But Margo “Maggie” Crane (Kenadi DelaCerna) is 15, growing up without a mother in the pre-Internet 1970s of Northern Michigan. Her Native American Dad (Tatanka Means) taught her how to work the river, fish and hunt. He never warned her about the uncle next door.
And Margo, after taking the “Wanna go huntin’ with me?” bait, doesn’t recoil at Uncle Cal’s (Coburn Goss) sexual aggression. She leans into it. Curious? Flattered? Turned on?
The fury this act rains down on him — from her dad, Cal’s brother-in-law, and Cal’s enraged family doesn’t seem to register with the teenager. Until she breaks out her Winchester .22 and shoots Cal, escalating matters in ways she could never foresee.
“Once Upon a River” is a drab, downbeat indie period piece built on impulsive, stupid decisions and irrational and emotionally unmotivated reactions to their consequences.
The shooting that upends Margo’s life doesn’t tear her up in ways we can see. She’s got a gun and backwoods skills, access to a rowboat and a mother who ran out on her years before she can try to track down. She can take to the woods. The guilt, fear and anger we might see in a more interesting performance simply isn’t in DelaCerna’s tool kit.
The coming-of-age-on-the-lam story swims or sinks on her performance and every limp plot contrivance musician-turned-writer-director Harloua Rose throws in Margo’s path. And there’s a whole lot of sinking going on.
Rose keeps the look late-fall and wintry and the tone dour, with little moments of magical plot-engineering that promise to house and feed our heroine whenever the chips are down.
She lays low with “safe” friends of her father, meets a sensitive hunky Native writer/adventurer (Ajuawak Kapashesit) just when she needs to, a dying, kindly old coot (John Ashton) at the perfect moment, and even her mom (“True Blood’s” Lindsay Pulsipher, the stand-out in the cast) promises to solve every grim 15 year-old problem her daughter finds herself facing.
We see her dressing wildlife she’s going to eat. But this “camping” she’s doing? The survivalist/live-by-your-wits part of the tale is shortchanged.
DelaCerna’s take on Maggie is timid, as meek and passive as the “pip pip” of her .22, which she brings down deer with. Hey, it’s a movie.
And that rape scene is…seriously 1977 and problematic. Did I mention she’s 15?
The basic ingredients of something gripping, tense and heartfelt, and in an unusual setting and culture, are here. Our director/cook spoiled the stew, with a lot of help from her miscast-cast main ingredient.
“Kajillionaire,” Miranda July’s latest Tales from the Quirky Side, is an almost magically eccentric portrait of longing and lowlife grifting.
It’s as if the filmmaker who brought us “The Future” and “Me and You and Everyone We Know” took a long, hard look at the dark Japanese Oscar contender “Shoplifting” from a couple of years back, and saw the poignancy of lives spent stealing, the gaping hole living from con to con leaves in the heart, and sought to make something silly and romantic out of it.
The three of them are old pros, accomplished at avoiding cameras, heartless in picking their marks and ruthless in their haggling when they’re trying to sell what they’ve obtained via illicit means.
But they’re damaged, “off” somehow. Robert (Richard Jenkins) has a head for timing and figures, but fills it with conspiracies and phobias. Theresa (Debra Winger) could pass for a bag lady, but is something of a sage screwball, passing on “Rich people can be very cheap” to their daughter.
The young woman (Evan Rachel Wood) with the long, uncombed hair? That’s their daughter, Old Dolio, who “learned to forge before she learned to write.” But that name? They’ll explain that later.
Walking the LA streets, we see them in their element — scavengers and pilferers. And now that they’re older, the “parents” lean on the daughter to mastermind and execute their petty crimes and scams.
Her arms are thin enough to raid post office boxes next to the one they rent. She can still pull off “the Catholic schoolgirl uniform” needed to scam parents out of money for “a classmate.” She’s 26, and Wood lets us see guilt, regret and resentment in Old Dolio’s face every time they’re up against it and she needs to make a score.
They obsessively enter online contests to sell the prizes, rent a cheap, dumpy office space next to Bubbles, Inc., some sort of soapworks that leaks mountains of foam into their living space. And they’re behind on the rent. Constantly.
“C’mon, THINK” Robert bellows, plainly expecting Old Dolio to not just tumble into forward rolls to dodge security cameras, but take a “job” to attend the parenting classes some irresponsible pregnant woman they know has been ordered, by the court, to show up for.
That class is where Old Dolio gets confirmation of the love, devotion and nurturing her parents never gave her. To top it off, the jerks are constantly hitting her with putdowns about how emotionally-stunted she is.
“She has tender feelings,” Theresa says of a new acquaintance. “You wouldn’t know anything about that.”
But that new acquaintance, the bubbly, chatty and vivacious Melanie (“Jane the Virgin” alumna Gina Rodriguez) breaks up the “three way split,” throws the team out of balance and generally tips over the apple cart of their cons.
Old Dolio can’t help but see that her parents seem to prefer Melanie’s companionship and assistance to her own, especially when their new “apprentice” pitches a hustle — rob these “old aggros” she knows, irritable, elderly shut-in clients of an optometry practice where she worked. Steal their antiques and sell them.
July created some interesting, conflicted characters, and wrote some funny lines and one absolutely gut-punch of a scene for “Kajillioaire.” But her coup here was the casting.
Winger is all but unrecognizable as a “mother” without a hint of mothering about her, and Jenkins animates every tic and mania Robert keeps in his noggin, a man entirely too highly-strung to be living in an earthquake zone.
Wood, taking a break from “Westworld,” seems too old for the part, which is kind of the point. Old Dolio is trapped in an awful name, stuck in a life with no future in it thanks to those aging parents, and starting to become aware of just how emotionally-deprived she’s been.
Rodriguez delicately balances winsome, sexy and charming with Melanie’s cutthroat instincts, which she’s quick to show off but just as quick to realize aren’t nearly as pitiless as what she sees in this family of vipers.
The one great scene involves an old man, bedridden but grateful to have his home invaders make “family” like noises as he tries, desperately, to breathe his last. Naturally, Old Dolio is saddled with keeping an eye on him as the others figure out what to steal.
“It’s like trying to fall asleep...forever,” he wheezes on his respirator.
Most of the time, July is on the hunt for grins or giggles, getting them from the conflict within the growing “family” and from their weeping, put-upon and always-put-off landlord (Mark Ivanir).
With “Kajillionaire” she’s conjured up a humorously dark character study whose grimmest twists may or may not be real, and certainly aren’t revealed out loud. But an outright remake of “Shoplifters” wouldn’t have the charm and whimsy that are July’s stock in trade.
MPAA Rating: R for some sexual references/language.
Cast: Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger and Gina Rodriguez.
Credits: Written and directed by Miranda July. A Focus Features release.
The girl is here, as a tween and later as a teen navigating a rootless childhood with a relentlessly-upbeat dad and a mother whose ambitious spirit was broken before her mind failed her.
The young woman takes a fellowship in India, hearing the stories of lower caste women — misused, abused and raped — bearing witness and becoming “the greatest listener on the planet.” We see her journey into journalism, not finding her place in “a man’s world” but literally creating one where gender is not a liability.
And we see Gloria Steinem in her glory, leading a movement by stressing teamwork, consensus-building and articulating — in writing and in speeches — the scope of the problem and new ways of looking at it.
“The Glorias,” Julie Taymor’s adoring portrait of the feminist icon, doesn’t see young Gloria’s (Alicia Vikander) two years in India in college as mere adventure or “life experience.” She’s drawing a parallel.
This admirer of Gandhi, traveling among native women to learn how he was taught “non violent” resistance by his “mother and aunties,” and discovering women’s issues on the Subcontinent, has been no less revolutionary a figure. Championing women’s rights all her life, ahead of the curve all the way, Gloria Steinem has changed the world. Just like the Mahatma.
Taymor (“Frida,” “Across the Universe”) latches onto an image common to most of America’s civil rights movements — a bus — to tell this story with four actresses. The various Glorias are on it, staring out of its windows, criss-crossing the country to catch up with their itinerant antiques dealer dad, riding to rallies and marchers as older women.
At times, all four Glorias, from the youngest (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) to the teen (Lulu Wilson), to Vikander’s 20something student-turned-journalist, to the older, wiser and battle-scarred Gloria (Julianne Moore) are on that bus together, challenging each other on this formative memory or that future setback or triumph.
“The Glorias” tells a linear narrative with a lot of non-linear touches, skipping backward and forward in time as the story of Steinem’s life moves forward — India to the breakout “undercover” magazine article that made her (“A Bunny’s Tale,” exposing Playboy’s exploitation of its Playboy Club waitresses), the emergent feminist who hears an editor warn her that “You can’t associate yourself with those crazy women” and realizes “I AM one of those crazy women!”
The kids show the trauma of an unsettled childhood, an unhappy mother (Enid Graham) who gave up her career for this life her hustling but always-broke husband (Timothy Hutton, delightful) saddles them with.
Vikander brilliantly gives us the first taste of the Steinem burned into the public consciousness — guarded, preferring “listening” to trotting out her blunt, softspoken Ohio purr for speeches, fending off sexism on her way to older Gloria’s Big Discovery.
“Inclusion” is a byword of Taymor’s film, as we see Vikander and Moore’s version of Steinem understand the link between racial equality and gender equality in the 1963 March on Washington.
Even today, we don’t think of that landmark event in terms of how sexist it was. Steinem, standing with generations of black women telling her stories of the genocidal origins of the sexism they still faced, did.
We see Steinem connect the struggle for women’s rights to Latino farm workers’ rights and the Native American rights movement via meeting and listening to women involved.
Taymor’s survey of Gloria’s Greatest Hits accounts for “The Glorias” running time. You can’t leave out “A Bunny’s Tale” or campaigning with Bella Abzug (Bette Midler, a hoot) or the mid-ERA fight 1977 National Women’s Conference. But you shouldn’t leave out activist Dorothy Pittman Hughes (Janelle Monáe) or brash civil rights activist lawyer Flo Kennedy (Lorraine Toussaint in fine spitfire mode), farm workers activist Dolores Huerta (Monica Sanchez, earthy and imposing) or Native Rights advocate Wilma Mankiller (Kimberly Guerrero) and how they shaped Steinem’s thinking, politics and activism.”
That inclusion, with lots of names that might not spring instantly to mind if you’re not old enough to remember them or haven’t immersed yourself in this history, isn’t so much a failing as a burden “The Glorias” carries willingly.
Steinem’s participation ensures a certain level of flattery in the portrait, as does an insistence on all those other figures being named or shown — Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm among them. Still, the film never feels as though attendance is being taken.
Was Steinem really this concerned that she, a former dancer beautiful enough to sneak into a job as a Playboy bunny, not be “the face” of the movement? Probably. There’s plenty of footage of her using “we” and “us” (something we see her “learn” to do) when speaking of the movement, with microphones constantly shoved in her “cover girl” face.
Taymor, the genius stage director who turned “The Lion King” into a Broadway sensation, reminds us she’s behind the camera in the film’s visual grace notes — older Gloria (Moore) dozing off on teen Gloria’s shoulder in black and white scenes on that bus — and in one surreal crimson hell free-association inspired by a particularly sexist TV interview showing how misogynistic men prefer their women in “uniform” gender roles — bunny or nun.
The performances range from impressive to stunning, with Oscar winners Moore (unflappable, reserved) and Vikander (inscrutable and cool) in top form. Toussaint and Hutton are terrific in large supporting parts, and Tom Nowicki (“The Blind Side”) gives heart to a single scene, playing the sympathetic British doctor young Gloria sees about an abortion.
I found two and a half hours skimming by, inspiring and touching, occasionally on the cusp of epic. Taymor wanted to give Steinem the “Gandhi” treatment, but there’s nothing stately or dull in this biography, even if it approaches its heroine with an eye for saintly self-sacrifice.
Pre-pandemic, there were harbingers of 2020 being a year of unprecedented female influence on American politics. That’s why pop culture is revisiting the history of the slow moving tsunami of feminism this year. “The Vote” was on PBS’s “American Experience,” the gloriously acrid “Mrs. America” on Hulu and the sweet Helen Reddy biopic “I Am Woman” came to theaters and streaming.
“The Glorias” rides the crest of that wave, the best project of the lot, and quite possibly the film of the year.
MPAA Rating: R for some language and brief lewd images
Cast: Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander, Janelle Monae, Bette Midler, Lulu Wilson, Lorraine Toussaint, Monica Snachez, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Tom Nowicki and Timothy Hutton.
Credits: Directed by Julie Taymor, script by Julie Taymor and Sarah Ruhl, based on the Gloria Steinem memoir. An LD/Roadside Attractions release.
The proof’s in the pudding, and that release date may move, what with the pandemic still not under control.
But James Cameron told Arnold Schwarzenegger that he’s wrapped on “Avatar” and that the third film in this franchise-in-the-making is almost finished production. From Variety…
In the alternate version of Turkey in “The Antenna (Bina),” a nationwide satellite network scheme promises to united the country and establish “the idea order,” “a single body.”
Only the guy installing the satellite dish at a random apartment complex that’s among the first hooked-up tumbles off the roof to his death.
“That’s a shame,” the locals say (in Turkish, with English subtitles). That puddle on the roof? Think nothing of it.
The dish and its connections ooze black bile that nobody seems to react to with much alarm, even as it swallows, smothers, kills and rots all in its path — leaking out of tubs, shorting out lights, spreading fear, paranoia and madness floor to floor to floor.
Heavy-handed metaphor — repression and oppression achieved through state-sponsored group-think — but we get it. And get it some more.
“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan prophesied. The medium is the monster, the debut feature of Orcon Behram warns.
Mehmet (Ihsan Önal) is a building supervisor in a Turkey even more repressive than the real one. In this alternate reality, Turkey is installing a nationwide satellite TV network that will, through dishes on every roof, link the nation to government approved weather, quiz shows and “The Nightly Bulletin,” delivered by a dear leader who looks a tad like the fellow running the country right now — Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mehmet has taken to wearing a suit to work to show “I take this job seriously,” even though his boss (Levent Ünsal) knows he snoozes at work.
Mehmet has hopes a repressed, despairing young lady in the building (Gül Arici) out of the country, but no hopes of joining her after she flees. He is what is, and changing locations won’t alter that.
But this guy who fell off the roof? That’s just the beginning of Mehmet’s new horrors. Noises in the walls, flooding in the baseball, and everywhere this oily black ooze — coming out of outlets, faucets, seeping through grout.
We see various tenants watching TV, living their lives and either succumbing to what’s going on, or crying out in alarm.
There are hints of “1984,” “Fahrenheit 451” and “Brazil” in this dystopia, but only hints.
A living nightmare of your home turning on you, and your neighbors, is faced by each apartment individually, families torn by what they can’t articulate or overwhelmed by a threat they didn’t realize was here.
What’s on the screen is more allegorical than interesting, although some of the visuals reach the level of indelibly nightmarish.
Satire and allegory aren’t alien to that corner of the world, but you’ve got to give us a little more than this to cling to and mull over.
MPAA Rating: unrated, disturbing images
Cast: Ihsan Önal, Gül Arici, Elif Cakman, Murat Saglam and Levent Ünsal.
Credits: Written and directed by Orcun Behram. A Dark Star release.
“The Devil to Pay” is “Winter’s Bone” with Appalachian folkways and an Appalachian twang, a razor’s edge thriller about old feuds and older traditions, a world unto itself and quite different from the one “down the mountain.”
Veteran bit playerDanielle Deadwyler carries it with the righteous fury of a woman imperiled by her geography, her circumstances and her “galivanting” husband.
Damn it’s good. And damn, she’s good in it.
Deadwyler plays Lemon Cassidy, keeping herself and her son fed and sheltered on a hardscrabble mountainside farm with a few chickens, a goat and a lot of okra.
Trouble marches right up to her door in the persons of Wade and Dixon (Jayson Warner Smith and Brad Carter). Her missing husband has a “debt.” She’s confused, “done paid my taxes” and all. But she needs to “Go see Tommy.”
Don’t worry about your little boy. Unless you don’t get that debt paid. “We’re stayin’ til it’s done,” Wade says.
Tommy Runion (Catherine Dyer, excellent) is the matriarch of the age-old Runion clan. She’s always cooking, chirping about “the secret” to mastering this pie or that pan-fried cornbread when she isn’t humming hymns.
Lemon’s husband “has skunked,” and “you know the consequences if he lights out.” Tommy smiles sweetly and holds Lemon’s hand as she purrs, “This is as hard on me as it is on you,” but unless you want her kin to “murder your boy,” well…
Husband and wife filmmakers Lane and Ruckus Skye (“The 7 Sevens”) send Lemon on an odyssey through an integrated, ancient and mythic Appalachia. Lemon’s Cassidy family has been there for generations, where everyone knows to “follow the creed” to survive.
But the two families supervising “the peace” have a Hatfields & McCoys history. Now Lemon’s caught up in it, bartering with the fixit man/shopkeeper Grady (Charles Black) to borrow his ancient Lincoln to hunt for her missing husband, agreeing to deliver his “vitriol” to some newcomers on the other side of the mountain on this “hallowed day.”
Grady’s scared to make the delivery himself. They’re a cult, and “vitriol” is archaic speech, like much of what we hear from everybody in this tightnit gene pool. It’s what people used to call sulfuric acid.
The awful choices and “consequences” of the machinations of the ruthless and well-armed test Lemon, and would break a weaker woman. But she’s got the “mother’s love” — that magic talisman of many a thriller screenplay — on her side.
The violence is as potent in threats as it is in actuality. Two mountaineers get a little boy (Ezra Haslam) to help them dig a hole. When the moon is full, it just might be Lemon’s son’s grave.
Deadwyler pulls off this hard woman among hard people with aplomb. Her every action and reaction is defensible, believable and justified. She makes Lemon easy to root for, accepting of the “righteous” nature of the backwoods justice her husband ran afoul of, even as we’re furious and fearful on her behalf.
“It’s a big’ol world,” she lectures her son, matter-of-factly. “Don’t nobody owe you nothing.” Even a break when her husband’s the one who apparently got them mixed up in all this.
“The Devil to Pay” — a great title, by the way — is a lean, mean straight-up genre thriller, leaning into some mountain stereotypes, twisting away from others. Throw in meth labs and kin you can ask for help and it’s “Winter’s Bone” with a mom and not a big sister on a quest.
And Deadwyler makes a grand, gritty heroine, a hard woman whose hard life makes the hard choices she faces now something she’ll just have to live with.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence.
Cast: Danielle Deadwyler, Catherine Dyer, Jayson Warner Smith, Adam Boyer, Brad Cater, Luce Rains, Parisa Johnston and Charles Black.
Credits: Written and directed by Lane Skye, Ruckus Skye. An Uncork’d release.
Maggie Q makes a pretty good surrogate for the audience in the horror tale “Death of Me.”
As Christina, a tourist trapped by on an Thai island about to take a typhoon hit, struggling to get around the not-wholly-hidden agenda of the simple, happy natives, Q (for Quigley) is quick to lose her patience, quick to realize danger if not what to do about it, and quick to anger.
“I’m so sick of this cryptic bull—t!”
Perhaps if this multi-handed script hadn’t been so caught up in rituals, hallucinations and attempts at explaining its illogical “logic,” and just focused on one pissed-off American tourist determined to get away from a deadly “paradise,” this mildly-chilling horror tale would have found its proper thriller footing and sprinted by.
Christina came here with her travel-writer husband Neil (Luke Hemsworth, older brother of Chris and Liam). They wake up after their “last night” there, dirty and confused. They need to catch a ferry, but don’t. They need to remember what happened the night before, but cannot.
In maybe the biggest eye-roller among the film’s too-obvious plot devices, Neil “recorded” everything that happened the night before on his phone. Hours of it.
A willingly-gulped spiked drink, an amulet of local origin, and Christina finds herself puking up dirt and grass in the morning. Because the video showed her murdered and buried the night before. By Neil.
Their quest to flee or find out what’s going on hurls frustrating scenes at them which strip away their sense of urgency, and the film’s. Language barriers, side-eyes from locals who don’t seem intent on “help,” reminders that there’s no typhoon danger here because “no storm hit this island two hundred years.”
Maggie Q gives Christina a nice mania that she lets go of too quickly, as her character’s panic gives way to cool-headed — TOO cool-headed — fury. She takes Neil’s phone, to call her parents, her sister, “the FBI.”
“Who’d the guy in ‘The Wicker Man’ call?”
“Nobody. He got burned to death.”
Separated from Neil, Christina questions everybody and everything. Locals, including the helpful American AirBnB hostess (Alex Essoe) try to steer her clear of…danger? Answers?
“This is the part where I tell you not to go in.”
“This is the part where I don’t listen.”
That self-awareness gives this Darren Lynn Bousman (“Repo! The Genetic Opera,” “Saw II”) film a light moment or two, but nothing more.
The confusion between reality and hallucination absolutely butchers the film’s forward momentum. Pausing to see this grisly vision (Or IS it?) or that one doesn’t fool Christina, or the viewer into believing “It’s all in your head.”
Being told that by a Thai cop, doctor or whoever doesn’t muddy the waters either. That misdirection squanders the film’s suspense and urgency.
Hell, you referenced “The Wicker Man.” Were you paying attention to how and why it worked or more recently DIDN’T work?
MPAA Rating: R for violence, gore, sexual content and language
Cast: Maggie Q, Luke Hemsworth, Alex Essoe, Kelly B. Jones and Kat Ingkarat.
Credits: Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, script by Ari Margolis, James Morley III and David Tish. A Saban Films release.
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