Talk to Me (2023)

 

Aussie twins Michael and Danny Philippou have written and directed a bitchin' adolescent horror flick that scares circles around the latest Insidious installment and doubles as a slam dunk of an anti-drug movie that is blessedly free of controlled substances.

Moody teens Mia (Sophie Wilde) and BFF Jade (Alexandra Jensen) don't need the hard stuff when their friends Hayley and Joss (Zoe Terakes and Chris Alosio, respectively) hold parties whose main feature is the preserved hand of a dead medium.

If touched and the title of the film is spoken, visions of the ghostly dead appear. That's the gateway. The hardcore stuff is inviting the spirit in for a ride.

When Mia spends a little too much time talking to the hand, perhaps while trying to impress her ex-squeeze, the chaste Daniel (Otis Dhanji), things start getting out of, er, hand. And when Jade's tween-sib Riley (Joe Bird) asks for a little taste of what the cool kids are doing, the whole trippy affair rises to new levels of grim gruesomeness. ("I turned my pesky little brother on and now look at him!")

With Talk to Me, the Philippou brothers, of the 2014 horror winner The Babadook, offer a fairly fresh take on the spirit possession flick, save for a few narrative misfires and peculiarities. The holes won't keep the picture from scoring big points with young fans of the genre and their parents who are more concerned about the evil effects of crank than the undead.

They Cloned Tyrone

 

Juel Taylor's They Cloned Tyrone is a satirical Woke Nation manifesto mystery (streaming on Netflix) that stars Teyonah Parris, Jamie Foxx and John Boyega as a mean streets prostitute, pimp and drug dealer, respectively, who discover an enormous conspiracy to control Black folks through fast-food chicken, hair-styling relaxer and communion wine. 

All of this is for the dubious purpose of restoring peace to a country tearing itself apart, according to arch conspirator / svengali played by Kiefer Sutherland. 

It's a fascinating and captivating moviee with that Jamie Foxx rapid-fire swagger that's worth millions. In

The Flash

 

Andy Muschietti's The Flash is, uh, flashy and frantic and overwrought with comic book urgency but fumbles essential human elements by investing too much in the central premise of averting a tragic death through time travel.

The film's controversial non-binary star Ezra Miller does a commendable job in portraying speedy Barry Allen, in two separate but merged universes, but the story itself is burdened by the movie studio's ambitions -- the revival and redirection of the D.C cinema franchise.

It is regrettable that Marvel has done so much with multiple universe narratives over the past few years because those films make The Flash feel more than a little like an also-ran.

Jaye Davidson

 

Oscar-nominated actor Jaye Davidson made two feature films back in the '90s and then retired from motion pictures, though he still works as a model and promoter.

Davidson's debut was as Dil, a transgender woman and agent provocateur in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992). Jordan's script won the Oscar for best piece written directly for the screen. As rich as Jordan's story is -- and despite intriguing performances by Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson and Forest Whitaker -- it was Davidson's full-frontal "reveal" that jettisoned the film into the realm of cinema legend.

Davidson, who is openly gay and married to Thomas Clarke, has said he retired from acting because the fame grew to be too much for him. Two years after The Crying Game, he appeared as the alien invader in Roland Emmerich's Stargate, a role for which he said he was paid $1 million. And that, for all intents and purposes, was it.

The son of a Black Ghanaian father and white English mother, Davidson was the first British person of color to be nominated for an Academy Award.

That's quite a footnote.

Chasing Amy

 

Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy (1997), his third feature film, is an entertaining look at that popular cinematic musing -- is platonic love ever possible between men and women?

Smith -- whose films are often dialogue-heavy, pop culture and profanity infused, self-referential tales set in New Jersey -- amps up the wattage in this film by having the couple in question, comic book creators, a straight man (Ben Affleck) and a lesbian (Joey Lauren Adams, whom Smith was dating at the time). Holden and Alyssa are introduced by a mutual friend, the Black gay writer / artist Hooper (Dwight Ewell), at a Comic Con and immediately begin friendly sparring. The comic book Affleck's Holden draws with BFF Banky (Jason Lee), Bluntman and Chronic, is hugely popular while Alyssa's radical feminist book is a boutique item. They find common ground and find themselves pulled into each other's orbit. Banky grows resentful as the unlikely romance takes flight, which eventually ends up with Holden being forced to choose.

Smith's films, Chasing Amy included, are semi-autobiographical stories directed at viewers who swing between cynicism and hope. To them, life is not about the destination, which is unknowable, but the journey.

Smith's characters often display emotional and sexual fluidity. This perspective carries Chasing Amy through some interesting territory as characters discover new ways to connect that go beyond society's rigid expectations and demands.

It's easy to see why it resonated with many LGBTQ+ audiences -- but may have been dismissed by others because of Alyssa's confliction.

The Amy in the title represents past relationships, which were often unhealthy, that we refuse to let go.

All reacti

The Harrad Experiment (1973)

 

Fifty years ago, veteran TV director Ted Post helmed the film version of Robert Rimmer's 1966 provocative novel The Harrad Experiment to a modicum of "outrage" but pretty decent box office sales. The film starred James Whitmore, Tippi Hedren and 24-year-old Don Johnson in one of his first feature films.

The story is set at fictional Harrad College where Philip and Margaret Tenhausen are conducting sexuality experiments with young male and female students, mismatched in dormitory rooms to see if "heat" will overwhelm their conflicting personalities. Johnson plays Stanley, a sexual libertine, who is assigned to a room with Sheila, the very model of sexual repression. It's all titillation and voyeurism and decidedly tame based on 2023 standards. (The DVD is available for purchase on Amazon.)

A 1970 issue of New York's Other Scenes newspaper included a guest column titled Group Marriage, which describes an alternative living experiment in Berkeley, California, (where else?) that invited those interested in sharing spouses, breeding and parenting to apply. It was called Harrad West.

The invitation read in part: "Since we are a growing community, we would welcome as new members those who share our aims. We are particularly interested in applicants in the thirtyish age bracket. Younger persons are often not emotionally ready for what we are doing, though of course there are always exceptions. The upper age limit is often a point at which the individual is no longer able to change his (sic) life style. Couples are especially welcome, as are single females. We already have a large number of inquiries from interested males."

Hmmm. I suppose there's no getting around human nature.

Sylvester

My Country 'Tis Of Thee - YouTube

Fifty years ago, a Black gay drag performer in San Francisco named Sylvester released an album of rock and blues cover songs with a group of straight white men that he dubbed The Hot Band.

The album, which featured a scented gardenia sticker on the cover, was titled "Scratch My Flower." It sold miserably at the time but, curiously, is still in-print, packaged along with the group's second venture for Blue Thumb records, Bazaar.

Those first two albums have some strong musical moments but are weakened a bit by Sylvester's often muddy vocals, an under-enunciated piercing falsetto that would nonetheless send his solo disco recordings of the late '70s into orbit. Sylvester's 1978 dance club hit "You Make Me Feel [Mighty Real]" was admitted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2019.

The closing track on "Scratch My Flower" is a rave-up rendition of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." I've never settled on whether this was intended to be an ironic send-up or sincere patriotic expression, but it's one of the highlights on the record.

Sylvester, who was reared in the Pentacostal church but was turned away after coming out as gay, died in 1988 from AIDS-related complications. He was 41.

Barbie

 

Greta Gerwig's marvelous deconstruction of the 60-year-old Barbie doll phenomena is a MAGA Nation nightmare about female empowerment, gender non-conformity and corporate fecklessness and misogyny that dismantles the country's fevered androcentrism while delivering a hilarious, tuneful, culturally dense, cinematically dazzling and whip smart treatise on how to fix what's wrong with the world -- at least a big part of it.

The film's prologue, which is narrated by 14-karat badass Dame Helen Mirren, is a brilliant recasting of the monolith discovery opening to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey that capsulizes girl / doll relations. It's been quite a while since I've been so enchanted by something so clever.

Margot Robbie, whose filmography strongly suggests she's the "gamest" A-lister in Hollywood, leads a stellar, decidedly diverse cast of characters, most of whom are named Barbie, in Gerwig and co-screenwriter and life partner Noah Baumbach's fantasy tale of the venerable toy's colossal identity crisis.

Barbie's bright and sunny disposition as Stereotypical Barbie in Barbieland is overturned when thoughts of mortality begin to pop into her head, at first inexplicably but later revealed to be related to the identity crisis of a real-world Barbie fan (America Ferrera). To avert disaster, Barbie must travel to the real world and make right what is wrong.

Barbie is joined on her journey by Ken (an equally game Ryan Gosling), who is experiencing his own crisis as Barbie's under-developed and woefully under-contextualized "boyfriend." He discovers in the Real World his own brand of empowerment that leads to a huge paradigm shift in Barbieland. According to some reports, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling were both paid $12 million for their starring roles.

Gerwig, as brainy an actress/screenwriter/director as any, has created in this $100 million pink parade an irreverent and subversive spectacle that will, nevertheless, make BILLIONS for Mattel.

The Bear, redux

 

Twenty minutes into Episode 6 of Hulu's The Bear's second season, I paused it to catch my breath. That was last night, and I'm still panting from the show's distinctively claustrophobic chaos, which was pinging in the red zone nearly from the beginning. 

A flashback episode -- home for the holidays with Carmy (Jeremy Allen White). Too many people in too little space with too much said and unsaid, too many agendas, too many old hurts, too many schemes, demands, unknowns. 

To my mind, that's been the key to the show's phenomenal success: its intensity and brashness and mystery.

So much happens in thpat space where freedom and obligation clash, where it's noisy and bloody. 

Where many of us are our most vulnerable and most creative. 

Now that I've caught my breath I'm taking just one minute to reflect further on the wonder that is The Bear's mother / martyr Donna Berzatto.

Berzatto, as played by Hollywood royal and A-lister Jamie Lee Curtis, is a furious blur of kitchen wizardry, pouring self-pity into her bubbling pots with the wine she steadily guzzles. 

She's a tortured torturer whose narcissism has turned her children into fearful comforters and enablers, inheritors of her mental and emotional illnesses, walking lightly around her to try to avert the inevitable. 

Donna fears abandonment even though it is clear from her treatment that she has abandoned her family for her own fixation on performance. That anybody still shows up for Christmas dinner knowing what will happen is one of the great mysteries of this scenario. Maybe they fear the year they miss will be the day Donna blows her brains out and they won't be able to live with the guilt.

Talk about power and control.

Donna Berzatto is the patron saint of functioning dysfunction and the answer to so many of the lingering questions in The Bear: Why Carmy bailed. Why Sugar is guardedly defiant.  Why Michael is dead. 

To quote the great Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, "Attention must be paid."

Mission: Impossible ~ Dead Reckoning Part 1

 

The thing to know before seeing the latest Tom Cruise / Christopher McQuarrie collaboration -- Mission: Impossible ~ Dead Reckoning Part One -- is it will be very much like their previous outings -- the other M:I films and Jack Reacher. That is to say, it will be a tremendous crowd-pleaser with off-the-chart stunts and chases, numerous cliffhangers and ample wit.

McQuarrie is an Oscar-winning screenwriter (The Usual Suspects) who knows good film stories are not made "good" by the crashes and body count but by the connective tissue that holds set pieces together in a sensible narrative. When a story is set in the world of spies and deception, it might be foolish to accept anything on "face value," especially in the case of Mission: Impossible, which has used masking, fakery and sleight-of-hand since its beginnings on '60s television.

In this episode, Cruise's Ethan Hunt and his crew of off-the-grid agents (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson) are trying to find the missing half to a key that would unlock a mystery involving artificial intelligence and existential threats to world governments' security and commerce. The key is so critical to maintaining the balance of power that many nations have dispatched parties (Esai Morales, Vanessa Kirby) to locate the key and answer the riddle of its purpose.

Typical of this series -- and most every other top-dollar actioner I can think of -- exotic locales factor into the story, if for no purpose other than to provide streets (or canals, in the case of Venice) through which Hunt and company (in this case, a highly skilled pickpocket named Grace played by Hayley Atwell) might race on foot or in vehicles.

Some of these pieces are more than a few beats too long -- the chase through Rome has some comedic moments but wears out its welcome after 10 minutes. I thought this was curious considering how sensitive McQuarrie seemed in the past to pacing and flow.

Still, Part One ends with a jaw-dropping train-crash escape that raises the bar on Cruise's famous stunting and audience demands for Part Two, to be released next year.

Joy Ride

 

The writer of 2018's Crazy Rich Asians, Adele Lim's, directorial debut, Joy Ride, is an outrageously bawdy road trip movie about four Asian-American female friends who travel to mainland China to close a business deal for one member of their party, but, as one might expect, the journey turns into much more than that. A lot of it having to do with sex.

The four young women at the heart of this buddy comedy --produced by the irrepressible Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (This is the End, Neighbors, The Interview, etc.) -- are Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Sabrina Wu and Stephanie Hsu.

Park's Audrey and Cola's Lolo have been friends since childhood; Wu's Dead Eye and Hsu's Kat are later but ardent additions. They have been invited along for the ride to help Park's accomplished but culturally clueless Audrey, who was adopted by a white American couple as a baby, with language translation.

Lolo, without her friend's permission, has located Audrey's birth mother in a town not far from Beijing by train and encouraged her friend to add a detour to the agenda. This turns into a near-fatal miscalculation that, in typical Rogen and Goldberg style, involves copious amounts of drugs.

The film has a writerly, high-speed, wise-cracking sensibility, which the four leads pull off effortlessly. They have amazing chemistry (no pun intended). Though for all intents and purposes this is Audrey's story, each of the equally winning principals gets an extended moment to shine -- and do they!

But beyond all of the ribaldry, the picture smartly and sensitively explores questions about racial identity, cultural authenticity and family. The picture is not just hilarious, it's also thoughtful.

I have every expectation that, as the ending suggests, we will see more of these delightfully refreshing women in future escapades (pun intended for those who have seen Joy Ride).

Sound of Freedom

 

Alejandro Monteverde's Sound of Freedom is a tightly wound independently produced thriller with an urgent message about child sex trafficking told through a Christian lens.

Jim Caviezel plays real-life Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard, who when we meet him is successfully tracking down and arresting pedophiles engaged in the sell of children for sex.

His latest arrest leads him to the rescue of a Honduran 8-year-old, who asks Ballard to find and rescue his older sister who was kidnapped from their town at the same time. With the help of a freelance rescuer named Vampiro (Bill Camp), Ballard follows leads into Colombia where he stages a major sting that results in the rescue of more than 50 enslaved children and into the jungle where he finds the girl and successfully rescues her from a rebel leader.

Though based on an actual case, journalists have questioned the accuracy of the events presented on-screen and even Ballard's own version of the role he played rescuing scores of children enslaved by sex traffickers in Latin America. Concerns about connections with Q-Anon conspiracy theories may have contributed to the decision to shelve the film until Angel Studios purchased distribution rights and raised enough funds to get the picture into theaters.

Questions about the accuracy of the film notwithstanding, Monteverde has made a passionate, difficult, troubling movie that expresses to powerful affect its central mantra -- God's children are not for sale.