Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is President of the Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
Kevin Tran's first feature centers on the diverse inhabitants of an ordinary-looking New York suburb. They're all pretty disconnected from each other until some of their pets turn up dead.
It begins and ends with Isaac (Michael Cyril Creighton, High Maintenance), a social studies teacher out walking his dog on a cloudy day before moving on to Marney (Brooke Bloom, She's Lost Control), a single woman who arrives home from the grocery store to find her back door open and her cat, Bruce, lying in a pool of blood (this death is implied rather than shown).
Her neighbors, a young couple newly arrived from the city, are expecting a baby. While Patty (Lindsay Burdge) works as a substitute teacher, Jimmy (Scott Friend), a freelance film editor, makes plans to get together with Richard (Jim Parrack, True Blood), a new friend he met in a bar. Richard, a technophobe, recently lost his job, and doesn't seem too put out about it.
Another couple, Sue (Jennifer Kim, She Dies Tomorrow) and Keith (Daniel K. Isaac) prepares for dinner while their daughter, Natalie (Kasey Lee), brings her pet bird, Polly, in for the night. A few houses away, three teens spend the evening skateboarding, eating instant noodles, and playing video games. One has a small dog. Another spends the night jamming in a basement with his hardcore band.
Though Tran identifies the cat killer early on, he withholds their reasons for doing the evil deed. As word spreads through the community, people make an effort to look after each other and to keep an eye on their animals.
Ian (Anthony Chisholm, Oz), an older widower who lives across the street from Marney, stops by with some beers to cheer her up. Jimmy, meanwhile, in a low-key thriller move, walks home from Richard's house in the dark, an unfortunate idea since he's drunk and doesn't really know the area.
The ending implies that no more pets are likely to die, but the killer's motive remains a mystery. It's an open question as to whether the threat brought the community closer together, but now they're certainly more aware of each other. Tran seems to be suggesting that it shouldn't take a tragedy for people to express interest in their neighbors and to look in on those, like the elderly, who are the most vulnerable.
Some of his ideas don't feel fully developed, but for the most part, the film plays like a series of short stories or plays in which fears of a pet killer serve more as a connective device than as a subject or plot point. If it doesn't all work, the sheer number of characters represents an ambitious undertaking for a debut director. I'm interested to see what he does next.
The Dark End of the Street is available on home video via Gravitas Ventures, on several pay operators, and on free streaming services, including Tubi, The Roku Channel, Plex, and Vudu. Images from Gravitas Ventures.
In a deep, nicotine-burnished voice, beat poet, performer, and playwright Ruth Weiss narrates Melody C. Miller's spirited and affectionate documentary.
Weiss starts off by stating that she always knew she wanted to be a poet. Born in 1928 in Berlin, she cites a book of Grimms' Fairy Tales for sparking her imagination. Her parents gave her the prized possession as a Hanukkah gift in 1935. After Hitler came to power, her father could see the writing on the wall, and the family traveled through Austria, Holland, and Switzerland on their way to the United States. Some of her poems retrace that journey.
In Chicago, she attended a Catholic school where the nuns encouraged her talent. After moving to San Francisco in the 1940s, she established her performance style. "I do my best to use simple, everyday words," she notes about her unpretentious writing approach. Though she doesn't claim to be the first beat poet, she helped to popularize the practice on the West Coast.
She got the idea to color her hair in shades of green from Joseph Losey's 1948 antiwar film The Boy with the Green Hair starring a young Dean Stockwell. Eighty-eight years old at the time of filming, her teal hair and fingernails match her sea-green eyes.
As part of the North Beach poetry scene, Weiss befriended fellow beat writers, like On the Road and Dharma Bums novelist Jack Kerouac, with whom she would drink and trade haikus. She expresses regret that she didn't save their work. Unlike her male peers, though, she had trouble getting published. She would eventually issue over a dozen books of poetry.
When she performs in the film, she receives accompaniment from sax player Rent Romus, bassist Doug O'Connor, and percussionist Hal Davis who plays a hollow log like a drum. According to Romus, "You almost have to be psychic to play with Ruth." Davis, 20 years Weiss's junior, moved in with her in 2010. Towards the end, he reads a poem in which he describes her as a princess. The two seem amazed that they found each other so late in life.
Throughout the documentary, Miller uses painterly animation from Ketzi Rivera to depict Weiss's peripatetic childhood and solo dance performances to illuminate her poems. She filmed the three dancers on the streets of San Francisco (Brennan Wall), in a forest (Isabel Tsui), and in a desert (Ida Nowakowska).
It's fortunate she spent time with Weiss while she was in such good health as the poet passed away in 2020. Her ability to carve out a niche in a male-dominated scene, in addition to her Judaism, bears comparison with Chuck Smith's documentary Barbara Rubin and the Exploding Underground, which revolves around an experimental filmmaker famed for collaborations with Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground, who traveled in similar circles.
Ruth Weiss: Beat Goddess can be streamed via Tubi, Plex, and Prime Video. Click here for the full list. Images from Blues GR (Weiss at home in San Francisco in 1972 and at Eugazi Hall in 1956) and Melody C. Miller/Ruth Weiss: The Beat Goddess (Weiss performing her poem "Turnabout" by the ocean in Albion, California; written to protect the whales and ocean creatures from oil rigs, she calls out to mother nature to protect them).
Margot Robbie looking more like a Halston model than a flapper
BABYLON
(Damien Chazelle, USA, 2022, 189 minutes)
When I was in New York last week, I caught a screening of Metropolitan with filmmaker Whit Stillman in attendance. Afterward, he spoke at length about his 1990 debut with journalist Abbey Bender. Stillman specifically cited the work of Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald as inspirations, something that should be obvious to anyone who has seen his 1990 film, particularly since Austen and Mansfield Park appear prominently in the script.
Though I don't recall any Fitzgerald references, the influence of the Jazz Age novelist isn't hard to find, since Princeton student--Fitzgerald attended Princeton--Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), the central character, recalls The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway, a decent guy who gets mixed up with some indecently wealthy people. The deb scene of Stillman's film also suggests the deb scene that produced The Great Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan.
I don't know if Damien Chazelle looked to Fitzgerald as an influence for Babylon, but it wouldn't surprise me, since he builds his fifth film around three characters with Gatsbyesque traits: jack of all trades Manuel "Manny" Torres (Mexican actor Diego Calva), aspiring actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie, whose other 2022 period film is David O. Russell's Amsterdam), and fading silent film star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt, last seen in Bullet Train).
These three aren't exact analogues for Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan, and Jay Gatbsy--or any of Fitzgerald's other glamorously doomed characters--but they come close, not least because the film opens in 1926, ends in 1932, and takes place in the same Hollywood milieu the writer depicts in his unfinished 1941 novel The Last Tycoon (my 2002 Modern Classics edition includes notes Fitzgerald left behind regarding the ending, so it feels fairly complete).
Both novels would inspire major motion pictures, which Chazelle is likely to have seen: Jack Clayton's 1974 The Great Gatsby with Sam Waterston, Mia Farrow, and Robert Redford (the actor Pitt has always most closely resembled), Elia Kazan's 1976 The Last Tycoon with Robert De Niro, and Baz Luhrmann's 2013 Gatsby adaptation with Tobey Maguire (who acts in and coproduced Babylon), Carey Mulligan, and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Nonetheless, according to Esther Zuckerman's New York Times piece about the film's occasionally anachronistic sartorial style, the look of Gatsby--if not the characterizations/storyline--wasn't exactly the filmmaker's intent. As she writes, "Chazelle was intent on creating a portrait of the 1920s that didn't look like the one audiences knew from, say, 'Great Gatsby' adaptations."
As he climbs up the ladder, Manny takes on some of the traits of The Last Tycoon's Monroe Stahr, a studio head inspired by Irving Thalberg, MGM's VP of Production. Not to give too much away, but Manny doesn't die at a young age like Stahr, but nor does he remain in Hollywood for the long haul. In that sense, he's more like Nick Carraway, who comes to see Daisy, Gatsby, and Daisy's philandering husband, Tom Buchanan, at their very worst, and returns to the Midwest from whence he came (Manny returns to Mexico). In Babylon, Max Minghella plays Thalberg; he's a minor character here.
De Niro and Ingrid Boulting in The Last Tycoon
If Whit Stillman made Jane Austen's influence explicit in the script for Metropolitan--and even more so in his excellent 2016 Austen adaptation Love & Friendship--Chazelle has done the same with Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's musical Singin’ in the Rain, possibly his primary influence, since his film follows a similar trajectory from silent cinema to the talkies and because he even includes clips from the 1952 MGM production.
Singin' in the Rain also revolves around a two-men-and-one-woman trio--Don (Kelly), Cosmo (Donald O'Connor), and Kelly (Debbie Reynolds)--except the dynamic isn't the same; Manny, Nellie, and Jack aren't a team, or even necessarily friends. Their relationships are largely transactional, even as Manny carries a torch for the oblivious, hyper-ambitious Nellie.
In the party sequence, which includes all manner of bad behavior fueled by mountains of cocaine, Chazelle depicts a rather spherical fellow receiving a golden shower from a willing young lovely. Whether that was the sort of thing comic actor Fatty Arbuckle, who appears prominently in 1965's Hollywood Babylon, really enjoyed, I couldn't say, but that's who he's clearly meant to represent.
Considering that most of Chazelle's previous films--from his black-and-white 2011 Godardian debut Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench to the candy-colored 2016 Jacques Demy-inspired La La Land--have revolved around performers of various kinds, these sorts of influences make sense, and they aren't bad in and of themselves.
Fitzgerald's novels and stories often took inspiration from figures, both public and not, that the well-traveled author actually knew or had heard about. His trick was to invest his characters with depth and complexity, and for my money, that's where Chazelle has fallen down on the job. If I wasn't exactly bored by the misadventures of Manny, Nellie, or Jack, I wasn't especially invested in them either (and as an actor, the less experienced Calva can't quite hold the screen as effectively as Robbie and Pitt).
Attractive, charismatic actors can only do so much, and though they give it their all--and then some--it's hard not to compare Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt in Babylon with the more three-dimensional characters they played in Quentin Tarantino's superior 2019 Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
In Tarantino’s film, Robbie plays Sharon Tate, an actual historical figure, while Pitt plays Cliff Booth, a composite inspired by actors, like Tom Laughlin, and stunt men, like Gary Kent. I'm not about to suggest that they're more likeable than Nellie and Jack--but they're more compelling.
It may not be fair to compare a low-budget comedy of manners, like Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, to an elaborate studio spectacular, like Damien Chazelle's Babylon, but one film proves that it's possible to create something personal and distinctive out of recognizable elements. The other doesn't.
Babylon opens on Friday, Dec 23, at theaters nationwide. Images of Robert De Niro and Ingrid Boulting from the IMDb and Hollywood Babylon from Amazon. All others via Paramount Pictures. Other inspirations Chazelle has cited in interviews: The Godfather, Modern Times, and Babylon Berlin.
Cooley High, director Michael Schultz's third feature, wasn't the story of his high school days, but rather screenwriter Eric Monte's. Schultz grew up in Milwaukee, while Monte grew up in Chicago, where Schultz shot his 1975 film on location at and around the same Cabrini-Green housing project featured in Candyman. Monte would also set his series Good Times (co-created with Mike Evans), which ran on CBS for six seasons, at Cabrini-Green.
Monte's cinematic counterpart, Leroy "Preach" Jackson (Broadway veteran Glynn Turman looking younger than his then-28 years), is a smart kid who dreams of going to Hollywood to make it as a screenwriter. His best friend, all-city basketball dynamo Richard "Cochise" Morris (Claudine's Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), is counting on a college scholarship. They're often accompanied by amiable, less ambitious goof Pooter (Corin Rogers). The finished film is proof that Monte-as-Preach's dream came true. By the end, it will also serve as proof that some of his associates weren't quite so lucky.
Schultz depicts the ups and downs of their senior year at Edwin G. Cooley Vocational High School, a real institution. They play hooky to knock about the zoo, hang out at the local diner, chat up the ladies--like Cynthia Davis's Brenda--at house parties, and go for a joyride in a stolen vehicle (the blissful house party dance sequence predicts Steve McQueen's sublime Lover's Rock).
Preach and Cochise aren't full-fledged juvenile delinquents, but their uncontainable high spirits sometimes lead to conflicts with parents and other authority figures. The joyride, at first, just seems like an ill-advised, if harmless stunt. Though no one gets hurt, the after effects will prove cataclysmic. In a sign of a very different time, Turman--rather than a professional driver--drove the car at high speed through tricky terrain, putting the fear of God into passengers Stone (Sherman Smith) and Robert (Norman Gibson), two non-actors who weren't exactly acting their fear.
Though Smith and Gibson had never acted before, the filmmaker and his wife, casting director Gloria Schultz, liked their look. Cooley High gave the gang members a chance to segue from stealing to acting. Only 15 months after the film's release, however, Gibson was murdered during a robbery. Smith, on the other hand, is still acting today, thanks to Jackie Taylor, a cast member who founded a theatrical ensemble and invited him to join.
It's one of many ways Cooley High changed lives in Schultz's drive for authenticity. When he was looking for an actor to play Mr. Mason, for instance, he turned to 38-year-old Garrett Morris, a struggling New York actor who was paying the bills by teaching. Though Schultz's producers balked, since they were hoping for a Sidney Poitier type, Schultze went to bat for Morris, who fully earns his faith. When the cops come calling for the teenaged joyriders the next day, Mr. Mason pulls some strings to help the two most promising participants avoid a misdemeanor felony charge. His good deed will backfire when Stone and Robert assume that Preach and Cochise snitched on them.
Only four months after Cooley High's release, Morris made his debut on Saturday Night Live as a Not Ready for Primetime Player. He had acted before he met Schultz, but afterward, he became a household name.
Beyond the writing, the acting, and the directing, there's another reason Cooley High maintains a buoyant tone, despite a tragic turn towards the end, and that's the music. From top to bottom, it's filled with The Sound of Young America: Motown hits from the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops, and Martha and the Vandellas.
Though Samuel Arkoff's American International Pictures, the home of exploitation fare like Sheba Baby, provided Schultz with a modest budget, Suzanne de Passe at Motown believed in the project, and let him have the music he wanted for a reasonable price. It's hard to believe it would be that easy today--though this licensing ease would cause problems once home video came into play.
If the film lacked big stars, it didn't need them, and Cooley High was a hit. Two months later, Hilton-Jacobs would make his debut as Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington on Welcome Back, Kotter, which ran for four seasons on ABC. Though he's worked steadily since, it remains his best known role.
One year later, Schultz would make the leap from AIP to Universal with Car Wash, another Black comedy, this time with bigger stars. In 1976, ABC also launched the Eric Monte-created, Cooley High-inspired What’s Happening!!, though so many details were changed--like the shift from Chicago to Los Angeles--that it feels like a different story, even if the action also revolves around three high school students, including Ernest Thomas's Roger "Raj" Thomas, a bespectacled aspiring writer, much like the young Monte.
As a kid growing up in the 1970s, I watched Good Times, Welcome Back, Kotter, and What’s Happening!!, but I don't remember hearing anything about Cooley High. I'm sure I would have enjoyed it if I had, not least because Schultz removed most of the R-rated language from Monte's script to secure the PG rating that opened it up to a wider audience. Instead, I caught up with it a few years ago on network TV. That may not have been the ideal context, but it aired mostly intact. I got the gist--and I loved it.
The lack of visibility, in the years after its release, was exacerbated by Cooley High's unavailability on videocassette due to the music rights. After Universal acquired Motown in 1988, the rights were cleared, and the film started to make the home-video rounds on DVD, culminating in this year's Criterion Collection Blu-ray, which lacks a commentary track, but compensates with context-rich extra features.
Cooley High (along with actor Glynn Turman) also receives pride of place in Elvis Mitchell's excellent new Netflix documentary Is That Black Enough for You?!? Mitchell lets Preach have the last word, since the concluding speech from Schultz's film also concludes Mitchell's tribute to the Black cinema of his formative years.
Sadly, Eric Monte, who remains among the living, appears only in archival footage in a featurette on the Criterion release. Cooley High, the film, differs from his high school years in certain respects--unlike Preach, he dropped out during his junior year and joined the Army--but the story began with him.
In the late 1970s, everything started to fall apart for Monte. It was a swirl of lawsuits, failed projects, alcoholism, drug addiction, and homelessness. Reportedly, he is now clean and living in Portland, Oregon. I hope he is well, and I hope he receives financial compensation from this new release.
Monte helped to make a different kind of Black entertainment possible in the 1970s: lively, funny stories about regular, working-class people, free from objectification, stereotyping, and kitchen-sink miserablism.
Michael Schultz, who would also shift to television--where he continues to work regularly in his 80s--brought Monte's story to life, and he did it justice. If anything, he made it better by bringing so much of himself and his collaborators, including their priceless ad libs, into the finished product.
In some ways, Preach is a composite character standing for any young striver trying to get somewhere against seemingly insurmountable odds, trying to have fun, and trying to savor every precious detail along the way.
The Criterion Collection releases Cooley High on Blu-ray on Dec 13, 2022. Images from The Dissolve (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs and Glynn Turman), Movie Valhalla (Sherman Smith, Norman Gibson, Turman, and Jacobs), the IMDb (Garrett Morris, Jacobs, and Turman), MeTV (Jacobs, Gabe Kaplan, and the Sweathogs), The Criterion Collection (Turman and Jacobs), and Washington University Digital Gateway (poster image).
Michael Caine shines in Simon Langton's 1986 Cold War thriller as a British Korean War veteran who turns detective after a devastating personal loss.
Langton (Upstairs, Downstairs, Smiley's People) begins his adaptation of John Hale's 1984 novel with a series of suspicious deaths. It isn't clear at first what they have to do with Caine's widower Frank Jones, an office equipment manager, until his son, Bob (Nigel Havers, Chariots of Fire), a Russian linguist, expresses doubts about his job at Government Communications Headquarters when superiors encourage employees to snitch on each other after they identify a Russian mole in their midst.
The dead men, as it turns out, were chatty colleagues, and Bob's handlers fear he's about to go public, so they've been bugging his conversations, though he has no idea. He's usually the one doing the eavesdropping.
Frank encourages his son to keep quiet, concentrate on his relationship with soon-to-be-single mother Cynthia (Felicity Dean), and count his blessings he has a job when many citizens in Thatcher's Britain don't. Frank is also a true believer who has always tried to see the best in his country and its "special relationship" with the United States. As he tells Bob, "I'm not out to change the system," but his faith will be shaken to the core when Bob dies under mysterious circumstances. Frank also notices that someone "tidied up" the unkempt Bob's flat in the aftermath, indicating that they removed anything incriminating.
Frank meets reporter Bill Pickett (Kenneth Colley, The Empire Strikes Back) when he arrives to examine the scene of the possible crime. Bob had made arrangements to tell Bill everything he knew just before he met his untimely passing, so Frank, Cynthia, and Bill decide to work together to figure out what happened, but Cynthia's fears for her daughter's welfare cause her to step away and then Bill disappears from the scene, leaving Frank to go it alone, questioning Bob's colleagues and superiors until he reaches the man at the head of the operation, the supremely condescending Sir Adrian Chapple (John Geilgud in a brief, but chillingly quotidian turn).
In addition to Caine's multi-faceted performance, The Whistle Blower benefits from a score that raises the temperature at key moments and low-lit, wood-paneled rooms that convey wealth and privilege as much as secrecy and subterfuge. "I want to believe in England again," Frank tells Cynthia, but the deeper he digs, the less likely that becomes.
This is the kind of film that could have benefitted from a commentary track to provide context regarding Langton (a one-shot feature director) and Britain's history of intelligence-gathering, but viewers will have to make do without, though trailers for nine Michael Caine films are a welcome addition.
The Whistle Blower is available on DVD and Blu-ray via Kino Lorber and streaming via Prime Video (with ScreenPix), The Roku Channel, and YouTube. Images from the IMDb (Michael Caine with Nigel Havers, Havers with Felicity Dean, and Caine with John Geilgud).
