Cinema revels in emotion. It’s why the artform has lasted well over a century. We love to experience films that make us laugh, make us afraid, and make us examine even the darkest of our decisions. Lost Girls & Love Hotels is an exploration of these painful, disorientated choices.
Margaret (Alexandra Daddario) is an American ex-pat living in Japan. By day, she teaches at a training academy for Japanese stewardesses. By night, Margaret loses herself in booze and random rendezvous in the red light district. Her life of debauchery softens after she meets a brooding Yakuza (Takehiro Hira).
Margaret’s pain and self-loathing are apparent from the opening frames: she drunkenly stumbles through a subway entrance, tears brimming in her wide eyes as she realizes a man is lurking behind her. Fear is less apparent in her distant gaze. What I saw was more akin to someone finally succumbing to their demons. This was rock bottom.
Lost Girls & Love Hotels isn’t looking to break new ground. There’s no way this movie could. What’s interesting – and original – is how this kind of movie is told through the point of view of a female character. We’ve seen self-destructive dudes do this for eons. Let the ladies have a turn at spiraling out of control!
Daddario turns in an impressive performance as Margaret. She walks a fine line – showing the character’s high-highs and low-lows with ease. Her wide-eyed, all-American look helps her stand out in a mostly Japanese cast. One would expect a person with such outwardly beauty to harbor very little in the way of pain. For a character like this one, believability is key, and Daddario delivers.
Director William Olsson and writer Catherine Hanrahan (adapting her own novel) haven’t set out to make a salacious sex drama. While Margaret’s BDSM escapades inform who her character is, Lost Girls & Love Hotels is more interested in a person who has latched onto numbing behavior. Isolation, even with a core group of friends and co-workers, is ever-present in Margaret’s condensed world.
There’s a simmering sense of danger running through the entire film. Olsson never wrings false drama out of it, but that subtle feeling is there nevertheless. When Margaret does find herself in a precarious situation, it feels more like an eventuality, not the tacked-on payoff to a sleazy thriller.
Grounded with an outstanding lead performance, Lost Girls & Love Hotels is a look at how sadness and isolation isn’t something you can run away from – even if you run halfway across the world.
Newcomer Charlie Guevara charms in Flavio Alves’s drama The Garden Left Behind with a bittersweet performance as Tina, an undocumented Mexican trans woman getting by in NYC. Her performance is simultaneously optimistic, wearied, frightened and strong.
Wisely, filmmaker Alves focuses his tale unblinkingly on
Tina—her day to day, her loving if prickly relationship with her grandmother
(Miriam Cruz), her warm and supportive community of friends, her struggle with
an insecure boyfriend, her tentative steps toward transition. In a real way,
every movement in the film is about transition, about claiming something that
belongs to Tina, whether it’s her voice or her financial independence, her
emotional health or her political power.
The rawness of Guevara’s turn sometimes makes way for
self-consciousness that brings certain scenes to an awkward halt. Still,
Guevara and Cruz share a lovely, lived-in chemistry. It’s their relationship
that both buoys the film and makes the it ache all the more.
The story around the periphery crystallizes the ways in
which the lives of trans people—especially trans women of color—differ from your
garden variety New Yorkers’. Alves’s hand is not heavy; the fact that so many
of Tina’s interactions could be taken as potentially menacing speaks volumes
without an overt narrative. It’s actually in this B-story that the filmmaker
may make the most salient and heartbreaking points.
If the film feels authentic, that’s unsurprising. Alves not
only cast trans actors for each trans role, but he also employed a staff of
transgender filmmakers in creative and crew roles. This after several years of
research within the NYC transgender community to develop the insightful and
poignant storyline.
It’s no surprise The Garden Left Behind became the 2019 SXSW audience award winner. The film breaks through as not only an admirable artistic vision produced with integrity, but a beautiful human tale of perseverance and love.
Anyone who saw the original The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo knows if you get on the wrong side of a score with Noomi Rapace, she’ll have no problem settling it.
As Maja in The Secrets We Keep, Rapace has a similar mindset. Settled into post-war Suburbia in an unnamed town, Maja and her physician husband Lewis (Chris Messina) run the local medical clinic while raising their young son, Patrick.
On one fateful afternoon, the Romanian-born Maja is shaken to her core by the sight of a man (Joel Kinnaman) she believes committed heinous war crimes against her and her family years before. After setting a successful trap, Maja kidnaps the man and holds him captive in her basement, finally detailing to Lewis the horrifying ordeal she has never spoken of.
Director and co-writer Yuval Adler sets an effective hook despite some forced visual cues (a literal bubble bursting, North by Northwest on a theater marquee). Rapace delivers the right mix of confused trauma, making Maja’s indecision between murder and interrogation ring true (much more so than the petite Rapace’s ability to maneuver the dead weight of Kinnaman).
Is the suburban hostage a Swiss immigrant named Thomas, as he claims, or is he the former Nazi Karl, whose war crimes haunt Maja’s dreams?
Adler seems to sense the need to distance the film from Death and the Maiden (and, to a lesser extent, Big Bad Wolves), but as events move further from the basement, an air of B-movie pulp emerges.
A visit from the neighborhood cop seems to exist only for contrived tension, while Maja’s burgeoning friendship with her captive’s wife (Amy Seimetz) and daughter can never quite move the shadow of secrets over the entirety of picket-fence Americana the way Adler intends.
And despite a terrific performance from Messina, Lewis lands as a frustrating and sometimes distracting presence. While Lewis’s struggle to believe Maja – even without a confession – is one of the film’s most resonant strengths, the bigger struggle concerns the film’s commitment to defining Maja on her own terms.
When it does commit, The Secrets We Keep rewards the investment. But when it cops out, there’s little here we haven’t already been told.
As colorful as a dream, Juan Diego Escobar Alzate’s feature
film debut Luz: The Flower of Evil looks like magic and brims with the
casual brutality of faith.
Set inside a religious community in the mountains of
Colombia, the film drops us into ongoing struggles with the group’s religious
leader, El Señor (Conrad Osorio). No one knows the devil as he does, he reminds
his daughter Laila (Andrea Esquivel).
She lives contentedly, devoutly, along with her two adopted
sisters. El Señor and the villagers consider the trio angels—just as they believe
the little boy chained up out back is the Messiah who will deliver the community
from its recent calamities.
Though never entirely detailed, the internal logic of the
film and the community is clear enough to feel simultaneously familiar and
horrifying. The way the filmmaker wrestles with what is and is not real, with
forgiveness and the morally ambiguous nature of man, and with our tendency to
blame God or the devil for our own shortcomings is frustrating and
intoxicating.
Alzate gets maximum impact for minimum budget thanks in
large part to Nicolas Caballero Arenas’s cinematography. His breathtaking visuals
add spooky richness, turning this Western of sorts into a beautiful, lyrical,
macabre Columbian folktale.
Lovely as it is, the film echoes of loss. The title itself conjures what is absent. As time wears on and the “angels” lose confidence in their father figure, remembered stories of the late mother figure Luz (Spanish for light) take the space for them that El Señor’s tales of God take for the rest of the community.
Luz: The Flower of Evil surprises as often as it relies on expectations to deliver its message. The film is more atmospheric than cautionary, its resolution a fitting end for characters’ whose own logic doesn’t likely reflect that of the audience. It is a vision, from its opening musical notes to its closing image, though, that marks a filmmaker worth discovering.
We haven’t been able to leave home in months, which means that home has kind of turned into its own horror show. For us, that’s Ohio, so we figured, why not celebrate?! In honor of our own home grown horror show, we dug into the best horror movies set right here in OH-IO!
5. Scream 2 (1997): Windsor College, OH
Updating his celebratory meta-analysis of genre clichés, Craven checked back in on Sydney Prescott (Neve Campell) and crew a couple years later, as the surviving members of the Woodsboro murders settled into a new semester in the little Ohio liberal arts school of Windsor College. The movie Stab, based on the horrors Sydney and posse survived (well, some didn’t survive) just two years ago is already out and screening on campus, but has it inspired copycat killers?
Craven, working again from a screenplay by Kevin Williamson, goes even more meta, using the film-within-a-film technique while simultaneously poking fun at horror sequel clichés in his own horror sequel.
And in the same way Scream subverted horror tropes while employing them to joyous results, the sequel – funny, tense, scary, smart, and fun – manages to find freshness by digging through what should be stale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG0oUO4mK4A&t=29s
4. Tragedy Girls (2017): Rosedale, OH
Heathers meets Scream in the savvy horror comedy that mines social media culture to truly entertaining effect.
Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand) and McKayla (Alexandra Shipp) are looking for more followers to improve their brand, and they have been doing a lot of research to make their content more compelling. The Tragedy Girls plumb their small Ohio town’s surprising death toll with more insight than the local police seem to have. Where do they get their knowledge?
Provocative.
Hildebrand and Shipp (both X-Men; Hildebrand was the moody Negasonic in Deadpool while Shipp plays young Storm in the franchise proper) nail their characters’ natural narcissism. Is it just the expectedly shallow, self-centeredness of the teenage years, or are they sociopaths? Who can tell these days?
3. The Faculty (1998): Herrington, OH
The film exaggerates (one hopes) the social order of a typical
Ohio high school to propose that it wouldn’t be so terrible if all the teachers
and most of the students died violently, or at least underwent such a horrific
trauma that a revision of the social order became appealing.
Indeed, in this film, conformity equals a communicable disease.
Adults aren’t to be trusted; high school is a sadistic machine grinding us into
sausage; outcasts are the only true individuals and, therefore, the only people
worth saving. Director Robert Rodriguez pulls the thing off with panache, all
the while exploring the terrifying truth that we subject our children to a very
real and reinforced helplessness every school day.
Interestingly, the infected teachers and students don’t turn into
superficial, Stepford-style versions of themselves. For the most part, they
indeed become better, stronger, more self-actualized (ironically enough)
versions, which is interestingly creepy. It’s as if humanity – at least the
version of it we find in a typical American high school – really isn’t worth
saving.
2. Trick ‘r Treat (2007): Warren Valley, OH
Columbus, Ohio native Michael Dougherty outdid himself as writer/director of this anthology of interconnected Halloween shorts. Every brief tale set in sleepy Warren Valley, Ohio compels attention with sinister storytelling, the occasional wicked bit of humor and great performances, but it’s the look of the film that sets it far above the others of its ilk.
Dougherty takes the “scary” comic approach to the film—the kind you find in Creepshow and other Tales from the Crypt types—but nothing looks as macabrely gorgeous as this movie. The lighting, the color, the costumes and the way live action bleeds into the perfectly placed and articulated moments of graphic artwork—all of it creates a giddy holiday mood that benefits the film immeasurably.
Dylan Baker (returning to the uptight and evil bastard he perfected for his fearless performance in Happiness) leads a whip-smart cast that includes impressive turns from Brian Cox, Anna Pacquin, Leslie Bibb and Brett Kelly (Thurman Merman, everybody!).
And it’s all connected with that adorable menace, Sam. Perfect.
1. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): Springwood, OH
Teens in suburban Ohio share nightmares, and one by one, these teens are not waking up. Not that their disbelieving parents care. When Tina woke one night, her nightgown shredded by Freddie’s razor fingers, her super-classy mother admonished, “Tina, hon, you gotta cut your fingernails or you gotta stop that kind of dreamin’. One or the other.”
Depositing a boogieman in your dreams to create nightmares that will truly kill you was a genius concept by writer/director/Clevelander Craven because you can only stay awake for so long. It took everyone’s fear of nightmares to a more concrete level.
The film was sequeled to death, it suffers slightly from a low budget and even more from weak FX that date it, but it’s still an effective shocker. That face that stretches through the wall is cool, the stretched out arms behind Tina are still scary. The nightmare images are apt, and the hopscotch chant and the vision of Freddie himself were not only refreshingly original but wildly creepy.
“Lord knows where a person who ain’t saved might end up.”
Indeed. The constant fight to overcome the worst in ourselves lies at the heart of The Devil All the Time, director Antonio Campos’s darkly riveting realization of Donald Ray Pollock’s best-selling novel.
Bookended by the close of World War II and the escalation in Vietnam, the film connects the fates of various characters living in the small rural towns of Southern Ohio and West Virginia.
Arvin (Tom Holland), the son of a disturbed WWII vet (Bill Skarsgård), fights to protect his sister (Eliza Scanlen) while he ponders his future. Husband and wife serial killers (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough) look for hitchhikers to degrade, photograph and murder. A new small town preacher (Robert Pattinson) displays a special interest in the young girls of his congregation.
It’s a star studded affair—Mia Wasikowska, Haley Bennett and Sebastian Stan joining as well—but every actor blends into the woodsy atmosphere with a sense of unease that permeates the air. No stars here, all character actors in service of the film’s unsettling calling.
Pollock’s prose created a dizzyingly bleak landscape where Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy might meet to quietly ponder man’s inhumanity to man. Campos unlocks that world courtesy of Pollock himself, who narrates the film’s depravity with a backwoods folksiness that makes it all the more chilling.
As rays of light are constantly snuffed out by darkness, Campos (who also co-wrote the screenplay) uses Pollock’s voice and contrasting soundtrack song choices to create a perverse air of comfort.
Redemption is a slippery aim in and around Knockemstiff, Ohio, and grace is even harder to come by. With a heavier hand, this film would have been a savage beating or a backwoods horror of the most grotesque kind. Campos and his formidable ensemble deliver Pollock’s tale with enough understatement and integrity to cut deeply, unnerving your soul and leaving a well-earned scar.
It might be more fair for someone who wasn’t an Ohio State graduate and/or rabid Buckeye fan to review TBDBITL 141.
But no one fitting that description lives in my house, so…
For the sadly unwashed, “TBDBITL” stands for The Best Damn Band in the Land. 2018 brought the Ohio State Marching Band’s 141st edition, and director Joe Camoriano takes us inside that memorable season with unprecedented access. (Camoriano’s role as the University Communication Director of National Broadcast Media might have helped.)
From summer practice to tryouts, headline-grabbing halftime shows to the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade, Rose Bowl and Disneyland, we get a captivating look at how hard Band Director Dr. Christopher Hoch, his staff and band members work to achieve a status that is – in the words of former football coach Urban Meyer – “elite.”
Camoriano is wise to humanize the experience via three engaging band members. There’s Konner, who is realizing a lifelong dream as Drum Major; Sydney, a charming trombone player with boundless enthusiasm; and Thomas, the lucky sousaphonist who gets the honor of dotting the “I” in the incomparable Script Ohio.
These three are likable personalities and easy to root for, which naturally increases our investment in the entire process, and is especially helpful for anyone coming to this film wondering what the hype is all about.
Despite an over-reliance on video fades and some rough patches in the background sound mix, Camoriano’s footage is always informative and engaging, even occasionally thrilling.
And for those of us always ready to answer a cry of “O-H!” there might be a goosebump or three.
Documentaries can be frustrating, especially political
documentaries. They warn you about coming disasters you hadn’t predicted, show
you the brutality and ugliness in parts of the world you hadn’t seen, reinforce
that ulcerous dread in your gut about humanity on the whole. You can basically
only hope they also show you a way out.
Mercifully, All In: The Fight for Democracy does
that. But first it upbraids your apathy about voting by detailing the harrowing
history of Americans who had to take a beating, even die, just to exercise that
right. Then it details the meticulously detailed strategy in place and being
executed right now to keep you from exercising your right, now that you understand
its value.
Filmmakers Lisa Cortes and Liz Garbus wisely anchor their
facts to Georgia’s gubernatorial race of 2018. The core storyline, narrated by the
Democratic candidate in that race, Stacey Abrams, is of that election’s rampant
and open-to-pubic-view suppression of Georgia votes. Abrams’s opponent, Brian
Kemp, had been an architect of voter suppression as Georgia’s Secretary of State:
closing polling places, purging voting rolls and instituting legislation that
made voting more difficult.
It was incredibly successful for him. Expect to see more of
it.
If that sounds cynical, it is. It’s also a major point of the film. But Cortes and Garbus (and Abrams) have a more idealistic goal, which is to point out something important to every American citizen regardless of party: Democracies only work when citizens decide what politicians do, not vice versa. When citizens vote, we can make the decisions. We can determine who is in office and what they need to fight for and against. And if they don’t do it? We can vote them out.
But we can only do that if we can actually vote, which is
why politicians who don’t want to do their jobs enacting the will of the people
work tirelessly to make it harder and harder for Americans to cast their
ballots.
The history is well told between effective speakers and
illustrative animations, but it’s the insidious nature of voter suppression and
its modern execution that is equal parts enlightening, terrifying and
frustrating.
So make a plan. Verify your polling location. Double check
that you are still on the rolls. (Ohio is especially guilty of stifling the
vote.) Vote early.
Hey, it’s been a pretty easy going year. Feel like a movie?
Well, first time feature filmmaker Rodd Rathjen has one for
you and you’re not going to like it, but you should watch it anyway. Buoyancy
shadows a 14-year-old Cambodian boy sold into slave labor on a Thai fishing
trawler.
I know, but stay with me.
In his feature debut behind the camera, Rathjen wisely
relies on naturalistic performances from mainly non-professional actors to
recreate the circumstances rather than dramatize them.
Sarm Heng is Chakra, a put upon adolescent bristling at the
limitations of his life. There’s the universal element of adolescent rebellion,
here tied to far more than angst. Chakra does manual labor rather than going to
school, and as kids in uniform whiz by him on bicycles, and cars on the nearby
highway come and go, his stagnancy and the back breaking monotony awaiting him
in adulthood press down on him.
He follows an opportunity to sneak away from home and get a
ride out of the country, where he’ll make real money working in a factory. It’s
OK if he doesn’t have the $500 fare to leave the country, he can work that off
in his first month.
That’s not how it actually works, and we spend the rest of
the film watching as Chaka’s realization comes to him in bits and pieces that
he will probably never leave this rickety fishing boat.
Rathjen’s film ends with sobering facts concerning the
modern slave trade in Southeast Asia, with as many as 200,000 boys and men
currently missing and believed to be held in bondage on fishing boats. The
filmmaker’s verité style helps us understand how this happens. There’s no boisterous
villain detailing the scheme, no, “Ha! You belong to me now!” No one tells you
you’re never being paid, never going home. You simply adjust to your
circumstances or you die.
There’s little dialog once Chakra leaves the boys in the
village behind, but Heng doesn’t need it. The evolution of this character hangs
on his face. It’s a remarkable performance, especially from a kid who’s never
acted before.
Heng gets an assist from two actors with some experience. An
utterly heartbreaking Mony Ros is the middle aged man who falls prey to the
scheme in the hopes of providing for his family. The camaraderie between these
two characters is powerful, and it’s a theme Rathjen mirrors in Chakra’s
relationship with the ship’s captain, played with menacing relish by Thenawut
Ketsaro.
What they create together is harrowing, but it’s also a brilliant piece of filmmaking that needs to be seen.
I have no problem at all with scary movies, I love them. But I gotta be honest, I can’t think of many things more frightening than the prospect of dating in today’s social climate.
So kudos to writer/director Natalie Krinsky for squeezing so much feel-goodiness out of the dating tribulations of twenty-something New Yorkers in The Broken Hearts Gallery.
Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan), a gallery assistant, is smarting from a painful breakup. Her roommate besties Amanda (Molly Gordon from Booksmart, Good Boys, Life of the Party) and Nadine (Hamilton‘s Phillipa Soo) are helping her cope.
First lesson in letting go: get rid of all that junk you’ve saved as souvenirs from past relationships!
But a chance meeting with Nick (Dacre Montgomery from Stranger Things), a budding hotel owner, spawns an idea. If Lucy will help get the hotel ready for opening day, Nick will give her space to open a gallery showcasing trinkets donated by lovers left behind.
Krinsky, a TV vet helming her first feature, leans on plenty of familiar rom-com tropes, but gives them all just the right amount of unabashed enthusiasm to feel more comfortable than cheesy.
The dance montages are numerous, the dialog less like real conversations and more like people waiting for their next turn to quip, and the ladies’ Big Apple cynicism as biting as a sugar-coated fantasy.
But Viswanathan (Blockers, Bad Education) is bursting with bubbly charm, Montgomery brings a welcome, dialed-down authenticity, and Krinsky is able to mine some contemporary laughs from recycled ideas (the actual Museum of Broken Relationships, When Harry Met Sally-styled interviews with the trinket owners).
The Broken Hearts Gallery is often as awkward and messy as it is breezy and spirited. You know where it’s going and it goes there, pushed buttons blazing.
And for 108 minutes, dating in this world seems like it isn’t that scary at all, and could maybe even be fun. Maybe.
