By: Henry J. Fromage –
This week I kept trucking on the last few 2020 releases that keep emerging from dark corners, plus a few new year flicks.
81. My Octopus Teacher
This short nature documentary about a nature photographer who reconnects with his passion for his job, and his life, by diving in the coastal tidepools near his home is simply beautiful. It’s not all a paean to nature’s outrageous beauty, alien strangeness, and breathtaking cruelty, though- it’s also all of that shone through the prism of his blossoming friendship with a little octopus, an animal whose intelligence is likened to dogs, cats, or lesser primates, and which is very, very evident here. What a treasure of a film. A Toast.
82. Dexter
A trip to Miami a few months ago led to a rewatch of this one-time obsession, all-time awful ending-having Showtime series. Knowing where it was going kind of ruined even the “good” seasons just a bit in retrospect- Dexter is the least careless meticulous serial killer possible, which is where essentially all of his problems come from, and his psychology is all over the map. There’s still some good fun (and some great supporting performances in seasons 1, 3, 4 (Lithgow!), and slightly underratedly 5), but when you average everything together you can’t in good conscience call it more than mediocre. Of course I’ll be watching the new episodes. Four Beers.
83. White Lie
This Canadian film about a young woman whose lie about being sick with cancer has become her entire life performs a rare alchemy. As her lie spins out of control in ways that seem inevitable, you can’t help but begin to root for her to keep all these plates spinning- it has the grabbiness of a classic conman’s tale even if, despite lead Kacey Rohl’s superb efforts, understanding her remains elusive. Directors Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas keep the pace unrelenting, too, so much so that, like our pro(an)tagonist, it may be hard to realize when those plates stop. Two Beers.
84. Lovecraft Country
It took me long enough to get on board with the latest HBO show examining blackness in America through the medium of pure genre material. There’s also a heady mix of ideas on queerness, feminism, and different kinds of family here, too, and while it starts slower and a little sillier than Watchmen, it doesn’t take too long to put its own stamp on this thematic material. The cast and behind-the-camera talent are all putting it all out there, too- HBO knows how to let their creators create. Two Beers.
85. Farewell Amor
This film begins in an airport, where Walter (Ntare Mwine) is welcoming his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and his daughter Sylia (Jayme Lawson) after 17 years apart while he worked to bring them over from Africa. It’s a story told in turn from all 3 of their perspectives, which writer/director Ekwa Msangi expertly exploits the differences in. Beautifully acted and growing to an emotional and triumphant conclusion, this is a gem of a film. Two Beers.
86. The Truth
This is one of those French films with a distinctly moneyed Continental bourgeois view of family and relationships and art that I don’t usually go for. When you have legends of French film involved like Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, playing a legendary (and legendarily conceited) French actress and her oft-neglected daughter, though, my interest levels shift. Though the subject matter is in the end fairly slight, watching these two greats try and reconnect despite their contrasting personalities and shared experiences is worth the price of admission (and it doesn’t hurt to have Ethan Hawke along as Binoche’s doofy but observant American husband). Three Beers.
87. The Life Ahead
Director Edoardo Ponti just so happens to be the son of another legendary European actress, Sophia Loren, who gets the showcase she hasn’t had in some time here (she last acted in a film in 2009’s Nine), playing a Holocaust survivor and ex-streetwalker who now takes in troubled children. The prickly relationship she forms with young Momo (Ibrahima Gueye) is the heart of the film, but this young man finds unexpected kindness just about everywhere in this film, even from the drug dealer who he finds a lucrative opportunity with. This is a film about families that are made, not born, and not precisely the movie you think it’ll be, to its definite credit. Three Beers.
88. Blizzard of Souls
Latvia’s entry into the Best International Film race this year tells the story of a 16 year old who enlists to fight the Germans in WWI, and very quickly finds out that War is indeed Hell. We follow him from battlefield to battlefield while the politics of the Russia he enlisted with begin to splinter and put him at odds with his own army, then fighting on the behalf of a nation that was not yet to be. A bit of jingoistic pride dulls the impact somewhat, but this is one of the finest depictions of the particular hell of WWI combat out there. Three Beers.
89. Nobody Knows I’m Here
Lost‘s Jorge Garcia stars in this Chilean film as a silent cipher living with his uncle in Chile’s gorgeous lake country. He’s harboring a secret- as a boy he was the voice behind one of the country’s biggest teen pop idols, at least until a violent outburst ends all that. Garcia is excellent as the taciturn giant who begins to emerge from his shell when a local woman shows interest in who he is as a person. And if that’s his real singing voice, and I’m pretty sure it is, he’s been hiding another talent from us all along as well. Two Beers.
90. Our Friend
Depending on how you count all of those Oscar-hunting limited 2020 releases that are just now starting to be more available like Nomadland and Minari, this is the first great film of 2021. Based on an affecting 2015 Esquire article from Matthew Teague, this film examines the unique relationship between Teague (Casey Affleck), his wife Nicole (Dakota Johnson), and their mutual friend Dane (Jason Segel), particularly after she is diagnosed with cancer that will prove terminal and Dane moves in as a permanent helper for them and their two young daughters. It’s a story that’s too common, but incredibly affectingly told in its time-hopping structure courtesy of Teague and Brad Inglesby’s pens and documentarian Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s eye for realism, not to mention the stellar performances of all involved. This one just hit me. A Toast.
91. Ema
The prolific Pablo Larrain reunites with Gael Garcia Bernal and in support of a darkly enrapturing Maria di Girolamo as Ema, a dancer racked with guilt about the adopted son she gave up and unsure whether to just possibly quite literally burn it all down (a flamethrower plays a surprisingly central and visually spectacular role) or try to reconstruct her broken family with the one superpower she knows she has. This is a seductive film in its every aspect, and let yourself be seduced- what game you’ve been drawn into will become clear in the end. Two Beers.
92. Wasp Network
Oliver Assayas’ dip into the Netflix coffers sees him reteam with his Carlos star Edgar Ramirez alongside a murderer’s row of decidedly non-Cuban nor American actors (Ramirez is Venezuelan, then there’s Spaniard Penelope Cruz, Mexican Gael Garcia Bernal, and Brazilian Wagner Moura, with only Ana de Armas half-representing Cuba). The story is the Wasp Network, a group of Cuban spies who infiltrated anti-Castro Cuban-American organizations whose tactics had turned terroristic in the early 1990s. Assayas may have bitten off more than he could chew plotline-wise (this could easily have been a miniseries at least the length of Carlos), which forces it into a conventionally constructed linear form for the most part, but it’s fascinating history delivered by world-class actors in the end. Three Beers.
93. The Quiet Family
I’ve been having to dig deeper as of late to satisfy my wife’s insatiable appetite for movies from her home country, and when you have a film starring both Choi Min-sik and Song Kang-ho, aka the two biggest names in Korean film the past 20 years, its a gimme. Well, there’s a reason why this hasn’t crossed our radar yet- it’s deeply, deeply weird. It’s about a family running a mountain hotel/resort suffering from business trouble, although that’s the least of their problems. The people that do come keep dying on them, and after one burial in the backyard, what’s a few more? This has that distinctly 90s Miramax daarrk comedy feel that dig as usually producing something distinctive, but to say it’s not for everyone is probably an understatement. Three Beers.
94. Ten Minutes to Midnight
This very short and freaky horror film is kinda like Pontypool, but vampires, I guess? A hard rock late night radio host is bitten by a bat on the way to what ends up being her last day, soon to be replaced by the younger hot thing that she finds in her boss’s office. What’s already a bad night ends up spiraling much worse places as her own bloodlust and then others’ takes over, with even stranger things afoot. As a genre exercise on a budget, it’s a definite success, even though it feels slight as a whole. Three Beers.
95. The Delivered
You don’t see a lot of movies set in the Mayflower-era Puritan England, but I think we can all agree that the only man for the job of portraying a strict Puritan patriarch is Charles Dance. Good thing he plays just the man here, husband of the meek Fanny Lye (Maxine Peake). When two interlopers claiming to be robbed travelers enter their home, a dangerous game ensues- one that doesn’t always go where you think it will, and one awash in clashing Puritan ideals and more modern ones that were heretical then (and are pretty frankly heretical now). Thankfully Director Thomas Clay’s storytelling instincts are stronger than his philosophizing ones. Three Beers.
96. Antarctica
This small-scale comedy is about two high school outsiders (Chloe Levine and Kimie Muroya) with perfect banter and living in a world that’s like an only just slightly perverted version of our own (that a high school history teacher may have a lesson about that most despicable of American traitors, William Jefferson Clinton, kinda doesn’t feel all that impossible now, eh?). For fans of, say, Booksmart, this is a gimme, and although Keith Bearden hasn’t gotten a bump quite the size of Olivia Wilde’s, he and his charismatic cast sure feel like they deserve to be discussed in the same breath. Two Beers.
97. Intruder
This 2020 Korean thriller is about a man (Kim Mu-yeol) racked with guilt from not one, but two traumatic incidents in his life. When he was a young boy he let go of his sister’s hand at an amusement park and she was lost, and recently his wife and the mother of his daughter was killed in a car accident that he witnessed. When his long-lost sister returns out of the blue (Song Ji-hyo), his family rejoices… but there’s something… off about her. The style and rhythms of this thriller will undoubtedly feel familiar, but it goes some stranger than expected places that are worth sticking around for. Three Beers.
98. The Last Tree
This English film follows young Femi (Tai Golding, then Sam Adewunmi, both great) as he goes from living in a fairly idyllic rural foster home to coming back to live in London’s inner city with his strict mother. As he grows he falls in with the wrong crowd, but that same young boy full of wonder and joy is in there, and he may just have a chance and reconnecting with him if he just lets others past the hard shell he’s grown since then. A fine coming of age film brought to multi-faceted life by writer/director Shola Amoo. Three Beers.
99. The Day After I’m Gone
This Israeli film follows a veterinarian (Menashe Noy) and his daughter (Zohar Meidan) who recently lost their wife and mother respectively. The daughter has begun displaying worrying signs of suicidal tendencies, and he has no idea what to do about it, to the point that he is beginning to actively resent her. Nimrod Eldar crafts a knotty tale and complex tale that encompasses not just universal familial strains but aspects of Israeli identity. Two Beers.
100. Parallel
This indie flick about parallel universes punches above its budgetary weight, feeling like something Hollywood in the early 2000s would have made and cast with a bunch of rising stars of the Ryan Philippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar variety. That’s not a knock, as this sci-fi flick is well-produced and acted by a cast of “I know her from somewhere” familiar faces, and its plot about a group of friends and tech startup coworkers who find a mirror to alternate universes engrosses with its ideas of how that could be exploited for personal gain- and just what the ethics of doing so may be. Three Beers.
101. An Easy Girl
This French film now on Netflix follows a high school girl (Mina Farid) and her more glamorous, sexually forward cousin (Zahia Dehar) during a Cannes summer full of flirtation and more with rich yachters visiting a place that is to them just boring, pedestrian home. This is one of those sex-positive French coming-of-age films that makes an arthouse impression every once in awhile, and Rebecca Zlotowski knows how to play the hits as well as any of ’em. Three Beers.
102. Rent-A-Pal
Reactions to this film have been decidedly mixed from the outlets I most usually read, and I can definitely see why. Brian Landis Folkins’ embodies a character that’s a loser in the classic sense, living with his mother off of her social security, and looking for love and even simple friendship via the video services that existed for this sort of thing in the early 90s. But Folkins and writer/director Jon Stevenson imbue him with such humanity and initial beautiful human connection with one of the video service lookers for love (Amy Rutledge) in the first half of the film, that it’s a bit of a damn shame that the second half is obligated to go the creepy lengths promised by the “Will Wheaton is a video tape-based friend who’s creepily misogynist and overly attached” premise. Three Beers.
103. You Will Die at Twenty
Another Best International Film submission, this one comes from Sudan- their first ever. A mother is told by a holy man that her baby son will die when he turns 20 years old, and spends his childhood protecting him from anything that may harm him, and only allowing him an education in the Qur’an. As his birthday nears, though, he begins to question what everyone around him accepts to be his fate. I found this more to be an accomplishment in imagery than storytelling, but it’s undoubtedly a thrilling new voice on the world stage. Four Beers.
104. Aviva
Boaz Yakin, a Hollywood lifer with credits from writing that Prince of Persia movie to directing Remember the Titans goes full arthouse in this dizzying art film about two lovers, Eden and Aviva, one American and one a Parisian of Russian heritage, who fall in and out of love over a series of years. There are two hooks here- one is that much is expressed through modern dance, and the other is that different actors and actresses portray different aspects of their personality- making this easily the most gender fluid film I’ve ever seen. I suppose the third is that it’s absolutely drenched in explicit sex of, if not every, quite a few conceivable varieties, most of them between Aviva and Eden. All of it hangs together far better than it has any right to- if you’re looking for something that not just is looking to push boundaries, but revels in doing it, this may just be the film for you. Two Beers.
105. The White Tiger
I’ve been a Ramin Bahrani apologist ever since he’s departed his low-budget sociorealist first career for something a bit more Hollywood, and I remain one after watching this tepidly reviewed film. The thing about Bahrani is, he’s basically always remained focused on the same themes- the vast disparity between the haves and have nots in most every society, and the ways the have nots are trapped in environmental- and self-perpetuating cycles of not having. It’s just now he’s even angrier about it, and he’s found the perfect marriage of material with this acclaimed Indian novel adaptation. And boy is this film furious, a conscious corrective for dirt-smudged fairytales like Slumdog Millionaire that isn’t interested in making anyone feel better about anything. There’s no heroes here, not our protagonist (a debuting and fucking perfect Adarsh Gourav), not his granny-led family, not his seemingly modern-thinking American educated employers/”masters” (Rajkummar Rao and Priyanka Chopra)- nobody. Two Beers.
106. Jallikattu
I unwittingly watched the perfect companion piece to The White Tiger with this other recent Indian film that’s really all about the rotten support beams for traditional Indian society. This one is purportedly about a bull that escapes slaughter in a rural town and starts to run rampant through it, but also about the raging machismo that this inspires in the menfolk of this town and those surrounding it, descending in growing numbers to try and capture and kill it and partake in the spoils. Lijo Jose Pellisserry creates an animatronic bull that ranks right up there with Jaws in wisely sparing usage and total believability, and shoots this thing with a unique, ever-escalating verve that I can only reallyi explain by comparing it to Darren Aronofsky’s Mother. Similar to that film, the horror grows exponentially, into an all-timer of a grotesque ending setpiece. It’s really something. Two Beers.
