Here and There, 2023

Here and There, 2022

 

Twenty-Five Words: The Stories We Tell

Facing Facts and Faith

Reasonable Doubt

 

The Dewberry Ridge Village Cycle

Smallest Towns in South Carolina

Smallest Towns in South Carolina (2022)

The Dead Don't Hurt

 Director/Writer/Actor Viggo Mortensen's The Dead Don't Hurt offers audiences a refreshing oater that celebrates female resilience and immigrant indispensability.

Set in the Nevada territory around the time of the Civil War, the film stars Mortensen, who also wrote the terrific screenplay, as Olsen, a Danish immigrant to America, who meets in a San Francisco market the fiery French-Canadian Vivienne (Vicky Krieps of Phantom Thread), who had until then been courted by a tiresome dandy with whom she's grown bored.

Fiercely independent, Vivienne has sworn to never marry as she would never be anyone's possession. Even when Olsen tells her she is his "ocean," Vivienne responds with "Who can own the ocean?" It's a poetic and touching scene, one that, nonetheless, foreshadows dark turns.

When Olsen signs up to join the Union Army to "fight against slavery," Vivienne scolds him. "This is not your fight! This is not your country!" And he says quickly, "It is now!" And after a tearful goodbye, he's off.

Most of the middle section of the film is about Vivienne making her way alone -- as she has since her parents' deaths -- but now she must navigate the unwanted attention of local sadist, Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), the son of a tyrannical businessman Alfred (Garret Dillahunt). Her refusal to respond to Weston leads to a brutal encounter, after which she is tempted to leave but doesn't.

When Olsen returns after many years away, Vivienne, relieved but also hesitate as she is now the mother of a young son, asks, "How was your war?" Olsen says, "Long. Not what I had expected. How was yours?" The question resonates with audiences because her battles have been many and not all of her skirmishes successful, as is apparent.

How Olsen and Vivienne go on to build a life from both scraps and whole cloth is the text of the final act, which offers some satisfying resolution and reason for optimism as suggested by the endless possibilities of the ocean's shore.

Highly recommended.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

 

Sir Stephen Frears directs layered, character-centric pictures that adroitly mix comedy and drama (The Lost King, Florence Foster Jenkins, Philomena, High Fidelity, among them).

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) was one of Frears' early feature films, after a long run as a television director.

The picture, based on an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, starred a young Daniel Day Lewis as Johnny, a white scally Londoner with a spiky blond dye-job who helps his Pakistani boyfriend Omar (Gordon Warnecke), the son of an alcoholic dissident journalist (Roshan Seth), turn a disaster of a washeteria, a money laundering enterprise owned by his gangster uncle (Saeed Jaffrey), into a respectable business.

Frears and Kureishi used this premise to explore sexual and racial politics in the U.K. during the Thatcher years -- with Johnny and Omar standing in as proxies for British disunity and resentment.

Day-Lewis (who would go on to be a three-time Oscar winner) and Warnecke infuse the picture with life and heat that is pretty chaste compared to 2021 standards.

The road to project completion (and whatever the lovers are trying to create romantically) is hardly smooth -- which I think is an accurate metaphor for England's experience with immigration. But the ending -- while uncertain -- is at least hopeful.

Prince's Chaos & Disorder and Emancipation (1996)

 

Knowing Prince's 1996 record Chaos and Disorder was his last contractual obligation to Warner Bros. might suggest to some the disc is pro-forma, without spirit and energy and otherwise lackluster.

It is none of those things, and I'm not proud to say I dismissed it out-of-hand back then without a listen. I recently rectified that and will attest to the album's stellar quality -- solid musicianship and infectious tunesmithing. It's a turn-it-up-and-sing-along party record.

Chaos and Disorder charted poorly because the Purple One didn't promote it, and I don't think Prince performed any of the music on the album in concert. Pity. Several genuine princely winners here -- Dig U Better Dead; I Rock, Therefore I Am; I Like It There, among them.

Foolish of me to doubt the man.

******

When Prince was finally done with Warner Bros. in 1996, he released on his own label an enormous musical F.U. to the record company. It was titled Emancipation.

Though "free," Prince was still photographed with "Slave" scrawled on his cheek and going by the vaguely Egyptian glyph that combined male and female symbols but had no meaning other than what he'd given it. "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince."

Emancipation is a sprawling, three-disc work of 36 songs that contains Prince's usual mix of funk, pop, rock and soul, God and sex, plus four covers, the first time he'd not written everything on a recording. It's strong but may have been a meal too large for his fans to take in completely even though the critics loved it.

Each record holds 60 minutes of music -- much more than any of his other multiple disc releases. It took me quite a while to get to all of it. It's a bit uneven to my ear but Prince's indulgences -- and he was prone to excess and experimentation -- were always more entertaining than much of the work by his contemporaries.

American Son

 

Kenny Leon's 2019 film adaptation of Christopher Demos-Brown's celebrated Broadway play American Son, which he also directed, is chilling and unnerving for good and ill.

Kerry Washington stars opposite Steven Pasquale as the Florida parents of 18-year-old Jamal, who did not return home after a night out as he customarily did. Washington, whose performance as mother Kendra delivers much of the anguish in the story, is frustrated not just by her son's absence but by the reticence of police officers, primarily junior Officer Larking (Jeremy Jordan), to share information with her until community liaison Lt. Stokes (Eugene Lee) arrives for his shift.

When estranged husband Scott, who is an FBI agent, arrives, Larkin is immediately much more deferential, not knowing the white man is Jamal's father, and tells him Jamal was involved in a incident with a police office during a traffic stop. Scott presses for more information about the whereabouts of Jamal, a star student heading to West Point, and Kendra continues to fume and attack. While they wait for Stokes, the couple alternately turn on each other, their interracial marriage, the police, hip hop culture, BLM, absent fatherhood, racial politics and other highly charged targets.

All of the acting is top-drawer and the production retains the single-set theatrical staging, which is fine on the level of art but is distancing because the the intimacy of film is not used to bring us uncomfortably close to the anguish of the parents of a Black teen on the streets.

Leon and Brown have created a trenchant, but not altogether successful, exploration of race and identity, cultural codes, prejudice and presumption. They pose important questions but leave the characters, especially Kendra, mired in distrust and confusion. There is anger and release and horrible resolution but no satisfying growth. Just coldness and pain, lots of pain.

American Son is streaming on Netflix.

What You Wish For

 

I haven't seen Nick Stahl (HBO's Carnivale, Sin City) in a lot of motion pictures, and the films he HAS appeared in don't get a lot of love from critics or audiences. That's unfortunate but not entirely surprising as Stahl's acting range is dependable but not Shakespearean. 

Still, when I saw he was starring in Nicholas Tomnay's What You Wish For, I made a note to definitely check it out. Stahl strikes me as an earnest performer who usually gives his best, certainly enough for a late-morning matinee.

In What You Wish For, Stahl plays Ryan, a chef on the run from fed-up bookies because of his gambling debts. He arrives in an unnamed Latin American country where former culinary school classmate Jack (Brian Groh) is stationed briefly at a luxurious villa to prepare a five-star dinner for an international group of patrons who, as we quickly learn, have very particular tastes.

In the course of this intriguing and disturbing film, Ryan assumes Jack's identity and takes on the task of preparing the four-course meal under the direction of the severe Imogene (Tamsin Topolski) and assisted by her aide Maurice (Juan Carlos Messier), both terrific characters, BTW.

It wasn't clear to me how Ryan ended up in this hellish paradise; he may have been invited by Jack or maybe invited himself. In either case, the events leading up to and following Ryan's stepping into the role of chef raise fascinating questions about Tomnay's underlying messaging and the relationship between the super-rich and the under-developed world they find so appetizing. He seems to be asking which of the two poses the larger existential threat to civilization. It was pretty clear to me what Tomnay thinks.

Similar questions about the callous super-rich have been posed by other recent movies -- The Triangle of Sadness (2022) and Poor Things (2023) being two treatments. 

What You Wish For thrums with bitter outrage throughout, even during the tense aftermath of the delectable dinner, which will not be to every audience member's taste -- to say the least.

God's Own Country

 

Fans of British actor Josh O'Connor who were beguiled by his roguish character Patrick in Luca Guadagnino's lusty 40-Love tennis world drama Challengers might fancy O'Connor's performance in Francis Lee's Love in the Highlands picture from 2017, God's Own Country.

In it, O'Connor plays opposite the smoldering Romanian actor Alec Secăreanu. O'Connor is the son of a disabled livestock farmer in England who hires Secăreanu's Gheorghe, a Romanian immigrant hand, to help O'Connor's Johnny during lambing season. Yes, there are some Brokeback Mountain reverberations here but there are no double-life / closet dramas.

Frustrated, lonely and feeling stunted by his lot, Johnny spends his evenings drowning his miseries in pints of ale and quickies with various local boys. His sexual identity doesn't appear to be an issue in the village; he's defined more by his unrelenting sadness -- revealed by interactions with his family and a former school mate who we

nt off to the university while Johnny is left to tend to cattle and sheep.

Once isolated in the fields with Gherorghe, who is also gay, Johnny discovers their mutual attraction. They share intimate evenings in the paddock and Johnny begins to grow up, seeing the world through another person's eyes for once. This is most tellingly revealed in a scene where the two stand at the peak of a rising and look out on the magnificent view -- something Johnny has never seen or seen in that way. It's a lovely moment.

Johnny's transformation from a wastrel to a responsible young man is elegantly handled and makes this achingly romantic story much more than just an affirming LGBTQ+ cinema experience. I think it more broadly speaks to the empowering effects of loving connections and says we become more fully ourselves -- we realize more fully our capabilities -- when our important relationships are energizing.

When we feel seen and cared for, we become truly ourselves.

Highly recommended.

Poolman

 

Chris Pine’s directorial debut, Poolman, is a vanity project created by a Hollywood star devoid of professional vanity. The rather unflattering role Pine has written for himself is goofy and naive and totally winning, at least for me, but the story is a fevered mess of impressions and allusions.

Pine is the title character, a bearded, long-haired man-child in Los Angeles at some indeterminate time on a mission to challenge the city’s indifferent expansion and growth. He’s making a movie — isn’t everyone in LA? — about his crusade and is assisted by his loving analyst (Annette Bening) and her companion (Danny Devito).

When a beautiful council staffer (DeWanda Wise) comes to him with a tip about city corruption, Pine’s Darren Barrenman is fired up and begins a clumsy investigation that leads down many surprising avenues, some familiar from ‘74’s Chinatown, which is referred to many times.

Critics and audiences have been trashing Pine's Poolman as a star-studded mess. It is a bit of that. But I loved its untethered stream of consciousness and Zen master loopiness. I was perfectly content watching the zaniness without thought of the logic of the storylines or the plausibility of events. Many scenes are howlingly funny; Pine has impressive comedic chops.

I mostly enjoyed Poolman's message about citizen engagement and change through action not passive resistance.

The Fall Guy

 

Director and former stuntman David Leitch's crafty tribute to Hollywood stunt performers, The Fall Guy, is a movie buff's delight -- self-referential and loaded with cinematic Easter eggs -- with two highly appealing leads -- Emily Blunt as cinematographer Jody Moreno and Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers, the title character.

Except for the many grueling stunts staged for Gosling by Leitch and company, the film is not a particularly challenging lift for Blunt or the other members of the strong cast -- Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham, Winston Duke, among them -- but everyone is having a hell of time.

In the opening minutes of the picture, Gosling's Colt is injured in a botched fall and retires for a year, without a word to Jody, with whom he was romantically involved. Waddingham's movie producer Gail invites Colt back to work on Jody's first picture as director, filming in Australia. Colt accepts, believing Jody has asked for him specifically. He hopes to rekindle their relationship.

When he arrives, he receives a chilly welcome from Jody, learns the actor for whom he has worked as stunt performer Tom Ryder (Taylor-Johnson) has disappeared and that Gail needs Colt to double for Tom on the set and search for the actor before the studio discovers he's missing.

This investigation leads Colt to one outrageous set piece of close-quarter combat and vehicular chase after another, with each subsequent bit more mind-blowing than what had come before.

Colt discovers a conspiracy and murder connected to Ryder's disappearance and finds himself a prime suspect.

It's all pretty ridiculous but is such a spirited endeavor that audiences aren't likely to mind one bit.

La Bête

 

French cinema polymath Bertrand Bonello's La Bête (The Beast) is a bilingual / time- and continent-leaping science fiction romance that is enjoyed best when reflecting on its many intriguing ideas and less as a single statement on identity, attachment and isolation.

It's a gorgeous but challenging work that will no doubt frustrate the impatient with its serpentine narrative structure that provides context and background to understand the characters or events only sparingly.

The wonderful French actress Léa Seydoux stars as Gabrielle, a young woman in a future world who appears to be exploring her options in a society that has little room for humans with "affect" (emotions) and offers limited employment possibilities because unemotional AI make better, unbiased decisions.

A disembodied counselor places Gabrielle in different virtual scenarios in different time periods -- pianist wife of a Victorian doll maker, contemporary fashion model -- to see if she is a likely candidate for realignment as a quasi-automaton, which would enhance her usefulness.

In these various virtual worlds, and there have been many, she meets a young man named Louis (George MacKay), whose purpose is not entirely certain even though his presence in her lives is clearly intentional.

The chemistry between these two attractive people -- whose verbal exchanges often shift from French to English and back again -- is palpable, and the passion that builds over the course of the picture is intense.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

 

Director Wes Ball's epic entry in the amazingly long-lived Planet of the Apes franchise shares with its predecessors a fascination with questions of humanity -- as concept AND practice.

Since the second film in the original series (1970's Beneath the Planet of the Ape), audiences have found the answer to those questions by watching the primates "ape" human prejudice, self-regard and destructiveness.

Like their human predecessors, the apes divide themselves into tribes -- scientists, clergy, warriors, common laborers -- with their competing / conflicting interests and ambitions. Though not particularly nuanced, the analogy is rich and fascinating.

The latest film takes up the story many years after the death of the ape's heroic liberator, Caesar, whom this generation has either never heard of or has forgotten. The elders have bastardized Caesar's generous teachings on cooperation with and compassion for humans and hunt them as game. (Parallels to religion are apparent.)

After a failed experiment that altered the primates into speaking beings that then took over the planet (thus the name), humans were left dim and dumb.

A village of ape falconers where young Noa (Owen Teague), the son of the clan's leader, lives is raided by marauders and the inhabitants enslaved to work for the belligerent and greedy King Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). Noa, presumed dead, escapes capture and sets out to find and free his family and friends.

On the way, he encounters an orangutan named Raka (Peter Macon), the last of the true followers of the original Caesar, who accompanies Noa on his journey to rescue his clan. Soon they discover they are being followed by a human woman (Freya Allan) on a mission of her own. The three join forces.

Even though the narrative feels familiar, Ball, a visual effects artist, has created an intricate and fully realized future world with highly relatable characters. He has staged extraordinary, vertiginous acrobatic set pieces, as well.

As has been true for all of the latest pictures in the series, the miracle of computer generation leaves no visible traces of the actors playing the apes. The seamlessness is worth the price of admission

Abigail (2024)

 

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's sardonic horror kick Abigail is a real bait and switch.

It's not that audiences don't know the movie about a darling ballerina with a secret (Alisha Weir) is a scare fest wrapped in a kidnapping plot. Bait and switch is actually the core of the springy story where we find six shady characters contracted by a mysterious envoy (the always welcome Giancarlo Esposito) to abduct the daughter of a tycoon and watch her in an abandoned mansion until the father (Matthew Goode) could pay the $50 million ransom.

The best thing about the picture is the whacked-out crew of delectable stereotypes (Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, William Catlett, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand and a stand-out Angus Cloud, who tragically died last year of a drug overdose).

As might be expected in such a picture, these half-dozen souls will be fodder for whatever awaits them overnight. The creature is revealed fairly early so much of this bloodily explosive adventure is watching the crew members get picked off and survivors try, with varying degrees of success, to outwit the smartest one in the house.

Much of the film, written by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, is howlingly funny, with a few tender moments, but mostly an open tap of raspberry jam and fake viscera.

Challengers

 Despite trailers and promos that suggest otherwise, Luca Guadagnino's Challengers is NOT a love story -- at least not in any conventional sense. His earlier cinematic triumph, Call Me By Your Name (2017), was a romantic tour de force. Challengers, though scorching hot, is not about romance as much as it is about control and, well, courtship.

Three impossibly attractive people are at the center of this unconventional but captivating story -- Tashi, a beautiful former college tennis standout sidelined by a dream-killing injury (a radiant Zendaya); who is living vicariously through her struggling husband, Art, whom she coaches and whom she might resent just a little (a soulful Mike Faist of West Side Story); and their old friend, Patrick, an under-accomplished fellow tennis player (a thoroughly engaging Josh O'Connor of The Crown and Emma.) who possesses a powerful serve but more magnetic brio than follow-thru.

The film, imaginatively constructed and shot, pieces together the co-mingling of these three lives over the years, beginning when they were teens on the junior circuit through their mid-30s. It is to their credit that the three leads pull off aging undetectably even as their characters go through marked changes -- some welcome, some surprising.

Guadagnino's flashy on-court set pieces might be a tad over-the-top for some viewers, but I think they are part of the auteur's mission to push the boundaries of narrative and visualization (see A Bigger Splash, Suspiria and I Am Love, for example). I thought they were inspired.

Guadagnino does not avert the camera's eye from naked flesh but makes clear through the characters' actions and words that sex is a tool, and despite being intense lacks true expressiveness and commitment.

This fits because Tashi, Art and Patrick don't seem to be fully able to give themselves over to anything or anyone except what they can't have, which might suggest that no matter how hard they try they'll never be real winners.

Civil War

 

Writer / director Alex Garland relies on the audience's familiarity with societal divisiveness to provide the backdrop for his intense and visually stunning apocalyptic odyssey Civil War.

Set in the not-too-distant future -- maybe just months away -- Civil War follows a quartet of combat journalists (Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Cailee Spaeny) as they race against the clock and the deterioration of law and order to make it from New York City to Washington, D.C., where rebel forces are descending on a totalitarian regime, headed by a populist, clueless president (Nick Offerman) who has turned the military against American citizens.The reporters must take a circuitous route through a mix of bombed-out urban devastation and rural detachment.

Audiences are invited to fill in the movie's gaps with whatever narrative they like but to keep their eyes and ears open for the mayhem and the carnage, which is unending. I trust Garland understood the dysphoria of the landscape he was creating; government and rebel combatants are indistinguishable. War obliterates the distinction between the good and the bad. Members of the press are marked with reflector vests that are no protection from the barrage and they succumb to their worser instincts, too.

And in that is the real power of Civil War -- the focus on the role of the press to capture what is happening. Steely nerves. Unswerving eyes. But also, and most disturbingly, a gradual moral decay that turns them into agents of spiritual decline. This becomes chillingly apparent in the movie's breathless last reel.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

 

Guy Ritchie's best pictures are caper confections that feature a coterie of criminals and con artists , most of whom have hearts of gold ... or at least burnished brass.

This is true of Ritchie's latest, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which stars Henry Cavill as the admittedly screwed-up leader of a band of equally mad incorrigibles (Eiza González, Alan Ritchson, Henry Golding and Alex Pettyfer, among them) commissioned by Winston Churchill to destroy a German ship that supplies the Nazi u-boats that have barricaded the Atlantic and kept America from coming to Britain's aid. The ship is docked off of the coast of Africa at a nearly impenetrable port -- nearly.

Based on true events, the scheme -- and it's as elaborate and outrageous as one might imagine from a Ritchie enterprise-- is completely off the books. If captured by the Germans, the team would be tortured and shot, and if discovered by the British, they would be imprisoned. These prospects only serve as more incentive for the crew.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is Mission: Impossible (Improbable?) with fewer stunts but with barrels more blood p cheeky humor -- much of it provided by Cavill. Who woulda thunk it?

Shogun

 

A friend and I have been exchanging thoughts about FX's Shōgun streaming on Hulu. He tells me he is fascinated by the symbolism of the various tokens passed among the main characters -- samurai swords and game birds, among them -- and what the program creators are saying with such cryptic markers. I agreed and told him I find especially intriguing how opaque the characters are -- their motives hidden behind clouds of deception, ego or tradition. With so many years -- more than 40 -- having passed since the original television adaptation of Clavell's 1975 novel, it is quite likely the story will be unexplored territory for many viewers ... which serves this latest elaborate entry quite well. Shōgun is best enjoyed, I believe, when the full intentions of the story's many characters are as murky as Japan's foggy coastline. Yes, the "mission" of the Jesuits and their Portuguese musclemen seems clear, if not entirely godly, but is it? And survival seems to be the prime motivation of the sea wise British navigator who is fiercely loyal to his aging Protestant monarch but might be moved even more by greed. And the motives among the Council of Regents seems pretty apparent, but might be revealed more by what is not said than what is. And the subservience of the trussed and obi-ed courtesans might come across a tad cagey considering many are more ingenious than the men they are bound to, but I suspect there is a great deal more underfoot, like the shifting tectonic plates that threaten to lay waste to all life. Wonderful stuff!

3 Body Problem

 

The Netflix series 3 Body Problem uniquely introduces the battle between truth and falsehood.

The very literal-minded alien colonists in a 400-year-long journey do not understand the human penchant for deception and fiction. Their introduction to these ideas is Little Red Riding, a story rooted in the dangers of falseness.

Because humans appear to revel in misleading and deceiving one another, the aliens decide humans can not be trusted. "We are afraid of you," they declare before ceasing communication with their Earthling contacts.

The moment is chilling for the perspective being offered about our culture and practices, how routine dissembling and pretense are for us. How much we get out of lying to one another -- and ourselves.

Ironic that a work of fantasy would place so much emphasis on the dangers of make-believe.

Monkey Man

Dev Patel's terrific directorial debut, Monkey Man, is set in a teeming Indian city where the wealthy castes live and party in high-rise splendor and the low-born, outcasts and untouchables swelter in congested outskirts where they compete for scraps and opportunities to be exploited by their betters.

Patel is the nameless monkey-masked combatant in nightly underground matches where he takes dives after being pummeled by opponents. His punishing existence hides a consuming desire to avenge his mother (Adithi Kalkunte), who was murdered during a purge by government agents looking to expand the city's holdings.

After a failed attempt to assassinate the chief of police (Sikandar Kher), which leaves him nearly dead, the fighter is rescued by a community of transgender monastics, patched up, and in the style of many films of righteous underdogs, rebounds with new battle skills and vision. His guide through this recovery is the wise priestess of the temple, played by Vipin Sharma, who challenges the fighter to "get up" and meet his fate, leading a revolt against corruption and exploitation.

Patel's highly impressive film borrows more than a little from the John Wick playbook in its kinetic energy and enormous body count -- its fight sequences are astounding -- but it also has a unique distinction and cultural significance that nonetheless resonates in the U.S., where the poor and marginalized also must contend with one another and their oppressors.

Hero (2024)

 

Dustin Whitehead's Hero, screening now at the Nickelodeon, is an energetic film with a committed cast of local actors in the story of a young man, Tre, who is on a meandering lifepath that ultimately brings him around to self-realization and fulfillment. A production of Columbia-based Local Cinema Studios, Hero stars Anthony Currie as Tre; Columbia theater veteran Darion McCloud as his doting father, Wayne; and Carly Siegel as Jess, Tre's ex-girlfriend who is facing her own challenges. The screenplay by Myles Isreal, who appears as Tre's best friend and fellow cosplay competitor Damon, covers a lot of emotional territory -- exploring tough terrain of interpersonal relations, missed opportunities and recovery with insight and spirited good humor. A tender and promising labor of love, Hero was shot all around Columbia, so spotting familiar landscapes is an added bonus.