Waitress/stripper Taylour “Zola” Paige joins new friend Riley Keough for a work/vaca trip to Tampa, not realizing the dude along for the ride is Riley’s pimp (Colman Domingo, Paige’s Ma Rainey costar). Instead of either participating or getting the hell out of there, Zola gets cut into the management side, negotiating Riley higher pay for her work. This all culminates in a fatal hostage situation caused in part by Riley’s suicidally dumb bf Nicholas Braun (of the Poltergeist remake), and our heroes survive mostly intact. I assume this is basically Spring Breakers, but with better music and based on a true story.
Tag: Riley Keough
Under The Silver Lake (2018 David Robert Mitchell)
In which the conspiracy uncovered by burnout loser Sam (an extremely likeable Andrew Garfield) turns out to be true. Gathering clues from Topher Grace, the Mulholland Dr. diner guy with the eyebrows, a pop-up local rock band, the Homeless King (David Yow!) and hospital boss Barrow from The Knick (in heavy old-age makeup as a secret apex popular songwriter), Sam discovers that his hot neighbor Riley Keough disappeared into a bunker to die (eventually) with a famous rich guy, and that he is not going to rescue her in the end.
I deny the Southland Tales comparisons, will happily loop this in with Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice, a trilogy of hapless L.A. detectives with different styles and tones. This was hilarious and terrific to look at, and probably warrants a rewatch, as well as catching up with his first film during the presumably long wait for his next, since this seems to have flopped.
Secret owls on the dollar bill:
Mike D’Angelo:
Under the Silver Lake dunks on its dipshit of a protagonist (beautifully played by Garfield as haplessness incarnate, right down to the way he walks and runs throughout; that puppy-dog quality no doubt gets in the way of folks recognizing that he’s meant to be kind of awful)… but it’s also achingly sincere about the innate human desire to believe there’s some secret code that will reveal the key to everlasting happiness, or at least enable some basic understanding of what the hell’s going on.
Matt Singer in Screencrush:
It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to see the film is poking fun at Sam, and at the urge to search for buried meanings in things in order to avoid the painful reality staring you in the face. And Sam’s sexuality is part of that; Mitchell openly compares his hunt for life’s little Easter eggs to the act of masturbation. Some viewers seemed to miss the joke altogether — even though Under the Silver Lake is a movie where former Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield buys an old issue of The Amazing Spider-Man that then gets stuck to his hand.
The House That Jack Built (2018, Lars Von Trier)
Watched this soon after reading Vox’s reviews of Joe Berlinger’s two new Ted Bundy movies, a documentary (“a bit of a slog”) and a “morally confused” Zac Efron feature. I was considering that maybe serial killer movies are a bad idea in general, but was also stressed out and feeling like watching some murders, so thought I’d torment myself by watching ol’ self-serious Lars alienate his fans. Divided into chapters, or incidents. “You might as well be a serial killer,” taunts Uma Thurman repeatedly in the first, until Matt Dillon finally, blessedly, beats her face in. Their self-conscious Tarantino conversation immediately calmed my concerns that this would be a grim, punishing movie. I keep forgetting about the campy prankster side of Lars – this was an escalating series of hateful murders, played for laughs and meta-commentary.
Segments are divided by short scenes, Dylan references, and stock footage in every aspect ratio and voiceover conversation with “Verge,” who turns out to be the late Bruno Ganz playing Virgil, Dante’s guide through hell, speaking of Jack’s murders as artworks. Next, Jack sets out to murder a woman alone at home (Siobhan Hogan, prison guard in Dancer in the Dark), talks his way inside with the most ridiculous excuses (he’s a cop but “my badge is at the silversmith”). He clumsily, awkwardly kills her then photographs the body, comes back inside to clean up and has to escape a visiting cop. Then he takes a date (Sofie GrÃ¥bøl, star of the series The Killing) and her two kids on a hunting trip and hunts them, kids first. Then the infamous double-mastectomy incident with a girlfriend (Riley Keough) whom he has cruelly nicknamed “Simple”. Then Jack, now known to the press as the serial killer Mr. Sophistication, is found out by his ammo supplier (Jeremy Davies of Dogville), and chased to his body-freezer home base by cops, where Virgil leads him into the underworld through a house made of the bodies of Jack’s victims.
I may have accidentally watched the censored version, but runtime is only two minutes different, so I’m not gonna sweat it this time.
Logan Lucky (2017, Steven Soderbergh)
The Logans (Tater Channing, Riley Keough and one-armed Adam Driver) would like to rob the Motor Speedway, so they break heistmaster Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) out of prison. Joe brings along his dimwit brothers (Brendan Gleeson’s son and Dennis Quaid’s son) and they get to work, avoiding Tater’s nemesis, the loudmouth sponsor of an energy-drink racing team (Seth MacFarlane?).
It’s been a month and I forgot to take notes, so I’ll make this quick. There’s light fun in watching the plan come together, then a bunch of additional fun afterwards when the plan seems to have failed, the FBI investigation by Hilary Swank and Macon Blair has come up empty, and they unveil the plan-behind-the-plan, enriching the locals who helped them along the way. Soderbergh’s return to filmmaking was fully satisfying (I couldn’t wait, so have also started watching The Knick). Writer Rebecca Blunt is the subject of some controversy. Mostly it made me wanna watch the Oceans trilogy again, but there are some suspicious user reviews of the blu-ray multi-pack on amazon.
It Comes at Night (2017, Trey Edward Shults)
If the scenario of 10 Cloverfield Lane was filmed with the emotional sensibility of The Road. Opens with the Joel Edgerton family (with Sarah and teenage Travis) murdering and burying grandpa, who has become infected with whatever killed the world, and only gets darker from there. Soon the Chris Abbot family (with Riley Keough and a young kid) shows up, and after a few days of Joel being extremely suspicious, they’re allowed to move in. But paranoia and infection follow, and the Abbots are evicted and killed.
It was sold as a horror movie (according to Indiewire, Black Phillip even has a cameo), but it’s a particularly grim sort of postapocalyptic thriller… effective, but somehow I didn’t go for it – too much grim hopelessness, not enough Take Shelter mystery/wonder – and it somewhat reduces my desire to catch up with Krisha. It’s not a bland genre exercise, tho – interesting ideas within.
Shults:
The ultimate unknown is death — I think that’s all over the movie. But there are worse things. And there’s a line you can cross that’s too far, and it breaks things, and if we keep functioning like this, and if we keep going in these cycles, we’re going to destroy ourselves. It’s inevitable. We need to take a step back. Losing our humanity is going to be a lot worse.
M. Halperin:
Travis’ sickness only appears after he’s seen his mother and father kill an entire family — mother, father, and child. For all we know, the disease could itself be a function of metaphor, appearing only after a character has been so fervently immersed in the deterioration of human structures. Indeed, Travis has watched as his parents, his creators and fervent shelterers, have themselves become the nightmares. (Quite literally: throughout the movie, Travis’ more surreal nightmares are shot in a different aspect ratio, and set to a different score. This brutally realistic scene, however, also occurs with these subtle flourishes.) Is his retching after this scene, and the coughing of blood, representative of a revulsion with the very stuff with which we’re made? Sure, he’s pretty undeniably sick, but the sickness is also a literal purging of blood — which metaphorically speaks to a guttural, uncontrollable desire to purge oneself of family, of an inheritance of violence.
Jack & Diane (2012, Bradley Rust Gray)
Stop-motion Quay Bros. hair-braid title card, then opening shot of a toilet with blood in it, and already I’m conflicted. There’s more bleeding and vomiting and bathrooms than seems strictly necessary (M. D’Angelo: “in many ways this is a film about the effect of passion on the gastrointestinal tract, which to my knowledge is a subject previously unexplored”), and I’m always a fan of injecting stop-motion and monsters into a movie, but somehow it didn’t work here. But the vast bulk of the runtime is a fucking lovely story about two girls, the actresses giving perfect performances, and I want to buy the movie’s poster and stare at it forever. And I don’t usually wish for sequels, but I’d like to see this movie’s Before Sunset. Good opening night pick for LNKarno.
Jack and Diane meet, make out, seem really good for each other, but Diane is going off to London in a week, so neither knows how to handle this. Each girl is kinda a mess in her own way… Jack (Riley Keough, the boss in American Honey, also this year’s The Discovery and Logan Lucky and It Comes at Night… and Elvis’s granddaughter) is mourning her late brother, gets hit by a cab and spends most of the movie with a scraped-up face, is mean to almost everybody. I don’t know what’s going with Diane (Juno Temple of Killer Joe, Kaboom) at the beginning, with no phone or ID, throwing up and bleeding. They do seem more collected when together, though Diane manages to transfer her nosebleed to Jack.
Diane’s poor Aunt Linda (Cara Seymour of The Knick, An Education, Gangs of New York) gets daily abuse. Kylie Minogue (same year as Holy Motors) plays a Jack ex-lover. Amazing character detail: Jack, wearing a Ministry t-shirt, says sushi is “good with ketchup.” Good texture to the movie thanks to the Múm score, the soundtrack (first time I’ve heard Shellac in a movie?), bursts of Quay visuals, richly colored cinematography. First I’ve seen by either Gray or his collaborator So Yong Kim.
Mike again:
Another thing I cherished: Has there ever been a movie that introduced an identical twin and then deliberately made so little of it? The scene in which Karen calls Jack pretending to be Diane, while terrific for its own sake, seems to exist primarily to raise the possibility that it’s actually Diane in the porn video, using her sister’s name in an unfamiliar situation. Karen is otherwise never seen; one might fairly conclude that she’s never seen at all. Indeed, if not for the fact that Diane’s aunt mentions her, it would be easy to conclude that Karen doesn’t really exist, so blatantly symbolic is her function. (See also: Jack’s dead brother, Jack’s facial bruise.) Like the monster metaphor, this would threaten to capsize the movie were it not so unemphatic; unlike the monster metaphor, its import is so glancing (there’s no overt suggestion that Jack suspects anything, and the subject never comes up again) that it doesn’t seem superfluous.