FLICKERS

Reviews (Video On Demand films) July 17, 2020

THE RELIC

Relic, the elegantly creepy debut film from writer-director Natalie Erika James, may not be the film to watch if you have an aging parent in distress. That’s the dilemma facing Kay (Emily Mortimer), whose mother, Edna (Robyn Nein), briefly disappears from her Australian country home only to return and begin acting out in strange and unnerving ways. Edna is clearly struggling with dementia but Kay and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) begin to wonder if Edna, or her rambling old house, or the family itself, is being taken over by a malevolent force.

In this house, the walls groan like a sailboat adrift at sea, a shadowy figure hovers at the end of hall, and everywhere, black mold is growing, including, most disturbingly, in a round patch on Edna’s chest. Aided by Brian Reitzell’s jangly score, director James and cinematographer Charlie Sarroff slowly build a sense menace and dread, even as the three gifted leads dive deep into the tangled emotionality of this fractured family.

In the last half hour, all hell breaks loose, with Sam trapped in a hidden, shape-shifting part of the house and Kay forced to battle her mother, who’s evolving into something else, something other. The film’s last moments, which shift daringly from the horrific to the tender, may frustrate horror fans in need of a clear explanation for all that’s come before, but anyone who’s watched a loved one age and fade is sure to feel a resonant ache.

DIVOS!

Of course, Ricky Redman (Matt Steele) will land the lead role in this year’s San Fernando Catholic Church high school musical. He does so every year. A proud show queen, with epic plans to be a Broadway star, Ricky is a true diva, but wait, who’s the hunky blonde boy walking into auditions, the one backlit like Jesus?

That would be Josh (Timothy Brundidge), the school’s injured baseball pitcher who’s decided that he too is destined to be a Broadway sensation. Ricky takes him under his wing but a bitter rivalry ensues, and Divos!, a deft indie comedy written by Steele and directed by Ryan Patrick Bartley, takes off.

If the cast seems a bit past high school age, no matter, their energy and general fabulousness carry the day. Steel’s script takes some unexpected plot turns, including a mid-turn shift to Josh’s home life, and a welcome avoidance of opening night clichés. A trifle to be sure, but an accomplished one, Divos!, is a charming surprise.

BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS

“When nobody don’t want your ass, you can come in here and have a good time,” says a patron at the Roaring 20s, a dive bar on the outskirts of Vegas. It’s just after lunch on a shimmery hot desert day and the bar’s regulars, young, old, and culturally diverse, are already arriving for what will be the joint’s last day.

In the sneakily haunting Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, filmmaking brothers Bill and Turner Ross (Contemporary Color), who make documentaries that redefine the term, roam the bar with their cameras, capturing snippets of conversation, song, and lament as a never famous Vegas staple prepares to close its doors.

For a good long time, nothing much seems to be happening. Folks greet each other fondly. Bad jokes are told. The bartender curses Jeopardy on the big TV.

And people drink, but never sloppily. Drinking, you come to realize, is what these folks do. They know how to stretch out the day, just as they know to lean in to humor and intimacy, for surely that’s the payoff for living your best hours in a bar.

Nothing happens in Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets except funny, quotable conversation — “You’re sweet on me now but just you wait. I’m a destroyer.” — and the passing by of a dozen lives filled with enough love, fury, and regret to fill three Hollywood movies. This is a scruffy, gorgeous movie.

Chuck Wilson

 

Reviews (Video-On-Demand/Cable films)

The Surrogate 

As rich with heady dialogue as a good play, the debut feature from writer-director Jeremy Hersh is sure to inspire provocative post-screening conversation. In a commanding film debut, Jasmine Batchelor stars as Jess, a Brooklyn IT specialist pregnant with a child she’s carrying for her best friend Josh (Chris Perfetti) and his husband, Aaron (Sullivan Jones). When tests reveal that the child will be born with Down’s syndrome, Jess struggles to respond optimistically, even as Josh, Aaron, and Jess’s own parents are consumed by doubt. It’s in Jess’s nature to put the concerns of others first, but gradually, she comes to see that the choice here isn’t just Joss and Aaron’s to make.
A movie where every scene could easily come with a topic sentence title card—Eugenics, Reproductive Rights, Race, Gender—The Surrogate nonetheless remains grounded in the personal. Jess and those around her are smart people trying to make impossible decisions. At any moment, someone could say the wrong thing, and the fear of that makes this a movie with the tension of a thriller. It’s amazingly tense. If the wrap-up feels a bit undercooked, dramatically, the unexpected end-title sequence is so lovely, and so right, that you’re not likely to mind a bit.

Babyteeth 

Milla (Eliza Scanlen) is 16 when 23-year-old Moses (Toby Wallace) bumps into her on a Sydney, Australia metro platform. In a blink, she’s brought him home and into her life. Tatted, raggedy and irresistible, Moses is a junkie who nonetheless proves to be a kindred spirit for Milla, an insular suburban girl navigating a terminal illness and well-meaning parents (Ben Mendelsohn and Essie Davis) trying to pretend that all will be well.

It’s one of the many virtues of director Shannon Murphy’s accomplished debut film, adapted from screenwriter Rita Kalnejais’ play that the particulars of Milla’s disease are not relevant. In this view, she’s not dying; she’s coming into her own, and Moses, who may or may not return the romantic feelings Milla is developing for him, is helping her get there.

Babyteeth has a fine cast and memorable scenes — a classmate thoughtlessly asking to try on Milla’s wig; a mother watching her child dancing with abandon; a father realizing that his daughter is asking for a favor for after she’s gone from this world. But the film is also a bit overstuffed, as if the filmmakers loved the characters (and actors) too much to cut them as mercilessly as they should. For me, the too much-ness of Babyteeth undercut the poignancy of the film’s ending but most folks find it wrenching. I envy them the feeling.

Ella: Just One of Those Things 

She was a wonder from the very beginning. At age 16, a girl named Ella Jane Fitzgerald entered an amateur night contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She was planning to dance but so intimated by the performance of the dancing Edward Sisters that she opted to sing instead. The crowd was restless, and at first, as dancer Norma Miller recalls in the stodgy but effective new documentary, Ella: Just One of Those Things, they booed. But then, Fitzgerald’s voice took hold. “She shut us up so quick,” Miller says, “you could hear a rat piss on cotton.”

A star had been born, although big time fame was still a few years away. Veteran British filmmaker Leslie Woodhead tracks Fitzgerald’s brilliant career beat by beat in a film that could have used more of Ella singing, especially in its first half, and a little less testimony, perhaps, from colleagues and scholars. There is history aplenty, including fascinating archival photos of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as remembrances of the difficulties Fitzgerald faced — even after she’d become “The First Lady of Song” — in a racist, segregated America.

In the home stretch, Woodhead finally lets Fitzgerald cut loose, most thrillingly from her legendary 1960 Berlin concert which included a genius-level five-minute vocal improvisation during the song “How High the Moon”. Footage of her singing “A House Is Not a Home” dazzles, too, and did for me what a music doc should always do: inspired a two-day Ella listening spree.

Welcome to Chechnya 

In 2017, the Putin-sponsored Chechnyan government, led by right-wing strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, began arresting, torturing and killing gay, lesbian and transgender people, while also encouraging their family members to do the same. In his riveting and disturbing new film, journalist-turned-filmmaker David France (the magnificent How to Survive a Plague) embeds with the Russian LGBTQ Network, a small, incredibly brave group that took it upon themselves to smuggle queer Chechnyans out of the country.

France begins with Anya, a 21-year-old Muslim lesbian whose uncle has threatened to reveal her truth to her father — who will surely kill her — unless she sleeps with him. Sneaking Anya away to a safe location, in a three-hour window of opportunity, becomes a high-tension escape.

There’s also Grisha, who is willing to become the first victim to go public with his story of torture but only if he and his entire family, including his mother, sister and her children, can first be moved to safety. In a safe house, we come to know other victims, including one who’ll try to kill himself just as he’s about to be transported to Canada and a new life, an act of desperation that suggests that there is no such thing as freedom after you’ve been tortured for being who you are. This is vital, essential filmmaking. (HBO)

The Truth 

There should be gift cards for Video On Demand movies. If there were, I’d give my home-trapped, movie-mad friends The Truth, the marvelous new film from director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters, Nobody Knows). The Japanese master’s first film outside his home country, and first in another language, proves to be a profound delight.

In a performance that wittily draws on her own storied career, Catherine Deneuve stars as Fabienne, a revered French actress worried that her best years, and best roles, are behind her. A proper diva, Fabienne has just published her memoirs, entitled “The Truth,” prompting her screenwriter daughter, Lumir (Juliette Binoche), to come to Paris from America with her husband (Ethan Hawke) and young daughter. Old patterns of mother-daughter estrangement quickly emerge as Lumir begins questioning her mother’s printed version of their shared past. “My memories, my book,” Fabienne declares defiantly.

As it happens, Fabienne is filming a low-budget science fiction film about memory, aging and regret, themes she’s so reluctant to embrace that her performance is suffering. Lumir has entrenched theories about her mother’s failings and is almost gleeful about the ways in which this arid little sci-fi flick is bringing Fabienne’s past sins to light. But Lumir may be wrong about a few details of that past, which means in turn that she’s wrong about herself, too.

One of the world’s great filmmakers, Kore-eda is also among its gentlest. The Truth always feels true to the every day, even though it’s a story about show folk. The screenplay is quotably acerbic but also steeped in melancholy, as is his way. But here, in France, with the great Deneuve before him, the director seems lighter of foot, more playful. Kore-eda reportedly communicated to his cast through an interpreter but you’d never know it. Filmmaker and cast appear to have been united, if not by language, then by joy.

Chuck Wilson