Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019)

[2020 review here]

USA / UK / China, 161 minutes

Director/writer: Quentin Tarantino

Photography: Robert Richardson

Music: Quentin Tarantino’s streaming playlists

Editor: Fred Raskin

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Margaret Qualley, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Al Pacino, Lena Dunham, Sydney Sweeney, Kurt Russell, Julia Butters, Rafal Zawierucha, Damian Lewis, Emile Hirsch

I admit I was hard on Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood a few years ago, director and writer Quentin Tarantino’s last feature to date. That’s now going on seven years, his longest gap between features. Previously it was the six years between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. He turned 60 in 2023 and the drift seems to be that he’s thinking of hanging it up, with possibly one more big one to go. Something about movie critics, the way I’ve heard it. Meanwhile, my write-up did nothing to warn people away. I have since seen Hollywood as high as #2 (after Pulp Fiction) on ranked lists of Tarantino’s pictures. For me, with perspective, the last picture he made that was close to exceeding its flaws was Death Proof. Everything from Inglourious Basterds on has represented increasingly diminishing rewards.

I suspect these are unpopular opinions, but I do think Death Proof is underrated. And that Hollywood is one of his worst, which was unfortunately confirmed for me with a recent second look. It’s better than I gave it credit for in 2020, sure—I was notably in a bad mood then for some reason—but that’s not saying much. It belongs with the second-half messes of Basterds, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight, as good, admittedly, as some of their parts can be. Hollywood wallows in a place familiar to Tarantino buffs, nostalgia for the bad movies pumped out then, circa 1969, which showed at B-movie palaces, drive-in theaters, and on TV. Hollywood is so full of clips it sometimes feels like we’re sitting around watching TV and mocking it in some dimly lit stoned haze with Tarantino himself.

The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las (2019)

With this 33-1/3 volume I had the impression author Ada Wolin was more interested in researching and writing about girl groups generally, and the Shangri-Las specifically, than anything about any album. One expectation or hope I brought with me is that a best-of in this series would address the ongoing simmering controversy about the validity of best-of collections versus more intentional or “authentic” album releases. Instead, and this surprised me, I found myself once again hearing out arguments about rockism and poptimism. Well, OK, I guess. Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las has the distinction of being the first of many Shangri-Las collections, released in 1966 and marking (amazingly) the de facto end of their career. As Wolin points out, many of them were not even 20 yet in 1966. Golden Hits also has the advantage of being succinct: 32 minutes, 12 songs, not even that many of them genuine top 40 hits. The Shangri-Las are a decidedly strange beast—a girl group, yes, of course, but distinct and apart, somehow anticipating punk-rock convulsions years before impact. Wolin has a number of bones to pick with narrative history and consequences (as do we all, at least those of us suffering under material contrarian instincts). I thought some of those bones contradicted one another. She objects, for example, to the performers in girl groups getting attention only behind the songwriters and producers. More specifically she objects to Shadow Morton getting so much credit for the Shangri-Las. She cites critics—and by name: Saul Austerlitz, Ted Gioia, and others—on their quick dismissals of performers in favor of producers. Yet elsewhere she gives Morton his due, which is not negligible. “Leader of the Pack” was a staple of radio and commercials for decades and even has a certain amount of fatigue attached to it now. “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and some of the others I know well and still enjoy for various details. The one I love best is the domestic drama “I Can Never Go Home Anymore.” Wolin keeps her distance from it and seems reluctant to credit it as more than sentimental and manipulative, which may be fair enough but left me not entirely trusting her views. But she’s out there fighting for the legitimacy of the Shangri-Las and that’s the good fight.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

I Like to Watch (2019)

Emily Nussbaum won a Pulitzer in 2016 for her TV reviews in the New Yorker. This roundup of her stuff—including feature profiles and one or two previously unpublished essays—is at once an eccentric survey primer and an exploration of what has happened to TV so far in this century. She sets the tentpole starting markers at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos, feeling called on to defend Buffy at every opportunity and noting that the accepted status of The Sopranos means no defense is necessary—in fact, some skepticism might be called for. She also takes nuanced feminist views into her analyses, which proved notably useful when Me Too rolled around in 2017. Most of these pieces appeared originally in New York magazine or the New Yorker but most of them were reworked at least a little for this excellent compendium. Three groups of reviews are organized by theme (“Girls Girls Girls,” “Breaking the Box,” and “In Praise of Sex and Violence”) and all the rest are essays and/or profile pieces, on subjects such as Tina Fey, Jenji Kohan, Ryan Murphy, and Joan Rivers. Issues of product placement are discussed alongside full-throated defenses of Buffy and Sex and the City. Perhaps the best piece here is a long meditation on Me Too and bad artists and good art and trying to split the difference. The fact that she is also a recovering Woody Allen fan made me like her even more. TV in the 21st century has become an overwhelmingly vast landscape, with which I am familiar only in relatively tiny parts. She talks about a lot of shows I’ve never heard of here (as do people all over social media, I’m kind of in the dark on a lot of this), many more I’ve maybe meant to get to and know a little, and some things I know well, like Lost and The Leftovers, the Damon Lindelof projects. If she prefers Law & Order SVU to the flagship series, which I don’t, her reasons are clear and not surprising. Ryan Murphy gets one of the biggest profiles at the very end, but he’s one I have tended to reflexively skip past—American Horror Story, Glee, Nip/Tuck, etc. I guess he got me with the OJ doc, which was brilliant. I’d say it makes me want to try more by him, except I already did with the first season of American Horror Story. I Like to Watch also promises to be useful because there’s a lot of TV here I hope I can track down.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Parasite (2019)

[2020 review here]

Gisaengchung, South Korea, 132 minutes

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Writers: Bong Joon Ho, Han Jin-won

Photography: Hong Kyung-pyo

Music: Jung Jae-il

Editor: Jinmo Yang

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-sik, Park So-dam, Lee Jeong-eun, Jang Hye-jin

(spoilers) Director and cowriter Bong Joon Ho’s best movie, or my favorite anyway, is a comical but only slightly exaggerated meditation on class conflicts between rich and poor. It’s a picture where all Bong’s crazy dirty themes and styles come together organically and just right. On the poor side we have the Kim family: father Taek (Song Kang-ho, you’d know him, a Bong regular, seen in The Host, Memories of Murder, and Snowpiercer), mother Chung Sook (Jang Hye-jin), young adult and criminal mastermind daughter Jung (Park So-dam), and son Woo (Choi Woo-sik, Okja). They live in a basement apartment whose picture window looks out on an alley where people often come to urinate and/or fight. And then we have the rich Park family: father Dong-ik (Lee Sun-Kyun), mother Choi Yeo-jeong (Cho Yeo-jeong, a perfect ninny), adolescent daughter Da Hye (Jung Ji-so), and young son Da Song (Jung Hyun-jun). And, importantly, not to be missed, the Park family’s housekeeper Moon Gwang (Lee Jeong-eun, another Bong semiregular, seen in Mother and Okja).

It's a crowded ensemble cast which sorts out as the movie goes. First, Kim Woo finds an opportunity to tutor the Park’s daughter Da Hye, who is 14 or 15 and promptly develops a crush on him. With this inroad, the Kims scheme to take all the jobs in the Park household. Kim Jung sells herself as an art therapist for Da Song, who is an undisciplined 8 or 9 years old, going through an “American Indian” phase. He’s extremely hard to control, though Jung somehow manages it in about 15 minutes. We never see how, but Da Song is completely obedient to her. He probably has a crush on her too. From there Kim Taek gets the job as the family driver and, eventually, Chung Sook takes over as housekeeper. It’s all like a situation comedy, with a touch of slapstick and unlikely schemes to displace the original Park driver and housekeeper. Unlikely, but they work perfectly. They are often just funny, and the fast pace helps to hide the ridiculous plot holes.

Dark Waters (2019)

If you’re looking to feel good you could do worse than this docudrama directed by Todd Haynes with a star-studded cast: Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins, Bill Pullman, Victor Garber, Mare Winningham, etc., etc. It tells the story of Rob Bilott, the brave and hardworking attorney who sought to hold the chemical company DuPont accountable for their deceitful treatment of so-called “forever chemicals” and other microplastics that live in most of us now with the lead and mercury. Teflon is probably the most famous forever chemical. Yes, they’re bad. Yes, they’re very bad. No, they’re not worth the easy wipe and clean. DuPont knew it, Bilott knew they knew it, etc., etc. If you’ve seen The Insider, the story of the tobacco industry and its legal reckoning (directed by Michael Mann, starring Russell Crowe, nominated for seven Academy Awards), then you have a good idea of what you’re in for with this one. Erin Brockovich is another good comparison point (directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Julia Roberts, nominated for five Academy Awards, Roberts the winner for Best Actress). On one level Dark Waters, like the others, is simple outrage porn, satisfying in a kind of grinding morally righteous way. But I also think it’s worth asking why we love these heroic David and Goliath battles instead of simply insisting that stuff be done right in the first place. Give the government sufficient authority to provide the necessary informed oversight and make corporations behave responsibly as part of their internal cultures. That's what I say. Oh stop, oh stop now, now you’re cracking me up. I can’t remember the last time I had such a good laugh. I know how it goes. How can people be so cruel? Easy to be hard. Easy to be cold. Especially people who care about— Wait a second, that’s an old pop song. Anyway, I’ve got enough to be outraged about these days (have you heard about the $10 million cash Egyptian bribe?!?) but I guess I can save room for a little more, especially when Todd Haynes is at the helm. It’s not as lunatic inspired as some of his best stuff—it’s about a serious issue and he seemed to be leaning more toward straightforward professional restrained with this and, for that matter, with his previous picture too, Wonderstruck. But on that level he certainly delivers. You can’t say he doesn’t know how to make a picture. This one is beautiful, often gripping, and a pleasure to watch, even if it leaves you feeling mad about things.

High Weirdness (2019)

Erik Davis, former rock critic and now full-time seeker, offers up a meditation with densely sourced notes on Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, as the subtitle of High Weirdness charts the path. Davis focuses, after a lengthy scene-setting introduction, on the McKenna brothers, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. I barely knew of the first two, and Dick I knew primarily for his work before 1974. High Weirdness focuses on Dick’s work after 1974, when a religious experience produced a frenzy that lasted the rest of his life, sprawling across some 8,000 handwritten pages known as The Exegesis. Extractions from it contributed heavily to his last and most difficult novels. As it turned out, I was more interested in the McKenna brothers, Terence and Dennis, who retreated to South American jungles in 1971 to experiment with very strong hallucinogens and contemplate the results, which are worth reading up on. Robert Anton Wilson, for his part, experimented with hallucinogens too but, under the influence of William Burroughs, seemed more interested in the pursuit of paranoid weird experience as such, recorded in unlikely places like the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, UFO reports, and Trilateral Commission discussions. The affectionately labeled RAW contributed to the prankster spirit of the ‘60s and ‘70s—the Yippies, the Fugs, the Church of the Subgenius, and like that. Dick had his brush with deep Christianity in 1974 and never stopped trying to figure it out. He did a moderate share of hallucinogens in the ‘60s but his drug of choice over time was amphetamines, which among other things gave him the stamina to write a huge number of revelatory science fiction novels and stories and arguably the psychosis to make them mind-bendingly weird. For better or worse, I remain suspicious of anything too connected to his Christian leanings—Episcopalian, to be specific. I’m not always sure what Davis is after in High Weirdness. It’s not the drugs and esoterica seemingly as much as the visionary experiences themselves, which leaves him a tricky balance between objectivity and credulity. He manages it well. If I wished for more on the drugs and esoterica, I was happy enough to settle for the visions. Davis cuts a wide swath of strange post-‘60s experience. I learned about a lot of things I didn’t know before—and I thought I was a pretty good student of the ‘60s—but there were many places Davis rushes through where I wish he would have lingered. With Dick’s Christian experience as a chief example, on the other hand, the places he did linger were those I was less interested in. Still, overall, a pretty interesting survey of bizarre ‘60s psychic fallout.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

La Llorona (2019)

La Llorona is a ghost out of Mexican folklore that hangs out, by reputation, near bodies of water, howling and mourning for her drowned children. There are lots of versions of the story and how the children came to be drowned and actually there are even lots of movies too, going all the way back at least to a 1933 La Llorona, a Mexican picture. Lately there has been a spate of them, perhaps connected to an appearance in Pixar’s Coco of the Mexican folk song about the business, “La Llorona.” Wikipedia details a specifically Guatemalan version of the La Llorona story so it shouldn’t be a surprise that a Guatemalan, director and cowriter Jayro Bustamante, stepped up with his own take. It made the rounds of film festivals a few years ago and remains worth a look. This version of the tale takes an interesting political bent, with a former dictator who has been forced from office, brought to trial for genocide and convicted, and then his sentence commuted by the country’s supreme court. No doubt they were more interested in looking forward, not backward. This dictator figure, played by Julio Diaz, is called Enrique Monteverde here, but he is based on the real-life Guatemalan dictator in 1982 and 1983, Efraín Ríos Montt, who faced his own charges of war crimes and genocide. The movie takes place soon after his conviction has been set aside, when Montaverde and his family (wife, daughter, granddaughter, servants, and security) repair to their home where they are virtual prisoners. The action is mostly interior but constantly punctuated by chants and calls from the crowds that gather daily to protest him. Sometimes they throw stones and break windows. The swimming pool is strewn with wanted posters for him, tossed over the fence. Even most of the servants have given up and taken off. But the need for servants is still there and one day a woman shows up ready to work, and with experience—Alma, played by an otherworldly Maria Mercedes Coroy. Later her credentials turn out to be falsified but she’s in the household by then. This La Llorona skillfully blends the horrors and depredations of Latin American death squads and repressive right-wing regimes with the La Llorona legend. Julio Diaz is nearly perfect as Monteverde, still a monster after all these years, with a little bristly mustache, an omnipresent sidearm, and bottomless horndog notions. I admit this La Llorona feels a bit like a film festival usual suspect, but don’t hold that against it.

Uncut Gems (2019)

USA, 135 minutes

Directors: Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie

Writers: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie

Photography: Darius Khondji

Music: Daniel Lopatin

Editors: Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie

Cast: Adam Sandler, Julia Fox, LaKeith Stanfield, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian, Mike Francesca, Judd Hirsch, The Weeknd, Tilda Swinton, Natasha Lyonne

Adam Sandler appears to be one of those actors—Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta might be two others—who have a surprising amount of ability to perform when they are motivated but seem to be more often satisfied to run the paces of uninspired but potentially boffo payday productions. Every now and then something seems to get into them—some hunger for respect in their chosen craft, or maybe they just want an Oscar after all—and they take on roles that demand the best from them. By my admittedly biased and perhaps ignorant count (set me straight, please), Sandler has made two of them: the highly eccentric Punch-Drunk Love from 2002, and this relentless, over-the-top thriller directed and cowritten by the Safdie brothers Benny and Josh. Sandler is better-known (per IMDb) for the comedies Big Daddy (1999), Little Nicky (2000), The Waterboy (1998), and The Wedding Singer (1998). Due to mostly peer pressure, I have seen Shakes the Clown (1991), Happy Gilmore (1996), and Hubie Halloween (2020), all of which have their dim pleasures and may be best seen with someone already prone to like them. Shakes the Clown is the best and I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that I don’t remember Sandler in it.

As for the Safdie brothers, I was impressed enough with Uncut Gems to go back and check out the thriller Good Time (2017), which I thought was also pretty good. Uncut Gems bristles with kinetic energy and a stream of unfortunate events as New York City jewelry merchant and gambling addict Howard Ratner (Sandler) attempts to square all the various debts in his high-flying, heedless life, dealing with underworld creditors as well as his embittered estranged wife. He has a hot love affair going on the side with Julia (Julia Fox) but spends most of his time wheeling and dealing and trying to get down exotic parlay bets. A brief establishing sequence introduces us to a rock the size of a large russet potato, obtained illicitly from a mine in Ethiopia and massively embedded with opals. Then the picture starts on live footage from a colonoscopy camera, wends its way through a concert by The Weeknd, and finishes on a basketball game on TV—proving, once again, that gambling simply makes everything more intense. Here we see what is purported to be a live game 7 between the Boston Celtics featuring Kevin Garnett and the Philadelphia 76ers. There’s a lot riding on it, and we are content to spend most of the last 30 minutes or so of Uncut Gems watching this game with Ratner.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, France, 122 minutes

Director/writer: Céline Sciamma

Photography: Claire Mathon

Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, Arthur Simonini, Antonio Vivaldi

Editor: Julien Lacheray

Cast: Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami, Valeria Golino

I promised myself I would keep horserace talk to a minimum with these movie reviews based on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT). But honestly I’m still absorbing some of the recent changes. One of the most notable is the arrival of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, emerging from practically nowhere in the past four years to land in the top 200, in the latest update of the TSPDT aggregated critical ranking of the greatest movies ever made, at #187. TSPDT, in turn, relies heavily on the Sight & Sound polls conducted every 10 years, the latest just concluded last year, where we find Portrait landing at #30, one of only nine movies from the 21st century to make the new S&S top 100 and by far the most recent, with Parasite, which is tied down at #90 with The Leopard, Madame de..., Ugetsu, and Yi Yi.

Is Portrait of a Lady on Fire a great movie, or is it a passing critical infatuation? Obviously that will take some time to understand. It’s certainly a very good movie. Another feature of the recent S&S survey is that films focused on and/or made by women outperformed most expectations, most famously Chantal Akerman’s 1975 Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which landed at #1 in the Sight & Sound poll, all three hours and 22 minutes of it (which pushed it to #12 on the TSPDT list). The present auspicious regard for Portrait of a Lady on Fire may turn out to be a high-water mark, driven by fleeting enthusiasms. But nonetheless it’s a picture worth seeing and I’m glad I was pushed to seeing it sooner rather than later.

The Cybernetic Tea Shop (2019)

I have questions about this heartening little SF novella by Meredith Katz. I’m not sure how to classify it, for one thing. It’s billed as a lesbian asexual romance and I’m sure at least that it’s a romance. In a future a few hundred years away, AI technology has reached a point where some robots are considered sentient. The result is that laws have placed limits on what technology can be developed and some robots now have specific grandfathered civil rights. One such is Sal, who has operated a tea shop in Seattle for 278 years—Capitol Hill, I think (Katz lives in Vancouver, BC). Sal still has problems with anti-robot vandals. Clara is a software developer who specializes in AI. She keeps a mechanical talking hummingbird as a pet and assistant. She’s also something of a drifter, never staying more than a year or two in any place before moving on. This is attributed to her background as the daughter of Latinx migrant workers. I would hope they’d sort out migrant worker civil rights before robots, but maybe not. Or maybe they have, because Clara’s parents don’t seem especially economically oppressed. That’s beside the point, but I do have questions like that about aspects of this story. The relationship between Clara and Sal develops pretty fast and has a physical component if not a sexual one, which raised questions for me about asexuality. But all these questions also kept me intrigued with a genre, romance, that doesn’t generally appeal to me. This was “highly recommended” by the booktuber Kazen at Always Doing. It doesn’t tempt me much into any more romances, but it does make me want to read more about asexuality. I identified more with the desires of Clara and Sal to be alone than with their loneliness, which was basically under control, not given as a bad thing but still there. Sal is an interesting character, lost after hundreds of years since her original creator died. This reminded me of Star Trek, particularly Data and his Freudian relationship with his creator (“Father”). Unlike Star Trek, however, Sal is given a range of real emotions. She doesn’t always know what to do with them, but they are real. For his part, Data shows emotions frequently, but they’re not considered valid or are rationalized. Clara the software engineer is able to tinker with Sal’s programming to make improvements and that is basically where the love affair begins. The sheer wholesome mental health of The Cybernetic Tea Shop is refreshing. Still, I have questions. Their sleeping together (setting aside issues of robots and sleeping), even without sex, seemed to me to put them in a realm well beyond friendship. I wasn’t sure how to take or interpret that, and I’m still not, but I enjoyed the book.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Who Killed Garrett Phillips? (2019)

This two-part three-hour HBO documentary from producer/director Liz Garbus (The Farm: Angola, USA; I’ll Be Gone in the Dark; Love, Marilyn) presents a murder mystery wrapped in law enforcement mistakes and bad faith. The movie lets its subjects speak for themselves through their words and actions. It never has to say a word about racism because we see it unfolding in front of us. It involves the murder of a 12-year-old boy in a small town in upstate New York and the subsequent single-minded focus on the town’s Black high school soccer coach. In the year or so before the murder the coach had been involved with the mother of the boy, Garrett Phillips. She is a white woman and her previous boyfriend, a policeman, did not like the relationship. The coach and the woman had broken up so recently that it still wasn’t clear whether they might not be able to patch it up. There are lots of unexplained gaps in this picture. The relationship of the coach and the boy is one. There are only glancing allusions that they did not get along. The reasons for the breakup are also unclear, though it sounds like racist social pressure was part of it. The mother evidently never wanted to cooperate with these filmmakers, so we never hear her version of anything. We never learn where she or the other son were on the day of the murder. That day, in the afternoon, people heard unusual sounds coming from the second-story apartment where the murder took place, including a neighbor who shared a wall and called 911. At first a lot of people seemed to think it was other kids in some kind of incident that went out of control, but police quickly focused on the soccer coach. He is not a bad suspect as these things go, but the evidence is ambiguous, circumstantial, and often strained. No other lines of investigation were ever seriously followed. The closer the evidence is looked at the less likely it appears to be the coach, but that doesn’t stop police and an overzealous prosecutor (later sanctioned for abuses in this and other cases) from systematically destroying the coach’s life with harassment and innuendo. It’s an object lesson, a cautionary tale, for Black people thinking of moving to white towns even still in the 21st century, no matter how well liked they may seem to be. And it’s another story of raw white fear and aggression. Who Killed Garrett Phillips? details the murder and investigation and then follows along with the attempt to pin it on the coach in court. It’s intense, dramatic, and harrowing, hard to watch as any dispassionate depiction of injustice can be. Definitely worth a look if you don’t mind getting helplessly angry about law enforcement excesses.

Joker (2019)

I skipped this originally for all the predictable reasons. It's a superhero movie, another more or less dark and gritty Batman movie—actually, better to call this one a Gotham City movie, as Bruce Wayne is barely in it. It is a "standalone," you see, an "Imaginary Story" in the grand old DC tradition. And it sets Joaquin Phoenix, noted gourmand of scenery, free to excessive displays of mental illness. These things did not appeal, and the reviews seemed mostly bad too. But I found one true heart beating for it on youtube (Sarah Hawkinson at the PossessedbyHorror channel, a regular stop) and decided to give it a try. I really don't know director Todd Phillips, who is famous for the Hangover movies and other gross-out teen comedies (Road Trip, Old School), none of which I've seen beyond The Hangover, on which I was meh. Immediately it made Joker look to me like a bid for being taken seriously in today's supersaturated comic book movie environment (compare Logan, which I haven't seen but has a similar marketing vibe). I basically enjoyed Joker, mostly for Phoenix's performance. One of the DC approaches to their movies seems to be "interpretive"—different players get their at-bats with the same character. Marvel does some of that but seems more to be more about buying up every player they can to be specific heroes. Anyway, how many Jokers do I know? Jack Nicholson, Cesar Romero. I have yet to see Jared Leto. Heath Ledger remains King Kong here, but I must say Phoenix makes a decent bid and comes in an easy second with his compulsive laughing disorder bit and a lot of quirks mainlined out of Travis Bickle. The main knock on this movie, and it's a fair one, is how completely derivative it is of Martin Scorsese movies, The King of Comedy most of all. Robert De Niro even kind of reprises Rupert Pupkin as a successful Johnny Carson. Taxi Driver is definitely in here as well. Joker also uses the narrative strategy of Frank Miller's original 1986 Dark Knight graphic novel, where the city is in crisis and self-serious urgent newscasts carry a lot of the exposition. Might as well say American Psycho (novel AND movie) gets its time in Joker too. Plus Juggalos, of course. These lifts arguably show a lot of studied good taste or acumen on the part of Phillips but not very much originality, and in many ways they fight with Phoenix's attempts to craft an original Joker. I get the feeling Phillips and Phoenix may not have been entirely working together. Phoenix carries the threat of Nicolas Cage levels of excess, but he is still an awesome talent and I think the script could have benefited from following his instincts more. But if Joker never entirely gets out of its own way it is never any less than entertaining either, with some neat twists and a lot of artful if extreme violence when the violence parts come. Phoenix makes the Joker haunting by the laughing disorder alone. The story delivers the rest, and it's not bad, if excessively familiar.

See DoestheDogDie report.

Don't F**k With Cats (2019)

When we last saw web sleuths in action (two weeks ago, in Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel) they were mostly all wrong. Here they are mostly all right. This Netflix miniseries starts, as so many things do, on Facebook, when a video was posted called "1 Boy 2 Kittens." Part of what is so interesting about this documentary is the power of this video and others posted by the same fellow. They are mercifully never shown to us, except in very small fragments, but they literally break down web sleuths and a police detective, who respond with blubbering tears and outrage, as do we all just knowing about it. In the first video the cats are killed by being placed in plastic bags from which the air is removed with a vacuum cleaner. These kittens are barely weaned, not even two months old, and they die. We see the corpses briefly, which he keeps in his refrigerator for later videos. This mysterious fellow kills other animals for videos and eventually goes on to kill a person. His story is another one that belongs to the internet age, interesting and creepy in its own right. Those of us who believe that wantonly killing animals ritualistically is a sign of a serial killer working himself up to bigger crimes are not surprised by how this case turns, but until that murder the web sleuths are unable to get the attention of the police IRL to take it seriously. For one thing, figuring out who the guy is at all and then where he lives in the world is no easy thing. The web sleuths manage it—all the various details of how they do so are there to be discovered. It's fair to call it fascinating, and relatable too, especially when they can't get the attention of the police once they have found the guy. Along the way, unfortunately, they do find at least one wrong guy, who is then hounded and harassed by web sleuth hangers-on until he commits suicide. Oops. That's the problem with these internet things. You can find out amazing things, but the mob feelings incited can also go out of control and ruin the lives of innocent people as well as guilty. On the other hand, our cat killer is anything but innocent and in general police will not take the case seriously until he actually does kill a person, also again done for the camera. Thanks to the work of the web sleuths—basically one of those private Facebook groups that can cause so much trouble—police are able to get the guy after only the one murder. If you have tender feelings like me for animals you have to be careful with this miniseries, which I think is worth seeing. They never show much, but your imagination is fully inflamed to terrible things. It's probably the next-worst thing to seeing the videos (which I refuse to look at myself) but at least there's a happy ending here and altogether it's an interesting ride.

The Confession Killer (2019)

I thought this Netflix miniseries was a pretty good primer on Henry Lee Lucas, who emerged in the '80s as pretender to the throne of King of the Serial Killers, the most prolific, rampant, and eclectic of all time. The legend was printed in the movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, although now we know it is mostly fiction and Lucas should be up for some posthumous credit along with screenwriters Richard Fire and director John McNaughton, plus Michael Rooker in possibly his greatest performance. It may be the single greatest serial killer movie of all time. Please don't talk to me about The Silence of the Lambs or M. The Texas Rangers, according to this documentary, still have Lucas down for some 200 murders—hitchhikers and housewives stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, strangled, stomped, throats cut, necks broken. After he killed them he had sex with them. Sometimes he didn't like their look so he cut off their heads first. He was thus set up as the Monster Truck Rally of serial killers. The worst any human could imagine. Pure E - V - I - L. It turns out—and it took awhile to really get to it, well into the 2010s, because the Texas Rangers resist the truth to this day (according to the doc)—Lucas probably killed three people: his mother (an abusive prostitute), his 15-year-old girlfriend (when Lucas was in his 40s), and a landlady. All the rest were more or less a matter of Lucas amiably going along with Texas law enforcement when they found this easy and fun way of clearing cases: Get Lucas to confess to it. He'll do it! Ironically, people-pleasing is in the nature of Lucas's pathology and his skills for reading people were prodigious. When others looked harder they started seeing 1) a crazy thing, and 2) something that should have signaled we're done here. The crazy thing was how much driving Lucas would have had to do to commit these crimes. There were periods of days and weeks on the timeline where literally, physically, the only way he could have done it was with constant driving, killing, and no sleep. The "case closed" thing was irrefutable documentary evidence in dozens of the murders that Lucas was elsewhere—a matter of timeclock stamps, receipts, and witnesses. He could not have been in New Mexico killing a housewife when he was buying gas and a hot dog that day in Florida. However, again by the slant of this miniseries, which is compelling, law enforcement by then was flocking in from 20-odd states with their cold case files, and Lucas was clearing them left and right. He'd grin, suck on a milkshake, and admit to every single one, offering up the lurid details, including his favorite about the having sex with the corpses. Uncovering the fraud of all this is basically the arc of this miniseries, a twisting complicated story that is there to be discovered. Lucas died in prison in 2001 awaiting execution for a murder he could not have committed. Required viewing for anyone like me who thought Lucas might be the ultimate boogeyman. He's still pretty creepy.

Who Killed Little Gregory? (2019)

I went digging around at Netflix and turned up this five-hour French true-crime documentary miniseries about a famous case in France from the 1980s. It's pretty good. The case is a bit of a forerunner to the JonBenet Ramsey murder in the US in the '90s, with a bizarrely ritualized and still formally unsolved murder of a young child, tantalizing clues that point to an inside job, and lots of mistakes on the part of law enforcement and investigators. The Gregory Villemin murder in rural France was preceded by years of anonymous threatening letters and phone calls to the boy's parents, specifically calling out Gregory's father Jean-Marie and promising vengeance for reasons known only to the stalker. This stalker and likely murderer became known in France as "the Crow," associated with the 1943 movie Le Corbeau directed by Henri-Georges Cluozot (a good one—worth seeing!). Gregory was murdered at the age of 4, trussed up and thrown in the local river to drown, with one more letter following to his parents from "the Crow," taking credit. There are a lot of moving parts to this case, including an incompetent judge overseeing the investigation and constant media / paparazzi harassment as the case unfolds. It captured the imagination of France, with an absurd number of people wrongly certain they knew who was guilty and innocent, again much like the Ramsey case in the US. The Gregory case has a number of surprises and strange twists and turns—the lengthy running time is justified and I don't want to give too much away. It reminded me of another title that came up in the same Netflix search, The Staircase, another TV miniseries and also coincidentally a French production, though in that case the crime under examination was committed in the US. I like these forensic procedural cases because they are just so chilling and mysterious, so open to interpretation and uncertainty, often feeling impossible ever to find satisfaction from. At the same time, Who Killed Little Gregory? is quite good at raising emotions. Not so much for me because it's a kid's death—though the photos show him to be extraordinarily adorable and it's hard to think of the way he died—but because the perpetrator feels so provocatively close, likely a member of the extended family. Who Killed Little Gregory? is thus often infuriating, and even desolating, but in that righteous, satisfying true-crime way. Recommended.

Dennis and Lois (2019)

The story of Dennis Anderson and Lois Kahlert and their mutual lifelong love affair with live rock music felt almost precious in synopsis and I put off taking a look for months. Now I'm sorry I did so I looked at it two times in a row to make up for that. It's nothing less than thrilling. Between them Dennis and Lois have seen (and have the receipts for) Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, Little Stevie Wonder ("when he was little") and lots of Motown artists, James Brown, the Shirelles—it's quite an amazing and long list. They met in 1975 at a CBGB show with Richard Hell, Talking Heads, and the Ramones. The Ramones was their first mutual love affair—they found they could be helpful by running the merch table for the band, selling t-shirts and memorabilia. The ever-evolving shift in their priorities across their impressive clubbing career (they claim 10,000 shows) is perhaps signaled best by their vanity license plates: first, RAMONES, which were constantly being ripped off and having to be replaced. Then MEKONS, which Jon Langford in interview here wryly notes have never been ripped off. There is an interesting missing piece in the adventures of Dennis and Lois, from about 1965 to 1975, with no mention of the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, or other NYC artists of the period—strange gap. By the 1980s their interests lay squarely in British indie trends, focused especially on Manchester, where they followed Joy Division into New Order into Happy Mondays into the Stone Roses. Happy Mondays wrote a song about them in 1990, "Dennis and Lois"—it's on Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches. By then the couple had inserted themselves into the indie traveling circuit, offering floors of their home in Brooklyn for touring bands and even more often traveling along with them to work the merch tables and see great shows four nights a week or more. This is their life. (Are they independently wealthy? Their house is full of collectible toys, but how they survive is never explained.)

By the 1990s and since then their taste has evolved into shoegaze permutations, some of which I know, barely, e.g., Doves, and much of which I don't know at all, e.g., A Place to Bury Strangers, John Grant, or Fat White Family. All of it heard in the movie sounds wonderful and excellent, although that does remind me of one weak point here, which is there appears to be some licensing problems. The Ramones loom huge in the story of Dennis and Lois, it's their main working preoccupation for more than 10 years starting in 1975. But there is no Ramones music in this doc—there's some Ramones-like generic riffing that accompanies that part of the picture, which I noticed more going through it the second time. But let that be the takeaway: this documentary was literally so thrilling, with so much useful information (the epic story of Frank Sidebottom!), and with such solace and sensitive understanding of the life-affirming powers of live music, that you don't always notice things like Ramones music missing in action. Dennis and Lois was shot and put together before the pandemic—there's a next chapter to be heard from Dennis and Lois, if we ever get to the end of this. Even as is, the two in these scenes from maybe circa 2017 already look like grandparents, which is charming and also weird. No one knows it better than Dennis and Lois themselves but they also know why they are where they are and as such stand as a certain kind of role model for the pursuit of something I abandoned myself in my 50s. Kudos to them. Long may they rock. They stand to the mosh and the crowd surfing and the dancing and all the rest, like they were born to it. They seem to have great taste too. Remarkable stuff.

Saint Maud (2019)

This picture walks a line in the gray area between extreme faith and mental illness, pushing it into the realm of horror where arguably it belongs. It reminded me in some ways of The Rapture, with some willingness to entertain or at least pretend to entertain that there might be something to Christian views of time and space and reality. Morfydd Clark is Maud, a hospice nurse who previously lost a patient (circumstances murky) and subsequently turned to a cultish brand of the Catholic Church. She is presently giving private care to Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a successful dancer and choreographer in her 40s now terminally ill with cancer. Maud, naturally, believes God has delivered them to one another to save Amanda's soul. Accordingly, she tries to control every aspect of Amanda's life but she's not doing a good job of winning her over. Amanda is a cosmopolitan, a genial but firm atheist. Though familiar, it's not a bad setup and the movie effectively seesaws away at this tension inside a dark and gloomy mansion somewhere in England by the sea. Amanda is amused by Maud and feels some affection for her but is often annoyed by her attempts to convert her. CGI special effects are used sparingly but with a good sense for how to play them. There is the usual handful or so of shock cuts but they seem more designed to unsettle Maud than the audience. We can see a lot of them coming. In a way, Saint Maud is a picture for connoisseurs of subtle horror. Director and writer Rose Glass has a good grip on the material and no evident baggage or scores to settle with the church. She just sees a good opportunity there and goes for it. She's interested in questions of faith but tends to use technique to explore that more than any of the inherent theatrical drama in what is essentially a two-hand piece between Maud and Amanda. For example, the ending comes in the form of a certain apocalypse which is predictable enough. Less predictable are the exalted aspects of it, and even less expected is a shot that lasts for maybe one second and may be the most shocking image in the whole picture, a gut punch. There's also a late scene that's quite good and feels almost like an homage to The Exorcist without even trying hard. Definitely worth a look. Abstracted enough that it might be OK for the faint of heart too.

Mindhunter, s2 (2019)

I raced through the first two seasons of Mindhunter in less than a week, which is pretty fast for me and a good context for any complaints I might have now. If nothing else the show is entertaining and compelling. I read the book it's based on some time ago when it was much newer, the 1995 true-crime by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker on the origins of criminal profiling, also called Mindhunter. Criminal profiling continues to be controversial, with mixed results. It's been long enough since I read the book that I can't speak to discrepancies very well. I don't remember any character like the hotshot young Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), who seems to understand serial killers instinctively well. He's a little unnerving here and also has the usual array of exaggerated powers in our era of superheroes. I don't remember Charles Manson being interviewed in the book, and the Richard Speck we are presented with here is very different from a mid-'90s portrait I saw on one of those Bill Kurtis true-crime shows reporting that estrogen drugs were being smuggled into prisons and Speck was taking them. Across both seasons, Mindhunter teases us with brief scenes of the Kansas-based BTK killer. The obvious suggestion is that he is on his way to becoming an A plot. I thought that would be the second season but instead (even as the show kept teasing BTK) the Atlanta child murders of 1979 to 1981 take over. I do remember that being extensively discussed in the book. The first season of Mindhunter is largely concerned with getting the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit off the ground in the first place, through the work of FBI agents Ford and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) with academic psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv). As is often the case with extended TV dramas, Mindhunter is better when it sticks to the subject at hand and not so good when it wanders into the personal lives of its characters. At the same time some of these threads—notably the sense that Tench's adopted 9-year-old son is on the way to his own serial-killer psychosis—are the most compelling. But I think you can see the problem of improbable, convenient coincidence here. Carr is a lesbian in the closet, Ford—well, there's something wrong with Ford. I thought often of the show Dexter, which I've never seen much of but know features a serial killer doing excellent police work, because that's what we seem to have in Ford. Even when Mindhunter does stick to the subject at hand it feels a little puffed up, with Ford taking on and often psychologically breaking down the likes of Speck, Manson, Son of Sam, and other terrible killers with their own trading cards and fan base. But this show is done so well that I couldn't stop watching it, like I said. Reportedly most of the responsibility goes to David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, The Social Network), who gets an executive producer credit and directed a good many episodes. I hope there's a third season. No one is being very clear about it at the moment.

Blow the Man Down (2019)

Problems of categorizing: I picked this movie more or less out of a hat from a list of "movies to see" I cobbled together late last year out of best-of lists and recommendations on social media. The list is full of movies about which I know nothing or very little until I go to look at them. Sometimes I go in entirely blind, sometimes I check IMDb or even a review or two. In this case, I noted that IMDb classes Blow the Man Down as "comedy, drama, mystery" (again, I ask, is this alphabetical?) with an aggregate ranking of 6.4 (that's too low btw so I gave it a 7). Later, after I'd seen it, I looked up Glenn Kenny's review on RogerEbert.com where he mentions the comic aspects of the picture too. Look, yes, Blow the Man Down has some bits that are funny, but they are mostly there for the relief from a nicely constructed thriller, and welcome at that. The picture also asserts eccentric indie cred with a perversely effective Greek chorus of New England fishermen who jump in and start singing sea shanties (like the title song, which I used to associate only with Popeye but has definitely been growing on me for some time now). It's mainly a predicament movie, in which characters get themselves into one and it only seems to keep getting worse, the kind of movie you talk to in the privacy of your home. "That body is never going to fit into that cooler," I said at one point, for example. Or, at another: "Stop wasting time now. Go get that knife or there's going to be trouble with it later." Or: "Are you kidding me? You should not believe a word this person is saying." And, of course: "Oh, noo!" And so forth. I consider the impulse (which I would never indulge in a theater or with company, of course) a mark of a pretty good suspense film, so add that please to the categories for Blow the Man Down along with thriller. It's set in Maine—the New England accents may be variously strained or nonexistent from character to character, but that's all right. Two young women, barely of age, have lost their mother and the picture starts on the day of her funeral. The younger girl, Mary Beth (Morgan Saylor), deals with her grief and hatred of the small town by going out that night, getting drunk, and finding herself in a royal predicament. You'll have your own words of advice for her. I had mine. She didn't listen, of course, and she probably won't listen to you either. Things do not get better from there, as various unsavory secrets of the town start to emerge while Mary Beth and her older and more mature sister Priscilla (Sophie Lowe) are busy trying to get out of the predicament. I think the secret of Blow the Man Down (aside from the singing fishermen and worrisome predicament) is casting the older characters well. The town madam Enid, for example, is a first-rate turn from Margo Martindale, a ubiquitous figure of TV (The Americans, Dexter, The Good Wife, Justified, Mrs. America, and many others). She is quite terrifying here. Or Susie (June Squibb), a bawdy but kindly old lady who's been around the block. Squibb has too, in places like Alexander Payne pictures (Nebraska, About Schmidt). Blow the Man Down is not perfect but it's good enough to get me talking out loud with some urgency to the screen. And I have to think codirectors and cowriters Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy are two to keep an eye on.

The Lodge (2019)

The Lodge is a busy horror picture stuffed with ideas and tropes. The setting (large isolated building in a snowstorm) is self-consciously reminiscent of The Shining. The stepmother figure Grace (Riley Keough, American Honey—did you know she's Elvis Presley's granddaughter?) may or may not be evil but she was once a member of a Christian cult. The kids (Jaeden Martell, Lia McHugh) may or may not be evil but their real mother (Alicia Silverstone, gone before you know it) has abandoned them, and Dad (Richard Armitage) is a clueless nebbish. It's Christmas. This family is wounded, fractured, attempting to heal. But the soundtrack alone tells us things do not bode well. The main source of tension is between the stepmother figure and the kids and tell me where you've heard that one before. But The Lodge does have a number of solid small-bore ideas. These kids barely know Grace and they are of an age (tweenish) to be capable of particular cruelty. Dad has left them alone there together because he has to work, planning to be back in a few days for the holiday. The kids coldly rebuff all Grace's overtures but she seems to understand and doesn't press too hard. That is, until the power goes out, everyone's things are missing, and the snowstorm just got worse. I liked the idea of having all their things stolen because it emphasizes how vulnerable they are, especially with the power outage and snowstorm and who is stealing their stuff and why? Even the refrigerator and cupboards are empty (though soup cans and crackers turn up later, no explanation). It bends the story more in supernatural directions, but unfortunately at this point cowriter Sergio Casci and cowriters/codirectors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz more or less lose the thread, turning obvious and predictable (that's what a dog is doing here, for example). Sometimes Grace and the kids move toward being allies, sometimes the kids appear to be playing a terrible joke, sometimes Grace appears to have gone psychotic. These things don't fit very well and I think maybe they should have picked one and worked it out from there. For a while I was enjoying these irrational aspects as the unexplainable is arguably horror's main stock in trade. Then it got to be too much, seesawing between haunted house ghost story and tale of monstrous children. Unfortunately, again, these things don't really fit. But the ideas as such can be good. Perhaps the best was when the kids decided—based on concrete detailed evidence we see for ourselves—that they have all died and are now in purgatory. They make the case for it, however impossible it may seem, but then more twists and turns undermine that and everything else. So the picture is a little disappointing in the end. You could probably make two or three decent shorts from it. Then you wouldn't have to strain to connect them. But who looks at shorts anymore, except maybe at film festivals? Are film festivals coming back?