By: Henry J. Fromage –
This week was one for a few under the radar genre films and both long and short form documentaries.
453. Faces of Death
This slickly shot horror film from IFC and Shudder has a little of that A24 feel, and the themes of internet voyeurism and the pain that it causes are heady ones, and even tie into the concept of a serial killer “remaking” the gruesome and apparently faked kills from the same-titled 1978 cult horror fairly well. If only so much of the plot doesn’t hinge on Barbie Ferreira’s continued awful decision-making. Dacre Montgomery is suitably creepy as fuck as the chameleonic serial killer with startling contacts game. Three Beers.
454. Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie
This is my first encounter with the long-running comedy pairing of Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, which has gone from web series to Canadian cult comedy show to a TIFF-debuting feature with some real ingenuity, major ins with Toronto city government and civil services, or brass balls (or all three). I know Johnson’s directorial work, and he delivers polish and creativity here in intermixing old footage of themselves, modern footage of insane stunts like parachuting off the CN Tower on top of the Skydome, and Jackass-style man on the street comedy, all with a gleefully Back to the Future-aping time travel plot. If this is any indication of the Nirvanna the Band experience, I’m all in. Two Beers.
455. Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea
Netflix tackles the Costa Concordia tragedy here, in which the Italian cruise ship ran aground and foundered on a Friday the 13th (when else?) in 2012. The first-hand accounts are harrowing stories of survival, selflessness, and true heroism among the staff and passengers, while the reconstruction and real audio of what was happening on the bridge is just the opposite- displaying miscommunication, incompetence, prioritization of saving reputation over proper emergency procedure, and finally cowardice, as the captain tries to abandon ship while passengers were still trying desperately to escape. It’s maddening to see how preventable the disaster itself, and then the loss of life because of it, truly was. Two Beers.
456. Peter Hujar’s Day
This short Ira Sachs film is a filmed version transcript of a conversation author Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) and photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) have as a part of a never completed series of Rosenkrantz’s of famous artists recounting what happened the day before to them in its totality. It helps when your randomly selected day before involves shooting a cover of a recalcitrant Alan Ginsburg for the New York Times, but Whishaw gives real life to even the more mundane parts of his story, and Hall is a natural interviewer. A real slice of 1970s Bohemian New York life. Three Beers.
457. Frank
One more roundup of documentary shorts from The New Yorker– for now at least. This charming but lightweight one is a quick profile of Frank Lucianna, 99 years old and still practicing criminal defense attorney in New Jersey- for at least one more case that is. That all plays out pretty anticlimactically, but Frank and his family are a good hang for the dozen or so minutes this one runs. Three Beers.
458. Goodbye, Morganza
This one is also on the shorter side and introduces us to a family it would clearly be lovely to be a part of. Devon Blackwell tells her family history, and how the family home they resided in since 1892 was wrested away from their great-grandparents, the loss of which has reverberated down on their circumstances even if they clearly have retained intangible richness. Two Beers.
459. Public Defender
There are plenty of laudable intangibles in how Heather Shaner goes about her life as well. She’s a criminal defense attorney that seems the very picture of blue-haired liberal values, but who defended a good number of January 6th rioters. She’s the kind of true believer in human rights and the American experiment who puts her values where her mouth is, and in the process converts some of these deluded and/or idiots over to a saner worldview. One wonders how many have backslid since (at least one for sure), but even one saved soul makes the efforts worthwhile. Two Beers.
