A movie about a CIA agent accused of treason who uncovers a right wing militia plot to overthrow the government?
Every month is Black Film History month at The Griot, (@TheGriotTV) a new African American-oriented TV channel.
And there’s always time for Sidney Poitier pictures.
But airing this one, so on the nose, right now? Well played.
African American artists have been around since the founding of the United States. But as in so many other corners of American history, they’ve been largely left out of the story of American art until quite recently.
A Fisk University (Nashville) professor and art curator, David C. Driskell, was interviewed by Tom Brokaw on “The Today Show” in 1976 about a monumental exhibition he’d pulled together and taken to museums across America in its Bicentennial Year.
“Two Centuries of African American Art” brought attention to 19th and 20th century Black artists, some of whom achieved a measure of fame, but whose work had never been gathered together in one celebratory overview.
As we hear Driskell, then and in a fresh interview for “Black Art: In the Absence of Light,” lament the oversight and celebrate the work, we meet current artists — some old enough to have caught the touring exhibition, others who grew up in a house that had the book that spun out of that LA County Museum to Brooklyn, Chicago to (The High Museum) Atlanta tour.
Artists such as Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold and Betye Saar — many still living at the time — could be celebrated for the movements which they were a key part of and what they represented.
Filmmaker Sam Pollard uses that “200 Years” exhibit as his framework and introduction for “Black Art,” as a jumping off point as he speaks with the most celebrated artists of today who, to a one, recall the lasting influence of that exhibition and how awareness of that in their upbringing pointed them towards creating the lively African American arts scene of today.
The film’s generous sampling of artists working today has the viewer thinking “representational” (as opposed to abstract) long before an artist explains why that tends to be the style embraced by Black painters, sculptors and even performance artists today. It wasn’t just the artists of the past who were “in the absence of light,” ignored or whitewashed out of history. Black people as subjects of visual art have been historically rare.
So Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall and others show us Black people, Black faces and Black life in a way that’s outside of the mainstream art world of collage, abstraction, surrealism and visual metaphor.
We consider Barack Obama’s presidential portrait and meet the woman who painted the iconic Michelle Obama as First Lady painting.
We hear of the fights in the 1960s over an infamous Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition on Harlem history, photographs which brought attention to one particular documenter of Black life there, was curated by a committee of white art experts and built largely out of white photographers’ vision of the place.
The sexism of the time, the Bearden-headed “Spiral Group” excluding female artists like Ringgold and Betye Saar from inclusion in the ’60s, is discussed, as is the context of artists first giving thought to “a Black aesthetic” in art.
Marshall shows us the paint selection that covers the gray scale spectrum of how painters depict African American people as subjects — seven paints, with any given painter’s choice of color or colors to use pointing to added meaning and degrees of realism or abstraction that they’re going for.
“In the Absence of Light” doesn’t cover early history, merely mentioning some important portrait or landscape painters of the first hundred years of African American art.
The quality of the works shown and the fame of the artists interviewed is undeniable and impressive.
One thing I was struck by, hearing from the collection of academics, curators from Virginia to New York and listening to the artists and even a collector of African American art (the rapper Swiss Beatz) is how “mainstream art world” they are.
These are the same sort of knowledgeable, top-schooled, largely upper middle class and faintly pretentious art cognoscenti you could find in any “opening” anywhere in America. We’re not meeting self-taught or underprivileged novelty “primitive” artists, the kind most often profiled on “The Today Show” and its ilk. We’re meeting Harvard academics and assorted museum (Virginia Museum of Art, etc) curators, all women and men of color.
In the larger art world, they speak a common language and present a shared expertise that marries knowledge with a hint of hauteur. The color-blind term that leaps to mind is “bougie.”
That, like the historical limitations of the film, narrows the focus of “In the Absence of Light.” It’s still an eye-opener for any casual art buff, realizing that a lot has happened in that scene since Basquiat, and an awful lot happened before David C. Driskell had the gumption and the thick skin to dare to suggest there was a Black art aesthetic, and that there were more than 200 years of African American art that was too good and too important to ignore.
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Cast: David C. Driskell, Betye Saar, Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Hank Willis Thomas
Credits: Directed by Sam Pollard. An HBO release (premiering Feb. 9).
Running time: 1:25
“Tazmanian Devil” is a Nigerian-American morality fable that might more accurately have been titled “How I Learned to Stop Preaching and Love the Frat.”
It’s about a kid who moves in with his Nigerian pastor father so that he can attend college in Texas. But the child the father always called “My young pastor” gets a whiff of fraternity life at a fictional Historically Black University (HBCU) and finds its temptations alluring, even if — like life with his father — there’s a lot of corporal punishment involved.
The messaging is awfully murky in Solomon Onita Jr.’s debut feature film. It’s not remotely a faith-based riff on Spike Lee’s “School Daze” — too many beatings, too much swearing, entirely too much abuse of the N-word for that. But that’s how it sets up, a kid in a moral quandary, being pulled and beaten at both ends by two equally unpleasant paths presented to our hero.
Abraham Attah is Dayo, a boy raised by his mother when his “get my American visa” preacher father (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) set off to set them up in America.
Except pious, all about “God’s work” pastor Julius keeps his visits home few and far between as he is getting his ministry started. Flashbacks show us the decade and a half that passes before he finally admits he’s not moving back to Nigeria and isn’t sending for them.
Dayo is a smart kid and talented musician who gets into an American college, one in Arlington, Texas, where his father is set up. Dad is more than happy to welcome “Young Pastor” there and assign him the role as keyboardist for the spirit-filled church choir. It’s his first step toward taking up the cloth.
“The Lord is going to use you to do exploits,” he insists.
Dayo makes eyes at the hottie in the church choir, Nicole (Billie D. Merrritt), notices her dancing with her sorority to help promote the top frat on campus, and begins to develop other ideas.
Can Mr. Shy, Naive and Awkward cut it with Tau Alpha Zeta, the top dog fraternity on campus, the “Tazmanian Devils?”
He’s torn, indecisive, not something testosterone-drenched frats tolerate.
And with their “vulgar music,” partying, drill-team precision “pledge line” in Satanic mask garb, this might not be something Dayo can share with the father he only addresses as “Sir.”
So the lies begin. And the further Dayo dives into the process, the more he has to lie to cover that.
On the other side of the coin, what about this quite-boyish gawky outsider, enunciation-challenged by the shouted recitations of fraternity self-promotion demonstrations, would make the popular, cool-kids fraternity even give him a second look? The kid has a 4.0.
“He could boost the chapter’s GPA single-handed!”
The fraternity leadership (Kyle Gardner, Lynn Andrews III, etc.) decide to give him a chance, even make him “line president” of his group of pledges. The smartest guy, albeit the least physically imposing one and the very worst public speaker (timid, mush-mouthed) will be in charge of prepping his fellow pledges for passing TAZ initiation.
Nicole takes more than a passing interest in Dayo’s progress. The kid’s got it made, if he can withstand the beatings and humiliations at the frat, and to a lesser degree at home from his father.
“Be very careful what you allow into your spirit,” the pastor preaches.
The mixed messages here — fraternity vs. church, peer abuse vs. parental abuse — work against “Tazmanian Devil.”
But the details, the rituals/exploitation/abuses of fraternity life, are smartly if somewhat sadistically presented.
The frat leaders worry about how far they can go with their pledges, and go there anyway. And by American fraternity standards, their bullying and “errands” are fairly tame –save for the brutal beatings.
In casting young Attah, Onita puts him in a spotlight where he needs to have the presence to suggest something that might make him pass for a “leader,” and the charisma to charm one of the campus’s great beauties. Attah simply isn’t up to it.
Every time he’s supposed to “step up” and show leadership, spine, ability or sex appeal, he physically shrinks on the screen. The character has “determination” scripted in. The performance and performer’s lack of presence smother that.
Attah’s articulation is poor enough to make one wish for subtitles. I’ve seen plenty of Nigerian films and rarely had so much trouble buying an actor in a leading role, or understanding much of what he had to say.
Onita has made a movie which points us to a rite of passage and demands our sympathy with the character and hope for one particular outcome. He and his star fail to make their case, leaving themselves and the viewer on the fence, lost as to what we’re supposed to feel when the closing credits roll.
MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence, profanity, drug and alcohol use
Cast: Abraham Attah, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Adepero, Lynn Andrews III and Billie D. Merritt
Credits: Scripted and directed by Solomon Onita, Jr. A 1091 release.
Running time: 2:00
Lance Henriksen gives one of the great “rage, rage against the dying of the light” performances in Viggo Mortensen’s finely-crafted “Falling.” Playing a withered, half-demented old farmer whose cruel lashing-out torches all within reach, he puts an exclamation point on an accomplished character-actor career.
Mortensen, who co-stars as the adult son coping with his Dad’s hair trigger temper and unfiltered willingness to make a scene, also wrote and directed this tale of not-quite-endless patience facing the sad furies of old age, when even growing up with the guy wasn’t exactly a picnic.
“Falling” is a cinematic “memory play,” a movie in which characters in the 2010-or-so “present” are triggered to recall their long, shared pasts.
It can be a pattern on wallpaper, the sound of the sea, ducks calling as they fly past or a meal at a restaurant, but both men — father Willis (Sverrir Gudnason plays him in the 1960s) and son John (Grady McKenzie, Etienne Kellici, William Healy at various ages) — remember and then wrestle with the troubling events of their lives through flashbacks.
John is gay, married to Eric (Terry Chen) in California. And when we meet him he’s just trying to get the old man to his house, flying him from his New York farm to the west. We’re treated to the first of Dad’s “scenes” — disrupting the flight with a belligerent cluelessness that is more infuriating than sad.
Dad’s tendency to lose things and wander off test John at the airport. Dad’s vile homophobia and racism are trotted out for professionally-patient Eric, who is Asian, a nurse and gay — three times the insult opportunities for the cranky old visitor.
Their adoptive daughter (Gabby Velis) is spared, even though she’s Hispanic. She isn’t spared the old man’s vulgar language and crudely cruel stories from father John’s childhood.
Willis remembers his wives — Gwen (Hannah Gross), who gave birth to John and Sarah, and Jill (Bracken Burns) — and constantly mixes them up.
Sarah (Laura Linney) keeps correcting him, as pointless as that is. He labels them both “whores” for fleeing him, can’t remember their deaths, loves his delusions and carries grudges like it was an Olympic sport.
“I don’t need to catch ‘The AIDS’ at my age,” he grouses, when asked about going to the beach, a single sentence with a record number of insults tucked into every word he bites off and spits out.
“Sundowning,” Sarah diagnoses. But his cruelty and ugliness — in front of her, John, Eric and their children — always brings her to tears.
Doctors are a big part of this stage of this life of defiant cursing, smoking, drinking and frying (Mortensen’s sometime collaborator David Cronenberg plays a proctologist), and they too weather his insults and abuse while praising his “fight.”
“I’m a f—–g VIKING!”
Linney’s deft handling of Sarah, a changer-of-the-subject and keeper-of-the-peace, will be recognizably real to most. Every family has one.
Mortensen’s John is a model of forbearance, suffering, “not taking the bait” when the old man spits it out. It’s a performance of delicacy and buried grievances.
But Willis will leave no grievance buried. Henricksen, who first gained notice in “The Right Stuff” and whose long career has been decorated with thugs, tough guys, vampires and the like, is the raging vortex of this cinematic universe. What’s truly startling are the ways he lets us know Willis has and had the tenderness that kept his children, at least, from not fleeing his toxicity the way their mother and step-mother did. In the flashbacks, Gudnason perfectly sets up the Willis that was and the Willis he will age into.
The lovingly-created flashbacks, of hunting and indulgent fathering coupled with callousness, even with the women he “loved,” finish the portrait. Dad could be affectionate and responsible when he wasn’t acting-out, making yet another scene, at home or out in public.
The worst thing you can say about “Falling” is that it isn’t on quite the same level with “The Father,” which covers the same ground in a deeper, Oscar-worthy inside-dementia way.
Mortensen spent the Hollywood capital he earned starring in the Oscar-winning “Green Book” on a film both personal and nuanced, a funereal look at old age, old wounds and the reasons families that experience the good and the bad in a parent persevere. They and we remember both. But when the chips are down, we cling to the good and hope that’s enough.
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout including offensive slurs, crude sexual references, brief sexuality and nudity
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Lance Henricksen, Laura Linney, Hannah Gross, Sverrir Gudnason, Terry Chen, Bracken Burns and David Cronenberg.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Viggo Mortensen. A Quiver release.
Running time: 1:52
Yes, the “hit-man thriller” is the most beaten-to-death genre in the cinema. Strangled, shot, stabbed and kicked to death as well.
But “Flinch” throws a few curves and screwballs when it comes to the plate. It offers a surprise or two, an odd touch or three, even if it doesn’t break format or reinvent this weariest of action tropes.
It’s about a young hitman, for starters. Our killer is young enough that he still goes by “Joey.” And Joey Doyle (Daniel Zovatto of “It Follows,””Don’t Breathe”) is something of a Momma’s boy.
He comes home, Momma reaches inside his jacket, removes his pistols from their holsters and clears the chambers. Momma fixes him dinner, says Catholic grace over the meal and practically tucks him in.
Momma is played by Cathy Moriarty (“Raging Bull,””Copland”). She tucks you in, you stay tucked.
She dotes on him the way Joey dotes on his Siamese fighting fish. She’s Catholic so Joey sleeps under a pink-neon rimmed crucifix/
Weird? Weird.
Joey’s in Dutch to a bigtime LA mobster (David Proval), a back-slapping paisano who knew his dad. Because Joey’s dad used to work for him, and got into debt.
Joey shoots his way through an opening hit, great. He tries to turn down the next job.
“That’s not what your father would say…Don’t make me cry.”
Nobody makes Lee, or his thug-squared son (Buddy Duress, of “PRVT CHAT”) cry.
But that “one last job” (which will never be one last job) goes wrong. The mark gets the drop on Joey, beats the hell out of him. And just as Joey turns the tables and finishes him, the dead man’s assistant (Tilda Cobham-Hervey of “I Am Woman”) walks in.
As she’s young and willowy and beautiful, Joey hesitates pulling the trigger. That’s not the story he tells Momma or anybody else who figures out he’s kidnapped a witness instead of silencing her.
“She didn’t flinch.”
Plenty of movies have played around with this killer/kidnapper-victim “romance” idea, which grows more cringeworthy the more often you see it.
But writer-director Cameron Van Hoy stirs things up a bit. A lot.
“Mia” has agency. She’s screaming and pounding on the car trunk on her way to Joey’s house. If the cops he stops at a light next to had a lick of sense, they’d have made the bloody guy with the noisy trunk in a heartbeat.
She gets lose, gets his gun, gets away even. Remember, she saw a murder and it wasn’t something that made her “flinch.”
But the guys she turns to for rescue? They’re all connected. The mob, the mob’s hirelings, all want her dead.
Momma wants her dead.
“Take CARE of this!”
Joey? He’s coming around.
Zovatto has a nice emotionally-disconnected glower about him. The character’s day is at a firing range. Guns and using them are things he’s grown up with and totally comfortable using.
Cobham-Hervey’s Mia can be vulnerable and resigned to her fate, but she’s collecting cards, drawing from the deck, improving her hand. Even Momma is a bit charmed. Eventually.
Duress has a look that reminds me of a young Richard Edsen — feral, and made heartless and ruthless because of what he grew up with and how he looks.
And Moriarty’s ferocious motherly turn reminds us that Jacki Weaver and Ellen Barkin shouldn’t be the only ones playing homicidal mommas in the movies and on TV.
Yes, this is a formula thriller, even throwing in the kidnapping a beautiful witness element. But Van Hoy finds a few wrinkles, and a pretty good cast twists those into something that’s just different enough to take you aback, if not quite enough to make you flinch.
MPAA Rating: Unrated, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Daniel Zovatto, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, David Proval, Buddy Duress and Cathy Moriarty.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Cameron Van Hoy. A release.
Running time: 1:39
Maybe it’s a sign of how stressful and infuriating the last few years have been. But a lot of 90something legends of the screen, the last of their generation, are passing away in a torrent in the last of January and first of February.
It was as if Cicely and Hal and Cloris and now Christopher Plummer were waiting, holding on a little longer.
Plummer lived through a life-changing blockbuster, a movie he ridiculed for decades as “S & M” (“The Sound of Music”), endured fallow years because of that type-casting.
And then, damned if he didn’t stage one of the great Third Act comebacks in screen history. He was the oldest actor to ever win an Oscar, collected Tonys and Emmys, too.
He was, as Helen Mitten put it today, “a monument to what an actor could be.”
“Beginners” wasn’t the beginning of it (2010), but “National Treasure,” “Inside Man,” “Syriana,” “The Last Station,” “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” — he replaced Kevin Spacey, literally in “All the Money in the World,” played Mike Wallace and his idol, “Barrymore,” and his last on screen appearance was a genuine show stopper — “Knives Out!”
Read his credits and mutter “DAMN.” I know I did. He played the chaplain in “Malcolm X!”
Loved him in almost everything he appeared in, even “S&M,” but especially in “The Battle of Britain,” “Aces High,” “Nicholas Nickleby” and “The Man Who Would Be King.”
Hell, if you ever channel surf and spy “Desperate Voyage,” a TV movie from the late 70s, STOP. He plays the hell out of a modern day Gulf pirate.
I interviewed him about a one-man show he brought to one city where I lived. Intimidated, because I knew his rep. And he was all fun and anecdotes. Chatted with him when his memoirs came out.
And he was more than happy to chat about His Time Has Come, as the Oscar favorite for “Beginners” back in 2010. Yes, he won. Here’s the story I wrote from that chat.
One of a kind…
OSCAR NIGHT is FINGERS CROSSED NIGHT for Christopher Plummer
It’s all coming late for Christopher Plummer — the acclaim, the glowing reviews, though he has earned a few of those over the years. But rarely like the ones the 80-year-old actor is winning for his performance as Count Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station.
“Delightful” and “ribald,” raved The Boston Globe. “Big and generous” added The San Francisco Chronicle. “If enough Academy viewers” see the performance, opined Carrie Rickey of The Philadelphia Inquirer, “surely” he’d win the Oscar.
Yes, he has an Oscar nomination, his first, correcting what Plummer’s Internet Movie Database biographer calls the injustice of “arguably the finest actor of the post- World War II period never to be nominated for an Academy Award.”
“I am so thrilled to be so honored at this stage in life,” Plummer says. But he’s also read the tea leaves, which have him as the underdog and point to Christoph Waltz taking the best supporting actor Oscar.
“Plainly, the prize is being nominated,” he says. “Somebody always has to win, of course. But that’s not the point. You can’t compare five performances in any of these categories. They’re all so different. So being honored as one of the five is to me the prize.”
Plummer is a starring voice in Pixar’s Oscar nominated Up. He had the title role in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. But the once-and-always Capt. Von Trapp from the movie he still playfully calls “S & M” ( The Sound of Music) says he’s most at home portraying real people — be they TV interviewer Mike Wallace (The Insider), lawyer F. Lee Bailey (American Tragedy) or another captain, Capt. Christopher Newport (The New World). And he predicted back in 2008 when we spoke about his memoir, In Spite of Myself, that The Last Station would be special.
“There has never been anything done on Tolstoy, theatrically or in the movies,” Plummer says. “It’s new ground, a new character from history for the movies to consider. I was sure it would create a stir.”
Like a lot of people, Plummer knew the literary Tolstoy. “I knew the history, the Russia he wrote about. But not much at all about Tolstoy the man. There isn’t but so much you can research on the man, though there is film of him, amazingly, from that last year of his life. Wonderful home-movies of the author of War and Peace! Imagine! There’s no sound, but the man is there, I think, even if I can’t tell what he really sounded like.
“I found my best resource was his letters. They really showed how he pioneered this idea of a more humane Russia, a humanitarian nation, a purer form of Christian communism that he had in mind. That’s the Tolstoy I had to play.”
Plummer says that he and the cast of the film — Oscar nominee Helen Mirren plays an overwrought Countess Tolstoy, with Paul Giamatti and James McAvoy in support — “all had enough Chekhov [plays] in our backgrounds to be right at home in that milieu.
“The big difference between being a character in a Chekhov play and Leo Tolstoy is that Tolstoy was every inch the rock star. He was followed, hunted by his fans, the press, hundreds of people everywhere he went. It was just insane. Paparazzi in Czarist Russia!”
Plummer took into account how “the marvelous, unforgettable Helen Mirren” played the Countess — loud and shrill — and pitched his own performance accordingly. “I think the only way to play a genius of any kind is to make him as unassuming as possible. I’m sure Tolstoy never felt the need to push his genius. If he knew he had it, he chose to wear it under a modest persona and was as unassuming as a man of his stature can be.”
Plummer will follow his latest screen triumph the way he has always followed his film performances — with a return to the stage.
“I’m doing Prospero, next, up at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, back in Canada,” the Canadian Plummer says. “We’ll take our production of The Tempest from there to China and then London.
“I hope it works, but we start rehearsing in April. So I’ll soon find out. Never played Prospero before. But you’re always learning in our profession. Learning about Tolstoy or about Shakespeare’s great wizard. The irony is that Helen Mirren has just played Prospero herself, for God’s sake, in a new film of The Tempest. I teased her about it terribly. I told her, ‘If yours works, then I’m wearing a dress!’ “”
Not to be a broken record, but what are they NOT teaching in film school about editing and pace these days?
Is everybody taking their filmmaking cues from limited series (streaming) television?
Because up here and Down Under, I’m seeing scores of movies that drift like an ice flow, taking forever to get to whatever obvious or semi-concealed point or twist they’re trying to get across.
“Rage” is the worst recent example of “Get to the bloody POINT mate” thrillers to crawl down the pike. Slow? You have no idea.
But if you’re flirting with an Australian version of the plot of a well-known episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” not just the 1950s version but one remade when the show came back in the ’80s, telling your story at a glacial pace doesn’t so much throw viewers off the scent as bore us half to death.
Maddie (Hayley Beveridge) and Noah (Matt Theo) aren’t in the happiest of marriages. There’s a hint of snippiness in his home renovation at odd hours and her toothpaste-tube squeezing obsession.
We slowly get a hint that she might be pregnant (EPT test eyeballed in the store), that she’s wondering if he’s cheating. He’s “late at work” entirely too often (in Melbourne) for comfort. Yes, there’s a side chick there.
And then there’s this creepy guy who asks a few too many questions at her job as receptionist at a dental office. We’re also seeing her stalked, from the stalker’s point of view.
On a fateful night, Noah “works late,” sister Rebecca comes over to comfort a zoned-out Maddie, and that’s when the home invaders strike.
Director John Balazs (“Ninja Immovable Heart”) stages screenwriter Michael J. Kospiah’s assault in brutal, bloody and close-up detail. It’s graphic and ugly and Maddie and Noah, who shows up late, barely survive it.
The movie is about their separate recoveries — this opens a wider rift in their marriage — and the hunt for the surviving attacker. About the only clever thing about that is tossing a few suspects in the path of the viewer and the slow-walking/slow-talking detective (Richard Norton) investigating the case.
There’s an opening scene “spoiler” I won’t reveal any more than I’ll name the Hitchcock TV script they borrowed. But here’s how you get 143 minutes out of a 52 minute tale.
We meet Detective Bennett (Norton) when he shows up at the crime scene, slowly walking through the house where the attacks took place, eyeballing the blood spatters and photos of the bodies. This slow-walk takes a minute or two. Then he takes another minute explaining what happened, and in what order, to his subordinates.
We’ve already seen the crime. We already know. The guy’s a grizzled veteran of the force, somebody with experience and skill. A gifted filmmaker can get across those ideas in a couple of scenes, in one fifth as many set-ups as we’re treated to here.
There’s no urgency that follows the shock, no “rage” that consumes the surviving victims.
Scenes leading up to that sort of stumble by, but the ones that follow — red herrings, cars rolling up to this location or that one, witnesses putting off talking to Bennett — are performed at a near standstill.
The basic idea — stalked, a terrible crime, a handful of suspects and potential motives — could have produced a brisk thriller with some bite.
As director Balazs also did the editing, well, that’s where the fickle finger of failure points.
This script should have been culled, winnowed and thinned before camera ever rolled. The finished cut should gotten to the assault earlier and sprinted through the investigation and aftermath.
And while there’s a nice villainous turn here and there, the performances have the same sedentary quality as the film they’re acting in.
As it is, “Rage” plays as “peeved,” and bored.
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, including rape, profanity
Cast: Matt Theo, Hayley Beveridge, Richard Norton
Credits: Directed by John Balazs, script by Michael J. Kospiah. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 2:23.
About fifteen minutes into “Bliss,” after we’ve been introduced to a lonely, newly-divorced and newly-drug-addicted office drone (Owen Wilson) falling under the spell of this bewitching off-the-grid woman (Salma Hayek), stay on your guard for the same resignation that swept over me.
As Hayek’s Isabella covers up the accidental death of Greg’s (Wilson) boss, trips waiters and roller-skaters with a flick of her wrist, and does all this with magic, hopes that this will be an edgy, free-spirit “Something Wild” transformation romantic comedy flitter away.
Any on-the-lam suspense set up by her “help” and his “guilt” in causing his just-fired-me boss to die is abandoned. Because that’s not the movie writer-director Mike Cahill (“Another Earth”) wanted to make. What Cahill chose to do with a good cast and some promising ideas is this “Matrix Lite” mess.
Because Greg’s estrangement from his kids (Nesta Cooper, Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), the call center management job he daydreams through, sketching this imaginary paradise he’d like to move to, that isn’t “real” the exotic stranger Isabella reveals to him at a neighborhood bar.
Isabella just looks and lives like a homeless person, in an elaborate shabby chic encampment under an overpass. She’s really some sort of arbiter of Greg’s reality, because this world? She’s got it wired.
Pop a few “yellows” or “blues” — crystalized pills — and she and by extension Greg can set their world right, or at least engage in petty acts of vengeance against rude roller skaters and street thugs.
Pop enough pills, and maybe you’ll find that “Bliss” you’ve dreamed of, sketched and hoped to live in (the lovely resort coast of Croatia).
Greg wrestles with all this input, the frisson of their scrambling, messy lives on the streets of LA, the magical, effects-happy calm of the “real” world Isabella presents to him. “Which version is real?” isn’t the best question. “Which version is preferable?”
Folks already down the rabbit hole are wholly-entitled to do some vigorous head-nodding at the fact that “A Glitch in the Matrix” and “Bliss” are opening the same week.
A documentary that explores the belief and slim possibility that we’re living in a “simulation” world, not unlike that imagined in “The Matrix,” and “Bliss,” another film that toys with that idea in fictional-fantasy form, come out at the same time?
That’s some serious cinema synchronicity.
Cahill’s never fretted over accessible films. “I Origins” made a little more sense than the alternate-reality based “Another Earth.” Here, he drifts from the faintly/bizarrely interesting to the unintentionally laughable.
There’s a lot of promise in the idea that a man’s idea of bliss would include a luxe seaside life, and Salma Hayek, even if she’s purring warnings about being “sedoooced by the seeeeeemulation,” or “socked into the eeeeeluusion.”
God I love her accent.
The alternate reality, where Bill Nye the Science Guy is a sage and arbiter of what is worthwhile and provable? That’s clever.
But the interface between these stories is clumsy, the fascinating opening act passes into memory and attempts at bringing it all back together are more frustrating than fun, loopy and daft when the aim was plainly something more intellectual.
Unlike “The Matrix,” there’s too little to hang onto thanks to a flimsy story that dives into future-tech and glib heaven-or-hell discourses, and characters who keep us at arm’s length.
MPAA Rating: R for drug content, language, some sexual material and violence
Cast: Salma Hayek, Owen Wilson, Nesta Cooper, Jorge Lendeborg Jr. and Bill Nye
Credits: Scripted and directed by Mike Cahill. An Amazon Studios release.
Running time: 1:43
“Minari,” a solid Troubles on the Farm American immigrants saga breathlessly praised in some quarters, got a bit of love from the Screen Actors’ Guild, love denied it by the Golden Globes nomination announcement. So it’s back on the Oscar radar.
As is Spike Lee’s limp but “Let’s honor him for ‘BlackKklansman’ a year late” summer Netflix release “Da 5 Bloods.” Shut out in Globes nominations, this gave a shot in the arm with SAG recognition.
Films like “Promising Young Woman” and “Pieces of a Woman” got a further boost, the wretched “Hillbilly Elegy” got more Amy Adams endorsement.
“Ma Rainey” ensured that Chadwick Boseman is not forgotten. Acting and ensemble nominations for that and his work in “5 Bloods ”
https://variety.com/2021/film/news/sag-awards-nominations-chadwick-boseman-1234900584/amp/
True confession here. When pressed for time, the only criteria I use to decide whether to review something pitched to me is that it comes from a distributor (and/or publicist) I know, and that the title is listed on Rotten Tomatoes (and certainly on Metacritic, too).
That’s a great way to stumble into something not suitable for every audience, something you might not want to watch in mixed company, screen on a notebook in a public space or what have you.
I mean, the title’s “PVT CHAT” and we ALL know what that implies. But when you don’t make a habit of reviewing porn, well #WhoKnew?
This little NYC indie has a limited cast, a pervy hook and a lot more clever touches and twists than I would expect. Given that I didn’t really have expectations, I mean.
The characters begin as “types” — the lonely, hapless Incel who gambles online and burns his earnings on sex chat websites, and the voluptuous 20something dominatrix who may be smarter than her kittenish, Kardashian vocal fry lets on, but probably not.
Even the basic set-up, guy becomes obsessed with his favorite “dom girl” chat contractor, seems porn lazy and simplistic.
But over the course of 80some minutes, we get a taste of Jack’s exterior life and interior one. And the lady Scarlet? There’s more to her than zippers, dominatrix commands to “my slave” and blowing cigarette smoke at the screen to tease, torment and taunt Jack with.
“Lick it,” she commands him, meaning his computer screen. “LICK it!”
Jack (Peter Vack of TV’s “Love Life”) is a hipster-aged habitue’ of Manhattan’s Chinatown/Bowery corridor. In between video blackjack sessions, he walks the mean, wintry streets of the naked city in search of another ATM.
When he wins at blackjack, he starts burning through chat sessions. He’ll take whoever he can get online for a session, but Scarlet (Julia Fox of “Uncut Gems”) is his favorite. She drives him wild with desire, something the film goes to graphic lengths to underscore.
Things turn weird when lonely, needy, clingy and trying-too-hard Jack hits her with a question.
“What have you been doing since we last talked?” He’s insistent. “How much do I have to tip you to get you to drop the act and just talk?”
What are your hobbies, what are you thinking, he wants to know?
“You know what I’m thinking right now? I’m thinking you should tip me another $200!”
But they start to chat. Jack’s obsession grows as he gushes, entirely too much, about Scarlet’s art — her “real” passion, apparently.
Jack’s online addictions are thrown into sharper relief when we see that he wasn’t always like this and that he used to have a girlfriend, a video performance artist (Nikki Belfiglio) who does comically pretentious audience participation “happenings” and is still into Jack, apparently.
Scarlet has an offline life, too, one she lies about to maintain the illusion that she lives in San Francisco. Jack? He’s seen her in his local bodega, where he stocks up on the ramen noodles he subsists on.
The players make the characters just intriguing enough to hook us. But the story drifts away from these two when we learn of Scarlet’s private life “complications” — a would-be playwright boyfriend (Keith Poulson) — and Jack’s random encounter with a house painter (Kevin Moccia) whom he meets when he wakes up and the guy’s in his tiny apartment, painting it.
Painter Will and his even less interesting goombah pal (Buddy Duress) becomes fans of “Blackjack Jack,” as Jack claims other people call him. Jack’s made two new friends!
It’s just that Jack lies — a lot. Scarlet does, too. The fact that neither reveals her or his suspicions about the other suggests a genuine mystery might be unfolding here, some sort of cat-and-mouse game.
That element of the story is left under-developed. There are coherence problems as the story lurches into position to start its final act.
The explicit spanking-the-monkey/petting-the-cat nature of the “relationship” is what our writer-director is more interested in, in graphic detail. So if you’re into that…
The film was written and directed by Ben Hozie, and if it wasn’t for his IMDb page, I’d have zero confidence that is his real name.
He’s made an unconventionally conventional movie about connecting in the sexual Facetime era, one that’s more intriguing than it has any right to be, but less surprising than it needs to be, considering the down-and-dirty online sex hook Hozie wants to hang it on.
MPAA Rating: unrated, explicit sex, nudity
Cast: Julia Fox, Peter Vack
Credits: Scripted by directed by Ben Hozie. A Dark Star release.
Running time: 1:26
Movie Nation 