Movie Nation

The thing about cult cinema is that it requires a buy-in, an “enlistment” in the cult that often requires a different sort of suspension of disbelief.

You have to believe the film is all that others say it is, and be willing to probe and plumb its mysteries to get at what they assure you should be gotten from the effort.

It’s no surprise that Pedro Almodovar is quoted as calling the 1970s Spanish horror experiment “Arrebato” or “Rapture” his favorite horror film. It was made when he was but an aspiring filmmaker himself, a daring, sexual (not erotic) Spanish film in a country that had never seen that. But should that alone account for the movie’s rapturous embrace by the horror cognoscenti?

It’s a self-consciously arty, indulgent and obscurant essay on the “addiction” of cinema, and the horrors of “possession” by that addiction made by a one-off filmmaker back when Spain was in the giddy throes of hedonism following the death of the dictator Franco.

“Arrebato” has time capsule appeal, a film that reminds us — especially filmmakers — of the tactile, delayed pleasures of shooting, processing, editing and projecting movies filmed on celluloid. It gives us a taste of the Spain of the pre-EU era, and of the drugs and sex and artistic opportunities the consumed the country in those heady disco-laced decade of blowback against forty years of Catholo/fascist repression.

But is it deserving of its reputation and the rubber-stamped approval others are contorting themselves into writing as it earns a re-release? I think not.

Slow, of limited shock and equally-limited intellectual and aesthetic appeal, “Rapture” is a grind to sit through. It subjects us to almost two hours of fervid, hoarsely-whispered voice-over narration, recorded on audio cassette, of an experimental (8mm) amateur filmmaker’s discoveries and fate as his addiction grows greater with every reel (cassette) of Kodachrome he exposes and drops off to be developed.

It delivers its payoff, which is…interesting — but hardly worth what we sit through to get to it, drugs and sex and vampire movie subtext included.

Jose Sirgado (Eusebio Ponsela) is finishing the editing of his latest, a vampire thriller. We’ve seen him working and bickering with the editor on its last scene. It’s a vampire being tucked into a coffin, and turning to give the viewer her best deadpan stare.

Pedro Almodovar’s first feature (“Pepi, Luci, Bom”) was filmed under conditions similar to those depicted here, shot on 16mm and released (blown up to 35mm) a year after “Arrebato” came out.

The filmmaker lives in a cinema-decorated apartment with a junkie leading lady (Cecilia Roth) he’d love to ditch. He gets loud with her, and even a little rough. Passed out from her latest heroin fix, she’s not going anywhere.

That’s why he unwraps the film package that was delivered in the day’s mail. He plays the audio cassette that came with it, and in between fights with Ana, he’s invited to remember his connection to the narrator on that cassette, Pedro (Will More), a highly-strung, effeminate and camera-obsessed experimenter who lived in a house and estate that Jose once visited on a location scout.

Pedro mesmerized the director who came looking for a place to film his “Wolf Man,” but left with a fixation on the amateurish, random 8mm reels Pedro showed him. Pedro is a fellow whose obsession only grew when he discovered how to film time-lapse on his Canon Autofocus 1014.

Pedro eventually moves on from scenery, time-lapse shots of crowds and such and onto filming himself, single-frame-by-frame. And that’s why he’s sent this director his next to last reel of processed film. The last reel, he fears, he won’t be able to deliver in person. Jose will have to come for it. What does Pedro expect to happen?

Ivan Zuleta, who only made one feature film and whose name was superseded long ago by a more famous accordionist, makes this a character study of Jose’s addictions, which he is trying to shake by the time he gets this mysterious reel of film from a fellow he only met “one or two times.”

That’s the source of his rows with Ana. She’s still deep into the coke and heroin and pills, although she vamps a mean lip-sync cover of Elvis’s “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” in her more lucid moments.

Is Pedro trying to warn Jose on an addiction even more insidious? What is it that he is discovering in his relationship to cinema/the camera that is showing him the “Rapture” of which he speaks?

Beats me.

After a lurid, promising start, Zuleta’s movie staggers into the presence of the pre-fanboy fanboy Pedro, who takes it over and is meant to, I guess, transfix us. He’s got old comics and trading cards from the ‘1950s adventure epic “King Solomon’s Mines,” a Betty Boop doll he kind of freaks a stoned Ana out with. I found him a bit boring after a few exposures, a serious of a drag after that.

He’s a quirky character, given to “perching” rather than sitting, wild-eyed and long LONG-winded, he insists that “cinema and I were up to something special together.” But if you’ve ever seen old “discover the camera” first-year film student super 8mm films, there’s nothing “special” to any of it.

We are going to get to a point where Jose (in Spanish, with English subtitles) rues the day he cracks, “It’s not me that loves cinema, it’s cinema that loves me.” We will get our payoff, which is as chilling as it is primitive.

But all due respect to Almodovar, who’s made the odd stinker himself, there’s a reason this other chap never made another movie. And as I can’t find an obituary for him, I’m guessing “death” wasn’t it.

Rating: Unrated, violence, nudity, sex, drug abuse

Cast: Eusebio Ponsela, Cecilia Roth, Will More

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ivan Zulueta. An Altered Innocence release.

Running time: 1:55

Eye popping? You betcha.

April 22.

This looks cute, and Amazon sends it our way just in time for Valentine’s Day – Feb. 11.

“Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf” is as mercurial and scattered as its teen heroine, a 17 year-old struggling to process identity, multiple family crises, hormones and the unwanted attentions of “a friend of the family.”

It’s a movie with a lot more promise and ambition than its lurching, stumbling execution can do justice to. The second feature film by Susan Youssef (“Habibi Rasak Kharban”) is a melodrama that teeters between frustrating and infuriating.

Marjoun (Veracity Butcher) is a teenaged daughter of Islamic Lebanese parents, just another high school kid in ripped jeans and black tees coping with high school in the only hometown she’s ever known — Little Rock, Arkansas.

She has a mother (Clara Khoury) who is on medication, given to impulsive rages and naivete that seems as much a part of her culture and upbringing as her mental illness. Marjoun’s little sister (Maram Aljahmi) has taken up the hijab — at age 10 — for reasons never made clear. To please her mother, maybe? That puts a target on her at middle school. She’s being bullied.

And then there’s Dad (Tarek Bishara). He’s in jail on a host of politically popular charges, all stemming from donating cash he earned from the family convenience store to the wrong Middle Eastern groups.

With her testy, can’t-read-English mother checked-out, her sheltered sister who can’t even feed herself and her dad in the clutches of “the system” with only a public defender to help, Marjoun needs to step up. But how?

Marjoun, a smart kid, enters a cash prize essay contest and asks one and all for money to help get her father proper counsel. She even hits up the boy (Alexander Biglane) she’s just started dating.

Her cracked mother makes a bad situation worse by inviting an actor-friend (Dominic Rains) to come “help with the store.” All he wants to help with is Marjoun.

“Sami is a man of God,” Mom prattles, as if she has a clue. Khoury never lets this mother character warrant sympathy. She serves up a mentally ill woman wholly incapable of making adult decisions, slapping and lashing out at her children, “medicated” or not. And she likes the idea of Sami coming on to her teenaged daughter.

Youssef slow-walks her young heroine through this minefield, struggling to show us how someone utterly inexperienced when confronted with all this would try to process it. Marjoun needs to save her father, wants to rally support in their Islamic community, desperately needs cash and has to cope with the cartoonish but criminally serious lechery of a 20something actor who comes on strong.

“Marjoun” slowly whips the viewer back and forth, letting us see rather than have explained to us Marjourn’s decision to “cover up” herself, watching the conflict she’s feeling between her culture and her environment play out over her desire for a motorcycle.

There’s good stuff here — Butcher’s title role turn, for instance. But Youssef loses track of it as she shifts points of view willy nilly and throws everything and anything at this family, little of it landing with any emotional impact.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Veracity Butcher, Clara Khoury, Maram Aljahmi, Alexander Biglane, Tarek Bishara and Dominic Rains.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Susan Youssef. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:20

Major points for style in this trailer for the Boy Harsher “Twin Peaks” meets Lady Jason thriller “The Runner.”

Shudder will release this Jan.16.

A good Spanish drama about a stubborn tender of sheep holding out against developers should join the collection of The Jean Rhenn Public Library, Seminole County’s finest.

Here’s my review of “El Pastor.”

MovieNation, improving America’s moviegoing choices one film, one library at a time.

O

It takes a good, long time for Jonathan Cenzual Burley’s “El Pastor (The Shepherd)” to become the thriller that comes to mind the moment you hear its description. But he makes sure that in this gritty tale of a lone-holdout who won’t sell his land to developers, throwing his shortsighted neighbors into a tizzy, it’s time well spent.

The Spanish drama constantly echoes the many Hollywood versions of this “lone-holdout” formula film, but the patience, detail and slow-simmer-to-slow-boil plot set it apart from its genre antecedents. It’s good.

Miguel Martín impresses as Anselmo, a lonely shepherd living outside a village whose only significant employer is a hog abattoir, a slaughterhouse for the pigs destined to be the jamon the Spanish crave from birth.

Anselmo lives a simple, Spartan life — a gas stone, a dog, Pillo, who helps with the sheep, and electricity so that he doesn’t have to read by candlelight.

That and his stops at the local bar are the only indulgences he allows himself. At 55, anyone else would see this as a rut, a dead end. But when developers come and give him the full-court press sales pitch — they want his land as part of their scheme for a planned community of houses, shops and a civic center — he politely brushes them off. Not interested.

They’re offering his a “more than fair” (in Spanish with English subtitles) price. Probably not enough to support him into his dotage, but “fair.” He’s just not going to change.

“He must be a little slow,” they figure. Not to worry. Local peer pressure should change his mind.

With big money, big debts and miscalculated “logic,” meat-packer Julian (Alfonso Mendiguchía) and his hotheaded employee Paco (Juan Luis Sara) figure this is a done deal. It isn’t.

Friends and others warn Anselmo that he’s “in for a hard time.” They have no idea. Things can only get messier from there.

Little-used leading man Martín, of “Celda 211,” maintains a “stubborn” without seeming that way posture, giving us a simple man who prefers a knowable status quo to the “promises” of the deal, which his land is the linchpin for.

Burley shows us the ulterior motives of the developers and those in their thrall, but doesn’t develop the light flirtation Anselmo has with the local librarian (Maribel Iglesias). This is all about desperate people whose desperation seems self-generated, a guy who fits in well enough most times, but has a growing list of enemies when he dares cling to what he has.

The striking central Spanish plains settings and self-contained world Burley captures here is what sets this formulaic film apart. That, and its patience. We know things are going to come to a head. He makes us wait to see how, and then provides a surprise or two in how that happens.

Not the first time we’ve seen this sort of story, but not a bad variation of it.

Rating: Unrated, violence

Cast: Miguel Martín, Juan Luis Sara, Alfonso Mendiguchía and Maribel Iglesias

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jonathan Cenzual Burley. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:38

And it’s all due to the 25 years younger Alfred Molina as Doc Ock.

But seriously, what do you say about a crowd pleaser that pleases millions?A

Aside from Gordon Ramsey’s favorite expletive, “F— me!”I

It’s the biggest hit of the pandemic era at the movies.

Nothing else made a dime.

“Encanto” fared best, pulling in another $6.5 million in ticket sales. That’s not even a million tickets sold, folks.

“West Side Story” tallied another $3.4 million. That is a 68% plunge on its second weekend. That’s right on the cusp of what we call “Tyler Perry Swoon.” Disastrous second weekend. This is why you cast movies stars, kids.

“Nightmare Alley” debuted with a disastrous $2.9.

“House of Gucci” earned $1.8, “Licorice Pizza” another $1.1.

Three generations of owners of the same British house cope with “change” and mysterious twists in their circumstances and fate.

The look of this vermin and bugs-animated series (Helena Bonham Carter and Matthew Goode are among those doing the voices) sets it apart, and it gives a big boost to veteran stop motion animators who get a high profile Netflix project that lifts their profiles and could allow many of them to graduate from animated shorts to features.

Jan 14, only on Netflix.

Who’s up for a “Lost City of Z,” “Romancing the Stone” mashup?

With Daniel Radcliffe in the uh Danny DeVito role?

This could be cute. Pitt had “Lost City of Z” rights for a while. Getting a comedy out of it? Smart play.