By: Henry J. Fromage –
This week the theme is the stresses of modern life coupled with the stresses of making a movie in the jungle. Don’t recommend either.
444. Eddington
Oh, Ari Aster, you just love to make us feel bad, don’t ya (plus cranial trauma- you really love that). This equal opportunity downer takes us back to those fun old days of COVID lockdowns and George Floyd protests, with a small New Mexico town representing the increasing polarity of the country in its anti-masker sheriff and buzzword-happy mayor. Don’t worry, this goes bugfuck in all kinds of directions in typical Aster fashion, cohering in a viciously satirical finale. We may not get what we want, but we will get what we deserve. Two Beers.
445. Echo Valley
This Apple-hosted drama stars Julianne Moore as the mother of the world’s shittiest junky daughter, played with absolute assholish conviction by Sydney Sweeney. When a periodic visit back home proves to be another scheme, Mom finds herself in the sites of a ruthless dealer (Domhnall Gleason, clearly enjoying playing against type). This is no storytelling groundbreaker, but it does get you invested pretty quick, if only to wish 75th trimester abortion was legal in fitting circumstances. Three Beers.
446. Pictures of Ghosts
Festival favorite director Kleber Mendonça Filho gets autobiographical in this documentary that traces his filmmaking journey alongside the history of his beloved hometown Recife, and particularly the mid-century movie palaces once graced by the likes of Janet Leigh. This is a portrait of a place and a culture near and dear to his heart, told through the formative cinema he made and consumed there. Two Beers.
447. Burden of Dreams
My next documentary stayed in South America, this time moving across the Amazon to the rainforests around Iquitos, Peru, where a young German filmmaker by the name of Werner Herzog sets out to make his opus, with the centerpiece being hoisting a steamship over a steep hill between two rivers, just as the character whose hubristic story he’s telling wishes to do. One of the great docs about the special hell and mania of a film shoot gone wrong. Two Beers.
448. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse
Well, here’s the other contender for greatest doc about the special hell and mania of a film shoot gone wrong. Eleanor Coppola documents here the making of an absolutely fraught self-financed, over-budget, insanely delayed Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece- well, at least one of the films meeting that description in his career- Apocalypse Now. This is a fascinating look at the excesses and dramatics of some of the greatest cinema artists of the century, butting heads in the intense Philippine jungle heat in a story that also mirrored the slow, sweat-drenched descent into insanity of its characters. Two Beers.
449. Wall to Wall
Netflix’s newest Korean high-concept anti-Capitalist filmed entertainment plays off of the very real epidemic of neighbor-on-neighbor violence in the cram-packed, largely apartment-based society. Kang Ha-neul, who you’ll recognize from the latest and last season of Squid Game, plays a young worker bee who is lucky enough to buy an apartment at just a bit over asking, only to embark on a long descent into noisy neighbor hell with a hearty dose of uncanny valley insanity along the way. This is a movie with a lot of social ills on its mind, and it’ll make you scream in frustration just like its protagonist- gripping and stressful as fuck. Two Beers.
450. Headdress
My latest Sundance membership short film is a creative and amusing trip inside the mind of young queer Native American Tai, who’s just seen a white girl in a feathered headdress at a music festival and is temporarily paralyzed crafting a response. In his mind, his various alter egos, made up of dominant personalities of his past, present (and eventual future), from goth Tai to gay Tai to work setting Tai, duel it out on what to say. Like a more adult and edgy Inside Out in miniature. Two Beers.
