Aug. 20, one week from today, brace yourself for a movie theater mob scene.
AMC is calling it “1920 prices” as a way of luring folks back into Cinemas.
One Twitter wag noted that “1918 prices” would have been “too on the nose.”
The US had its worst COVID day since May on Wednesday. So…one day, 15 cent movies, from a chain that lost over $500 million last quarter.
We are never going to tamp COVID down, thanks to morons following a traitorous nitwit right off a cliff.
“The Driftless Area” is as good a representation of Anton Yelchin’s acting and role selection as you’re going to find. A mystical, moody and cryptic dramatic thriller with wry touches, it was “Indie” with capital “I,” so obscure as to earn very little theatrical release and almost no attention after his death, just after finishing it.
It plays like a film that came to life when some screenwriter (Tom Drury and director Zachary Sluser co-wrote it) noticed the geographical name of that corner of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota that wasn’t flattened by glaciers — “driftless.”
The result is a story that drifts around in time, it’s narrative “present,” with characters that drift by or linger in the metaphysical. Yes, it’s willfully odd, but so arresting that you can see why an all-star lineup of indie-cinema favorites signed on for the ride.
Yelchin plays Pierre, a young man we meet as he hitchhikes into a mugging. The first sign that this won’t go well is that John Hawkes (“Winter’s Bone”) plays the pickup truck driving redneck who stops. The second is his instant demand for “gas money,” $20 just to take Pierre to the nearest garage so he can have his car towed and fixed. The third is when he stops the truck and mugs Pierre, stealing the rose bush (NOT a rose bush) Pierre is carrying with him.
But there’s justice in this universe. Pierre throws a rock at the creep as he drives off. Damned if he doesn’t crack the creep in the head, causing him to roll into a ditch, out cold. Pierre’s revenge is getting his rose bush back, tossing the dude’s keys away and stealing a backpack full of cash the chatty jerk bragged about before kicking Pierre out of the truck.
The story starts to fold back on itself as we see why Pierre bought the flowers, how they’re for this strange, romantic young woman (Zooey Deschanel) who walked naked away from a house that burned down around her, how Shane (Hawkes) set that fire and how he was put up to it by the evil rent-a-car crook Ned (Ciaran Hinds) and his minion (Aubrey Plaza).
Alia Shawkat plays Pierre’s pal, the sort of woman who says “This is what people talk about when they refer to ‘having a good time.”
That’s one of the quirky charms in play here, a sort of “driftless”drollery that has characters noting the obvious, that “It is what it is” is a meaningless, nonsensical expression that everybody picked up and abandoned a decade ago, confessing that “I just thought life would be fun. That was my impression.”
No. Not really. Even in non-“driftless areas.”
Deschanel took one last stab at playing the “quirky girl” before hitting 40. Stella meets Pierre when he falls into a well.
Him: “I think you saved my life.” Her: “I think you’re right.”
She has a protector/mentor (Frank Langella) who looks after her after the fire.
And everybody circles back around to the fictional present, where the brutish Shane hunts for his missing cash and revenge, Pierre’s aimless life takes on one big “purpose” and Aubrey Plaza gets to play one libidinous lowlife.
Good times.
“The Driftless Area” has a middling sense of place (What, no accents?), Several precious touches and a pall cast over it that comes from any movie Yelchin was in just before his Jeep killed him. There’s action and violence, and not much to the romance that’s set up here.
It’s watchable, but “Driftless” is more a movie that you like and appreciate than respect or feel challenged by. Color me shocked that neither the writer nor director has made a film since.
MPAA Rating: R for language, some drug use and violence
Cast: Anton Yelchin, Zooey Deschanel, Alia Shawkat, John Hawkes, Aubrey Plaza and Ciaran Hinds.
Credits: Directed by Zachary Sluser, script by Tom Drury, Zachary Sluser. A BRON Pictures film on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:35
“Around the Sun” is a simple, talky two-hander — just two actors, a lovely location, a little charm and lots and lots of words.
It’s a courtship of the mind with dashes of wit, dollops of melodrama and drops of Jupiter mixed in. A screenplay with literary pretensions offers up mystery, period piece concerns with just a hint of sci-fi thrown in.
Not a lot happens, but the charming twosome draws you in and makes you invest in the story, obscurant touches notwithstanding.
“Sun” tells its tale in a series of repeated scenes, shifting points of view and intent, layers of misdirection peeled away with each telling.
“Location Scout” is how it begins. Bernard (Gethin Anthony) rolls up to this chateau in Normandy, eyes popping out at the image of a pregnancy test just emailed to him. Maggie (Cara Theobold) is waiting, a pert, pretty and pleasant estate agent, here to show him the property.
He’s rattled by the phone message. She prattles on about the property, long empty, but with one bit of glorious history. The French essayist, scientist and philosopher Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle once stayed here. He is most remembered, she goes on with the barest hint of encouragement, for “Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds.”
Think nothing of the “coincidence” that Fontenelle and Bernard share the same first name.
The two of them tour the grounds, and as they are both young and good looking, we witness the most intimate conversation between a real estate agent and a film location scout in recorded history. As they are English, the “flirtation” is reserved, more implied than overt. And it’s her doing all the flirting.
She asks indirect questions about what is bothering him and they banter about something that’s more “ennui than malaise, not quite a joie de vivre.”
It takes on the tone of remembered “super-nerdy late night student chats,” all this stuff about life elsewhere in the universe, her “ex,” his seemingly pregnant wife.
“Is it just me, or doesn’t this feel really familiar?
Over 78 minutes we are treated to variations on this introductory conversation, changing perspectives, the nature of his work/reason for visit, more overt expression of her reasons for turning on the charm, laughing at his silly nothing of a joke. Once, they appear in 17th century garb, mimicking the dialogue Fontenelle set up in his “Conversations.”
Anthony, who did a season of “Game of Thrones” (Who didn’t?), is mainly a reactor here, someone who responds, in different ways in each of the different dialogues/chapters, to Maggie’s questions and revelations.
It is Theobold, who did a season of “Downton Abbey” (Who didn’t?), who piques our curiosity and maintains our interest. Maggie’s motives, her over-familiarity and her pressing on with the charm offensive, even after she spies that texted pregnancy test, raises an eyebrow even as we lean on that Fontenelle book to “explain” the story, the way it’s being told and what she’s really up to.
The roundabout, repetitious storytelling gimmick and lack of incident and drama won’t be to every taste. But “Around the Sun” is a perfectly engaging cinema essay on the lost art of conversation, the charm of romantic interrogation and the connection two people might find, in this universe or whatever alternative there might might that they’re willing to explore.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, alcohol
Cast: Cara Theobold, Gethin Anthony
Credits: Directed by Oliver Krimpas, script by Jonathan Kiefer. A Giant release on Apple TV+, Amazon Prime
Running time: 1:18
I love the way director Martín Hodara folds his flashbacks, seamlessly, into the fictive present in “Black Snow.” “Nieve Negra,” as it is titled in Spanish, is another polished, stark thriller from Argentina, and the feature directing debut from this career second-unit chief obviously knows his craft.
The worn and world-weary screen presence of Ricardo Darín (“The Secret in their Eyes,” “Truman”) has become as sure a guarantee of “quality” as any actor in the South American cinema.
The plot? That’s the weakest link in this frosty thriller about family tragedy, grudges and guilt.
Marcos (Leonardo Sbaraglia of “Pain and Glory”) and his pregnant wife Laura (Laia Costa of “Maine” and “Duck Butter”) have come to Argentina from Spain to settle his father’s affairs. The old man has died and there’s property to contend with.
“The Canadians” have made an offer for their land. But his estranged father has left a last request, that his ashes be buried with Juan, a brother whom we’ve seen killed in some sort of hunting incident in the prologue.
Thirty years have passed, and as unsettling as being back in these mountains is to Marcos, there’s nothing for it but to do as his father wished, especially since there’s a recalcitrant, reclusive brother (Darín) living in a cabin on that land, which is worth a lot of money if he can be talked into agreeing to sell it all.
“I thought we could have a coherent conversation,” he offers (in Spanish, with English subtitles). Salvador? He’s pointing a gun at him at the time.
The cabin and the sibling prompt flashbacks — sometimes in the form of dreams — about what really happened that winter hunt long ago. There’s a third sibling, a sister, in a mental institution and a newspaper clipping about “an avalanche” that tells Laura, and us, that what really happened was covered up. The only two people who know the truth are out here, in the wilderness, casting dark accusatory looks in each other’s direction.
Darín has the showiest role, a man wrecked by what happened long ago, embittered by it and not letting go of any grudge attached to it, especially against their father.
But the plot doesn’t deliver much in the line of mystery or suspense. The script, by Hodara and Leonel D’Agostino, has some twists, not all of which are strung out in the most cinematically effective manner.
“Black Snow” benefits most from its striking wintry setting, the ways this family’s sea of troubles seem anchored in that land and its secret and Darín’s brooding turn as a man who left civilization and family behind because he had his reasons, some of which we can guess, a few which arrive as a shock.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex
Cast: Leonardo Sbaraglia, Laia Costa, Ricardo Darín
Credits: Directed by Martín Hodara script by Leonel D’Agostino, Martín Hodara. A Direct TV production on Netflix.
Running time: 1:31
Say this for “Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies.” It’s thorough, almost academic textbook/video-accompanying-a-film-studies-class broad in its scope.
The documentary’s two hours and nine minutes take us from the first naked moving images of the human body to #MeToo, coming a lot closer to mentioning and showing a clip from EVERY movie that has ever had nudity in it than you might expect, or than is absolutely necessary. No, “Skin” doesn’t just dance through the hundreds of movies that the academics, historians, filmmakers, journalists and actors label as “groundbreaking,” or that moment when “the floodgates opened.”
Maybe that’s to be expected as Jim McBride appears in it and has a producing credit. The “senior entertainment editor” at the online film nude scene repository MrSkin.com is something of a completist, after all.
There’s marvelous, little-known history brought out, from “pre-code” to post-MPAA, “Extase” to “Henry & June,” “Magic Mike” and “American Pie.”
But the effect of this decade-by-decade, film after film having its plot summarized by a critic, a professor, an actress who appeared in it or the filmmaker, is muted by the excess.
Lost in the excess are actresses talking about “nudity riders” in contracts, nudity “required” in a film that producers and a studio want to reach a certain rating for pure business reasons, the not-really-nuanced difference between “essential nudity” and “exploitation,” the power imbalance that has ALWAYS put actresses in particular in the awful position of wondering, “Was it coercion, or consent?”
These matters are visited, right from the opening credits, a sort of CYA “permission” the filmmakers give themselves for their sometimes glib Survey of Skin on film. The differences between American attitudes and European ones on the subject are used to dismiss any thoughts of the exploitation that occasionally enters into the conversation.
When an actress talks about the eating disorder that hit her the minute she saw her naked self up on a theater screen for the first time, some editor or more enlightened producer might have said, “This is what our movie is about” because it’s certainly the most interesting thing in it.
When Sean Young mentions having to lift her shirt at the end of her audition for “No Way Out” for director Roger Donaldson, somebody — not just the viewer — should have cringed enough to say “We need to emphasize this more.”
And when an actress we’ve seen in “Skin,” time and again, explain away the decisions she made that painted her into a career corner — “She does nude scenes– finally adds “I didn’t have the choices women do today,” maybe rethinking this whole “survey” of skin in cinema as an organizing strategy should have entered somebody’s mind.
Because not every starlet could shrug it off with a carefree “When am I ever going to look this good again?”
As an overview, the blizzard of titles and parenthetical detours — into “nudie” and its subgenres, “women in prison” pictures, “stag films,” “art films” — could launch a hundred dissertations.
Great raconteurs Peter Bogdanovich, “Last Picture Show” director and film historian, and actor Malcolm McDowell (nude in “if…” and “Caligula,” a rapist in “A Clockwork Orange”) tell well-polished tales of this scene in that movie.
Landmark films in their treatment of nudity– many of them forgotten — are sampled, from the pre-Code silents to the competitors of Russ Meyer. We can laugh at the on-screen perversions that Cecil B. DeMille visited and revisited, and the ’50s and ’60s obsession with “nudist colony” set “nudies” (lampooned in “A Shot in the Dark”).
Then a wag jokes that “Last Tango in Paris” “certainly put butter on the map,” even as allegations that star Maria Schneider made about feeling “a little raped” on the set are downplayed and written off (by another male “expert” who looks about 30). And an actress tells us about learning how to read a script and a contract to ensure that you’re not “just the pair of (naked) boobs in that (film’s) distribution deal.”
McDowell sneering at the “hypocrisy” of Hollywood, the sexism that puts naked women on the screen exponentially more often than nude men, opens another can of worms “Skin” doesn’t fully address.
Any prurient value the film with “MrSkin” built into its bones has vaporizes in an instant. Let’s hope that’s by design, but the light touches that make a joke of Monroe’s openness and the “shock” of Julie Andrews losing her top in “S.O.B.” or the pointless inclusion of “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” suggest that it isn’t.
In setting out to do a complete history of on-screen skin, director Danny Wolf and the producers must have been bowled over by the access they got and the “names” they landed interviews with, all the titles they had permission to sample, and not been able to edit some of them out.
Perhaps a better approach might have been splitting this into a two or three film series, the way clips-heavy “cult films” and other histories of film genres or issues in the cinema have been dealt with. Entire episodes on “pre-Code” and “exploitation vs. ‘essential (necessary) nudity'” and the like would have streamlined “Skin,” and lessened the sense that ugly, important subtexts are given lip-service, and little more.
Because we know what the MrSkin crowd wants and will be streaming this for. “Thorough,” in this case, feels like pandering to the prurient.
MPAA Rating: NC-17
Cast: Shannon Elizabeth, Pam Grier, Malcolm McDowell, Mariel Hemingway, Martha Coolidge, Sean Young, Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich, Sylvia Miles, Amy Heckerling, Mamie Van Doren, Traci Lords and Eric Roberts.
Credits: Directed by Danny Wolf, script by Paul Fishbein and Danny Wolf. A Quiver release.
Running time: 2:09
It seems like ancient history, now. In a lot a ways, it is.
There was a summer roiled by a murder of a black man, one that laid bare the open wound of American violence and racism long before this one.
Yusuf Hawkins was a black teen of 16, murdered because he and some friends went to check out a used car somebody was selling in a part of town their parents never warned them about.
The fact that this happened in supposedly cosmopolitan, enlightened and integrated New York City in 1989 hit America, and especially the city, as a shock.
But not filmmaker Spike Lee. His defining and most important film, “Do the Right Thing,” was still in theaters when Hawkins was murdered. And it took civil rights marches through Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the stabbing of an emerging activist leader and mob involvement to bring the killers to justice.
In “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn,” director Muta’Ali Muhammad tells this story in “true crime revisited” form, interviews that dissolve into voice-over narrations over crime scene photos and mesmerizing drone shots of the locations as they are today.
Survivors, cops, a mayor, relatives of the deceased and the accused are heard from. Archival news footage and screaming newspaper headlines follow the media coverage given this murder in America’s media capital.
And the story is as convoluted, bizarre and tragic as anything that Spike Lee dreamed up as fiction. A friend sees a classified ad for a cheap, used Pontiac, Yusuf and three friends take the train with him from East New York to Bensonhurst, because, as one survivor remembers, “Nobody told us ‘That’s off limits. You can’t go there.'”
But their parents knew.
Meanwhile, in Italian American Bensonhurst, a mouthy teen named Gina Feliciano taunted a beau with threats that she’d invited Black and Hispanic teens into the neighborhood. That guy “warned” other guys, and the next thing you know, a mob armed with baseball bats is confronting four Black kids at a convenience store, a shot is fired and a kid is dead.
Hawkins’ mother Diane relates the heartless way she got the news, family members and others tell of cops warning them to “keep this quiet.” And then the Reverend Al Sharpton, new in the public eye and fresh off the debacle of the Tawana Brawley case, is summoned.
Muhammad (“Life’s Essentials with Ruby Dee”) peels layers off this story with the interviews, which include lawyers and cops involved with the case, as they contradict “the media narrative” that was pushed (probably by cops and lawyers) back in 1989.
It wasn’t going to be easy keeping racial tensions, simmering for a decade, under control. Other mobs had killed other Black men. The Central Park 5 case had exploded that spring, five young Black men railroaded into prison for a crime they were later cleared of. And the mayor, Ed Koch?
“His finger was on the trigger, too,” Spike Lee declared, interviewed outside the Hawkins home in 1989. There’s footage of Koch, leaping to conclusions about other cases where the accused are Black, to back up that argument.
The next mayor, David Dinkins, was running for office when Hawkins was murdered. He is interviewed here and seen back then, and can’t help but come off as exploiting the tragedy.
Muhammad gets so much of the story in here that it’s as if he’s re-trying the case himself. Lovely details color the film, about how the marches pushed a mafia figure to lean on the neighborhood to “give up” the criminals to the police, the lone Black Bensonhurst kid who was there that night — culpable in some ways, righteous in others, tormented about his unique part in the tragedy, the first paramedic on the scene getting the first ear full of “keep this quiet” from a cop.
And New Yorkers remember how shocked they were when those marches exploded into white riots, laying bare the racism that the city had been doing its best to ignore.
“Storm Over Brooklyn” is a tense, tight and timely film that reminds us that America itself has been doing the same — trying its best to ignore something that’s been there, for those willing or forced to see it, all along.
MPAA Rating: unrated, some violence, profanity
Cast: Amir Hawkins, Diane Hawkins, Rev. Al Sharpton, Joey Fama, David Dinkins, Det. Joseph Regina, (archival) Moses Stewart, Ed Koch, Spike Lee
Credits: Directed by Muta’Ali Muhammad. An HBO release.
Running time: 1:40
This one streams Aug. 25. Looks compelling — mental disorders among scientists and gamblers aren’t rare — and maybe annoying. “Dude, get up from the poker table and CURE this already.”
What an odd duck of a doc “Big Fur” is. But that just means director Dan Wayne has gotten damned close to his subject.
Alberta, Canada taxidermist, Roy Orbison impersonator and Bigfoot believer Ken Walker is a veritable rural Renaissance man.
Wayne’s film watches Walker, one of the world’s very best at taxidermy — he has the ribbons, trophies and absurdly lifelike menagerie to prove it — as Walker works his magic on his greatest “recreation,” bringing the Bigfoot of Myth, and 53 seconds of film footage to (still) life.
Walker’s work “has never been recognized by ‘the art crowd.'” There aren’t many scientists who’d stake their reputations on saying that “forest people,” “Sasquatch” or “Bigfoot” exist. And Walker confesses that taking on an “animal” for which he has no fur or skeleton to work with, which most don’t think actually exists, makes “people think I have lost my mind.”
But by the time “Big Fur” is done, your opinions on one or two of those three prejudices are sure to have changed.
“Big Fur” takes on the herculean task of rescuing the reputation of taxidermy, which city folk in particular regard as kind of ghoulish. Thank Norman Bates for that, Walker says. “Ever since ‘Psycho,’ taxidermists,” who used to garner a little respect thanks to the craft’s most famous practitioner, John James Audubon, “have been fighting that (murdered and stuffed his mommy) stereotype.”
That’s one of the few places in his movie that director Dan Wayne lets us in on a joke. He plays a little “Psycho” music as Walker carves away at styrofoam body structures, touches up glass eyes or paints the nails of this or that critter.
The rest of this quirky film is played deadpan straight — just a man, his art, his competitive streak, his “understanding” family and his obsession. Big. Foot.
Watching him study, frame-by-frame, the Zapruder Film of Bigfoot believers, the Patterson-Grimlin Film, less than a minute of a hulking, big-hairy-bosomed beast lumbering away and glancing over her shoulder (“Patsy” she is called, after Big Foot “researcher” Patterson) from 1967, you figure “Canadian dude’s been drinking the Kool-aid.”
But the back-and-forth over that movie’s authenticity has never conclusively settled on “hoax” or “the real deal,” although “hoax” still has the upper hand. “Big Fur” throws graphics up that tell us of the thousands of alleged “sightings” over the past 100 years of North American deforestation and population growth.
No, it’s not likely. That “film” has never been replicated, for starters. But as Ken Walker croons into the mike in a spot-on Roy Orbison impression, you concede that “In Dreams” might not be the only place Sasquatch stalks the dwindling forests.
And as Ken’s project nears completion, his fame growing as it does, his story takes a personal turn that’s kind of “on brand” for rural white North America, as well.
But conspiracies, killing critters, country music, and art? He’s got quite the task on his “magic hands,” changing the world’s mind about that last label.
“Taxidermy,” Ken says, regaling another competitor at a convention, “it’s all done by right wingers, who don’t BELIEVE in ‘art,’ and won’t call themselves ‘artists.'”
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Ken Walker, Amy Carter, Ken Walker Sr., George Roof, Colette Walker, Chantelle Walker
Credits: Directed by Dan Wayne, script by George Langworthy. A 1091 release.
Running time:
A Netflix series about the first mission to Mars, with a multinational crew, perilous obstacles and the cost to those back home.
Josh Charles also stars in this Sept. 4 Netflix release.
A throwback B-movie about Tommies trying to make it to the evac zone, where Kenneth Branagh, the Royal Navy and “The Little Ships” could whisk them to safety. Look for “Behind the Line: Escape to Dunkirk” Aug. 17.
Movie Nation 