High school is the ultimate horror mainstay. From Carrie to Scream,
there have probably been more horror movies and TV series set within the halls
of secondary education than drafty Euro castles. The tradition continues with
the two-for season premiere of Vera Miao’s Two Sentence Horror Stories,
airing this coming Tuesday on the CW.
“Bag
Man,” directed by Kimani Ray Smith and written by Leon Hendrix and Miao is
definitely the better of the two stories, in part because it obviously starts
as a genre homage to the Breakfast Club. Five students of varying social
status must spend Saturday morning in detention, but there is a very contemporary
wrinkle. All are suspects in a cherry bomb incident that triggered the school’s
new automated lock-down system. When they arrive, there is already a mysterious
bag in the room that just radiates bad vibes.
Admittedly,
the narrative follows a familiar horror arc, but the execution is brisk and
energetic. Hendrix and Miao come up with enough new, ironic wrinkles to keep it
interesting for experienced genre viewers and the cast hits the right notes,
especially Doralynn Mui as Zee, the catty “good girl.” Having recurred on Riverdale
and guested on Sabrina, this must be pretty comfortable terrain for
her.) Regardless, even though we know where it is all headed, it is still a
macabrely amusing ride.
The
titular bullied transmasculine teen of “Elliot,” written by Stephanie
Adams-Santos and directed by Chase Joynt (who also helmed the upcoming Billy
Tipton doc) could relate to movies like Carrie, Sleepaway Camp, and more
recently Some Kind of Hate, but at times this episode risks becoming an
afterschool special. The lesson is laid on rather heavily, but there are still
some creepy moments, especially down the stretch.
You remember from Ghostbusters how bad it is when cats and dogs are living
together? It is even worse for vampires and witches. Nevertheless, vampire Matthew
de Clairmont and Diana Bishop, an American witch, have fallen in love, but it
is a romance forbidden by the terms of the uneasy truce governing vampires,
witches, and demons, the weird kind. Yet, fate and a missing book of alchemy
seemed to have conspired to bring them together. However, to stay together and
escape their enemies, the two lovers had to jaunt back in time at the
conclusion of season one. Getting back will take some doing in season two of A
Discovery of Witches, which premieres tomorrow on Shudder and Sundance Now.
It
is a bit awkward to hide out in during an era of literal witch hunts for a
witch like Bishop. It just so happens, her beloved de Clairmont was one of the most
ruthless witch-hunters. He was also a faithful French Catholic, but he loyally
served Queen Elizabeth, doggedly persecuting his co-religionists. Such is
vampire politics.
At
least she is impressed to learn he is also known as the poet Matthew Roydon
during this era. One of his great friends is Christopher Marlowe, a demon with
a serious case of bro-jealousy. Understandably, it is a bit tricky for de
Clairmont to remember what he exactly was doing four hundred years ago, but he
will fake it as best he can, while Bishop seeks out the training to spellcast
their way back to their proper time. After years of being “spellbound,” her powers
have only just resurfaced, so she does not yet understand their full extent or
how to properly control them.
This
review is only based on the first four episodes of season two (out of seven),
because time is limited for us mortals. Still, we feel safe in saying the
general quality is consistent with the first season. Particularly notable are
the depictions of historical figures, which are much more fully developed than
mere gimmicks. Barbara Marten is a kick chewing the scenery as the Machiavellian
Queen Elizabeth and Tom Hughes does some of the best work we have ever seen
from him as the temperamental Marlowe. However, it seems rather a shame to have
the great Lindsay Duncan sidelined for so long, as de Clairmont’s regal mother,
Ysabeau.
James Alfred Wight sold millions of books and was recognized with a CBE on the
queen’s honors list, but his prospects seemed rather modest in 1937. You might
recognize him by his pen-name: James Herriot. In the midst of the depression, it
was difficult for a newly qualified veterinarian like Herriot (as he is known
in his somewhat fictionalized memoirs and the previous dramatizations), but
fortunately, his prospective new boss is dashed difficult to work for, so he
still has an opening. Fans already know Herriot’s bedside and stable-side
manner wins over the mercurial Siegfried Farnon and the Yorkshire community they
serve in the newest seven-episode All Creatures Great and Small, which
premieres this Sunday on PBS.
Herriot’s
parents made great sacrifices so he could graduate from the University of
Glasgow’s veterinary program, but jobs are scarce in the 1930s. If he doesn’t
land the position in rural Darrowby, he will have to join his father working on
the docks. Frankly, Farnon does not want to hire an assistant, but his motherly
housekeeper, Mrs. Hall insists he needs help. Poor Herriot does not exactly get
a warm welcome, but he slowly wins over the widowed older vet with his diligence.
Fortunately, he compares rather favorably with Farnon’s slacker younger brother
Tristan, who has just failed his veterinary finals, yet again.
Nevertheless,
the well-meaning Herriot has plenty of awkward moments during his early days.
Frankly, we didn’t remember from the previous serious the life of a country vet
entailed so many moral crises (and somehow, we missed the 1975 movie starring
Anthony Hopkins altogether). Comparisons between the series are inevitable
especially since Nicholas Ralph and Samuel West look so much like their
previous counterparts, as Herriot and the elder Farnon, but that sort of stands
to reason. However, Anna Madeley is definitely a younger and softer Mrs. Hall.
She also becomes a much greater emotional center for the series.
This
All Creatures also co-stars the late, great Diana Rigg, as the fabulously
wealthy Mrs. Pumphrey, whose beloved pug Tricki-Woo must board at the practice
for a week to protect him from her pampering. It is always good to see her. Probably
the next most notable guest star would be Nigel Havers (of Chariot’s of Fire),
appearing as the chairman of the local racetrack.
Of
course, the real stars of the series are the beloved characters and the endearing
animals they treat. Ralph sometimes portrays Herriot as such a naïf, he can be
uncomfortable to watch, but he still wins viewers over with his warmth and
earnestness. West clearly relishes Siegfried Farnon’s sharp tongue and high-handed
demeanor. He definitely supplies most of All Creature’s humor, in a House
MD kind of way, but Callum Wodehouse gets the biggest laughs of the series
as Tristan, saying the things we’d like to in the finale. In fact, he does a
terrific job portraying the prodigal Farnon brother’s maturation. Yet, it is
Anna Madeley who pulls the heartstrings—in the right way—as good God-fearing
Mrs. Hall.
Only war can make a twenty-year-old this emotionally deadened and world-weary.
That is what happens to Arturs Vanags. During a four year-period, he
technically switches sides several times, first fighting against the Germans
for the Russians, then against the Soviets, and finally against both. Yet, he
always fights for Latvia. Viewers will see WWI turn into the Latvian War for
Independence through the eyes of a young recruit in Dzintars Dreibergs’ Blizzard
of Souls, Latvia’s official International Oscar submission and its all-time
domestically-produced box office champ, which opens virtually this Friday.
After
Germans casually kill his mother, Vanags and his father reluctantly flee their
farm to Riga, where they enlist in the Latvian army. Technically, Vanags is too
young, but his father gives his permission. Technically, the stern veteran is
too old, but his sterling war record makes him valuable as a sergeant major (or
the rough equivalent). Much to Vanags’s surprise, his father is probably harder
on him than the other recruits, but veterans will well understand why.
During
the first act, Blizzard follows the traditional arc of WWI movies, with
the green enlisted men dealing with the horrible routine of trench warfare. However,
the war will take a series of unusual turns for Vanags and his colleagues, because
of the fateful position of the Baltics. Although they initially march to war
wearing Latvian uniforms, they are clearly considered subservient to the
Russian army (they aren’t even allowed to sing their national anthem). After
the Revolution, the Bolsheviks first talk peace, but then start waging war
again. Most of the Latvian Riflemen Corps are absorbed into the Latvian SSR,
which again functions as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Soviets. Inevitably,
the call for genuine independence and the Soviets’ brutal purges drove
experienced soldiers like Vanags into the Independence Brigades.
Screenwriter
Boris Frumin makes all this complex military history quite clear, while maintaining
the focus on Vanags’ grunt-level survival story. Oto Brantevics could not
possibly look more milquetoast is his early scenes as young Vanags, but he
undergoes a harrowing transformation, even more dramatic than George MacKay’s
in 1917. MacKay provides far and away the most memorable performance in
Mendes’ Oscar nominee, but Martins Vilsons is just as strong, or even stronger
as crusty Old Man Vanags. It is a quiet but colorful and ultimately deeply
humanistic portrayal.
It turns out classic Toho monster movies did not go far enough. It wasn’t
just some stray turtle getting radiated into a mutant monster. It happens to
every cold-blooded creature. The worst of it for luckless loser Joel Dawson is
that it happens just as he was getting somewhere with his pretty girlfriend.
Giant mutants now rule the surface of the Earth, but he is still determined to
find her in Michael Matthews’ Love and Monsters, which releases today on
DVD.
Much
to Dawson’s regret, he was separated from his girlfriend Aimee in the confusion
of the apocalypse and both lost their parents during the ensuing carnage. After
seven long years underground, Dawson (like the Creek) has finally made radio
contact with her in a shelter 85 miles away. He cares about all his
shelter-mates, but since he is the only one not paired romantically, he figures
it is worth risking the perilous journey to reunite with her. However, he is considered
the Don Knotts of his shelter, so nobody gives him much chance.
Fortunately,
he soon encounters Clyde Dutton, a crusty old survivalist played by Walking Dead’s Michael Rooker, so you know he must have a knack for staying alive.
Dutton has been caring for a young girl named Minnow (not unlike Newt in Aliens),
who does not think much of Dawson’s chances, but she is rather taken with Boy,
the stray dog that started following him.
If
you are guessing Boy (played by Hero and Dodge) steals the show than you would
be correct. Together they give quite an endearing canine performance. The
monster design also hits the right tone. There is plenty of gross slithering
and secreting business, but they never look too realistic or too fake.
Frankly,
Dylan O’Brien’s constant neurotic narration eventually gets exhausting
(seriously, sometimes he needs to just shut-up and concentrate on his
surroundings). Still, he plays well opposite crusty Rooker, snarky little
Ariana Greenblatt (as Minnow), and Jessica Henwick, who shows some impressive
action cred as Aimee. Of course, Hero and Dodge (the stunt dog) totally upstage
him, but what could he expect.
It is sort of like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, with Really, Really Good Taste.
There are not a lot of Rembrandt paintings in private hands, because they are rarely
brought to market. It is harder still to “discover” a previously unattributed
Rembrandt, but maybe not impossible. Viewers meet several private owners and
prospective buyers in Oeke Hoogendijk’s My Rembrandt, which releases
this Wednesday via Film Forum’s virtual cinema.
In
Scotland, the 10th Duke of Buccleuch owns a Rembrandt that is truly
magnificent. He would never want to sell Old Woman Reading, and given his
family’s extensive land holdings, they probably will never need to. On the
other hand, thanks to France’s high rate of taxation, Baron Eric de Rothschild
agrees to sell his twin portraits, Marten and Oopjen, igniting a politically
fraught contest between the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre.
Meanwhile,
Jan Six XI, whose father Jan Six X still proudly owns Rembrandt’s portrait of
the original Jan Six, believes he has discovered a previously unattributed
Rembrandt, which he purchased in Christie’s auction for a mere 100K Euros and
change. Eijk and Rose-Marie de Mol Van Otterloo are seriously considering
purchasing it, but questions about Six’s business dealings will cloud the sale.
So far, philanthropist Thomas S. Kaplan has not had such problems acquiring his
fifteen Rembrandt, each of which he maintains in public exhibition.
My
Rembrandt starts
out as a meditative film about what his paintings mean to the blessed few
fortunate to own one, but it suddenly takes on unexpected intrigue when Six’s
ex-partner starts making allegations in the media. There is also a great deal
of bureaucratic infighting, when the French Minister of Culture bullies the
Louvre into contesting the Rijksmuseum’s plan to acquire both Marten and
Oopjen, free and clear. Hoogendijk’s last documentary was The New Rijksmuseum, an epic four-chronicle of the museum’s restoration, so it is
not surprising her sympathies lie in Amsterdam. Frankly, it is hard to root for
the French, when they seem more interested in political CYA-ing than the great
art they suddenly decide must stay in France.
“Please Don't Come Back from the Moon” was a typically complex composition Charles
Mingus recorded during his notorious 1962 Town Hall Concert. It also basically
sums up the message Dr. Augustine Lofthouse has for the crew of the Æther. Technically,
they are returning from one of Jupiter’s moons, but the upshot is the same. A mysterious
cataclysm has destroyed the Earth, so they are better off where they were. Getting
that message out will take some doing in George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky,
which screens for MoMA members as part of the current edition of Contenders, or
the “Big Netflix Catch-Up,” as it could be called in January.
Nobody
really describes what happened, but it was clearly bad. Lofthouse’s arctic research
station is evacuating, but he decides to stay, because he has nobody to get
back to. He once had someone, as we see in flashbacks, but he pushed her away
with his single-minded dedication to his work. He never even bothered to meet
the daughter his ex-lover raised on her own. However, he suddenly finds himself
exercising his unused parental muscles, when he finds a mute little girl named Iris
has been left behind. Perhaps that was a blessing for her, because the arctic
region will be the last to be consumed by the Wrath of God, or whatever it is
(seriously, why would scientists be interested in such details?).
Lofthouse
quickly determines the only space exploration mission still operational is the Æther,
which was scouting the moons of Jupiter for habitable environments. He hopes to
warn it away from Earth, once it enters the range of communications, but he
will need an antenna with more range.
In
many ways, Midnight Sky is a decent example of the earnest, character-driven
side of science fiction, but Clooney way over-cooks the emotional symbolism of
his scenes portraying Lofthouse, the anti-social greybeard (literally). Iris’s
function in the narrative is so blatantly manipulative, we are instantly
suspicious of her secret. Not to be spoilery, but she is just so obvious.
Frankly,
the film is much better when it focuses on the crew of the Æther. Of course, it
makes no sense that Dr. “Sully” Sullivan would proceed with the mission while
she was pregnant, but Clooney wanted his first casting choice, Felicity Jones,
so he had pregnancy written into to the story. It doesn’t make real-world
sense, but it heightens “Noah’s Ark” significance of the Æther crew.
As
Sullivan and Commander Adewole, Jones and David Oyelowo have good
Kirk-and-Spock or Picard-and-Riker rapport. Demian Bichir and Kyle Chandler also
add tremendous human dimension to the crew as Sanchez, the temperamental engineering
officer, and Mitchell, the family-oriented American astronaut.
In the 1930s, the motion picture industry was reluctant to criticize Hitler,
fearing their films would suffer in the German market. So how did that
investment payoff for them in the 1940s? Today, Hollywood cravenly self-censors
to curry favor with the Chinese Communist Party. Does anyone think it will work
out better this time? Back in 1934, there was one filmmaker who fully
recognized the threat of National Socialism. He found a friend and ally in an
eloquent but marginalized Conservative back-bencher. Together, Sir Winston
Churchill and Sir Alexander Korda helped steel the British fighting spirit at a
crucial time. Their efforts are chronicled in John Fleet’s BBC-produced Churchill and the
Movie Mogul, which airs Monday night on TCM.
The
mid 1930s were known as Churchill’s wilderness years. The Chamberlain government
actively encouraged the press to censor Churchill, to stifle his “war-mongering”
criticism. (Again, does any of this sound familiar, Twitter?) However, Alexander
Korda, the Jewish-born Hungarian immigrant, was equally alarmed by the threat
of Hitler’s national socialism. Finding a kindred spirit, Korda hired Churchill
as a sort of idea-man at-large.
Churchill
did not write any full screenplays for Korda and his conceptual treatments were
considered too grandiose to produce. However, biographers and historians see
Churchill’s fingerprints on a number of the patriotic films Korda produced
during this time, particularly The Four Feathers, The Lion has Wings and
his classic Hollywood production, That Hamilton Woman.
Fleet
and his ensemble of experts do a nice job explaining the similarities shared by
the seeming odd couple. They even smoked the same brand of cigar. Although
considered “propaganda” by many critics, most of the films addressed in the
documentary still hold up today. Likewise, both men’s hawkishness has been
vindicated by history, which is what makes Fleet’s film so uncomfortably
timely.
This is Moscow, where everything goes. No matter how wild the game might be,
there is always a big enough palm to grease. Logically, this is where an annual
real-life gladiatorial betting extravaganza takes place. Some of the players sort
of suspected what they were in for, whereas others did not. Either way, they must
kill all their rivals to be the final winner in Slava N. Jakovleff & Ilya
Kulikov’s eight-episode Insomnia, which starts streaming today on Crackle.
Contestants
in the Insomnia game get a car, a gun, one bullet, and shot of a drug that will
make their hearts stop if they fall asleep. That last part was a nasty surprise
to everyone, but some were expecting the kill-or-be-killed rules. The
frontrunners are the Russian hitman, the American Special Ops vet with the
heavy Russian accent, the ex-cop tarnished by controversial shooting, and a
massively creepy sexual predator. The dark horses include a sixteen-year-old
girl who is so dull and expressionless, she must harbor some kind of strange
secret. The wild card has to be Ken, a former Insomnia employee thrust into the
game. Weirdly, he is not so shocked to be there (but none too thrilled either).
It
all unfolds as the fat-cat VIPs watch from a luxury hospitality suite. This
year, Marina Croft will also be there. She is taking the place of her late
mogul husband, who just died in a suspicious plane crash. As she watches Insomnia
unfold with a mixture of horror and fascination, she starts to suspect her
husband’s death might be related to the blind bet he placed on Lea, the boring
girl.
Basically,
Insomnia is like a cross between Crank and any one of the dozens
of involuntary online bloodsport thrillers, like Guns Akimbo or the
dreadful 31. In this case, Jakovleff and Kulikov mix in a bit of Lost,
by revealing hidden player connections through flashbacks, which helps a lot.
It is a bit embarrassing to confess, but Insomnia is addictive, much
like the reprehensibly voyeuristic game it depicts.
Pasha
D. Lychnikoff is a major reason why the series is s watchable as it is. Playing
Russian thugs is his specialty, so the kind of smirking, snarling, and scenery
chewing Insomnia needed is right in his wheelhouse. Basically, he is the
pro-wrestler of the series, yelling into the camera, “I’m coming for you,”
while keeping his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.
As murder mysteries go, this one is relatively small in scale, but you
still wouldn’t call it a cozy. There are really two mysteries in need of
solving that occurred decades apart, but they will get entwined in the increasingly
confused mind of the aging protagonist in Elizabeth is Missing, which
premieres this Sunday on PBS.
Maud
Horsham greatly relies on post-it notes to keep to her daily schedule, but she
still functions relatively well on her own at the start of this adaptation of
Emma Healey’s novel. However, the discovery of an old lady’s compact buried in
her friend Elizabeth Markham’s garden appears to strike a chord with Horsham.
When she returns to visit the next day, she finds her friend mysteriously
absent, but her eye glasses are plainly visible on the kitchen table. Horsham
comes back several days in a row, but there is never any sign of Markham.
The
experience brings back painful (and possibly suppressed) memories from Horsham’s
childhood, when her glamorous older sister Susan “Sukey” Jefford also
disappeared under mysterious circumstances. At the time, suspicion fell on
their nebbish boarder, but the ravings of a mad homeless women keep echoing in
Horsham’s head. Although she is start to drift more frequently into the past, Horsham
is still determined to find Markham, to help redeem herself for failing her
sister.
Missing
is
a quiet but profoundly sad film, thematically much like Anthony Hopkins’
upcoming Oscar contender, The Father, but it leans into the potential
criminal aspects of both disappearances much more, while suggesting ironic
parallels with the cruel psychological mysteries of Alzheimer’s. Unlike most
amateur sleuths, Horsham has the further challenge of assembling clues from her
disordered brain, before she can follow leads in the real world.
Director
Aisling Walsh handles the two levels of the TV film’s mystery quite dexterously
and sensitively. It is often frustrating watching the story unfold from Horsham’s
perspective, because we are so acutely conscious of the blind-spots that plague
her. As one of those “unreliable narrator” novels, adapting Elizabeth is
Missing is a tricky proposition, but screenwriter Andrea Gibb pulls it off
quite notably.
If you have to be stalked by a doppelganger, they should at least make an
effort to look like you, right? Not necessarily in Yorgos Lanthimos’s world. As
a result, he might just be the perfect filmmaker to represent late election-year 2020, when
someone might be conspicuously out of place, but people perversely refuse to
recognize the obvious. A symphony cellist finds himself the victim of such a
phenomenon in Lanthimos’s short film Nimic, which is now streaming on
MUBI.
The
“Father” thought he had a healthy relationship with his wife and three
children. Yet, when the strange woman he encounters on the subway tries to take
his place, nobody seems to be able to tell them apart. Yet, they look radically
different and her cello player sounds like fingernails on a blackboard.
It
turns out Matt Dillon is highly compatible with the idiosyncratic Lanthimos
aesthetic. As the Father, he projects an appropriate morose dejection, while
still maintaining the extreme deadpan we have come to expect from films like The
Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Likewise, the crazy eyes
of Daphne Patakia’s mimic are truly unsettling, yet she maintains a similarly
stoic demeanor.
It is an early red state-blue state culture-clash that takes an uncanny
turn. State Trooper Robert Franklin is a military veteran state trooper. Charlotte
Scott is a neurotic New York fashion editor recovering from a nervous
breakdown. If they put aside their differences, they might survive an encounter
with the unknown in “The Fear,” the penultimate episode of the original The
Twilight Zone series, which airs as part of Syfy’s annual New Year’s Twilight
Zone marathon.
Trooper
Franklin thinks he is on a fool’s errand and Scott is the fool. The passive-aggressive
big-city snob reported seeing lights in sky, so he duly drives out to her cabin
to investigate. She is not very welcoming, until some mysterious force starts wreaking
havoc on electrical things. Then he finds a gigantic set of fingerprints on his
cruiser.
They
are about as archetypal as it gets (thanks to Jack and all), but you don’t see
a lot of giants in genre film or television. Of course, it sounds crazy, but
Serling’s script uses the idea of them in clever ways. Yet, what really makes
the episode stand out is the way Franklin and Scott come to an understanding and
put aside their kneejerk presumptions about each other.
Maybe you don't remember the part about the monster on the plane’s wing in
Randall Jarrell classic poem, “Death of a Ball Turret Gunner,” but surely its
implied in there someplace. Regardless, Maude Garrett will have to contend with
exactly that, as well as a number of Japanese Zeroes, when she hitches a ride
in the deadliest seat in a WWII B-17 Bomber for nearly the duration of Roseanne
Liang’s Shadow in the Cloud, which releases in theaters and on VOD this
Friday.
For
some reason, Women’s Auxiliary Flight Officer Garrett is determined to hitch on
ride with the crew of the “Fool’s Errand” making a supply run to New Zealand. Even
more important than her is the top-secret cargo in her dispatch box. The sexist
crew stash her in the ball turret and make demeaning sexual jokes over the open
comms, but they stop laughing a little when she bullseyes a Zero that
supposedly never would have flown out that far. However, they start dismissing
her again when she claims to see a gremlin-like monster sabotaging the engine.
Max
Landis and Liang (whose previous short film Do No Harm was the highlight
of the 2017 Sundance) cleverly riff on the jokey WWII lore blaming gremlins for
engine failure (they were sort of like the invisible “Not Me” in the old Family
Circus comic strip). You could think of it as Richard Matheson’s Nightmare
at 20,000 Feet adapted to a WWII setting, but Liang and Landis fully
develop the premise and consistently raise the stakes.
Liang
also deftly capitalizes on the confined space of the ball turret to create
tension. In many respects, Shadow is like Steven Knight’s Locke,
in which the car-bound Tom Hardy plays off numerous unseen voices over the
phone. In this case, the voices and personas of the B-17 crew-members are not
as clearly and distinctly established, but that sort of reinforces Garrett’s
perspective of alienation from the men above her.
This
is very inventive genre filmmaking, so we can forgive the over-the-top,
unbelievable excesses of the centerpiece action scene. Of course, it also helps
that the gremlin looks cool—and appropriately sinister. Unlike the various Twilight
Zone adaptations of Matheson’s story, Liang doesn’t tease us with the gremlin.
She gives us plenty of good looks at the nasty creature, who holds up to scrutiny,
thanks to some nifty design and effects work.
Hector Bebenco was born to Jewish immigrant parents in Argentina, but he
pursued a career in filmmaking after moving to Brazil. Occasionally, he still lapsed
into Sportuguese, but Brazil often embraced him as a representative of their
national cinema, with good reason. Nevertheless, Babecno often never really
felt like he wholly belonged in either Brazil or Argentina (even though the latter
is really just a Spanish-speaking colony of the former, at least as it has been
explained to me). Regardless, Brazil has made an unconventional but defensible
choice submitting his wife Barbara Paz’s documentary profile of her late
husband, Babenco: Tell Me When I Die, as their official international feature
Oscar contender (they used to call it the “foreign language” category).
Babenco
is still best known for his English-language productions, Ironweed, At Play
in the Fields of the Lord, and Kiss of the Spider Woman (for which he was nominated for best director), but his
final film could well be his most personal. My Hindu Friend thinly
fictionalized his own final days before succumbing to cancer and clearly serves
as a companion film to Paz’s doc. Its star, Willem Dafoe also served as a
producer of her documentary. Although she clearly had sharp editorial
differences with her subject, his aesthetic still informs each frame.
In
part, Paz’s film serves as an impressionistic survey of Babenco’s filmography,
but it also becomes a meditation on the act of dying. Somewhat, ironically,
Babenco had a great deal of time to organize his thoughts on mortality, because
he was first diagnosed with cancer during the shooting of At Play,
nearly thirty years ago (allowing him to fast-forward past at least three
Kubler-Ross stages).
She taught millions of young readers respect for family and the self-reliant
pioneering spirit. She wrote from the perspective of a daughter of Nineteenth Century
settlers, because that is who she was. Her books most definitely do not reflect
the attitudes of a Berkley Feminist-Third World Studies major, so the ALA
canceled her, striking her name from their life achievement award. Wilder’s
life is chronicled and the petty posthumous controversies of the professionally
offended are also addressed in American Master’s Laura Ingalls Wilder:
Prairie to Page, produced and directed by Mary McDonagh Murphy, which
premieres tomorrow on PBS.
Frankly,
Wilder should be considered a feminist icon. She endured years of subsistence
farming with her beloved Almanzo, in a marriage that was considered a true non-hierarchical
partnership. She sold her first book at the age of 65, with the help of her
daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Lane, the great libertarian journalist, who wrote The
Discovery of Freedom truly deserves her own American Masters profile,
but it is a pleasant surprise to see her treated relatively fairly by Murphy’s
battery of talking heads.
Throughout
the program, Lane is given full credit for editing her mother’s Little House
novels, giving structure the narratives. During their lifetimes, both denied Lane’s
involvement, in Lane’s case because the public’s generally low regard for
children’s books could have damaged her own literary career, but there is ample
evidence of her editorial contribution in their surviving correspondence.
However, Prairie to Page perversely concentrates on each and every minor
deviation of the books from the events of Wilder’s life. Honestly, this
glorified fact-checking becomes tedious, especially when the real story seems
to be how closely they actually hewed to her verifiable biography.
Murphy
also gives Wilder’s critics more than ample time to complain about Wilder’s
depictions of Native Peoples. Yet, their grievances, including the notorious
smoking gun passage: “There were no people. Only Indians lived there,” which
Wilder agreed to rewrite in the 1950s, sound more like sloppy writing or the
exotic fascination of a young girl than anything truly sinister. Wilder critics
like Linda Sue Park come across like delicate orchids, who should keep
themselves hermetically sealed in a bubble, to prevent themselves from reading
anything that might potentially offend their fragile self-images. Or perhaps
they could just grow-up and act like mature adults, who understand not everyone
sees the world precisely as they do. Honestly, the mere fact Wilder can now be considered
“controversial” is in itself a telling commentary on contemporary Cancel
Culture.
Nobody
can deny Native Peoples faced profound hardships during this period. So did
settlers, like the Ingalls. Living on the frontier with what little the 1870s
had to offer was a precarious proposition for everyone. Readers come to understand
this in vivid terms from Wilder’s books. For that reason, they should be due
for a popular renaissance, now that we as a nation are facing challenging
times. Smart readers of any age can parse books for their insights and disregard
what is dated. Honestly, it is just sad that the ALA has so little faith in
young readers—and it is frustrating that Murphy gives so much time to the
cancel chorus.
Remember, this is supposed to be fun. People go to great lengths and expense to
enjoy a scuba-diving vacation. Swedish sisters Ida and Tuva need only drive a
few hours to the Norwegian coast, but their diving excursion will not be much of
a holiday. Disaster will strike, imperiling their lives and sibling bonds in Joachim
Heden’s Breaking Surface, which is now playing in virtual cinemas.
A
near fatal swimming incident poisoned young Ida’s long-term relationship with
her mother and indirectly caused her to resent Tuva’s blatant status as her
favorite daughter. Perversely, a love of diving still sort of keeps the family together.
Their post-Christmas dive is a family tradition, but Mommie Dearest must take a
pass this year, due a lingering cold.
As
a result, it is just the two sisters diving when Tuva is suddenly trapped
beneath a freak rock slide. Unfortunately, she is the more experienced,
professional diving, whereas Ida is the more emotional one, making her prone to
panic. She tries to keep calm, but when she reaches the surface, she finds
their gear is also buried under the rocks. Don’t worry—Knut, the family dog is
still safe and loyally provides encouragement from the shore.
Breaking
Surface is
sort of a shorty, not even reaching eighty minutes, including the entire end-credits,
but Heden keeps it lean and down-to-business. There is a lot of compelling undersea
action, mostly performed by the two primary cast-members themselves. Yet, maybe
the most cinematic episode comes early on, when Tuva narrowly escapes death
during a work-related dive.
Joseph Mersault's family does not hunt because they are cruel. It is not even a
matter of sport. If they do not hunt and trap for meat and pelts, they won’t
have food on their table. This hard winter, they might also have to hunt a
rival predator to avoid becoming a meal for it. Nature and man vie to show who
is more dangerous in Shawn Linden’s Hunter Hunter, which is now
available on VOD.
It
is a hard, hand-to-mouth life, but it is the only way of living that makes
sense to Mersault. His wife Anne is not so sure anymore. She suspects their
home-schooled daughter Renee would be better off if she had more structure and
socialization, but the young girl idolizes her father and wants to follow in
his outdoorsy footsteps. However, both parents agree to temporarily keep her
close to their cabin.
Lately,
they have seen signs of an unusually aggressive wolf scaring off game and
feasting off their traps. It appears to have a taste for blood and little fear,
making it especially dangerous. With pelt prices plummeting, Mersault resolves
to track and kill the beast. Unfortunately, we start to suspect there are
other, more vicious dangers lurking in the woods.
Hunter
Hunter is
sort of a big-twist movie, but we are ready and waiting for the shocking
revelation long before it happens. Yet, Linden’s execution is so tight and
tense, we still hold our breath watching it unfold. There is some buzz growing
about the nearly Biblical conclusion, which is indeed pretty powerful, yet it
is also totally logical within the context of the film.
When it was originally released, it nearly killed Francis Ford Coppola’s
career—yet again, even though it was sufficiently well-received in the jazz
world to win a Grammy for its soundtrack. Most frustratingly, the filmmaker
knew it could have been great if the studio and producer Robert Evans hadn’t
done so much to kill. Like the opposite of George Lucas, Coppola went back and
fixed a lot of the problems (much like he recently did with The Godfather
III), resulting in the director’s cut known as The Cotton Club Encore,
which airs on Bounce TV.
In
the late 1920s, Harlem’s Cotton Club featured African American talent on stage,
but they are not allowed to enter the club as paying guests. This fact comes
through loud and clear in the Encore cut. Delbert “Sandman” Owens and
his brother Clay (clearly inspired by the Nicholas Brothers) have just been
hired there as featured tap-dancers. Recently back in town, the scuffling white
cornet player Michael “Dixie” Dwyer is naturally drawn there, but he will wish
he had steered clear.
Dwyer
has the questionable fortune of saving Dutch Schultz’s life. Regrettably, the
gangster’s subsequent patronage quickly becomes controlling and emasculating.
It is especially awkward when he orders the musician to accompany Vera Cicero,
his not-so-secret mistress. The sexual tension between them is obvious and therefore
quite dangerous. Meanwhile, Sandman Owens’ attempts to romance vocalist Lila Rose
Oliver have been nearly as rocky. As a source of tension, the Cotton Club
performer has been trying to pass for white, so she can accept more profitable
work in downtown clubs.
Evans
should have been ashamed of himself, because Coppola’s recut Cotton Club is
a great film. It definitely provides more balance to both sides of the Club’s
color line, which is clearly significant. It also fully restores entire musical
numbers, which are terrific. (If you don’t see Lonette McKee’s rendition of “Stormy
Weather,” as Oliver, you’re watching the wrong cut.) Their inclusion makes Encore
a musical in the fullest sense. A number like Ellington’s “Creole Love Call,”
performed by Priscilla Baskerville, expresses so much about the club’s place in
Harlem. Likewise, McKee’s “Ill Wind” and “Stormy Weather” establish Oliver’s
character far more than any dialogue.
Anyone
who isn’t grinning from ear to ear after watching Gregory Hines lead a
one-upping tap contest at the Hoofer’s Club needs serious anti-depressants. The
closing fantasia of “Daybreak Express” is also a nifty piece of throwback movie
musical magic. Perhaps the exception that proves the rule is the dramatic
cross-cutting between Hines’ solo tap “improvography” [as the credits refer to
it] and a climatic gangland hit.
Gregory
and Maurice Hines were always the show-stoppers on-stage, but now their
conflicted sibling relationship comes to satisfying fruition in Encore.
In a deliberate irony, Dixie Dwyer and his wannabe gangster brother Vincent are
denied that opportunity by their underworld entanglements. Yet, it is a lot of
fun to see the crazy Nic Cage we know so well bubbling out of the manic Vincent
(we can imagine his Uncle Francis begging him not to yell “top of the world,
Mom!”). It is also good to see Richard Gere in the sort of matinee idol role he
was meant to play, since his support for Tibet and the Dalai Lama has gotten
him blacklisted from studio tent-poles (seriously Hollywood, he was in Chicago,
Pretty Woman, and An Officer and a Gentleman). It should also be
noted Larry Marshall is an absolutely spooky dead-ringer for Cab Calloway.
By definition, there can't be a strike in the socialist workers’ paradise,
so there must have been something deeply amiss in the provincial industrial
town of Novocherkassk. Of course, the Soviet authorities dealt with dissent the
way Communists always have. The result was a massacre and a cover-up. Andrei
Konchalovsky dramatizes this formerly redacted episode of Soviet history in the
searing Dear Comrades!, which releases virtually tomorrow, in conjunction
with Film Forum.
Loyal
Party apparatchik Lyuda Syomina keeps assuring townspeople they have never had
it so good, even though the Party just increased food prices and slashed wages
at the local munitions factory. Despite the local Party’s propaganda campaign,
the factory workers have had enough. Awkwardly for her, this includes her
modestly rebellious daughter, Svetka. The mere notion of a strike is enormously
embarrassing, but when the striking workers barricade the Novocherkassk
committee headquarters, Khrushchev dispatches the military, under the command
of a trigger-happy loyalist.
Even
though Syomina and her colleagues manage to sneak out, the shooting inevitably
starts and it continues until the strikers are utterly broken. The unofficial
death toll is high, but officially, the incident never happened, leaving
worried parents no recourse when they realize their children are missing. That
also includes the panicked Syomina, but at least her Party status gives her
some limited latitude to search for Svetka, or her body. She finds a surprising
ally in Loginov, a cautiously disillusioned KGB agent.
You
probably never heard of the Novocherkassk Massacre, because the Party tried to
whitewash it from history. Yet, it most certainly did happen. To ensure accuracy,
Konchalovsky enlisted Yuri Bagrayev, the chief military prosecutor in charge of
the frustrated 1992 inquiry, as a technical advisor. Years after the regime’s
fall, this film still feels radioactive. Initially, the tone is somewhat akin
to the absurdism, particularly with respect to the petty bureaucratic rivalries,
but it soon turns deadly serious. Frankly, Konchalevsky’s depiction of massacre
maelstrom is frighteningly realistic and the subsequent crack-down and cover-up
are absolutely chilling to witness. Absurdity, confusion, and brutality—that pretty
much covers the Soviet Socialist experience.
Regardless,
you cannot look away as this tragedy unfolds. Without question, Dear
Comrades is Konchalovsky’s late-career masterpiece. There is so much to
parse and analyze in the film, but it is always gripping on an immediate, human
level. Julia Vysotskaya’s portrayal of the conspicuously flawed Syomina is
wonderfully complex and messily human. (In many ways, her compromises represent
all the compromises the Soviet people had to make, in order to live under an
immoral system.) Vladislav Komarov provides an effectively understated
counterbalance to her, as the slightly out-of-step Loginov.
The X-Files gets credit for taking paranormal paranoia mainstream,
but Quinn Martin got there first. Keep in mind, his alien infiltration series
was created by future low-budget genre master Larry Cohen (It’s Alive, The
Stuff), which makes sense, doesn’t it? It is interesting the revisit the
two-season series, post-X-Files and post-Men in Black. You can
get in at the beginning when Me TV resets their reruns of The Invaders from
the beginning, in its super-convenient Time-slot: 5:00 AM, on Sunday mornings.
In
the pilot, “Beachhead,” architect David Vincent pulls over exhausted, while
driving home late at night from a business conference. Instead of shut-eye, he
gets an eyeful of a flying saucer landing. He tries to alert the authorities,
but they do their best to discredit him. His partner Alan Landers similarly tries
to assure him it was all in his pretty little head. Of course, Vincent has seen
too much to forget, so he sets out in search of the witness who contradicted
him. In the suspiciously empty town of Kinney, he finds a decommissioned power
plant retrofitted for nefarious purposes and Kathy Adams, a widow, whose late
husband may have learned too much.
Frankly,
all the gaslighting of the first act gets a little boring. However, the scenes
in the ghostly looking Kinney are surprisingly cinematic (and impressively
helmed by Joseph Sargent). In addition to tapping into the Cold War paranoia of
classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Invaders from Mars (which
Cohen himself identified as influences), rooted in the loss of individuality
and free will, Beachhead also appeals to the mounting anxiety over the
vanishing small-town way of life. Here, the insidious aliens represent urbanization
as well as Communism.
As
Vincent, Roy Thinnes had already perfected the dogged earnestness that would
make the lonely crusader a minor genre icon, but he sounds awkwardly overwrought
when making his case to others. However, Diane Baker really stands out for her
subtly turned guest appearance as Adams.
