MOVIE REVIEWS!
Jordan Peele's 'US' Feels Like a Cerebral Thriller!
written by Donaldo Prescod
After seeing Jordan Peele’s sophomore film Us (the second in his series of social thrillers, with the promise of three more similarly-themed films to come), you may exit the theater with your head spinning, searching for answers. But I recommend that you allow yourself to sit with those thoughts for a few hours, or days, even. Then try to process this film the way you would while decoding the otherworldly, slightly askew films of Lynch, Kubrick, and Aronofsky, and it starts to feel like a cerebral thriller (a new term I hope I just coined). Think: abstract and not literal, moody, quirky and offbeat, a genre which is great for black filmmakers, as we hopefully graduate more and more to audiences accepting our kind of strange.
Before I dive into my thoughts, theories, and feels, I need to geek out for a moment and mention a different kind of tethering that I noted (as opposed to the kind described in the film). Elizabeth Moss: when I first heard about the plot for Us and saw her in the trailer, immediately I thought, “Wait! She was in a similar film a few years ago! Will the world of Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love, which tackled the same idea of dealing with your doppelgänger, intertwine with the world of Us, like the interconnectedness of a Stephen King novel?” That’s probably wishful thinking for us film nerds. Still, it’s interesting to see Moss in both of these films which address the subject of doubles, though McDowell took a simpler approach to literally facing oneself, whereas Peele expanded on this idea with great depth and integrated the element of horror.
I had a visceral reaction within the first ten minutes of the film. Having grown up in the Santa Cruz area, I could relate to frequent family trips to the boardwalk. I never wanted to get on that rickety-sounding ride The Big Dipper, which always seemed like it was made up of barely-held-together old wood, though it was probably safe. But I do miss the corn dogs, and mastering the art of ski ball like a Kung Fu prodigy. And one can never forget the boardwalk at night. For starters, it’s creepy, just like how it was portrayed in the movie. It is especially eerie when that layer of fog rolls in and coats the beach, creeping onto the lip of the boardwalk, thus beginning the terror soon to befall young Adelaide when she meets her doppelgänger.
This film is wrestling with many themes, but overcoming trauma and PTSD was always at the forefront of Lupita Nyong’os’ performance. All the acting was solid but this film has her mark all over it. At every turn you saw a wave of emotions wash over her face: fear and rage as she tried to suppress a deep, dark secret; trying to maintain her composure as a loving mother and wife while keeping that secret bottled up. Then there was her performance as her other self: creepy, raspy, unforgettable voice combined with the rigid movements of a homicidal maniac. The physical and emotional depth she displayed was layered, and it was exciting to see her pull from a whole basket of acting skills we’ve never seen her demonstrate before.
Now back to the trauma: an incident occurs ten minutes into the film which arrests a child’s development, giving rise to her end goal as an adult, when she and the rest of her ‘tethered’ family and friends surface to kill the undeserving. And as referenced several times in the film, Jeremiah 11:11 says:
Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.
After evil was brought upon, the tethered joined hands to complete the Hands Across America mission. Though a bit strange to behold, it represents one of the last, happy moments embedded in young Adelaide’s mind before her traumatic incident. And lastly, I have to give a huge shout out to Peele for taking a 90’s West Coast classic by the Luniz, slowing the beat down and making it creepy as fuck.
Us is definitely that kind of film with replay value, where a new mystery is discovered in each viewing so that as we gradually dissect more and more of it, lets us appreciate the unconventional, weirdo aspect of an instant cult classic.
Donaldo Prescod is an award winning filmmaker from Boston, Mass and currently based in Brooklyn. His film Black People Are Dangerous won Best Narrative Short at the Urban Film Festival and the Honorable Mention Award at the 10th Annual Bushwick Film Festival.
BlacKkKlansman / Directed by Spike Lee
Hollywood loves a good biopic, so when we see "based on a true story" in the opening credits we get comfy in our seats and know what to expect: liberties will be taken. Generally, we think “okay sure, based on some real shit but—— how much of this really happened?" In BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee's latest joint, we do more than wonder how much of this is true. This time, as a nation, we also self-reflect.
Brother Spike is not letting anyone off the hook. We don't get to escape for two and half hours and learn about the highs and lows of someone else's life far removed from our own. Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington, Denzel’s son) is the first black Colorado Springs police officer, known for working undercover to infiltrate a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan by using his white partner, Adam Driver’s Flip (“Chuck” in the memoir) as a surrogate. Flip, a Jewish man, is also dealing with the fact that he must pretend to hate his own kind in order to gather intel. Together, Driver and Washington provide Spike Lee with a way to broach the “how did we get here?” question from multiple angles.
The truth here is the most nonsensical you could imagine; the real Ron Stallworth did spend many a days talking to a young David Duke about his hatred for the blacks, the Jews, and his fear of the white race being browned out. Basically, it sounds even more realistic today.
Review continued below trailer:
Spike Lee is one of our best auteurs, and BlacKkKlansman is a much needed film and its no coincidence that it's released one year after Charlottesville. Today's America is not supposed to tolerate racism and bigotry, xenophobic behavior, or the celebration D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation." We say we're passed that but here we are putting up with all of it today. Since Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X, Bamboozled, When the Levees Broke, Summer of Sam, and pretty much in most of his films, brother Spike has been sounding the alarm to the racial tensions that continue to cripple our country, telling us to "Wake Up." Heck, those are the last lines said in School Daze, but what makes Lee’s work so hard-hitting this time around is that BlacKkKlansman does not shy away in showing how this through line, of a young David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan's mission to stoke the ires for a race war, is the same mindset that made its way to the White House.
I saw the movie Thursday because I couldn't wait for the typical Friday night opening. I am not exaggerating when I say everyone in the theater sat in silence during the closing credits asking ourselves: "How did we get here?" BlacKkKlansman is no doubt some "for real, for real shit.”
Once again, Spike Lee is telling us to "Wake Up."
-Donaldo Prescod
Sorry To Bother You / Directed by Boots Riley
Before I invite you into this review, I should mention my most obvious bias toward this film: last month marked the nine-year anniversary of when I saw Street Sweeper Social Club open up for Jane’s Addiction and Nine Inch Nails in concert, the summer after 7th grade. On that day, frontman Boots Riley told me that he was not fronting a band, rather he was inviting all of us in the audience into a social club. The headliners of the concert were well and fine, but on the way home our minds were on that man, the one with the military jacket and the hidden eyes. Today I saw Boots Riley’s inspired frenzy of a feature film debut, Sorry to Bother You, and one of the many things it made me feel was a regret that I had not been annually renewing my membership to his club.
Before I even popped my shoes off and sat in the almost-empty miniature theatre reserved for creative projects, I knew things would be good. In line, after seeing the manager of the AMC getting belittled by an angry guy who thought this man decided when Mission Impossible gets released, I gave him a warm smile and put my debit card on the table:
ME:
Sorry to Bother You.
MANAGER:
No, it’s fine, man.
ME (giggling, opening up a special place in my heart for this man):
Sorry to Bother You, 4:15.
MANAGERR:
I’ve seen worse, seriously.
ME:
Really? That guy was an asshole, I hope your day gets better.
MANAGER:
Yeah… so what are you seeing?
ME:
OMG :)! Sorry to Bother You!
MANAGER:
Oh, shit, I’m sorry man, here’s your ticket! Enjoy. Sorry to bother you.
And with that adorable interaction over and done with, I got ready for a world that I knew from Riley’s time with The Coup and SSSC would be, at least, provocative, and more importantly, inviting.
We meet Cassius Green (a puppy-eyed Lakeith Stanfield) at a job interview for RegalView, a telemarketing company that pushes encyclopedias in Oakland. Unemployed, Cassius is armed with a trophy celebrating his achievements at the local bank and a plaque honoring his year-long streak as Employee of the Month at a local restaurant. Unfortunately, the guy who could hire him worked at the bank from 2014-2016 and knows he’s full of shit. “You steal that?” he asks (here we go). On the contrary, Cassius had them custom-built for the interview. Of course, he’s hired.
From the beginning, we know that this man is a self-starter. And, like many self-starters, he can’t afford the rent. He lives in a garage attached to his uncle’s house that is so homey and messy-artist-chic that you wouldn’t know its a garage if the damn door didn’t keep opening up at the most inopportune moments. Every world he enters simply wants to fuck him over, but he is too creative for that— most of the time. Every card he’s handed leads to a gamble that might bankrupt him. Because of this, what Cassius thinks he wants evolves into a serious issue.
Throughout the movie, Cassius is haunted by this shadowy want, rising to the top, “making a difference,” and is more concerned with pursuing that than evaluating his actions on a case-by-case basis. This leads to issues with his best friend (Jermaine Fowler’s stone-faced straight-man Salvador), his girlfriend (Tessa Thompson's Detroit—- more on her later), and his family (Uncle Sergio, Terry Crews). By the middle of the film, the man’s only friend and vice is his “white voice,” David Cross. After all, he “sidesteps more than the fucking Temptations.”
Whiteness threatens Cassius’ identity as an African-American man throughout the movie. Salvador pokes him at the bar for being “mostly white,” all his higher-ups are white (with one notable exception), and the White Voice is a magical tool all the black men at work must use in order to sell any hardcovers. What begins as a joke and a party trick quickly becomes a distancing mechanism between Cassius and all of his friends, an indicator of how deeply buried his anxiety about this is. To rise up in this company, to help his Uncle pay the rent, to get a nice house, must he compromise his identity? Obviously, this is not a question that I have any business trying to answer. In fact, it is something Cassius himself has buried, but it is certainly something that Riley wants everyone in the audience, whether they immigrated from Mexico, China, or Ireland, to consider. White corporatism’s role as the engine that runs society has forced Cassius, and many others, to live a life running uphill.
This Oakland’s surreal elements are so grounded in serious truth about privilege in the U.S. that it might be more fair to call it magical realism. There is a ladder of the ridiculous: at first, Cassius’ sales calls actually place him in the room of his potential customers. Then, he gets a full glass of whiskey spilled on him in the VIP room at the club and he says, straight-faced, “that was some baller shit.” Then, we start seeing a TV show on which contestants volunteer to get the shit beat out of them… and so on. How far off is this from what we know? Even RegalView affiliate WorryFree is just a hop away from Amazon; abuse, picket-lines, and all.
What allows for such a successful combination of the real and the fantastic is the tightly constructed screenplay and visual world. Sorry to Bother You follows a guy whose nickname is Cash, and a ringing phone consistently populates the film’s atmosphere. [In fact, the only “plot hole” in the film might be that Cassius elects to buy a landline after receiving his promotion!] Production Designer Jason Kisvarday, known for his work with directing duo Daniels, colors expressively: WorryFree boss Steve Lift’s (Armie Hammer) spices up his house party with evil red light, Detroit’s art show is decked in noble blue light, and Cassius’ post-promotion pad is shark-tooth white.
The beats of the story are often predictable, but this is what allows us to sit with Cassius’ actions rather than waiting to see him change, as a more traditional story demands. Not only that, but we are asked to question why we shame him for the kind of hypocrisies that maybe we, certainly I, commit. At least twice, the camera backs away from Cash in disgust: when we first see his new apartment, when he sits lost after rapping for the entertainment of the guests at Lift’s party. The camera telegraphs emotion to us when it needs to, handling comedy, remorse, and violence with the maturity and patience that DP Doug Emmett showed us on even the weakest episodes of Room 104. Much of the buzz about this film has (deservedly) gone to its story, but there are several unforgettable images, including one of the first wides: a train running across the top of the frame and two gas pumps on Cassius’ sides create a border for the pathetic and hilarious moment during which he requests 42 cents in gas from the teller. The editing is particularly strong during Tessa Thompson’s masterful work, as she brings to life Detroit’s performance art piece, a melding of Motown movie The Last Dragon and Marina Abramović’s “Rhythm 0.” Detroit stands reciting dialogue from the film while everyone throws bullet casings, old cell phones, and balloons of sheep blood at her. Whenever the take cuts, it is to another brutal MCU of her body being violated. The violence in the film is as sure-handed as the comedy. Sometimes, it is happening at the same time.
Detroit’s stillness begs Cassius: don’t be a sheep, don’t cover me in your blood, be something as true as what you have repressed. The movie’s title is, of course, Cassius’ anxiety, and the triumph of the film comes as we realize that it is not his, but a much greater power’s fault that he is this way.
-Matt Gill
The Killing of a Sacred Deer / Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
I’d like to say I was ready for Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos’ follow-up to international breakthrough The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
I’d like to.
As I got comfortable and turned on the film, I was under the impression that I’d already been subjected to enough insane plot twists and psychological head games that have been so popular in recent films to know what this movie had in store.
Fortunately, Lanthimos’ style is a little more idiosyncratic, his characters a little deeper, than what I’d prepared for. A mother (Nicole Kidman), father (Colin Farrell) and two children (Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic) are dripping with guilt. A tormenter (Barry Keoghan) is wracked with grief, waiting to commit some of the most horrific forms of revenge I’ve ever witnessed on-screen. It wasn’t perfect, but as flawed as any person going through such torment might be.
The action is savage, and to make it even more terrifying, Thimios Bakatakis’ cinematography gives the world a dreamy and lingering stillness, slowly following the characters throughout the film like a specter. This, combined with Lanthimos’ trademark awkward and stilted direction of performance, makes the audience uncomfortable right from the start, locking us into watching characters in their own personal prisons for almost inappropriate amounts of time. We feel like voyeuristic perverts, but the film couldn’t care less and goes out of its way to build unsightly spectacles comfortably and ordinarily mundane tasks uncomfortably. Lanthimos plays with our perception and our ideology in shockingly simple ways.
Newcomer Keoghan, who had a good year between this and Dunkirk, delivers a performance on par with Farrell’s. The two are the stars of the show and play off each other amazingly well in the name of tension. Farrel’s Stephen tries to maintain a level of closeness with Martin out of guilt, but knows that if he gets too close it will ruin his and his family’s lives. Unfortunately, Martin gets so close that Stephen has no choice. In the beginning Martin is just seen as a dorky-outcast type, but Stephen’s secrecy only leads his wife Anna (Kidman) to dig deeper into their mentor-disciple relationship. As the investigation continues, the relationship strains so much that it reaches up and grabs hold of Stephen’s family. Martin is no dork, but a holder of many facades, and Sacred Deer escalates to such a point where seeing him on-screen is akin to Michael Myers in Halloween. Like Myers does, Martin cycles through each member of the family, pressing their buttons like a kid holding a god-like gameboy.
This movie is not for everyone. It bubbles and boils underneath the surface in such a curious way that it begs an unusual amount of patience to appreciate the payoff. Watching an idyllic everyday family implode in on itself is a difficult thing to watch, especially as it is executed by a child, a child who has no family and no regard for human suffering.
-Matt Gonzalez
3 Women / Directed by Robert Altman
Psychiatrists Glen O. Gabbard and Krin Gabbard believe 3 Women is the dream of one woman externalized as three characters; film scholar Frank Caso sees it as an exploration of personality disorder and schizophrenia; Altman himself gives a characteristically opaque offering, it is about “empty vessels in an empty landscape.” Though interpretations of the film are as varied as the director’s filmography itself, I believe that 3 Women is a lush and complex poem about a single subject: the strength it takes to reject the housewife-or-die narrative in order to form a modern feminine identity.
3 Women follows Shelley Duvall’s Millie and Sissy Spacek’s Pinky, two women, as they search for identity in the California desert. Our third woman lives on the periphery, painting murals of primal serpentine men in the midst of erotically violent acts. Her murals are painted on the bottom of two independently-owned local pools near Millie’s home, slowly drowning. Ever the jester, Altman has named her Willie, and we suggestively pan to one of her grotesque characters when her husband Edgar is caught on the way back from a rendezvous, or when he harasses Millie and Pinky to the point of serious crisis.
Willie offers up a ghostly presence throughout the film, but we know from the title card that we are meant to pay serious attention to her. There are demands placed on the viewer, as it is our conscious responsibility to piece together exactly why Willie does little more than listening, watching, and creating these days. As the film progresses, Millie and Pinky slowly creep towards similar isolations.
The Desert Hot Springs wides we see are as open as the awkward silences Millie fills at work with monologues (largely improvised by Duvall) about dating and fashion. There is little of Altman’s signature overlapping dialogue here, as much of the talking Millie does is to herself. The (male) doctor at the local Rehabilitation & Geriatrics center has treated Millie’s supervisor (female) like garbage and that has trickled down professionally and personally, branding Millie with an English Mustard letter that ensures none of her coworkers gift her with any socialization. This amplifies her disposition. A group of men at the Purple Sage Apartment where Millie and Pinky live have conditioned their one female friend into spitting vicious mockery (“There’s Thoroughly Modern Millie!”) at Millie whenever she exits her home to sit by the pool. Millie is constantly lying about going on dates (this gives her as much satisfaction as actually going on one) and kicks Pinky out of the house when a group of friends including two blind dates for the duo decide not to come over. What Millie feels is not lust, but a societally imposed benchmark that shakes her brain every time she feels she can’t reach it.
The film’s conclusion has been debated for decades, but I believe it to be quite clear: as the murals on the bottom of the pool have been constantly drowning, Willie gives birth to a baby that is deprived of oxygen. This baby, like the mythic figures she paints, was a boy, and it is his tragic death that gives Millie her individual permission to live free from the expectations and bullying that plagued much of her adult life. As soon as Millie pronounces the boy dead, she grows into the role of not a mother but a leader of the household, spending her days operating the bar Edgar used to run, Dodge City, while Pinky and Willie are secluded in a cottage out back. Though ignored for so long, the men and women at the Geriatrics facility and Purple Sage are surely talking about Millie Lammoreaux now, but she is certainly not listening.
-Matt Gill
It Comes at Night / Directed by Trey Edward Shults
Typically, Bushwick Film Fest prides itself in being fearless, and would never ever ever admit to getting scared, but, have you seen... It Comes at Night? Cause this film—Trey Edward Shults’ follow up to his highly successful indie debut, Krisha—has us suffering from all types of nightmares. The director takes a big concept (the apocalypse) but keeps the story (about a family) and the scale, micro. No doubt, this intimate A24 movie might cause you some temporary psychological damage and leave you feeling like the future ahead, is more backward than forwards, but dare we say that the future of filmmaking, with Shults in it, is a silver lining worth feeling hopeful about.
Hereditary / Directed by Ari Aster
An almost-shaking camera follows Angela Bullock’s Mrs. Johnson through her son’s wedding party, capturing her as she desperately tries to ignore everyone speaking to her while she searches for her son. Today— today might finally be the day the family curse is broken! Unfortunately, Ari Aster’s direction and longtime collaborator Pawel Pogorzelski’s cinematography tell us otherwise.
I remember this scene from The Strange Thing About the Johnsons as the first time I got a glimpse of Ari Aster’s singular talent for cognitively dissonant filmmaking. At first the scene seems poorly, or at least strangely, acted, then surreal, then as the circumstances reveal themselves: painfully realistic.
With the release of Hereditary, many audiences are discovering Aster for the first time, while others are noticing a newfound maturity in his filmmaking, pushing the saccharine surreality of shorts like Johnsons and Munchausen aside in order to explore a more traditional horror territory: grief. Instead of Toy Story production design and Scorsese to-the-camera monologues, there are grief counseling meetings, impending deadlines, and the sound of forks clinking against plates occupying the silence at the seemingly loveless dinner table.
The family members sitting around that dinner table are so at odds with one another, devoid of any physical or verbal affection, that it is obvious they truly love each other. Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, and Milly Shapiro are the Grahams, who sit in an awkward place following the death of Annie’s (Collette) estranged mother. She is not estranged in a traditional way, rather the relationship she had with her daughter was a boiling kettle of constant abuse and confusion. Nearly always in close proximity, a contemporary psychological estrangement. The ghost of Annie’s mother and brother’s mental illness sits in every frame of this film, particularly the first third, largely ignored by Annie outside of the grief counseling sessions.
This dissonance between psychological and sociological privilege is what makes up the strongest threads in the film. Annie and Steve (Byrne) live in a house that looks like Fallingwater and their children, (or, rather, Wolff’s Peter, who is forced to bring Charlie [Shapiro]), party in L.A. mansions that Lindsey Lohan would be proud to hang out in. Annie’s relationship with her mother allows her to create meaningful art, whereas those less fortunate would be left without her cultural capital and prestige. Even the first twist in the film, edited by Jennifer Lane and Lucian Johnston as if it were the roller coaster you are too afraid to ride, is made all the more impactful by the realization that someone who was not so well-off would not have gotten into this same mess. This is Hereditary at its best. Though the more supernatural set pieces are undeniably entertaining, on first viewing these ultra-realistic moments are more clearly imprinted by the hand of someone with an individual style and a deep commitment to investigating privilege itself.
C’est La Vie, Munchausen, Basically and the bulk of Hereditary are Aster’s quartet of crazy white people movies. Munchausen follows a white mother who is haunted by the idea of her perfect dorky white son going to college. C’est La Vie follows a homeless white man’s rambles until they evolve into a more obviously sophisticated analysis of what it means to dream and be ignored by everyone around you. Basically is about a beautiful white actress in L.A. that is willing to say anything to sound smart. Though race and class may not read as obvious parts of the films themselves, when you view them in context of his whole filmography, including Beau and The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (both starring a wonderful Billy Mayo) it becomes clearer. In Beau, Aster observes Mayo’s Beau as he is driven into a paranoid (but notably less violent than his white Aster peers) fit of isolation by his rude neighbors. If you have read this far and do not know what a Strange Thing About the Johnsons is about, I thank you, suggest you watch it, and read what Aster has said about race in the film.
The dioramas, the seances, and that long closeup make it obvious to me that Aster is obsessed with what I call the white nightmare: finally reaching for your privilege in an explicit way after a major loss, only to lose even more, and then somehow still become King.
-Matt Gill
WATCH TRAILER
Tangerine / Directed by Sean Baker
Today, I visit for the first time what many consider to be a modern classic.
Tangerine (2015) is a comedic drama about Sin-Dee, a transgender woman on a relentless quest for the prostitute who is sleeping with her boyfriend/pimp, Chester. Early in the film, we find Sin-dee talking in a dinky donut shop with Alexandra, the cushion when Sin-Dee gets volatile. This is a scene that sets up the rest of the film, the camera weaves in and out of the women against a luring tangerine sunset. Scenes like this show a little of what I loved most about the movie: the characters. We not only follow Sin-Dee and her hunt for the prostitute but oscillate back and forth between hers and other stories. This jumping back and forth sets up an expectation that these events will merge in a meaningful way, and they do. Everything is intentional here. Even the incessant use of the term bitch, in the beginning, is revealed to be purposeful rather than exploitation.
After interrogating a local about the whereabouts of her prostitute, Sin-Dee finally finds her. In the brothel where Chester’s new boo is staying, Sin-Dee storms in and grabs her by the pigtails, drags her out, and man-handles her throughout L.A. in search of Chester. Honestly, I found this scene to be quite disturbing -- just the thought of being coerced to run off at the whim of a total stranger frightens me. As hard as it was for me to watch, the prostitute herself seemed a bit cavalier about it. This is a narrative with a unique voice that challenged my preconceived notions about the population it depicts. I seldom come across films that star one transgender person, let alone two! That, however, is Sean Baker, a maverick who has employed minorities that are rarely given a voice elsewhere in film.
Oh, and I can not finish this review without mentioning “the thing:” Tangerine was shot on three iPhone 5s. The quality of the film was so superb that I couldn’t really tell. This movie proves that with a really compelling story there is no reason not to make your movie-- it’s waiting in your pocket.
-Melissa Romeo
WATCH TRAILER
First Reformed / Directed by Paul Schrader
It begins with a powder white church, so worthy it seems that we must approach it slowly, so big that we must look up at it. As the camera comes up to the church, we ascend, rising alongside the steeple— towards the heavens! Ethan Hawke’s Reverend Toller embodies this alongside us, doing exactly what the camera does in the first minute of the film over the course of the next 110. Writer/director Paul Schrader and the rest of the team bring us closer to Toller and his church than we would like to be to anything, stripping away all worth and value from this once magnificent thing.
First Reformed argues that once you get near enough to something so irreversibly damaged, something that was so magnificent from a distance, you have no choice but to turn back or ascend.
Reverend Toller starts out the film so worthless-feeling that he is incapable of noticing the obvious admiration that everyone around has for him. I shall not say how he ends the film. Former lover Esther and employer Pastor Jeffers, who work at the Megachurch down the road, the daily visitors of the historical church’s Souvenir Shop (don’t call it a museum), the eight people who attend mass on a regular basis… Toller lives his private life as if every single good thought his community has about him morphs itself into a malignant mole in his psyche. The damage is understandable: his wife left almost a year ago after their son died in the Iraq War, upholding a Toller-family tradition of service. Even if we were not told this outright, we might imagine it. Hawke’s vibrating stillness in every frame, the way wrinkles seem to carve their way onto his face over the course of every conversation he has— they tell us enough. Schrader’s given circumstance only add cherries.
Toller’s pain is admirable in that it is selfless— no one else’s sadness makes him feel better about his own. Not noticing that is part of what makes him suffer so deeply. Confidant Mary, played by Amanda Seyfried, is constantly picking at her fingers, tossing her glance around the room like any outside ears hearing her private thoughts could singlehandedly ruin her reputation. Mary does everything she can not to be that broken and honest, but it is in her very nature to be both of those things. So, she and Toller get close in their selfless agony. As Toller learns from weekly conversations with Mary’s husband Michael, a sharing of suffering (not a confession of them) is what ultimately leads to solace. Mary knows this too; as Toller falls deeper and deeper into emptiness, she begins to meet his every move with revelations of her own.
[He offers her husband conversation, she thinks to offer him tea. He insists he pack up some clutter in the house, she realizes it is not truly like her to take advantage of this help for too long. He commands that she not to come to the late-film consecration ceremony, she knows she must, and must privately.]
A relationship beginning in such a broken place is what fascinates me about this movie. Each of our two protagonists suffers a great deal in order to forgive themselves. In the ending Schrader and his team posit that maybe it was not suffering and selflessness after all that Toller and Mary needed, as the church suggests, but something much simpler: indulgence. Concentrated, boundless, and wrong.
As we get closer and closer to the white church, we see how ugly it can be: chipped paint on the roofing, squirrels lying dead from trying to hop through the barbed wire fence, gravestones toppled over. Throughout the movie, Toller himself grows grosser and grosser until we get so near that we are finally too close to him to pass judgment. The distance has closed completely in a way it can not in his vapid church. Nothing as inherently un-transcendental as his environment could account for what finally frees the Reverend: hands meeting, shoulders pressed up against necks— ascension.
-Matt Gill
Annihilation / Directed by Alex Garland
Annihilation is a mystifying science-fiction tale that undoubtedly leaves the audience puzzled and confused but simultaneously intrigued. Writer/director Alex Garland, best known for the captivating 2015 thriller Ex Machina, adapted Annihilation from the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, though Garland has stated that his adaptation is more like a “dream” based on the original source material rather than a faithful adaptation. The film stars Natalie Portman and is rounded out by a supporting cast that includes Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny, Benedict Wong and Oscar Isaac.
The film opens with an Earth-bound meteorite cruising through space. At the site of the meteorite’s impact - a lighthouse somewhere along the Atlantic coast - the very DNA of the landscape and environment begins to evolve. Co-opted and quarantined by the US Military, the “Shimmer,” as it is referred to, has been investigated multiple times by military expedition crews, zero of which have returned. One of those missing-in-action is the husband of a John Hopkins biologist, Lena (Natalie Portman). Upon her husband’s sudden return and his contraction of a foreign illness developed within the Shimmer, Lena is taken to the government-supervised Area X, where the Shimmer has been growing and expanding for the last three years.
Desperate to find a cure for her dying husband, Lena volunteers to join the next expedition into the heart of the Shimmer, joining a psychologist (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a physicist (Tessa Thompson), a paramedic (Gina Rodriguez) and a geologist (Tuva Notvotny), to round out the all-female squad. Unaware of what they’re walking into, the team sets off into the Shimmer, where months feel like days, navigation equipment is useless and any efforts at outside communication fail.
The Shimmer is home to hundreds of new genetically-diverse animal and plant species, some of which should be impossible, like an alligator/shark mutated crossbreed or vegetation that grows in the shape of the human body. What Lena and the team encounter as they progress further into the Shimmer tests the strength of their bodies, minds and everything they thought they knew about human existence.
Visually stunning, wonderfully acted and at times, downright mind-boggling, Annihilation offers the audience a sophisticated puzzle to solve, well aware that the solution to the puzzle will remain out of reach even after the film concludes.
-Written by Adrianna Redhair
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Lady Bird / Directed by Greta Gerwig
Lady Bird is Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut and her first solo writing credit. It’s a film very personal to Gerwig, set in her hometown and in the same year she would’ve been a senior in high school. It’s a story that feels authentically hers, containing shades of the same protagonist she played in the wonderful Frances Ha (2013) which she co-wrote with Noah Baumbach. The seventeen-year-old titular protagonist, played by Saoirse Ronan, has a lot in common with Gerwig. Both are from Sacramento, and both moved to New York for school.
Something about Lady Bird feels like a ticking time bomb. She’s willing to try just about anything, and has so much to learn at the start of the film, despite insisting that “the learning part of high school is over.” Lady Bird is a character with convictions, impulses and subtle empathy. This is a coming-of-age story and by the end, our hero demonstrates immense growth, fulfilling a lot of what her parents see in her and what we glimpse in passing early on in the movie.
Throughout, Lady Bird experiments with life and with people. She has brief flings with two boys, both of which fail for different reasons; ditches her best friend for someone cooler but ultimately less interesting; works in secret with her father to help secure financial aid to send her to college on the east coast, against her mother’s wishes. Although Lady desperately wishes to leave Sacramento for the majority of the film, by the end she finally accepts where she’s come from and who she is. It’s a kind of self-acceptance very common to this type of story but which never goes out of style.
There’s always something so appealing and comforting about coming-of-age stories, which typically follow young, misdirected characters on a quest through which they learn to accept themselves and the people around them. You have to embrace what’s behind you, to have any chance of moving forward. These characters, like Lady Bird, grow up just a little bit and begin to validate their own existence. As cheesy as it may sound, Lady Bird proves to us that it’s not about wanting to be somewhere else, do something else or even be someone else; it’s about being who you are. Gerwig reminds us of all those special moments in our own lives - the ones shared with others or only with oneself. A movie like this has such mass appeal because everyone can recognize themselves in Lady Bird’s journey.
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I, Tonya / Directed by Craig Gillespie
I, Tonya is the true story of Tonya Harding’s tragic career as an Olympic ice skater. The film delves into not only her career, but her notorious personal life, which was full of domestic abuse from her mother, LaVona and husband, Jeff. The story cuts back and forth between in person interviews with Tonya, Jeff, LaVona, and other witnesses as we’re led up to the highly controversial attack on Nancy Kerrigan at the 1994 Olympics by an unknown assaulter. The characters are flawed and the subject matter is heavy, yet the film stays upbeat through its dark comedic tone, witty dialogue, and fast-paced edits.
Although Tonya Harding was infamous for being hot tempered and narcissistic, Margot Robbie plays her with respectability and depth. We’re able to understand her behavior, rather than judge it, and in the end we’re left with compassion for this deeply wounded person. The same goes for her husband Jeff, whose played by Sebastian Stan. We know his character is irreparably violent, but we also see a very kind-hearted man, who has absolutely no control when it comes to his anger. These two characters are trying to make things work, to piece things together, but it’s clear they’ve both been too hurt to ever have a real chance. The mother, LaVona, is quite the opposite. She’s ruthless, and inexplicably mean, and is played with 100% commitment by the incredibly talented actor, Allison Janney. Not once did it feel unbelievable or over the top, even though some of her actions were at times outrageous.
I, Tonya might not be the film of the year, or an artistic masterpiece, but overall we found it to be an engaging, and compelling narrative. It’s important that there are more stories told of passionate, fearless women, especially in this day in age.
-Amber Paulette, BFF
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Super Dark Times / Directed by Kevin Phillips
If you took the average news headline about #NonPresidential Trump and turned it into a motion picture, we’d call it SUPER DARK TIMES; apropos right? As it so happens we just caught a film on Netflix with exactly that same title and let us tell you, the setting may be different but the vibes are equally terrifying! The somewhat mystifying third act aside, Super Dark Times is full of rich details, beats and character moments; courtesy of the very confident hand of first-time helmer, Kevin Phillips.