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.
Photo caption: Dale Dickey in A LOVE SONG. Courtesy of San Luis Obispo Film Fest.
A Love Song is a welcome starring vehicle for the longtime character actress Dale Dickey, whose every good night and every bad night is etched into the lines on her face. Dickey plays Faye, whom we meet camping alone in her travel trailer in the remote high desert of Western Colorado.
After a decades-long marriage, Faye has been widowed for seven years, paralyzed by grief in the first two. Now she moves confidently around her solo campsite, displaying her serious outdoor skills and an impressive touch for fishing for crawdads.
It is revealed that Faye is waiting for someone. She has invited a high school friend, whom she hasn’t seen for over three decades, to re-connect. That friend is Lito (Wes Studi), who has also been widowed after a long marriage.
A Love Song wistfully explores loneliness and how grief can impact the ability to love again.
Dickey is on screen almost every moment, and she’s great. Dickey has a way of making even her supporting performances unforgettable. She broke through as the scary meth matriarch in Winter’s Bone, and played the flinty bank teller in Hell and High Water.
Wes Studi and Dale Dickey in A LOVE SONG. Courtesy of Bleecker Street.
Studi recently received a deserved lifetime Oscar. His performances as very scary Native American warriors in Dances with Wolves and The Last of the Mohicans sparked a very impressive body of film work.
Dickey and Studi have said that each had their very first on-screen kiss in A Love Song.
A Love Song is the first feature for writer-director Max Waterman-Silver, who uses his debut to show off his native Western Colorado. I found his direction inconsistent, but he delivered two perfect single-shot scenes, both of very long duration, one when Lito and Faye are sitting with guitars, the other when the two are standing outside Faye’s trailer.
Faye is occasionally visited by four Native American brothers with their little sister as their spokeswoman. Waterman-Silver’s sense of comic timing in these scenes is flawless.
Both The Wife and I were periodically distracted by holes or inconsistencies in the screenplay. At one point, the dog inexplicably vanishes (fortunately temporarily). And there’s no way that someone with Faye’s seasoning would hike up a mountain without water, especially when she can’t make it back down by nightfall.
I admire filmmakers who make their films short enough (82 minutes) so they can pace them slowly. The Wife, less patient with slow burns, still thought that it ran long.
The performances by Dickey and Studi are reason enough to watch this bittersweet, gentle, heartfelt and funny film. I saw A Love Song at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival. It releases into theaters this weekend.
Photo caption: Dale Dickey in A LOVE SONG. Courtesy of San Luis Obispo Film Fest.
A Love Song is a welcome starring vehicle for the longtime character actress Dale Dickey, whose every good night and every bad night is etched into the lines on her face. Dickey plays Faye, whom we meet camping alone in her travel trailer in the remote high desert of Western Colorado.
After a decades-long marriage, Faye has been widowed for seven years, paralyzed by grief in the first two. Now she moves confidently around her solo campsite, displaying her serious outdoor skills and an impressive touch for fishing for crawdads.
It is revealed that Faye is waiting for someone. She has invited a high school friend, whom she hasn’t seen for over three decades, to re-connect. That friend is Lito (Wes Studi), who has also been widowed after a long marriage.
A Love Song wistfully explores loneliness and how grief can impact the ability to love again.
Dickey is on screen almost every moment, and she’s great. Dickey has a way of making even her supporting performances unforgettable. She broke through as the scary meth matriarch in Winter’s Bone, and played the flinty bank teller in Hell and High Water.
Studi recently received a deserved lifetime Oscar. His performances as very scary Native American warriors in Dances with Wolves and The Last of the Mohicans sparked a very impressive body of film work.
Dickey and Studi have said that each had their very first on-screen kiss in A Love Song.
A Love Song is the first feature for writer-director Max Waterman-Silver, who uses his debut to show off his native Western Colorado. I found his direction inconsistent, but he delivered two perfect single-shot scenes, both of very long duration, one when Lito and Faye are sitting with guitars, the other when the two are standing outside Faye’s trailer.
Faye is occasionally visited by four Native American brothers with their little sister as their spokeswoman. Waterman-Silver’s sense of comic timing in these scenes is flawless.
Both The Wife and I were periodically distracted by holes or inconsistencies in the screenplay. At one point, the dog inexplicably vanishes (fortunately temporarily). And there’s no way that someone with Faye’s seasoning would hike up a mountain without water, especially when she can’t make it back down by nightfall.
I admire filmmakers who make their films short enough (82 minutes) so they can pace them slowly. The Wife, less patient with slow burns, still thought that it ran long.
The performances by Dickey and Studi are reason enough to watch this bittersweet, gentle, heartfelt and funny film. I saw A Love Song at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival. It has been picked up for distribution by Bleecker Street, which plans a July 29 theatrical release.
Photo caption: Reika Kirishima and Hidetoshi Nishijima in DRIVE MY CAR. Courtesy of The Match Factory.
Drive My Car is director and co-writer Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s engrossing masterpiece about dealing with loss – and it’s the best movie of 2021. Layered with character-driven stories that could each justify their own movie, this is a mesmerizing film that builds into an exhilarating catharsis.
Drive My Car opens with an entrancing story about a teenage girl, told by a woman to her sexual partner. It turns out that the woman regularly tells stories to her husband during sex. advancing the plot after she climaxes, and the husband remembers and preserves the stories. She is Oto (Reika Kirishima), a television writer and showrunner. He is Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theater actor and director, known for his work in Beckett and Chekhov. He works on his line readings while driving his beloved 13-year-old red SAAB 900 turbo.
Yûsuke and Oto’s relationship is complicated. We later learn how complicated and why.
Forty or so minutes in, the movie’s opening titles appear, and it’s two years later. Yûsuke still has the SAAB, which he drives to Hiroshima for a two-month theater residency. He is to cast and direct a pan-Asian, multi-lingual production of Uncle Vanya. His Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Taiwanese-American cast speak the lines in their languages (one being Korean Sign Language), with the dialogue subtitled at performances.
To Yûsuke’s distress, he is required by by the Hiroshima theater to use their driver, the impassive tomboy Misaki (Tôko Miura). He resents this incursion into his vehicular sanctuary, but Misaki is now driving his SAAB, and she turns out to be diligent and expert.
During the weeks of rehearsal, more stories emerge and more of Yûsuke’s own story is revealed. When Yûsuke and Misaki have dinner at the home of the theater project’s organizer (Dae-Young Jin) and his deaf wife (Yoo-rim Park), they are surprised by a deeply personal revelation.
Masaki Okada and Hidetoshi Nishijima in DRIVE MY CAR. Courtesy of The Match Factory.
Yûsuke has cast a young actor, Koji (Masaki Okada), whom we know to be unreliable, but even Koji comes through with an impassioned, and apparently true, story of his own.
There’s an outdoor rehearsal scene between two actors (Sonya Yuan and Yoo-rim Park) that becomes magical.
Sonya Yuan and Yoo-rim Park in DRIVE MY CAR. Courtesy of The Match Factory.
Each component story is powerful, and Drive My Car becomes even more than the sum of its parts and builds in intensity.
Drive My Car is three hours long. While screening a movie, I take notes on an unlined notebook, and I see that I had scrawled, MESMERIZING ENGROSSING WHAT AM I WATCHING? The rest of the art house audience was as spellbound as I.
There is one soon-to-be-iconic shot in Drive My Car. After a cathartic scene, Misaki and Yûsuke drive into a reddish tunnel. Hamaguchi shows us two hands holding lit cigarettes out of the SAAB’s open sun roof. It’s an exhilarating and unforgettable shot, and once enough cinephiles see Drive My Car, it will become the instantly recognizable signature of Drive My Car.
Hidetoshi Nishijima and Tôko Miura in DRIVE MY CAR. Courtesy of The Match Factory.
Hidetoshi Nishijima (Yûsuke) and Tôko Miura (Misaki) are superb. Both characters are poker-faced, so the performances are exceptionally subtle.
I’m dismayed that Drive My Car is so difficult to find. It is currently playing in only three Bay Area theaters, in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco, plus a couple For Your Consideration screenings in San Rafael. It is currently the number one movie on many top ten lists, including mine and Barack Obama’s.
