Outtakes

Book Review: True Crime

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by Hope Madden

“Every girl in the world was taught not to trust her gut. Every girl in the world knew she was the fool in the play.”

Samantha Kolesnik’s insightful first novel, True Crime, hypnotizes as it repels. Like a string of memories playing across the narrator’s mind during a long and loose car ride, the novella delivers a Southern gothic tale that calls to mind Flannery O’Connor or Shirley Jackson. The grim poetry of Kolesnik’s writing style, however, is uniquely hers.

As Suzy meanders through some of the more eventful times in her young life, you realize this is a narrator with the potential to  be unreliable if she valued anyone’s opinion enough to lie. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Her story is mainly being articulated for her own benefit, a way to measure her culpability, evaluate her options, reflect on root causes and wrestle with the monster within.

True Crime is hardly an exercise in existential angst, though, and that’s mainly because Suzy is such an enigmatic and yet utterly straightforward character. Kolesnik’s prose is empathetic but not forgiving, which creates a fascinating atmosphere.

The approach of depicting events as memories allows Kolesnik the poetic license to focus just on the moments Suzy finds most compelling—the truth behind the details, the cause and effect, the timeline and technical details are rendered irrelevant. In their place Kolesnik offers a dead eyed but dreamlike depiction of the ugliest side of life.

What sets the piece apart from others of the same subgenre is the insight Kolesnik offers through the eyes of this young woman. She is both victim and beast in degrees that frustrate and inform, her narrative containing moments of genuine clarity concerning victimhood and the female form that rarely emerge in horror fiction.

Kolesnik’s style, her ability to create something that’s simultaneously aimless and meticulous, entrances as it delivers a quick, effective punch. In its own way an indictment of true crime culture that has overtaken the nation, the writing feels quietly but deeply fascinated by the compulsion to wade into a grisly reality.

Like the contents of the magazines Suzy so loves, Kolesnik’s tale contains a horrible beauty you can’t seem to look away from.

True Crime is available January 15, 2020 from Grindhouse Press.

You can also preorder on Amazon.

Outtakes

Pretty McFly (For a White Guy)

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Fastest Delorean Part II

by George Wolf

When we last saw Adam Kontras and his record-setting Delorean, one of them was on the side of an L.A. freeway engulfed in flames.

Fastest DeLorean in the World ended with that fiery cliffhanger, and now Kontras is back to finish the story with his second documentary feature, Fastest Delorean Part II.

Kontras, a Columbus native who bought the Delorean and turned it into a stunning replica of Marty McFly’s Back to the Future time machine, has for years been making his living in L.A. by renting out the vehicle for a variety of gigs.

That led to a desire for setting the Delorean speed record, which Kontras chronicled to stirring effect in Part I. But aside from all the cool car stuff, what really drove the first film is the human drama that developed between Adam and his gearhead brother Kenny.

The status of their relationship was as much an unanswered question as the car fire, and Kontras readily admits his sequel won’t mean much to anyone who hasn’t seen the first film.

“It’s the rightful conclusion to everything,” Kontras said.

Plus, from the Universal Studios backlot to Paris and beyond, we get first person accounts of the often amazing places the car has taken Kontras and his good friend Don Fullilove, who played Mayor Goldie Wilson in the Back to the Future films.

“Just like the first one, I’m very happy as a storyteller to have somehow pieced it all together,” Kontras said. “The scope of everything is pretty intense…but holy fuck, I wish I wasn’t in it.”

“I am so done with the drama, I did everything humanly possible to make Fastest DeLorean a nice redemption story.”

“There will not be a part III.”

There will be more documentaries, though. Kontras is set to announce his next project in January, one he describes as “a love fest that has nothing to do with family.”

Okay, but what about time travel?

Fastest DeLorean Part II is streaming now on Amazon.

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Freedom Riders

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Queen & Slim

by George Wolf

“I’m not a criminal.”

“You are now!”

A white cop lies dead on a Cleveland roadside, while a young black couple is processing how a traffic stop escalated to the point of tragedy, and realizing they have a choice to make.

“Slim” (Daniel Kaluuya) is confident his actions were self-defense, but “Queen” (Jodie Turner-Smith) is a lawyer who knows what they’re up against.

They must run. Now.

The feature debut for both director Melina Matsoukas (TV’s Master of None, Insecure) and screenwriter Lena Waithe (Master of None, The Chi) has a righteous outrage that nearly burns through the screen. Working in beautiful tandem, they create a mix of gripping character study and urgent fable that speaks with brutal honesty about being black in America.

In Slim, we see the situation personally, while Queen is always there to remind him, and us, of the big picture, and why from now on, they can only go forward.

And from the moment we meet them – in the opening scene, out on their first date – Queen and Slim are real people we’re drawn to. Through wonderfully authentic dialog, they get to know each other (Who eats too loud? Who prefers “fat Luther?”) and we get to know them, all while they are running for their lives.

But honestly, it might still work if the two just worked in silence, as the chemistry between Kaluuya and Turner-Smith is a natural wonder. Her Queen is a smart, no nonsense woman who admits Slim wasn’t going to get a second date. But Turner-Smith allows Queen’s vulnerability to surface gradually, making her admission that she wants a man who will “cherish her bruises” all the more sympathetic.

Slim’s arc is equally valid with Kaluuya, who shot to Oscar-nominated stardom in Get Out, again flashing an admirable depth. As Slim softens Queen, he in turn absorbs her defiance, ultimately accepting their roles as cultural freedom fighters traveling a modern day underground railroad.

The effective contrasts aren’t limited to the main characters, as Matsoukas and Waithe populate their film with consistently resonant pushes and pulls, from romantic risk to shrinking options in wide open spaces.

A stop or two – such as Slim’s unlikely encounter with a gas station attendant – break the spell, but only for a moment. This is an unapologetic and purposeful first feature, as much a complex story of joy and love as incendiary protest parable.

And like Queen & Slim themselves, it matters.

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Stranger than Fiction

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Honey Boy

by Hope Madden

“The only thing my father gave me that was of any value was pain, and you want to take that away?”

In other hands, that line could be the beginning and end of a movie, a maudlin attempt to summarize a life of abuse.

In other hands, Honey Boy could have gone really, really wrong.

It did not.

Ostensibly the strung together memories of a damaged movie star committed to rehab, the script tells of the insidious relationship between child star Otis (Noah Jupe as the semi-autobiographical avatar for Shia LaBeouf) and his ne’er do well father (LaBeouf, basically playing his own father).

Are we watching LaBeouf work through his own issues with this remarkable act of empathy, or is this, too, just an act? Or is Honey Boy itself a blurring of the line between sincerity and performance? To director Alma Har’el’s credit, Honey Boy does not shy away from that question. In fact, at every turn it embraces it. Just don’t expect an answer.

Har’el weaves between past and present. Modern day (2005) Otis (Lucas Hedges) stomps, blusters and bullies his way through court-appointed confinement where certain triggers send the film back to 1995. There, mainly in a dodgy motel with prostitutes for neighbors, young Otis and his dad struggle.

Hedges and Jupe make for eerily strong choices to play the two younger versions of LaBeouf, each an actor of such remarkable range and talent that super stardom seems inevitable. Hedges’s turn brims with contempt and vulnerability, while Jupe seems to recognize the limits of his own character’s understanding. His performance is heartbreaking.

The showier work comes from LaBeouf, who delivers a truly compassionate if not entirely forgiving performance. Your dad can be a hard guy to understand. If this entire film is simply LaBeouf’s attempt to do that, we’re lucky we get to participate.

LaBeouf’s work as a child actor—his turn as Stanley Yelnats in the utterly charming Holes, for instance—solidified his standing as a talent. His mainly mediocre choices and flat performances in his young adulthood made his off-screen antics more worthy of comment. And though his personal life may not have steadied much (his last arrest was just two years ago), his 2019 cinematic output (including the endlessly delightful The Peanut Butter Falcon) is easily the most impressive of his career.

The feat here is not just the performance, but the script.

In other hands, Honey Boy is another look at the ugly familial dysfunction that both propels and destroys young actors. Instead, through mundane details, we’re offered an unsettling and candid character study and a finely written family tragedy.

For Your Queue

I Don’t Want to Go Out – Week of November 25

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Well, a lot of options for your time off this holiday. Too bad none of these movies are very good.

Click the film title to link to the full review.

Official Secrets

Where’d You Go, Bernadette



Don’t Let Go

Angel Has Fallen

Mary

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Being Alive

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Marriage Story

by George Wolf

If plot is what happens and story is how it happens, there’s no better title for Noah Baumbach’s latest than Marriage Story.

For years, Baumbach’s films have probed characters struggling to live up to an image of themselves. It’s what he does, and now Baumbach has written and directed his masterpiece, a bravely personal and beautifully heartbreaking deconstruction of a marriage falling apart.

Adam Driver is Charlie, a New York stage director. Scarlett Johansson is Nicole, an L.A. film actress who made the switch to NYC live theater when she married Charlie and they welcomed son Henry (Azhy Robertson).

We meet Charlie and Nicole in counseling, taking part in an exercise that reminds them why they married and reminds us how skilled Baumbach is at not only writing wonderfully organic dialog, but in bringing it to the screen with layer upon layer of authenticity.

Tremendous performances from Johansson and Driver cement our immersion into the lives of two people valiantly trying to retain some control over the process of splitting up.

Nicole hurts deeply but wears a brave face, unsure of how to approach a future without Charlie, but unable to deny that life with him has meant she “got smaller.” Johannson has never been better, successfully mining Nicole’s mix of pain and defiance with silent tears and impassioned outbursts alike.

Here’s something I’ve said a lot this year: Driver is one the most consistently impressive actors around. His skill at finding the human center of his characters is subtle but unmistakable, and here Driver never lets you abandon Charlie, most importantly when his refusals to face reality seem like cathartic soul-baring from Baumbach himself.

We see the details that make up the work of a marriage, and the subtle cracks that weaken the relationship and begin to pull two people apart. And with the break comes the battle for child custody and the business of divorce.

But even as their two opposing lawyers (Ray Liotta and Laura Dern, Oscar-worthy herself) bleed the couple’s finances and turn the fight dirty, Baumbach never gets petty. When you think the film is taking sides it makes a subtle change in direction, slowly building toward the brilliantly executed emotional tsunami you know is coming.

Will you need tissues? Oh yes. The story of Nicole and Charlie’s marriage will put you through the wringer. And every frame is absolutely worth it.

Late in the film, Charlie’s out with a group of theater friends and ends up joining a pianist to sing Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive.” So we have a theater guy going through a tumultuous divorce taking time to sing a Broadway classic about the risk of commitment. It’s a sequence that could have easily devolved into self-indulgent excess, but instead only confirms the depth of Baumbach’s reach.

He lets another writer’s words brilliantly refocus what Charlie and Nicole will always mean to other, and like everything else in Marriage Story, it feels real, true and necessary.

It feels alive.

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Parasites

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Knives Out

by Hope Madden

It’s interesting that three of the most deliciously watchable films of 2019 exist to question the societal value of the rich. Earlier this year, the action-comedy bloodbath Ready or Not pitted one regular schmo in a bridal gown against a mansionful of one-percenters looking to end her life.

Too bloody for you? How about Joon-ho Bong’s masterpiece of social commentary, Parasite? Who, exactly, is it living off the blood of others?

Rian Johnson follows this path with the hoot and a half that is Knives Out.

If you only know Johnson for his brilliant fanboy agitator The Last Jedi, you should give yourself the gift of every other movie he’s ever made, Looper and Brick, in particular. This guy is an idiosyncratic storyteller, one who balances style and substance to create memorable worlds you aren’t ready to leave when the credits roll.

Knives Out is his own Agatha Christie-style take on the general uselessness of the 1%. And it is a riot.

Christopher Plummer is Harlan Thromby, the recently and mysteriously deceased mystery novelist whose family is in a pickle. Though they believe their gregarious patriarch offed himself, the notion seems unlikely however clear the death scene seems to make it.

Renowned gentleman detective Benoit Blanc (that’s a name!), played by a priceless Daniel Craig, joins two police detectives (LaKeith Stanfield and Johnson go-to goof Noah Segan) to dig into the affair.

As little as possible should be said about the plot, as it is a whodunnit, but at the very least it’s appropriate to acknowledge this cast.

The spoiled and entitled are played by Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Jaeden Martell (from It), Toni Collette as well as Michael Shannon and Chris Evans and their sweaters. Each finds a memorable character and each clearly has an excellent time doing so.

Credit also Ana de Armas as Marta, the homecare nurse and anchor for the story. De Armas has previously been cast primarily for her looks (Blade Runner 2049, War Dogs, Knock Knock), but proves here that she can lead a film, even a film with this strong an ensemble. Her Marta is wholesome but funny, gullible but smart. Her chemistry with Craig is enough to generate some interest in their next collaboration. (Well, that and the writing.)

Johnson proves that you can poke fun without abandoning compassion. More than that, he reminds us that, as a writer, he’s shooting on all cylinders: wry, clever, meticulously crafted, socially aware and tons of fun.

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Screening Room: Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Frozen 2, 21 Bridges & More

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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Frozen II, 21 Bridges, Frankie, Scandalous, Making Waves

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?