The Privilege of Confidence

Tyrel

by George Wolf

“Hey, Tyrone.”

“It’s Tyler, actually.”

“Oh, my bad.”

The subtle discomforts start early in Tyrel, writer/director Sebastian Silva’s perceptive and slyly intense slice of racially tinged mumblecore, a film that benefits greatly from yet another standout turn from Jason Mitchell.

Mitchell stars as Tyler, an African-American man who is grateful to escape a houseful of in-laws by joining his friend John (Christopher Abbott) on a birthday getaway in the Catskills.

But it’s not John’s birthday. It’s John’s friend Pete’s (Caleb Landry Jones) birthday, and it isn’t long before Tyler is meeting plenty of new faces and realizing his is the only one that isn’t white.

Plus, it just happens to be the weekend of Trump’s inauguration. Perfect.

Amid heavy dialog that’s fast and free-flowing with an improvisational feel, the crowded mountain home becomes a nerve-wracking metaphor for the state of race relations. Silva, the unconventional Chilean filmmaker who mined social anxieties effectively in Nasty Baby and The Maid, continues to subvert expectations through intimate, thoughtful characterizations.

After a long stream of memorable supporting roles (Straight Outta Compton, Mudbound, Detroit, Kong: Skull Island), Mitchell carries this film with a performance that is sympathetic from the start, a key factor Silva leans on to turn our insecurities against us. With each slight, appropriation and assurance that “he didn’t mean anything by that,” Tyler’s feelings become more conflicted, raising the level of concern we have for what might happen.

As is his wont, Silva steers clear of expected plot turns and veers in surprising directions, one of them concerning a friendly Catskills neighbor down the road (Ann Dowd).

Though it’s understandably easy to compare this film to Get Out (especially with Jones in the cast), that comparison itself may be one of the scabs Silva is picking. Why did Jordan Peele’s horror story resonate so brilliantly?

With a focus on casual affronts to identity and the privileged confidence that everything is fine, Tyrel‘s Catskills weekend offers some clues.

A Star Is Spun

Maria by Callas

by Christie Robb

It’s an ambitious project to document the life of an international celebrity almost entirely in her own words. And that’s the task undertaken, not entirely successfully, by director Tom Volf in Maria by Callas.

The life of the mid-century opera singer is captured primarily through taped interviews, diary entries, letters to friends (read by the opera singer Joyce DiDonato), and, of course, recordings of Callas’s phenomenal performances.

We see the polished surface of a star born to humble beginnings in New York who rose to command stages across Europe and the Americas. It’s almost two hours of sweeping updos, elaborate costumes, chic evening wear, dripping jewels, swaddling furs, impeccable makeup, and pristine manicures.

Volf tracks Callas’s career from the 50s through the 70s, and lingers on close ups of Callas’s arias. She’s a waif—all bouffant hair, expressive eyes, and bird-like bones. You wonder how such a big voice can possibly come from such a tiny frame. She’s magnetic. Passionate. Commanding.

The singing is interspersed with autobiographical tidbits provided by Callas. But these are only sketches. Although she states again and again that she would give up her career to raise a family and it’s clear that at some point around her late 20s or early 30s she got married, the first time she utters her husband’s name in the documentary it’s to discuss their impending separation. We are left to wonder how genuine she is in saying that she’d give up her career for domestic life and how much she felt compelled to say that, given the prevailing gender norms of the years in which she was famous.

Much of the autobiography portion is consumed with Callas’s operatic 10 plus year affair with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, which occurred both before and after his marriage to Jackie Kennedy. Through interviews and letters you can see Callas’s attempt to put a positive spin on what must have been quite a tumultuous relationship. Even while he is pulling away from her, Callas writes to a friend, asking for agreement on how he has changed for the better.

The final moments of the movie show Maria kicking back in Florida. Her hair is down for the first time. She’s wearing loose lounge wear instead of a corseted bodice. Her hair flows down her back, and she’s sporting thick glasses that magnify her myopic eyes. It’s clear how much effort has gone into the package of the public Callas persona.

The contrast between the woman and the artifice would have been more effective with a bit more exposition. It’s an admirable goal to have Callas in control of her own narrative, but to do so leaves out information that would be helpful to provide context to this life. For example, Maria’s rivalry with an older sister who was considered to be the pretty one in the family. The scandalous headlines. The qualities of her vocal talents. The year Maria decided to lose some weight mid-career and lost nearly 80 pounds. How the weight loss may have contributed to her vocal decline. How her changing voice impacted her attempted late-career comeback. Without the biographical backstory, the documentary seems too surface level.

If you don’t know a lot about Callas, do your research beforehand and come for the music and her arresting performances.

I Don’t Want to Go Out— Week of December 3

It’s a big-ass week in lounge around in your jammies movie watching. For some of these, you will want a very large TV.

Click the movie title for the full review.

McQueen

Mission: Impossible—Fallout

Operation Finale

The Happytime Murders

The Nun

Fright Club: Menstruation in Horror

Only Women Bleed? Sunday Bloody Sunday? Let It Bleed? What song would we have chosen to open the new podcast? There are more possibilities than we might have imagined—in song and in film—as we celebrate the monthly curse with a talk about the best horror movies concerning menstruation. Do you have the stones to listen?

5. It Stains the Sands Red (2016)

We open with some impressive aerial shots of the smoking, neon ruin of the Las Vegas strip. Cut to another gorgeous aerial of a sports car zipping up a desert highway. In it, a couple of coked-up strip club lowlifes, Molly (Brittany Allen) and Nick (Merwin Mondesir), are escaping to an airfield where they’ll meet with other lowlifes and head to an island off Mexico.

Naturally, this isn’t going to work out. But what co-writer/director Colin Minihan has in store will surprise you. He’s made a couple of fine choices with his film. The point of view character is not only an unlikely protagonist – an unpleasant thug with a drug habit – but she’s also female.

Soon the car goes off the road and one meathead catches her scent, and suddenly Molly’s stripper shoes are not her biggest problem as she faces a 30-mile trek across the desert to the airfield.

What develops is an often fascinating, slow moving but relentless chase as well as a character study. With a protagonist on a perilous journey toward redemption, It Stains the Sands Red takes a structure generally reserved for the man who needs to rediscover his inner manhood and tells a very female story.

Very female. Menstruation and everything.

4. A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

Writer/director Jee-woon Kim (I Saw the Devil) spins a hypnotic tale of family and ghosts—both literal and metaphorical. Tale of Two Sisters is a deep, murky and intensely female horror.

A tight-lipped father returns home with his daughter after her prolonged hospital stay. Her sister has missed her; her stepmother has not. Or so it all would seem, although jealousy, dream sequences, ghosts, a nonlinear timeframe and confused identity keep you from ever fully articulating what is going on. The film takes on an unreliable point of view, subverting expectations and keeping the audience off balance. But that’s just one of the reasons it works.

No line of dialog, no visual is wasted. The seemingly simple moment of one daughter needing to borrow a feminine product from her stepmother works in a dozen ways: to introduce blended identities, to exacerbate the uncomfortable familiarity, to foreshadow future horror.

Tale masters the slow reveal in large and small ways. Whether you’ve begun to unravel the big mystery or not, Tale always has something else up its sleeve. Or, under its table.

3. Excision (2012)

Outcast Pauline (a very committed AnnaLynne McCord) is a budding surgeon. She’s not much of a student, actually, but she does have an affinity for anatomy. Especially blood. Pauline really, really likes blood.

A horror film focused on an adolescent girl as antihero is likely to involve 1) menstruation, 2) a mom. Excision is no different. Well, it is a little different.

The mom is Traci Lords, in what is certainly her most assured dramatic performance. Her arc is interesting: overbearing and cold and, eventually, probably correct in her unfavorable assessment of her eldest girl.

Writer/director Richard Bates, Jr. takes more of an unusual course when bringing in Pauline’s cycle, though. I’m not sure we’ve seen it handled quite like this before, although to be fair, it’s definitely in keeping with the peculiar and beautifully realized character he and McCord have created.

2. Ginger Snaps (2000)

Sisters Ginger and Bridget, outcasts in the wasteland of Canadian suburbia, cling to each other, and reject/loathe high school (a feeling that high school in general returns).

On the evening of Ginger’s first period, she’s bitten by a werewolf. Writer Karen Walton cares not for subtlety: the curse, get it? It turns out, lycanthropy makes for a pretty vivid metaphor for puberty. This turn of events proves especially provocative and appropriate for a film that upends many mainstay female cliches.

Walton’s wickedly humorous script stays in your face with the metaphors, successfully building an entire film on clever turns of phrase, puns and analogies, stirring up the kind of hysteria that surrounds puberty, sex, reputations, body hair and one’s own helplessness to these very elements. It’s as insightful a high school horror film as you’ll find, peppered equally with dark humor and gore.

1. Carrie (1976)

What else? Nobody did moms, the pain of adolescence, the horror of the onslaught of womanhood, or period quite like Brian De Palma’s 1976 original. Is there a more tragic scene? Is there a scene that better establishes a character, a context or horror?

De Palma films the scene in question, appropriately enough, like a tampon commercial, all cheese cloth and beautific music. And then Carrie White (Oscar nominated Sissy Spacek) desperately claws at her classmates, believing she is dying. It’s the most authentic image of vulnerability and terror you can imagine, matched in its horror by the reaction she receives from those she seeks: laughter, mockery and contempt.

Beyond the epitome of adolescent mortification that the scene represents, it also clarifies the unspoken relationship between Carrie and her as-of-yet unintroduced mother, who has never told her teenaged daughter that this was coming.

The result is the ultimate in mean girl cinema and an introduction to a nearly perfect horror film.

Screening Room: Bodies and Souls

Wow! Hollywood unloaded last week for Thanksgiving, but the pickings are slim this weekend. We cover The House that Jack Built – director’s cut, The Possession of Hannah Grace, Burning, Mirai and Meow Wolf: Origin Story, plus we dig into what’s new in home entertainment.

 

Listen to the full podcast HERE.