Tag Archives: Madd at the Movies

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Luz

by Hope Madden

Fast, brave and baffling, Tilman Singer’s experimental demon thriller Luz enters hot, exits quickly and leaves you puzzled. In a good way.

The film begins with a nightmarish vision leeched of color, as battered young cabbie Luz (a letter-perfect Luana Velis) tumbles into a banal police station lobby shouting about how the receptionist wants to live his life. Soon she’s seated in an equally bland hallway, mumbling blasphemies to herself in Spanish as two German police officers—one who doesn’t understand and one who refuses to translate—look on.

Meanwhile, in a dive bar across town…

It makes little sense to summarize the plot because the fairly slight premise unfolds in front of you, offering as many questions as answers. To spoil that seems pointless.

There is something fascinating happening in this film, though, and Singer has no real sense of urgency about clarifying what that is. Seedy, lifeless places become environments where those as baffled as we bear witness—or don’t—to a patient if tenacious courtship of sorts.

It all begins in dehumanizing but fascinating wide angle shots. Slowly, clip by clip, Singer draws us in closer to the diabolical unfolding in our midst. It’s the deconstruction of a possession film, a bare-bones experimental feature that hangs together because of its clever turns, solid performances and Singer’s own technical savvy with sound design.

Running about 70 minutes and boasting no more than 6 speaking roles, Luz is surrealism at its most basic, storytelling at its sparest.

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

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California Dreamin’

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Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Happy QT Day, everyone — that rare and special holiday where moviegoers love a movie made by an unabashed lover of movies. And this time, he’s made a movie about loving the movies.

It’s Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s clearest love letter to cinema both great and trashy. Spilling with nostalgia and packing more sentiment than his previous 8 films combined, Hollywood is the auteur’s most heartfelt film.

Not that it isn’t bloody. Once it hits its stride the film packs Reservoir Dogs-level brutality into a climax that’s as nervy as anything Tarantino’s ever filmed. But leading up to that, as the filmmaker asks us to look with a mixture of fondness and sadness at two lives twisting toward the inevitable, he’s actually almost sweet.

One of those lives belongs to Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a one-time TV Western leading man who’s made a couple of poor career choices and seems to be facing obsolescence. This would mean, domino-style, the obsolescence of his best friend and stunt double with a sketchy past, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt).

But that’s not the second story, which instead belongs to the real life tragedy of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Set in the LA of 1969, Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood uses the Manson family crimes (marking its 50th anniversary this August) as the thematic underpinning, a violent metaphor for the end of two eras.

Tarantino being Tarantino, though, he’ll use the movies to make everything better.

From the foot fetish (more proudly on display than ever) to the familiar faces (even one who made the cutting room floor and the credits), the hiply retro soundtrack to the inky black humor, Hollywood hides no Tarantinoism. But the film establishes a timestamp more precisely than any of his other works. And on the whole, he shows unpredicted restraint.

The film moseys through the first two acts, with long, deliberate takes full enough of pop culture as to completely immerse you in time and place. Tarantino again frames sequences with alternating levels of homage, but dials back the dialogue from his usual quick-hitting crispness to measured ruminations often thick with intention.

In strokes stylish and self-indulgent, Tarantino is bidding adieu to halcyon days of both flower power innocence and the Hollywood studio machine. Here, he’s looking back on the Manson murders as a dividing line, and again wondering what might have been.

For us QT aficionados, Hollywood may feel at first like an odd, overlong duck, but its wandering nature gives you ample time to adjust. The cast shines from top to bottom, propelling an entertaining vision of humor and blood and irony and bittersweet nostalgia.

Settle in, trust the driver and enjoy the ride.

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Cry and Laugh Again

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Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love

by Hope Madden

For fans, there is something endlessly fascinating about Leonard Cohen. Maybe it’s because, regardless of the volume of his work—songs, novels and poems—or the intimacy of his words, it’s still impossible to feel as if you know him.

In Nick Broomfield’s latest documentary, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, it’s clear that Cohen’s longtime companion and eternal muse Marianne Ihlen felt the same way.

Ihlen inspired the Cohen classic So Long, Marianne, obviously, as well as dozens of others including Bird on a Wire. The two had one of those Sixties relationships—open but committed, tumultuous but loving, and ultimately doomed.

For eight years they lived together, on and off, along with Ihlen’s son Axel in a humble cottage on the Greek island of Hydra. An artists’ refuge of sorts, it was the kind of pre-hippie paradise where eccentrics engaged perhaps too freely in freedom.

It was there that Broomfield first met Ihlen. Their friendship and the director’s clear fondness for his subject give the film a fresh and odd intimacy.

Though his personal connection to Ihlen is an interesting inroad into this story, the doc sometimes feels like two separate and uneven pieces sewn together.

That seems partly appropriate, given that Leonard and Marianne spent increasing spans of time apart as the years wore on. And there’s no question that—for Leonard devotees, at least—the behind the scenes footage of Cohen on tour in the Sixties, commentary from his bandmates, and snippets of background intel from close friends is as engaging as it is enlightening.

Unfortunately, we lose Marianne almost entirely by Act 2. The titular character becomes a bit of a ghost, and not even one who looms large over the material in the foreground.

Of course, as the film was made posthumously (both Ihlen and Cohen died in 2016), their own insights are limited. In this way, though, Ihlen’s presence outweighs Cohen’s in that Broomfield dug up audio conversations in which she discusses the relationship.

The lack of Cohen’s own thoughts on their pairing—outside of one or two rambling, drug-riddled onstage song intros—makes its absence known.

Still, there is a melancholy beauty in the way Bloomfield’s documentary—his love letter to Marianne and Leonard—follows Cohen’s song lyrics, telling of a fractured, unconventional but nonetheless loving connection.

Indeed, it is Cohen’s final words of love to Ihlen, a note sent to her hospital room as she lay dying, filmed at her request, that illustrates that very point.

A bit disjointed but never uninteresting, Words of Love is an often compelling look at the relationship between muse and artist. For Cohen fans, it’s required viewing.

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I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of July 22

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So, there’s this great animated movie that no one saw. It probably isn’t entertaining enough for the littlest kids, but everyone else should see it. There’s also a middling action flick and a sad, sad reboot.

Click the film title for the full review.

Missing Link

Master Z: Ip Man Legacy

Hellboy

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Her Story

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Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché

by Hope Madden

Do you know Alice Guy-Blaché? Documentarian Pamela B. Green thinks you should.

She is clearly right.

Guy-Blaché’s groundbreaking career has not been celebrated in the same way as her historical counterparts. She was not only the first female filmmaker, she was among the first four filmmakers, period. She boasts an output of around 1000 films, among them the first narrative film, the first color tinted, and one of the first two films with synchronized sound.

And yet, of the dozen or so filmmakers and actors Green interviews in the opening montage, including Geena Davis, Peter Farrelly, Catherine Hardwicke, Peter Bogdanovich and Ava DuVernay, only DuVernay recognizes the name.

Says Bogdanovich, “I’ve spent my life making films and have written for years about film and I’ve never even heard of her.”

Well, clearly Peter Bogdanovich never took a Women in Film class at Ohio State.

Whether you have or have not heard of Alice Guy-Blaché, Green’s film is bound to be informative, showcasing a figure with remarkable aptitude not only in business (she ran her own studio and produced her own films) but amazing artistic vision, pioneering much of the comedic and dramatic form we now take for granted.

Jodi Foster lends respectful narration (and spot-on French pronunciation!) to an earnest and loving—if sometimes tedious—exploration.

Green’s film is at its best during rare interview footage of the filmmaker, at the time nearing the end of her life and taking a wistful, reflective posture. Between that, footage from Guy-Blaché’s canon, and responses from modern filmmakers on that footage, Green pieces together some engaging and illustrative moments.

Her film gets sidetracked too easily, though, answering questions from those very filmmakers who did not recognize Guy-Blaché’s name, “I would like to see inside her studio,” “I’d love to hear how she managed to be a filmmaker and a mother during that time period…”

These offshoot moments feel disjointed, lessening the intimacy with the subject the more successful moments nearly reach.

Green’s biggest misstep as a filmmaker is her preoccupation with her own sleuthing, some of which feels endearing in its enthusiastic amateurishness, but too often comes off as needlessly self-congratulatory.

Though Green herself struggles to create a film artistically worthy of the pioneering filmmaker, her heart is in the right place and her quest to help Guy-Blaché reclaim her own place in cinematic history is laudable.

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Woman’s Woman

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Darlin’

by Hope Madden

In  2011, filmmaker Lucky McKee unleashed the subversive, feminist horror jewel The Woman to a lot of boos at Sundance. It’s tough viewing, no doubt—the screener we were sent to review prior to its release arrived wrapped in a vomit bag—but it amounted to an envelope-pushing miracle of modern horror.

The film itself was a sequel to the underwhelming 2009 cannibal horror penned by Jack Ketchum, Offspring. The point of both films was that only a doomed moron underestimates Pollyanna McIntosh.

McIntosh (The Walking Dead) returns to the feral, nameless role that’s caused such a ruckus over the years, this time taking charge of the woman’s trajectory by writing and directing the latest installment, Darlin’.

Darlin’ picks up some years after the end of The Woman. McIntosh’s alpha and Darlin’ (Lauryn Canny), the adolescent whose grown in her care since the events of McKee’s flick, approach a hospital. Filthy, communicating with grunts and probably smelling pretty foul, the two split up as the girl enters the hospital.

To the dismay of the unrealizing Woman, the system’s not about to let her back out.

What follows is a sloppy, superficial finger-wagging at Catholicism, which is unfortunate. Not because the church deserves more respect than that—it doesn’t, really—but because there may be no lazier strawman in horror right now than the Roman Catholic Church, and McIntosh doesn’t even bother to get a single dogmatic or ritualistic point accurate.

Let me pause. Pollyanna McIntosh is a sort of hero of mine and The Woman is an all-time favorite. You have no idea how much I wanted to like this film or how much slack I was likely to give. The raw truth is that very little about the film merits praise.

McIntosh still cuts a mighty impressive figure as the nameless beast running the show. Canny, however, struggles with her Tarzan-style dialog.

The always capable Nora-Jane Noone, playing the church’s one good nun, serves mainly as a painful reminder. Those of us who saw her breakout film The Magdalene Sisters remember how cinematically powerful the horrors of Catholicism really can be.

There’s an underfed side plot about a loving nurse and an ill-fitting storyline about a group of homeless women, all of which coalesce with the evil priest core story in a bat-shit climax that almost makes the ride worthwhile.

It’s unfortunate, because there are three or four moments in this film of unique, subversive horror. They flash across the screen and then are gone, drown out by lazily written, listlessly directed cliché.

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Dearly Beloved

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Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

by Hope Madden

Before Toni Morrison was old enough to understand the F-word her mother had her washing off the sidewalk, she understood the confrontational nature and the power of words.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am benefits from the Octogenarian Nobel and Pulitzer prize winner’s characteristically mesmerizing ruminations on her life. As she sits and recounts memories, moments and, most fascinating, glimpses of her writing inspirations, the documentary blossoms.

Compared to the composed and thoughtful interview footage with the likes of Dick Cavett and others from across her career, Morrison’s interaction for Greenfield-Sanders’s camera has a playful quality.

She charms when recounting her personal history: “When I got to Howard, I was loose,” she recalls happily. “I probably overdid it. I don’t regret it.”

Her confidence when considering her life in publishing is awesome. “Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn’t even interesting.”

And when she speaks about her writing—just, wow: “My sovereignty and my authority as a racialized person had to be struck immediately with the very first book. The white world was peripheral if it existed at all.”

It comes as no surprise that someone with such breathtaking mastery of the language would be as beguiling when speaking as she is in writing, and the veteran documentarian knows when to just turn the camera toward his subject and let it roll.

Sure, some context has to be provided. We get biographical information. We see snippets of news shows, hear from famous fans (Oprah, Angela Davis, Sonia Sanchez, Walter Moseley—Toni Morrison has impressive fans). But honestly, this is when Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary gets away from him.

Allowing the audience some background they may not have concerning Morrison’s struggle to be appreciated in her own time, or the bold and culturally imperative choices she made as an editor, or the global reaction to her novels feels necessary. It also feels superficial.

Worse still, it feels like a cheat—like these were moments that could have been spent listening to Toni Morrison tell us something. Anything. This is particularly stinging when we’re finally allowed a sentence or two about how Beloved was inspired. Morrison tells of a vision that suggests there is something genuinely magical, something otherworldly, about her process.

It’s a hint, but it’s impossible not to want more, not to feel as though we could have chucked all that gushing from fans, all those archival interviews, all those photos from Howard and just listen to Toni Morrison tell us a story.

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Teen Titan

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Spider-Man: Far From Home

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Spider-Man: Far From Home has more than a webshooter up its sleeve.

One part reflection on the state of MCU, one part statement on our cartoonishly ridiculous world today, one part charming coming-of-age tale, the latest Spidey episode almost takes on more than it can carry. But return writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers embrace franchise strengths while betting director Jon Watts, also back from Homecoming, can maneuver slick surprises.

The wager pays off, and Far From Home winds up being a film that feels a bit campy for a while, but in retrospect succeeds precisely because of those early over-the-top moments.

Peter Parker (the immeasurably charming Tom Holland), having returned from oblivion (Infinity War), then universal salvation and personal loss (Endgame), would like a vacation. The poor kid just wants to take a trip abroad with his class and get a little closer to his crush MJ (Zendaya).

But that is not to be, is it?

Not with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) following him across the globe, or the surprise appearance of Quentin Beck aka Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), a new monster-slayer from another Earthly dimension.

“You mean there really is a multi-verse?”

That’s a nice nod to the stellar animated Spidey adventure from last year, and a big clue about how self-aware this chapter is determined to be. The front and center ponderings about what Peter (and by extension, Marvel) is going to do now threaten to collapse the film from self-absorption.

To the rescue: a jarring and unexpected pivot, and that wonderfully youthful vibe that now has one eye on growing up.

Interestingly, Tony Stark fills in for the guilt-inducing father figure that’s always been missing from this iteration of Peter Parker’s tale. Without Uncle Ben, Stark becomes that hallowed hero whose shadow threatens to obliterate the fledgling Avenger.

Peter’s still a teenager, after all, and Homecoming soared from embracing that fact, and from Holland’s ability to sell it in all its wide-eyed and awkward glory.

He still does, but now our hero’s naiveté is shaken by some mighty timely lessons. Number one: “It’s easy to fool people when they’re already fooling themselves.”

Not exactly subtle, but fitting for the world of a distracted teen. And for kids of all ages, there’s no denying how cathartic it is to see world leaders, their media lapdogs and widespread buffoonery on blast and blasted across the largest screens, where good will inevitably conquer.

As fun and funny as this keep-you-guessing Eurotrip is, its core is driven by a simple search for truth. And don’t leave early, because that search doesn’t stop until Far From Home plays its second post-credits hand, and you walk out re-thinking everything you just saw.

Tangled webs, indeed.