Tag Archives: Matt Weiner

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Holy Terror

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Holy Spider

by Matt Weiner

A killer on the loose, inept authorities and simmering political protest come together in the taut, unflinching Holy Spider, the latest from writer/director Ali Abbasi (Border).

After a tense opening sequence, there’s little mystery who the killer is. Saeed, played to cipher-like perfection by Mehdi Bajestani, is a construction worker and family man by day who spends his nights strangling sex workers in the Iranian city of Masshad.

Rahimi (Zar Amiur-Ebrahimi, who took home Best Actress for the role at Cannes) is an out-of-town reporter chasing down the story—often propelling the authorities to even consider the killing spree an urgent matter. As her investigation quickly outpaces that of the police, she becomes determined to crack the case, even if it means becoming the next victim.

If that sounds like a dated setup for a serial killer movie, Abbasi quickly shifts focus. His film sits at the timely intersection of two issues. There’s the handling of the wildly popular true crime genre, undergoing its own interrogation for a focus on lurid storytelling and police narratives at the expense of real people. And then there are the protests and unrest in Iran, sparked by the death of a young woman by the Morality Police.

Holy Spider is based on the real-life Spider killer Saeed Hanaei, who murdered 16 sex workers in the city of Mashhad and was celebrated as doing God’s work by hardline factions after his arrest. And while Holy Spider was made before recent protests, it’s impossible to miss Abbasi’s indictment of how Iranian society at large treats women, especially the most marginalized among them.

It’s not subtle, but it makes for a powerful twist on the usual true crime narrative. Abbasi’s script resists depicting Saeed as a suave or supernatural monster. Saeed is merely an instrument, yes, but it’s not God’s work. It’s the authorities and even Saeed’s own neighbors who show so little care in catching a man who can barely be bothered to cover his tracks. It turns out, choosing victims deemed immoral by society is all he needs to do.

Rahimi’s overt line of questioning wins her no friends in the police department, and Rahimi herself is subject to the same harassment that has allowed Saeed to turn the holy city of Mashhad into a body dump. (There are echoes in Rahimi’s backstory to the actress Ebrahimi’s own past, now an exile living in Paris after an alleged sex tape scandal blew up her career in Iran. It’s an unusual meta-narrative, but there’s nothing gimmicky about Ebrahimi’s fierce, grounded turn.)

If you look up photos of the real Saeed, it’s uncanny how Abbasi is sure to capture his self-assured smile in the courtroom. But more than that, the filmmaker drives home how the real terror lies with Saeed’s certainty that this will all turn out okay in the end. How could it not, for someone just doing what’s expected of him?

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Polemic as Poetry

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I Didn’t See You There

by Matt Weiner

Early on in the documentary I Didn’t See You There, filmmaker Reid Davenport says that his new camera allows him to look for shapes and patterns in a way that wasn’t possible when he wasn’t the one physically filming his movies. Davenport succeeds, wildly—and the end result is so poetic, bracing and beautiful that it’s more than a bit of an understatement.

I Didn’t See You There is shot entirely from Davenport’s perspective. Often this is from his wheelchair, with unbroken shots on the streets of Oakland, California, that start to take on their own captivating rhythm. At least until Davenport is nearly taken out by inattentive drivers or forced to stop at a blocked crosswalk.

It’s a deeply personal and unabashedly political film. As Davenport shows, what other choice is there? Every public act, from taking the bus to using the ramp to get into one’s own home, becomes a negotiation with (at best) apathetic parties.

The presence of a circus tent in his neighborhood becomes a jumping-off point for Davenport to tie in the cultural history of the freak show and this country’s treatment of people with disabilities. It’s a connection Davenport can’t avoid—during a trip back east to his family, he points out that he shares a birthplace with P.T. Barnum.

At the same time, Davenport interrogates this throughout the film, his intimate filmmaking and perspective on the environment turn the personal documentary into a visually stunning meditation on the connections we have to our built environments.

Davenport’s eye calls attention to every bump in the street, or shrub encroaching on the sidewalk—there’s a fresh beauty to the tessellated patterns of urban design that he uncovers, and a hostility always there beneath the surface.

I Didn’t See You There presents an undeniably unique perspective. But it also feels impossible to view one’s own environment the same way afterward.

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Hallowed Be His Name

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Memories of My Father

by Matt Weiner

Like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, Memories of My Father confronts what happens when a deadly serious story faces off against an endless supply of sentimentality.

It’s certainly a story worth remembering. Memories of My Father celebrates Colombian doctor, professor and public health leader Héctor Abad Gómez (Javier Cámara), as seen through the eyes of his son, the renowned Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince.

After spending decades trying to alleviate the health of Medellín’s poorest citizens (and winning few friends among the Catholic church and his university administration), Abad Gómez becomes increasingly active in politics during the country’s tumultuous 1980s.

Memories of My Father is well-intentioned and well-acted, with sensitive performances not just from Cámara but from those in the roles of the numerous women in Abad’s life. They are given little to work with in this treatment but do their best—as various university secretaries, devoted daughters and especially Patricia Tamayo as Abad Gómez’s wife—to give the hagiography some connection to humanity.

These moments are few and far between, however. As adapted from the memoir by Abad Faciolince, the film (with a screenplay by David Trueba) spends much of its time in the past establishing Abad Gómez as the world’s most attentive father devoted to his family and public health in equal measure.

Whereas Abad Faciolince’s memoir is the story of both one man and the decade of violence, paramilitary forces, cartels and militias that led to so many assassinations in the 1980s, Memories of My Father narrows its lens mostly to just the man. One gets a sense even from the way Abad Gómez is talked about in his own movie that the real person was a lot more interesting and less inclined to sentimentality than his onscreen treatment.

The film’s decision to keep politics on the periphery, with Abad Gómez himself asserting that he’s “just a doctor,” also seems to put this movie version at odds with reality. What is more maximally political than being on a state-approved list for targeted assassinations?

Memories of My Father gives us what amounts to a series of Very Special Episodes on moral childrearing, but very little in the way of historical context to prepare for the sudden, shattering final act.  If the purpose of this story is to rescue Abad Gómez’s name from oblivion, he also needs to be rescued from the lack of nuance paid to a man who was unafraid to lead marches and write public letters to government officials. Turning Abad Gómez into a secular saint divorced from earthly concerns might keep his name alive, but this portrayal studiously avoids examining why his righteous crusade was needed in the first place.

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Spy vs. Spy

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Hunt

by Matt Weiner

If Squid Game was Lee Jung-jae’s international coming out party, his directorial debut Hunt is a confident and original statement that the engaging actor isn’t slowing down anytime soon.

Loosely inspired by real-world events during the waning days of South Korea’s military dictatorship, Hunt (written by Lee and Jo Seung-Hee) follows a cat-and-mouse game between the heads of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency’s Foreign Unit, Park Pyong-ho (Lee), and the Domestic Unit, Kim Jung-do (Jung Woo-sung).

The agency is grappling with a student uprising against the president, ever-present North Korean belligerence, and of course, meddling American intelligence agencies. When an assassination attempt on the South Korean president comes dangerously close to succeeding, the KCIA suspects a mole. Park and Kim are pitted against each other, and no agent is above suspicion.

Lee stuffs his debut with impressive action set pieces. But this is not the most nuanced of spy thrillers. Lee tends to paint his arterial spatter with a firehose rather than a brush—and it’s a bright, busy canvas by the time Park and Kim are done rooting out the mole.

And then there are the frequent (and graphic) torture sequences perpetrated by the South Korean security forces, carried out almost unthinkingly on friend and “foe” alike. While Lee doesn’t shy away from over-the-top action, he also takes care to shade his characters with enough moral ambiguity that after the umpteenth double cross it’s no longer clear which outcome anyone is rooting for—including the characters themselves.

There’s not much downtime from start to finish. If anything, the story ultimately suffers from the relentless action, especially as the cold war paranoia turns hot. They might not be the quiet tragic heroes of le Carré, but Park and Kim’s deadly game plays so well that it excuses any number of absurd plot twists.

Hunt sticks to the hits with its dueling double (or triple?) agents, but Lee directs with a flourish for action. There’s enough here for action fans, and it’s even more promising as the start of a new phase in Lee’s prolific career.

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I Guess This Is Growing Up

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Bromates

by Matt Weiner

Not to go Don Draper over a movie with an extended gag involving a dog and a condom, but Bromates isn’t a buddy comedy… It’s science fiction, letting us travel back to the early 2000s. This is a heady time, where men need a romantic contrivance to show emotion, women are cardboard cutouts and all manner of sin will be forgiven once you put on a shirt with buttons and confess to having “grown up.”

The ties to the past are strong, if not deep, with Bromates writer and director Court Crandall serving as one of the writers for Old School. And Bromates offers a superficial nod to that kind of throwback comedy, only with an even more threadbare setup.

Solar panel salesman Sid (Josh Brener) gets talked into moving in with his close friend Jonesie (Lil Rel Howery, one of the few bright spots in the movie) after both men are dumped by their girlfriends. Sid, consummate nice guy and eco-do-gooder, discovers his influencer girlfriend has been cheating on him with their next-door neighbor. And Jonesie is too immature, although for some reason the story codes “immature” as “hiring a sex worker while his girlfriend is out of the apartment.” (The nerve of that harpy to break up over a peccadillo.)

It’s important to stop here to point out that this is, without exaggeration, the extent of character development we get for the rest of the film. Jonesie concocts a plan to help Sid get over his breakup, there’s an impromptu trip to Texas that takes up a good chunk of the story but seems to exist solely to set up a Snoop Dogg cameo (which at least makes some sense, as he produced the film), and the rest of the time is devoted to Sid’s workplace drama. Also, somewhere along the way, Sid falls in love with a woman who is onscreen for maybe 5 total minutes.

Bromates is less a fleshed-out movie and more a series of bits, tossed out at a pace that feels desperate rather than zany. It’s a pattern that repeats itself so often that it goes from disorienting to discouraging. Nothing gets developed, nothing gets heightened. Ostensibly, this is a movie by people who understand this kind of comedy, but Crandall shows no interest in establishing an internal logic even by the low standards of the tropes the film leans on.

It’s not all bad. There’s an end credits bit that’s funnier and more pointed than what made it into the main movie. Plus the runtime is barely an hour and a half, so you don’t have to wait too long to get there.

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Ashikaga Rhapsody

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Inu-Oh

by Matt Weiner

Inu-Oh is one of those movies where the less you know going in, the more of a delight it becomes as the story unfolds. Stop right now, go see the movie and you won’t be disappointed.

To call director Masaaki Yuasa’s take on feudal Japan a Noh rock opera undersells the delirious places the movie goes, even for Yuasa (although if you watched his Devilman Crybaby on Netflix, you know what you’re in for). What starts with a ghost story and a brief history of the birth of Noh in 14th century Japan becomes a rollicking, righteous homage to the likes of Queen and Bowie.

The animation is as fluid and rhythmic as the music, and Inu-Oh is always beautiful to look at. But the music is where the film soars—along with its almost relentlessly on-message theme. The story focuses on the friendship between Tomona (Mirai Moriyama), a blind biwa player looking to avenge his father, and Inu-oh (Avu-chan), a demonic child who can only exorcise his curse through storytelling.

But these aren’t just any stories. Tomona and Inu-oh form a band and start staging modern rock performances that inspire crowds but anger the shogun and the more traditional troupes that will become the highly regimented Noh.

For Tomona, there is a creative imperative to be yourself and decide who that is, even under threat of execution. And for Inu-oh, their new form of expression is even more essential. As he tells these forgotten stories of dead Heike warriors, he slowly becomes more and more human.

The message isn’t subtle, and just in case, it’s spelled out explicitly by Tomona and Inu-oh. The songs are a way to honor memories. If our stories are forgotten, what do we have left?

Still, it’s hard to argue. And harder still to resist when delivered in the form of Yuasa’s brilliantly conceived stage performances that blend traditional, modern and downright trippy into something wholly new. It’s about as joyful a movie as you’re likely to get for a feudal ghost story about curses and family tragedy. It’s also a movie that manages to be both epic and immediate. History for Inu-oh is alive. And art needs to be as well if it’s going to have any lasting relevance for an audience

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Into the Woods

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The Deer King

by Matt Weiner

An empire torn apart by war. A fatal disease spread by wild attack dogs. A lone warrior who would do anything to protect his young cub. And the directorial debut of a legendary animator.

On paper, The Deer King has all the elements of a modern animated classic. And visually, there is plenty to admire in Masashi Ando’s first feature film, co-directed with Masayuki Miyaji and based on the fantasy novel by Nahoko Uehashi.

The story follows the exploits of Van (Shinichi Tsutsumi), the last surviving Lone Antler warrior. The battle heroics of this fierce group of fighters from the kingdom of Aquafa helped lead to an uneasy peace with their ruling empire, Zol. These two nationalities have enjoyed a decade of fragile co-existence that threatens to collapse with the resurgence of a deadly fever.

Ando is a giant in the animation world, having served as animation director for Hayao Miyazaki on Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, as well as on 2016’s wildly successful Your Name. That’s a lot of pressure for a feature debut when your resume includes some of the best of Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon and others.

On the animation side, at least, The Deer King succeeds. The sprawling epic fantasy offers up a lush world that takes great enjoyment in slowing down the action in favor of small details—iridescent grass, otherworldly hallucinations, the love between Van and his adopted daughter, Yuna (Hisui Kimura).

Too often though, The Deer King is a lot better looking than it is comprehensible. The pacing is admirable for allowing the relationship between Van and Yuna to take center stage, but it also compresses the action into some erratic plotting choices—things are surprisingly quiet for an epic realm facing down a genocidal epidemic.

At the same time, the film refuses to linger too long on the sort of world-building that makes diving into a new fantasy world so enjoyable, even with languid action. It falls to a mix of brief flashbacks and heavy-handed exposition to put all the pieces in play.

From the rebellious court machinations that may be playing a part in the disease to hints of the great wars between the two cultures, The Deer King shows occasional flashes of a wider world that would have been very much worth spending time on. It’s a testament to Ando and the work of his animators that there are enough moments of beauty to hang onto, though they never truly come together as a whole.

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Nippon Dynamite

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Ninja Badass

by Matt Weiner

The title of Ninja Badass also serves as a statement of purpose: if nothing else, this is a movie that knows what it wants to be.

Ryan Harrison, the movie’s (take a quick breath) writer/director/producer/actor/special effects guy, clearly has a vision for his low-budget cult flick. Ninja Badass aims for somewhere between midnight grindfest and “so bad it’s good.” Harrison remains dedicated to hitting that mark far more than sticking to an even remotely coherent story.

Rex (Harrison), an aimless Midwesterner fresh out of jail, finds himself on a journey. He aims to become a “real ninja” and save hot babes from ritual sacrifice at the hands of the Ninja VIP Super Club, run by the supremely evil Big Twitty (Darrell Francis). Along for the ride are his best friend Kano (Mitch Schlagel), new sensei Haskell (Steven C. Rose), and the mysterious and formidable Jojo (Tatiana Ortiz).

And… that’s pretty much it. The movie is less concerned with developing its leads than using them as human canvases for explosions, torn limbs and pureed puppies. The trail of destruction these ninjas leave across Indiana is immense, with copious digital blood sprays augmented by enjoyably gross practical effects and gore.

It would be a category error to spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether or not Ninja Badass is a good movie. Are numbers spicy? Can vegetables convert Eastern to Mountain Time? These aren’t the right questions.

Good movie? Bad? Ninja Badass is certainly an offensive one, almost deliriously so with the star-spangled Midwesterners constantly misunderstanding and conflating an entire continent’s worth of influences and languages. We’re clearly meant to be in on the joke, although Harrison dips into that well a bit too often.

Ninja Badass is also highly watchable, if you can allow yourself to have as much fun as Harrison clearly had getting this made. The action wears too thin by the end for the film to become a full-blown cult classic like the unintentionally bad films it borrows from. But this is also a country that gave American Ninja enough sequels to be considered a proper franchise. In the pantheon of weird white dude ninja movies, Ninja Badass more than holds its own.

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Poor Cow

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Cow

by Matt Weiner

There’s nothing in the rulebook that says a cow can’t be nominated for Best Actress, right? Because Luma, the bovine star of Andrea Arnold’s mesmerizing new documentary, deserves to be the most improbable frontrunner of awards season.

The filming for Cow took place over about four years at a British dairy farm. There is no voiceover, no reassuring David Attenborough nature narration… Just an unsparing look at Luma and the daily existence for cattle on a modern farm.

For Luma, that means a life built around providing milk through high-tech milkers. In one of the film’s more arresting images, Arnold shows Luma entering what the industry whimsically calls a milk carousel—but takes on the foreboding look of a milk panopticon each time Luma trudges into place.

Arnold and her director of photography Magda Kowalczyk capture everything through Luma and the cattle. When farm workers appear, their presence is in the background, guiding the animals or performing routine examinations but never the focus of the action.

It’s a powerful effect that lays bare our relationship to modern farming without being proscriptive. Cow shows just how much these animals do for us—Luma cannot even nurse her calves. Instead, it’s right back to the milk carousel so no sellable product goes to waste.

And this truly seems like one of the more favorable options for modern farms. The cows get some seasonal pasture time, although the sense of calm it provides them makes the limited time outside the pen all the more depressing.

Luma may not have a voice, but Arnold’s masterful direction makes her as complex and compelling as any Arnold protagonist. Luma deals with birth, sex, sadness, grief. Arnold makes the case that we are connected to these animals. These animals may not have any agency beyond capitalist utility in life, but Cow demands that we at least take the time to reflect on this relationship and what we might owe the things in life that give us so much.

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In Sickness and in Health

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7 Days

by Matt Weiner

We likely have years of pandemic-related movies ahead of us. And while 2022 may seem a bit soon to look back on the early days of Covid-19 (much as this country seems ready to declare mission accomplished no matter what), here’s some good news: You’ll be hard-pressed to watch anything more winsome and heartening than Roshan Sethi’s 7 Days.

A pre-arranged first date in March 2020 between Ravi (Karan Soni, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Sethi) and Rita (Geraldine Viswanathan) goes for much longer than either one was expecting when Covid grinds the country to a halt. Unable to get back out of town right away, Ravi hunkers down with Rita.

As the world outside Rita’s house falls apart, the two opposites—traditional, marriage-minded Ravi and freewheeling, drinking and partying Rita—slowly get to know each other on a deeper level than their disastrous first meet-up.

Sethi’s romantic comedy might be the first to use shelter in place as a meet cute, but the film earns its medical bona fides. This is Sethi’s feature debut, perhaps because he is also a practicing oncologist who wrote on medical dramas while finishing Harvard Medical School.

The film is set not only in quarantine but almost entirely within the confines of Rita’s house—save the occasional video call for Ravi, who keeps to his arranged dating schedule even with Rita sitting just feet away. So it falls entirely on Viswanathan and Soni to make these people we genuinely want to be trapped with, even as their perfectly opposite foibles drive each other mad.

And sure, their relationship follows the usual romcom course. (No spoilers, but you will get an answer to the question of whether opposites attract.) But both leads bring an impressive level of charm and depth to their roles, with a chemistry that feels natural and earned even within the formula.

Ravi and Rita have more in common than they first think—not just their traditional families urging them to settle down, but also the struggle of forging their own identities and paths in life.

Of course, the shadow of Covid looms over all of their conversations, especially the early days when so much was unknown and a cough could be the harbinger of weeks on a ventilator—or worse. The way the film works these concerns into the third act is inevitable but no less affecting.

Nothing about the phrase “Covid romcom” should play out as well as everything does with 7 Days. For that alone, the movie is a surprising gem. But to also get an incisive look at love and dating, thoughtful cultural commentary and genuine laughs is a pandemic miracle.