A doc about docs and their fallout. The women who were teens when The Staircase was made about their family feel doubly exploited when The Staircase 2 comes out… a star of Hoop Dreams was one of the few participants covered here to profit from the film’s receipts and merch… Bing Liu’s family therapy in Minding the Gap somewhat backfired… Capturing The Friedmans guy wants to escape the shadow of the movie. Sometimes we’re just catching up with a subject later (The Wolfpack). After each example, a small team of scolds points out that there is no way to ethically create or consume art.
Tag: 2020s
The Bikeriders (2023, Jeff Nichols)
Tom Hardy is the absolute best as a family man whose mind got warped by a TV viewing of The Wild One so he adopted a Brando voice/pose and formed a motorcycle club that provided a real good time for a group of empty-headed friends before it got too big for him to control. Jodie “The Last Duel” Comer is our entry point, being interviewed by Mike Faist (who has nothing to do here) about her relationship with Elvis Butler and the changing forms of the club.
Nichols’s dream project based on a photo book about the real club. Feels kinda flat, sorta what’s-the-point – if you’re going to make Rumble Fish then don’t hold back, just make Rumble Fish. At least it’s smart enough to cast The Bonnie Man as a bartender and to end strongly, and of course it’s better than Ferrari. Note that my options tonight were this Mike Faist movie where two sporting men who are deeply in love keep getting challenged, or Challengers.
some riders:
Michael Shannon, the director’s lucky charm
Damon Herriman (Charles Manson) as Hardy’s right-hand man
Emory Cohen (Brooklyn) wants to quit and become a cop
Toby Wallace (The Royal Hotel) shoots Hardy and takes over
Happy Anderson (The Standoff at Sparrow Creek) must have been the first challenger
other riders: Blueface from The Nice Guys, Karl Glusman of Noe’s Love, Boyd Holbrook of Dial of Destiny, and Norman Reedus of Cigarette Burns.
Red Rooms (2023, Pascal Plante)
Coolly obsessive Kelly-Anne camps outside the courthouse every night to attend a serial killer’s trial, along with very-uncoolly obsessive Clementine, who’s crushing on the killer. K-A bonds somewhat with Clem, as much as she can bond with anyone, since she’s a probable psychopath and we’re given little clue about her motivation. Her modeling job and her online gambling are all put at risk by the case, as she becomes a newsworthy attendee then a secret participant. She maybe has a change of heart at the end or maybe had a master plan all along, hard to tell. I thought of Serpent’s Path, with its torture/murder video producers destroying each other while manipulated by an outsider.
Eureka (2023, Lisandro Alonso)
Viggo Mortensen is searching for his missing daughter again, this time as a killer in a b/w Western. Presumably this is a prank on those of us who wanted another Jauja, because after a half hour Viggo’s movie is shrunk down to an SD TV movie and ignored like Danny Glover in Bamako, and instead we follow a Native American cop on her rounds, and then… I think her niece gets transported by a CG stork into a dream-recounting ceremony where a young man stabs somebody then tries to escape.
Shot:
Reverse shot:
“Each story explores questions of indigeneity and its reaction or resistance to the imposition of Western law and order” – Jeff Reichert works through the cinema/myth/dream journey on Reverse Shot, and Alonso has no fucks to give in his Cinema Scope interview.
From Bamako to Dead Man:
Art Talent Show (2022, Tomás Bojar & Adéla Komrzý)
Not really a talent show, but admissions week at an art academy. A pretty enjoyable True/False doc. Vadim Rizov: “beautifully shot and consistently funny while observing a zone where inspiration and bullshit perpetually dwell side-by-side out of impossible-to-separate necessity.”
Coma (2022, Bertrand Bonello)
Online/lockdown movie starring the white girl from Zombi Child who creates Barbie sitcoms, plays a Simon game that’s impossible to lose, and watches videos of her hero Patricia Coma (who starred in P. Garrel’s Sauvage Innocence).
Sometimes there’s a serial killer interview or animation or day-for-night dream-limbo or an Unfriended homage (zoom call intruder, hand in blender) or a Nocturama homage (surveillance split-screen). Bookended with over-sincere subtitle essays. “Is this horror?,” I wrote (it’s not). Bonello in Cinema Scope: “Horror films were the first kind of cinema that I really liked when I was a kid. I think I know them quite well, and was trying to put some of their codes in here.”
Lousy Carter (2023, Bob Byington)
Byington continues to be the most consistently funny dude in the movies. This didn’t make me die laughing like Frances Ferguson, still a very good time, watching Carter (David Krumholtz) suffer. Lousy thinks that he’s dying, turns out his charts got mixed up, then he’s immediately murdered.
Lost in the Night (2023, Amat Escalante)
Not a great title, I keep forgetting which movie this was. It’s more like Mexican Parasite – Emiliano (Robe of Gems) is searching for his disappeared activist mom and after a tip from a dying cop he gets a job with a rich social-media-artist family, and hangs out with their daughter while things fall apart between a local religious cult and the cartels and the family’s own secrets and greed.
Evil Does Not Exist (2023, Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
Lovely and not mysterious at all until suddenly it is. The community responds to a tourism company: “The very essence of this village is at stake.” The company has sent a couple of know-nothing PR types – main dude Takumi pokes holes in their plan but also drives them around and indulges the guy’s desire to do manly backwoods things like chop wood. Then Takumi’s daughter goes missing, and the PR dude must be killed to maintain nature’s balance (I guess). No big stars – the woman who runs the local noodle shop and wants to maintain the water quality for her broth costarred in Happy Hour. Hamaguchi reveals in Cinema Scope that it was put together rather experimentally, says his own perspective is usually closer to the invading PR people than the rural residents.
The PR people surprised to hear they have to protect their grounds from deer:
The deer they never considered:
