In a world where thin, beautiful, braless women look hot at work, stare longingly at each other and writhe sensually across the screen, are we supposed to see art where art is not just because Below Her Mouth is a film made by and (ostensibly) for women?
Writer Stephanie Fabrizi and director April Mullen – with an entirely female crew – bring to life the threadbare tale of an uptight good girl whose wild side is ignited by a chance encounter with a bad boy.
The fact that the bad boy is female is beside the point.
No, unfortunately, it is the only point.
Dallas and Jasmine – I swear to God, those are their names – are stiffly played by Erika Linder and Natalie Krill, respectively. Both cut impressive figures and are clearly comfortable with nudity.
Their chemistry is forced and inauthentic, their dialog weak, their storyline nearly nonexistent. What little plot there is – straight, engaged Jasmine indulges her fantasy with Bowie-esque roofer Dallas while her beau is out of town – feels more like porn than like a real movie.
There’s a reason for that.
Below Her Mouth is bound to garner comparisons to Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color – to its terminal detriment. Though Blue has its flaws, it tells a powerful story very well and boasts utterly brilliant performances. And, like Alain Guiraudie’s equally sexually graphic Stranger by the Lake, Blue’s vivid – almost exhausting- carnality supports the narrative.
Below Her Mouth strings together almost enough narrative to frame a dozen or two sex scenes.
Is there something to be said for taking that oh-so-heterosexual film structure (good girl/bad boy, not porn) and upending it? Shouldn’t Mullen be praised for subverting ideas of sexual objectification – if that’s what she’s doing? (We can objectify us just as much as you can – is that the theme at work here?)
Should she be applauded for bringing an entirely female-made film to our theaters?
The first notes I took, about ten minutes into the screening for Ben Wheatley’s latest Free Fire, read like so: This is a ballsy first act.
Indeed. Co-written with his wife and frequent collaborator Amy Jump, the Seventies crime thriller wastes little time on backstory, context or exposition. None, really.
You gather that two Irishmen (Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley) wait in a warehouse parking lot with their liaison (Brie Larson) to a gun runner. They’re always waiting for their own henchmen, as well as the gunrunner’s liaison (Armie Hammer).
I love Ben Wheatley. In 2011, he and Jump brought forth the utterly brilliant horror show Kill List, and I have waited breathlessly for every collaboration since. Free Fire included.
And while each of Wheatley’s films is decidedly different from each other, Free Fire is very different from most films altogether.
Imagine if the entire 93 minutes of Reservoir Dogs took place in that last act shootout among the pack.
The noteworthy fact about Free Fire is not that it has a ballsy first act, but that the entire film is a third act. With scarcely a word of context, we’re rolled into an empty warehouse just in time for a shootout to begin, and there we will stay until the film concludes.
It’s pretty brilliant, really. Character development happens under fire. Hammer’s “Ord” (yep, that’s his name) brings a lot of laid back comedy. Brie Larson is characteristically spot on, as is the always welcome Cillian Murphy. The two infuse characters and the proceedings with some authentic humanity.
Also working the comedy angle is Sharlto Copley – always reliable for some scenery-chewing, here working those mandibles as a South African imbecile/arms dealer once misdiagnosed as a child genius.
Jump and Wheatley rob the gang meeting of any of the slick romance or brutal gravitas usually bestowed on such events by cinema. There is a barely controlled, very funny, incredibly bloody chaos afoot here, and it is a wild and entertaining sight to behold.
Kristin Stewart is an acquired taste. In the last few years, though, she’s shown in a handful of indies that she has some talent. Not a great deal of range, but some definite talent.
That shone most brightly in writer/director Olivier Assayas’s 2014 film Clouds of Sils Maria.
In that film, Stewart played the put-upon personal assistant to a demanding celebrity. Assayas places Stewart in a similar position but with wildly differing themes for his latest, Personal Shopper.
Stewart plays Maureen, an introverted American in Paris. By day, Maureen darts around Paris and even trains to London to pick up fancy-schmancies for her A-lister boss to wear to this red carpet or that fashion show.
By night, though, Maureen wanders the empty rooms of her deceased twin brother Lewis’s old house. Both siblings possessed the gifts of a medium, and Maureen wants to contact Lewis.
It’s a ghost story of sorts, with a bit of a mystery thrown in for good measure, but what Personal Shopper really offers is an exploration of isolation, alienation and identity in the digital age.
Maureen is almost always almost alone. As the film opens, her friend drops her off at Lewis’s old house and Maureen asks, “You’re not staying?”
No, she is not. It’s just Maureen in this old house and her desire to connect with someone.
Likewise, Maureen periodically Skypes with her boyfriend, on some kind of IT assignment halfway across the globe. And she is always just missing the celebrity she shops for. Maureen’s solitary existence is a series of near-connections.
Assayas explores this most fully with an anxiety-inducing texting relationship with an unknown contact – a plot device that attempts to drive the themes and storyline forward. But, as is often the case with this filmmaker, ambiguities and curiosities are more important than closure or action.
Aside from an unfortunate run-in with CGI, the film barely registers as horror and impatient genre fans are likely to be disappointed. But for a lonesome comment on modern times – or for proof that Kristin Stewart can actually act – it’s not bad.
A pensive charmer tries to raise a child prodigy on his own. Gifted offers a premise as rife with possibilities as it is weighed down by likely cliché and melodrama, and it strangely meanders somewhere between the two.
Chris Evans attempts the gruff everyman with some success, playing Uncle Frank, guardian to math genius Mary (Mckenna Grace – very solid). Against the advice of his landlord and Mary’s bestie Roberta (Octavia Spencer), Frank enrolls Mary as a first grader in a local public school.
There Mary wows her good natured teacher (Jenny Slate), and draws the attention of her grandmother (Lindsay Duncan), who’s been MIA since Mary’s mother – another family genius – died when the girl was just a babe.
What’s the best way to care for a gifted child? This is the conundrum at the heart of the film. In rooting out the answer, writer Tom Flynn wisely keeps Mary at the center of the story. She’s an actual character, not a prop for evangelizing one course of action over another.
Luckily, Grace is up to the task, and her chemistry with Evans feels genuine enough to make you invest in their story.
Perhaps more important is Duncan, a formidable talent who elevates a tough role. She, too, shares a warm chemistry with Evans, and it’s that kind of unexpected character layering that helps Gifted transcend its overcooked family dramedy leanings.
On occasion, Gifted is Little Man Tate without the pathos. At other times, it’s Good Will Hunting for first graders.
Strong performances help the film navigate sentimental trappings, but Flynn’s script veers off in too many underdeveloped and downright needless directions, and director Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer) can’t find a tone.
Gifted is warm without being too sweet. Though it knows the answer to the question it’s asking, the film resists oversimplification and never stoops to pitting one-dimensional characters against each other in service of a sermon.
Though the final decision about what’s best for Mary is really never in doubt, in getting to that revelation, the film acknowledges nuance in the choice.
That’s not to say Gifted avoids cliché altogether, or that it embraces understatement. It does not – on either count. But it does present an intriguing dilemma, populates its story with thoughtful, almost realistic characters, and refuses to condescend to its audience or its characters.
Everybody has their rituals, and that’s all fine and dandy. But we aren’t looking for fine and dandy, are we? Hell no – we’re looking for the kind of rituals that generally includes goats heads and/or black candles and/or virgins and/or special meat preparation.
Where will we find these? In some great horror movies. Check it.
5. Kill List (2011)
Never has the line “Thank you” had a weirder effect than in the genre bending adventure Kill List.
Hitman Jay (a volcanic Neil Maskell) is wary to take another job after the botched Kiev assignment, but his bank account is empty and his wife Shel (an also eruptive MyAnna Buring) has become vocally impatient about carrying the financial load.
Without ever losing that gritty, indie sensibility, Ben Wheatley’s fascinating film begins a slide in Act 2 from crime drama toward macabre thriller. You spend the balance of the film’s brisk 95 minutes actively puzzling out clues, ambiguities and oddities.
Everything builds, unsettlingly, to a climactic ritual you won’t see coming.
For those looking for blood and guts and bullets, Kill List will only partially satisfy and may bewilder by the end. But audiences seeking a finely crafted, unusual horror film may find themselves saying thank you.
4. The Wicker Man (1973)
In the early Seventies, Robin Hardy created a film that fed on the period’s hippie- versus-straight hysteria. Uptight Brit constable Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward) flies to the private island Summerisle, investigating charges of a missing child. His sleuthing leads him into a pagan world incompatible with his sternly Christian point of view.
The deftly crafted moral ambiguity of the picture keeps the audience off kilter. Surely we aren’t to root for these heathens, with their nudey business right out in the open? But how can we side with the self-righteous prig Howie?
But maybe Howie’s playing right into something he doesn’t understand – and what would the people of Summerisle do if he didn’t play along? The ritual would be blown!
Hardy and his cast have wicked fun with Anthony Shaffer’s sly screenplay, no one more so than the ever-glorious Christopher Lee. Oh, that saucy baritone!
The film is hardly a horror movie at all –more of a subversive comedy of sorts – until the final reel or so. Starting with the creepy animal masks (that would become pretty popular in the genre a few decades later), then the parade and the finale, things take quite a creepy turn.
3. We Are What We Are (2010)
In a quiet opening sequence, a man dies in a mall. This is a family patriarch and his passing leaves the desperately poor family in shambles. An internal power struggle begins to determine the member most suited to take over as the head of the household, and therefore, there is some conflict and competition – however reluctant – over who will handle the principal task of the patriarch: that of putting meat on the table.
We’re never privy to the particulars – giving the whole affair a feel of authenticity – but adding to the family’s crisis is the impending Ritual, which apparently involves a deadline and some specific meat preparations.
Grau’s approach is so subtle, so honest, that it’s easy to forget you’re watching a horror film. Indeed, were this family fighting to survive on a more traditional level, this film would simply be a fine piece of social realism focused on Mexico City’s enormous population in poverty. But it’s more than that. Sure, the cannibalism is simply an extreme metaphor, but it’s so beautifully thought out and executed!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBkNz3_pzsw
2. Martyrs (2008)
This is one you may need to prepare yourself for. Equal parts orphanage ghost story, suburban revenge fantasy, and medical experimentation horror flick, the whole of Martyrs is a brutal tale that is hard to watch, hard to turn away from, and worth the effort.
Mining the heartbreaking loneliness of abandoned, damaged children, the film follows the profound relationship between Lucie (Mylene Jampanoi) and the only friend she will ever have, an undeterrably loving Anna (Morjana Alaoui).
Constantly subverting expectations, including those immediately felt for Anna’s love, writer/director Pascal Laugier makes a series of sharp turns, but he throws unforgettable images at you periodically, and your affection for the leads keeps you breathlessly engaged.
The third act offers the most abrupt change of course as well as tone. Here is where the ritual begins – it began long ago, but the subject wasn’t quite right. Though it feels like an abrupt shift, it ends up a gruesome but inevitable conclusion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbct9qWBSME
1. The Exorcist (1973)
For evocative, nerve jangling, demonic horror, you will not find better than The Exorcist.
Slow-moving, richly textured, gorgeously and thoughtfully framed, The Exorcist follows a very black and white, good versus evil conflict: Father Merrin V Satan for the soul of an innocent child.
But thanks to an intricate and nuanced screenplay adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own novel, the film boasts any number of flawed characters struggling to find faith and to do what’s right in this situation.
So was Friedkin, the director who balanced every scene to expose its divinity and warts, and to quietly build tension. The titular ritual was simply the climax of a film filled with rituals, big and small, Catholic and non-religious, that we use to keep us clean and safe.
I learned precious little in my 12 years of Catholic schooling. (That’s more on me than it is on the schools, to be honest.) But one lesson that did stick: nuns are judgey.
When I was a 4th grader in Tiffin St. Mary’s Catholic Elementary school, my teacher, Ms. Teill, was charged with generating some kind of skit to entertain at an upcoming PTO gathering.
I volunteered my services.
I would not act, oh no. I prepared to write and direct my first stage play. I called it, “When a Stranger Calls.”
If that title sounds familiar to you, it’s because it is. I stole it from the box of a VHS rental I coveted at the local video store.
As a child, I was fascinated by horror films.
I attribute this to inaccess (my parents only allowed G-rated films until I was about 12), and my abiding fear of all things.
As a preschooler I was afraid of Sesame Street – you must admit it is lousy with monsters. I found Boo Berry cereal equal parts delicious and frightening. Trees and the woods still terrify me – a handicap in rural Ohio.
Odd as it sounds, my ritual for overcoming my fear was to write scary stories.
Not just any scary stories – I would rewrite those tales I overheard that frightened me, allowing me a sort of ownership, I suppose.
I had notebooks full of them – tales crafted of what I could glean from a commercial I’d seen for Helter Skelter, or after eaves dropping on the babysitter as she summarized the film Carrie over the phone to a friend, or after poring over the box for the VHS tape of David Cronenberg’s Rabid. All these became inspiration to my 10-year-old self. Little did Miss Teill know.
I’m not sure how familiar you are with the 1979 slasher whose plot I attempted to plagiarize.
A babysitter receives creepy phone calls telling her to check the children. She ignores the message, the children are slaughtered, and eventually she finds that the calls are being made from inside the house.
“Have you checked the children?”
In the film, the babysitter survives – a fact I did not grasp from the VHS box, so in my play, she dies. And the children die. So do the parents, the police who investigate – actually, every character in my play died except the maniac, who lived to kill another day.
So my friends and I rehearsed during recess. We honed our tale until we were ready to share it with our parents – and everyone else’s – as well as most of St. Mary’s faculty at the PTO meeting.
Poor Miss Teill. Well, I suppose she should have paid more attention during rehearsal.
As it happens, it was Holy Week – those sacred days leading up to Easter.
Let’s be honest, though, there is a lot of blood shed in those days leading up to Easter. Is this really that different?
Where do you think Sister Cleofa landed with that argument?
It turns out, child slaughter doesn’t play that well with the nuns.
My parents were mortified, as was the whole of the audience. As I recall, Miss Teill was reprimanded. I was definitely reprimanded, and had to promise to stop writing anything at all.
And to stop being morbid.
There were several children I had to promise to stop playing with, also, at their parents’ request.
But otherwise, the performance went well, I think.
Anybody with any sense at all is afraid of pregnant women.
I myself all but pushed a man down a flight of stairs while I was pregnant, and still don’t see the problem with it.
With unassuming mastery, Alice Lowe pushes that concept to its breaking point with her wickedly funny directorial debut, Prevenge.
Lowe plays Ruth. Grieving, single and pregnant, Ruth believes her unborn daughter rather insists that she kill a bunch of people.
With her characteristically dry, oh-so-British humor, Lowe exposes awkward moments of human interaction and then forces you to stare at them until they become gigglingly unbearable.
Why such bloodlust from Ruth’s baby? Lowe, who also wrote the script, divulges just as much as you need to know when the opportunity arises. At first, there’s just the macabre fun of watching the seemingly ordinary mum pick off an unsuspecting exotic pet salesman.
And then on to the saddest, most pathetic 70s-loving disco club DJ of all time.
With each new victim we learn a bit more backstory and a little more about Ruth, who’s on a path that’s funny, bloody and just touching enough to leave a mark.
Lowe’s blackly comic timing as an actor is well proven, particularly in Ben Wheatley’s 2012 gem Sightseers, which she also co-penned. Wheatley’s picture predicted Lowe’s ability to zero in on anxieties around social awkwardness and exploit them for all their squirm-worthy horror and comedic worth, as well.
She ably showcases these skills and more in Prevenge, this time mining larger themes of grief and pre-partum depression with a weary authenticity. (Lowe, like her character Ruth, was 7 months pregnant during filming.)
Rarely gory (DJ Dan does get it pretty good, though), the film barely registers as horror, but as a comedy it treads some dark territory. It does so with authority, good will, subversive insight and a laugh.
It’s a thin plot requiring the ability to suspend disbelief, but it also announces a very fresh voice in horror.
He said he would be back, and he is – onscreen, anyway. Open fan of Columbus Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in Aftermath, a movie filmed and set in central Ohio.
Based on the real-life mid-air collision of Danish airplanes in 2002, recast as an American disaster, the film follows the merging paths of a grieving father (Schwarzenegger) and the air traffic controller he holds responsible (Scoot McNairy).
Greater Columbus Film Commission and Gateway Film Center celebrate the release with a premier this Friday, April 7. Local cast and crewmembers will share the excitement, which begins with a mixer at the film center at 7:30 pm and a screening at 9.
Schwarzenegger delivers one of his best performances in a role that contrasts with the type that made him an icon. He’s thoughtful and understated in a film draped in a haze of sadness and regret.
He’s joined onscreen by Columbus native Maggie Grace in a film written by Javier Gullon (Enemy), produced by Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, The Wrestler), and directed by Elliot Lester (Nightingale).
Add to that cameos by former Mayor Mike Coleman and shout outs to local media Sunny 95 and Channel 6 – not to mention locations you’re sure to recognize – and the whole thing feels just darn homey.
Tickets for this special opening night event are $15 each ($5 for myGFC members).
How many period romances set against the crumbling of the Ottoman empire must I endure in one month?
Current tally: 2, and Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert is the least endurable.
I had been cautiously optimistic about Herzog’s biopic on Gertrude Bell. Nicole Kidman (rarely a bad idea) stars as Bell, a British writer/traveler/scientist/spy who helped shape British policy on the Middle East.
Herzog + Kidman = reason for optimism.
Unfortunately, that math doesn’t really work out.
I’m not going to lie, I had no idea who Gertrude Bell was before I saw this film. Ten seconds on google and I found out that she was an absolutely fascinating human being. It’s crazy. She explored everywhere, climbed everything, learned new languages, informed culture and politics, wrote about all of it, had torrid affairs, never married, and determined the boundaries of modern day Iraq. All in the early 1900s.
That should have been a hell of a movie.
Unfortunately, director Herzog cannot tell this woman’s wildly unconventional story without framing her in the most conventional way possible. She exists exclusively in terms of her relationships – or the absence of a relationship – with men.
We’ll lay that at the foot of Herzog the director, but this God-awful dialog? That’s on Herzog the writer.
Kidman, almost tragic in her earnest commitment to this part, manages to wrestle Herzog’s humorless and hackneyed prose into submission. But Lord, James Franco cannot.
The plotting is no better than the concept or dialog.
Scene after needless scene shows Kidman in the office of one man or another, announcing her plans to do something they don’t need to know about, only to suffer their indignant rebuffs. She responds with obstinate will. Cut to Kidman doing whatever it was those men told her she couldn’t do.
Repeat ad nauseum.
This woman hand-drew the border between Iraq and Jordan – in a time when women couldn’t vote in England. That alone could be unpacked and considered from about 30 different perspectives. There are so many things worth knowing about Gertrude Bell, but all I really learned from Queen of the Desert is that she was, “a woman without her man.”
Desperation encourages odd, sometimes uncharacteristic behavior. I, for example, once saw a hypnotist.
I clench my teeth, a habit that creates gigantic head pain. It’s the kind of debilitating headache that might send a person to bed. But if you clench your teeth when you sleep, relief is hard to come by.
Let’s just say I spend more money on Advil than many do on rent.
This is what has driven me to the heathen sciences. I did exhaust the regular sciences first, rest assured. No help. Hypnosis it is.
When I called the downtown office, I half-expected to let the idea die. But the therapist – he answered his own phone, which should have been a warning sign – was very lulling and informative. He spoke slowly and reassuringly, with rolling l’s. I think he may have hypnotized me over the phone into making an appointment, but I’m not sure. Still, it suggests a level of skill, doesn’t it?
Dr. Bob, a skinny older man with a flesh colored Abe Lincoln beard, believed he would solve my problem. He claimed to have helped a woman just that week heal herself of cancer.
Surely if he could do for this woman what medical doctors, hospitals and years of cancer research could not, he could do for me what a bite plate couldn’t.
My first concern was that Dr. Bob kept asking me if there was anything else I wanted him to fix while he was “in there.”
This whole idea put me ill-at-ease. He even asked my husband if there were any other things he should fix while I was “out.”
Wisely, George could find no faults needing attention. But still, how was I to know that they wouldn’t program me to do his bidding while I was under? God forbid I woke up an attentive wife who remembers to write down debit card uses.
So I was uncomfortable before we even began, but I was supposed to relax. Really relax, as I could tell by the number of times he sing-songed the word “re-lax-aaaaaaaaaaa-tion.”
But I couldn’t relax. For one thing, I had an issue with the fluffy clouds. I was meant to visualize myself bouncing safely through a series of ten fluffy clouds, relaxing more with each cloud. How do you visualize yourself in a cloud? They’re made of water vapor. No way that could support me. I’d fall to my death. This was not relaxing.
Alarmed that I was failing already, I alerted Dr. Bob to my issue. He switched to a different technique, but it may have worked too well.
I fall asleep easily and at one point, when I was mentally descending my set of ten safe, hypnotic stairs, I realized as I hit the bottom step that I was surrounded by zombies. Oops. Sleeping. Who knows how much hypnotherapy is missed while you’re battling zombies?
I explained about the zombie situation to Dr. Bob and he honestly seemed concerned that the zombies themselves were causing the teeth clenching. I know this because he said, “These buggers might be the cause of the whole problem.”
I’m open to a lot of ideas but I feel safe in saying that the living dead do not control my mandibles.
I was pretty sure they were just cartoon villains that had popped into a dream – they didn’t have to be zombies at all. It could have just as easily been Thundercats. It was a dream.
The doctor disagreed. He looked at me as one passing down wisdom to a Padawan and asked, “Have you noticed their eyes are only red if you look directly at them?”
What?
Unfazed by my skepticism – indeed, oblivious to it – Dr. Bob told me to relax and just say the first thing that came to mind as he asked me questions.
“What’s the first number that comes to your mind?”
“8.”
“OK, of the 8 of you inside Hope, how many of you have heads.”
“Um, what?”
“No, no, just relax and let me know the first thing that comes to mind. How many of you have heads.”
“I don’t know, 4?”
“OK, you four who have bodies, look into the light. You’ve never been punished in the light, have you?”
What the hell? Was this an exorcism? Because I’m Catholic and we don’t take exorcism lightly. You’ve seen the film.
He continued in this vein for the balance of our time together, but eventually I stopped paying any attention – an important part of hypnotism, truth be told, so it wasn’t like I was cheating. And anyway, my head really fucking hurt and trying to puzzle through this whole exorcism thing was more than my brain could process at the moment. One thought did keep recurring to me, though.
