(hoopla/kanopy/Prime/VOD/Vudu) Paul (Jaeden Martell, IT (2017), THE LODGE) is a thirteen-year-old boy with Hypertrichosis (also known as ‘Werewolf Syndrome’), whose body is fully covered with hair. He’s grown up without his mother and feels ostracized and misunderstood by all — even his loving but somewhat misguided father (Chris Messina, SHARP OBJECTS, BIRDS OF PREY) — so, when he gets a birthday present from his mom, marking a spot in Philadelphia and promising answers, he takes off in search of her.
What follows is a misfit coming-of-age story as Paul encounters all sorts of threats and oddball friends along the way, many of whom mirror those Odysseus met during his adventure, including Sophie Giannamore (TRANSPARENT) as a singer who loves water, executive producer John Turturro as a predatory carnival owner — Turturro should really play more villains — and Eve Hewson (TESLA, previously recommended) as an energetic eye-patched punk who loves to steal.
WOLFBOY’s penned by Olivia Dufault (a playwright who has also written for LEGION and PREACHER — the very definition of an epic misfit adventure) and while the unique folks Paul meets along the way are the focal point of the film, she inserts whimsical elements while keeping them grounded in the real-world. First-time feature director Martin Krejcí manages to instill artistic wonder and scale into traditionally humdrum urban locations. A soundtrack featuring the delightfully melancholy DeVotchKa and Timber Timbre also imbue WOLFBOY with swoony charm.
In my opinion the trailer shows too much but, with this film, it’s about the journey.
(hoopla/kanopy/Prime/tubi/VOD) A quiet drama about British Aid doctor, Shea (Andrea Riseborough, MANDY, CHRISTINE), who is currently on leave because she’s ‘seen some things no one should see’. She embarks on a trip to Luxor, Egypt and, quite quickly, runs into her former lover of twenty years ago, Sultan (Karim Saleh, TRANSPARENT, COUNTERPART), who is there on an archeological dig.
While the above may sound like a ‘late-in-life rekindled romance’, it isn’t, although the looks and stumbled phrases they exchange upon seeing each other after so many years ensure they’ll be orbiting each other for the rest of the film. The core is a human story about a woman who is not confident that she will feel broken for the rest of her life. While the undercurrent of revitalized romance is there, it’s just one facet of Shea’s present time.
Quiet tales like these, about people with lived lives, of adult reflection, are rarer and rarer nowadays, and writer/director Zeina Durra (THE IMPERIALISTS ARE STILL ALIVE!) does an exceptional job realizing her script, letting the camera follow the actors and allow the silence to speak volumes.
(Prime) A light comedy/horror movie about four city boys (three hellion misfits, another a straight-up nerd) who have mostly unwillingly signed up to participate in The Duke of Edinbergh’s Award, an ‘outdoor adventure challenge in the Highlands’ set up in 1956 by the Duke of Edinbergh to help inspire young teens to ‘attain standards of achievement and endeavour in a wide variety of active interests’. (The film opens with a clearly faux-dated training video that — partially due to its use of fonts — feels like parody, but it is not, the Award is a very real thing: https://www.royal.uk/60-years-duke-edinburghs-award .)
Left without adult supervision, and only the barest of instructions, the boys dick around, smoke up (using part of the map they were given), and act generally obnoxious (except for the nerd, who is disheartened he’s not receiving the bonding adventure he’d hoped for). For the first third of the film, sitting through the scenes of infantile behavior is tedious, but the gears shift upon the introduction of a older stranger determined to kill youths, and he has his sights trained on them.
From there the adventure really begins, as the boys try to find ways to survive despite their incompetence and their willingness to leap first and look later. There’s a particularly rousing break about midway through that serves as a self-indulgent music video — this is the first feature effort from writer/director Ninian Doff, who has previously directed videos for acts like Run The Jewels and the Chemical Brothers — but the song and visuals ratchet up the fun, before culminating in a final act that tries to draw out a bit of political satire before immediately turning on its heel as if to tell the audience ‘fuck that, have a few more laughs.’
It helps that those playing the boys are able to come across as goofs instead of maniacs, and DUKED is fleshed out with great supporting talent like Eddie Izzard, Kate Dickie (THE VVITCH, PROMETHEUS, PREVENGE), Alice Lowe (SIGHTSEERS, PREVENGE), and Jonathan Aris (loads of British TV like HUMANS, SHERLOCK, etc.) Yes, it’s a slight film but, by the end, it had earned a bit of love.
(Hulu) A psychological thriller about an extremely ill young woman named Chloe (newcomer Kiera Allen) suffering from a litany of medical conditions — heart arrhythmia, hemochromatosis, asthma, diabetes, and paralysis from the waist down — and her overly protective mother Diane (Sarah Paulson). Due to these ailments, Diane opted to homeschool Chloe, but Chloe’s coming of age and can’t wait to go to college and expand her engineering knowledge, nervously waiting to receive an answer to her college application.
You can probably guess where this is going, and director Aneesh Chaganty (SEARCHING (2018) who co-wrote this with Sev Ohanian (who also co-wrote SEARCHING) are aware of that, and they cut to the quick rather than make you guess. The end result is a tense, clever little genre film shot with a self-assured hand, bolstered by strong performances — as you might suspect, Paulson makes a meal out of her role — and closes on a satisfying note.
(Hulu/kanopy/VOD) Released in May 2020, this doc focused on the first real attempt to create a self-sustaining, human-made biosphere, was perfect pandemic fodder, and remains that way. It’d be enough to just hear the tale of those who lived through two years of isolation, but the doc’s juiced by the corporate intrigue and mismanagement that occurred. A fascinating, bewildering experiment that calls for a slightly grander film than this, but I’m just happy to be able to experience it.
(hoopla/kanopy/Netflix/VOD) A delightfully filthy ‘last summer before college’ tale co-written by and starring Hannah Marks (DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY, the previously mentioned I USED TO GO HERE). Marks plays April (coincidentally, also the name of her character in I USED TO GO HERE) who, after a whirlwind senior year relationship with Nick (Dylan Sprouse, as in the Sprouse that -isn’t- in RIVERDALE) — swiftly conveyed through a montage set to X-RAY SPEX’s -Obsessed With You- — the two break up. Nick rebounds with new-to-town Clara (Liana Liberato, THE BEACH HOUSE (2020)) who, much to April’s surprise, isn’t a terrible person. In fact, the two hit it off and become fast friends, despite their shared history with Nick.
It’s a winsome look at the intensity of both young love and teen friendships, earnest and honest but never too serious, and features in-jokes that are earned as opposed to a litany of pop culture riffs. First-time director Benjamin Kasulke (hard-working indie cinematographer who has shot everything from Guy Maddin’s BRAND UPON THE BRAIN to BETWEEN TWO FERNS: THE MOVIE) keeps the pace lively, embellishing bits here to wring the most from a scene, but often gets out of the way and lets Marks lead the way.
“We are going to have -one dinner- that doesn’t end in kissing fat asses or sucking dicks!”
(DVD/YouTube) Apologies in advance for the lengthy entry — please bear with me.
I moved to Chicago to attend film school, specifically Columbia College Chicago (not to be confused with NYC’s Columbia College). Back in the 90s, Columbia College Chicago was known as a film trade school: folks who worked in the industry taught you the basics to become another cog in the industry, and you were immediately able to get your hands on a camera, sit behind an AVID deck, rig lights, etc., as opposed to say UCLA or NYU, which taught you film history and theory for two years before you could shoot a single frame of film.
Freshmen CCC film students were required to enroll in FILM TECH I, and your first exercise was to shoot a three-minute silent film in Grant Park, an iconic Chicago space carved out in the mid-19th century, and was never to meant be touched by developers’ hands. It’s also basically Columbia College Chicago’s backyard.
Grant Park also happens to be the location of the protests that occurred during 1968 Democratic National Convention, the time and place of Haskell Wexler’s (best know as the Oscar-winning cinematographer of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOS NEST, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT) hybrid fact/fiction documentary MEDIUM COOL, a film primarily concerned with the ethics (or lack thereof) of documentaries and photographic/filmic journalism, but whose captured footage of the DNC protest turned the film into an evergreen historical document.*
If you aren’t familiar with the events of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, here’s a primer.
(If you can’t view it, basically: a peaceful protest was turned into a bloody warfield by Chicago cops abusing their authority, all approved by the first Daley mayor.)
I didn’t see MEDIUM COOL until about a year into my CCC education, but I was still shell-shocked to see it, shot in the very same field I filmed a terribly pretentious, very slight short film. I admit, I felt a bit dirty, despite the fact that yes, it’s a public space but, after watching MEDIUM COOL, it felt like hallowed ground (even if it hosts Lollapalooza and the Pitchfork Music Fest every year).
Watching the events unfold yesterday (January 6th 2021), witnessing folks storming the US Capitol, watching a coup so dumb it felt like Christopher Morris penned it, immediately brought me back to when my wife and I travelled to DC for the Women’s March in 2016 which was definitely a clusterfuck of a protest, but still: it was a peaceful, indelible protest.
It made me recall all of the times I’ve seen protests in the news, and how when I was in D.C. my mind blurred into all of the prior D.C. protest footage I’ve seen in film and news over the years. It was a surreal moment then, and seeing a locale turn into the shitshow of domestic terrorism we witnessed on the 6th, of cops simply opening the floodgates into the US Capitol, allowing these racist, seditious assholes run rampant through the building, looting it as if the Patriots just won the Super Bowl, fried my brain.
To say we haven’t resolved the issues that spurred the police abuse in 1968, events that occurred ~fifty years ago., would be an understatement. But this is why MEDIUM COOL exists: to visually document historically important events, to reflect on them, and to force the viewer to reconcile the events in the film with the events in their current lives.
(hoopla/Prime/tubi/VOD) This is one hell of a neo-noir thriller. In the wrong hands, this story of mother accidentally murdering a man could have been Lifetime movie, but director/writer Matthew Pope, along with lead Bethany Anne Lind, shape it into a wickedly ruthless tale, then punctuate it with a gut-punch of an ending.
(Prime) There’s a moment early on in Julia Hart’s (FAST COLOR) I’M YOUR WOMAN where Jean (THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL’s Rachel Brosnahan), while making breakfast for her husband as their baby cries, cracks an egg into a frying pan and you can see how her nail punctures the shell, resulting in a broken egg yolk. I noticed and muttered to myself: ‘I wonder how intentional that was.’
As you might suspect, it was very intentional and turned out to lack subtlety — hell, it’s in the trailer I failed to watch beforehand — but it’s a brisk character detail.
I’M YOUR WOMAN is a 70s period piece about Jean, a young wife who has a baby literally handed off to her by her charismatic, but criminally-minded, husband. Before she’s even had time to acclimate to the baby, one of her husband’s friends rings her doorbell, tells her she has to leave her home right now, and passes her off to Cal — played by Arinzé Kene (HOW TO BUILD A GIRL) who he says will watch over her. Matters spiral from there as Jean attempts to shine light on the underworld events that fractured her life.
The film moves quickly and swiftly establishes just enough about the characters involved to keep you wanting to know more, while managing to tease you through to the end without being needlessly frustrating. That said, at times certain events can be off-putting and needlessly bleak and, for such a character-centric movie, the supporting personalities often outshine Jean and her ‘newly independent’ arc.
I hadn’t planned on recommending it upon watching it a month ago, but its smaller moments have lingered in my mind. While it I’M YOUR WOMAN doesn’t always balance its character and genre work, it’s still a noteworthy attempt in a year full of similarly high-minded crime thrillers.
(Hulu/VOD) If you’re a big fan of Cinemax’s short-lived pulpy action programming — I, for one, am a big fan of one-season wonder QUARRY, based on Max Allan Collins’ gritty novels. — you’re probably familiar with M.J. Bassett, the writer/director of ROGUE *, and steadfast Cinemax action creative. (Bassett also helmed SOLOMAN KANE (2009) and SILENT HILL: REVELATIONS (2012).)
If you aren’t familiar with Cinemax’s action block, which includes STRIKE BACK and BANSHEE — the former of which Bassett contributed to — you know that you’re not watching for plot, but for jaw-dropping action set-pieces, stylish gunfights, and occasional bits of counterpointing character work. ROGUE is in the same mold: Megan Fox is a gun-for-hire, paid to form an extraordinarily well-armed troop to rescue the governor’s daughter (which governor? It doesn’t matter!) from a nefarious crime ring that traffics in guns, underage girls, and giant cats. (Before becoming a director, Barrett also was a nature photojournalist, so much of ROGUE feels like a big -fuck you- to the hurt that she’s witnessed.)
Shortly after Fox’s troop rescues the daughter and a few other girls from their cages, they find themselves stranded in the wilderness, pursued by the very angry crime ring and surrounded by the vengeful lions that they accidentally ended up freeing.
From there it dials into ‘survive until sunrise’ mode and, while the locked location could drag the material down, Bassett and the cast/crew elevate it into a thrilling romp. While Fox’s performance as an action hero is a bit hit-and-miss, the supporting cast — including Philip Winchester — insert their own quirky mannerisms and bring a bit of levity to what could otherwise be a mind-numbing array of bloody deaths. There are number of quaint little scripting details, such as one dude thanking another character for a hot grenade, during a massive firefight, that also ramp up the charm in a film that other filmmakers might not think to include.
* To be clear, this is unrelated to the giant croc film ROGUE (2007) that I recommended in October.