Tag Archives: Matt Weiner

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Lost in Elevation

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Peak Season

by Matt Weiner

With the passing of M. Emmet Walsh this year, it might be time to update Roger Ebert’s (Harry Dean) Stanton-Walsh Rule—that no movie featuring either actor can be altogether bad—to include a living guidepost. And there are few more apt candidates than Fred Melamed.

Thankfully, Peak Season, which features a brief but memorable turn from the veteran character actor, is much better than “not altogether bad.” The second feature from directors Steven Kanter and Henry Loevner takes a familiar romantic premise to welcome new heights.

Amy (Claudia Restrepo) is a fish out of water in more ways than one as she enjoys a brief vacation away from New York to spend the 4th of July holiday at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She is staying with her well-to-do fiancé Max (Ben Coleman) at his uncle’s opulent vacation home. But after a family friend (Melamed) gets the couple fishing lessons as a welcome gift, she finds herself more in sync with the vibes of Loren (Derrick DeBlasis), a fly fishing guide, restaurant dishwasher, part-time landscaper, and whatever else pays the bills so he can fish and hike the Tetons.

When Max has to return to the city for a work crisis, Amy seeks out Loren as a stark contrast to the Silicon Valley-types Max left her with. His life trajectory is the total opposite of Amy’s—her career as a well-paid but burnt out management consultant pleases her immigrant mother, but she lights up at Loren’s unburdened joy. Or at least the appearance of ease, as we learn there are some downsides to living out of a Jeep without health insurance while pursuing vigorous physical activities.

Max bounces in and out of town, oblivious to Amy’s gnawing uncertainties and focused more on work and video calls than Amy’s casual mentions that she’s been spending a good deal of time with a ruggedly handsome stranger.

Amy’s soul-searching is comfortable territory for romantic dramedy, but Peak Season has two major advantages. First, there’s Grand Teton and the Wyoming scenery. It’s easy to see how the town became one big dude ranch to the wealthy, which Peak Season hammers home to great effect with numerous hard cuts between the struggling local workforce like Loren and the urban cowboys who rely on them as set dressing to live out their own fantasies of a life that could’ve gone differently, if only.

Second, there’s the fully earned chemistry between Amy and Loren. Even as the story relies on some emotional shortcuts to save time on character development, the two are fully realized by Restrepo and DeBlasis.

For those who wrap up every vacation in a new place with a score of Zillow links for unaffordable homes in unaffordable neighborhoods, there’s a wistful comfort to be found in Peak Season. But when you ask yourself “How did I get here,” just know that you might not like the answer.

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Madame Robinson

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Last Summer

by Matt Weiner

The word “provocative” gets thrown around a lot in art, but French director Catherine Breillat has at least earned it over her storied career.

Last Summer, Breillat’s first film since 2013’s Abuse of Weakness, lives up to the label with an age-gap stepmother/stepson romance that dispenses with titillation to become a sharp, complicated and morally fluid examination of its leading lovers.

Anne (Léa Drucker, without whom none of this would work) is a successful middle-aged lawyer with a comfortable bourgeois life—business owner husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), two adorable young children who enjoy their horseback riding and trips to the cabin—just the sort of luxurious ennui that’s ripe to be upended.

And upended it is, when Pierre’s wayward son from a first wife comes to stay with the family after troubles at his boarding school. Théo (Samuel Kircher) is a stranger to his father almost as much as he is to Anne, but it falls to her to integrate the rebellious 17-year-old into the family.

Casual secrets and moments of raw openness between Anne and Théo quickly progress from emotional intimacy to a passionate affair. It’s a salacious premise, and the adaptation, written in collaboration with Pascal Bonitzer, is a natural fit for Breillat’s boundary-pushing explorations of sexuality.

Breillat’s rewrite of the Danish original takes almost sadistic pleasure in the unresolved ambiguity and hypocrisy on display from Anne. Drucker gives a performance that credibly swings from feminist advocate to abuser to… well, something Breillat leaves up to the audience to decide.

Last Summer is also a far more artful way of grappling with complex subjects like abuse and agency than Breillat’s blunt interviews on Harvey Weinstein in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

Anne is a compelling subject, and Last Summer refuses to condemn her as a one-note monster. In many ways, she is all the more fascinating for the way she seems unable to come to terms with her own deeply flawed behavior and actions toward Théo.

It can be an intense artistic exercise to bear the full force of Breillat’s provocations with none of the pitch-black humor of the similarly confrontational May December. There’s no clear-cut legal satisfaction here, by design. Breillat’s unsettling study of Anne and her motivations is ultimately an artistic one—and all the wallowing in moral uncertainty that goes along with that.

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In Nightmares

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The Blue Rose

by Matt Weiner

There’s a deep-rooted, surreal evil lurking at the heart of the idealized, candy-colored world of Blue Velvet that traps all its characters in a web of… no, wait, this is The Blue Rose.

Writer and director George Baron’s first feature film is either a love letter to David Lynch or a pale imitation that draws heavily—heavily—on that director’s themes, mood, tone, plots, imagery and characters. Your mileage may vary depending on your affection for the original source material.

Young LAPD detectives Dalton (Baron) and Lilly (Olivia Scott Welch) take on a gruesome, high-profile murder case set in a dreamy 1950s version of Los Angeles. Like anyone in Hollywood, the two are looking for their big break, one much needed after botching their last case.

This one should be a straightforward whodunnit: painter Sophie Steele (Nikko Austen Smith) has more than enough means and motive in the death of her abusive husband. As the detectives chase down leads and interview less than forthcoming persons of interest, the lines between potential witness and suspect start to blur.

And all of that’s before the pair gets thrown into a Lynchian nightmare of an alternate reality, masterminded by a femme fatale overseeing a vast conspiracy. While this nightmare world often fails to rise above echoes of Lynch, the production design is immaculate for such an ambitious setting. It also goes a long way—along with a number of wonderful off-kilter performances—toward giving the nightmare sequences some actual teeth. (In particular, Viola Odette Harlow channels her best Isabella Rossellini as the nightclub ingenue Catherine.)

Often, though, Baron’s dream world swaps out soul-shaking Lynchian horror for jump scares. The effects are creepy but fleeting, and emblematic of the bigger problems with the story. The Blue Rose might be a fun diversion for diehard Lynch fans. But it also serves as a helpful comparison for those usually put off by the director, to see what a skin-deep send-up looks like without the cosmically unnerving core of the original.

It’s not the worst outing for a feature debut, but Baron should go beyond the sum of his influences if he hopes to equal them in profundity.

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Love Will Tear Us Apart

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Banal & Adama

by Matt Weiner

A tale of star-crossed lovers gets a welcome refresh that’s equal parts tragic and enigmatic in Banel & Adama, the feature debut from Senegalese writer and director Ramata-Toulaye Sy.

Khady Mane anchors the film as Banel, a fiercely independent woman who wants to chart her own destiny in life rather than adhere to the traditions of her rural village. Building a new home together rather than staying in the village is seen as odd enough, but her strangeness goes too far when she persuades Adama (Mamadou Diallo) to give up his bloodline claim to village chief.

What the elders see as a spiritual sickness becomes manifest when a drought falls over the remote village. Sy’s arresting use of brightness and color gives way to a desiccated village. The growing unease and desperation are palpable, and made all the more visceral as the starving cattle succumb to the oppressive weather. And all of that before death comes for the villagers.

These languid middle sequences in the village are some of the most powerful shots in the movie. Sy’s treatment of Banel and Adama is part Shakespeare, but there’s a healthy dose of Melville too. What starts out in happier times as a romantic refrain—Banel whispering their two names over and over—turns into an obsessive mania. Banel drops hints that her union with Adama might be fate… but it also might have been caused by more direct and nefarious human intervention.

Sy’s script, along with Mane’s performance, adds a welcome layer of complexity to the otherwise slight story. Banel can be frustrating, but also sympathetic and enchanting. (Adama never stood a chance.)

The film’s allegorical explorations of fate and destiny become more deeply felt as the village suffers. For Banel, too, it becomes unclear if her true love is Adama, or the idea of a different life.

Sy doesn’t offer clear answers. Only stellar performances that welcome the inscrutable, even haunting contradictions of love and life.

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Eastern European Capitalist Blues

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Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

by Matt Weiner

An overworked production assistant driving all over Bucharest to collect footage for a workplace safety video doesn’t sound like the most likely candidate for an era-defining film that best captures the current political and social moment.

Yet with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, writer and director Radu Jude has made an unsparing, pitch-black comedy with a sprawling but never dull nearly 3-hour runtime that attempts to distill the last decade-plus of precarity and decline felt by so many workers. What’s miraculous is how well Jude succeeds, without ever becoming cloying or didactic.

Angela (Ilinca Manolache) is a contract worker for a Romanian film production company. A multinational company has commissioned a safety video that sends Angela around the city to interview severely injured workers that will be vetted for the final video.

Angela, an overworked gig worker herself who is so exhausted she can’t stop falling asleep at the wheel, shows sympathy for the workers and their families as she draws out their stories for the camera. This stands out in stark contrast to how the Austrian bosses parachute into Bucharest and talk about the poorer Romanians that bring the company its massive profits.

Nina Hoss in particular stands out as a perfectly icy marketing executive whose feigned empathy masks a barely submerged contempt for the lower-class Romanian employees. (The company itself is kept vague, but Jude gets in plenty of digs about a deforestation scandal involving furniture, which narrows it down considerably.)

Angela’s diatribes take on everything from class politics to foul-mouthed influencers like Andrew Tate, with these being delivered by her filthy alter ego Bobita. Manolache created the character during COVID lockdowns, and Jude brings them to hyperreal life in one of the film’s few recurring segments shot in color.

Jude’s story is unabashedly political, and ruthless in its portrayal of the inhumanity of neoliberal austerity. But the script, propelled by Manolache’s indefatigable portrayal of Angela, is also laugh out loud funny. The capital class can take a lot from its workers, but not their profanity.

Or, as the film shifts into the making of the final safety video, their humanity. When the company selects the injured worker they want to star in the safety video, the film crew gets to work recording his story. This sequence makes up nearly the final half hour of the film, and Jude’s staging and camera choices turn a routine film within a film into an audacious set piece with an unforgettable gut punch.

Whether or not another world is possible seems to lie just outside the bounds of Angela’s day-to-day living. But Jude makes the case that one is urgently necessary, even as we laugh in the face of everything speeding up our destruction in the meantime.

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Sleeping with the Enemy

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Femme

by Matt Weiner

“Revenge thriller with a twist” doesn’t do justice to Femme, the tight feature debut from writers and directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping.

Based on their 2021 short film, Femme kicks off with a brutal and unflinching gay-bashing when Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) stands up for himself after being mocked for his drag attire by Preston (George MacKay) and his mates.

The attack leaves Jules traumatized for months. After a chance sighting of Preston in a bathhouse, Jules realizes that his attacker is deeply closeted—and the idea for an intricate revenge plot energizes Jules and gives him a new purpose.

The plan is to film revenge porn and out Preston, ruining his life in a social circle with little tolerance for homosexuality. To achieve this plan, of course, Jules has to actually record the revenge porn, which kicks off a high-wire secret relationship between the two as they fall in something resembling love despite the glut of secrets each man is hiding.

Freeman and Ping breathe fresh life into the self-loathing homophobe trope. The sexy (and seamy) sides of London nightlife elevate Femme into a taut neo-noir thriller. As Jules develops complicated feelings for Preston, his plan for revenge feels much closer to Hitchcock than Forster.

The movie also moves at a rapid pace, almost to a fault. It’s a sparse plot, which puts the full weight of the challenging emotional interplay on MacKay and Stewart-Jarrett. The two leads are both exceptional, and pull off their thorny affair with empathy on both sides. This is no small feat for MacKay especially, whose Preston starts the movie full of hate and nearly killing his soon-to-be lover.

MacKay humanizes Preston without letting go of a barely contained menace that could erupt at any moment. It’s clear that Jules is playing a dangerous game. And one that is unlikely to have any winners.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Road House, Immaculate, Late Night with the Devil & More

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Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Road House, Late Night with the Devil, Immaculate, You’ll Never Find Me, Riddle of Fire, Coming To You

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Reptiles Never Say Die

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Riddle of Fire

by Matt Weiner

An inseparable band of foul-mouthed children drawn into a fairytale-like quest might sound very of the moment, but Riddle of Fire shows how much richness there is to explore in the hands of a unique voice that doesn’t settle for pastiche.

It’s hard to pin down any single genre that gets loving attention from writer-director Weston Razooli, but imagine the Goonies adventuring through the world of Mandy… and it only gets dreamier from there.

Children Alice (Phoebe Ferro), Hazel (Charlie Stover) and Jodie (Skyler Peters) liven up their summer vacation by stealing a video game console, only to be thwarted by a lock on the family television. In exchange for game time, the kids must bake a blueberry pie to cheer up Hazel and Jodie’s sick mother (Danielle Hoetmer).

When a key ingredient gets snatched up by John Redrye (Charles Halford), the trio—who call themselves the Immortal Reptiles—follow him back to his house, where he lives with the cult-like Enchanted Blade. When they accidentally stow away in the cult’s truck on a trip into the woods to hunt a prized stag, the group hardly notices that their afternoon has gone from whimsical fetch quest to life-or-death survival.

As the kids play a game of cat and mouse with the cultists, Razooli heightens the fairytale elements. The cult leader, a witch named Anna-Freya (played with beguiling menace by Crazy, Stupid, Love.’s Lio Tipton ), figures out they are not alone. It is only with the help of her daughter Petal (Lorelei Mote), a princess with powers of her own, that the children manage to outsmart the gang and escape back into town—but not away from danger.

Razooli’s mix of humor and danger ratchets up the suspense for any adult watching the movie even as the young heroes remain defiantly unbothered. It’s a proper fairytale, and also a stylish throwback to an era of movies that delight in the mischief of featuring young kids getting into real trouble.

But Riddle of Fire rises above other nostalgic retreads in the way it commits to the mystery and unease of the world Razooli creates for a remarkably assured feature debut. The film captures the spirit of adventure for weird kids in a grown-up world. And how sometimes it’s worth risking everything to play a cool video game.

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Eugénie’s Feast

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The Taste of Things

by Matt Weiner

You know you’re in for a hell of a meal when the appetizer is a 15-minute cold opening that lingers on every small detail of cooking a feast to a degree that borders on pornographic.

This scene from writer and director Anh Hung Tran sets the mood—and pace—of the rest of his latest feature, The Taste of Things.

Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) prepares these elaborate meals for Dodin (Benoît Magimel), a famed gourmand and restaurateur who has relied on Eugénie’s unique blend of skill and intuition to bring his culinary visions to life.

The bright, airy kitchen where these feasts are prepared might as well be one of the film’s co-leads. Binoche is spellbinding as Eugénie, who must be played as equal parts enchanting muse and aloof lover to Dodin. It’s a delicate balance, especially in a film with Tran’s subtle direction where the emotional connection between the pair comes out as much in the physical acts of cooking food as in the dialogue.

The two seem to have forged an idyllic life together that caters to their passions. Their kitchen is an insular one—debates over French culinary giants like Caréme and Escoffier are as political as Dodin gets, even as outside the kitchen modernism is poised to upend European society and tradition.

But within this narrow setting, Tran’s light touch and genial script centers the story on Eugénie and Dodin’s love and respect for one another, and how the two intersect personally and professionally. Dodin is determined to get Eugénie to marry him, formalizing the intimacy they already share.

A drawn-out challenge to turn a paramour into a wife may sound like a lucky problem to have. But in The Taste of Things, such stakes are life and death. And why shouldn’t they be? Dodin and Eugénie’s mutual affection for one another isn’t just around cooking, but in the vanishing conviction that craft elevated to art is in itself a monumental—and rare—achievement.

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Arhat Get Your Gun

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The Monk and the Gun

by Matt Weiner

What if you took the interlocking stories of a Pulp Fiction, but all the gunplay was in the service of a hopeful Buddhist fable?

It’s a fantastical idea, but the film recognizes that so is the sight of a peaceful country being “forced” to go through the early throes of democratic governance. For The Monk and the Gun, there’s no great upheaval accompanying these sweeping changes.

Instead, Pawo Choyning Dorji’s delightful second feature (after 2019’s Oscar-nominated Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom) takes place in the aftermath of the King of Bhutan choosing to abdicate the throne and hold modern elections.

The rural village of Ura is holding mock elections to help prepare its residents, whose reactions to the abdication range from apathy or disinterest to outright hostility toward those voting for parties that do not seem aligned with the former monarch’s views.

Tshering Yangden (Pema Zangmo Sherpa), an elections official from the city, arrives in town to oversee the practice election and educate voters on why democracy matters. Her big city assurances about the great import of the election contrast with Ura’s locals, who question if they really need something that they don’t have to fight for.

As Yangden grapples with proving that democracy is as sacred as the campaign posters around the village proclaim, the village Lama (Kelsang Choejey) instructs his monk Tashi (Tandin Wangchuk) to bring two guns for the full moon ceremony so that the lama can “make things right” in the presence of the election official.

Tashi diligently follows his master’s odd (and unsettling) request, which gets the unassuming young monk caught up with an unscrupulous American gun collector (Harry Einhorn) and the criminal underbelly of Bhutan. While The Monk and the Gun is mostly bucolic satire, it’s a credit to writer/director Dorji that the ominous unease surrounding the ceremony persists up until the very end. Being given the means to control your life—and your national destiny—is serious stuff. But along the way, his film pokes both inward at itself and outward at the west, suggesting that nobody has a monopoly on the best way forward for a community.