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The Vast of Night (2019)
Signs Of Life
Just what is it that we want from a movie - do we know before it starts? 120 years into this voyeuristic pursuit, is expectation now the primary determinant of our experience and satisfaction? By now, we've mostly surrendered all suspensionable disbelief before our butts meet seats. So what is this thing that occasionally slips past our carefully tended cynicisms, like a slow-acting spiked beverage, to lodge unshakably in our consciousness?
Months into the 2020 quarantine, when habits became a tinge warped, I found myself watching The V of N three nights in a row, enjoying more of it each time but unable to dissemble what I found so enthralling. I coaxed other eyes to watch it (remotely), but the response was a blowsy "Meh." I couldn't let that go, countering with a few aspects that I thought might account for my mesmerized response to the film. "Yeah, that was the best part," was all I got back. Huh.
English language film-making of the last 40 years has largely abandoned the texture and the brazen attitudes that once made Anglo cinema a distinctively muscular presence in world culture. Satiny serializations now flood a market which, at one time, threatened to buckle under an assault against our collective movie-going subconscious. Artistic codes of conduct, arguments about the limits of vulgarity, audiences' struggles with a perilous learning curve - all seemed to be breathing, expanding (after periods of recovery) under this rough treatment. And then, without much warning, it mostly dissolved into cloying mush, as if a little tired of astonishing us. If you want to be challenged now without having to read subtitles, there is really only horror to reliably do the job. And that sensation has dwindled to a creepy tickle.
But, in the newish century, subtle disturbances are beginning to be felt, like a breeze unnoticed until you see it moving the trees. Modestly budgeted genre films, like Take Shelter, and Gareth Edwards' first theatrical feature Monsters, from 2010, gently undermine the structural supports of what should be thoroughly exhausted tropes. With a more meditative, dreamlike manner than found in the rightly praised hallmarks of mid-20th filmic mayhem and paranoia, this second wave of apocalypse anxiety and fear of shadow forces unspools amid drab, realistic surroundings, peopled not with everymen/women but prickly, unsettled characters who've stopped looking for a place to fit. Signs of life.
There's nothing exactly new here - the vocabulary has long been set, and the times are perhaps unready to birth new idioms. Still, language, an assurance of tone and stubborn resistance to metronomic pacing unite features as dissimilar as Moon, Nightcrawler and the unclassifiable The One I Love. They are also utterly adult films, with no enticements to lucrative youth-market vectors. What distinguishes them from their golden age predecessors may mostly be the absence of an outsider community for their makers. One burst of startling vitality from a newcomer on the veldt is all it takes to alert entertainment industry predators, who come flooding out of agency warrens to drive them into the homogenizing machinery of the Hollywood herd with sickening skill. Little support is afforded to outliers to pursue their independence.
TVON - a puckish acronym for a transmission-mad flick - is among the first of these maverick works to leave a light on for young viewers. Andrew Patterson, the credit-averse writer/director/producer, financed this first feature almost entirely on his own dime. Is it possible that he's right, that the attention spans of 21st Century youth might need breakneck conversational rhythms lifted from 40s comedies, and sets kitted out with period detail that wouldn't embarrass David Lynch's production designers? Patterson's displaced artificiality isn't sneaky, either. It greets you at the door, in framing devices that intrude on action and suggest that the movie is itself an episode from a 50s television series called Paradox Theater, playing to an empty living room. Irony and the archness of kitsch are notably absent - the characters and story are as open to experience as an off-leash twelve year old.
Equally risky, Patterson upends the paradigmatic flow of nearly every thriller since the 70s, launching his leads out of the gate at a pace that, near the halfway mark, slackens to take in rambling accounts from two elderly informants, one seen, the other only heard. This easing off the throttle would dismember the average tale of suspense, but it is how such entertainments can be made bearable to children.
Professional and recreational reviewers of The V of N have name-checked a number of obvious predating works, particularly Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stranger Things and the pandering, ineffectual Super 8. There's a glancing resemblance to American Graffiti as well, with townsfolk so rooted inside their enormous automobiles they appear to be living in them; and, in it's radio station setting, to the remarkable Canadian picture Pontypool. But these are no stronger influences than the airier SciFi features of the post-war period we're revisiting, or some of the dark-toned art/independent films flowing out of Mexico, South America, Asia and Africa in the last 20 years. What may have set off the grousing in many user/blogger reviews is this work's artistic atmosphere, neither listing toward dread nor wonder, and the patience required to attend carefully to a narrative that's spoken as often as visualized.
There are also plenty of kinetic thrills. Long takes thread throughout the movie, in tracking shots that move through a smalltown in New Mexico (really Texas), where almost of all the residents are convening after dark for a high school basketball game. Later, the camera takes off again, gliding past one of the protagonists at her switchboard post and over the empty streets, darkened backyards, through a parking lot and into a glowing gymnasium, where it eases around cheering teenagers and townies, onto the court in full play and up into the bleachers, then out a second story window to end at the local radio statio. There the DJ, our other guide, stands smoking outside, contemplating the night sky while broadcasting a signal that may have come down from it.
More daring still are slow zooms that focus for minutes on the leads talking, or just listening, and disorienting black outs that force our awareness of leaning in to the darkness. These scenes make great demands on the actors, not a one of whom disappoints. We're in the fabled age when technology has begun to be spiritualized, summoning demons out of the clouds, and every character not in thrall to local athletics succumbs to a slow pull toward the uncanny.
Patterson has made a perfectly scaled paean to the yearnings of land-locked, small town Americans nearing the end of our affair with ideas of innocence. (It must be one of American cinema's more patiently cataloged eras, like the Regency for the Brits). His handling of character could have read skin-deep if not for the long moments we're allowed to just observe a young woman sitting at her shabby workstation, and the way that a man's prized veneer of cool can begin to give at the seams. Somehow even the big reveal hovers within the frame of its characters' imaginations, instead of catering to ours. On occasion, something almost perfect is delivered by an artist holding all the reins. And almost perfect is just about what movies should dare to be.
There's no reason this should work. Whether it does for you may depend on if you've ever felt driven to watch a challenging movie more than once, to see if it might be different when freed from anticipation and relentless expectations. If foreign films bug you, or you can't endure minutes passing without explosive stimulation, you probably won't make it far into The Vast of Night. The delicate sound design, an almost subliminal score by Erick Alexander and Jared Bulmer, Chilean cinematographer Miguel Littin-Menz's astonishing camera work, the assured, intuitive performances of leads Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz and a game supporting cast - none of this is likely to make much difference. Ones needs are, lately, often not negotiable.
Maniac (2018)
Worth your time, but see World On A Wire
There's some great work here by everyone involved. The story and its execution are surprising and unpredictable, with a mostly happy ending that seems to come from nowhere. Unless, maybe, you've seen the source from which it springs - Fassbinders 1973 German tv mini-series "World on a Wire." Unreleased in the U. S. until about 10 years ago, the project must have been in wide circulation among filmmakers in the 70s, as it's influence is unmistakable in dozens of subsequent SciFi pictures. With its cold, flat sense of menace, absurd staging and the ironic use of action tropes atop a mystery about the virtual world sneaking through the firewalls of human reality, WoaW unspools into an astonishment that must have blown the socks off of German families in their living rooms. It stands alongside any of Kubrick's work in its forward and backward reach, with a tone that is bewilderingly sprightly and haunting. Thrilling, and possibly one of the most influential works withheld from wide release.
Maniac seems conceived as a tribute and an update to WoaW, and if it falls short (particularly in the latter episodes), it's none the less entertaining and generously affords its stars room to stretch and play. Watching the work here of Jonah Hill, Emma Stone, Justin Theroux and even Sally Field, you realize how seldom actors of any age are allowed to really perform on screen anymore, to take chances and get really "out there" in character. This is a solid direction for Netflix - a challenging kind of work that they should continue to invest in instead of throwing everything into more super hero dreck.
The Square (2017)
About 40 Years Too Late?
Everybody makes a stinker, let's hope this is Östlund's only. After the long, slow fascination of Force Majeure it seemed a safe bet to follow him anywhere - maybe not. The Square is not well written, ponderously executed and full of the type of stale assaults on modern preoccupations that Woody Allen was tossing off in the 70's. Tighter editing (by about an hour of running time) might have helped to sharpen the point that people nurture misery by acting like nothing terrible is happening, but maybe he should have given this one a pass.
One could almost imagine that the main character's rise to prominence was because he's so damn pretty, but the blandly stupid decisions he makes are not credible for a successful adult in a highly competitive field. Neither is the resolution of the main set piece - the apeman's performance piece at the donor dinner - initially fascinating but unravels with poorly conceived violence that sort of ruins the moment. The actors are more than competent but the filmmakers can't bring Claes Bang's Magnetic Everydope to life, though the camera just lingers and lingers and lingers and lingers, while the background intrusions annoy/provoke/unsettle to no particular effect. The experience as a whole is both provokingly memorable and exactly the sort of thing people for which people despise art films.
Ripe (1996)
Dark fantasy
Reading reviews on this site is often a head scratcher. Save for one boisterous post by the director's students (caustically unimpressed and self-amused), nearly all seem to hold this gently dark fable in breach of some law of realism. When I saw this in a theater in the 90s it seemed immediately clear that the film was not a true life tale but a languid fantasy of girls on the run. How often are 14 year old girls allowed to caper through a store shoplifting in front of a mute store owner, or hide out in plain site at a weedy army base where the soldiers do little but loll about and roughhouse? An initial stab at a voice-over betrays the girls' naive perspective, while their hi jinx are never checked even when one breaks into a moldering armory and is caught stealing a gun by an MP.
This isn't realism, but it also isn't a pat "flowering of early womanhood" scenario a la Man In The Moon, and has more to offer than a somewhat similar indie feature from the same period, Manny and Lo. The independently financed boom of 80s and 90s American film was experimental in only the mildest sense, but it did open the door to perspectives that before only occupied the edges of the frame. Little of it holds a candle to the seismic shift of the previous two decades (or work coming out of Asia at the time). But seldom have young women been shown wandering through a landscape, experimenting with their sensual impulses and liberty, with so few brutal consequences to themselves. In that respect, Ripe has more in common with countless films of boys on the loose.
Also confused (and confusing) in the reporting here is that the director is a woman, not a man, which may account for the mostly sensitive handling of the young leads, who are never fully exposed even during sex scenes. The performances are uneven, the writing is mostly challenging only in conception. Still, this one of those rare films that may appeal to few but has more than enough to offer if one can manage to hold still and let it slowly, steadily sway into your subconscious.
Ozark (2017)
Worthwhile, if derivative, a bit sloppy
A better than average moody nail-biter, with talented actors mostly up to the task. The downsides are roughly the same as with Breaking Bad, which Ozark's plot models so closely that you have to wonder: are white middle-class American families mega-bummed that they're missing out on drug trafficking action? Both shows roll with sloppy handling of major plot points in order to orchestrate set pieces that, for their fans, probably define each series. That puts a heavy onus of belief suspension on viewers who're not quite besotted with the goings on (thus the wildly divergent reviews here). But if dark and brooding are your taste, you could do far far worse.
The good stuff: Bateman and Linney, shot for maximum middle-age ravages, artfully avoid the clichés of long term, living dead marriages, swinging through their roles as through a cave with a very dim lantern. A big problem with many of these shows (Breaking Bad a principle case) is that the A-Z character arc is not really supportable in episodic TV. The Good Wife understood how slowly evolution had to occur to not only ring true but remain effective. Ozark seems to be giving its leads the necessary rope. The mood and look is nearly always post-dawn with no sleep, and the creators have mined an area of the country mostly unseen on the tube and, until recently, in movies. The pace is nimble - there are a few early shocks, but the producers are generally aces at making somnambulism compelling and believable in a high-functioning criminal entrepreneur. Carnage to follow.
The weak stuff: The actress playing Ruth is absolutely better than adequate, but the role needs genius to side-step the implausibility of a teenage woman amassing power in her circumstances (swapping roles with the actress playing Bateman's daughter might have worked). The location is more upstate New York than central/southern Missouri, and lacks the gut-bucket rawness of impoverished lives subsisting alongside some of the most challenging natural environment in the U.S. (my guess is it's filmed in Canada, with some clips from the Ozarks dropped in).
One reviewer mocked the performers' accents. I spose he could be a linguistic expert, but I spent half my life in Missouri and have never encountered a place with more variance in tone and twang (or toxic racism). That lack of consistency seems approximately accurate with this moment in the redneck diaspora. Ditto that the sole intellectual exertion prominent in the local characters is spent on insults and gleeful, nihilistic prognosticating.
Not a bad time investment, though, and could have a long term payoff.
Gary Numan: Android in La La Land (2016)
Pretty good stuff, even if you're not much of a fan
Numan turns out to be a lot more interesting than I recalled, and his music certainly has held up in ways I wouldn't have imagined. The documentary does a great job of letting you into the world of an introverted hermit, who somehow married one of his fans and that turned out to be a really good thing. It's overlong by about 10 minutes, but the part about his current work provide a pretty impressive display of artistic firepower for someone 30 years from his celebrated work, and there are some surprises about the early stuff too. This is a really solid music doc, something you should enjoy even if you're not a fan of Gary Numan's oeuvre.
Baby Driver (2017)
Bland, Loud, Adolescent - you're gonna love it
Velveeta filmmaking to its warm, gooey fantasy finish, this two hour time-waster seems to be provoking about as much adoration as that excremental insult, Mad Max-Fury Road. It'd be entirely forgivable/forgettable, if only this weren't the probable end of Edgar Wright's signature dish - mysteriously perfect balancing of action and comedy sunken in plots that you can't see the end of from their opening credits.
At the outset, the miscasting of Baby seems the main obstacle to endure. Ansel Elgort, perfectly believable as a coffee delivery boy, never convinces as a getaway driver badass, and his lip synching and street scampering are Mentos commercial ready. Minutes later, it's clear that posturing-as-performance is all we're going to get from anyone on screen. With the exception of Jamie Foxx, the actors make so little impact they could have been played by anyone. Spacey snores through his lines and looks vaguely relieved to be run over. Jon Hamm seems ever more like a one-character wonder and Eiza González plays hot and dangerous like her character notes were "be HOT, and DANGEROUS." This is fantasy, right? That's why every improbable moment is tolerated, right? So what's with the flavor-free, tight-assedness? I guess I should just be grateful that they didn't include Block-O-Wax Theron as one of these ho-hum maniacs.
The lineage here is at least a little interesting. Taken as a triptych - The Driver/Drive/Baby Driver - this edition loses in nearly every category save whiplash editing. Ryan O'Neal appeared equally miscast in Walter Hill's gloomy, preposterous original, but both he and the film began to exert centrifugal force around the halfway mark that made the whole haunting, if lacking the exhilaration that most seek in a wreck-em-up flick. The second coming of Ryan (Gosling) solved that with a silence (the flow through character trait of the three films) that suggested vitality in reserve, rather than living death (O'Neal) or sad puppy (Elgort). If you found Drive boring, you probably don't find much of interest in reality either. I suspect this Baby was made especially for you.
It isn't such a surprise that elders like George Miller and Ridley Scott risk tampering with their legacies to stay in the game (have a look at Hitchcock's last release). But Wright seemed in his prime, making deals that didn't sacrifice style, advancing the proper scale and focus of B movies, understanding that they needed the ridiculous as well as moments of genuine outrage. With the success of his big Baby, how likely is it that he'll turn away from a seat at the Blandmakers table? Not too. Another genre specialist sucked into the hotdog factory. Sigh.
Dazed and Confused (1993)
Really good, but not yet really great
Loved this movie when it came out, but with each successive viewing it seems smaller and less than its first impression. Undeniably, the Criterion package is beautiful (the booklet worth the price alone), but I'm surprised that they chose to put this film out at all. The nighttime cinematography is a serious thing of beauty, the performances are mostly good to brilliant, the music plumbs the depths of 70's trash rock with curatorial zeal. Still somehow, the finished product cruises about midway between the offhand brilliance of American Graffiti and the adolescent goofs of Porky's.
Watching the deleted scenes, I think it may be that the movie just isn't long enough. What did they leave out? The girls, of course. With the bulk of screen time spent with the male characters - hazing and being hazed, the hardships of being a jock AND a freak, drink and drug rants. Why no room for the other, equally looped perspective which was actually filmed? Kaye's ongoing rants about sexism and politics followed by Shavonne's mockery were unnecessarily, ridiculously sacrificed (the actresses must have been livid when they saw they finished product). Why - for the sake of a tidy run time? It's a shame, and the final edit mimics Lucas's AG so precisely in neglecting the actresses (seldom on screen unless they're relating to a male character) that it almost seems programmatic (read: studio mandate - girls are boring). Maybe it wasn't outside interference, but I have some hope that Linklater will someday sit down and eek out a longer cut. And while he's at it replace that last throw away shot through the windshield. What the heck is that? Looks like Slater grabbed the camera, for chrissakes.
By the way, the reviewer who said the depiction was Not Realistic At All - he graduated in 73 and clearly missed all that shortly followed. The mid-seventies were a hybridizing period. Every guy but the scuzziest badass had a slick nylon button up shirt, even people who hated disco. Hippie style was subverted/perverted by consumer culture, the natural look gone cartoon tawdry. The worst thing you could do in 1976 was try too hard (see if you can sell that to today's crop of attention seekers). Everyone looked ridiculous, but mellow ridiculous. No, the look and styling of this film is pretty spot-on, though everyone is too clean and the girl's makeup is way too flattering (mascara in the seventies was so globby it looked like spiders died on your eyes). Also, the main character's ride between the two social camps was one of the subtle touches that really made the movie work for me. Stoners were called freaks, and jocks who did drugs were frocks. There were plenty at my suburban nowhere school - one of them was a homecoming attendant and a well known (to the students) user. It made him popular with everyone, not unlike Randy Floyd. Sorry man - you checked out a little too early to authenticate this party buzz.
Pourquoi pas! (1977)
NOW ON YOUTUBE!!! My favorite movie ever (I think...)
Whenever I'm asked what is my favorite movie I always say this one, though I haven't seen it since the late 70's, when it played for a week or two in my mid-west town. I managed to see it 3 times, just overwhelmed with this concept of romance. I took a friend who'd probably never seen a subtitled movie - worried that she would think I was an nutty perv - but she "got it" and liked it too. Romantic love, affection and sex between 3 people, shown so casually and sweetly - I can't let go of it. I love to see that others have felt the same.
I've looked for the movie on eBay and Amazon every year, but except for an out-of-print and expensive director's collection (in French format), no luck. Sigh.
Though not about a trio, the Argentinian movie Plan B has some of the same sweetness that gets under your skin.
UPDATE: after searching yearly for DVD or streaming, I just found the full flick, a good print with English subtitles, on YouTube (you may need a paid subscription to view). I was braced to be disappointed after....45 years??? .... but it's still the warm, bright/dark delight that knocked me out in 1977. The cast is all solid, but Sami Frey really haunts with his evocation of the volatile, solid center the characters are all drawn to. I will be watching this over and over, lest it again disappear into the media mists.
The Sweet Hereafter (1997)
Not so great, really
Atom Egoyan proves again and again that he knows how to shoot and pace a movie, but the man is dead on his feet directing actors. The luminous praise herein for this movie is a real mystery - unbelievable (and unnecessary) plot embellishments (a toothless rural gas station owner with a cell phone in 1996? in the middle of Nowheresville, Canada?) and actors left stranded in mid-anguished howl. When you can get a bad performance out of Ian Holm you've really accomplished something. And yet another showcase for wet-lipped, doe-eyed young girls to be dangled suggestively across the plot. I must say though, the actual incident around which the story revolves was handled beautifully.
Dying Room Only (1973)
Cloris on the loose
A favorite t.v. movie from the 70's. Again, Richard Matheson creates atmosphere and suspense out of almost nothing as a couple stops at a remote diner/motel and the husband never returns from the bathroom. From the bathroom? Who writes a suspense movie where the husband apparently falls in the toilet? The man who brought you the vindictive 16 wheeler of "Duel." Unlike that clever but overpraised feature, "D.R.O." (What's up with that title? It can't be a play on "S.R.O." can it? You don't buy tickets for the toilet?) stays close to realistic scale, and the less than apocalyptic climax is a face-off by two determined middle-aged women. Complain all you want - it worked for me then, it works for me now.