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).
(Sean S. Cunningham, 1989, USA, rated R, 99 minutes)
It's hard to imagine that DeepStar Six would exist if Ridley Scott's influential Alien hadn't come along first. Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham's science fiction disaster movie may take place 40,000 leagues beneath the sea, but the defining elements bear an uncanny resemblance, from the diverse crew stuck in a claustrophobic workspace to the insatiable creature prepared to devour every one of them.
If the budget was smaller, the actors less famous, and the ideas less original, the script, the performances, and the special effects prove surprisingly persuasive. With expert assistance from composer and frequent collaborator Harry Manfredini (Swamp Thing), Cunningham effectively ratchets up the tension as the crew's situation grows increasingly perilous.
Collins (Nancy Everhard, The Punisher) and McBride (Greg Evigan, B.J. and the Bear), anchor the scenario as a couple whose relationship may not survive the return to topside, as they term dry land. She has ambition, he doesn't. She wants to get married, he doesn't. There's no doubt that the challenges to come will bring them closer together--or tear them apart. Assuming they even get out alive.
Their crew mates include a steadfast captain (Taurean Blacque, Hill Street Blues), a dependable doctor (Nancy Pickett, Ferris Bueller's Day Off), a genial jokester (Matt McCoy), an underdressed marine biologist (pop star Nia Peeples), and a loose cannon (Miguel Ferrer, RoboCop) ready to blow.
The trouble begins when they attempt to set up a missile silo, and the bottom drops out of the ocean floor. They send out a remote camera to explore the situation, but it breaks down. Then, an unknown force starts hurtling towards them at great speed, ramming into one of the mini-subs.
At that point, the body count rises as systems malfunction, leading to power outages, waterlogged passageways, and frozen pod bay doors. Then, the crustaceous Eurypterid Monster, aka Depladon, slithers its way inside, terrorizing the remaining crew members who have few places to hide.
If Cunningham ends things on an optimistic note, which predicts Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim, it isn't an especially convincing one as a certain character emerges from a fiery conflagration without a scratch.
In their dishy commentary track, co-writers Lewis Abernathy and Geof Miller help to explain why some things work so well, while others don't. For one thing, they had intended a nastier affair with an entirely different director, but the studio had other plans, resulting in a more predictable picture.
They also note that they titled the shooting script Claws, an indication that they hoped to capitalize on the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws. In regards to Alien, Miller acknowledges an engagement in "wholesale theft."
The production was such a shoestring affair that a former So-Cal supermarket, burdened by the occasional rodent visitor, served as their set. The actors also did most of their own stunts. For all those disadvantages, though, the film looks pretty good for the era.
Other extras offer insights into Manfredini's score and the special effects, including models, miniatures, and an animatronic arthropod nicknamed Buffy. Not exactly essential, DeepStar Six is still an enjoyable watch.
DeepStar Six is available on Blu-ray through Kino Lorber. Images from Zeke Film (Deepstar Six crew and Matt McCoy in the diving suit), the IMDb (Alien crew), and Trailers from Hell (Miguel Ferrer, maxing and relaxing).
"Can't we just live in hotels for the rest of our lives?"--Sophie (Frankie Corio)
In her directorial debut, Charlotte Wells begins in the past with smeary, pixelated camcorder footage shot by 11-year-old Sophie (newcomer Frankie Corio in a naturally effervescent performance) who finds her dad's dance moves embarrassing. He is, she jokes, "130 going on 131."
For reasons unexplained, Calum's left wrist is in a cast, which has to be a drag while traveling in Turkey--or anywhere (he's played by Irish actor Paul Mescal of Normal People). Calum and Sophie's mother are divorced.
Vacation for these two--or "holiday" as they say in the UK--means hotel rooms, swimming pools, bus rides, chess matches, and mud baths.
Calum has enough of a youthful affect that a teenage pool shark assumes Sophie is his sister, and he does almost seem more like an older brother or an uncle. He can be silly and mischievous, but the occasional sober moment descends like a grey cloud, like when he tells a scuba instructor that he can't see himself at 40...and that he's surprised he even made it to 30.
Calum encourages Sophie to play with the younger kids at the hotel, but she prefers to play pool with the teen congregation, with the exception of Michael (Brooklyn Toulson), an age-appropriate boy with whom she plays a coin-operated motorbike game. When the teenagers flirt and make out with each other, she watches with avid curiosity. Later, she and Michael enjoy their own brief romantic moment, a first for the both of them.
Only towards the end of their stay does Calum's mood shift, possibly because he knows he won't be seeing his daughter every day anymore--even if they can exasperate each other--because Sophie lives in Scotland with her mother, while Calum relocated to England after their divorce.
Then again, it might have nothing to do with Sophie. It could be because his girlfriend returned to her ex-boyfriend or because their business venture fell apart as a result of her departure. It could be anything--it could be everything--but he rallies, and Sophie doesn't seem to notice, or acknowledge, that anything was amiss.
Throughout the film, Wells inter-cuts strobe-lit scenes of Calum dancing at a rave. He dances at the beginning of the film, and he dances at the end, but these scenes combine past and present (Mescal also dances throughout the Rolling Stones' video for "Scarlet"). They're memories, not flashbacks, since they include images of the adult Sophie (played by dancer and choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall) watching and even appearing to dance with her father, circa their late-1990s vacation.
The Lost Daughter / Netflix
It's never completely clear or explicitly explained--and all the more moving for the ambiguity.
Not until afterward did I realize that Maggie Gyllenhaal's 2021 directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, sort of predicts Aftersun. Not intentionally, since one film draws from personal experience and the other draws from an Elena Ferrante novel, but it isn't hard to see why Paul Mescal sparked to Charlotte Wells's script after appearing in a previous film involving a conflicted parent, a broken marriage, and a continental European vacation.
In The Lost Daughter, however, he plays a summer hotel worker (not a dad), but he establishes a vivid connection with Olivia Colman's professor (a divorced mother of two), just as he did with Daisy Edgar-Jones's fellow student in Normal People, and just as he does with Frankie Corio in her first movie role (she's already got a followup project in the works).
In other words, Mescal has, of late, been gravitating towards projects involving intense male-female interactions. I'm sure that won't describe every project he takes on in the future, like an upcoming film with The Crown's Josh O'Connor, any more than it describes every project he took on in the past--including a theatrical career in Dublin—but striking parallels abound, including God's Creatures, the new film from Saela Davis and The Fits' Ana Rose Holmer predicated on the relationship between a mother (played by Emily Watson) and her estranged son (played by Mescal).
Normal People / Hulu
Much like Normal People, Aftersun lives and dies by the chemistry between the two leads, and Mescal and Corio are never less than fully convincing as father and daughter.
If Calum is at a slight disadvantage as a character, it's simply because Wells presents him strictly through Sophie's eyes, except for one private moment that his daughter is unlikely to have witnessed. It helps to explain what's going on beneath the surface—the way parents can put on a brave face for their children—but I feel a little conflicted, because most everything else is mediated through her experience. And yet the film would make less sense without it.
Though I couldn't say whether Wells considers writer-director Barry Jenkins an influence, his production company, Pastel, shepherded her first feature film from page to screen. I do know that Jenkins has long claimed Claire Denis as an influence, and I would imagine Wells does, too, since she luxuriates in the sensual, abstract possibilities of half-open doors, muffled voices, translucent surfaces, and sunlight on sweat-dappled skin.
These images, captured on video and etched in her mind, help Sophie to remember her father: forever young, forever dancing--forever a mystery.
Aftersun is playing at the Meridian and AMC Seattle 10. Images from A24 (Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio) and Netflix (Mescal with Olivia Colman)
GORDON LIGHTFOOT: IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND (Joan Tosoni and Martha Kehoe, 2020, Canada, naturally, 90 minutes)
If You Could Read My Mind, a production of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, doubles as a documentary about both Gordon Lightfoot and the Canadian music scene that produced him.
The Lightfoot of today, with his rail-thin frame and long, lanky hair, doesn't look much like the robust, tousle-haired singer-songwriter who first came to fame in the 1960s. His mind is sharp, though, and he recalls his life's highlights and lowlights with clarity and humor in Joan Tosoni and Martha Kehoe's profile.
Lightfoot started out as a choir boy and barbershop quartet singer in the waterfront town of Orellia, Ontario before studying jazz composition in Los Angeles. Back home in Canada, he formed the Two-Tones, an Everly Brothers-style duo, but he wrote the songs, and tired of sharing the credit.
As a solo artist on Toronto's coffee house circuit, he impressed fellow folk artists, like Ian & Sylvia (Ian and Sylvia Tyson), who covered the title track and "(That's What You Get) for Lovin' Me" on 1965's Early Morning Rain.
Lightfoot also befriended Joni Mitchell, a Yorkville neighbor, who let him crash at her apartment when she would go on tour (Martin Scorsese includes footage of Lightfoot, Mitchell, and other musical luminaries jamming at her pad in his 2019 quasi-doc Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story).
To his biographer, Canadian journalist Nicholas Jennings, Lightfoot's million-dollar record deal with Warner Brothers represented a breakthrough for Canadian artists, but the resulting album, 1970's Sit Down Young Stranger, attracted little attention outside of Canada until a Seattle disc jockey made a regional hit out of "If You Could Read My Mind." The label took notice. Though Lightfoot wasn't happy about it, they changed the album title to reflect the song, and the sales rolled in.
As with "Early Morning Rain," several high-profile artists covered it, from Barbra Streisand to Johnny Cash. Lightfoot shares the stories behind others, like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," which drew from a real-life tragedy, and "That's What You Get," which drew from personal experience. Though it caught the attention of the country music establishment, Lightfoot believes it was disrespectful towards his first wife (he has remarried twice since then). "I didn't know what chauvinism was," he acknowledges.
To musicians like Geddy Lee of Rush, Lightfoot proved that Canada had more to offer the world than lumberjacks and hockey players. "We're capable of sensitivity and poetry." Randy Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive, meanwhile, praises his "smooth, honey kind of--velvet kind of voice."
While Mitchell and Neil Young would decamp to California, Lightfoot resisted the urge to follow that migratory path, helping to open the door for other Canadian vocalists, like Diana Krall and Sarah McLachlan, to reach a wider audience in subsequent decades.
Tosoni and Kehoe, who first met Lightfoot in the 1990s, also touch on his friendship with Dylan, his struggles with alcohol, and his tempestuous relationship with backup singer, music-biz scenester, and John Belushi associate Cathy Smith for whom he wrote cautionary ballad "Sundown."
If You Could Read My Mind joins the ranks of recent sensitively-drawn, well-constructed music documentaries about folk-rock peers Linda Ronstadt and David Crosby, who also found ways to stay relevant and energized years after their initial burst of fame. Recommended...not least since Lightfoot was the first artist I ever saw in concert, live at the West Anchorage High School auditorium (at the time, there really wasn't another suitable venue). Few major artists traveled to Alaska in the 1970s--but Gordon Lightfoot did.
Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind is available to stream for free through Plex, Pluto, Tubi, and Vudu, and on DVD (but not Blu-ray) from Kino Lorber. Images from USA Today / John Reeves (Lightfoot) and Amazon / Vanguard (Ian & Sylvia), and Place des Arts (Lightfoot in 2013).
Jang Hae-joon (The Host's Park Hae-il) is a Busan detective who only sees his wife on the weekends due to her job at a nuclear facility in Ipo, but they seem to have a good relationship, particularly sexually. And maybe it's best that they don't spend much time together, because he's fully invested--possibly too invested--in his job.
It becomes an obsession when he investigates the death of 60-year-old rock-climbing enthusiast Ki Do-soo (Yoo Seung-mok). Did he jump or was he pushed? Hae-joon and his partner rappel up Guso Mountain to check things out, risking their own lives in the process. Next, they meet Song Seo-rae (Lust, Caution's Tang Wei), a Chinese woman so much younger than the victim that they assume she's his daughter--she's his wife.
Seo-rae isn't the least bit surprised--or even upset--by Do-soo's death, implying that he was suicidal. Nonetheless, the detective suspects murder, not least when Seo-rae promptly stops wearing her wedding ring, so he looks into her background, but the employer and the elderly patients with whom she works praise the caregiver. Aside from her pleasant bedside manner, the trained nurse is, apparently, "good at giving injections."
As he investigates, Hae-joon imagines that he's with her, at home and at work, breathing in her intoxicating scent. Waking life and daydreams converge as he asks more questions, secures a DNA sample, sorts through cell phone clues, stakes out her apartment, and meets with one of her patients. What starts out as surveillance soon looks more like voyeurism. Seo-rae, aware of his presence, doesn't seem to mind. He watches as she smokes, eats ice cream, and watches old TV dramas.
Just as his boss pressures him to wrap up the case, his partner discovers that Seo-rae killed her mother. When Hae-joon questions her about it, he finds that the situation wasn't quite so clear-cut. In the process, she questions him about his job, and he tells her about a few cases.
They continue to see each other, even after the case is closed, or maybe it's all in his imagination. It's possible that he's still investigating, and that she's still trying to prove her innocence, or that they're just compensating for the spouses who aren't there, one dead and the other out of town.
In a way, Decision to Leave recalls the erotic thrillers of the 1980s in which detectives who should know better become obsessed with murder suspects or other kinds of bad-omen women, except this film, for which Park won best director at Cannes, focuses more on psychology than carnality, though the surveillance/voyeurism doubles as a form of sex. No one would confuse it for Basic Instinct or Body Double, though it seems likely that Park appreciates both Brian De Palma and Paul Verhoeven at their trickiest.
The filmmaker has worked noir elements into his films before, particularly 2016 psychological thriller The Handmaiden, but this is the closest he's come to noir without plunging full-bore into the genre. As he told Film Stage, "This might sound surprising, but I'm not the biggest fan of the noir genre." It's also his funniest film in a playful, Chungking Express-like way. There's more action, too--foot chases through streets and over the tops of roofs--but less gore, other than a few scratches on arms and legs.
Genre aside, Park has always been the opposite of predictable, and at the halfway mark, Decision to Leave takes a turn. Hae-joon and Seo-rae have moved on with their lives, but they haven't forgotten about each other. If anything, Seo-rae has become equally obsessed over time.
Hae-joon's wife, Jeong-ahn (K-pop singer Lee Jung-hyun), believes he's happiest when he's investigating a murder.
As the months pass, locations, colleagues, and sartorial signifiers change, but another high-profile case comes his way just as he was starting to grow bored with small town life after a move from Busan to Ipo, and the film's second half essentially repeats the first, except that everything is different in some way, not least what the characters think about each other--and what we think about them.
For all that the film has going for it, from Yeong-wook Jo's Bernard Hermmannesque score to Ji-yong Kim's lustrous cinematography, the chemistry between the leads keeps things crackling. While Seo-rae plays her cards close to her chest, outside of a disclosure toward the end, Hae-joon is consistently expressive--and his range of expressions is inexhaustible (Tang first played a femme fatale in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, and she's very good at it). The attraction is as understandable as the tension.
In the end, there's something they find irresistible about the detective-suspect/hunter-prey dynamic. Park and co-writer Chung Seo-kyung never explain it; they just leave clues, providing more information, for instance, about Seo-rae's past than Hae-joon's. To my mind, it's a little like the dominant-submissive relationship in Peter Strickland's Duke of Burgundy. You might think Hae-joon has the upper hand, but...maybe he doesn't.
The two share a form of love, but it isn't necessarily a sustainable kind. It's also a form of psychosis, but it isn't necessarily a treatable kind. Park Chan-wook's 11th film is his most inscrutable, his most romantic--and his best.
Decision to Leave is playing now at the Regal Meridian and SIFF Cinema Uptown. It opens at Northwest Film Forum on Fri, Oct 28. Images from JoySauce (Song Seo-rae), Awards Daily (Song and Park Hae-il), the IMDb (Song), and Bloody Disgusting (Song and Park).
Inisherin is the kind of postcard-pretty Irish town that only really exists in the imagination of filmmakers like Martin McDonagh. It isn't just that his film takes place in a past devoid of radios and TV sets--even electricity--but Inisherin is more of an idea of Ireland than a representation.
In its hazy beauty, it never looks or feels quite real, though McDonagh, an Englishman of Irish ancestry, filmed on location on the Aran Islands (aided by extensive post-production work to erase all signs of modernization).
Though I don't believe he was aiming for documentary realism, his take on rural Ireland isn't worlds away from the cozy communities depicted in mainstream features, like Kirk Jones's 1998 codger comedy Waking Ned Devine or John Patrick Shanley's 2020 romantic picaresque Wild Mountain Thyme (from his play Outside Mullingar). I doubt that McDonagh, a playwright who expanded from the stage to the screen with his Oscar-winning 2004 short Six Shooter, would be flattered by those comparisons.
As a filmmaker, his work often feels like a cross between the plays of Samuel Beckett and David Mamet and the films of Quentin Tarantino.
The 27-minute Six Shooter with Inisherin actor Brendan Gleeson features a reported 34 instances of the word fuck and its variants. That's something the American auteurs behind 1992's Glengarry Glen Ross and Reservoir Dogs could get behind--and probably inspired. (According to Jason Bailey's recent 30th anniversary piece about both films in The New York Times, one features 138 instances of the word and the other features 269.)
The Irish-born Beckett, meanwhile, is famed for work that is stripped to the bone. Plays like Waiting for Godot could be set in Ireland, or anywhere, really. They exist in minimalist spaces of the writer's unique imaginings.
Inisherin, by contrast, can be cartoonish. Other than Kerry Condon's Siobhán, the characters are a pretty simple-minded lot. With few exceptions, they aren't all bad or all good, but they're painted with broad strokes.
Colin Farrell's Pádraic, a dairy farmer, shares a cottage with Siobhán, his well-read sister. Pádraic considers Siobhán, Colm (Brendan Gleeson), and Jennie, a donkey, his closest companions. There's no mention of parents or partners, love or sex, but Pádraic has everything he needs. Or so he thinks.
That changes when Colm stops talking to him and Siobhán considers leaving for a teaching job. There's also the buzz of war in the distance. Though McDonagh doesn't specify the year or the conflict, characters make vague references to it (it's 1923 and civil war is in full bloom). They know something is going on, but they're more concerned about life on Inisherin, where minor conflicts, like Colm's silent treatment, can seem cataclysmic.
Though it's tempting to describe the 20-year age gap between Pádraic and Colm as unrealistic, cross-generational friendships aren't completely unheard of. If anything, I wish they were more common, but in an isolated village like Inisherin, Pádraic doesn't have many options (in 2008's In Bruges, the actors' first collaboration with McDonagh, Gleeson played more of a protective mentor figure to Farrell's trigger-happy hitman).
Though Pádraic has a friendly rapport with the troubled, puppyish Dominic (The Green Knight’s jittery Barry Keoghan), they aren't exactly friends.
If anything, Colm's age seems a likely factor in his desire to concentrate on his fiddle-playing over his pub sessions with the amiable, if aimless Pádraic.
In a different kind of movie, Colm's behavior might signify mental illness--not least when he turns to self-mutilation after Pádraic refuses to leave him alone--but McDonagh presents both men as stubborn in the worst of ways.
The more closed-off Colm becomes, the more aggressive Pádraic becomes in trying to get him to open up. He just wants things to return to the way they were, but once the Spy vs. Spy trajectory is set in motion, it's too late.
Though described as a black comedy, and studded with some genuinely amusing bits of business, Inisherin's central conflict, a metaphor for the Troubles, plays more like tragedy. The actors are certainly up to the task, though the Venice Film Festival awarded Farrell for his work over Gleeson.
As in In Bruges, they're pretty evenly matched, though Farrell has more dialogue (he's also admitted that he felt like a pillock during the 14-minute standing ovation at the Venice fest, though Gleeson found it touching).
Throughout the film, McDonagh fills the screen with uptight priests, beneficent bartenders, batty old ladies who aren't as batty as they seem, pints of lager, pub singalongs, woolly sweaters, battered brogues, and all the usual markers of Irishness--it's only missing a few freckle-faced urchins. It's not that these things don't exist in Ireland, only that he lays it on a bit thick.
As The Irish Times criticDonald Clarke told Indiewire, "There's a certain degree of unease in Ireland about McDonagh's post-modern, heightened versions of Irishness. The films and plays do well here. But there is a tension in Ireland about his treatment of the country." Even from thousands of miles away, here in the States, it's a tension to which I can completely relate.
But still, the chance to spend time with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson is worth the price of admission alone, and they're both in top form here.
The Banshees of Inisherin opens in Seattle on Fri, Nov 4, at SIFF Cinema Uptown, among other venues. Images from GeekTyrant (Colin Farrell) and Jonathan Hession/Searchlight Pictures (Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, Farrell and Kerry Condon, Farrell and Barry Keoghan, and Farrell and a horse).
Depending on your perspective, The Bay of Silence is a domestic drama, a psychological thriller, or a travelogue--possibly all three.
In the prologue, Will (Danish actor Claes Bang, the BBC's Dracula), a graphic designer, and Rosalind (Ukrainian-French actress Olga Kurylenko, Quantum of Solace), a photographer, wander around the hills of Liguria, Italy. They swim in the titular bay, admire the hillside homes, and make love al fresco.
It would all seem idyllic if Rosalind, a single mother with two kids, wasn't so skittish about having her picture taken. The minute Will tries to capture the moment, she deletes the photo from his phone. He laughs it off. The audience knows better.
The vacation culminates in a marriage proposal. Eight months later, she's pregnant, and they've moved into a London home with her grade school-age twins and a nanny. The romantic idyll ends when she leans against a wobbly railing and tumbles over the balcony to the cobblestones below. Though their baby suffers no harm and she recovers from her injuries, Rosalind emerges with the conviction that she lost a child in the fall. Will assures her that she wasn't carrying twins for a second time, but she doesn't buy it.
After Rosalind develops a sleepwalking habit, Will tries to figure out what's really going on.
Her stepfather, Milton (Succession's
ever-slippery Brian Cox), a former military intelligence officer, tells him that she's been seeing the same Swiss doctor for years. Since they don't live anywhere near Switzerland, that seems odd. "Skype," Milton explains.
One day, Will comes home to find the house empty. No wife, no kids, no nanny, no passports. While sorting through the clues, he suspects she's run away with a photographer friend. Knowing that her family has property in Normandy, he goes looking for her in France where he finds a woman, his wife, who has gone off the deep end. He also finds a dead body.
From Normandy, they travel to Switzerland, where Rosalind’s mother, Vivian (Alice Krige, Institute Benjamenta) tells him a few things about Rosalind's mental state, but it doesn't explain what happened to the nanny, who has disappeared, and why a stranger has been following them around Europe.
Oscar-nominated Dutch director Paula van der Oest (Zus & Zo), working from Caroline Goodall's adaptation of Lisa St. Aubin de Terán's 1986 novel, eventually solves the mystery, but it's all too neat and tidy (Goodall also plays Will's colleague). If her film isn't quite the disaster its reputation might suggest, it doesn't add up to a whole lot, despite the filmmaker's attempts to grapple with serious issues like mental illness and sexual abuse.
The actors are fine, though both leads have done better work elsewhere, particularly Claes Bang who made such a vivid impression in Rubin Östlund's Palme d'Or winner The Square--it's also nice to see the undervalued Alice Krige, an intriguing presence in some of the dreamier films of the 1990s, in most anything. But the scenery is certainly nice. A strong optional selection.
The Bay of Silence is available to stream through the usual digital pay operators. Images from the IMDb (Claes Bang and Olga Kurylenko and Bang and Alice Krige) and The Hollywood Reporter (Bang and Kurylenko).
This is a revived version of a Line Out post about Hanly Banks's 2012 documentary Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film (these posts were purged from the internet after The Stranger pulled the plug on their music blog).
APOCALYPSE: A BILL CALLAHAN TOUR FILM (Hanly Banks, USA, 2012, 60 minutes)
Instead of a conventional documentary, this concert film captures the singer/songwriter on one tour in support of one album, 2011's Apocalypse (I caught his Seattle stop at Neumos with Michael Chapman; it was great).
Of course, there's nothing particularly unusual about a concert film, except Callahan's been around long enough that some fans might welcome the opportunity to get to know him better or to hear a few older songs.
For an artist who wants to showcase their most recent work while maintaining their privacy, however, it's the way to go. As he sings in "America!," one of his finest songs to date, "Everyone's allowed a past they don't care to mention."
Instead, the director combines songs with glimpses of the towns Callahan visited. Filled with twang, reverb, and the seersucker suit-clad subject's unvarnished baritone, Apocalypse offers a noirish take on Americana, like Scott Walker playing with Calexico, and the shots of farms, forests, and factories suit the material.
Nonetheless, the emphasis remains on Callahan and his band (guitarist Matt Kinsey and drummer Neal Morgan), and Hanly Banks neatly stitches together different domestic performances. One minute, Bill is wearing sunglasses, the next he's not. One minute, he's outside under the stars, the next he's not. It isn't as distracting as it sounds, but I'm also pretty accustomed to the technique by this point.
Hanks, a former Fader contributor, has designed the film more for listening to the music and meditating on the imagery than for thinking about Callahan's background and how it relates to his discography. If he talks about writing and touring, he avoids specifics, concluding that he's never more "real" than when he's on stage.
In the end, Apocalypse belongs to the impressionistic, About a Son school of filmmaking, which is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. Even the latest John Mellencamp DVD, It's About You, takes this approach; in fact, the two releases are strikingly similar, even if one guy's an FM mainstay and the other's an indie stalwart. If I prefer this film, that's mainly because I prefer Bill Callahan.
Apocalypse opens at the Grand Illusion on Fri, 9/7, at 7:30pm.
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.
