Monthly Archives: June 2023

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Play Acting

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Love Gets a Room

by Rachel Willis

Trying to keep the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto from succumbing to despair, a group of actors performs a lighthearted musical-comedy in director Rodrigo Cortés’s film, Love Gets a Room.

The film is set almost entirely within a theater over the course of a single performance. As the actors perform onstage, things are thrown into chaos backstage when Stefcia (Clara Rugaard) learns she can escape the ghetto with Patryk (Mark Ryder). The problem is her love, Edmund (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), would be left behind.

The performance of the play is based on real events from 1942. Written by Jerzy Jurandot, Love Gets a Room was performed in the Warsaw Ghetto by a troupe of actors. For the film, the actors are given a backstory that shines a light on the harsh conditions for the people imprisoned in the Ghetto.

There are several taut scenes, including a moment when a Nazi soldier arrives in the theater and takes a seat in the audience. Scenes like these best serve the film, perfectly juxtaposing the lighthearted nature of the play with the very real terror in the heart of everyone at the mercy of the Nazi soldiers in their midst.

It’s unfortunate the film never quite captures the right tone when its characters struggle with the possibility of escape. The dialogue often feels unnatural, which sometimes fits with the theater-like tone, but more often weakens the film.

The score doesn’t work for the most dramatic scenes. It serves the film well when the focus remains on the play, but backstage, it heightens the melodrama rather than the drama.

But it’s a devastating conundrum – to leave behind those you love when a chance of survival is presented. It is also distressing to watch a group of people in utter fear of their captors, trying their hardest to survive, when their fates have already been written.

However, Love Gets a Room struggles to maintain the sinister nature of the situation. While it successfully captures the need of the audience to laugh at a light-hearted stage play, the characters backstage never quite come to life. This creates a disconnect, which is unfortunate since the subject matter is so very important.

New In Theaters

Unmasked

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Makeup

by Tori Hanes

The financial-turned-emotional bond of two people joined by the matrimony of a shared lease – who couldn’t relate? Following the individual yet interlacing lives of food critic Sasha (Hugo Andre, who also directs) and trans woman at the start of her transition Dan (Will Masheter), Makeup attempts to connect the struggles and secrets under the shared roof.

Makeup is ambitious in its interest. The arguable protagonist, Dan, is a closeted trans woman moving through a world laden with toxic masculinity, which she outwardly embraced and embodied. Dan’s identity is found out, but neither explored nor accepted, leading to prickling social pain points. However, Makeup fails to fully dig into the meaning of these moments.

After being outed and then fired, for example, Dan’s grieving is stripped to a few moments of heavy breathing accompanied by a shaky camera. This seems to be the pattern: the ball is tossed and volleyed, waiting to be spiked into true emotion, but we never quite see that deeper understanding. While Masheter delivers a multifaceted performance, he never gets the opportunity to show us Dan’s longing. 

The film is, for all intents and purposes, Dan’s. Sasha often seems to be a secondary thought, necessary for moving Dan’s larger beats. But as we steer into the meat, it becomes obvious Sasha and Dan’s relationship is supposed to be the major thread; the veins leading to the film’s heart.

But the unevenness makes itself apparent: one character struggles in a world created by bigotry while the other has an unnamed ailment affecting his hand. Andre’s performance implies something more interesting and important lies just out of view. Unfortunately, it stays out of sight indefinitely, leading to an unbalanced chemistry and soul.

Representation is an ever-important conversation spanning media, and films highlighting trans women aid in this continued journey. However, while its heart is in the right place, Makeup’s story winds up short despite its best effort.

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Cruel to Be Cruel

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The Hole in the Fence

by George Wolf

The fence is meant to separate the proud and the privileged from the lawless and desperate. So the opening in it serves as a warning about who might try to come in, and a reminder about how important it is to protect your place on the “good” side.

The Hole in the Fence (El hoyo en la cerca) isn’t exactly subtle, or especially profound, but it does serve up a well constructed lesson in the roots of toxic masculinity, the twisted tenets of religious hypocrisy, and the casual cruelty that often accompanies both.

A group of rich Catholic kids is bused into Mexico’s Los Pinos integration camp for boys. The lessons they receive will continue their grooming as the next wave of the Mexican “elite,” and lesson one is a speech that reinforces how unworthy the “outside” people are.

And right on cue, ringleader Jordi (Valeria Lamm) and the rest of the boys begin singling out any sign of weakness in the ranks. Diego (Eric David Walker) is hampered by casts and a neck brace, Eduardo (Yubah Ortega) is a scholarship kid, and Joaquincito (Lucciano Kurti) might be gay.

This will not do.

We’ve seen these themes and metaphors before, but director and co-writer Joaquin del Paso does score some compelling moments by narrowing the focus to the teachers and students interacting in one confined space. And the pupils learn quickly about how well cruelty can work for them, especially as a means to decrease your own suffering at the expense of someone else’s.

Slowly, the priests and instructors begin moving from the periphery to the center of the narrative. One camper goes missing, hints are dropped about the history of the camp, and del Paso engineers a truly unsettling extended take sequence set by the side of a highway.

Who is more dangerous here, those outside the fence, or those inside? The Hole in the Fence has answers that are not soft-pedalled, but still too hard to be ignored.

New In Theaters

Do You Want to Buy a Snowball?

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The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons

by Hope Madden

In 1983, a woman buys a snowball from a street vendor. He has many snowballs laid out in a beautiful pattern on a blanket on a wintery New York street, surrounded by other vendors. She thinks she’s helping a homeless man but keeps the snowball in her parents’ freezer in Queens for months before letting her mom toss it.

Decades later she realizes the seller was David Hammons, an American artist who defied boundaries, mocked socially accepted practice, and became one of the most influential voices in art.

I bet she wishes she’d kept the snowball.

Documentarians Harold Crooks and Judd Tully share countless similar anecdotes as they unveil, layer upon layer, something of what Hammons meant to an art world desperately in need of him.

“The more he tells the art world to go fuck itself, the more they want him,” says poet Steve Cannon, whose poem “Rousing the Rubble” offers worthy narration to sections of the film. An ode to Hammons, the poem announces the artist’s many phases, as does the documentary:

            Booomboxes, into bebop, hip hop, scatter shots – lower poles Higher Goals –

            into human hair – into Bottle caps into people and their attributes ­–

Cannon’s interviews, as well as those with art historians, artists, curators and collectors, will have to mainly suffice. Although Hammons himself does appear and speak on a handful of rare occasions, his voice is mainly absent (he prefers not to be interviewed, the doc clarifies).

Those who do talk illuminate the spirit of an artist whose work defies categorization. That work, luckily, we do get to view throughout the film. Provocative, racial, absurd, prescient – the art itself is all of this, and the film points to Hammons’s rejection of the norms of the art world as among his most valuable qualities.

The Melt Goes On Forever celebrates the audacity of Hammons’s  curation, the subversive nature of his exhibition and the humor in his reactions and presentations, but is quick to point out that his lasting impact on art in the U.S. and globally is more a product of the intensity and relevance of the work itself.

The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons screens this weekend only at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

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Take Me Down

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Asteroid City

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Welcome to Asteroid City, a grief comedy that may be the most Wes Anderson-y movie Wes Anderson has ever made. Or, welcome to “Asteroid City” – the stage play from famous writer Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) upon which Asteroid City, the film (TV show?) is based. Actively. Brian Cranston will explain as he, the narrator of “Asteroid City”, deconstructs the meticulous framing device Anderson crafts to keep us just one layer further from chaos.

“We are all just characters in a play that we don’t understand.”

As is so often the case, writer/director Anderson painstakingly creates a world – colorful, peculiar, emotionally tight lipped – brimming with characters (equally colorful, peculiar and emotionally tight-lipped). Brimming. About 50 speaking characters stand or sit precisely on their mark, perfectly framed, each one doing their all to keep chaos at bay.

Like Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a widowed war photographer stranded with his teenaged son (scene-stealer Jake Ryan from Eighth Grade) and three daughters in the clean desert nowhereville of Asteroid City, where a “stargazing event” will soon commence. Cinematographer Robert D.  Yeoman’s 360-degree swivel shows all you need to see: diner, roadway cabins, onramp to nowhere, and the garage where the town mechanic (Matt Dillon) has found that Augie’s wagon is now deceased.

Augie’s father-in-law Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks, in the usual Bill Murray role) fires ups his Cadillac and arrives for a rescue, only to find no one can leave Asteroid City on account of the alien.

Yep, an alien! He just came down sure as you please and made off with the city’s prized meteorite! Everybody saw it – including famous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and all the visiting school kids in Miss June’s (Maya Hawke) class!

So the whole city’s on lockdown, while General Gibson (Jeffery Wright) and Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) assess the situation and Augie realizes he just may have snapped the only photo of an honest to goodness alien.

All the unique and wonderful trademarks of Anderson’s craftsmanship are on display. Both the city itself, and the surrounding stage area where the play is performed, are given distinct aesthetics that benefit equally from Anderson’s commitment to symmetry, palette and depth-of-field.

The wordplay is succinct and witty per usual, dancing through themes of science, art, and Cold War paranoia. But while Anderson’s last film, The French Dispatch, left its procession of indelibly offbeat characters to fend for themselves, this time they’re connected with the sterile humanity that buoys the best of his work.

“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep!”

You’ll hear that several times in Asteroid City, enough to know that Anderson hopes we’re paying attention. Leave yourself open – to what art, and science, is saying – and your world might seem a little more colorful.

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Swiss Cheese

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Mad Heidi

by Hope Madden

Hard core, low budget genre films tend to seem cheesy: women in prison, boobs, torture, splatter, training montages, katanas. Filmmakers Johannes Hartmann and Sandro Klopfstein embrace the budget constraints, embrace the genre, and absolutely celebrate the cheese with their opus, Mad Heidi.

Their genre sendup returns to Heidi, that cheery Swiss Alps legend, along with her grandfather and Peter the goat herder. But not all is well in Switzerland. The country’s Very Swiss Leader (played with relish by Casper Van Dien) is something out of a bad 1970s exploitation film. Swissploitation, if you will.

So, Heidi (Alice Lucy) must suffer, find her strength, and reclaim her country for the Swiss and the lactose intolerant.

One of the benefits of making a spoof is that no one can hold your ludicrous plot against you. Indeed, the more ludicrous, the spoofier. The plot – what there is of one – exists to move Heidi and her story from one recognizable genre beat to the next. The filmmakers clearly possess a sincere fondness for grindhouse action. Their film never feels mean-spirited, and more importantly, it never feels lazy. Instead, Mad Heidi delivers sometimes inspired set pieces, gags and jokes that land harder if you’re in on them.

It’s also sometimes shockingly beautifully shot.

While the filmmakers are obviously having fun with genre sensibilities, they also showcase genuine cinematic craftsmanship with a clearly low budget. The movie looks great. Gore effects strike the ideal over-the-top practical vibe. Hartman and Klopfstein make their chosen genre’s ludicrous nature, plot holes and unnatural pauses, cartoonish characters, and bloodlust work for them.

Van Dien – so good earlier this year in Daughter and mainly known for maybe the world’s greatest action spoof, Starship Troopers – delivers fun, exaggerated comic timing. In fact, the whole cast bad-acts quite well. Still, even at just 92 minutes, the film feels more than a little bloated around the midsection.

It can’t hurt to watch it, though, assuming you’re in the mood for an awful lot of goopy, sloppy, sticky – dare I say cheesy – action and you’re able to fully unplug your brain.

Shudder Premiere

Away with the Fairies

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Unwelcome

by Hope Madden

There’s never a bad time for an Irish horror movie. I guess it’s lucky that Grabbers director Jon Wright is back with the new tale of bloodthirsty little people, Unwelcome. Wright’s yarn follows Londoners Maya (Hannah John-Kamen, Ant-Man and the Wasp) and Jamie (Douglas Booth, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). We meet as the two 1) confirm they are pregnant, and 2) barely survive a brutal break in.

Act 1 is grim, humorless and traumatizing, capitalizing on the very Brit-horror anxiety around roving young thugs and the pointless violence they will do. Act 2 ushers us into the lush, quaint Irish countryside where Jamie and Maya relocate, thanks to a timely inheritance. Jamie’s aunt passed on more than a cottage, though. There are rules.

But Maya doesn’t take the rules very seriously. And besides, she’s due any minute, there’s a hole in her roof, the clan of handymen they hired to fix it is somewhat terrifying, and she and Jamie are still suffering from the trauma of the break in back in London. So, yes, she forgot to leave the raw meat out on the back fence for the “red caps” roaming the forest beyond.

What could go wrong?

Let’s start with what goes right. Wright’s pivot to very Irish horror, with its humor, color and creatures of old creates a fascinating shift from the gritty British tone. The Whelan family (Colm Meaney, Kristian Nairn, Chris Walley and Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), hired to patch and repair the cottage, deliver uncomfortable tension from their introduction. Set design is gorgeous and the creatures are pretty cool.

Unfortunately, that’s not enough. Maya and Jamie make ridiculous decisions, many of them running counter to the characters’ own (sometimes verbalized) natures. The film doesn’t lean into humor nearly enough, and the conclusion leaves much to be desired.

Irish horror so often incorporates folktales of malevolent tricksters. You Are Not My Mother  (2021), The Hallow (2015), and The Hole in the Ground (2019) all tread similarly magical ground and all do a better job of it. Unwelcome can’t begin to stand up to comparisons to Wright’s creature feature Grabbers –the best Irish horror film you could hope for.

It’s not without its charm. Meaney and his crew turn in excellent performances and generate some honest laughs. But the film itself is a mess.

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OK with Age

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Aged

by Brandon Thomas

The subject of aging has become a popular trope in the world of horror. Films like M. Night Shyamalan’s Old and the Aussie favorite Relic used our own fears of natural mortality to tap into something more supernatural. Ti West’s X comments on how aging – and the supposed loss of beauty – can have deeper psychological implications. Director Anubys Lopez’s Aged may not reach the highest highs of the aforementioned films, but what it lacks in originality it more than makes up for with old school things that go bump in the night.

Veronica (Morgan Boss-Maltais) has recently taken a temporary job as a caregiver for the elderly Mrs. Bloom (Carla Kidd). Shortly after arriving at Mrs. Bloom’s remote home, Veronica begins to sense a presence in the house. As the strange events in the house escalate, Veronica also begins to suspect that Mrs. Bloom herself might be harboring a sinister secret.

Aged checks a lot of low-budget horror boxes right off the bat. 

Single location? Check. 

Small cast? Check. 

Simplistic story that requires little in the way of production value and special effects? That would be a check. 

These aren’t detriments by any means. The simplicity of Aged is actually the film’s greatest asset… well, except for Kidd’s old-age makeup. That gag is right out of a Spirit Halloween and pretty wince-inducing. 

Lopez aims high with the film’s visuals. The low-budget still manages to shine through here and there, but the emphasis on production design and shooting every nook and cranny of the desolate farm house helps create a real sense of place. Lopez has a good eye – so good, in fact, that it’s a shame much of Aged was filmed in the brightness of day. 

Boss-Maltais and Kidd spend nearly all of their scenes together. Kidd chews up an enormous amount of scenery as the venomous Mrs. Bloom. Boss-Maltais’s Veronica is your standard bland non-personality-having lead. Veronica’s role is to walk the audience through the plot of the movie and not to have any real arc of her own. 

Aged isn’t the first movie you should seek out this weekend – heck it might not even be the 10th – but it is an entertaining enough haunted house flick that’ll keep your attention for 90 minutes.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: The Flash, Elemental, The Blackening, Extraction 2, Maggie Moore(s) & More

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The Flash, Elemental, The Blackening, Maggie Moore(s), Extraction 2, Moon Garden, Peppergrass, Persian Lessons, Dry Ground Burning, Aged