popsublime

As always in mid-June, I was very much looking forward to attending the annual film festival in Provincetown, just in time to balance out the kinds of movies that take over all of the cinemas elsewhere for the summer season. This year I had mostly documentaries on my schedule of films to see at the festival, all of which I enjoyed; those that I’ll be writing about in depth this time all focus on individual artists of various sorts, from a musician to actors to a Provincetown painter. I’d also been anticipating the gay drama Plainclothes, which got me thinking in a variety of different directions, even while I wanted it to probe its subject a little more deeply and extensively than it’s able to do. Part of the pleasure of seeing about fifteen movies in five days is simply thinking about the movies together in between watching them, as this post continued to take shape in my mind from movie to movie: how they converge and differ, what they say about cultures past and present, and how they contribute to the wider fabric of film history.

The movie that I was most excited to see in the festival this year indeed turned out to be the one that I’ve been thinking about the most since watching it, Amy Berg’s insightful and carefully assembled documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, which is the first major documentary treatment of the late singer-songwriter’s career in over two decades since the 2002 BBC documentary Jeff Buckley: Everybody Here Wants You. That Buckley’s birth, life, and tragic early death at age 30 should feel like such a readymade story, yet one that’s still challenging to tell, speaks to why he’s remained an enigmatic ghost since his accidental drowning in 1997. The film works to unravel his enigma through many traces of archival footage and audio recordings that he left in his wake, accentuated with live performances and animation, as well as personal memories and commentary from other artists such as Ben Harper and Aimee Mann.

Jeff Buckley was born in 1966 to a single mother and is the son of famed folk musician Tim Buckley, who didn’t want a child to hinder him from touring at that point in his career. The presence of his absence and the overall sense of abandonment can be keenly felt throughout the early parts of the documentary that explore Jeff Buckley’s childhood, in spite of his obvious affection for and attachment to his mother. Jeff spent only one four-day period with his father during his youth, which ended with Tim putting Jeff on a bus home to his mom with a matchbook that he’d written “Love you” inside of, along with his phone number. All calls went unanswered, and Tim Buckley died within a year thereafter of a heroin overdose at age 28. The darkness of that loss haunts the film and clearly haunted Buckley even if he tried to escape or downplay it, remarking that it felt strange to have outlived his father when he turned 29. At that point, his career had already taken off, based on the popularity of his transfixing live performances and the strengths of his only studio album, his 1994 debut Grace. David Bowie praised it as the greatest album he’d heard.

Aimee Mann’s recollection of her conversation with Jeff Buckley at a noisy jazz bar has lingered with me the most since watching the film. Because of the loud volume of the music in the bar, the two wrote notes back and forth on a large white paper placemat throughout the night. His comment that he really likes sex gave Mann pause since he was the kind of guy who clearly needed love and rescuing. Her description of him as a very “liquid” person and his need to be rescued as a “tidal wave” that she had to protect herself from being drawn under by, despite the intrigue of his seductive, “self-medicating” sexual advances, reveals a lot and works on multiple levels, given his tragic death by drowning in Memphis. The sadness of that loss still brings her to tears as she recalls it nearly three decades later in this film. Ben Harper similarly recounts watching Buckley dangling dangerously from the rigging far above the stage at a Led Zepplin concert, in order to let the music totally surround him, so an animated image of Buckley falling through open space recurs throughout the documentary. In the end, curiously, it's a cultural aesthetic product about someone who was himself being turned into a product of commerce and deeply skeptical and distrustful of that process at that point in his young lifetime, but it works in the film because the documentary intelligently examines that exact same friction.

My Mom Jayne, the actress Mariska Hargitay’s moving, cleverly layered documentary about her legendary mother Jayne Mansfield, is just as sharply determined to investigate the harsh glare of fame’s limelight and how it caused various and often surprising distortions in her knowledge and understanding of her own family. Her father, the late Mickey Hargitay, who had immigrated from Hungary at a young age, found notoriety as a bodybuilder while his all-American wife Jayne Mansfield rode the pin-up wave to become a legitimate actress along the lines of Marilyn Monroe. Mariska’s older sister and two older brothers were somewhat perplexed by their mother’s vampy blonde Hollywood persona, contrasting with her smart and accomplished demeanor at home; she spoke several languages fluently and was an adept classical musician.

Mariska has no childhood memories of her mother, however, because she was only 3-years-old when Jayne Mansfield died in a car accident in New Orleans at age 34 with her children riding in the backseat, the devastating emotional climax that the film expertly and respectfully builds up to, and which elicited a collective gasp from the audience with whom I watched it, although the incident itself is fairly familiar from Hollywood history. The well-told narrative of Mariska’s personal trajectory beyond that point in the story is very finely paced, and its secrets and revelations (some of which must be kept spoiler-free in this review, in order to maximize the film’s cumulative power) are also deployed to riveting effect, with the appropriate balance of attention and purpose throughout the documentary. The result is an earnest homage to Jayne Mansfield’s unique individual memory, one that’s by now become somewhat faint, to be honest, in our own cultural memory. No Hollywood tale’s details would be easier to sensationalize, but Mariska Hargitay’s command over her subject matter navigates around those potentially lurid obstacles with authenticity and grace.

It's also heartening to watch her family’s mission come to fruition as the adult children gather together not only to share their painful memories, but more importantly to enjoy together the vault of archival materials that Mariska collected during her making of the documentary, a feat that serves in many generous ways to resurrect her mother’s spirit. Watching the family bond over these artifacts through their laughter and tears is a testament to the strength of a familial unit to endure some of the deepest forms of private and public tragedy, yet ultimately remain able to find redemption over time and with patience to heal. As Mariska Hargitay comments at age 60 in looking back on her mother’s life, Jayne Mansfield was so young as a successful Hollywood actress and a mother of four children, that time and understanding have now entirely shifted the perspective on what she survived and how her life should be viewed, as well as celebrated.

I truly enjoyed learning about a couple of Provincetown icons from Michael Cestaro’s documentary Everything Moves, two names that I’ve heard often over the past thirty years that I’ve been a regular visitor to the town: Salvatore and Josephine Del Deo. Sal, as he’s known in Provincetown, is one of the town’s many local star painters, whose work has documented the lives of Ptown’s fishermen and its extraordinary landscape. His wife Josephine was instrumental in helping to protect the land itself through spearheading the movement to have the tip of Cape Cod preserved as part of the National Seashore. It’s a very eerie feeling to be sitting in a movie in Ptown and realize that I might not have been sitting there at all had this woman’s work not prevented developers from gaining access to the very lands on which Town Hall stands.

Josephine’s efforts, as her New York Times obituary noted, helped to ensure that Provincetown wouldn’t be transformed into the typical kind of touristy resort beachfront ruined by endless strips of skyrise buildings, strictly for commercial and economic reasons. It makes sense then that Salvatore, who immigrated from Ischia, Italy, to Provincetown as a young man, was intent on forming community from the beginning of his time here. Not only did his paintings set out to capture that and preserve the images through his art, but he and Josephine also founded Sal’s Place in the west end of town, the wonderfully homey and genuine oceanside Italian restaurant that still operates in that same location under different ownership today. Sal memorably recalls how they barely ever made a profit in the restaurant’s early days since many fellow artists would come by late into the night to eat dinner cheap or even for free.

I’ll always remember a scene from much later in his life when Sal is gathered at a long outdoors dinner table with about twenty or more guests and cheerfully raises a toast: “To friendship!” I’ve been to similar gatherings here in town, so it’s a familiarly reliable scene. He speaks just as eloquently about his artistic process throughout the film, how it’s tied to both the history and presence of movement and light in the town’s landscape itself. His line about knowing that a painting is finished because “if I add one more thing to this picture, it will lose the balance” is also the perfect last line for the documentary. Although Sal’s legs weren’t feeling quite strong enough to stand up and address the audience at the packed Town Hall screening, everyone agreed that it was especially meaningful and memorable that he was able to attend and see his life play out retrospectively up on the big screen.

Carmen Emmi’s Plainclothes, set in 1997, focuses on the plight of a young gay closeted undercover policeman named Lucas, and his covert pursuit of Andrew, a slightly older closeted guy who’s also in a surprising occupation as we find out later in the film (again, that’s best left spoiler-free for those who plan to watch the movie). Lucas is stationed undercover near the restrooms in a local shopping mall as part of a sting operation to lure and entrap men who are cruising for sex there (think George Michael) and then get arrested for indecent exposure. Tom Blyth’s portrayal of Lucas is excellent and nuanced throughout, and one of the main reasons to see the film. He's keyed into his character’s downlow anxiety, one that spikes to a higher pitch in his moments alone, and yet he’s also aware of his own attractiveness and seductive energy to pull unsuspecting men at the mall into his orbit.

Russell Tovey is equally well-cast in his role, and he clearly knows these kinds of guys well and probably has even had some past personal experiences with them, given how precisely he modulates his character’s forwardness, indulgences, retreats, double-backs, and betrayals. Lucas imagines (or desires) that there’s much more to Andrew’s interest than Andrew would ever allow to enter into his own life, though Andrew is clearly drawn to Lucas in ways that he hadn’t anticipated when setting out to the mall. (“Where did you come from?” he asks with a bewildered smile as he gazes up at Lucas’ face during their intimate scene in a quiet greenhouse midway through the movie.) The movie’s time setting in 1997 is significant because it was still an era mostly before cell phones, and certainly well before gay instant hookup culture via apps like Grindr. Pagers go off often throughout the film, usually at inopportune times, a taste of things yet to come. But since cruising still happened mostly in person at that point in time, especially in a location just outside of Syracuse, New York, it gives the film and the actors’ performances a charge of energy that they would lack otherwise.

Nevertheless, not everything has changed about these sorts of men’s interactions since that time, nor even since the much earlier 1963 setting of Brokeback Mountain. The real underlying theme whenever a movie is dealing with the topic of sex between closeted guys, and a subject that remains intentionally undiscussable in relation to these issues, is men’s emotional unavailability, particularly their emotional unavailability to each other. So much in our culture is still dependent upon the smokescreen of that reality never being fully addressed. The big confrontation scene between the two men later in the film is blunt enough and well-scripted (Russell Tovey is great at conveying this, just as he was in the underseen movie The Pass), but it bends too soon to the idea of heteronormative family. Note how much more played up the marriages in the film of Brokeback Mountain are, for instance, when compared to Annie Proulx’s original short story. I would have liked to see the two central characters in Plainclothes have a chance to go deeper into that dialogue one-on-one, which they come a bit closer to doing in a hushed scene at an old movie-house, although I wonder whether that will ever really happen in another film someday or not, given the reasons that I’ve mentioned above. Andrew Haigh’s Weekend provides the kind of model that could work, if it’s even possible for closeted guys to talk about it at that intimate kind of level. Perhaps it isn’t.

Finally, on the festival’s opening night I was glad to see Little Shrew, Kate Bush’s animated music video for her song “Snowflake,” included in a program of short films. Surely, she’s the most globally famous director of a short film ever to have appeared in the lineup for the festival in Provincetown (unless there’s someone else who’s more widely known that I’m forgetting?), even if her inclusion in this year’s festival seemed to provoke little fanfare, maybe because the video has been available online since last fall. It’s a beautifully conceived and executed short, on the heavy topic of war and its effect on small children. The approach is delicate and harrowing at once, as the little shrew of the title traverses war-torn forests and cityscapes, including the body of a dead soldier, followed and seemingly safeguarded by a light-like snowflake. Kate Bush has mentioned that the idea for the film was sparked by the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022. The audience’s complete and total silence as we watched and listened (the gorgeous song was sung by Bush’s son Bertie) said everything.

Thursday, August 29, 2024

Two Last Summer Movies of 2024

India Donaldson’s debut feature film Good One offers an exemplary answer to an important aesthetic question: is it possible to craft an entire work of art merely from subtleties? Thanks to its three finely tuned central performances and a handful of intimate, precisely written dialogue-based scenes amongst those three actors’ characters in the film, Good One is also able to etch out a place for movies that needn’t rely on action to command an audience’s attention, though there’s plenty of movement in Donaldson’s film, too. Specifically, the characters traverse a weekend through the mountains (and creekbeds and waterfalls) as a kind of family retreat away from the din of New York City. Good One is a drama in which the dramatic elements unfold internally, often via silences, pauses, glances, and language that’s both flowing and halting.

Sam (Lily Collias) is living her final summer at home before leaving for college. Her dad Chris (James Le Gros) takes her backpacking in the Catskills, along with his friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). The set-up is intentionally simple since the complexities grow inward from there. I won’t describe the interpersonal dynamics of this trio, although of course it’s tempting to do so. All of that is best left to simply watching the film. I can comment, however, on a number of decisions and aspects that make the movie distinctive, and that earn it a place among this year’s best films.

Early in the movie, for instance, after they’ve set up camp, they encounter three younger guys who are experienced hikers. The two trios of characters hang out and talk together, prepare a meal side by side, and plan a tentative hiking trip to China together for the following year. It’s clear that the younger trio of guys, more sensitive to each other and to contemporary ways, is intended to contrast with the slightly older male characters Chris and Matt, who can be a bit abrasive, corny, and dismissive of Sam on more than one occasion. As an extension of that contrast, Good One does suffer a bit from what I’d call Thelma & Louise Syndrome, allowing the middle-aged male characters to border a bit too much on cariacature at times. Chris is a developer/contractor, and Matt has had a career as a successful television actor, so in actual life, they’d obviously be a little more sensitive and not quite as stupid (to be blunt) as the film portrays them.

The actors rescue the movie from being derailed by that. Expert at lending their dialogue and expressions layers of close-up nuance, Le Gros and especially McCarthy diversify what could otherwise be a monochromatic pair of performances. The light sparring that they engage in with Sam throughout the movie is innocuous enough, until late in the film when it quite suddenly isn’t. How the film pivots based on a single line of dialogue has been critically misconstrued in my view, and the movie itself is invested in exploring why that is. I won’t reveal what exactly gets said (and by whom & to whom), though you can just google that easily enough if you want.

Lily Collias gives the year’s best performance by any actor in her age bracket. We are with her every step of the way, in terms of what its like to feel like a young woman at her age, one who has to contend both with men and with her female friends (as well as her period, which descends on her just as the trio are getting packed to depart for their weekend camping trip). How she expediently yet patiently deals with things like being somewhat sidelined and controlled, mansplaining, and being forced into something of a caretaker or “emotionally available” role for the duration of the movie coaxes the viewer into trusting her point of view despite our initial hesitancy to do so because she’s someone who’s very much still in the process of growing. Everything that Collias reveals through her portrayal of Sam is measured, exact, and natural in ways that allow anyone, not just young women, to relate to her character and what she endures.

Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples made me laugh out loud just as much as it moved me. Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane are quirkly pitch-perfect as Ben Gottlieb and Carla Kessler, respectively. Raised in a time and place that made having her bat mitzvah impossible at age 13, Carla seeks out cantor Ben to help her prepare for a bat mitzvah at her much later age, a favor that he’s amenable to because Carla happened to be his grade school music teacher.

Schwartzman and Cane share the most powerful scene between two actors from any film in 2024. As Ben and Carla are getting to re-know each other through their initial discussions of Carla’s later-years bat mitzvah, Carla tells Ben in painful detail the story of why she never had a bat mitzvah when she was thirteen. Then, she makes Ben repeat the entire story back to her verbatim, using “I” instead of “you,” so that he’s reiterating Carla’s own story in the first-person voice. The effect is profound, an authentic encapsulation of the spiritual notion that “you are everything, and everything is you.” We see this depth of empathy clearly in the two actors’ eyes, and Silver’s camera abundantly captures it. After Ben finishes repeating Carla’s story back to her, she simply looks at him and says, “You got it, Benny.”

Midway through the movie, there’s a hilarious scene at a restaurant called The Chained Duck, in which the characters hold menus the size of a folded map of the world, certainly the most oversized prop menus ever devised for any film. Their dinner out is Ben’s re-introduction to Carla’s son, who went to grade school with Ben but doesn’t remember him. Another riotous dinner scene a bit later in the movie very directly invokes John Cassavetes’ films, both in its grainy close-up visual style and its chaotic capturing of the characters’ seemingly semi-impromptu dialogue. Robert Smigel (who voiced Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on Conan O’Brien’s late-night talk show) as Ben’s rabbi, and Dolly De Leon (from Triangle of Sadness) as Ben’s mother-in-law, both add comic relief with their swerves of trenchant humor and swiftly timed curveballs throughout that sequence.

The film’s ending, however, is what makes it truly special and worth sitting through its entire two-hour running time. What if your temple is a rolling hillside out beyond your rural-suburban backyard? What if your temple is the world?

Monday, August 12, 2024

Three More Summer Movies of 2024

I didn’t anticipate that I’d find three more summer film releases interesting enough for me to write about in 2024, but indeed there have been some more excellent movies out in cinemas, which I watched multiple times in order to puzzle through what I want to say about them. It’s a diverse range of films, each one powerful in a very different way. Who knows, from an industry standpoint at least, what causes these little bursts of worthwhile movies to get released at around the same time? Perhaps it’s all just sheer coincidence. Does anybody other than movie critics even notice? Perhaps not. Would any of them agree with me about what I’ve found worthwhile?

Rich Peppiatt’s Kneecap follows the hip-hop group of the same name, a rowdy trio of Irish language speakers from West Belfast who rap in Gaelic. Their fictionalized yet true-to-life story shifts into high gear as their band starts to gain both artistic traction and popular momentum in the north of Ireland, while also becoming the target of political slings and arrows due to their Irish-speaker, language-centric stance and "Brits Out!" subject matter. I got a bit addicted to this movie, honestly, in part because it’s an overdue reminder of why men would always be wise to shave their handsome faces. (And bearded DJ Próvaí in the group, who must obscure his face because he teaches Gaelic to students at a local public school, wears a balaclava in the colors of the Irish flag whenever Kneecap performs in concert; maybe he also somehow intuited my preference for clean-shaven mugs, though his neat beard does look quite dashing as well.) Anyhow, Kneecap was a total kick of adrenaline for me every time I watched it at the cinema over the course of the past week or so. I downloaded the band’s 2018 album 3Cag as soon as I got home from my first viewing of the movie, and I’ve enjoyed listening to the songs and their break-neck, intelligent lyrics over & over again. Why oh why is there no soundtrack for this brilliant film yet? Oh well...I’ll just wait for it to surface out there in the record shops eventually.

As much as I adore these young Irish hoods, however, I mustn’t forget about Michael Fassbender, who plays the political dissident father of Móglaí Bap, who's just barely the second-cutest of the rappers. (I currently have a gay man-crush on frontman Mo Chara [sorry, mate!] due to the unique combination of his jughead crewcut and his widescreen electric smile, charms that he’s fully aware he possesses because he uses them to dazzling effect at several key moments in the narrative.) But back to Michael Fassbender, on whom I’ve long had a nearly equal crush. His grizzled daddy character named Arlo blew shit up all over Belfast in protest of the British occupiers two decades prior, then faked his own death at sea to avoid serving prison time. Some citizens of Belfast think he’s actually dead, some think he’s still alive, and some are eager to embrace him again if so, such as the punk-mouthed leader of the Radical Republicans Against Drugs, another trio of hooligans who effectively act as a collective nemesis for the lads of Kneecap throughout the movie. I’d say more about the sweet kinetic flow of this motion picture, its fun plot twists and deft Roland 808 beats, plus the actresses who are uniformly admirable in their well-rounded roles, but guess what? It’s my blog, and I prefer to let my focus on the male hotties be the mission of this particular review since those muckers are all both talented and sexy.

I enjoyed seeing Sean Wang introduce his film Dìdi at Coolidge Corner Theatre a couple of weeks ago. He said that his idea for the movie originated with films like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and he wondered whether he could make that kind of classic movie about childhood, except with Asian-American characters instead. He’s succeeded, and he even pays homage to Truffaut’s masterpiece at the climax of his own movie, when his central character Chris Wang (played by Isaac Wang, who’s hilariously bittersweet and pitch-perfect for every single second of Dìdi’s running time) starts running at full speed in the opposite direction after having a terrible blowout fight with his mom (the absolutely phenomenal Joan Chen) out in their car one night. Wang-Wang (his friends’ nickname for him, whereas Dìdi is his family’s nickname for him) is kind of continually grumpy because his dad has been far away working in Taiwan, so he feels like he’s being nagged constantly by the three females in his life: his mom, his otherwise beloved grandmother Nǎi Nai (Zhang Li Hua, a sweetly wrinkled firecracker), and his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), who’s getting ready to leave home for college at the end of the summer.

The film is set decisively in 2008. Audiences of a certain age group will laugh at the many strategically crafted messenger chats on MySpace and details like that, even though it’s all been done before by now. Nevertheless, I heard a shocked female gasp ripple through the audience in unison at my screening when Chris blocked online the girl whom he’d been pursuing, Madi (Mahaela Park), after they had a typical teenage falling out. The other teen actors are all wackily precise in their roles, from skateboarders who recruit Chris to film their antics around their suburb of Fremont, California, to peripheral semi-friends who often try to bully and taunt Chris despite (or maybe because of) their own apparent nerdiness. The film adequately captures the insecurities, anxieties, and occasional cruelties of American kids at that age, along with a petulant, entitled adolescent attitude that Nǎi Nai scolds her daughter for not more sternly countering as a mother who always lets her two children get away with things.

After all, their mother is a painter who lives in her own little world a bit, in spite of faithfully attending to her children’s daily needs. Her delicate, Mary Cassatt-like paintings of maternal care are the film’s first indication of the emotional curveball that Joan Chen’s masterful performance will be throwing toward us as the movie progresses. One of the greatest rarities, and also one of the greatest pleasures, is to be able to see an actress actually thinking, and Joan Chen subtly conveys every gentle layer of her character’s inner workings. Her motherly portrayal is so good that it’s kind of supersonic. I’ll be beyond disappointed if she receives no attention during awards season, but sadly, because her performance is so deep and unflashy, I predict that most viewers will unfairly forget about her role in this film by year’s end. Although Sean Wang’s movie treads ever so slightly inventively on familiar ground for most of its duration, two profoundly moving scenes between Chris and his mother during the film’s final minutes have secured his future place as a director to watch. They’re two of the most memorable mother/son sequences ever committed to celluloid, and both of the actors in those scenes know it, too.

I’d like to live forever at the relaxed yet steady pace of Baltasar Kormákur’s Touch, a beautifully unhurried tale of an Icelandic man named Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson), who’s facing a serious medical diagnosis later in life and decides to try to find a woman whom he was involved with long ago, back when he worked at a Japanese restaurant during his student days in London. Frustrated with the conservative administration at the London School of Economics during the era when John Lennon and Yoko Ono were cultural forces for promoting peace, young Kristófer (Pálmi Kormákur, a born runway model if ever I saw one) drops out of school to work as a dishwasher and cook at the restaurant owned and run by Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki), alongside his family and close friends. Takahashi is very protective of his daughter Miko (Kôki), for complex and historically tragic reasons that are revealed gradually later in the film. Miko is the woman whom Kristófer returns to London and then Tokyo to find over five decades later, right in the initial days of what would become the Covid-19 pandemic in March of 2020, just as the whole world was slowly and bizarrely winding down to a hitherto unforeseen standstill.

What Kristófer and Miko experience together is best kept in the world of the story for the viewer to appreciate when watching the film. Much of its success rests on the subdued performance of Ólafsson, whose character is content with the life he’s lived, yet he also feels that something has been missing or gone unresolved for far too long. The movie’s strongest element is how it explores what it must be like to sense that one’s life could have gone in an entirely different direction, a life that would perhaps have been a better fit, and so a person in that predicament must continue to live with an unarticulated yet ongoing tinge of regret, even if the events that set the alternate life-path into motion were totally beyond anybody’s control. When Kristófer finally re-connects with the older Miko (Yoko Narahashi), the quiet cascade of emotion which the audience is guided through was intense enough for one young woman in the cinema at my screening to make her cry uncontrollably right up to the end of the film’s closing credits. The final outcome is not one of despair but rather beauty and redemption.

Thursday, August 1, 2024

Maxxxine (dir. Ti West, 2024)

I was excited to watch Ti West’s latest film Maxxxine because I loved Pearl, the previous movie in West’s accomplished neo/retro-horror trilogy. Pearl was like an old-school graphic novel come to life in Technicolor, a film that changed the game rules of the horror genre in my view. Even if Maxxxine is no Pearl, it’s also not too far off the mark. Indeed, Maxxxine is a consummately enjoyable ’80s horror-comedy throwback that’s impeccably made for its particular genre. A mainstream film director’s job is to assemble a reliable machine, a contraption that the viewer can set into motion anytime, not just on a device or player, but in their own memory as well, which is why no artistic medium taps into the sensory capacities of the human mind better than film does. Set squarely in Hollywood in 1985, Maxxxine revels in the fun aspects of memory, with touchstones from the decade to which it pays homage tucked away in all corners of the movie. For instance, when Mia Goth’s central pornstar-in-trouble character heads out for a night of clubbing (simply a lure to entrap the detective who’s pursuring her), her makeup with a bold streak of color airbrushed across her eyes invokes Dale Bozzio’s look from the cover of Missing Persons’ classic 1982 album Spring Session M.

There’s no need to synopsize the plot of Maxxxine (which includes standard elements like a night-stalking serial killer, a religious cult, an evil daddy, etc.) because it’s a character-driven movie. The actors all know that and appropriately play to it. Despite a male presence in some key roles, this is essentially a women’s movie, and it’s a movie about being a woman in Hollywood. Elizabeth Debicki’s precisely haughty director Liz Bender, who’s at the helm of The Puritan horror movies within the fictional world of Maxxxine, is a stand-in for someone like Kathryn Bigelow, and she’s also a professional oracle for Maxine Minx, the pornstar whom she’s hired to star in her new sequel. Liz pointedly dispenses lessons to Maxine in dialogue that Ti West has smartly crafted to speak to the realities that actresses and female directors have dealt with in Hollywood for decades now. In Liz’s weary worldview, Hollywood is a beast, with all that description implies. It’s a town that gives zero fucks about artists. Is Maxine an artist? Does she want to be one? For the duration of this film, she’s merely trying to survive, and in order to do so, she must first beat down the beast of her own past, a sinister one that originated in the first movie in West’s trilogy, X, which we see a multitude of important flashbacks to throughout Maxxxine.

Mia Goth opens Maxxxine with a movie audition monologue of several minutes in length, picking up where her long devastating monologue that ended Pearl (in a performance that deserved way more awards attention) left off. In combination, those two scenes prove that Goth is now the single-most actress to be reckoned with in her generation. Her monologues have an emotional sweep and amplitude that showcase her range, which was clearly Ti West’s main aim in writing all three films in his trilogy with Mia Goth specifically in mind. At the close of Maxxxine, when the newly crowned “legitimate” Hollywood starlet Ms. Minx gazes in the mirror and says, “You’re a fucking movie star,” Mia Goth herself is obviously saying the same thing. And when Liz Bender asks her what she wants to do next, Maxine replies, “I just never want it to end.” Maxine’s comment early in the film that actresses in hardcore pornography age like bread, not wine resonates more deeply in that final context. Actresses in the mainstream film industry are nearly always faced with a cruel and unfair expiration date for their careers, an ageist cutoff (or more typically, a gradual fade-out) that’s based on their appearance rather than their talent.

During the closing credits of the screening of Maxxxine that I attended, I overheard a guy of about 23 in front of me remark to his girlfriend, “I wish I’d liked it more.” I rolodexed back through the movie’s feminist moments and thought, “It’s not as easy to like a movie when it’s not about you, is it?” To paraphrase Susan Sontag’s 1966 critical text Against Interpretation: a work of art is what it is. It is not — contrary to popular belief in our current era of endless streams of comments that nobody reads — only what you want it to be.

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Four Summer Movies of 2024

Summertime is traditionally a commercial wasteland for people who take cinema seriously, and 2024 hasn’t been much of an exception, yet I’ve seen a few films so far this summer that have held my interest in various ways, at least to some degree. To my surprise, I’ve enjoyed a handful of the Minions movies in bursts and snippets over the past several years. I mean, they’re not really worth watching beyond the Minions themselves, yet the comedic onslaught of those little troublemakers usually makes the ticket price worthwhile. The kids and teens dressed up as Minions out in the cinema lobbies clearly agree. I’ll confess that I fell asleep through the middle of Despicable Me 4 a total of three times before I finally made it through the entire thing without dozing off. When I managed to stay awake, that middle stretch of the movie wasn’t even well-written, of course, because it focuses on Gru’s family. To be frank: nobody cares, even if the infant son who hates Gru is enough to maintain our attention in brief spells. The basic desire of the audience at these movies is consistently “bring back the fucking Minions or we’ll leave.”

The only reason why I’d watch this particular movie four times, other than to give myself some time to drift off into dreamland, is because the screenplay was co-written by the great Mike White, who worked on one other film in the series previously. Given the noticeable slack in the middle of the movie, I have a feeling that Mike White was simply brought in to doctor the script. The bookends of the first and last portions in the movie are entertaining, with plenty of smart jokes and rapidly dispatched dialogue, along with characters like the villainous Maxime & Valentina and Principal Übelschlecht, campy creations that obviously didn’t spring from the mind of some random straight guy. But as usual, the only reliable homosocial, bromance-driven, and slightly raunchy humor arises from the frenetic, slapstick, irreverent interactions of the Minions themselves.

At the opposite end of the summer movie spectrum tonally is the origin story A Quiet Place: Day One. The first two films in the series didn’t indicate how and when the aliens-slash-insects-slash-monsters arrived to start attacking anything that makes noise, so now we get to see the introductory part of the narrative in this prequel. We also get plenty of suspenseful and well-crafted action sequences, chase scenes, underwater antics, and visual echoes of 9/11. I wasn’t expecting the actually valuable aspect of the movie to be its performances by its two central actors, Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn, as they evade and face off with the invading creatures from outer space. Because so much of the film must be silent, the two actors are forced to rely on their eyes and expressions to convey the depths of meaning, far more than they’re required to do in other films, and they accomplish that feat subtly and expertly throughout the movie.

The relationship between these two characters is calibrated carefully through a sequence of quiet and intimate scenes that excel the overtly trashy genre they inhabit. Joseph Quinn’s sweet-tempered law student, Eric, is intrigued that Lupita Nyong’o’s troubled character Sammy is a published poet. “Used to be” is her blunt retort, one to which I related, and it’s also one that the actress clearly gets. That converted me to someone who’ll follow her career more than I’d previously been interested in doing. There’s a lot that her character must navigate, both physically and emotionally, and she knows how to balance that in a way that few other actors could manage. She builds a background for the character out of things that are dead and gone, while also building up to a fierce final moment in the film that ensures that her character will not be back for another prequel. Move on to “Day Two” without her, so that she can move on to something that her talent deserves.

The milieu that’s embraced Jane Schoenbrun’s impressive film I Saw the TV Glow might despise the two previous movies that I’ve written about in this post as much as the characters in the film might potentially enjoy them. They’re mid-to-late 1990s kids who are obviously aligned with fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, however, so they predate the ridiculous penchant for perpetuating sequels and multiverses that Hollywood has now settled into and settled for. High schoolers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) are diehard fans of a fictional TV show called The Pink Opaque. It’s a hallucinatory mixture of teenage television and edgy horror by way of both David Lynch and Dawson’s Creek, in that its main characters Isabel and Tara rarely speak like teenagers at all. The same might be said, to some extent, of Owen and Maddy, in a kind of parallelism that’s rife with meanings which gradually unfold for an audience that’s willing to pay enough attention.

As the movie progresses, we begin to understand through the main characters’ ongoing obsession with The Pink Opaque that I Saw the TV Glow is an intricate commentary on transgender identities and also quite an intelligent one. (I was reminded by the fictional TV show’s title of the gender theorist Judith Butler’s referring to sexuality, and by extension gender, as a “region of opacity.”) The atmospheric symbols present that forwardly, sometimes even through hazy clouds of pink that saturate and obscure the suburban lawnscapes, or oversized pink shirts that drape themselves over Owen’s angular, lanky frame. The seventh-grade version of Owen (played by Ian Foreman) stands in quiet fascination during gym class, for instance, beneath the dome of a parachute that’s stitched together in the colors of the trans pride flag; a couple of years later, similarly, ninth-grade Owen walks down a corridor of the high school that’s lit in pastel pink & baby blue and white on each wall of the hallway. Those suggestive shades oppose and balance one another on either side of Owen, and they also envelop Owen as the character passes between them while continuing to struggle to arrive at an adolescent version of self-understanding.

The two central actors courageously tackle all that the film requires of them and liberates them to do. Often they sit right next to each other or directly face one another in a manner that implies that they’re two sides of the same persona in a way, connected on a spiritual level like Isabel and Tara, and in other ways this staging toys with our perception of whether they exist at all. Are they from the show? Or are they the show? A later scene in a bar called the Double Lunch lets us know outright that the lines of reality and fiction are blurred. The dialogue between Owen and Maddy in this scene, which is set a decade after their high school years, and especially an artful monologue delivered by Maddy (whose name is no longer Maddy at that point in the narrative) inside an inflatable planetarium, gives Schoenbrun an opportunity to let viewers puzzle things out in a way that reminded me of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, perhaps the best compliment that I can give this layered, slippery, and innovative film. And so the movie’s final act, which finds Owen working and near-fatally languishing in a local Fun Center twenty years later, felt too forced to me, making overly explicit what the film’s prior acts had worked so hard and so successfully to make implicit. (I think the right earlier ending might have been “there is still time” scrawled across the pavement of a suburban street in trans-toned sidewalk chalk.) Nevertheless, I Saw the TV Glow is a stylish and ambitious achievement overall.

My favorite “formula film” so far this summer, and one that also happens to be directed with a grand and majestic sweep, is Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me to the Moon, a spirited recreation of the Apollo 11 mission and what went on behind the scenes to produce the July 1969 televised broadcast of the historic event. Channing Tatum’s strapping launch director, Cole Davis, orbits Scarlett Johansson’s marketing guru Kelly Jones (actually Winnie, we find out later), circling closer to their long-awaited kiss that closes the movie. It’s an old-school romantic comedy with historical underpinnings, and it made me cry a couple of times at the expected dramatic moments, but also because of how I miss that kind of romance in our culture and in daily life. I was also moved to see Greg Berlanti working on such a resplendent widescreen scale with so many resources at his disposal. He’s come a long way from his 2000 gay romantic LA buddy comedy The Broken Hearts Club, one of my favorite gay movies that I still watch at least once a year.

What with the rocket launches and moon landing and many scores of NASA minions running around Cape Canaveral to orchestrate, Berlanti wisely lets his actors convey what they’re consummately adept at communicating, including Woody Harrelson and Ray Romano as head honchos with hearts. The quasi-political messages about American democracy and the perks & pitfalls of capitalism are nothing new, though they click along admirably as the plot advances alongside a mischievous lynchpin of a black cat named Mister. Past traumas are revealed and dealt with expediently by the central characters. Readers can discover those details on their own by seeing the movie on a big screen before it streams on Apple’s platforms. For me, the tawdry highlight was a solid Channing Tatum looking hotter than he ever has, sporting a colorful series of short-sleeved vintage shirts that had me waiting for the next one to appear. After all, it’s summer.