Fromage –
Some weeks, teasing out even the most tenuous of themes feels odd- but let’s say “responsibility” ties these films all together.
797. After the Hunt
Knotty problems of responsibility, consent, and perception are what infatuates Luca Guadagnino and his characters in this attempt at unpacking Me Too, cancel culture, and the high-handed moral convolutions of modern Academia. Julia Roberts is great as a professor vying with her overly handsy and brash protege played by Andrew Garfield for tenure in Yale’s philosophy department- at least until a star student accuses him of forcing himself on her. Material this inherently difficult gives the actors plenty to play, but defies much of a degree of insight or catharsis. Three Beers.
798. Smoke
My wife’s been on a Paul Austen reading bent (man, I remember books…) and discovered he also wrote a screenplay or two in his time. This 1995 character drama was perhaps his most successful, a novelistic story of fathers and sons and found friendships in the greater New York City area. A stacked cast including Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Harold Perrineau, Forest Whitaker, and many more recognizable faces (even a lanky, long-haired Jared Harris in a small role) all make great hay of the writerly dialogue. Two Beers.
799. Adulthood
Alex Winter directs this dark comedy that’s pretty much just dark. Josh Gad and Kaya Scodelario play not particularly close siblings who discover their parents had the body of a long-vanished family friend walled up behind their water heater for 30 years. An ill-advised attempt to dispose of the body sets off a chain reaction of escalating, at least initially unintentional violence. It’s shooting for that old Coen Bros sweet spot but lands considerably short despite everyone’s best efforts. Four Beers.
800. Falling Down
This movie sure hits different in the Age of Trump. The white male grievance that drove Michael Douglas’s white collar everyman past his breaking point during one scorching L.A. traffic jam and resulted in an at times comically violent rampage felt a bit transgressive and wish fulfilment-y as a 19 year old. Now it’s just recognizable, with Douglas’s character coming across as both sad and terrifying. That was assuredly the original intent, but that still admittedly rather hilarious “no breakfast after 11:30” scene tends to obscure it for some. Three Pack.
801. Final Girl
Now this, friends, is a genuine disaster. Another one of my wife’s random Reel finds, this stars an 18-but-she-doesn’t-look-it Abigail Breslin as some kind of groomed for murder ingenue by a just the right side of inappropriate Wes Bentley. I will say, the filmmakers do have a visual sensibility on a budget, but the Doo-Wopper teenage serial killer gang is smorgasbord of bad acting, and the action choreography leaves much to be desired. It’s somewhat difficult to imagine Breslin herself being as weak as the blocking and cuts make her look, much less a trained-since-childhood assassin. Six Pack.
802. Riefenstahl
This is far from the first documentary examining the many contradictions of Leni Riefenstahl, a woman who practically wrote the book on larger than life heroic portrayal in film with her Nazi-mythologizing work on Olympia and Triumph of the Will, but who escaped the censure and justice of practically all of her peers besides another creative force for the Fuhrer Albert Speer. Here Andres Veiel makes the damning case that she did indeed know more than she ever publicly admitted, even as she made successful films and lived to the ripe old age of 101. Two Beers.
803. Bribe, Inc.
This investigative documentary delves into British journalist Nick McKenzie’s efforts to expose the corporation Unaoil and the Ahsani family that owned it as the ubiquitous middlemen of global bribery, particularly in the Oil trade, in which the company keeps turning up like a bad penny in mysterious transactions everywhere he looks. An engaging and damning portrait of how the wheels of global business are greased despite the best efforts of lawmakers and watchdogs seemingly governing the actions of First World corporations. Two Beers.
