Paloma Kwiatkowski in THE ISLAND BETWEEN THE TIDES. Courtesy of Cinequest.
The Island Between the Tides: In this supernatural thriller, a young girl wanders away from her parents on the isolated British Columbia coastline and returns seemingly the same. As a young woman, she disappears again, and this time returns 20 years later, but at the same age as when she left. She’s trying to figure out what has happened, as is the family who has been grieving her loss for twenty years, not to mention her son, who is now older than she is. They and the audience are bouncing between the unsettling possible explanations of delusion and disassociation, ghosts or a dimension where beings move to and may be trapped in different times.
The story is based on the play Mary Rose by Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie, which I’ve read that Hitchcock wanted to adapt, but couldn’t overcome studio suits finding it “too troubling”. Impressive feature debut for writer-directors Austin Andrews and Andrew Holmes.
Paloma Kwiatkowski is good as the protagonist, and she is ably supported by Donal Logue, Camille Sullivan and David Mazouz. I always enjoy Adam Beach, and here he gets to play a sunny, non-brooding role,
Cinequest hosts the world premiere as Cinequest’s opening night film. The Island Between the Tides is one of my Best of Cinequest.
David Allen White in Fabio D’Orta’s THE COMPLEX FORMS. Courtesy of Slamdance.
The visually striking atmospheric The Complex Forms is set in a centuries-old Italian villa, where Christian (David Allen White) and other down-on-their-luck middle-aged men sell their bodies for a period of days to be “possessed”. Possessed how? By who or by what? As the dread builds, Christian resolves to pry the answers from the secretive masters of the villa.
Director Fabio D’Orta unspools the story with remarkably crisp black-and-white cinematography, a brooding soundtrack and impeccable editing. In his astonishingly impressive filmmaking debut, D’Orta wrote, directed, shot and edited The Complex Form.
David Allen White is excellent as Christian, who begins resigned to endure whatever process that he has committed to, but becomes increasingly uneasy as his probing questions are deflected. So are Michael Venni as Christian’s talkative roommate Luh and Cesare Bonomelli as the impassive roommate simply called The Giant.
Like his countrymen Fellini and Leona, D’Orta has a gift for using faces to heighten interest and tell the story. He makes especially effective use of Bonomelli’s Mt. Rushmore-like countenance.
Slamdance is hosting the United States premiere of The Complex Forms. The Complex Forms is the my favorite among the dozen or so films I screened in covering this year’s Slamdance. The Complex Forms won Slamdance’s Honorable Mention for Narrative Feature.
Photo caption: Ralph Fiennes and Ana Taylor-Joy in THE MENU. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
The darkly funny horror film The Menu is a battle of wits set in absurd foodieism. This isn’t the kind of horror film with a lot of jump scares, although one sudden event shocks and disgusts the diners (though some think that it’s all part of the show). The Menu builds a sense of dread, a situation where it looks like survival is impossible.
Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) presides over a restaurant on its own island in the Pacific Northwest, with its own carefully curated gardens and aquaculture and a staff as cultish as The People’s Temple. The restaurant has 12 seats and each evening’s prix fixe goes for $1250.
Slowik seems like a self-important and officious kitchen tyrant, but unsettlingly high strung. That signals, and this is really not a significant spoiler, that he’s a balls out psycho intending to slaughter all his guests.
Creepily, it is revealed that tonight’s customers have been carefully selected by Slowik. The one exception is Margot (Ana Taylor-Joy), the last minute substitute date of Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) an obsequious celebrity chef groupie.
I’m a foodie myself; after all, I named my blog The Movie Gourmet. But, as much as I enjoy fine dining experiences and my own amateur cooking, I look askance on a $60 small plate of foam. The Menu is a wicked, The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes sendup of that kind of culinary silliness. Each of the courses of Chef Slowik’s meal (and each wine pairing) is its own very funny comment on food fads. The best is the “breadless bread”, which I guess is not a “deconstructed” dish, but an “unconstructed” one. The Tyler character gets funnier as he ignores the escalating horrors to laser in on the avant-garde flavor combinations.
The key to the story is that Margot is immune to pretension. Margot never buys into the extreme food scene, and she has street smarts, which equip her for an epic psychological showdown with Slowik.
Ana Taylor-Joy is one of my very favorite actors, endlessly watchable with as she projects her unique blend of intelligence and danger, I first discovered her in Thoroughbreds, and have enjoyed her in The Queen’s Gambit, Last Night in Soho and even the blah Amsterdam.
Ralph Fiennes is really cast perfectly as an ego monster with a telling insecurity or two. Hoult is a hoot, and Hong Chau, is a master of deadpan as Slowik’s henchwoman.
The Menu is only the fourth feature for veteran television director Mark Mylod (Game of Thrones, Succession). The screenplay – and it;s a damn good one – is by Seth Weiss and Will Tracy, who come out of The Onion. These guys, with Ana Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes, have made a pointedly acid and entertaining movie.
Daniel Kaluuya in NOPE. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Jordan Peele’s Nope is an exceptionally intelligent popcorn movie. I’m not a big horror/sci fi guy, and I loved it.
Siblings OJ and Emerald own their dad’s legacy ranch in a desolate SoCal valley (Nope was shot near Santa Clarita). Surreal, unexplained events take place, and they wonder if the happenings are supernatural or extraterrestrial (as in space aliens)?
At first, there are strange noises. Then sinister things happen with ordinary objects – a house key, a Jefferson head nickel and, eventually, a blue tarp. Finally, OJ connects the dots about a cloud in the sky and…we’re off on a thrill ride.
This is not an agricultural ranch – it houses horses that are trained for production of movies and video commercials. OJ is continuing his dad’s role as a professional movie horse trainer and wrangler.
OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) is a man of few words – very few words. He’s all business, and prefers horses to people. Uncomfortable with the Hollywood schmooze and hustle, he wonders why being a horse whisperer doesn’t seem to be enough to keep the business alive.
OTOH, his sister Emerald (a very funny Keke Palmer) is all about self-promotion, and sees her future success coming from showbiz or the internet, not from isolated, dusty horse corrals. She is bubbly, self-absorbed and has no boundaries.
On the other side of the valley, there’s another ranch, owned by a former child television star Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yuen), who runs a hokey, retro Old West theme park. (The cheesy, family theme park reminded me of San Jose’s Frontier Village in my youth.) In Jupe ‘s back story, there’s an incident from his childhood TV work that fits with one of Nope’s themes – the dangers of messing with natural phenomena.
Why would space aliens come to our planet – to explore, conquer, inhabit our bodies, study us or destroy us”? From 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still and 1953’s War of the Worlds, movies have posed the question, should we fight off the aliens or try to make friends? In a brilliantly pointed observation of our culture in 2022, Jordan Peele knows that many would ask – how can we monetize this?
Brandon Perea, Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer in NOPE. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
OJ and Emerald need high tech assistance, and they happen upon a Gen X geek working in a particularly reviled electronics store. Angel (a perfect Brandon Perea) greets them with a despairingly weary Thanks for shopping at Fry’s and invites himself along on their quest.
Nope begins with a WOW segment and ends with a Western-movie-meets-sci-fi horseback escape. Along the way, it explores the transformation of our economy and culture.
Daniel Kaluuya is a charismatic enough presence that he can, like Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood, carry a feature film without saying much. Keke Palmer and Brandon Perea are very funny in essential roles. Yuen’s performance may be the most nuanced, with an insincere Hollywood slickness masking his feelings about a childhood trauma and a failing business. Michael Wincott is excellent as an old school cinematographer whose gravelly voice makes Sam Elliott sound like a soprano.
The title is from a hilariously appropriate mutterance of OJ’s. The obvious title Don’t Look Up was employed by Adam McKay just last year.
Here’s a hopeful thought. Will Jordan Peele bring young moviegoers to theaters for horror thrills and teach them to expect SMART movies?
Nope is now widely available to stream (and should be watched on the biggest screen available to you). It’s one of the Best Movies of 2022 – So Far.
Photo caption: Laura Galán in PIGGY. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
In the fresh and darkly hilarious Spanish horror movie Piggy, Sara (Laura Galán) is an overweight teenager cruelly teased by her peers. She works in her family’s butcher shop, which supplies her tormentors with a surfeit of unkind pork-related nicknames. Her affectionate but clueless dad and her brusque martinet of a mom aren’t much comfort.
One day, at the town swimming pool, mean girls sadistically traumatize her. Sara makes a shocking decision, and Piggy becomes a kind of Carrie meets Beauty and the Beast thrill ride as Sara is bounced along to the satisfying conclusion.
Piggy is the first feature for writer-director Carlota Pereda, a veteran television director. It’s based on her award-winning 2018 short with the same Spanish title, Cerdita, and also staring Galán. Galán gets all the teen angst and impulsiveness just right and, in a piñata-like role, is a helluva good sport.
Horror films turn on whether the protagonist can survive, and, often, on whether the victims deserve their demise; Pereda has a lot of fun with both.
I screened Piggy for the Nashville Film Festival, where it was one of my Under the Radar picks. Piggy opens this week at the Alamo Drafthouse and then rolls out nationally. This movie is a hoot.
Technically, the Dutch thriller Borgman is a horror film, but it’s horror for adults, without the gore and with lots of wit. The shock doesn’t come from monsters unexpectedly lurching out of nowhere. The entertainment comes from the OMG moments of the “don’t ask the weird guy into your house!” and “don’t let the sinister guys watch your kids!” variety.
The setting is the architecturally striking and well-tended home of an affluent Dutch family and their Danish nanny. The husband is an aggro corporate schemer and a real scumbag – selfish, racist and chauvinistic, with the capacity for a violent rage. His wife Marina is repressed and neurotic. But they are highly functional until a homeless guy, Camiel Borgman, happens by, and circumstances compel them to put him up. Borgman feels entitled to more and more outrageous impositions – and soon it’s apparent that he’s even more sinister than he is obnoxious.
What if Charles Manson wasn’t a drug addled hoodlum, and his deranged charisma worked on the affluent mainstream? Borgman leads a crew of normal looking but murderous henchmen, who operate with the ruthless efficiency of Navy Seals. (Watch for the scar near the younger woman’s shoulder-blade.) Vaguely gifted with mind control, he can apparently create dreams by squatting naked and gargoyle-like above Marina while she slumbers with her husband. There is violence aplenty, but it tends to come through a bonk on the head or some poison in a glass.
Dark comedy stems from the matter-of-factness of the murders and body disposal (as in tossing corpses into a lake and then diving in for a relaxing swim). Every once in a while, there’s a hilariously sinister moment, like the supremely random appearance of some whippets that seem more like hellhounds.
BORGMAN
The acting is uniformly excellent, including the kids, but Jan Bijvoet as Borgman and Hadewych Minis as Marina are stellar.
Some questions are never answered (who are those three guys at the beginning and why are they hunting the homeless guys?). Is this a cult or aliens or what? The audience needs to accept some ambiguity. But the overall story arc is clear – no good is going to come of these people once they meet Camiel Borgman and his friends.
There is a subtext here: is this family so bourgeois that it deserves its fate? Fortunately, this subtext isn’t as in-your-face as in some recent self-loathing Eurocrap like Happy Days or Finsterworld, so it’s not at all off-putting. But Borgman can be enjoyed without going there at all.
Borgman is superbly written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam, a 62-year-old Dutch actor with only a handful of writing and directing credits.
I don’t often recommend a horror movie, but I’m all in on Borgman. Take it from me – you haven’t seen this movie before, and it’s endlessly entertaining. Borgman is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Hulu.
Technically, the Dutch thriller Borgman is a horror film, but it’s horror for adults, without the gore and with lots of wit. The shock doesn’t come from monsters unexpectedly lurching out of nowhere. The entertainment comes from the OMG moments of the “don’t ask the weird guy into your house!” and “don’t let the sinister guys watch your kids!” variety.
The setting is the architecturally striking and well-tended home of an affluent Dutch family and their Danish nanny. The husband is an aggro corporate schemer and a real scumbag – selfish, racist and chauvinistic, with the capacity for a violent rage. His wife Marina is repressed and neurotic. But they are highly functional until a homeless guy, Camiel Borgman, happens by, and circumstances compel them to put him up. Borgman feels entitled to more and more outrageous impositions – and soon it’s apparent that he’s even more sinister than he is obnoxious.
What if Charles Manson wasn’t a drug addled hoodlum, and his deranged charisma worked on the affluent mainstream? Borgman leads a crew of normal looking but murderous henchmen, who operate with the ruthless efficiency of Navy Seals. (Watch for the scar near the younger woman’s shoulder-blade.) Vaguely gifted with mind control, he can apparently create dreams by squatting naked and gargoyle-like above Marina while she slumbers with her husband. There is violence aplenty, but it tends to come through a bonk on the head or some poison in a glass.
Dark comedy stems from the matter-of-factness of the murders and body disposal (as in tossing corpses into a lake and then diving in for a relaxing swim). Every once in a while, there’s a hilariously sinister moment, like the supremely random appearance of some whippets that seem more like hellhounds.
BORGMAN
The acting is uniformly excellent, including the kids, but Jan Bijvoet as Borgman and Hadewych Minis as Marina are stellar.
Some questions are never answered (who are those three guys at the beginning and why are they hunting the homeless guys?). Is this a cult or aliens or what? The audience needs to accept some ambiguity. But the overall story arc is clear – no good is going to come of these people once they meet Camiel Borgman and his friends.
There is a subtext here: is this family so bourgeois that it deserves its fate? Fortunately, this subtext isn’t as in-your-face as in some recent self-loathing Eurocrap like Happy Days or Finsterworld, so it’s not at all off-putting. But Borgman can be enjoyed without going there at all.
Borgman is superbly written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam, a 62-year-old Dutch actor with only a handful of writing and directing credits.
I don’t often recommend a horror movie, but I’m all in on Borgman. Take it from me – you haven’t seen this movie before, and it’s endlessly entertaining. Borgman is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Hulu.
In the very satisfying horror film Unfriended, it’s the one-year anniversary of a teenage girl’s suicide, and her bullying peers convene via webcams on social media. But their computers are hijacked by an Unknown Force who starts wreaking revenge. The kids become annoyed, then worried and, finally, panicked for their lives.
Here’s something I had never seen before this 2015 film: the entire movie is compiled of the characters’ screenshots. The critic Christy Lemire says that “Unfriended is a gimmick with a ridiculous premise, but damned if it doesn’t work”, and she’s right. Writer Nelson Greaves and Director Levan Gabriadze came up with this device, and their originality pays off with a fun and effective movie.
And, just like all-on-screens Searching, it’s perfect for a time when we are living our lives on Zoom.
It’s on both my 2015 lists of I Hadn’t Seen This Before and Low Budget, High Quality Horror. Unfriended is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.
Zombieland brings several nice touches. Our young heroes (Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin – very early in their careers) band together with the a master zombie killer (Woody Harrelson). The zombie killer’s astonishing skills and unwholesome enthusiasm are very funny. After many close calls, the group finds shelter in Bill Murray’s LA mansion where Bill Murray (playing himself) is surviving by impersonating a zombie. The climax is a showdown in an amusement park where the zombies have cornered the heroes.
Zombieland is also on my list of Woody Harrelson’s Overlooked Gems. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
A Bucket of Blood is a campy, minor horror film from 1959, but it’s most interesting as window into beatnik culture. Turner Classic Movies will air A Bucket of Blood on May 13.
In 1959, the Beat Movement had been alive for a decade, but had just begun to be recognized by the mainstream culture. Beatniks, before the usage of that word, had been glimpsed in the 1950 classic noir D.O.A. and in 1957’s Roman Holiday. The word “beatnik”, usually a pejorative used by squares, was resisted by the Beat generation artists and thinkers. According to Wikipedia, the term was coined by Herb Caen in his San Francisco Chronicle column of April 2, 1958. Of course, the popular stereotype of a Beatnik stems from the character of Maynard G. Krebs (played by Bob Denver of later Gilligan fame) on TV’s Dobie Gillis (1959-63).
By 1959, beatnik consciousness was ripe for exploitation by low-budget movie wizard Roger Corman, who produced and directed A Bucket of Blood. The story is about a loser who covers a dead cat with plaster of Paris and is acclaimed as a talented sculptor. He embraces the hoax and starts hunting victims to cast into human “sculptures”; hence the horror and the bucket of blood.
“Beatnik” conjures up 20-somethings adorned in black turtleneck sweaters (and black leotards for women), berets, goatees and dark glasses; they’re in coffee houses snapping their fingers to applaud poetry and jazz. And they’re conversing in hip cat patter. Watch A Bucket of Blood and you’ll get a dose.
Can you dig it?
[Ubiquitous game show host Burt Convy, as a young actor, played Lou in A Bucket of Blood.]
