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?

This is the final post of popsublime, my blog of over fourteen years now. I will close it with the final poem from my fifth and final book of poetry:

PROVIDENCE HIGHWAY

Between midday cinema screenings
at Legacy Place and Dedham Square,
I walk a mile of Providence Highway

beside four lanes packed with cars
under heat of summertime sunshine
intensified by an even greater heat

radiating from the metallic traffic
continually churning past me
as I thread my way past parking lots,

shattered debris of old asphalt,
blank storefronts staring forlornly,
taking me back to Colerain Avenue

in Cincinnati where I walked alone
in second grade to see a matinee
of “Annie” at Northgate Mall Cinema

and paid for it myself with a tiny bag
of 200 pennies I had collected.
In this country you can opt out

of capitalism just once in youth
and after that last chance to get out
you’re subsumed into the system

forever, even if you think otherwise.
The cars, the heat, blazing currents:
you know how the world will end,

or at least human life, which means
for us the world. I will no longer give
this world what it doesn’t deserve.

— Jason Roush

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 Pepplatt’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.

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Jason

Boston, United States

Pop culture aficionado.

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