Tag Archives: Christie Robb

Screening Room: Kung Fu Panda 4, Imaginary, Ricky Stanicky, Damsel & More

Black Metal Kung Fu

The Invisible Fight

by Christie Robb

Picture it: the Soviet-Chinese border, 1973. Three Chinese martial-artists dressed up like they are about to join John Travolta for a Saturday night at the discotheque,  wire-fu their way into Soviet territory and kick the shit out of some guards.

One of the guards, Rafael (Ursel Tilk) falls in love. With kung fu.

Determined to learn, despite the practice being banned in the USSR, Rafael tries to teach himself. Then, his car fortuitously breaks down in front of a Russian Orthodox monastery.  There, in a take on the Shaolin Monastery (birthplace of Shaolin Kung Fu), Rafael begins his true training, both physical and metaphysical.

Only in director Rainer Sarnet’s (November) movie, the trappings of Chinese kung fu are replaced with the long beards, black floor-length gowns, and gilt religious treasures of the Russian Orthodox aesthetic. And all the hand movements are derived from the symbolism of religious iconography.

The look is bright 70s pop art. The sound effects are cartoonlike. The music is Black Sabbath. The fight sequences are amusing and often manage to use food. (I’ve never seen someone weaponize a pierogi before.)

The only thing that got in the way of a thoroughly enjoyable movie-time was the sexual politics. The film really wanted to sort its female characters into the roles of either Madonna-mother or whore-demon. But maybe that’s more the Church’s issue than the movie’s. The kung fu surrealist comedy has the kind of video-store cult-classic vibes that would make for a great weekend watch with a group of rowdy friends.

Parents Who Use Drugs…

Bleeding Love

by Christie Robb

It’s generational trauma time as real-life father and daughter Ewan and Clara McGregor play estranged family embarking on a 14-hour road trip across the American Southwest.

She thinks she’s going on a vacation. He’s taking her to rehab in the aftermath of a first OD at 20. His support now is made possible by his own sobriety journey. It’s just too bad that his rehabilitation started after his daughter’s early childhood had ended. And his rock bottom involved abandoning the family.

Directed by Emma Westenberg (Stranger’s Arms), Bleeding Love is a spare, gritty film. Quite a bit of it consists of extreme close ups of the pair, bathed in golden desert light, awkwardly attempting to rebuild a connection.

This is interspersed with the tropes you’ve come to expect from road trip movies—a breakdown, a sing-along, moments of high drama broken with comedic relief—the best of the latter coming from a sex worker (Vera Bulder) who helps the duo navigate a medical crisis.

With flashbacks to the daughter’s childhood, recalling moments of joy and pain surrounding her dad’s wacky behavior, the film will definitely give watchers of a certain age flashbacks to the large-scale anti-narcotics PSA by Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Nope. Not the frying egg. The other one.  The one with the dad finding a box of drugs in his son’s bedroom and asking the poor kid how he even knows to use them.

You alright. I learned it from watching you!”

Bleeding Love can be a bit heavy-handed and ignores some of the realities of addiction (like the crushing hangovers) but it’s sweet and hopeful and grounded in the real-life struggles of the McGregors.

Bubblegum Noir

Marmalade

by Christie Robb

Newbie prisoner, Baron (Joe Keery, Stranger Things), needs to be back on the street by three p.m. Luckily, his new cellmate is a veteran at all things illegal, including successful jail breaks. And he’s bored. If Baron can spin a compelling enough yarn about why he needs to make his three o’clock meeting, Otis (Aldis Hodge, Black Adam) will get him there on time.

Veteran character actor Keir O’Donnell takes the helm to write/direct his first feature with Marmalade.  And his casting is pretty great. Keery’s Baron shares a lot of the qualities that made his Steve from Stranger Things so much fun—great hair, the charisma of a golden retriever puppy, and a relentless devotion to his loved ones.

Here, Keery’s the caregiver of a bedridden mamma whose prescription medication just jumped up in price. All seems bleak until Marmalade (Camila Morrone, Daisy Jones and the Six) rolls into town. She’s got the pink hair, tattoos, and unconventional fashion sense of a manic pixie dream girl. But she’s also got a gun and a plan to rob a bank, so more a noir femme fatale who shops at vintage stores.

Marmalade is a little bit Forrest Gump and a little bit Natural Born Killers and a lot bit of another movie that I won’t mention because…spoilers. But you’ll figure it out before the credits roll.

It’s a stylish movie with good chemistry between cast members and some fun twists. However, the script deserved another few drafts before filming. In order to pull off what the film is trying to do, you need a tightly woven script that works the first time without giving away the ending, and that holds up to multiple viewings once you know. Here, there were plot holes as big as those in the hot pink fishnet tights that Marmalade so often wears.  

But if you don’t mind that, Marmalade is pretty sweet.

Binary Schminary

Fitting In

by Christie Robb

It’s hard enough being a typical teenage girl. Then, layer on being the new girl in school. With a single mom who is taking on side hustles to pay for college tuition and breast reconstructive surgery post mastectomy. Then, throw in a cute boy who has cheekbones that could cut granite who wants to go all the way, and a charismatic nonbinary hottie.

And, just when you’ve found a ride-or-die BFF who will accompany you to the gynecologist for a birth control consult, you find out your reproductive organs decided to develop atypically. Instead of a canal you’ve got a dimple.

Fitting everything in just got a whole lot more complicated.

Writer/director Molly McGlynn’s background in TV comedy (she’s directed episodes of Grown-ish and Grace and Frankie) serves her well in this feature. She can find the right balance of pathos and humor inherent in stuff like using a series of medical dildos to DIY a vagina.

The movie is also semi-autobiographical and it always helps to write what you know.

Maddie Ziegler (West Side Story) is perhaps a little bit more comfortable with delivering McGlynn’s one-liners than she is surrendering to the emotional depths. Her mom, played by Emily Hampshire (Schitt’s Creek) is a gem, sparkling with a wider emotional range. But Ziegler does an absolutely fantastic job conveying the body horror of being a newbie in stirrups acting like it’s normal to have a chit chat while some dude you just met with no bedside manner tries to plumb your hidden depths with a chilly metal device.

Fitting In is sex positive and fun and smart and silly. It explores the way that binary notions of sex and gender are limiting. It can actually pull off opening with two quotes—one from Simone de Beauvoir and one from Diablo Cody (writer of 2007s Juno and the upcoming Lisa Frankenstein). And the flick’s  got the absolute best visual metaphors soundtracked to Peaches’ 2000 jam “Fuck the Pain Away”.

Seriously.

To Everything There Is a Season

Under the Fig Trees

by Christie Robb

First time feature director Erige Sehiri’s Under the Fig Trees depicts a day in the life of Tunisian agricultural workers harvesting an orchard’s worth of figs on a sunny summer day. The village is almost claustrophobically small. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. Life’s opportunities are limited. Gender roles are rigid.

Sehiri’s film unfolds slowly. It feels like we are eavesdropping. The cast of non-professional actors chat, flirt, and bicker among themselves and try to avoid getting in trouble with the boss Gaith (Gaith Mendassi).

The progressive Fidé (Fidé Fdhili) has a closer relationship with Gaith than most, but is aware that this is a source of gossip for the other workers. She also knows that he is just as capable of assaulting her in a quiet corner as he is capable of letting her ride shotgun to the job site instead of making her stand in the bed of the truck like the others.

Fidé’s younger sister Feten (Feten Fdhili) is delighted to meet up with an ex-boyfriend she’s never completely gotten over. The beautiful Abdou (Abdelhak Mrabti) seems less than thrilled. Another couple struggles to define the terms of their relationship as they simultaneously attempt to hide a stolen bucket of figs.

The young speculate joyfully on their futures and love lives while a separate clutch of older women gaze on from the sidelines. Their swollen bodies and melancholy demeanors hint at the unexpected challenges and burdens that the young folks will someday have to navigate themselves.

Sehiri’s background in documentary film comes through in lingering shots of the countryside that are reminiscent of the honey-hued oil paintings of agricultural workers from the 19th century. And like those paintings, her movie shows both the hardships and the beauty of working on the land in community.

Meeting of Minds

Freud’s Last Session

by Christie Robb

Freud’s Last Session imagines the lengthy conversation that might have taken place had a young C.S. Lewis (author of the Chronicles of Narnia) taken a train down from Oxford to meet up with a dying Sigmund Freud to debate the existence of God.

It could have happened. An anonymous Oxford don did apparently chat with Freud toward the end of his life in 1939, right as England was declaring war on Hitler’s Germany. But history didn’t record the identity of the scholar.

Freud, the man behind the field of psychoanalysis, is a committed atheist and he’s keen to talk to Lewis (already a published author and famous Christian about town) about the origins and inner workings of a faith he’d come to as an adult.

Freud is played by Anthony Hopkins (who once played C.S. Lewis beautifully in 1993’s Shadowlands). He delivers the layered and nuanced performance you’d expect from someone as talented as Hopkins. Still, it manages to feel that he’s giving you Freud’s greatest hits instead of plumbing the depth of this controversial and legendary figure. (He’s shown chomping a cigar talking about regressing to his oral stage of development and absentmindedly fiddling with a pair of scissors after discussing the fear of castration.) But that’s not Hopkins’ fault. Hopkins finds both the fear and the playfulness sprinkled amidst the theory.

Matthew Goode plays Lewis and he is good. He manages to hold his own with Hopkins. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have nearly as much material to work with. He doesn’t expand much about Lewis’s philosophy. Hopkins gets all the best lines.

Freud’s Last Session is adapted from a stage play and you can feel the director/co-writer Matt Brown (The Man Who Knew Infinity) struggling with that legacy.

The film is beautifully set, almost a Pinterest board of all things Dark Academia. It’s shot in chiaroscuro—a high contrast technique that sets off a highlighted subject against a dark background. Perfect lighting for weighty discussions about the legacy of war, why bad things happen to good people, and why one’s daughter feels compelled to tell one about her genderbending S&M fantasies.

To adapt the material to film, Brown makes use of cutaways to what is happening elsewhere while the men chat—whether that is what is happening on the same day but elsewhere or flashbacks.

We see an overburdened Anna Freud (the doctor’s daughter, not his wife, although you’d certainly be forgiven for mistaking her for a spouse given the way the old man treats her) and flashbacks to the two central men’s formative years. However, the cutaways interrupt the flow of the debate. Although sometimes beautiful, they seem like a deflection and distraction from what might have been weightier revelations—like the subject was changed right as we were getting to the good stuff. 

In the end, the film seems like a beautifully composed thought experiment, but it doesn’t exactly make for a satisfying story.

OK Google, Start Apocalypse

Project Dorothy

by Christie Robb

When small-time crooks James (Tim DeZarn, the Cabin in the Woods) and Blake (Adam Budron, Special Ops: Lioness) need a place to hunker down and evade the police, they pick the absolute worst location. They’ve stolen a laptop with a Wi-Fi dongle that enables internet access. And they are hiding out in an abandoned research facility where a rogue AI named Dorothy has been lying dormant since killing off its human overlords.

All Dorothy needs to enact its plan for world domination is, you guessed it, access to the internet.

In Project Dorothy, director George Henry Horton (co-writing with with Ryan Scaringe) tries to make the most out of an abandoned factory and a handful of actors. The use of security camera footage and the saccharinely menacing voice of Danielle Harris (genre staple and the voice behind Nickelodeon classic The Wild Thornberrys Debbie Thornberry) as Dorothy is surprisingly effective in conveying the oppressive sense of constant surveillance.  And the use of forklifts as Dorothy’s robotic enforcers is amusing.

But many of the shots seem repetitive and there is not enough in the script to make the viewer care much about the fate of the world or the two men. It’s like the set up for a Doctor Who episode without the lived-in charming characters and would have, perhaps, made a better short film than a feature.

But, hey, forklift henchmen are fun.

The Horror of Microagressions

Raging Grace

by Christie Robb

When Filipina illegal immigrant Joy (Max Eigenmann) has to come up with an extra five thousand pounds to fund her quest to obtain a work visa, she’s thrilled to get a job offer that pays one thousand a week under the table. It’s a live-in housekeeping gig at a swanky British estate that hasn’t been given a once-over in quite a long time.

There are few downsides. First, she’ll have to hide her young daughter Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla) from her employers. Second, she’ll have to look after the dying old white guy upstairs. And that involves following orders barked at her by the dying guy’s total Karen of a niece. Only, maybe the niece’s intentions aren’t entirely well-meaning. And then there’s the racism…and the classism…and the sexism. But, while Joy may be stressed, she’s also stoic and resilient.

This updated Gothic thriller helmed by debut director Paris Zarcilla and co-written with Pancake Zarcilla effectively suspends the viewer in a state of wary suspicion. Dim lighting, spooky old sheet-draped antiques, a discordant musical score, and a kid with a penchant for pranks and squeezing into tight spaces provides ample opportunity for jump scares.

But it’s not the long shadowy corridors, or the judgmental eyes of the family portraits on the walls, or the suspicious locked doors that spook Joy. It’s the worry that her kid is going to get her in trouble with the boss and she’ll end up getting deported.

Toward the end, the social-critique/Gothic horror gets a little bit too complicated and hard to follow for a few minutes with character choices that seem alternatively forced or not dialed up enough, but ultimately it was an effective take on the traditional atmospheric horror.

Could have used more rage, though.