Movies

FREMONT: self-discovery and a fortune cookie

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Photo caption: Anaita Wali Zada in FREMONT. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

Good news – one of the year’s best and most overlooked movies is now valuable to watch at home. Fremont is the absorbing and frequently droll portrait of a woman, having landed in a new place, who has paused her life and needs to find her path to self-discovery. Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), having worked as a translator for the US military in her native Afghanistan, has fled Kabul for her life. She is living in a stucco-box apartment in the Bay Area suburb of Fremont and is working for a San Francisco manufacturer of, absurdly, Chinese fortune cookies.

Her life is lonely and boring, and her social life is anything but what one would expect for an attractive Bay Area. single woman in her mid-20s. What’s holding her back? It’s not fear, shyness, the bounds of traditional Afghan culture or PTSD from the war. She could have landed an entry level job in Fremont and saved herself the 45-minute commute, but she has intentionally left the insular enclave of Afghan refugees for a job that exposes her to folks with other backgrounds. That clues us in to Donya’s curiosity and fearlessness.

Donya is quiet without being shy, engaging in conversations with her benevolently goofy boss, her know-it-all co-worker and her oddball psychiatrist, and indulging their need to explain things to her. It’s clear to us that she knows more than all of them except for the old owner of an Afghan café, whose life experience tells him what she needs to do with her life.

Donya is the only member of her family in the US precisely because she is the only one whose life has been expressly threatened by the Taliban. That presents her with a form of survivor’s guilt that she needs to confront.

Donya needs to pivot, and the spark is a fortune in a fortune cookie – a fortune written by Donya herself.

Fremont and the character of Donya are the creations of Iranian-born and Belgium-based director and co-writer Babak Jalali, a master of deadpan, absurdist humor. (I love his even more droll Radio Dreams, also set in a Bay Area immigrant community.) After all, what is more disposable or trivial than the fortune in a fortune cookie? I especially enjoyed the scenes where Donya listens implacably as her shrink earnestly (and, he thinks, therapeutically) reads her passages from Jack London’s White Fang.

Donya borrows her friend’s beater of a car for a quest to, of all places, Bakersfield. At a remote gas station along the way, she meets Daniel (Jeremy Allen White of The Bear), a kind and lonely mechanic, and very, tentatively and more than a bit awkwardly, a connection forms.

Jalali captures and distills the profound attraction between mutual soul mates. Donya’s and Daniel’s encounters are so spare, you wonder how much of our courtship rituals are superfluous.

In her screen debut, Anaita Wali Zada effectively inhabits the fresh and original character of Donya, whose reserve masks her strong will. Essentially all of the cast (including his leading lady) are first-time actors, except for Jeremy Allen White and Gregg Turkington, who plays the shrink. You gotta wonder what Jalali could do with trained actors.

Fremont is now streaming on Amazon and Vudu. The more I think about Fremont, the more I like it.

BUG: the “paranoid” in paranoid thriller

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Photo caption: Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon in BUG. Courtesy of Lionsgate.

It’s William Friedkin Week at The Movie Gourmet, and we’re looking at three of the director’s more overlooked films. We’ve examined the neo-noir thriller To Live and to Die in L.A., and today’s choice is the psychological horror movie Bug. We could also describe Bug as a psychotic horror movie.

Ashley Judd plays Agnes, a woman who seems well-balanced but has been made vulnerable by circumstance. She has been shattered by the most profound family tragedy. She’s justifiably terrified of her monstrous estranged husband Jerry (Harry Connick Jr.), and she’s unsettled by being on the run from him and in an unfamiliar environment; there are signs that Jerry is closing in on finding her. She’s found herself living so far from a regular, stable life that’s she’s become profoundly alienated.

Ashley Judd and Lynn Collins in BUG. Courtesy of Lionsgate.

Agnes is street-wise and, in normal times, she could handle herself, but she’s just being overwhelmed by too much shit. She needs some comfort and acceptance, some of which she finds in a new pal R.C. (Lynn Collins), although R.C. enables Agnes’ tendency to get too wasted.

But Agnes could also use some male companionship and physical security and protection. She meets Peter, who, in contrast with Jerry, is civil, kind and not abusive. He’s socially awkward, but he seems really safe and non-threatening.

As soon as they bond and start sharing the same motel room, Peter believes that he has found, first one aphid, and then a slew of them. More alarmingly, Peter is attaching the bugs to a conspiracy theory. Is Peter paranoid, delusional, hallucinating, or is it really a conspiracy? Friedkin and the Tracy Letts screenplay start to play with movie genre conventions.

Agnes is in a place where she is inclined to join Team Peter, and she starts seeing thing Peter’s way. Unfortunately, the two become ever more unhinged, begin deploying vast quantities of aluminum foil and, finally, go to EXTREME LENGTHS.

Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon in BUG. Courtesy of Lionsgate.

Friedkin’s final shot messes with us one last time. Memorably.

What happens in this story is a real thing, called folie à deux, shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder. The person whose delusions become shared by the second person is called the inducer, which gives a new, chilling meaning to the phrase “he drove her crazy“.

Michael Shannon is an actor with an uncommon gift for projecting creepiness. He shot Bug just a year before he broke through in Jeff Nichols’ brilliant indie Shotgun Stories and five years before Nichols’ Take Shelter. Writing about Take Shelter, I described Shannon’s character’s behavior “which starts out quirky, becomes troublesome and spirals down to GET ME OUT OF HERE.”

Ashley Judd in BUG. Courtesy of Lionsgate.

But Bug really depends on Ashley Judd’s performance as Agnes. After all, we can accept that Shannon’s Peter is just balls-out wacko, but Judd has to make us believe that an absolutely sane person can become completely insane on 48 hours. She’s dazzling here. I also recommend Mick LaSalle’s fine review of Bug, focusing on Ashley Judd’s performance

Bug can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.

TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.: obsession without an iota of redemption

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Photo caption: William L. Petersen in TO LIVE AND TO DIE IN L.A. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

It’s William Friedkin Week at The Movie Gourmet, and we’re looking at three of the director’s more overlooked films. First up is his 1985 neo-noir To Live and Die in L.A., now a cult fave of noir fans. It’s a study of amoral obsession without any iota of redemption. Along with directing, Friedkin co-wrote the screenplay.

The secret service agent Chance (William L. Petersen) is consumed with tracking down the counterfeiter Masters (Willem Dafoe). Both are very dangerous men, and it’s pretty clear that no more than one of them is going to survive. Chance’s new partner Vuckovich (John Pankow) has to go along for the ride – and it’s a doozy.

Friedkin begins To Live and Die in L.A. with a thrilling set piece, involving terrorism in a highrise, that introduces Chance as a nervy stud. Then we meet Masters, and learn that he is anything but an ordinary criminal. Just when we have caught our breath, Friedkin toys with us in a scene that establishes that Chance is a reckless adrenaline freak.

The stage is now set for a manhunt, and Chance unleashes all his ruthlessness. Poor Vuckovich stands in for the audience as he and we are repeatedly shocked by Chance’s amorality, even corruption.

The car chase in Friedkin’s The French Connection remains the gold standard, but the one in To Live and Die in L.A. is also extraordinary. This one careens through LA’s freeways (including wrong way on the freeway), industrial areas and the cement channel of the Los Angeles River. The LA River has since been the site of countless movie chases, but it first was prominently featured in Point Blank and To Live and Die in L.A. may have been the river’s first car chase in a mainstream movie. All of the action is photographed by master cinematographer Robby Mueller.

Of course, along with the thrills of the chase and Chance’s astonishing behavior, we also get a counterfeiter procedural as Masters combines art, craft and greed as he prints his own faux money.

Willem Dafoe in TO LIVE AND TO DIE IN L.A. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

This was Willem Dafoe’s first major film role, just before Platoon and The Last Temptation of Christ. Dafoe, in an understated performance, oozes menace as the smooth, but very lethal, Masters.

William Petersen inhabits Chance with none of the gruff lovability he would show on CSI. It’s a balls-to-the-wall performance. Interestingly, Petersen didn’t get high profile jobs for the next fifteen years until CSI.

Dean Stockwell is perfect as a shady lawyer. Debra Feuer, John Tuturro and the renegade filmmaker Robert Downey, Sr., also appear in supporting roles.

William L. Petersen and John Pankow in TO LIVE AND TO DIE IN L.A. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

The ending is so dark that the studio insisted that Friedkin shoot an alternative ending, in which a main character improbably survives. Fortunately, that alternative ending was not affixed to the final cut of the film. You can view the alternative ending on YouTube, with the comments of Friedkin, Petersen and Pankow.

To Live and to Die in L.A. is available on Blu-Ray from Shout! Factory and in 4K from Kino Lorber. I’ll let you know when you can stream it or if it shows up again on TV.

MASTER GARDENER: anything but careless

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Photo caption: Joel Edgerton in MASTER GARDENER. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Paul Schrader’s deeply engrossing Master Gardener came out in late May, when my life was rich and complicated, so I’m just getting around to writing about it. Better late than never, because it’s a worthwhile watch.

Joel Edgerton plays Narvel, the titular manager of a grand estate’s extraordinary formal garden. Norma (Sigourney Weaver), the proprietor of the estate, has the means to keep Narval’s operation well-resourced and well-staffed. Narvel combines an encyclopedic knowledge of plants with a meticulous attention to detail. His team of year-round assistants respect him and buy into his leadership. It’s well-ordered, above all, and then Norma asks a “favor” of Narvel that he cannot refuse – to take on her troubled grandniece as an intern.

The grandniece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), is a puddle of Gen X attitude, but she’s smart enough to know that she needs to put in the time, if not commit fully. Interestingly, Norma hasn’t had a conversation with Maya since she’s grown into adulthood, and puts off their first conversation until well into the internship. Norma is judgy, and didn’t approve of Maya’s late mother. Norma also relishes her power over Maya, Narvel and everyone- and chooses the time and place of each social engagement.

But, back to Narvel – why is he so exacting in his standards, work ethic and expectations of his team? Is he a martinet, a petty tyrant of flowers and mulch? Does he lack perspective, like The Caine Mutiny’s Captain Queeg consumed by the missing strawberries?

It turns out that Narvel has a past.. A shocking past. And running an estate’s formal garden is the last place you would have expected him to be. There were consequences for the bad decisions in Narvel’s previous life, and those consequences are irreversible. Narvel, far more than others, understands how circumstances and events can change lives forever. That’s why he faces every situation so deliberately. He is anything but careless.

Maya, however, has lived a careless life, and her past threatens all of them. In his bad past, Narvel developed skills that equip him face violence now. And now, facing Maya’s problems, he finds a long-denied chance for redemption.

Quintessa Swindell and Joel Edgerton in MASTER GARDENER. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The cast is excellent. Edgerton is prefect as a contained man whose regrets power his discipline and determination – and harnesses his determination so as not to lose a second chance. Sigourney Weaver also wonderfully nails the emotional remoteness of Norma, who is also very contained – until she lapses into a Queen of Hearts caprice. Quintessa Swindell, who I hadn’t seen before, is charismatic, and takes her Maya from an apathetic insouciance to someone who has learned, for the first time, what being fully committed really is.

Master Gardener is a Paul Schrader film. Schrader wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull., adapted The Last Temptation of Christ, wrote and directed American Gigolo and Affliction. All very good. All very dark.

Master Gardener is the third movie in Schrader’s late-career, self-described ‘Man In A Room’ trilogy, following First Reformed and The Card Counter. I would name it the “Man with a Code Seeks Redemption” trilogy. When I wrote about The Card Counter, my subtitle was “a loner, his code and his past” – and that would work for Master Gardener, too.

Master Gardener is now available to stream on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and redbox. As readers have come to expect, I’ve included the trailer below, but I recommend that you don’t watch it because of spoilers; the story is much more impactful when the plot elements unspool as Schrader intended.

CHARM CIRCLE: you think YOUR family has issues?

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Raya Burstein and Uri Burstein in CHARM CIRCLE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

In the superbly structured documentary Charm Circle, writer-director Nira Burstein exquisitely unspools the story of her own bizarre family. At first, we meet Burstein’s father, a sour character who inexplicably is about to lose his rented house, which has become unkempt, even filthy. He is mean to Burstein’s apparently sweet and extraordinarily passive mother, and the scene just seems unpleasant.

But then, Nira Burstein brings out twenty-year-old videos that show her dad as witty, talented and functional. We learn a key fact about the mom, and then about each of the director’s two sisters.

Some of the publicity about Charm Circle describes the family as eccentric, but only one daughter is a little odd – three family members are clinically diagnosable. Charm Circle is a cautionary story of untreated mental illness and the consequences of failing to reach out for help.

This is Nira Burstein’s first feature, and she has two things going for her: unlimited access to the subjects and a remarkable gift for storytelling. Charm Circle works so well because of how Burstein sequences the rollout of each family member’s story.

The Nashville Film Festival returns in a few days, and I attended a screening of Charm Circle, with a Nira Burstein Q&A at NashFilm two years ago. It went on to play both the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and Cinequest, and can now be streamed on the Criterion Channel.

More, much more overlooked neo-noir

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Photo caption: Kang-Ho Song and Kim Sang-kyung in MEMORIES OF MURDER, Courtesy of NEON.

I’ve just completed a major reworking of my list of Overlooked neo-noir, and added twelve movies.

The best of these is probably Memories of Murder, a true crime story from Joon-ho Bong, Oscar-winning director of Parasite and Broker. It just might be the best serial killer movie ever, and the haunting ending is unforgettable. A bonus: there was a breakthrough in the real-life case 16 years after the movie, but don’t read about it until you’ve screened the film.

Another Oscar-winning director (and a great raconteur), William Friedkin, had huge hits with The French Connection and The Exorcist, but his To Live and Die in L.A. bombed. Today, it’s become a neo-noir cult favorite. It stars William Petersen without any of the gruff lovability he became known for years later in CSI. And it was the first showcase for the creepy charisma of Willem Dafoe.

Some of these unexpectedly stretch our notion of neo-noir: All Night Long is a Shakespearean play set in the London jazz world of the early 60’s, A Colt Is My Passport is a Japanese yakuza movie that is essentially a spaghetti western and A Dark, Dark Man is a 2019 film from Kazakhstan.

Here are the new additions:

William L. Petersen in TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

THE SAINT OF SECOND CHANCES: irrepressibility, ingenuity and audacity

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Photo caption: Mike Veeck in THE SAINT OF SECOND CHANCES. Courtesy of Netflix.

The endearing documentary The Saint of Second Chances is about a guy who is both a character himself and the son of another character. Mike Veeck, the film’s subject, is the son of the legendary Bill Veeck, who was kind of the P.T. Barnum of baseball, known for the many gimmicks he used to draw paying fans into the ballpark. Unlike his father, Mike Veeck is not in the Hall of Fame, but he has earned his place in his self-described “family of baseball hustlers”.

This a movie about baseball people that really isn’t about baseball itself. It’s about Mike’s irrepressibility, ingenuity and audacity in conjuring up publicity stunt after publicity stunt. The story, cleverly divided into innings, traces Mike’s life through his very high highs and his very low lows. You may already know about his most famous low point – the Chicago White Sox’s “Disco Sucks Night” in 1979 that turned into a riot. That disaster drove Mike out of baseball, until, years later, he started promoting obscure minor league baseball teams with wacky novelties like the St. Paul Saints and their baseball-delivering pig, their nun masseuse and their blind radio broadcaster.

Like anyone’s life, Mike’s has had his share of heartaches, and The Saint of Second Chances‘ wistful moments are genuine and touching.

The Saint of Second Chances is co-directed by Morgan Neville, director of Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, Won’t You Be My Neighbor and 20 Feet from Stardom, for which he won an Oscar.

The Saint of Second Chances is streaming on Netflix.

FREMONT: self-discovery and a fortune cookie

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Photo caption: Anaita Wali Zada in FREMONT. Cortesy of Music Box Films.

Fremont is the absorbing and frequently droll portrait of a woman, having landed in a new place, who has paused her life and needs to find her path to self-discovery. Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), having worked as a translator for the US military in her native Afghanistan, has fled Kabul for her life. She is living in a stucco-box apartment in the Bay Area suburb of Fremont and is working for a San Francisco manufacturer of, absurdly, Chinese fortune cookies.

Her life is lonely and boring, and her social life is anything but what one would expect for an attractive Bay Area. single woman in her mid-20s. What’s holding her back? It’s not fear, shyness, the bounds of traditional Afghan culture or PTSD from the war. She could have landed an entry level job in Fremont and saved herself the 45-minute commute, but she has intentionally left the insular enclave of Afghan refugees for a job that exposes her to folks with other backgrounds. That clues us in to Donya’s curiosity and fearlessness.

Donya is quiet without being shy, engaging in conversations with her benevolently goofy boss, her know-it-all co-worker and her oddball psychiatrist, and indulging their need to explain things to her. It’s clear to us that she knows more than all of them except for the old owner of an Afghan café, whose life experience tells him what she needs to do with her life.

Donya is the only member of her family in the US precisely because she is the only one whose life has been expressly threatened by the Taliban. That presents her with a form of survivor’s guilt that she needs to confront.

Donya needs to pivot, and the spark is a fortune in a fortune cookie – a fortune written by Donya herself.

Fremont and the character of Donya are the creations of Iranian-born and Belgium-based director and co-writer Babak Jalali, a master of deadpan, absurdist humor. (I love his even more droll Radio Dreams, also set in a Bay Area immigrant community.) After all, what is more disposable or trivial than the fortune in a fortune cookie? I especially enjoyed the scenes where Donya listens implacably as her shrink earnestly (and, he thinks, therapeutically) reads her passages from Jack London’s White Fang.

Donya borrows her friend’s beater of a car for a quest to, of all places, Bakersfield. At a remote gas station along the way, she meets Daniel (Jeremy Allen White of The Bear), a kind and lonely mechanic, and very, tentatively and more than a bit awkwardly, a connection forms.

Jalali captures and distills the profound attraction between mutual soul mates. Donya’s and Daniel’s encounters are so spare, you wonder how much of our courtship rituals are superfluous.

In her screen debut, Anaita Wali Zada effectively inhabits the fresh and original character of Donya, whose reserve masks her strong will. Essentially all of the cast (including his leading lady) are first-time actors, except for Jeremy Allen White and Gregg Turkington, who plays the shrink. You gotta wonder what Jalali could do with trained actors.

Fremont has opened in LA at the Laemmle Nuart, Town Center and Glendale, and in the Bay Area at the Roxie, the Rafael, and, happily, in the Cine Lounge in Fremont. The more I think about Fremont, the more I like it.

THE LEAGUE: untold stories

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Photo caption: THE LEAGUE, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The League is a comprehensive documentary on the history of Negro League baseball.  As one would expect from a Sam Pollard doc, it’s well-sourced and reveals some less well known history:

  • Rube Foster, remembered as a pitching great and inventor of the screwball, was the impresario and strategic mind behind the first Negro League.
  • Effa Manley, the canny co-owner of the Newark Eagles, was a pioneering female AND African-American businesswoman with the spunk, if not the resources, to stand up to MLB.
  • The Negro Leagues’ surprisingly brief lifespan and even briefer glory days.
  • Why the immensely talented, even Ruthian, Josh Gibson wasn’t put forward to integrate MLB (like Jackie Robinson was).  
  • How MLB execs like Branch Rickey and Bill Veeck worked with the Negro Leagues (or not).
  • The painful trade-offs from the long-awaited integration of MLB.

The League is the work of filmmaker Sam Pollard, who directed the more compelling MLK/FBI.  The League will appeal to those with interests in baseball and/or civil rights.  The League is streaming on Amazon.

SCRAPPER: a funny film about loss, connection and second chances

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Photo caption: Harris Dickinson and Lola Campbell in Charlotte Regan’s SCRAPPER. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

In the delightful coming of age dramedy Scrapper, Georgie, a precocious 12-year-old girl, thinks that she is independently living her best life, until the unexpected appearance of the dad she hasn’t known.

In her first feature, British writer-director Charlotte Regan has created a deliciously charming character, played to roguish perfection by Lola Campbell. Streetwise and mischievous, Georgie is able to outsmart the adults who might be expected to be providing more effective oversight.

Regan gradually reveals why Georgie is living alone, and the back story of her family. The screenplay, about loss, connection and second chances, is brimming with humanity.

Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness) is very good as the dad.

Scrapper won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema/Dramatic at Sundance. I screened Scrapper for the SLO Film Fest, where it was my favorite film. Scrapper is playing Cinequest tonight, and opening in theaters this weekend.