Costa loves his very low-light digital cinematography (very cool, Lois Patiño-esque) with actors being extremely still, until he faces a challenge in the second half with a jittery Ventura – either the actor or his priest character is now afflicted with Parkinson’s. Everyone in this movie is desperate, all zombie-walking through spaces, only VV has any passion left. Her confrontation with Ventura is intense, and her big backstory monologue takes place on the toilet.
Park’s followup to The Handmaiden doesn’t reach the same heights as Stoker, his other English-language movie, held back by the writing and the six hours of buttoned-up spies underplaying to survive. Big actory dialogue though – by episode three I decided I wasn’t buying any of it, but it’s pretty fun so I watched to the end. On the plus side, cool sets and costumes and cars. Park can really throw light exactly where he needs to, is excellent at photographing multi-level architecture. Michael Shannon has a wonderful laugh, but we maybe hear it once, given he’s playing a tormented Israeli agent on a convoluted revenge mission. Most importantly, Florence Pugh has the most openly expressive face of any actor right now, so what’s she doing in a spy movie? Well, it’s complicated, but she plays an actress hired by Shannon to get caught up with the Palestinian bombers so they can eventually be trapped or killed. Kidnappings and love letters and multiple fake relationships as she becomes a terrorist-in-training… as far as U being who U pretend to be, I wonder if Mother Night is out on blu-ray.
Pugh dances with Alexander Skarsgård:
Pugh practices with evil mastermind Khalil:
“At least it’s more lively than Possum,” I wrote in my notes, trying hard to look on the bright side after a long movie day. Molly is released from the psych ward and set up in an overheating apartment with a stain on the ceiling, crying in the vents, and a constant S.O.S. knocking sound in the walls. She keeps bugging the neighbors and the cops (complete with a rare use of body-strapped Pi-cam) trying to get to the bottom of the sound, afraid that somebody is in trouble. Bad use of birds – a precious birdie dies, a finch keeps slipping off a metal railing – some cool cranes appear in a video, at least. At the end, she’s crazy AND she’s right, but I’m tired of playing “is this real? OMG is anything real” in these movies.
Paper-cutout people make out in a lovely owl forest. The man dreams of breaking past a line of police and storming the D.C. Capitol – this is set in Vietnam-era, but January 2021 is funny timing for such a sentiment. A burst of nudity, profanity and violence after they scale a fence and the man is impaled by a unicorn, and I was ready to write this off as low-rent edgelord animation, but the movie changes course dramatically – I got caught up in it, and gotta admit with its scale, ambition and budget, the animation gets the job done.
Lauren Grey is a globetrotting zoo agent, capturing mythical creatures (cryptids) and giving them nice captive zoo-bound lives, fighting off enemy agents who want the cryptids for private sale… the zoo’s real motives are questioned as its moneyed owner fucks a bigfoot in her castle tower, tables are turned, the traumatized woman from the beginning releases the most dangerous caged beasts, and all hell breaks loose.
A girl drowning while her neglectful parents fight inside reminds of Don’t Look Now, but Udo Kier appearing with a wormhole does not. Years later, the drowned girl’s twin sister is in college, drawings of wormholes covering her wall, decides to do herself in. The tough girl with the beret from Mayday was in this, according to imdb, so she appeared in two separate movies premiering the same day at Sundance where suicidal girls travel to fantasy realms filled with transformed people from their lives.
Back in the real-world-or-is-it?, Margaret (Young, starring in the movie she wrote/directed) visits her parents, still wasted and fighting, hangs out with some old friends. There’s lots of metaphysics in this, maybe aimed at Donnie Darko fans. By the time she’s walking down a Caligari-shaped, Argento-lit hallway towards demon Udo Kier, it all looked pretty cool but I wasn’t too interested anymore. She has to defeat three demons in a certain time, first her mom in a house of sand, doing that fantasy thing where every line is slow and portentous. Margaret trades her shoes for a glass of water, I think door #2 is her childhood home and door #3 is herself, then she banishes Udo and chills at home with a Panda Bear song.
It was a twitter post by director/star Kentucker Audley which first alerted me to the online nature of Sundance this year, both that he had a cool-sounding new movie, and that ordinary punters like myself could watch its premiere for a reasonable cost, so I felt I owed it to him to watch this… though at this point in the late afternoon, an overall Sundance skepticism had set in, and I’d lost my hopes that it would be great. Thankfully, it was great, or at least good enough to seem great after Mayday – a hundred times wackier than that movie, beautifully imaginative and very fun to watch.
A year-2035 dream auditor has to visit an offline old woman who still stores her dreams on analog tape, to calculate how much she owes in taxes based on the objects her subconscious summons – or how much her estate owes, since she passes away while he’s on the job. Her VHS dreams start bleeding into his own life, and are more pure than the auditor’s own dreams. This is because she knows that companies beam advertisements into dreams, and has developed a protective helmet as an ad-blocker.
The woman knows about the dream-ads because her son is in charge of the ad agency, and when he arrives after her death he determines that the auditor knows too much, and tries to burn him alive in mom’s pink house to destroy all evidence. Asleep in the flames, he bonds with a young dream-Bella on a small island, making this my second movie in a row about an island-bound dreamer needing to awaken to their dangerous real life. Scenes from earlier that felt randomly eccentric return as sense warnings. Despite his meaningless job working for the man, the auditor deserves happiness because he stops to save a pet turtle on his way out of the burning house.
Tyler Davis’s Vanity Fair review is good at noting what makes this movie special, while accidentally summarizing my own Sundance experience:
Like Ham On Rye, another recent fantastical low-budget film, Strawberry Mansion puts modern dread at the fore through a series of dynamic set pieces that reveal just how many obstacles are placed between us and our inner lives … The boundaries between our imagined lives and the ones we try to lead in the midst of never ending sales pitches has thinned to a sliver … It’s easy to mistake Strawberry Mansion for a simple parable about advertising and the federal government. But ultimately, it’s a strange film about art and its conditions … Increasingly, as we’re asked to look at more and more yet with less and less of our minds activated, all the watching becomes unbearable. Strawberry Mansion takes a wild swing at yanking its protagonist—and us—out of this predicament.
“Feels good to fall, you know? The further the better.” After a dream of skydiving, Grace Van Patten (The Meyerowitz Stories, daughter of the Master Ninja guy) is working a shit job at a nightmare wedding, then ends the day by putting her head in an oven, so I guess the rest is an Over the Garden Wall near-death fantasy with a Peter Pan wonderland feel. She’s recruited as a sniper by the other women on the island she falls onto, never being well advised on wtf is going on, as they’re constantly being attacked by men whose planes they steer into rocks and storms using deceptive radio practices (and the Wilco yankee-hotel-foxtrot clip).
“Maybe we should capture some instead of killing them all.”
“We’ve tried that, that was exhausting.”
The woman are actors she glimpsed at the wedding, from bride Mia Goth to bathroom attendant Juliette Lewis, now a solitary motorhead badass. Eventually there’s a music sequence with a troop of men, and Grace believing that her old life could be better if only she could return by escaping this island. A good looking movie, but the thing about taking place in a fantasy world where nothing makes sense is that nothing makes sense. The widescreen ratio means the watermark with my email address never obscured the action.
Mia and Grace go Moonlighting:
Feminist murder gang:
My first feature at Sundance was one of the ones with uncomfortable covid-pandemic resonances. But first, it’s the neighbors griping at Sebastian (played by the director’s brother) that his dog cries too loudly while he’s at work… then work telling him that he can’t bring the dog into the office. We never hear the dog at all, until it cries out one time then is dead and buried, represented by drawings. In general the movie is crisp b/w, the cameraperson setting up still frames but stubbornly refusing to use a tripod.
Some unquarantine behavior as Seb scarfs a sandwich left behind on the train. He can’t find work, stays with his mom, and now he’s shaven and tending an old man who’s on morphine, and I’m not sure how fast time is passing. He joins a co-op farmer’s market truck that flees from cops (illicit veggie delivery), later dances with a hot girl at his mom’s wedding, then they’re having a kid together… and then the near-apocalypse comes. Cool scene, out in the field and everyone who stands up passes out… illustrations of a meteorite hitting, and we’re told that due to atmospheric changes, nobody can lift their head more than a couple feet off the ground without wearing a diver’s helmet. “In less than a year we’ll go back to normal, god willing.” A short movie that feels both slow-paced and full of incident.
