This is a revived version of a Line Out post (The Stranger purged them from the internet some time after they pulled the plug on their music blog in 2014).
BETTER THAN SOMETHING: JAY REATARD (Alex Hammond and Ian Markiewicz, USA, 2011, 89 minutes)
During his relatively short stint on Earth, Jay Reatard
poured his heart into his work. Love it or leave it, there's no denying his dedication to his music, but extreme careers often go hand-in-hand with extreme
lives, and Reatard, born Jimmy Lee Lindsey, Jr. in 1980, isn't here anymore.
If he doesn't always come across as the nicest guy in this
even-handed portrait—he could be a total dick—he was never a dilettante
or a poseur.
Alex Hammond and Ian Markiewicz, associates of director and cinematographer Albert Maysles (Gimme Shelter),
start by soliciting reminiscences from Reatard's colleagues at 2010's
SXSW before backtracking to interviews and performance footage from
1999-2009, including video of a screaming, howling, short-haired
teenager—more hardcore than garage-punk at that point in time. Admits
Reatard, "If I wouldn't have found music, I'm sure I'd have been a petty
criminal."
"I'm more like a jack-off of all trades."
By the new millennium, Reatard was still having on-stage temper tantrums and battling audience members in a series of bands: Lost Sounds, Destruction Unit, Angry Angles, and the Reatards.
Shangri-La Records founder Sherman Wilmott says that he wasn't a very
popular figure in Memphis. Friend Jonathan Boyd adds, "He couldn't care
less if people didn't like it or didn't think it was good or
worthwhile."
Other speakers: In the Red founder Larry Hardy, Goner Records co-owners Zac Ives and Eric "Oblivian" Friedl, Memphis Flyer writer Andria Lisle, Cheap Time leader Jeffrey Novak, and Wavves bassist Stephen Pope.
Despite his enfant terrible reputation, Reatard comes
across as friendly and forthcoming in the latter-day interview segments.
He clearly felt comfortable with the filmmakers, who hang out with him
around town and at a few in-store performances (I attended one at Sonic Boom). He submits that touring
tires him out and that he prefers to work on music when he's bummed out,
hence the bummed-out sounds he produced.
"I know I'm not gonna be able to make records when I'm dead...it's that simple really."
Better Than Something isn't bad at all,
but it never really gets to the bottom of Reatard's anger issues. He
grew up poor, but his mother and sisters supported his music career, so why would
he sometimes turn on trusted associates? He acknowledges a tendency to
self-sabotage, but it isn't clear why. There may be no easy answers, but
I wish the co-directors had tried to dig deeper. That rage lives on in Reatard's
music, though, where you can tap into it at will, even if he was never
able to let it go.
The duo also fails to mention when and how he passed away,
though they certainly don't ignore his death. Reatard died in 2010 of a
drug overdose, nine months after the interviews in the film, which
reveal a cogent and healthy-looking musician. Clearly, their intent was to
focus on his short, fast life rather than his seemingly sudden death, but films aren't often made
about the under-30 set, and death will always define Jay Reatard.
Better Than Something plays the Grand Illusion Cinema Mar 2-8 at 7 and 9pm (plus 5pm on Sat and Sun). No 9pm screening on
Sat. The theater is located at 1403 NE 50th. For more information, click
here. All images: the IMDb. Another image to come, taken by me, of Stephen Pope and Jay Reatard at Sonic Boom in Ballard. If I can find it.
"Everything dies, and that's a fact."--Bruce Springsteen, "Atlantic City"
"Everybody dies. And that's fucked up."--uncensored tagline, The Monkey
It's hard to imagine horror cinema without the inspiration provided by a nine-page story written 123 years ago, and yet the name W.W. Jacobs isn't as famous as that of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker...or Stephen King.
Granted, 1818's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and 1897's Dracula were full-length novels, but Jacobs' punchy parable features a distinct beginning, middle, and end–even a prologue with an Indian fakir and a British sergeant-major. Osgood Perkins also adds a prologue to his darkly funny adaptation of King's 1980 short story, which otherwise lacks one.
Just as King used Jacobs' 1902 story, "The Monkey’s Paw," as inspiration, he didn't merely update it for a new era, he turned it into a distinctly King creation as an ordinary father grapples with something he doesn't understand--something that endangers his entire family--kind of like The Shining, except he doesn't lose his mind. There's no fakir or soldier; just some creepy toy his long-gone merchant mariner father picked up abroad.
Perkins has done something similar in his fifth feature. He retains the bones of King's 42-page story, but changes the tone, condenses the number of characters, invests one of them–and not just the toy monkey itself–with malevolence, and amps everything up to 11.
Subtle, it ain't, but for my money, it works marvelously, and King, who famously dismissed Stanley Kubrick's auteurist 1980 take on his 1977 novel, has proclaimed, "You've never seen anything like 'The Monkey.' It's batshit insane. As someone who has indulged in batshittery from time to time, I say that with admiration." He's not wrong.
If you're all about creative kills, this Monkey is for you--you'll find the most creative one in Neon's red-band trailer. If not, you may want to look elsewhere, because this is Perkins' first full-fledged horror comedy, though the loopy Longlegs with a pasty Nicolas Cage was a step in this direction.
In the prologue, Adam Scott–currently weirding up TV screens in the second season of Apple's Severance–plays Capt. Petey Shelburn, an airplane pilot trying to return the creepy toy to the pawn shop from which he picked it up (in a nod to Jacobs' anti-colonialist story, the shopkeeper, played by Shafin Karim, appears to be of South Asian descent). The encounter doesn't end well for either gentleman, and Petey disappears from the scene.
Lois (Tatiana Maslany, who appears in Perkins' fall follow-up Keeper) goes on to raise twin sons Bill and Hal on her own. Remarkably, Sweet Tooth's Christian Convery plays both boys--I never would've guessed they weren't played by two different actors. If they kind of get along in King's story, in Perkins' conception, Bill is a bully and Hal is an inarticulate, bespectacled weakling who doesn't know how to stick up for himself. They'll grow into adults, both played by Theo James, who haven't changed in the slightest.
One day the boys find the toy their father had tried to keep from them. It's a mystery as to how it got into their house in the first place, and it will continue to bedevil them no matter where they go or what they do.
In King's story, the monkey was a broken-down thing with patchy fur, akin to the drumstick-wielding rabbit in Irish filmmaker Damian Mc Carthy's 2020 horror film Caveat, but it's more robust here with a toothy, humanoid grin and penetrating brown eyes. I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.
Naturally, the boys can't resist turning the key in the back of the creature to see if it still works, but nothing happens–at first. Then, after a few beats of the drum, friends and neighbors start to drop dead. Once they figure out what’s going on, they try to rid themselves of the thing. Hal’s plan, which involves a well, works for 25 years, but the monkey eventually finds its way back to solid ground. By which point, the brothers are fully estranged.
James, a classically-trained British actor, appears to be having a ball as the adult brothers, though he spends most of his time as the hapless Hal, who could make everything better if he just knew how to express himself.
I've always thought James was a fine actor–he received an Emmy nomination for The White Lotus a couple of years ago–but it's a treat to see him getting his hands dirty, a marked contrast to the glossy, James Bond-like Range Rover commercial currently making the televisual rounds.
Hal, a divorced dad who works in a convenience store, has the shitty life he believes he deserves, largely because he's been haunted by this terrible toy that just won't leave him alone. His sober-sided son, Petey (Colin O'Brien), thinks his father doesn't love him, whereas Hal stays away, because he believes he's better off without him, though Petey's soon-to-be-stepdad, Ted (Elijah Wood, also having a ball), is a different kind of awful: a preening narcissist whose wealth comes from self-help books about fatherhood.
Despite their differences, Hal, Bill, and Petey band together in an attempt to defeat the nemesis that has claimed their nearest and dearest, including a swinger with mutton chops played with relish by the director himself (like his father, Perkins started out as an actor before shifting to filmmaking).
This isn't to suggest that the unhappy Shelburn men have put their grievances aside. The Monkey remains a prickly enterprise from start to finish with plenty of gore along the way. By contrast, Perkins drops the climactic sequence from King's story in which Hal, who has a wife and two sons, tries something foolhardy that actually works, and father and son walk off into the sunset, as it were.
Granted, it's a King creation, so there are dark clouds on the horizon. Though Hal bonds with nine-year-old Petey, it doesn't change the fact that he doesn't like 12-year-old Dennis. In Perkins' adaptation, Bill is a bully who grows up to be a mullet-headed loser, but in King's story, he's mostly just unlikeable, the kind of thing no parent wants to admit to themselves.
As with Ted, Perkins adds other characters who weren't in the original story, like Ricky (Rohan Campbell), a leather-jacketed, faded-jeaned, floppy-haired slacker who becomes obsessed with the monkey when he spots it at an estate sale. He looks like the sixth Ramone. If the real band members were smart guys playing at being dumb, this fellow is a cretin born to hop.
I had a great time at The Monkey, better than I did at Longlegs, and I hope other viewers have as much fun. Perkins' approach to "The Monkey's Paw," by way of "The Monkey," never stirred my emotions, like Bob Clark's Vietnam parable Deathdream, a darkly dramatic illustration of fucking around and finding out, but it proves the durability of a story written in another century that has also powered episodes of the Twilight Zone and Night Gallery–Rod Serling was clearly a fan–as well as The X-Files and Tales from the Crypt, both in EC Comics and TV form.
Even horror maestro Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us, Nope) got in on the act by naming his production company Monkeypaw Productions, complete with an image of a shriveled simian appendage, seen in animated form as a severed paw stirring a cup of tea (in Get Out, Catherine Keener's spoon-stirring is as creepy as the rat-a-tat drumming in Caveat and The Monkey). Notably, Monkeypaw produced CBS's 2019 Twilight Zone reboot. Just as notable: Perkins directed alien invasion episode "You Might Also Like" with Gretchen Mol and Greta Lee. It's quite good.
I can't say whether anyone will adapt King's story again, but it's worth a read. Though I haven't seen every film adapted from his stories, Oz Perkins' contribution became an instant favorite, up there withRob Reiner's coming-of-age drama, Stand By Me, an adaptation of 1982 novella The Body. (I was initially impressed by Frank Darabont's1994 The Shawshank Redemption, also from a novella, but have increasingly mixed feelings about it.)
In 1985, King included "The Monkey," which premiered in skin mag Gallery, in his Skeleton Crew collection, which also spawned Darabont's adaptation of The Mist, but W.W. Jacobs' story as a source of inspiration will never go away, kind of like the toy in the 1980 story, always watching and waiting for some intrepid individual to ignore the warning…and…turn…the…key.
Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Gerber Bicecci's third feature is a social realist drama with Godardian flair.
The story centers on subway car driver and mother of two Dalia (award-winning Mexican actress Adriana Paz), who sets out to find her husband, Esteban, when he disappears without a trace, but few people care.
The Mexican Missing Persons system is a pervasive problem due to drug cartels, corrupt police and politicians, and a powerless populace. Plus, it shows no signs of stopping. As Carlos Aguilar wrote in The New York Times in a Feb 8, 2025 piece about the controversies swirling around Emilia Pérez, "Since 2006, over 400,000 people have died and more than 100,000 have disappeared as a result of ongoing drug-related violence across Mexico."
With no one to assist her, Dalia turns detective, which puts her job in jeopardy, and she starts to wonder if her lover (Noé Hernández), a driver hoping to take Esteban's place, or the union opposition had something to do with it, since she and her husband were both outspoken union members.
Hatuey Viveros Lavielle's black and white cinematography is gorgeous and inventive, and since Bicecci shot during the pandemic, streets are largely empty and the occasional face mask appears, bringing to mind the alienation of artful science fiction features, like Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 Alphaville and Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo B. Ragona's 1964 The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price.
Granted, the streets are emptier at night than during the day, but that only adds to the tension, since a woman walking alone in the dark through some of Mexico City's sketchiest neighborhoods takes her life in her hands.
This is a vital subject and Adriana Paz is fantastic. Dalia is strong, sexy, and caring about her children, who have unique lives of their own--her son, who is openly gay, has recently taken a lover--and other subway car drivers.
At Cannes 2024, Paz shared the best actress award with the cast of Emilia Pérez, which is ironic, because Jacques Audiard's embattled musical, which was shot in France, also deals with the Missing Persons system, and it's by far the inferior effort, even as it's gotten significantly more exposure, more awards consideration, and more attention overall--some of it quite scathing.
For another moving take on the subject, I would recommend Fernanda Valadez's haunting 2021 film Identifying Features, which revolves around a middle-aged mother (an excellent Mercedes Hernández) searching for her migrant worker son. Little wonder Mexican filmmakers are making the least clichéd, hardest-hitting, most personal films about this ongoing crisis.
Dead Man's Switch has been making the film festival rounds, but isn't currently available on video or streaming in the US. As Bicecci told Director's Notes, "Mexico produces around 200 features a year and a lot of colleagues can shoot their films; however, independent author driven social realist films are not exactly the easiest ones to fund, and certainly are the most difficult to distribute." I'll update this post if that changes. Images from Director's Notes (Adriana Paz), Eventival (Paz and Noé Hernández), and Mubi (Paz).
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.
