Kate Lyn Sheil’s husband is dead in the trunk, and her new man Kentucker Audley is driving them from Jacksonville to Tampa to hide his body, but they’re not very smart criminals and end up racking up another body. Maybe in the wrong mood for this – Kate playing not-smart isn’t working for me.
Tag: Amy Seimetz
No Sudden Move (2021, Steven Soderbergh)
A few guys get a job to camp out menacingly in a family man’s house until he retrieves some documents from his workplace, but the documents aren’t so easily retrieved, and somebody dies, and who’s really working for who? It’s that sort of movie, and I could do a whole plot rundown but it’s twisty and fun so I’d rather just forget the particulars and watch it again in a few years. I’ll say that everyone’s sleeping around, all the women are dangerous, the documents are about the auto industry wanting to avoid pollution regulation, and Soderbergh shoots the action with a widescreen lens that perversely distorts everything on the sides.
Besides the superstars, we’ve got family man David Harbour (star of the Hellboy remake which I accidentally bought on blu-ray for a few bucks thinking it was the original, dammit)… his wife, hostage Amy Seimetz (director of last year’s finest film)… and Ray Liotta’s wife is Julia Fox (Uncut Gems).
Not how you want to meet Don Cheadle:
You do not impress Bill Duke:
You don’t want Brendan Fraser pointing his napkin at you:
She Dies Tomorrow (2020, Amy Seimetz)
“I just came back to see if this is real, if you were real.”
Kate Lyn Sheil, suspiciously named Amy in a movie written/directed by an Amy, is a mess, acting strangely in her new house and insisting that she dies tomorrow. Her friend Jane (Adams, star of Happiness) comes over to check on Amy, then Jane goes home to her microscope art and classical music until the flashing colored lights from Amy’s psychosis start to invade the house – and now Jane, too, will die tomorrow.
Jane’s checkup doesn’t go great:
In the parlance of the kids, this movie is a “mood,” and I am “here for it.” Amy and Jane wander into the world, their imminent death syndrome passing to everyone they meet. The movie begins to feel like a last day on earth story, like Last Night – no explanation is ever given, but we’re also given no reason not to believe the doomed protagonists. Some get high or go on adventures, some get real – break up relationships, disconnect their dad from life support(!). Instead of ending up an urn of ashes, Amy wants to be a leather jacket, and focuses her efforts on this. The cast plays it straight and is uniformly strong, including the usual suspects with some delightful additions (Michelle Rodriguez! James Benning?). It’s even produced by Benson and Moorhead, just gobs of talent.
Tunde Adebimpe!
Bilge Ebiri in Vulture:
As a filmmaker, Seimetz started off in the experimental world, and her willingness to let her narrative occasionally slip into abstraction serves her well, suggesting broader, more cosmic meanings. Her images blur, her frames pulse and shiver, bubbling microscopic phenomena wash over the screen, and fields of unreal color overwhelm the characters. The soundtrack assaults us with ominous thrums, blasts of classical music, whispers, and distant screams. The film is short and sparsely populated, but it can’t be called minimalist — it’s more of a clipped maximalism, bursting with expressive power before quickly pulling back, like a tale told by someone both eager and afraid to let you in on their darkest secrets.
Seimetz in Brooklyn Rail:
I was saying the other night at the Brooklyn premiere, sometimes, when I’m watching movies, the first 15 minutes are giving me a character’s CV, [spelling out] what this person does, what they do for a living, their boyfriend, their relationship status…as opposed to accessing something that I can’t put into words and just showing me their behavior, which I’m much more fascinated by. To do away with, “Okay, this is the character I’m exploring,” and just go, “We’re exploring that feeling,” and doing that with each individual actor and saying, “This is the energy you’re bringing to the scene,” as opposed to, “You work as a florist.”
More Criterion Shorts
The Big Shave (1967, Martin Scorsese)
Scorsese’s queasiest film? Guy just keeps shaving until he is bloody all over, ending with a full cross-throat red slash. Jazz score with no direct sound, very student-filmy.
We’re Going to the Zoo (Josh Safdie +3)
Stop-motion opening title, nice. Woman on a long drive pulls over for a minute when she spills her coffee and hitchhiker Josh jumps in back with her little brother. They stop at a diner and dine-and-dash, but he runs back in and pays? He gets lectured about sex before marriage from a rest-stop cashier. They have a fun ride, drop him off, proceed to the zoo which is closed, then pick him up on the way back. Lo-fi camera.
When We Lived in Miami (2013, Amy Seimetz)
Scenes of a woman and her daughter in Miami, a day or two before a hurricane comes through, then it adds her cheating husband into the mix. Lovely editing.
The Lonedale Operator (2018, Michael Almereyda)
John Ashbery recalls his childhood love of movies, and the viewing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which led to his beginning to write poetry at age 8. He’s interviewed in color 16mm, reading from his own letters, with photos and film footage cut in. He moved to Paris and binge-watched silents at the Cinematheque… pretty standard interview doc except for a cool bit of editing between classic films at the end, and the factor that this was filmed just months before Ashbery’s death. DP Sean Price Williams is just everywhere.
Pinball (2013, Suzan Pitt)
The director’s own paintings, detailed and turntabled then fast-cut to the music Ballet Mechanique. So far Pitt is 2 for 2, and there’s more on the Channel – hope it’s sticking around.