(Hulu/FX) I have a few issues with the first season of THE BEAR — mostly typical first season problems regarding tone and clumsy character dynamics — but you should watch it if you’re into claustrophobic, high-strung, hyper-local character dramas, especially if you’re a Chicagoan who seeks out restaurants or have worked in restaurants.
Also, I was relieved to see that it skews closer to half-hour eps for its eight ep run. (That said, wouldn’t be surprised if the runtimes ballooned in the second season.)
One notable facet is its use of lighting and set decoration as a cleansing arc throughout the season. THE ORIGINAL BEEF space goes from looking like mud to gleaming like a private hospital, and watch for how light increasingly floods the space, beaming around the characters.
Also noteworthy is that it’s one of the few works out there which starts out with a dude being traumatized in many ways, he tries to be better, realizes he’s still not great at it, but learns how to reach out. He’s willing to learn, and willing to change, in a city that is often resistant to change.
In other words, S2 could be great. “What do you call it?”
Director Claire Denis routinely traffics in works about perceived emotional dishonesty and duplicity, and her BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE definitely delivers.
BLADE opens with middle-aged Sara (Juliette Binoche, CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA, THREE COLORS: BLUE, THE ENGLISH PATIENT) and Jean (Vincent Lindon, TITANE) frolicking in the water, arms entangled, all embracing, basking in the sun and sea.
They return to Sara’s tiny, artistically-adorned, open-concept flat in Paris, the camera barely able to contain the two of them.
Post-vacation, Sara trundles off to work as a radio interviewer, mask over her face, as this is a film that’s firmly placed during the pandemic. Right before she’s about to be temperature-tested, she catches a glimpse of François, a younger lover of hers, who has kickstarted a motorcycle with an even younger woman.
Later, we discover that Jean is a single dad, an ex-rugby player, someone who used to run jobs for François, and that one of François’s parties was what brought Sara and Jean together. We also learn that Jean eventually served some jail-time — it’s insinuated that he took the fall for François — but after Jean’s release, the two are still eager to work together again, and they start scouting for potential professional rugby players.
BLADE is the first dramatic film I’ve felt that properly captures, and capitalizes, on COVID. All of the major characters practice precautions in a very blasé way; there’s one moment where Jean apologizes to his mother — who is overseeing his son — for not giving her a hello kiss, as he wasn’t masked properly on the three-hour ride to her estate. Sara ventures into a crowded unmasked party, only to run from it shortly after. However, COVID itself is never named; it becomes background noise, an undercurrent that exacerbates the emotional tension.
Despite the intimate camera, despite the terse words and enclosed spaces, the specifics of these relationships are all vagaries. It’s a film that teases, that baits-and-switches, roping you in with the potential of mob-intrigue and sexual dalliances and the washed-out neons of the city, and while those components are there, BLADE is more about the interior lives and desires and pasts of the characters than audacious actions, leading to a more enigmatic but far more engrossing relationship tale.
MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON, a stop-motion animated film from Dean Fleischer-Camp about a sentient shell that wears shoes could be yet another epic film in the Pixar vein, of an outsider thrust into the unknown to find their own community and the adventures they encounter while doing so.
Instead, it has more in common with smaller scale documentaries, such as the idiosyncratic GREY GARDENS, which shines a light on an off-beat mother and daughter inhabiting their dilapidated ruin of a home and how they eke out their existence.
MARCEL builds on the shorts that made the character internet-famous in the early 2010s — essentially, that of documenting the life of Marcel the shell (voiced by Jenni Slate) living in a house with his nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini). The house they find themselves in is far larger than they need but it’s what they have, so they make the most of it while waiting for the next episode of 60 MINUTES to air so they can see fearless Lesley Stahl report on the latest notable of the prior week. Said house is an AirBnB, and apparently no one ever really takes note of them until the lonesome Dean rents out the space.
Dean ‘discovers’ Marcel and Marcel’s nana, and proceeds to film how Marcel manages to exist in this space that is not built around their needs, and he also details the circumstances that put Marcel and his nana into this place, namely:
A couple inhabited the place for a while, and they frequently argued. Whenever these outbursts would occur, whenever Marcel’s family would hear strife, they’d collectively meet in a drawer. This one last time though, one half of the couple went to collect their things, which also meant collecting all but Marcel and Nana, and they rushed out the door with Marcel’s family.
A more mainstream film would have turned this tale into Dean embarking on a cross-country trip to re-unite Marcel with each and every family member. Instead, Dean drives to the highest point in L.A., all while Marcel repeatedly gets roadsick, neither learning much of anything during the afternoon jaunt.
Despite being told in miniature, Marcel and MARCEL have high aspirations, but both are small voices, and both are better for it. This is a quiet film, both in tone and in scope, but it confidently speaks volumes. It’s a work about ennui and minor victories and emotional stumbles while also being about longing for an accepting crowd. It’s a melancholy, complicated film told simply, one that’s destined for cult status, simply because it defies tonal categorization or, perhaps, because it’s so cute, so initially innocuous, while ultimately being a measured existential tale, one so immaculately put together in a way that will almost certainly have you smiling through tears.
Few novels can evoke the feeling of a Kurt Vonnegut work, of leaning on the crafting of an internal sci-fi novel, one that speaks just as much as the text it’s buried in, but Caroline Woods’s THE LUNAR HOUSEWIFE manages it.
Louise Leithouser inhabits 1953 New York City as a romance writer who pens articles for her boyfriend Joe’s upstart culture magazine DOWNTOWN under the name of ‘Alfred King’. She met Joe while waitressing an industry party, and passed herself off as someone with a higher station in life than in reality and, while she’s still insecure about her lower-class background, she’s slowly adjusting to being part of the upper-crust party, instead of being party to hand out hors d’oeuvres.
As Louise spends more time with Joe and Harry, the other half of DOWNTOWN magazine, her suspicions are raised as she overhears murmurs of fear and paranoia from the two of them. By the time she’s assigned an interview with Papa himself — Ernest Hemingway — she’s fraught with anxiety, which he stokes with off-the-cuff remarks about government surveillance and the like.
To process her suspicions, Louise writes her life into the star-crossed romance novel she’s always wanted to pen: THE LUNAR HOUSEWIFE, which focuses on a fuckup of a single American woman who defected to the Soviets in hopes of feeling useful again, who is then shot into space to be a ‘housewife’ to a single man while the two of them inhabit a pod on the moon.
Woods’s interweaving of second-halves, literary aspirations and influences, along with the singular thorough-line of cold war insecurities, sets the stage for Kilgore Trout-ish digressions, which are a fine second-side to the same coin; Woods leans on romantic fiction tropes instead of Trout’s action and wartime scenarios to spread her, and Louise’s, deeper messages.
While THE LUNAR HOUSEWIFE isn’t as intricately wound as one might like from a thriller, it trades the intrigue for ruminating on a more realistic portrayal of the end-result of confronting others with your paranoid instincts. This is a singular tale of a woman with artistic and autonomous aspirations, of a woman who, in her own words, learns that “the government lies to you. Men lie to you.” and is constantly endeavoring to keep herself open, while protecting herself.
(VOD) YOU CAN COUNT ON ME is one of those early naughts small-scale family-centric indie films that you don’t see much of anymore. Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan (MARGARET, MANCHESTER BY THE SEA), it’s about two middle-aged siblings, Sammy (Laura Linney, LOVE ACTUALLY but I’ll also say: TALES OF THE CITY) and Terry (Mark Ruffalo, I’ll just say BLINDNESS instead of THE AVENGERS), who have stuck together through thick-and-thin, but Terry is an addict and a bit of a selfish asshole, and at this point in his life the film focuses on him circling back to needing the emotional and financial support of his sister.
It’s a quaint, heart-felt tale, sparsely told without much in the way of adornment unless you count the East Coast greenery, and worth your time. I wish there was more room for films like these nowadays.
However! YOU CAN COUNT ON ME sticks in my mind because it repeatedly utilizes the prelude in Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major — yes, the video misspells it as C Major, but it’s G Major — building and exposing more of it as the film goes on. It’s an exceptional incorporation of the work into the film, but it has the sad side-effect of reminding me that I completely failed at successfully performing it for my cello teacher for weeks on end, until I finally left for college and quit playing cello all together. (Not Bach or my cello teacher’s fault, obviously! I just didn’t have the chops.)
This is a roundabout way of calling attention to the little weirdsies (as Linda Holmes would say) that we have about artistic works. I can’t watch YOU CAN COUNT ON ME without flashing back to all of my failed attempts at this Bach piece, akin to both Sammy and Terry’s failures and trips during life. I’m sure that Longergan had his reasons for including this work in YOU CAN COUNT ON ME, but all I can hear is a reprise of my teen years.
(Theaters/VOD soon) In this age of cheap film production values, of 4K cameras in every pocket, toaster box CGI readily-available, it’s odd that truly out-spoken, revolutionary DIY works seem to be less visible now than they were during the 90s, when you only had shitty digital cameras or bought the unused 16mm heads or tails from local TV shoots.
This is only one of a number of reasons why Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s NEPTUNE FROST is such a welcome and radical musical, one that embraces a lo-fi, DIY ethic, while still shooting for the stars, for having a globally disruptive message and still being absolutely wildly engaging.
Part-fairy tale, part-post-industrial capitalist nightmare, NEPTUNE FROST sings a number of songs of specially anointed individuals that find each other and then work to upturn the world through their technical abilities. NEPTUNE FROST is one of the most vibrant, most effective posterworks to extoll what can be accomplished by a lo-fi look: the film mostly eschews CGI — apart from some CG-centric motion and interface design late in the film — opting instead for some radical costume design, glowing make-up, black lights, and dumpster diving for CRT monitors, raw electronics, and tactile keyboard pieces.
The physicality of the disparate look of the revolutionaries sets NEPTUNE FROST apart in ways that so many other films would falter. This is a film that should be spoken alongside of REPO MAN, of TETSUO: THE IRON MAN, and other lo-fi class-centric punk films. It is an effective call to arms, one that I hope finds its audience.
If you do get a chance to see it in theaters, please do so: the soundtrack is astounding, and you will want to feel it surround you.
GOOD TIME PARTY GIRL is a self-reflexive work of sorts: penned by POPULAR HOME magazine editor Robert Dougherty, it’s a recounting of “The Notorious Life of Dirty Helen Cromwell”, straight from her mouth, according to Robert.
Dirty Helen Cromwell (Helen, from here on forth), was — for some time — a Milwaukee fixture from the Prohibition age. While she was reluctant to lay down roots anywhere, she did find a home in Milwaukee with her boozy outpost THE SUN FLOWER INN, which is where Robert first met Helen.
What follows is Robert jotting down Helen recalling a good forty years of ‘good times’ as a self-proclaimed ‘woman of pleasure’. In other words: a sex worker. There’s a moment where she wishes that the term ‘call girl’ was popular in her time.
The tales recalled in GOOD TIME PARTY GIRL are certainly those of a willful, self-possessed woman, one who isn’t a skin-flint, but values what remains in one’s pocket, while still living a remarkable life, one the that included all sorts of fashionable dovetailing, as well as shoulder-rubbing with Al Capone.
“My advice is not to accept initiations to these cruises if you aren’t prepared for certain eventualities.”
That’s about as dark as Helen deigned herself to deal with, but as one dives deeper into GOOD TIME PARTY GIRL and reads about the litany of dead husbands, and the brave face she plastered on, the harder the read becomes. This is a memoir/auto-bio where the absence of details are more damning than the inclusion; you can almost feel the hurt in certain eras of hers that she glosses over, ambiguous hurt that hits harder than when she discusses the death of one of her several husbands.
That said, yes, you do have to read in-between the lines for that. Otherwise, it’s a bold, brash tale of a bold and brash and gregariously singular woman who made her place in Milwaukee. That alone is reason enough to read her tale.
Caitlín R. Kiernan’s THE TINDALOS ASSET is the third and final novella in the TINFOIL DOSSIER trilogy, a fitting bookend to their confidently wild portrayal of mostly scumbags trying to reign in — or perpetuate — horrors both otherworldly and extra-dimensional. Like the other two novellas, it’s an absolutely wild ride of clipped thoughts, traumatic events both past, present (and some future), all occasionally interrupted by bouts of depravity.
THE TINDALOS ASSET returns to The Signalman, the binding character of the series, while spending much of its time in other Dreamland agents’ heads. In several ways, both in setting and inciting events, TINDALOS feels smaller in scope, far more than the epic, wide-ranging state-of-the-world relayed via the second book in the series, BLACK HELICOPTERS. That feels strange to say, given that TINDALOS is centered around very apocalyptic events, but it primarily takes place in only three locales: a hotel room, and airplane, and by a body of water. Between the limited locations and the amount of exposition and dialogue expelled between the major players, TINDALOS often comes across more like a stage play, as opposed to the unseeable weird fiction it is.
That TINDALOS feels more insular and focused more on the headspace of its characters and their actions and motives, and this approach is to be applauded! Each act in this grand work has its own texture, its own litany of surprises. Don’t enter weird fiction hoping for more-of-the-same with every installment, because if you do? You should find a different genre.
After reading AGENTS OF DREAMLAND I noted: “To riff on the ‘it’s not a season of TV, it’s a 12-hour movie’ sentiment, the TINFOIL DOSSIER series is not so much three novellas, but a three-part novel.” I wish I’d taken my own advice and binged the novellas like a season of TV. Reading the three novellas over the period of a few months under a year proved to be too spread out. To those who read these as they first appeared, especially those who followed it via piecemeal through anthologies and the like, I salute you. I wish I’d read them all in one big gulp, but in time — instead — I’ll simply re-read them, hopefully shortly after being told the release date of a TINFOIL DOSSIER film or TV adaptation.
The moment I realized Dorothy L. Sayers’ THE NINE TAILORS was a special sort of murder mystery novel was when I encountered one passage and thought: “Wow, she’s really leaning hard on the details of this old church’s bells.” Ten pages later: “Cripes, I never knew that I wanted to know this much about bell-ringing!”
Sayers is best-known for her murder mysteries, specifically her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, featuring a rich, compassionate, gregarious but astute man who often finds himself surrounded by death. GAUDY NIGHT (the tenth Wimsey story, published in 1935, one a year after THE NINE TAILORS) is perhaps her best-known, but sadly, nowadays unless you’re attending an Edgar Awards afterparty, you’re probably unlikely to hear her name or accidentally stumble over a visual adaptation of any of her novels.
This is a shame — and something The Dorothy L. Sayers Society is trying to rectify — because, as THE NINE TAILORS exemplifies, she’s exceptional at weaving a engaging world, one dense with intriguing and idiosyncratic individuals, where actions are richly detailed, and each work is ornately penned to soothe even the most high-minded snob. In her hands, the murder contained in THE NINE TAILORS almost fades away as we’re drawn into this small town and its denizens.
In other words: THE NINE TAILORS is the complete package. It’s thrilling, it has depth, it goes unfathomably deep into the world of bell-ringing in ways that manage to be highly entertaining, and it sticks the landing in an amazingly satisfying way. It’s an absolute classic, one that should certainly not be overlooked by any mystery fan.
(Theaters) Michael Glover Smith’s RELATIVE is a refreshing throwback family ensemble drama, the kind of indie film that traditionally centers around a homecoming during the holidays or a major family event.
In the case of RELATIVE, the inciting ceremony is a college graduation party for Benji Frank (THE WALKING DEAD’s Cameron Scott Roberts), the youngest child of four who is described as a late-in-life miracle baby by his aged hippie parents, librarian Karen (TWIN PEAKS’ Wendy Robie) and retiree David (grand character actor Francis Guinan).
Living in Karen and David’s basement is their thirty-something asshole son, Rod (Keith D. Gallagher), a veteran recovering from both PTSD and a four-year-old breakup.
Rounding out the family is Evonne (Clare Cooney) whose marriage and mental state appears to be strained, and Norma (Emily Lape, MERCY’S GIRL), who presents a cool, calm, and collected veneer to her family that all is well in her world, but that she pines for older times.
What follows isn’t as conflict-driven as you may think, but there is tension in the air as all of the characters find themselves at their own crossroads, exploring life-changing decisions all while under the comforting roof of the family home.
Smith is known for his paeans to Chicago and RELATIVE is no exception. It is primarily filmed in the far north regions of Chicago, mostly Rogers Park which happens to be Smith’s neighborhood. Rogers Park also houses RELATIVE’s family abode, and Smith takes great care to gloriously portray its interiors via several long pans, detailing hand-painted landscapes with inventively embedded lighting, all framed by the signature molding of 19th century Chicago.
Oh, and when the characters occasionally escape Rogers Park, they run off to Andersonville’s mainstay gastropub Hopleaf*, or happen to be in the nearby village of Wilmette.
If there’s one qualm I have, it’s that Smith hits a few dialogue refrains harder than I would have liked. There’s a repeated bit about ‘choosing soup’ that is clearly meant to be an insightful-but-also-comedic icebreaker, the kind ripped from real life, that left a bad taste in my mouth.
Nonetheless, Smith serves up a quiet, thoughtful depiction of a family, comprised of individuals who miss their old bonds, some who wonder about the unknown, while others are eager to exit. RELATIVE explores these familial bonds with aplomb while respecting the audience by exerting considerable restraint when it comes to revealing certain facets of the characters. While the audience is rewarded as matters wrap, Smith allows for some questions to linger and remain with you long after the film is over.
Trailer (although, if the above sounds appealing to you, skip it!):
While I understand the difficulty of finding a unique bar that was also open to allowing a film shoot while COVID reigned, as an Andersonville resident who often frequents Hopleaf, I couldn’t help but flinch while watching Benji eat pizza and drink wine in the venue. You head to Hopleaf for the mussels or, if you tire of those then a hot sandwich, and you wash it down with an eclectic Belgium draft beer.
