Photo caption: Laure Calamy in THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. Courtesy of IFC Films.
The surprises just keep coming in The Origin of Evil, a family drama that morphs into a psychological thriller. Laure Calamy plays a blue collar woman in her forties who is finally ready to meet the father who has never been in her life. She finds a man (Jacques Weber) of immense wealth, who has had a stroke and is fighting his wife and (other) daughter’s attempts to take control of his estate in conservatorship. He takes to her, although the rest of the family is hostile, and we think we’re watching a dad-daughter reunification story. She tells a lie about her job, which is just the first domino in a series of revelations about who these people are, and how evil and/or unhealthy they may be.
It’s not long before we think we’re watching a story in which all the people are terrible; but then we see that, while all may be behaving very badly, some may be angry, some damaged, some unhinged, and at least one is evil. Perhaps the biggest reveal is about how long one character has known about another’s fraud. Two other big plot twists come at the end.
This is a fantastic and highly original story. Director Sébastien Marnier wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Fanny Burdino
Laure Calamy is brilliant as the protagonist, a shifting character whom we are always trying to figure out and to guess what she’s going to do next. The Origin of Evil is a dramatic showcase for Calamy, who is one of my favorite international comic actresses (Sibyl, My Donkey My Lover and I,My Best Part,Only the Animals).
Jacques Weber is excellent as the patriarch. The rest of the cast (Dominique Blanc, Doria Tillier, Suzanne Clément,Celeste Brunnquell, Veronique Ruggie) is solid.
The Origin of Evil can be streamed from Amazon and AppleTV.
Photo caption: Kim Min-hee and Song Seon-mi in THE WOMAN WHO RAN. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.
In The Woman Who Ran, even after a few years of marriage, Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee) has never been apart from her husband until he takes a business trip; she takes advantage of the opportunity to visit each of three old friends to catch up. In each of the three vignettes, Gam-Hee gets a tour of the friend’s house, sits for a meal and covers much the same ground in conversation. The audience settles in, and gleans a few nuggets about each of the women. It’s pretty low-key until the eruption of a final simmering confrontation.
Writer-director Hong Sang-soo cranks out little, intimate, clever films like Woody Allen did in his heyday and is kind of his own genre. As he demonstrates in Yourself and Yours, Claire’s Camera, Walk-up and The Woman Who Ran, Hong is a droll observer of human behavior. There’s usually a lot of drinking and eating in his films; there’s far less drinking than usual in The Woman Who Ran, but the gals do devour the food.
The acting is first-rate, especially Kim Min-hee, whom we also saw in Hong Sang-soo’s Claire’s Camera, You may remember her riveting performance in The Handmaiden.
I’m such a fan, I’ll watch any Hong-Sang-Soo movie. Even though The Woman Who Ran is only 77 minutes long, I won’t recommend it to a general audience because the payoff is not worth such slow burn. I do recommend that you sample Hong Sang-soo by watching his You, Yourself and Yours, which I tagged as “Buñuel meets Seinfeld”; you can find it as Yourself and Yours on AppleTV and YouTube.
The Woman Who Ran is available to stream from AppleTV and YouTube.
In the irresistible documentary Chasing Chasing Amy, filmmaker Sav Rodgers tells his own highly personal story of finding sanctuary in a romantic comedy, a movie that ultimately spurs a both a filmmaking career and his transition to trans man. Rodgers weaves in parallel tracks, the origin story of the 1997 movie Chasing Amy, and thoughtful discussion of how that film, after 25 years of cultural evolution, has aged. Chasing Chasing Amy seamlessly braids together the fictional love story in Chasing Amy with the stories of real life relationships, including his own.
Chasing Chasing Amy‘s writer-director Savannah Rodgers, grew up a bullied lesbian in small town Kansas, and found lesbian representation in an old DVD of Chasing Amy, which became a lifesaver. When Kevin Smith himself heard Rodgers’ TED Talk, he connected with Rodgers and supported her (and then his) filmmaking career. All this is contained in Chasing Chasing Amy along with some revelations.
The novelty of Chasing Amy is a straight man and a lesbian as inseparable soulmates, and we learn that Kevin Smith modeled this after his real life friends, his producer Scott Mosier and the screenwriter Guinevere Turner. Turner had written the lesbian coming of age film Go Fish, which was on the festival circuit along with Smith and Mosier’s Clerks; Turner later wrote the screenplays for American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page.
But the core of Chasing Amy’s narrative is a love affair sabotaged by the guy’s insecurities, mirroring Smith’s own less-than-two-year relationship with Joey Lauren Adams, who plays Alyssa, the main female character.
Rodgers meets Smith himself, who becomes a mentor, and we get current on-camera interviews with Smith, Adams and other principals. There’s a shoulder-to-shoulder joint interview with Smith and Adams, followed by a sobering solo interview with Adams. Along the way, Rodgers matures from a gushing fan girl to a grownup who recognizes the personal flaws that complicate other people’s relationships. Smith comes off well here, and if Rodgers seems too adoring of Smith in most of the film, just wait until her final interview with Joey Lauren Adams.
Chasing Amy was director Kevin Smith’s 1997 masterpiece, with a groundbreaking lesbian/bi-sexual leading lady; but, after 25 years of cultural evolution, some elements now seem stale and even embarrassing. The leading male character is Holden, played by Ben Affleck. His buddy and wingman is Banky, played by Jason Lee, and Banky (to Lee’s off camera discomfort) is unspeakably vulgar and homophobic, a whirlpool of toxic masculinity. But of course, Banky is there to highlight Holden’s comparative evolved tolerance and openness. As an exasperated Kevin Smith says, ‘Banky id the idiot“. But, were Smith to make the same movie today, he would certainly still make Banky offensive, but so much over-the-top offensive.
Some viewers saw in Chasing Amy a toxic male fantasy of a “the right” straight male being able to “convert” a lesbian to heterosexuality. But Alyssa is a bisexual character, as is explicitly depicted in the movie when her lesbian friends react to her fling with Holden. She’s just a bisexual who is more than he is emotionally able to handle.
The story of Sav Rodgers winds from Kansas and the TedTalk, through her long relationship and now marriage, and final, the transitioning into a he/him trans man. Rodgers grows from a naïf into a grown ass man, albeit one that is still earnest, sweet and wears his emotions on his sleeve.
That Rodgers tells such a highly personal story along with the origin story of Chasing Amy and subsequent film and cultural criticism is impressive and ever watchable. I screened Chasing Chasing Amy for the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival where it led my Best of the SLO Film Fest. I’ll let you know when it’s available to stream.
Photo caption: Jessie Buckley in WICKED LITTLE LETTERS. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Jessie Buckley sparkles in the comedy Wicked Little Letters, about a contretemps between English neighbors that erupted into scandal. It’s 1920, and, though although no longer technically in the Victorian (or even Edwardian ) Period, Victorian social mores prevailed, and the stuffiness, repression and classism make easy targets for Wicked Little Letters.
Buckley plays Rose, a vibrant single mom who may or may not be a war widow. Foul-mouthed and a joyous carouser, Rose is decidedly tot adhering to the social and sexual mores of the time. Her ultrareligious and ridiculously proper neighbor Edith, (Olivia Colman) on the other hand, could be a poster girl for devout virginity; Edith lives under the tyranny of her father Edward (Timothy Spall), a bullying, racist, patriarchal prig.
The two women start out friendly, but inevitably fall out. Edith is shocked to received a series of profane, obscene and vituperative letters. Edward brings in the police, and soon Rose is on trial for sending the letters, although she denies it. What will happen to Rose? Who really sent the poison pen letters? Wicked Little Letters‘ story closely follows a true story, which you can read about if you Google “Littlehamption Letters Scandal“.
Here’s the most interesting aspect of Wicked Little Letters. We are used to watching people who are sexually and/or socially repressed acting out perversely (see the TV preacher or right wing politician scandal du jour). But here, we have someone who is so angry about BEING repressed, that the perverse behavior comes out of her rage.
This really isn’t much of whodunit, because the authorities, blinded by their own stupidity and classism, and ignorant of forensic tools like handwriting analysis (not to mention the scientific method), keep missing the obvious solution. A fictional young female cop (Anjana Vasan) is the stand-in for the 21st century audience and can see what her superiors miss. Once it’s revealed who is really sending the letters, Wicked Little Letters finishes a little too slowly.
But we get to enjoy a charismatic performance by Jessie Buckley, deploying a deliciously crooked grin as she brings a devil-may-care woman to life. Buckley is so good as troubled characters (Beast, Wild Rose, The Lost Daughter, Women Talking), and it’s great to see her letting loose as a fun-loving character.
Olivia Colman, of course, is superb as Edith, a woman who is not nealy as one-dimensional as she first appears. The great actor Timothy Spall (who has lost a reported 100 pounds over the past several years) has fun with a character who has no nuance whatsoever, unless you count varying shades of bigotry and entitlement.
I caught Wicked Little Letters very late in its its theatrical run and I expect that it will be leaving theaters soon; I’ll let you know when it is available to watch at home.
Every year, Turner Classic Movies packs this weekend full of war movies. Here are my recommendations of the very best:
Men in War (Friday, May 24): An infantry lieutenant (Robert Ryan) must lead his platoon out of a desperate situation. He encounters a cynical and insubordinate sergeant (Aldo Ray) who is loyally driving a jeep with his PTSD-addled colonel (Robert Keith). In conflict with each other, they must navigate through enemy units to safety. Director Anthony Mann is known for exploring the psychology of edgy characters, and that’s the case with Men in War.
The Steel Helmet (Friday, May 24): This is a gritty classic by the great writer-director Samuel Fuller, a WWII combat vet who brooked no sentimentality about war. Gene Evans, a favorite of the two Sams (Fuller and Peckinpah), is especially good as the sergeant. American war movies of the period tended toward to idealize the war effort, but Fuller relished making war movies with no “recruitment flavor”. Although the Korean War had only been going on for a few months when Fuller wrote the screenplay, he was able to capture the feelings of futility that later pervaded American attitudes about the Korean War.
Merrill’s Marauders (Saturday, May 25): This is another Samuel Fuller film, this one telling the true story of a seemingly impossible American mission against Japanese forces in Burma.
Mister Roberts (Sunday, May 26): Henry Fonda is at his most appealing in this subversive WW II comedy. Fonda gets to play off of James Cagney, William Powell and Jack Lemmon.
The Best Years of Our Lives (Sunday, May 26): This is the best film on this list and one of my favorite movies from any genre. The Best Years of Our Lives is about people yearning to Get On With It after their lives were consumed by an upheaval they all shared. This is an exceptionally well-crafted, contemporary snapshot of post WW II American society adapting to the challenges of peacetime. It justifiably won seven Oscars. And it’s still a great and moving film. When Frederic March, immediately back from overseas, sneaks back into his apartment where Myrna Loy is washing the dishes, I dare you not to shed tears at her reaction.
The Rack (Monday, May 27): In this overlooked Korean War film, a returning US army captain (Paul Newman) is court-martialed for collaborating with the enemy while a POW. He was tortured, and The Rack explores what can be realistically expected of a prisoner under duress. It’s a pretty good movie, and Wendell Corey, Edmond O’Brien, Walter Pidgeon, Lee Marvin and Cloris Leachman co-star.
The Bridge on River Kwai (Monday, May 27): Director David Lean is known for epics, and this is his most successful epic. It’s the stirring story of British troops forced into slave labor at a cruel Japanese POW camp. The British commander (Alec Guinness, in perhaps his most acclaimed performance) must walk the tightrope between giving his men enough morale to survive and helping the enemy’s war effort. He has his match in the prison camp commander (Sessue Hayakawa), and these two men from conflicting values systems engage in a duel of wits – for life and death stakes. William Holden plays an American soldier/scoundrel forced into an assignment that he really, really doesn’t want. There’s also the stirringly unforgettable whistling version of the Colonel Bogey March. The climax remains one of the greatest hold-your-breath action sequences in cinema, even compared to all the CGI-aided ones in the 67 years since it was filmed.
Harold Russell, Dana Andrews and Frederic Mrch in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES
Photo caption: Maya Hawke in WILDCAT. Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories.
Wildcat braids together the sad life of writer Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) with several of her iconoclastic stories. Director Ethan Hawke starts Wildcat with a faux trailer for a lurid movie based on O’Connor’s short story The Comforts of Home. Then he depicts O’Connor thinking up one of her stories and then suddenly shifts from O’Connor’s real life by bringing an O’Connor story to life. Maya Hawke and Laura Linney, who also plays Flannery’s mother Regina, play various fictional characters in the O’Connor stories.
O’Connor herself described writing, not as an escape, but as a “plunge into reality”, a reality many would prefer not to face.
Flannery was trapped in a cultural wasteland where no one understood her work (Milledgeville, Georgia), trapped in the body of an invalid (lupus) and trapped in profound loneliness. Flannery took herself and everything so seriously and made no concession to the social niceties. At a cocktail party, Flannery could be an epic Debbie Downer. Flannery’s mother (Laura Linney) – so often wrongheaded – is absolutely correct when she suggests, “you might want to consider being a little more friendly “.
Wildcat is a showcase for Maya Hawke’s chameleonic performance as Flannery and as several of O’Connor’s fictional characters. Laura Linney is brilliant, too, both as Flannery’s mother and as several characters in O’Connor short stories (and is unrecognizable in the first vignette).
Poor Liam Neeson – he’s a fine actor who has become so iconic a movie star that, when he appears here as an Irish priest, you can’t help crying, “Hey – that’s Liam Neeson”.
Here’s my bottom line on Wildcat. Ethan Hawke’s direction is imaginative. Maya Hawke’s and Laura Linney’s acting are superb. The core story is one of an unhappy and often unpleasant person. Wanna sign up for this?
We revel in the art produced by the anguished artist, but would not enjoy being in the company of said artist and her anguish. The best parts of Wildcat are the staging of O’Connor stories. The least enjoyable are the scenes with O’Connor herself.
Tasha Van Zandt’s AFTER ANTARCTICA. Photo courtesy of SFFILM.
The fine documentary After Antarctica follows ecological adventurer Will Steger on two polar expeditions – different poles and twenty-five years apart.
In 1989-90, Steger led the first non-mechanized expedition to cross continent of Antarctica (the LONG way – from one coast to the other). This was a grueling and risky endeavor. The international team needed to avoid terrifying crevasses; (check out the beginning of the trailer below.) The volatility of the weather was brutal. Steger noted, “Antarctica doesn’t want us here, and is making every effort to remind us”.
The team faced a crisis of supplies and exhaustion just 16 miles from the end of their 3700 mile journey. They knew that the earlier Antarctic explorer Robert F. Scott had died only 12 miles from a supply cache. Steger’s leadership, informed by zen discipline and sheer force of will, brought them through.
The Steger team’s achievement will not be matched – due to climate change, the 4000 square mile Larsen ice shelf that they traversed is no longer there.
Tasha Van Zandt’s AFTER ANTARCTICA. Photo courtesy of SFFILM.
A quarter of a century later, After Antarctica follows a 75-year-old Steger as he undertakes a solo expedition above the Arctic Circle – contemplating the effects of climate change and and his own mortality. In contrast with the global celebrity of the Antarctic expedition, the Arctic march is solitary.
Will Steger, who has survived both a lethal mountain climbing accident and cancer, has lived a life on the extreme. He is self-focused, crusty and open, without defensiveness, about own personal flaws.
The two polar journeys, the examination of climate change and Steger’s own life are told through the voice of Will Steger himself.
After Antarctica is the first feature for director Tasha Van Zandt. We see never-before-seen file footage of the Antarctic expedition. The Arctic cinematography by Van Zandt and DP Sebastian Zeck is extraordinary. Van Zandt has said that the icy ground and the grey sky of the Arctic hindered depth perception, making the piloting of drones for aerial photography especially difficult.
I screened After Antarctica for the 2021 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), where it won a jury award. It’s finally available to stream on Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.
Photo caption: Amy Winehouse in AMY. Courtesy of A24.
An Amy Winehouse movie (Back to Black) is coming out this weekend, but I’m not aware of any reason to go see it, when you can watch a great Amy Winehouse movie, an Oscar winner, at home. Amy, documentarian Asif Kapadia’s innovative biopic of the singer-songwriter, is heart-felt, engaging and features lots of the real Amy Winehouse.
In a brilliant directorial choice, Amy opens with a call phone video of a birthday party. It’s a typically rowdy bunch of 14 year-old girls, and, when they sing “Happy Birthday”, the song is taken over and finished spectacularly by one of the girls, who turns out to be the young Amy Winehouse. It shows us a regular girl in a moment of unaffected joy and friendship, but a girl with monstrous talent.
In fact ALL we see in Amy is footage of Amy. Her family and friends were devoted to home movies and cell phone video, resulting in a massive trove of candid video of Amy Winehouse and an especially rich palette for Kapadia.
We have a ringside seat for Amy’s artistic rise and her demise, fueled by bulimia and substance addiction. In a tragically startling sequence, her eyes signal the moment when her abuse of alcohol and pot gave way to crack and heroin.
We also see when she becomes the object of tabloid obsession. It’s hard enough for an addict to get clean, but it’s nigh impossible while being when harassed by the merciless paparazzi.
Amy makes us think about using a celebrity’s disease as a source of amusement – mocking the behaviorally unhealthy for our sport. Some people act like jerks because they are jerks – others because they are sick. Winehouse was cruelly painted as a brat, but she was really suffering through a spiral of despair.
The Amy Winehouse story is a tragic one, but Amy is very watchable because Amy herself was very funny and sharply witty. As maddening as it was for those who shared her journey, it was also fun, from all reports. Everyone who watches Amy will like Amy, making her fate all the more tragic.
Amy, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and is included in Max and Hulu subscriptions.
Photo caption: A scene from Tracey Arcabasso Smith’s RELATIVE. Courtesy of Gravitas.
Relative is filmmaker Tracey Arcabasso Smith’s reflective exploration of intergenerational sexual abuse in her own family. As Smith lovingly, but insistently, interviews her family members, she uncovers an epidemic of abuse in generation after generation. Relative becomes ever more powerful as Smith refuses to sensationalize, but stays centered on the strength and humanity of the women on camera. Finally, Relative takes us to how the cycle of abuse can be broken.
This is a brilliantly edited film (by Jeremy Stulberg, Ian Olds and Natasha Livia Motola) – first person testimonies are inter-cut with the home movies of a lively family – a family we now understand was stained with corrosive secrets.
Relative is the first feature for director Arcabasso Smith. (BTW the unadorned word Relative is a great title for this story.)
I screened Relative for the 2022 Nashville Film Festival. It’s now available to stream on Amazon (included with prime), AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
Photo caption: Kirsten Dunst in CIVIL WAR. Courtesy of A24.
Alex Garland’s unsettling thriller Civil War is a different movie than anyone expects.
An America in the near future is embroiled in a civil war, but it’s NOT sectarian violence along the Red State/Blue State axis that divides America today. Writer-director Garland never explicitly explains the cause of the war, but he leaves enough clues, especially when a blowhard, propagandist President (Nick Offerman) refers to his “third term”, which he must have seized unconstitutionally. A band of journalists are dispassionate about what the two sides are fighting about, but forecast that the President is about to be deposed like despots Nicolae Ceausescu and Muammar Ghaddafi.
We see the civil war through the eyes of the journalists, led by two veterans from Reuters, war photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and her writing partner Joel (Wagner Moura). They are joined by an old school New York Times political reporter, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a young free-lance photographer, Jessie (Cailee Spaenee of Priscilla), who idolizes Lee and is covering her very first conflict.
The four are on a quest for a journalistic holy grail, to secure what they will believe will be the very last interview with the President. They drive to DC from New York on a circuitous route, navigating through battle-torn upstate New York, western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia. Essentially, the plot of Civil War is their harrowing road trip through the war zone, moving from vignette to vignette, which range from terrifying to surreal.
Civil War‘s substantial impact comes from the depiction of the familiar in an unfamiliar setting. We are used to seeing the atrocities of insurgency wars, both in news reports and fictional stories. Accordingly, we may be inured to the horror of a mass grave of executed civilians – if it is in, say, Serbia or Sudan. The same is true of an encounter with a fighter with an assault weapon-bearing fighter who can kill you on a whim. Indeed, Civil War has much the same feel as movies like The Killing Fields, Salvador or Hotel Rwanda.
The shocking difference is these horrors are taking place in the old U S of A. (There’s a brief, jarring shot of a red, white and blue flag with only two stars.) At one point, Lee says that she has been sending home photos of other people’s civil conflicts as a warning to Americans – avoid this at all costs. Civil War is a message picture, and this is the message. Lee is used to witnessing nightmarish things and compartmentalizing them so she can go about her job amid the horrors. But seeing them in her home nation brings her anguish, which she is less and less able to contain.
The most surreal scene is when the journalists drive into a hamlet where life goes on as if there is no civil war, and an apathetic store clerk will only observe “from what we see on TV, it’s all for the best.”
Kirsten Dunst’s performance as Lee carries Civil War; she’s our moral center, a bad ass whose soul is crushed before our eyes.
Stephen McKinley Henderson, as usual, projects warmth, canniness and lived experience; he’s really a treasure. Cailee Spaenee is 26, but looks much younger (young enough to play a 14-year-old in Priscilla); unlike in Priscilla, her character in Civil War has a lot of agency, and she’s very good. Jesse Plemons (Dunst’s real life husband) is brilliant in a cameo as the random judge-and-jury soldier with an assault weapon.
Like many who had seen the trailer, I was expecting a much different movie – one I really didn’t want to experience. When I found that it was the creation of Alex Garland and had gotten some rave reviews, I decided to see it. But I put it off until I could go to the theater with my buddy Keith, who shares many of my sensibilities, for support.
As it turned out, Keith didn’t like Civil War, primarily because the source of the conflict is not explicitly explained, and the idea of a California-Texas alliance is so absurd. And, as a photographer himself, he was distracted by Jessie shooting with a film camera that she never reloads. Those criticisms, while reasonable, weren’t a problem for me.
This is only Garland’s fifth feature as a director, but he directed Ex Machina, my pick as the top film of 2014. Before that, Garland wrote 28 Days Later, which I would rate as the best and most thoughtful zombie movie of all time.
We’re used to rooting for one side or the other in a war movie, but Civil War is not about why a war is fought, it’s about the experience of civil war itself, and why it should be unthinkable.
