Movies

MEGALOPOLIS: pretentious, cartoonish, incoherent

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Photo caption: Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in MEGALOPOLIS. Courtesy of Lionsgate.

The epic Megalopolis is Francis Ford Coppola’s labor of love, a project he had been imagining since the 1970s. I’m glad he finally got to make the movie he wanted to make. Sadly, it’s not good.

Megalopolis is set later in this century in a New York City fictionalized as New Rome. Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a visionary urban designer, seeks to replace midtown Manhattan with his creation, a utopian built environment. From his aerie atop the Chrysler Building, Cesar is as unaccountable Robert Moses in The Power Broker. Cesar must overcome the resistance of the vision-impervious mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the psychotically venal aristocrat Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) and Cesar’s own ruthlessly avaricious mistress Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza). Mayor Cicero’s Wild Child daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) sets out to punish Cesar for Cesar’s disrespect to her father, but she becomes fascinated by him.

Obviously, no one can imagine razing and rebuilding 100 contiguous square blocks of Manhattan without some hubris, and Cesar has plenty. Of course, he has invented a miracle building material, won a Nobel Prize and has the super power of stopping time. But his hubris makes him underestimate his enemies at his peril. Soon, Cesar and New Rome are plunged into a convulsion of betrayal and treachery. Will Cesar and his vision survive?

The visuals are astounding. New Rome is so dystopian that we yearn for the Times Square of Joe Buck, Ratso Rizzo and Travis Bickle. Ben Hur-like gladiator battles emerge, and a circus looks like Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge. There’s no shortage of eye candy.

Unfortunately, there are also no shortage of movie-killing flaws. The first is the revolting pretentiousness. Each chapter is introduced with a self-important title, carved into stone, no less. Great Thinkers, from Marcus Aurelius to Ralph Waldo Emerson, are quoted, and, just in case that isn’t elevated enough, Latin is occasionally uttered. Every time poor Lawrence Fishburne speaks in voice-over, he’s proclaiming something ridiculously heavy-handed without any irony. All of these Great Thoughts are about as deep as the inside of a Hallmark greeting card.

The second major flaw is that Megalopolis is a message movie with a message that is naive and simplistic. Coppola seems to have missed the core lesson in The Power Broker, which is that the tradeoff for letting an unaccountable visionary build great things in a city, is that the result may be unjust, and that regular people are stripped of any ability to control their own lives. Everybody likes freedom, which requires the messiness and inefficiency of democracy. Coppola wants us to root for Cesar because he is vaguely high-minded, but letting Cesar have his way on everything is pretty disrespectful of Cesar’s fellow citizens.

Third, with one exception, the characters are cartoonish, like they’ve been pulled from a Batman movie. As a result, we don’t care about them. For example, there’s never been an actress better equipped to play a dangerous, sexy conniver than Aubrey Plaza; but here, Plaza only gets to act like a comic strip version of a dangerous, sexy conniver. Clodio is a silly cross between a Bond villain and Dr. Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (and Shia LaBeouf ‘s eye makeup sometimes makes him resemble TV character actor Anthony Zerbe). Cesar himself toggles between smug and tortured with little texture.

Finally, the story is often incomprehensible.

This all makes for a wretched movie-viewing experience. 

There are a few bright spots. Nathalie Emmanuel seems to be acting in a different movie than the rest of the cast, and imbues her Julia with life force, charisma and genuine feelings. Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck themselves are back in very small parts. Dustin Hoffman sparkles as a big city fixer. Jon Voight plays a doddering financier with the dulled eyes and speaking mannerism of Donald Trump – very funny. And what about the name of Aubrey Plaza’s character – Wow Platinum? What would her stripper name be?

It pains me to pan a Coppola movie. Casablanca remains my favorite all-time movie, but The Godfather Part II is probably my #2. Godfather II, along with The Godfather, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now! are films that have impacted me deeply. That being said, as fond of Coppola as I am, and even reverential, I haven’t been enraptured by his post-1979 body of work.

In the first 20 minutes of Megalopolis, I resolved that I didn’t care about any aspect of the film and was going to walk out, but somehow stayed for the entire two hours, eighteen minutes, You don’t need to.  

TOKYO COWBOY: he came, he saw, he changed

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Photo caption: Goya Robles and Arata Iura in TOKYO COWBOY. Courtesy of Salaryman.

The charming dramedy Tokyo Cowboy centers on a Japanese corporate turnaround artist, Hideki (Arata Iura). Confident that he has the secret sauce to recharge any stagnant brand, he’s got a slick pitch deck (with a snapshot from his own childhood), and he’s engaged to the corporate vice-president he reports to. His company is about to liquidate a money-hemorrhaging cattle ranch in Montana, when he parachutes in for a quick fix. His Japanese beef consultant goes hilariously native, and Hideki, a smart guy, immediately sees that his idea for a quick fix was mistaken. Now unsettled and off the grid in an alien culture, Hideki recalibrates his values and his life goals.

Arata Iura’s performance is exceptional, especially since the character of Hideki is a restrained man from a very reserved culture, a cypher who is dramatically changing internally. Ayako Fujitani is very good a Hideki’s fiancé/boss Keiko. Robin Weigert (Calamity Jane in Deadwood) is excellent as the ranch manager. Jun Kunimura (222 IMDb credits) is hilarious as Hideki’s cattle expert.

Arata Iura and Ayako Fujitani in TOKYO COWBOY. Courtesy of Salaryman.

It’s the first narrative feature for director Marc Marriott, who, with cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiménez, creates a Big Sky setting that could reset any of us in need of self-discovery. Some directors would have ruined this story by making the fish-out-water comedy too broad or the self-discovery too self-important, but Marriott strikes the perfect tone. The screenplay was co-written by Ayako Fujitani (who plays Keiko)) and Dave Boyle.

I screened Tokyo Cowboy for the SLO Film Fest, where it won the jury award for Best Narrative Feature. Tokyo Cowboy opens on September 28 at the Lark in Larkspur and on October 25 at the Palm in San Luis Obispo.

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES: prodded out of his funk

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In Nathan Silver’s comedy Between the Temples:, Jason Schwartzman plays a cantor whose wife’s death the year before has plunged him into despair; he is so paralyzed by depression, he has even lost his ability to sing. He has a chance meeting with his childhood music teacher (Carol Kane), now a retired widow.

Despite her age and his resistance, she insists on joining the bat mitzvah class he teaches at the temple. She’s a force of nature and may have enough gusto to overcome his angst. As their friendship evolves, will it bring him out of his funk?

Between the Temples is co-written by C. Mason Wells and director Nathan Silver. There are plenty of chuckles arising from Schwartzman’s character trying to neutralize his former teacher’s tsunami of will. And there are LOL moments from Madeleine Weinstein’s hilarious turn as as the rabbi’s lovelorn daughter Gabby.

Kane is excellent, and so is Dolly De Leon, who stole Triangle of Sadness, sparkles as a relentlessly determined Jewish mother. The prolific comedy writer Robert Smigel appears as the rabbi.

I screened Between the Temples for this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival; Between the Temples opens in Northern California theaters this weekend.

DIDI: learning to get out of his own way

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Photo caption: Izaac Wang in DÌDI. Courtesy of Focus Features/Talking Fish Pictures LLC © 2024 All Rights Reserved.

The coming of age dramedy Didi explores that moment of maximum awkwardness and intensity for boys – the summer before entering high school. Their universe is their peers, and their desperation to be accepted and to avoid embarrassment is overwhelming. At the same time, raging testosterone seems to be crowding out the ability to think.

Didi is set at that moment (2008?) when teenagers were migrating from Myspace to Facebook. Chris Wang (Izaak Wang) lives with his older sister, their mom and his dad’s elderly mother in the Silicon Valley suburb of Fremont; the dad is away on a tech job in Taiwan. The mom (Joan Chen) has her hands full running the household by herself, and her would-be career as a fine arts painter is just not happening.

There’s a lot of immaturity in our world, but little is as obnoxious as that of a 14-year-old boy. Chris plunges ahead brashly, with a social clumsiness that is remarkable even for a young teen male. .

He is fascinated by a girl, but his best friend accurately observes that “you have zero game“. Chris also identifies what he thinks is a short cut to popularity, as a skate board filmer, but without any of the requisite preparation. He doubles down on a series of postures. One of the funniest aspects of Didi is Chris’ gift for telling pathetically naked lies that will inevitably be exposed.

Not only do Chris’ poses fail to work, he self-isolates and self-humiliates. He is going to have to learn whether he can accept who he is and is not, whether his sister is his ally instead of his antagonist, and whether his mother has something to offer besides meal preparation.

Didi features another stunning performance by Joan Chen as a mom absolutely beaten down by household drudgery, her ungrateful kids, and relentless criticism from mother-in-law. Through most of the film, the character is an emotional pinata, but Chen finishes the story with moments of searing humanity.

Didi is the first narrative feature written and directed by documentarian Sean Wang, who was nominated for an Oscar last year for his short film Nai Ni and Wai Po. Wang brings us into a teen milieu with unsurpassed authenticity.

Note: As a Bay Area native, I was confused by the Wang family home being in Fremont, but Chris starting to attending Fremont High, which is twenty miles away in Sunnyvale; that’s a dumb-down for the non-Bay Area audience. Writer-director Sean Wang himself grew up Taiwanese-American in Fremont and attended Irvington High.

THE LITTLE THINGS: worth it for Denzel

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Photo caption: Denzel Washington in THE LITTLE THINGS. Courtesy of Warner Bro. Pictures.

I finally caught up with caught up with the neo-noir crime procedural The Little Things on Netflix, and it’s much better than I expected. I had skipped it until now because, upon its 2021 release, it disappointed critics who were eagerly awaiting this neo-noir with Oscar-winners Denzel Washington, Rami Malek and Jared Leto. Its Metacritic rating is a middling 54. True, it’s no David Fincher or Martin Scorsese movie (or even a John Dahl movie) but, compared to the other noirish crime procedurals that you could be streaming (and I watch scores of them), it’s pretty good.

Denzel plays Joe Deacon, who is a deputy sheriff in Kern County, not an exalted position in law enforcement. We learn that Deacon used to be a crack detective in Los Angeles County, but something happened that caused him to leave that department. A Kern County departmental errand takes him back to his old stomping grounds in LA, where some old-timers greet him warmly and some warily. There’s a murder that bears resemblance to an unsolved serial killer case that still obsesses Deacon and the young up-and-coming detective Jimmy (Rami Malek) invites him to help.

The two hash through clues, augmented by Deacon’s institutional memory and his hunches. After some wrong turns, the evidence hints at a primary suspect, Albert Sparma (Jared Leto). Yes, it’s a whodunit, but the real story is about how the earlier unsolved case broke Deacon emotionally, and whether this unsolved case will do the same to Jimmy. Late in the film, there is a reveal of the moment that devastated Deacon. I loved the ending, which is about whether Deacon can find a way to save Jimmy.

Denzel Washington elevates any material and that’s the case here. Nobody does a profoundly sad and very masculine man as well as Denzel. There’s a scene where he drops by and greets his ex-wife which is wrenching, all because of the heartbreak in his eyes. Plenty of actors can portray an emotionally tortured character in a showy performance (think Nic Cage), but Denzel, in an utterly contained performance, can make us understand how a man who is doing everything to conceal his pain, is really shattered to the core.

Malek, whom I have never warmed to, is as reptilian as usual, contrasting oddly with his character’s suburban poolside family.

Jared Leto in THE LITTLE THINGS. Courtesy of Warner Bro. Pictures.

Leto does creepy magnificently, and his Albert Sparma has an especially twisted menace about him.

The Little Things was written and directed by John Lee Hancock, who directs better movies that others write (The Rookie, Saving Mr. Banks, The Founder) than the ones he writes (The Alamo, The Blind Side, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil). The Little Things is a bit too long at 2:08.

Still, Denzel’s performance and the ending make The Little Things a worthwhile watch for fans of neo-noir and of crime procedurals. The Little Things is included with Netflix and Max subscriptions and rentable from Amazon, AppleTV, VUDU and YouTube.

HOW TO COME ALIVE WITH NORMAN MAILER: addicted to his own turmoil

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Photo caption: Norman Mailer in HOW TO COME ALIVE. Courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.

The superbly crafted biodoc How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer reveals a generational literary talent who managed to be immensely successful, all while addicted to turmoil of his own making.

Of course, How to Come Alive reminds us Mailer’s prodigious talent. This was a writer who published his first best seller, the definitive WW II novel, at age 25. He won a Pulitizer Prize for a novel he published at age 45 and another Pulitzer for an even more groundbreaking work at age 56. Yet that rare gift of being recognized in his own time as America’s greatest novelist wasn’t enough for Mailer.

Mailer both wondered at and crassly exploited his own celebrity. He picked public fights of all kinds whenever he could – the feuds of a public intellectual and the fisticuffs of a barroom bully. He drank immense quantites of alcohol and used uppers and downers simultaneously. His interior demons were so intense that, drunk and raging at a humiliation, he stabbed his wife. No wonder the film is taglined a cautionary tale.

Mailer went through six wives and produced nine children. This brilliantly sourced doc draws from interviews with Mailer’s sister and from at least six of his kids, who tell us about Mailer and about their mothers. And we hear lots about Mailer from Mailer himself, who seemingly never passed a microphone or a camera without discussing himself, his ideas and his behavior. “I am a narcissist…I love shocking people.”

While chronicling Mailer’s life more or less in chronological sequence, director Jeff Zimbalist and co-writer Victoria Marquette ingeniously structured How to Come Alive around Mailer’s own guiding principles. These topical chapters effectively introduce us to the paradoxical aspects of Mailer’s persona. Zimbalist and his editor Alannah Byrnes deliver one of the best edited films of any genre this year; they present their talking heads without lingering on any of them and keep us mesmerized with a firehose barrage of images and clips.

Mailer’s boorish and conceited behavior would be tiresome if not rooted in so many diverse aspects of his character. Sometimes he was genuine, throwing down on one of his intellectual principles. Sometimes he was posing to get attention. And sometimes, he was just out of control (as in wife-stabbing).

Certainly, his running for Mayor of New York, his organizing an anti-war march on the Pentagon, his running for Mayor again and his producing, directing and starring in a film about his own fantsy alter ego, were all vanity projects. If he were serious about his purported outcomes, he wouldn’t have put himself at the forefront.

Why is someone a serial provocateur and constantly oppositional? Is there pleasure in goading a reaction from others? Is it about defying conventions, discomfiting the comfortable? Is it about positioning himself as superior to others?

Mailer was one helluva piece of work, which How to Come Alive makes clear:

  • Mailer’s ambition in declaring, “I want to write the great novel of WW II” BEFORE he saw any combat, let alone wrote about it. Who does that?
  • The notorious “feminist debate” in which Mailer squared off against the leading feminist thinkers and leaders of his time. I didn’t expect the mutual respect between Mailer and the feminists. It’s pretty funny, and there’s one howling moment at Mailer’s expense.
  • And then there’s the most stunning sequence in How to Come Alive – while filming Mailer’s self-indulgent art film Maidstone, a demented Rip Torn, in the ultimate method acting, decides that the story demands that he assassinate Mailer’s character; Torn then tries to kill Mailer (really kill him) with a hammer as the camera rolls, all in front of Mailer’s real life family. Torn’s visage is maniacal, and some serious drugs had to be involved here. The video is disturbing, as are the recollections of Mailer’s traumatized children.

Mailer was a person who, above all, rejected safety; that turned his life into a high wire act without a net, and, in How to Come Alive, Jeff Zimbalist unspools it into a thoughtful, entertaining and engrossing 100 minutes.

coming up on TV – Dennis Hopper and Robby Müller make things weird in THE AMERICAN FRIEND

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Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIEND

Dennis Hopper, in his Wild Man phase, brings electricity to the 1977 neo-noir The American Friend,  an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley’s Game.   Highsmith, of course, wrote the source material for Strangers on a Train along with a series of novels centered on the charming but amoral sociopath Tom Ripley; her gimlet-eyed view of human nature, was perfectly suited for noir. You can catch The American Friend on Turner Classic Movies on July 29.

German director Wim Wenders had yet to direct his art house Wings of Desire his American debut Hammett or his masterpiece Paris, Texas.  He had directed seven European features when he traveled to ask Highsmith in person for the filming rights to a Ripley story.

In The American Friend, Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz) is a craftsman who makes frames for paintings and dabbles in the shady world of art fraud, making antique-appearing frames for art forgeries.   Here, Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) entangles him in something far more consequential – a murder-for-hire.

As befits a neo-noir, Zimmermann finds himself amid a pack of underworld figures, all set to double-cross each other with lethal finality.  In very sly casting by Wenders, all the criminals are played by movie directors: Sam Fuller, Nick Ray, Peter Lilienthal, Daniel Schmid, Gérard Blain, Rudolf Schündler, Jean Eustache.  Nick Ray is especially dissolute-looking with his rakish eye-patch. Sam Fuller, in his mid-60s, insisted on performing his own stunt, with a camera attached to his body on a dramatic fall.

Bruno Ganz in THE AMERICAN FRIEND

As the murder scheme unfolds, there is a tense and thrilling set piece on a train, worthy of The Narrow Margin.  Other set pieces include a white-knuckle break-in and the ambush of an ambulance.

Here’s one singular sequence.  After a meeting with Ray, Hopper walks away from the camera along an elevated highway.  Then Hopper is shown, still on the highway, in long shot from what turns out to be Fuller’s apartment, where Fuller interrupts the filming of a skin flick to deny having a guy shot on the Paris Metro.  Then we see Hopper on an airplane, and then Ganz on a train.  Finally, Ganz returns to a seedy neighborhood by the docks.  It’s excellent story-telling –  at once economical and showy and ultra-noirish .

Dennis Hopper and Nick Ray in THE AMERICAN FRIEND

Cinematographer Robby Müller pioneered use of fluorescent lighting in The American Friend. The nighttime interiors have a queasy eeriness that match the story perfectly. Müller, who died in 2018, was endlessly groundbreaking. He made the vast spaces of the Texas Big Bend country iconic in Paris, Texas. He was also responsible for the one-way mirror effect in Paris, Texas’ pivotal peepshow scene. For better or worse, he jerked the handheld camera in Breaking the Waves, spawning a legion of lesser copycats. Müller gave a unique look to indie movies from Repo Man to Ghost Dog; The Way of the Samurai.

Dennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIEND

The American Friend was shot in 1977, in the midst of Dennis Hopper’s tumultuous drug abuse phase. He had just directed his notorious Lost Film The Last Movie and arrived in Europe from the Philippines set of Apocalypse Now!, where he was famously drug-addled and out of control. After getting Hopper’s substance abuse distilled down to only one or two drugs of choice, Wenders gave Hopper carte blanche to take chances in his performance, and The American Friend has the only movie Tom Ridley in a cowboy hat. It paid off in a brilliant scene in which Hopper lies on a pool table, snapping selfies with a Polaroid camera; it’s a brilliant imagining of a sociopath in solitary, with no one to manipulate. John Malkovich, Matt Damon and even Alain Delon have played some version of Tom Ripley. Hopper’s is as menacing as any Ripley, and – by a long shot – the most tormented. Wenders is interviewed on Hopper at the Criterion Collection.

The American Friend is not a great movie. Zimmermann is motivated by a grave health issue, but too much screen time is wasted on that element, causing the movie to drag in spots. Movie auctions come with built-in excitement, but The American Friend’s art auction is pretty ordinary. And, other than Fuller, Ray and Blain, the directors are not that good as actors.

Still, the unpredictability in the high-wire Dennis Hopper performance, the look of the film and the action set pieces warrant a look.

The American Friend will be aired by TCM on July 29th and can be streamed from Criterion, Amazon, AppleTV and Fandango.

Dennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIEND

WITHOUT GETTING KILLED OR CAUGHT: her soul and her heart

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Photo caption: Guy Clark holds his favorite photo of Susanna Clark in WITHOUT GETTING KILLED OR CAUGHT. Courtesy of Indie Rights.

The lyrical documentary Without Getting Killed or Caught is centered on the life of seminal singer-songwriter Guy Clark, a poetic giant of Americana and folk music. That would be enough grist for a fine doc, but Without Getting Killed or Caught also focuses on Clark’s wife, Susanna Clark, a talented painter (album covers for Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris) and songwriter herself (#1 hit I’ll Be Your San Antone Rose). What’s more, Guy’s best friend, the troubled songwriter Townes Van Zandt, and Susanna revered each other. Van Zandt periodically lived with the Clarks – that’s a lot of creativity in that house – and a lots of strong feelings.

Susanna Clark said it thus, “one is my soul and the other is my heart.”

The three held a salon in their Nashville home, and mentored the likes of Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle. You can the flavor of the salon in the 1976 documentary Heartworn Highways (AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube). It features Townes Van Zandt’s rendition of his Waitin’ Round to Die. (Susanna was also a muse for Rodney Crowell, who, after her death, wrote the angry song Life Without Susanna.)

Documentarians Tamara Saviano and Paul Whitfield, have unearthed a great story, primarily sourced by Susanna’s diaries; Sissy Spacek voices Susanna’s words. These were artsy folks so there are plenty of exquisite photos of the subjects, too. It all adds up to a beautiful film, spinning the story of these storytellers.

Guy and Susanna Clark in WITHOUT GETTING KILLED OR CAUGHT. Courtesy of Indie Rights.

I loved this movie, but I’m having trouble projecting its appeal to a general audience, because I am so emotionally engaged with the subject material. I’m guessing that the unusual web of relationships and the exploration of the creative process is universal enough for any audience, even if you’re not a fanboy like me.

The title comes from Guy’s song LA Freeway, a hit for Jerry Jeff Walker:

I can just get off of this L.A. freeway

Without gettin’ killed or caught

There is plenty for us Guy Clarkophiles:

  • the back story for Desperados Waiting for a Train;
  • the identity of LA Freeway’s Skinny Dennis;
  • Guy’s final return from touring, with the declaration “let’s recap”.

There’s also the story of Guy’s ashes; the final resolution is not explicit in the movie but you can figure it out; here’s the story.

Without Getting Killed or Caught had a very limited theatrical run in 2021, but it’s now available to stream from Amazon and YouTube.

DISCREET: untethered to home or sanity

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Jonny Mars in DISCREET photo courtesy of SFFILM
Photo caption: Jonny Mars in DISCREET. Courtesy of Uncork’d Entertainment.

The psychological drama Discreet is breathtakingly original. Within a revenge tale, writer-director Travis Mathews has braided threads of social criticism and political comment.  Most of all, Discreet is a compelling portrait of one damaged, very unwell guy and a thoughtful exploration of the alienating aspects of the current American zeitgeist.

Discreet is centered on Alex (Jonny Mars), who has drifted back through his Texas hometown to find that his childhood sexual abuser has re-surfaced.   Alex is untethered either to home or sanity.   Away from home for a long time, Alex has been roaming the country, oddly stopping to shoot videos of freeway traffic.   The most hateful alt-right talk radio plays incessantly from the radio of his van.  And, in a creepy juxtaposition, he’s obsessed with a New Agey YouTube publisher (the comic Atsuko Okatsuka).

Alex sets out to find and confront his abuser (Bob Swaffer), and Discreet takes us on a moody and intense journey, filled with unexpected – and even flabbergasting – moments.  Only the ultimate vengeance seems inevitable – and even that act is handled with surprising subtlety.  The catharsis is intentionally understated, and there is none of the customary splatter.

Swaffer’s physicality, along with his character’s condition, makes him a monster unlike anything I’ve seen in a movie before – a unique blend of the bone-chilling and the vulnerable.

Discreet is only 80 minutes long; keeping it short was a great choice by Mathews, allowing the film to succeed with a deliberate, but never plodding, pace.  We’re continually wondering what Alex is going to do next, and the editing by Mathews and Don Swaynos keeps the audience on alert.  Cinematographer Drew Xanthopoulos makes effective use of the static long shot and gives Discreet a singular look.  The idiosyncratic sound design, with its droning and its use of ambient noises, sets the mood.  It’s an effective package – and an impressive calling card for Travis Mathews.

Bob Swaffar (left) and Jonny Mars in DISCREET photo courtesy of m-appeal World Sales
Bob Swaffar (left) and Jonny Mars in DISCREET. Courtesy of Uncork’d Entertainment.

While he’s in town, Alex is on the lookout for secret – and sometimes very kinky – sex with other men.  It’s a comment on the repression in Flyover American culture that drives gay sexual expression underground. And furtiveness can make anything seem seamy.  Indeed, the movie’s title comes from the Craiglist euphemism for anonymous sexual hookups.

One critic referred to Discreet as “Travis Mathews’ latest queer experiment”.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s far too narrow a label.   True, Discreet definitely comes from the point of view of a gay filmmaker, and it addresses the repression of gay sexual expression. But this is a film, with its broader focus on alienation, that is important for and accessible to every adult audience.

Mathews previously collaborated with James Franco on Interior. Leather Bar., which is nothing at all like Discreet.   Interior. Leather Bar. is talky and centered on artistic process with a hint of sensationalism.  Discreet more resembles an experimental film such as Upstream Color.  Come to think of it, Discreet has more of the feel of a budget indie (and less languorous) version of Antonioni‘s The Passenger.

Jonny Mars is very effective as Alex, a character who is usually stone-faced, but whose intensity sometimes takes him completely off the rails.  In her one speaking scene as Alex’s mom, Joy Cunningham’s stuttering affect gives us a glimpse into both her past parental unreliability and her current clinging to sobriety by her fingernails.

But the heart of Discreet is Alex and his unpredictable path.  To what degree has Alex’s madness been formed by the childhood abuse?  To what extent has he been deranged by absorbing random and unhealthy bits of American popular culture?  Stylistically, Discreet is a near-masterpiece, and audiences that embrace the discomfort of the story will be rewarded with a satisfying, ever-surprising experience.

I screened Discreet and interviewed director Travis Mathews for the 2017 SFFILM. Discreet can be streamed on Amazon (included with Prime,) AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.

MEDITERRANEAN FEVER: the depressed writer and the crook

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Amer Hlehel and Ashraf Farah in Maha Haj’s MEDITERRANEAN FEVER. Courtesy of SFJFF.

In Mediterranean Fever, a depressive writer becomes friends with his shady neighbor and the two embark on a dark journey.

Waleed (Amer Hlehel) is an Arab Israeli living in Haifa, and he’s left his job as a bank clerk to write a novel. His wife’s job as a nurse supports them, and Waleed handles the laundry and schleps the kids to school. The novel is not going well because Waleed suffers from depression; he is so paralyzed with hopelessness that he wants to give up on the therapist that his wife sends him to.

Waleed initially disdains his new, less-educated neighbor Jalal (Ashraf Farah), who day drinks, smokes and, when Waleed is staring at his blank screen, listens to obnoxiously loud music. Jalal is a whiz at anything construction-related and is generous with Waleed’s family. But Waleed is finally drawn to Jalal’s sketchiness: Jalal owes well more than he can pay to some menacing gangsters, is comfortable with his own brutal means of informal debt collection, has a girlfriend on the side and knows his way around the underworld.

Waleed’s wallowing in despair is only brightened when he recognizes that Jalal is a crook (but for an especially morbid reason we learn later). And he sparkles when he finally figures out the cause of his young son’s gastrointestinal distress (the movie’s title is a play on this).

In her second feature, Israeli Arab writer-director Maha Haj has created two memorable guys, and the story of Mediterranean Fever is entirely character-driven. Much of the humor stems from the odd couple of Waleed and Jalal.

I don’t want to describe the tone of Mediterranean Fever, as I do many films, as “darkly funny” because its tone is singular. Haj has written a story about that unfunniest of topics, depression, and keeps us watching with subtle, observational humor.

After a slow burn, Mediterranean Fever pays off with a shocking twist, followed by an epilogue with a character’s hilarious reaction to learning a new neighbor’s occupation. And, yes, that scene is darkly hilarious.

Most of the Arab films we see from this part of the world are about people living in Palestine and occupied territories. In Mediterranean Fever, we glimpse into the day-to-day life of Israeli Arabs – and middle-class Israeli Arabs at that. We also see a Haifa where middle- and working-class families occupy apartments right across the road from a glorious beach; (In the US, these would all be converted into short-term vacation rentals.)

Mediterranean Fever won the Un Certain Regard screenplay prize at Cannes. I screened Mediterranean Fever for the SLO Film Fest; it’s playing at the 2024 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival – July 19 at the Vogue and July 31 at the Piedmont.