By: Henry J. Fromage –
This week was one focused on performance and character, even, or perhaps especially, in the below documentaries.
603. She Rides Shotgun
While this has all the trappings of a stylish thriller, it’s as much or more of a character piece. You could strip xxx’s debut down to 90 or so minutes of well-presented action, and I particularly appreciate how it renders everything realistically in all its messy and at times incompetent details. It’s a robust 120 minute film, though, because it’s a heartrending father/daughter relationship drama first and foremost, with xxx and particularly young xxx both delivering superb and deeply moving performances. Two Beers.
604. The Legend of Ochi
This A24-backed fantasy film announces Isaiah Saxon as a stylist and world-builder of note. His semi-Nordic, semi-Eastern European isolated island of Carpathia feels like a living, breathing place, as do the mixed puppet and CGI monkey-gremlin creatures that populate it and serve as age-old nemeses to its human inhabitants. There’s a bit of Wes Anderson and a lot of crazed Willem Dafoe to the proceedings, although the story itself is a bit simplistic. Three Beers.
605. Ebony & Ivory
Listen, Jim Hosking is going to Jim Hosking. This extremely fictionalized account of the coming together of music legends Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney to write the rather cheesy anthem “Ebony & Ivory”. Gil Gex and Sky Elobar play the two respectively, and the entire exercise is like the most repetitious and annoying aspects of stone cold classic The Greasy Strangler stretched out to feature length. Even fans are likely to find themselves at their wits’ end, when they’re not laughing, that is. Four Beers.
606. The Scrapper
I searched out this microbudget thriller after watching director xx’s xxxx, which I quite enjoyed earlier this year. This is a bit scruffier film, but one that still makes quite clear his facility in crafting a compelling story without a ton of resources. You also have to love the very Brooklyn milieu, with a focus on Pashtun and Mexican underworlds and how they have historically intermixed. All of this specificity is draped on a story that’s a bit more conventional (and a bit unevenly acted), but these are understandable drawbacks when working with this degree of outsized but laudable ambition. Three Beers.
607. This is the End
My wife and I gave this a rewatch for possibly the first time since it came out way back in 2013. I forgot how absolutely chock-full of comic cameos this was, and how comically profane it ultimately got for a studio comedy. This was the heyday of the Apatow boys, and they play on their comic personas beautifully here, none more so than Michael Cera, who plays an amoral party monster (Danny McBride also gets to play a monster, but one more attuned to his own comedy wheelhouse). Every bit as funny as the first time around, even despite the James Franco of it all. Two Beers.
608. Unknown Number: The High School Catfish
This Netflix true crime documentary is a curious one. It profiles the years-long cyberstalking of a high school boy and her girlfriend that ripples out into a barrage of text messages that rocks a small Michigan community. It promises a shocking conclusion early on, and it absolutely delivers on that, then morphs into another kind of psychological profile of the strangest kind, one that is amazing in the likely supremely self-delusional access given the filmmakers. Two Beers.
609. The Truth About Jussie Smollett?
Hey, this is kind of a theme, eh? Here Jussie Smollett is given another platform to try and talk himself out of the now famous events of a particular wintry Chicago day, in which Smollett claimed to be beaten by White Supremacists and left in the snow with a noose around his neck. This is a story whose details quickly start to bring questions, and then investigation, but arguably this documentary offers equal weight to perspectives that don’t necessarily warrant that degree of equanimity. Does it say something about me that I still don’t see Jussie’s side essential at all? Does it? Three Beers.
