Tag Archives: Hope Madden

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Coen My Way?

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Drive-Away Dolls

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Is the flattery still sincerest if you’re imitating yourself?

Because about 15 minutes into Drive-Away Dolls, the first installment of a lesbian B-movie trilogy from director/co-writer Ethan Coen and co-writer Tricia Cooke (Coen’s longtime producer/editor/wife), you can’t ignore how much this film reminds you of Coen Brothers movies.

And yes, better Coen Brothers movies.

Like The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, Barton Fink and A Serious Man, all of which get subtle and not-so-subtle nods in a twisting story of two young women and a mysterious, valuable briefcase.

Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) are queer best friends in 1999 Philadelphia. Marian is sexually conservative, and the free-spirited Jamie hopes to get her friend some action while they accept a drive-away job down to Tallahassee and hit every lesbian bar they can find.

What the girls don’t know is that the car they’ve been given has two very important items in the trunk, and it isn’t long before “The Chief” (Colman Domingo) and his two hapless henchman (Joey Slotnick, C.J. Wilson) are on their tail heading South.

The cast is indeed impressive (with appearances from Pedro Pascal, Bill Camp, Beanie Feldstein and Matt Damon), but while the film serves up a handful of LOL moments, the vast majority of the nuttiness lands with more desperation than inspiration.

It all feels so forced, except for Viswanathan, whose earnest delivery points out the artifice in Qualley’s. The Foghorn Leghorn-y of pre-millennium lesbians, Jamie’s every line draws attention to its own zaniness. It calls to mind The Ladykillers—and that’s never the Coen movie you want to make people remember.

Much of the ensemble works magic, though. Camp is particularly, dryly memorable. But this script, and the unsteady direction, suffers from high expectations. Drive-Away Dolls is fine. It’s fun enough. It’s nutty. But if Coen and Cooke weren’t awkwardly chasing their own family history, it would have been more satisfying.

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Glad I Spent It With You

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Perfect Days

by Hope Madden

Wim Wenders is having a year. Though his epic 3D documentary Anselm somehow regrettably missed out on a Best Documentary nomination from the Academy, his unhurried slice-of-life Perfect Days caught their attention.

Nominated for Best International Film, Wenders’s lovely drama tails Hirayama (Koji Yakusho, perfection) through about two weeks in his life. Hirayama doesn’t have a lot to say, but he misses nothing in his days driving from public restroom to public restroom with Tokyo Toilet written on the back of his pristine blue jumpsuit.

Tools in rubber-gloved hand, Hirayama is meticulous as he works. He has a routine that suits him—brings him joy, even—and Wenders cycles us through that routine day after day after day. At a full two hours, Perfect Days begs your indulgence with this montage of minutely changing events.

The cumulative effect is, at first, lulling. As days pass, some small change draws attention and we try to predict a plot—will this turn into a love story, will that create financial chaos, is a tragic backstory of abuse about to come to light?

Not the goal of this movie. The film actually began as a commissioned short film meant to celebrate Tokyo’s pristine public toilets. I swear to God. It blossomed from there into a lithe, meditative character study shouldered by an impeccable Yakusho.

Though there are moments in the film that feel orchestrated—today, this happens; today, this happens—but not one breath, smile or nod of Hirayama’s head betrays the fiction. His is a mainly solitary, nearly silent life that can be surmised as a middle-aged man’s intentional creation. Hirayama has left something behind, has stripped himself of something, and what remains is what he finds vital: work where you can see a result; floor to ceiling shelves of books; a tidy and enormous collection of cassette tapes; a room full of tiny plants taking root, thanks to his tender care.

You could fit Hirayama’s dialog on less than a single page, and there are times when his silence feels forced and almost comedic. But Yakusho’s brilliantly nuanced, heartbreakingly felt performance makes up for any flaws in the film. Wenders punctuates scenes with joyously on-the-nose song choices—minus the cassette hiss—and the final few singalong minutes showcase one actor’s transcendent work.

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A Walk in the Woods

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Lovely, Dark, and Deep

by Hope Madden

What is the draw of the deep woods? Ticks? High likelihood of injury with haphazard chances of rescue? Cocaine bears?

Even the obvious reasons to steer clear of the woods can’t deter a lot of people. Writer/director Teresa Sutherland’s Lovely, Dark, and Deep links two risks that have haunted writers and creators throughout existence. Some people go crazy in the woods, and many get lost in there and never come out.

“And into the forest I must go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” John Muir said that. The “father of the National Parks” may not have predicted Sutherland’s translation.

Sutherland drops new ranger Lennon (Georgina Campbell, Barbarian) in the National Park back country, where she will spend the season mainly alone in her ranger hut. Does she know that Ranger Varney (Soren Hellerup) disappeared last season?

Likely it wouldn’t dissuade Lennon, who has a past to reconcile and some podcasts on missing people to listen to.

Campbell’s performance shifts as Lennon’s determination makes way for absolute confusion and terror. What begins as single-minded pursuit shows itself to be desperation in disguise. Willfulness gives way to horror as Lennon’s investigation turns up wooded weirdness and wickedness she did not predict.

Wide shots and drone work keep Lennon dwarfed by an increasingly claustrophobic forest, though Campbell never lets the character feel overmatched by nature. Not nature. But a disorienting woods as deep as these (it’s actually Portugal) can easily conceal a lot that is far from natural.

Sutherland’s film is a bit of a slow burn, but once it hits its stride, she throws an unsettling assortment of hellish visions at you. You don’t have to have a natural (and really healthy, I think) fear of the woods to know it’s time to get the F out of Jellystone.

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Fantastic Mr. Fox Corpse

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Stopmotion

by Hope Madden

There will be moments when you’re watching Robert Morgan’s macabre vision Stopmotion that you’ll think you see the twists as they’re coming. That’s a trick. Morgan, writing with Robin King, assumes you’ll catch the handful of common horror twists, but he knows that you won’t predict the real story unfolding.

Although you should because he’s given you every clue.

Aisling Franciosi (The Nightingale) is Ella. She’d like to make her own stop-motion animated film, but instead she’s helping her mom finish hers. Ella’s domineering mother Suzanne (Stella Gonet, very stern) is a legend in the field, and she makes Ella feel as if she has no stories of her own to tell.

But when Suzanne is hospitalized, Ella determines to finish her mother’s film. Her boyfriend Tom (Tom York) sets Ella up in a run down, empty flat where she can work and he can check in on her, bring dinner and take care of her.

Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? Unless Ella really has no stories to tell, or the story she tells is too scary, even for her.

Stopmotion delivers a trippy, uncomfortable, and deeply felt tale of a struggling artist. This is a descent into madness horror of sorts, but it’s also the story of an artist coming to a realization about what scares her most. Franciosi’s turn is brittle and often internal. Ella’s insecurities float to the surface, and Franciosi’s unafraid to make the protagonist frequently unlikeable.

The dual storylines—live action and animation—are both well told, but the real pleasure is in the gruesomely tactile movie Ella is making. Her characters—wax and feather, bone and blood and ash—come to life in a lumbering, grotesque way that hints at any number of possible horrors.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen Morgan’s animated shorts, including “D Is for Deloused” in ABCs of Death. The animator sees the monstrous possibilities in his medium, clearly. But his feature debut balances that with an existential ugliness in Ella’s real life, and thanks to committed and nuanced performances from the whole small ensemble, both sides keep you riveted.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Towns that Won’t Let Go

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Being trapped in a town–whether by supernatural forces or physical ones–is a nightmare scenario that horror movies use to their advantage. Maybe it’s bloodthirsty kids in a cornfield who keep you. Maybe it’s some kind of unnatural barrier, and every time you leave, you wind up where you started. Either way, spooky times! Here are our five favorite towns that won’t let you leave!

5. Hilsboro: The Brotherhood of Satan (1971)

One of those mid-afternoon TV watches one day home sick from school, this movie scared the shit out of me. Was it the kidnapping and possession of children? The Satanic cult? No–it was the idea that K.T. and Nicky could never leave the town. No matter what direction they drove or how they attempted it, they would never get out of the town.

That idea stuck with me for ages, but in restrospect, the movie has a lot of weird goodness going for it. It seems to have inspired Being John Malcovich to a degree, as well as Cemetery Man. It’s a B-movie, no question, but it is a lot of fun.

4. Camp Arcadia: The Endless (2017)

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead continue themes developed in the remarkable Resolution (which could also be on the list). And though it’s really a camp they need to leave, the dread the filmmakers develop is identical to that of the town that won’t let go.

As brothers return to the cult they’d escaped years earlier for a friendly visit, you spend every minute hoping, goading, yelling, begging them to fucking just leave! Get out! What are you still doing there?!

The tension is palpable and the fraternal familiarity between Justin and Moorhead is painfully, tenderly authentic. This works to ground the science fiction elements as they develop, creating an unnerving and memorable feature.

3. Hobbs End: In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

John Carpenter combines King with Lovecraft to create an unforgettable journey into madness. Sam Neill is an insurance investigator out to prove that vanished author Sutter Cane is a phony. He just needs to get to Hobb’s End and prove it.

There’s a scene with a bicyclist on a country road that boasts of Carpenter’s genre magic, as madness and mayhem collude to keep Neill where he is, at least until he can serve a greater purpose.

2. Buffalora: Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore – [of death, of love], 1994)

Inarguably director Michele Soavi’s best work is confined mainly to the cemetery in Buffalora. Released the same year as In the Mouth of Madness, Cemetery Man explores a handful of the same themes. It just does it with more sex.

The film balances humor with horror, sneakily leading to meaner and more chaotic plot turns until there’s no going back.

Rupert Everett is perfection as Dellamorte, the cemetery keeper who has noticed that the dead come back about seven days after they’re interred. Things go from bad to worse to worse still, and finally he loads up his best friend Gnaghi and plans to put Buffalora behind him. Good luck.

1. The Yabba: Wake in Fright (1971)

First time in the Yabba?

Sweaty, drunken, debauched–Ted Kotcheff’s Aussie thriller wrings tension from every scene as John Grant, put-upon school teacher, explores his manliness with the very manliest in town.

A pressure cooker, the film is an absolute education in escalating tension, but it also boasts what may be the greatest performance of Donald Pleasance’s career.

The film is not for the faint of heart, and potential viewers beware: the kangaroo hunt is real.

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Oscar Nominated Shorts: Animation

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by Hope Madden

When I was a kid watching the Oscars, I remember always being perplexed by short film categories. How do people manage to see these shorts?

Good news, kids, it’s gotten much easier. Not only to we now have ShortsTV, but in the last several years, all the nominated shorts have been packaged by category for theatrical showings. And in the cases where the combined run times don’t reach feature length, some bonus shorts are added to the programs.

In this year’s Animation group, don’t look for a lot of silly fun. Or any, really. These animators have beautiful heartbreak in store for you. (Did Pixar not make a movie this year? Seriously, have your Kleenex handy.)

Our Uniform 7 Mins. Director: Yegane Moghaddam Iran

The lightest of the films in the category, Our Uniform delivers a tactile journey through the weight, feel and even sound of the fabric of our lives. Told from the perspective of an Iranian school girl, the film unfolds as a nonchalant conversation about the clothing she wears and how it changes depending on her age and where she is.

The animation is a delight of fabric and flow, and the story releases a sense of freedom and what that feels like.

Letter to a Pig 17 Mins. Director: Tal Kantor Israel

This haunting story, told mostly in black and white with startling uses of pink, follows the dream a school girl has as a Holocaust survivor visits her classroom to tell of a pig that saved his live.

Tal Kantor, who writes and directs, takes unexpected turns in tone. What at first feels like a heartbreaking but beautiful story of survival meeting the apathy of middle schoolers, turns to bitterness and hatred, which turns on its head as it’s translated into the dream of a child. It’s a harrowing, somber but beautiful work.

Pachyderme 11 Mins. Director: Stéphanie Clément France

This heartbreaking tale that sneaks up on you is told in lovely, fluid watercolor style animation with a lilting, melancholy delivery as a grown woman looks back at her visits to her grandparents when she was a child.

Together director Stéphanie Clément and writer Marc Rius tease one story from another, the combined tale told with the resigned distance of age by the narrator. The result is touching and lovely.

Ninety-Five Senses 13 Mins. Director: Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess USA

This is not a film I would expect from Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess (working alongside his wife and directing partner, Jerusha Hess).

Tim Blake Nelson voices the protagonist of this story, an older man running through a personal tale depicting each of his senses. The delivery is cantankerous and the often quirky animation style suggests homespun wisdom. But the story the Hesses tell consistently surprises. It’s a startlingly human story of redemption, of sorts, and it pulls more tears than the others. (And that is a feat—these movies are out to destroy you!)

War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko 11 Mins. Director: Dave Mullins USA

A carrier pigeon flies through the winter sky, bombs bursting around him. A soldier clomps through snow, his boot print showing the blood beneath the snow.

A chess match unfolds that offers a birds-eye view of the idiocy of war. It’s another tear jerker, but what’s wrong with a good cry?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrcilSXWa8M

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Rastaman, Live Up

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Bob Marley: One Love

by Hope Madden

It’s kind of stunning that Bob Marley: One Love represents the first time someone’s told the star’s legendary tale onscreen. Yes, you can find concerts to watch (may we recommend 2020’s Marley?), as well as Kevin Macdonald’s outstanding 2012 documentary, Marley.

But this life seems custom designed for cinematic treatment.

Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard, Joe Bell–dude loves him a biopic) finally gives the Rastafarian some big screen drama with a fairly straightforward, greatest-hits look at what set Marley apart.

Kingsley Ben-Adir (Malxolm X in One Night in Miami) plays Marley. The 2012 doc provides a little clearer picture of Bob’s enigmatic, challenging character. Ben-Adir delivers a charming, eternally laid-back presence. Marley’s flawed, but just enough to make him human. Never enough to make him unlikeable.

As the film–written by Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers, and Zach Baylin–begins, Jamaica is in the middle of a contentious election year that threatens to erupt in a civil war. Marley hopes an upcoming concert can bring the people together.

His wife Rita (Lashana Lynch, The Woman King) disagrees. She thinks it will bring danger to Bob and his family. Rita is right.

The balance of the film follows Marley’s story, sometimes flashing to dreamlike snatches from his childhood, or allowing glimpses of the teen years that brought Bob, Rita, and Rastafarianism together. The main throughline is the trouble caused by success outside of Jamaica.

Lynch flexes muscles we’ve not seen before, though the unapologetic ferocity that has marked her work up to now is as present as ever. Ben-Adir’s Marley is all tenderness, and the performances balance each other nicely.

The music is great, obviously, and a large ensemble (Nia Ashi, James Norton, Anthony Welsh, Quan-Dajai Henriques, Michael Gandolfini) delivers.

Marley’s widow, his oldest son Ziggy, and several of his other children produce. Possibly this explains One Love’s soft touch. And the result is a perfectly lovely tribute to a figure who is not known as well as he should be. But it also does not really let us get to know him, which is too bad.

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Forest Primeval

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Out of Darkness

by Hope Madden

Some 45,000 years ago, Adem (Chuku Modu) and his mate Ave (Iola Evans), his heir (Luna Mwezi), his brother (Kit Young), the elder (Arno Lüning), and a stray (Safia Oakley-Green) left their hunter-gatherer community and crossed the water, looking for the paradise Adem had heard tell of in the old lands.

We know this because the little group spins yarns around a campfire to stave off starvation, and wise Odal (Lüning) is entertaining. He’s also owning the narrative, a concept co-writer (working with Ruth Greenberg and Oliver Kassman) and director Andrew Cumming returns to often as he contemplates early human history with his stone age thriller, Out of Darkness.

Adem, confident of his godlike abilities and his entitlement, believes he will establish his own paradise in this land. But there is no food in sight, and pregnant Ave may die or lose another baby if he does not find food soon.

And yet, starvation may be the least of the little band’s worries. Gathered around the fire at night, they feel movement in the shadows, hear unearthly shrieking. Have they angered demons? Will they become prey?

An imposing Scottish landscape lends the film immeasurable production value, and the invented language adds authenticity. Each performance is solid. Modu, as the steely alpha, is pitiless and selfish. Lüning delivers a conniving turn, and Oakley-Green, as the underdog hero, mines a primitive spirit for complexity.

The film itself treads somewhat familiar ground–a little bit Prey, a touch Quest for Fire, maybe a little Bone Tomahawk.

The film expertly plays with audience expectations. A “brains trump brute force” evolution tale, a la One Million B.C.? A feminist reimagining of prehistory? A pioneering story, or one of invasion? Is it a man versus nature ordeal, or is it a horror movie?

Out of Darkness asks more questions than it answers. That’s not to say there are plot holes–the script is airtight. But what Cumming is out to communicate about our humble beginnings or what that has to say about humanity is a little tougher to decipher.

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Hey, Barbie

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Sometimes I Think About Dying

by Hope Madden

Sometimes I Think About Dying feels like the farthest from Star Wars an actor can go. And I like Star Wars, but still, I mean that as a good thing.

Rather than taking place in a galaxy far, far away, director Rachel Lambert’s film takes place in a set of cubicles inside an office near the ocean of a small Washington town. Daisy Ridley (who also produces) plays Fran. Fran likes spreadsheets, almost never talks, and sometimes she thinks about dying.

That is, until Robert (Dave Merheje) takes the cubicle recently vacated by Carol (Marcia DeBonis), who retired and went on a cruise. Robert’s outgoing, as all of Fran’s office mates seem to be, but there is one difference. Robert realizes Fran exists. And now suddenly, as she sits alone in her very modest apartment after eating a microwaved meal of meat patty covered in cottage cheese, Fran no longer thinks about dying. She thinks about Robert.

Lambert’s film benefits immeasurably from an incredibly lived-in, authentic environment. Though each character has its charm, each one also feels apiece of this world. Sometimes I Think About Dying doesn’t satirize the world of the cubicle as The Office or Office Space. It just understands it–recognizes the banality and camaraderie and sparks of humanity and humor.

What Lambert and Ridley mine beautifully is the difficulty people face when they’re trying desperately to be normal, and the only way they can manage is to be utterly invisible. The longing that comes to life in Fran’s face, her slow thaw to tenderness, vulnerability, brittleness, and panic testifies to Ridley’s versatility.

The full ensemble is a delight, but Merheje is particularly perfect in this role. His own insecurity and loneliness bubble to the surface as he tries and fails to figure Fran out and just have a normal relationship.

Working from a script by Stefanie Abel Horowitz (which she adapts from her acclaimed short), Kevin Armento, and Katy Wright-Mead, Lambert shies away from the morbid or fantastical that exists in the tale. It exists, but it’s accepted lightly in a film that is quiet. It sneaks up on you, like death or like love. And it shows an impressive, introspective side of Ridley.