Movie Nation

You put a filmmaker in quarantine, you never know what he’ll get around to finishing.

David Lynch, Eagle Scout, Missoula Montana.

Whatever praise Netflix is due for financing and distributing attention-grabbing documentaries, whatever success it has in the woefully under-served romantic comedy/teen comedy genres, “Liar’s Dice” is the sort movie gem that proves Netflix’s value to the culture.

This little-seen Indian road picture, a desperate, intimate quest wrapped in a scenic yet harrowing journey through India’s underclasses, would have been lost to all time without the streaming service. Netflix is positively stuffed with gems, just like this.

Actress turned writer-director Geethu Mohandas (“The Elder One”) gives us a simple story with built-in charm and appeal, a mountain villager and her daughter make a trip, bringing their adorable kid (goat) with them.

But the reasons for their trip and the scanty means they have for completing it are a missing husband away doing construction work, who hasn’t answered his cell phone in months, something wife Kamala (Geetanjali Thapa) is willing to spend their last rupee to rectify.

Her peers and relatives reassuring “Don’t worry” starts to sound downright dismissive when the village elders repeat it. With toddler Manya (Manya Gupta) in tow, Kamala sets out for the city.

Fate throws them in the path of an armed drifter (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) whom they meet as he’s being beaten for stowing away in a long-distance hauler.

He’s injured. She’s alarmed at his presence and tries to put some distance between them. But he hangs onto their goat when it wanders off during the night. And guileless Manya doesn’t see a problem.

“What’s your name?” (in Hindi, with English subtitles.

“Nawazuddin” is rude, coarse, and not the sort Kamala would trust to get them their destination. He demands money, too.

The film’s running gag? “I don’t have it,” she says. “Look in your bag. Look again.” That’s always his reply.

The film, largely set in Chitkul, Himachal Prades, puts them on foot (he limps from an injury), in Jeeps, trucks, trains and buses, riding along cliff-edge roads, backcountry rails from one city to another.

Kamala is beautiful, young but wary. She can’t allow herself to trust this cursing hustler who runs dice games in the back of the bus or wherever he has an audience. This husband she seeks sounds like the sort of fellow he’d know.

“Screwed you over and dumped you. Is that the story?”

People keep telling her, “Madam, be careful.” But if she wants answers, she must put herself, the child and the goat in the hands of this character. She is desperate enough to sit herself next to him when the bus is searched at army checkpoints.

He is probably exactly the sort of guy they’re looking for. But he’s got a “wife, child” and a goat. “Upstanding citizen” they probably think.

Thapa lets us see the worry and the calculation in every negotiation with Nawazuddin, makes us believe her daughter is winning him over and that maybe she should soften a little.

Siddiqui never lets us forget the hustler this guy is. No small kindness makes us trust that he will finish his mission and save the day for them.

And writer-director Mohandas keeps us guessing, pining for a happy ending, fearing for the child, her mother and the goat, hoping Nawazuddin’s humanity will shimmer through.

That’s no mean feat in a film as fraught as “Liar’s Dice.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Geetanjali Thapa, Manya Gupta

Credits: Written and directed by Geethu Mohandas. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

The Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer turns a Herman Bang novel about a love triangle with gay undertones into a lovely but austere, sentimental melodrama with “Michael,” a 1924 silent film memorable for being the first major role for Walter Slezak, who left Europe for Hollywood where he had a long career as a character actor.

Bang, a homosexual journalist and novelist from Dreyer’s native Denmark, loosely based this story on the life of French sculptor Auguste Rodin. It’s about a pretty young man (Slezak) taken in as a model by a famous artist (Benjamin Christensen), treated as “a son,” but who betrays the older man’s affections when a Russian princess (Nora Gregor) shows up for a sitting.

Young Michael had once shown his sketches to Zoret (Christensen) who dismissed them as “worthless.” But the boy caught The Master’s eye. He brought the kid on as his model.

Now, years later. Zoret is losing his grip on Michael’s attention. The journalist Switt (Robert Garrison) may be hanging around, working on a biography of the painter. But he’s privy to all the gossip about Michael, a fair-haired young man who cuts a dashing figure in his cape and beret.

“He spends each night at the opera, eyeing up the ballet rats,” the gossipy Switt relates.

Zoret shrugs this off, and every indiscretion to come. That’s the meaning of the film’s opening title.

“Now I can die in peace for I have known a great love.”

Princess Zamikov (Nora Gregor) longs to be painted by Zoret. And Michael, the object of his master’s eye and subject of his heroic nudes, is jealous.

Until he gives the Russian royal the once-over. He is smitten, sneaking into her opera box, kissing her bare shoulder as she holds up a demure fan against prying eyes.

Zoret obsesses and frets over her portrait, never quite mastering her eyes. Michael, in the spirit of “Only youth will know,” adds that final touch with the brush.

But that will be their last collaboration of any note. Michael, never coming out and admitting it, is moving on.

The acting is positively modern, with only the occasional moment of Christensen overacting with the eyes to give away how close this film came to the exaggerated theatricality of silent cinema of just a couple of years before.

But the lack of action here — a common complaint in movies about painters — makes “Michael” drag. A subplot mirroring the love triangle of Zoret, Michael and the princess, and involving a man seducing another’s wife may lead to a duel, but doesn’t do much other than overtly show the turmoil that the forbidden, hidden love that Zoret has for his “son,” Michael.”

The compositions are neat and craftsmanlike, with an occasional exterior (snowy streets with carriages) and a recreation of “Swan Lake” in the theater where Michael and the Princess have their assignations among the visual delights here.

Compared to 1919’s overtly gay “Anders also die Andern (Different from the Others),” this is seriously tame, a watered-down version of a gay writer’s novel. But being by Dreyer (“The Passion of Joan of Arc”), “Michael” is worth revisiting to see how a leading director of the day approached material that, however socially progressive Denmark and post-war Germany might have been, was more daring than he was willing to make it.

MPAA Rating: unrated.

Cast: Walter Slezak, Benjamin Christensen, Nora Gregor and Robert Garrison

Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, script by Dreyer and Thea von Harbou , based on the novel by Herman Bang. A Kini Classics (virtual cinema) release.

Running time: 1:34

She made some pretty good movies, had a hand in inventing an entire style of indie cinema, and a lot of Hollywood folks were big fans, even those who never got to work with her. They’re paying tribute tonight. Details are below.

“In honor of beloved filmmaker Lynn Shelton who passed away May 16th, her friends and colleagues have organized an intimate music-driven tribute to Shelton’s life and work. Shelton’s closest collaborators will share words about what working with Lynn meant to them while musicians will perform songs featured in her films.

The program will air live tonight Wednesday (Humpday!) June 10th on YouTube (https://youtu.be/ybtW1su19Fk) at 9pm ET/ 6pm PT and will be available indefinitely afterwards for people to watch, revisit, and share.

Among the actors slated to speak are Emily Blunt, Kaitlyn Dever, Rosemarie DeWitt, the Duplass Brothers, Jeff Garlin, Joshua Leonard, Sean Nelson, Michaela Watkins, Reese Witherspoon and more.

Musicians scheduled to perform include: Marc Maron, Andrew Bird, Ben Gibbard, Laura Veirs, Tomo Nakayama and many more. There will also be a special ensemble performance from many of the musicians featured in Shelton’s online series about the Seattle music scene “$5 Cover” with artists including Kevin Murphy, Sassy Black, Seth Warren, Ryann Donnelly, Jason Dodson and Brady Harvey.

Megan Griffiths, Lynn’s longtime friend, collaborator and fellow Seattlite, directed the tribute. Mel Eslyn, the Duplass Brothers and Adam Kersh produced with Megan.

“It has been really meaningful to me to work on this project. Lynn was one of my dearest friends and losing her has been leveling,” said Megan Griffiths. “It has given me comfort to focus on celebrating her life by bringing together all of these beautiful performances and hearing the heartfelt words of her many friends and collaborators. I hope it brings solace to her family and all those mourning this unfathomable loss.”

Coming to filmmaking in her mid 30s, Shelton was a major force in American independent cinema and was a pillar of the arts community at large in her home town of Seattle. She was a vibrant, kind, creative human being. Her work drew acclaim for its compassion, humor, unique voice and wonderful performances. Shelton directed eight features including HUMPDAY (2009), YOUR SISTER’S SISTER (2011), OUTSIDE IN (2018), and last year’s SWORD OF TRUST. Shelton also worked in television, directing memorable episodes of acclaimed series including: “Mad Men,” “GLOW,” “The Mindy Project,” and “Little Fires Everywhere.” She is gone too soon and will be deeply missed.

Donations to the Shelton/Seal Family Fund for the Northwest School for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children, or Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum are encouraged.
 

A couple of beautiful young dancers — one in Paris, the other a New Yorker — meet online and have a years-long affair and post-affair “relationship” in “Aviva.”

But writer-director Boaz Yakin, best known for directing “Remember the Titans” and scripting even more conventional films such “Prince of Persia,” “Now You See Me” and the kid-and-a-war-dog family picture “Max,” takes a stab at reinventing himself with this stylized, experimental indie drama.

It’s non-linear, at times, non-binary in its treatment of sexuality and almost nonsensical as he empties his bag of tricks onto the screen.

Characters change actors — for actresses, and actresses become male characters. Copious passages of voice-over narration are joined by characters breaking the fourth wall, directly addressing the camera and speaking about the film they’re in.

“I was thinking of trying out a song, at this point. F— consistency and tone.”

Actually, it’s fairly consistent and the tone lingers on the mopey side of scale.

There’s a bit of dance and a lot more sex.

Yakin introduces a number of characters, early on, in the nude — full frontal, sometimes addressing the camera. After we’ve met the elderly attorney our young couple, the Parisian Aviva (Zina Zinchenko) and New Yorker Eden (Tyler Phillips), Yakin brings in more older folks, and children for flashbacks.

And even he blinks at the idea of showing them naked.

As our simple “love story” has only so much promise, he decides to gloss it over with gimmicks and coitus – gay and straight, threesomes and slapping — many scenes’ worth.

That’s where the whole non-binary thing comes in. Eden is narrated and even played by the first nude (Bobbi Jene Smith) we meet, in some scenes. Or Schraiber takes over Aviva as the film dabbles in the fluid nature of sexuality as defined by current thinking on the subject.

The acting isn’t awful, just awfully arch — as dictated by the screenplay. Eden laments about the doubts he has and how they “cast a pall of my own making over the shimmering beauty of creation.” Aviva’s come-on includes “with every moment that passes, my heart loses a little bit of innocence.”

Dude, just let the dancers dance!

There’s early promise, characters slipping into stylized movement just skipping down the street. The dance scenes are glorious, a bluesy-klezmer bar scene, a Jewish wedding reception that takes traditional line-dancing into sexy modern dance, kids in a flashback, rapping and break-dancing on the subway.

But somewhere well before Eden mimes driving a car, conversing with another lover/alter ego in the “back seat,” I lost all interest in this exercise in indulgence.

Who can keep track of the assorted bearded little-known look-alikes with mismatched accents, none of them driving the “plot” or deepening our understanding of the human condition? Who wants to stay involved with Aviva and Eden breaking up, reconnecting and who-cares-what-comes-next?

Orate and strip, have sex, dance and argue. Then repeat, with different gender performers playing the characters.

It’s pretentious. It’s on-screen onanism, and rarely more than that.

MPAA Rating: unrated, explicit sex and lots of it, full frontal nudity, slapping.

Cast: Zina Zinchenko, Bobbi Jene Smith, Tyler Phillips, Or Schraiber

Credits: Written and directed by Boaz Yakin. A Strand release.

Running time: 1:55

“The Trip to Greece,” which is the last of the Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon “road comedies” will be the first feature to show when The Enzian (www.enzian org) reopens June 12.

It’s a stitch, and scenic to boot. See it on a big screen.

The fine documentary about James Baldwin,” I Am Not Your Negro,” is also on the bill, appropriately enough, considering the times. That film is also being screened all over the Middle East at the moment, in solidarity with the nation’s protestors.

And Enzian is throwing in a little Hitchcock to sweeten the lot. Go to their websitefor showtimes.

Matinee prices on all shows the first week. Pack a mask if you’re worried and get out there. They’re perfectly set up for cinematic social distancing.

https://t.co/grSL1bpngA https://t.co/I0sZ9n8RJN https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1270641857182253056?s=20

Flirting with financial ruin already, pummelled by the pandemic, AMC is reopening not a minute too soon. And might need a buyout to survive.

It was “the summer that saved baseball,” but what do we remember of it?

There was the majestic home run stroke of Mark McGwire, the joyous bounce of Sammy Sosa, urging balls over the fence as he cleared the batter’s box — the grins, the hugs, the good-sportsmanship, the thrill of “chasing the record.”

The summer of ’98 was months of following the best “feel good” sports story in decades for a game four years removed from a dispiriting, fan-repelling strike.

On TV and the radio, it was a nightly parade of epic home run calls from the announcer’s booth.

“To the track, to the WALL, it AIN’T coming back!”

“Get out GET OUT!

“A SMOKER into the left field seats!”

“Calling air traffic control…”

“Look-a there, LOOK-a there, heading for Planet MARIS!”

Mobs gathered on Waveland Ave behind Wrigley Field, the faithful wept and cheered in America’s most baseball savvy city, St. Louis. It’s all burned into the memory, even if we’ve almost tried to forget it.

This was the summer of Sosa, McGwire and Ken Griffey Jr. (“The Chosen One”) chasing the 37 year-old major league single season record for hitting home runs, “61,” set by Roger Maris in 1961. “Long Gone Summer,” the latest ESPN “30-for-30” documentary, takes us back there.

Director AJ Schnack (the political films “Caucus” and “Convention”) and his interview subjects recall the giddy highs of this chase, which, let’s face it, was a lot of fun. He fills the screen with most of those involved (Griffey isn’t here) — managers, teammates and even the Busch Stadium groundskeeper, who wound up on David Letterman before that summer was through. Legions of sportswriters and sportscasters tell stories, with Bob Costas, finally looking and sounding like the grand old baseball sage he’s been since his teens.

But always, hanging over it all, is the knowledge of what came later — the comeuppance, the realization that the “authenticity” (as Costas labels it) wasn’t there, and isn’t there now. In a game “where records matter,” the taint of PEDs, “performance enhancing drugs” all but erased this glorious year from memory and slapped asterisks, real-and-de facto, on all those dingers.

“In retrospect, there was a price to pay for it,” Costas intones in the film’s brief final act summary of the scandal that didn’t really unravel until years later.

But while it lasted…

Schnack leans heavily on the extensive TV coverage which included hours of footage of both the games, the homers, the players’ many many press interviews and lovely over-the-shoulder shots of the play-by-play announcers, including the nearly-peerless Jack Buck in St. Louis, as they beheld the spectacle of it all.

Buck, nearing retirement, burst into tears on air when the record was broken, as indeed did many another baseball fan. It was historic. And as the interviews (archival and fresh present day ones) show us the reserved, stoic McGwire and the effusive, buoyant Sosa not just bringing out the best in each other but having a veritable mutual love fest as they competed, it’s hard not to get choked-up all over again.

But of course, the hammer will come and the hammer will drop. The open-locker secret of McGwire’s magic ointments (not banned at the time), the suspiciously newly-bulked Sosa, coming out of nowhere to overtake Griffey and become the real challenger to McGwire and the record, all kind of spoiled it.

The fresh interviews for this show Sosa resisting admitting anything and McGwire trying not to dwell on it. Neither was banned from the game.

Still, we’re reminded by the historically-minded (columnist George Will) and by Roger Maris Jr., son of the long-dead Yankee slugger who lived in Mickey Mantle’s shadow, that Maris got death threats for chasing Ruth’s record in 1961 and lost his hair from the stress.

The only performance enhancing drugs Maris used were Philip Morris cigarettes, and maybe the occasional Schlitz. And the only shrine to Maris’s career is in his hometown of Fargo, North Dakota. For years it was tucked in a display case in corner of a local mall.

McGwire and Sosa aren’t in Cooperstown. Nor is current home run record holder and hat-size expander (a PED give-away) Barry Bonds.

But it’s fitting that “Long Gone Summer” feels truncated, cut off at the end. As glorious as the chase was at the time, as long as the “nobody cares” about PEDs ethos held the stage in the sport, among fans and sportscasters (and today’s online sports folk), the stain was still there. And it just grew.

There’s just enough here to remind us how we pushed memories of ’98 out of our baseball minds, a fleeting glimpse of Ferguson, Missouri (with a “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt in it) emphasizes just how long ago it seems.

And dwelling on the cheaters, summoning up sympathy for their plight, wouldn’t seem fair.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, Bob Costas, Ray Lankford, Tony LaRussa

Credits: Directed by AJ Schnack, music by Jeff Tweedy. An ESPN “30 for 30” (June 14) release.

Running time: 2:00

In “Darkness Falls,” Shawn Ashmore, playing a police detective, gets this crazy eye thing going when he’s trying to “think like they do” to figure out who murdered his wife, and made it look like a suicide.

Does he do that on TV’s “The Rookie?” Because man, it’s unnerving and it comes out of nowhere, a blast of “A Beautiful Mind” thrown into an early scene of a violent, grimly ridiculous serial killer thriller.

Considering we’ve seen Ashmore give away what he’s about to see in a moment when he’s supposed to be SHOCKED at finding his wife, bled out in the bathtub — while holding his sleepy little boy in his arms — the crazy eyes make a certain sense. He’s not got this whole acting/facial “indicators” thing worked out.

Yeah, that’s partly a direction problem. But Ashmore stands out as bad performing a script that was never going to be anything but awful, a dispiriting and ham-fisted psychological thriller with potential, and little else.

We’ve seen two armed strangers break in on the woman in the tub, the older man (Gary Cole) knowing her name and the name of her little boy asleep a few rooms away.

“Swallow these,” he orders her, giving her pills. As she dozes off in the tub of warm water, the razor comes out. It’s the perfect murder-disguised-as-suicide.

Detective Jeff Anderson (Ashmore) is eaten up with this loss, his lovely artist wife, mother of his child, taken. The little boy says “I dreamed a bad guy came into my room,” a clue unexplored. Jeff just KNOWS his wife didn’t kill herself.

He haunts every 10-56 (suicide) radio call in greater LA, “the suicide guy,” piling up departmental complaints which his captain and former partner (Daniella Alonso) tries to protect him from.

It’s been months. He needs to move on, get a homicide case that’ll take his mind off his loss.

“I AM working a homicide,” he growls.

And so he is, interviewing the first survivor of this string of suspicious suicides, palming off the kid on his mother (Lin Shaye), trying to “think like they do” to piece together the puzzle.

That mystery is just…daft. The confrontations with the villains (Richard Harmon is the co-killer)? Trite.

“Doesn’t it strike you how you and I are a lot alike?”

An interrogation that begins with “Tell me your story” and LITERALLY chases that line, seconds later, with “Why are you TELLING me all this?”

That is some seriously stupid writing, Giles Daoust. I guess “The Man Who Killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot” was inadequate writing prep for a police procedural.

French director Julien Seri (“Nightfare”) wasn’t going to save you, or the dude with the crazy eyes. “Darkness Falls” fails all up and down the line.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Shawn Ashmore, Daniella Alonso, Gary Cole, Richard Harmon and Lin Shaye

Credits: Directed by Julien Sire, script by Giles Daoust. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:23

Smart, educated and liberal New Yorkers debate morality “The Surrogate,” an indie drama that is almost all talk, and all of it good.

Jasmine Batchelor has the vibrant, idealistic and opinionated title role. Jess is an upper middle class 20something of independent means and independent thought, and a Columbia alumnus who just might correct your grammar if you dared call her “woke.”

Born into the upper middle class, a yoga-loving web designer and marketer for a non-profit, she is Buppy to her marrow.

“You’re describing every chick in Brooklyn.”

She is still keeping her life options open. She’s just shifted her boyfriend to “just friends” when we meet her. Doesn’t need the commitment.

Yet she’s agreed to be a surrogate for a gay couple, Josh (Chris Perfetti), whom she met when they were undergrads at Sarah Lawrence, and Aaron (Sullivan Jones). She’s not doing it for money. She supports their love and their commitment. It’s kind of an altruistic political statement, for her.

“They’re the new parents,” she over-shares with a waitress. “I’m just the…vessel!”

And then they get the prenatal test. She fetus has the extra chromosome that indicates Down Syndrome. Writer-director Jeremy Hersh’s movie is about the widening circle of debate about what they will decide to do about this.

That agonizing discussion is fascinating because of the pitfalls the movie avoids and what becomes obvious as Jess’s Achilles Heel. She is open and friendly, intelligent and curious. So she “works the problem” by finding a community center where Down Syndrome children can play together and parents can bond.

She immerses herself in that world and insistently ingratiates herself with one parent, Bridget (Brooke Bloom) and her adorable son, Leon (Leon Addison Brown).

What’s more, she insists Aaron and Josh come along for these info-gathering, get acquainted with the available support system sessions.

“It would be great if we could hang out with Leon’s family…”

Jess does all this without noticing the looks the gay couple exchanged, the way the diagnosis devastates Josh, who knew a Down child growing up. She doesn’t pick up on “Having a kid with Down Syndrome…it requires a lot.”

She peppers Bridget with questions without seeing the exhaustion in her eyes, without hearing how difficult it is, even for people of means, to take on this responsibility.

Maybe she’s disconnected, not facing the fact that sure, she can afford to be all-in. She won’t have to raise the baby, toddler, tween, teen and adult who will be dependent on her parents or others her entire life.

So the news that the couple have discussed all the options and decided on terminating the pregnancy might come as a shock, although outwardly, she seems fine with that.

It’s just that she insists on deepening her ties to the community center, to Bridget and Leon. Is she “working” Josh and Aaron?

Hersh gives every single character in this a defensible point of view and lets each make his or her case. Parents get involved. Siblings.

His attention to milieu all but mocks affluent Manhattan liberalism, people wanting to make moral yet political decisions but petty enough to have bones to pick with that precious TV cook, “The Barefoot Contessa,” Ina Garten, with and evolutionary biologist, ethologist and atheist Richard Dawkins.

“He’s ALT right!”

No, he isn’t.

The tone ranges from testy to distraught, but always “adult” in the insistence on talking this out.

It can seem too talkative, at times. But Hersh never lets us or anybody else off the hook. This is a very real situation and an incredibly difficult decision if you take all the financial, physical, spiritual and ethical aspects.

And Batchelor makes us see, appreciate and feel every step in Jess’s deliberations, from reasoning and bargaining to defensive and shrill. It’s a marvelous turn in a very smart movie, and we can only hope there are roles just as challenging residing in her bright and bright-eyed future.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Jasmine Batchelor, Chris Perfetti, Sullivan Jones, Brooke Bloom

Credits: Written and directed by Jeremy Hersh.  A Monument release.

Running time: 1:33