Kraftwerk’s Computer Love (2022)

Australian Steve Tupai Francis has a bio that claims “over 25 years’ experience in writing in a range of contexts including music, academia, and civil society” and possession of a “collection of over 3,000 records.” What he may lack in bona fides—I don’t know his music writing—he more than makes up for with his enthusiasm. For the album Computer Love particularly, but also, in chatty footnotes, for David Bowie, Kate Bush, Visage, and others. He reignited all my own ardor for the deceptively light 35-minute set. Francis just kept proclaiming it one of the best of all time until suddenly I had the daily habit again. He’s all about the complete package too—not just the songs and lyrics but also the cover art and attendant world tour, one of the greatest of all time, he says, and instantly I began to regret never seeing them. I was perfectly infatuated with Computer Love in 1981. If the metric is raw number of times I’ve played an album, then it’s my favorite Kraftwerk album, although at one time or another I’ve owned a handful of their best. What seems amazing to me now, all these years later, is how clearly Kraftwerk saw the coming of personal computers and even the internet, at least in terms of look, feel, and mood. Yes, they were using the most primitive tools to do it—the Speak and Spell toy, for crying out loud—but using them well, maximizing them all the way. The rumble of voices, the counting in multiple languages, “Computer World,” “Computer Love,” it’s quite almost overwhelmingly perfect. “By pressing down a special key / It plays a little melody.” With our attention spans shrinking down to the size of a little melody, as Kraftwerk foretold, it’s wry and painful and uncanny and hilarious all at once. It may never have sounded better than while I was reading this book—and I obsessed over this album once. Francis triggers a lot of that simply by insisting on it, because much of what he says in his flights is true. In that way it reminds me of another 33-1/3 title, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli. Francis and Fusilli take different routes in terms of emphasis, but they are equally effective at infectiously raising the passion for these great albums. I mean, you probably have to love them in the first place. But if you do, prepare for a good+ time.

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

Barbarian (2022)

[2022 review here]

Bulgaria / USA. 102 minutes

Director/writer: Zach Cregger

Photography: Zach Kuperstein

Music: Anna Drubich, Ronettes

Editor: Joe Murphy

Cast: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgard, Justin Long, Matthew Patrick Davis, Richard Brake, Jaymes Butler, Kate Nichols

(spoilers) Since at least 2013 and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Detroit’s amazing deterioration in areas such as Brightmoor has been there to be used as a powerful visual element for anyone willing to venture into them. Capitalism isn’t doing anything about it and whole blocks are going all the way back to nature, with barest hints of the decrepit decaying houses where people used to live. Barbarian makes good use of the wreckage. Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at night to her Airbnb destination in a pouring rainstorm and never gets a good look at the neighborhood until next morning, when it is almost as shocking for us as it is for her. The camera takes its time swiveling and panning and showing us everything it can see.

Tess is in Detroit for a job interview with a documentary filmmaker but already she’s in over her head by the whims of fate. The house at 476 Barbary has been double-booked and the other renter is already in there with the key. It’s an Airbnb nightmare. A large convention in town makes available hotel rooms scarce. The guy already there, Keith (Bill Skarsgard), doesn’t seem threatening, but you never know. Director and writer Zach Cregger reportedly based a lot of Keith and other males in Barbarian on a book by security specialist Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear, which details warning signals of dangerous men. If alarm bells are going off for Tess—and they are—they are going off for us as well through all the uncomfortable conversations that lead to Tess agreeing to stay there overnight. We won’t learn it for a while, but Keith is the least of her worries.

Fresh (2022)

Fresh starts as a movie about dating apps and The Dating Scene Today. That’s a premise I can buy for a horror show, and the opening scene fully delivers on all expectations. But Fresh has some other fish to fry and soon moves on to its destiny as a movie about billionaire cannibals and their exquisite tastes. One such, for example, is that they all believe women taste better. In many ways Fresh is riffing on American Psycho, featuring a yuppie scum guy, Steve (Sebastian Stan), who is making his way in the gig economy picking up women, capturing them, holding them, and eventually cutting them up into chops and cutlets. It offers up some very fine food cinematography along the way—fans of Big Night might think about giving Fresh a try (think hard, I say). Steve promises his victims to keep them alive as long as he can. But there’s something different for him about Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones). Why, he seems to be falling in love with her. What makes Fresh work for me is that it’s much less focused on gore and shock—there’s some, but it’s more antiseptic, just enough to convince you it’s horror. By contrast, and somewhat confusingly, it is more focused on maintaining a light and engaging tone. It’s entertaining, in short. A lot of it is clonkingly obvious by the points it wants to make. Director Mimi Cave and writer Lauryn Kahn seem aware these points are not that fresh, casting a wry and ironic wash over the proceedings. Still, billionaires consuming people, where have we heard that before? Women as disposable consumer product. Et cetera. To be clear, Steve is no billionaire. He’s just the moral equivalent of the Uber Eats driver delivering goods to the doorstep. He’s obviously making big money on it as he lives in a spectacular mansion with large walk-in freezers all over the place. Once we are hep to all the nuance of the details and tone in Fresh, the picture does start to flag some. It’s especially hard for me to believe the love story, and the action-oriented escape attempts only take you so far. But the picture is warmly humorous with an admirable relentlessness. A strange way to put over a cannibal holocaust, but there you go.

Watcher (2022)

Watcher has a good premise and a good start, as our main character Julia (Maika Monroe) finds herself in Bucharest, Romania, with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman). Both were raised in the US and both have Romanian roots, but only Francis can speak the language, and he is there for a demanding job in marketing with long hours. Julia’s isolation is near complete, as she spends most of her time by herself in their excellent apartment, frustrated by the language every time she goes out. Then, actually almost right away, she notices a man in the building across the street, standing in his window. She gets the feeling he is looking at her. She gets the feeling he is following her. She thinks she sees him everywhere she goes. Maybe—we only catch glimpses of him if that. We see a couple of the events she reports to her husband and skeptical police. A man sits directly behind her in a movie theater in one, but we never get a good look at him. He might be some other creep. She might be overthinking the guy in the window (though we doubt that given that we know the chosen genre of our show). Her overworked husband starts to wonder about her. The police plainly think she’s a little kookoo. There are nice notes here of paranoid classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Rear Window. It’s never entirely clear whether it’s all not Julia’s imagination, though the movie gets noticeably more predetermined to an agenda as it goes, particularly in the last third. When Julia waves at the figure in the window and it waves back the picture is all in as a serial killer Psycho kind of show with some strange ins and outs and, ultimately, explaining every last blasted thing, complete with twists and turns that are not that unexpected. The first half is better, creepy and sneaky with uncertainty. We feel Julia’s isolation keenly. The language barrier is done really well. Director and cowriter Chloe Okuno never gives us subtitles for the Romanian and not many Romanians have even passing English. Monroe puts on a good show as someone who might be cracking up from culture shock. Then, well, you might as well stay for the end. It’s not a long movie.

Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022)

Ethan Coen’s documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis does not add a lot to what we already know about the iconic rock ‘n’ roller, but it has the advantage of being posthumous. It was released shortly after Lewis’s death in October 2022, offering the most panoramic view yet of his entire career (much like the essential I Am Everything did for Little Richard). As the picture notes toward the end, Lewis outlived a good many of his peers, including Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. This documentary overall leans more toward hagiography, never really addressing the many scandals that swirled around and dogged Lewis. The good news here is that means more time for the music. Who cares whether he murdered anyone or if there really was a hound dog no one ever saw before or since howling outside the window the night he was born? The music ranges across his rock ‘n’ roll hits, then his country music chapter, and chases all the way down to his pentecostal gospel music roots in Ferriday, Louisiana. His cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart get their time here too, as does his sister, briefly, Linda Gail. They all agree Jerry Lee was the most talented of them all, and Lewis of course modestly allows they’re right. When the music and performances are all stacked up in such proximity his whole deal does have a certain sameness—but what sameness! He gets the rumbling boogie-woogie undertow going and layers practically anything he likes on top, his own stuff and covers of songs, rock ‘n’ roll, country, gospel, anything. There’s some great footage of Lewis with Tom Jones on an exuberant cover of “Tutti Frutti.” Lewis goes out of his way to bearhug Chuck Berry in an extended sequence and pays his respects to Little Richard too. But on the matter of Elvis Presley, he remained dubious to the end. He never exalts Elvis for anything and credits Colonel Tom Parker for all the success, which made him basically consistent to the end. Little Richard had a similar problem and I have to say I’m inclined to agree with them more than not. Jerry Lee Lewis was as original and dynamic a rock ‘n’ roll performer as anyone else and there’s approximately 70 minutes of proof in this tidy documentary, worth seeing for the musical performances alone.

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

They said 50,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong (on Elvis Presley’s second collection of gold records in 1959) so maybe the same principle applies to the second movie in the Avatar franchise? About the 2.9 billion who saw the first? They can’t be wrong? I don’t know. I saw a 3D IMAX version of that first one some double-digit years ago, with all the many folks (and me) ridiculously wearing the 3D glasses and gasping in wonder. Every generation seems to get its turn at the buying end of 3D as the future of cinema. I was duly impressed and inclined to defend it in a general way, the problematic auteur James Cameron notwithstanding. What’s wrong with a hit? I even looked at it again a few years later across the living room on my not-so-big TV and still liked it then, perhaps some kind of lingering hangover effect from the wonderful theater experience. But certainly things about the blockbuster rankled as insipid—looking at you, “unobtanium”—and they’re not particularly better in this sequel. I never thought the putdown of “Dances With Wolves in space” was that insightful, maybe because I like Dances With Wolves, even with all its problems, including a running time close to four hours. And speaking of long, I spent half my life the other day looking at a non-3D non-IMAX streaming version of the 2022 Avatar sequel. The Way of Water (which is over three hours) spends nearly an hour reprising the situation established in the first one, then shifts gears from the forest culture of the planet Pandora to the sea culture. Native forest Pandorans are tinted blue whereas the sea tribes helpfully have teal skin, for easy identification during the pitched battles. There’s probably nothing I can say to convincingly encourage or discourage anyone about seeing this movie, particularly at this late stage of the affair. It’s all world-building and big battles, with the now-usual blockbuster dose of family feels sprinkled in. Those inclined may find it wise to keep a hanky handy. In the first one, if it was there, I missed that Pandora is a moon of a larger gas giant type of planet. They make good use of it here as periods of light and darkness are dramatically affected, with a regular (daily?) event called “Eclipse,” functioning something like our tides. There’s also a lovable whale-like creature with specific interesting features who must suffer from human stupidity. Among other things, The Way of Water is a condemnation of game hunting. I can allow that in many ways its heart is in the right place and now and then it even rises to the level of entertainment. I thought The Way of Water was mostly boring but, you know, how can 2.9 billion people be wrong?

Triangle of Sadness (2022)

Director and writer Ruben Östlund is still full of withering contempt for rich people and modern life. Can you blame him? The likelihood is he always will be. There is a general drift from Force Majeure (2014) to The Square (2017) to his latest, Triangle of Sadness, of increasing outrage and disgust. I followed the reviews of Triangle from a distance and got the impression there was something gross and/or over the top about it. And so there is. I don’t think I’ve ever seen vomiting that is so convincing, vomiting being one of those things that’s hard to produce on command for cameras, take after take. It’s even harder than crying, going by what we’ve seen. Triangle of Sadness also takes on social media culture, featuring an influencer couple, Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean, who sadly died shortly after the film’s release). Naturally they have a messed-up relationship. They work as models when they can and otherwise use their instagram-oriented status to score free stuff, as one does. For example, this cruise on a fabulous yacht with the ultra-rich—which leads us to the longer second and third parts of the picture, after a relatively brief introduction to the influencers. On the yacht, there’s a lot of Luis Buñuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in the scenes, as the rich are presented as a mixture of the refined, the barbaric, and the childish, depending on circumstances. Lots of these characters are ridiculous and hilarious. Woody Harrelson plays the captain of the ship, who mysteriously holes up in his stateroom for most of the voyage and insists on scheduling the Captain’s Dinner when they will be traveling in anticipated stormy conditions. Sure enough, giant waves are crashing and the boat is rocking and rolling for the occasion, which leads to rampant seasickness among other disasters. A subsequent attack by pirates follows, blowing up the ship and leaving a Gilligan’s Island / Survivor quotient on a rugged island. The only person among them who knows how to fish and start a fire is a housekeeper named Abigail (Dolly de Leon), who quickly takes command of the situation in a scenario that represents a kind of grown-up version of Lord of the Flies. She buys sexual favors from Carl, for example, using pretzel sticks. She doles out bites of food to people who acknowledge she is the captain. Triangle of Sadness is predictable—not in the details, which can surprise, but the direction of it is always clear. It’s also funny and entertaining. And, yes, gross. If you haven’t seen Force Majeure, start there. I like Östlund better when he focuses on toxic relationships. If you have seen it—and especially if you’ve seen The Square too—then you know what you’re in for with this.

Women Talking (2022)

Star-studded Women Talking has a kind of twist on the familiar “based on a true story” cliche of a lot of topical movies. It is based on a novel, Women Talking by Miriam Toews, which in turn is based on real events—or, as Toews puts it, is “an imagined response to real events.” Those real events took place in a conservative Bolivian Mennonite community and have been dubbed the “Bolivian Mennonite gas-facilitated rapes.” These rapes took place between 2005 and 2009 and involved a group of men who sprayed a sedative intended for animals into the windows of houses, later taking advantage of the passed-out women, girls, and children. Their confirmed victims numbered 151. The movie is pretty much as the title advertises. These women or their loved ones have been assaulted. Lately a man has been caught at it, which has finally explained all the incidents of women waking to clear physical evidence of an assault (including pregnancies) but no memory of it. Now they are meeting clandestinely—Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand, Judith Ivey, Emily Mitchell, and more—to decide what to do next. They formally vote on their three choices: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The first is eliminated and the debate circles around the latter two. It’s mostly talking, but there are many uncomfortable flashbacks. Sarah Polley directs and cowrites (I realized later I had confused her with Sarah Paulson). It’s Polley’s fourth feature and her first in 10 years. While it is easy to make conservative religious groups like Mennonites out to be rife with such problems, blaming it on sexual repression, that’s partly because these things predictably happen over and over. Does anyone still think celibacy is a good idea for Catholic priests? Has anyone noticed that Southern Baptists are presently laboring under a major such crisis? Look it up. The strength of this movie is its focus literally on women talking—talking out the issues, the violence of men, their attachments to men, the difficulty of starting a new community, the line to draw for bringing their sons. They finally settle on under age 15—me, I’d go a little lower. The picture is somewhat plodding and talky, but that’s also the intention. I have a hard time sympathizing with people who can’t quit the religion that is actively harming them—Stockholm syndrome, anyone?—but I also believe everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. Groups like those in this movie challenge me on the latter point, but I think the picture is worth seeing for its distinctly feminist and/or even feminine approach to conflict resolution.

Sanctuary (2022)

Sanctuary feels a little like a stage play, with the basic setup of two primary characters largely confined to a sumptuous hotel suite. It’s practically the only element of stability in this tricksy loop-the-loop tour de force which fully showcases Margaret Qualley as Rebecca and Christopher Abbott as Hal. You think these guys can’t perform? Come and take a look. Hal is a rich guy with issues whose father just died, leaving him the family business worth $185 million. Rebecca is a dominatrix for hire. The seesawing dynamics here are all about power and control. It’s more than a BDSM hobby for both, though they both take turns declaring it’s only that. Eventually they start talking about “the game” because it’s nearly as hard for them as it is for us to figure out when they are speaking directly and when they are speaking in various characters or simply being deceptive. The action revolves around Hal trying to cut Rebecca off now that he’s stepping into the responsibilities of his inheritance. He gives her a watch worth $32,000, goes doe-eyed, tells her how much it all meant to him. Rebecca is having none of it. She claims she can blackmail him—and we are on. I better admit I found this movie hot—Qualley is notably on her game. But it’s all in the script and by way of performance, on both their parts, within the movie and without. It’s hard to tell what’s real in the ever-shifting dialogue (again like a play)—there are a lot of movies like this—but in this case Sanctuary keeps things moving fast enough to distract from the general unbelievability. I’d say it takes about 15 or 20 minutes after the movie is over for the spell to dissolve. Perhaps the point is that during the movie we have no questions and few objections as the tensions ratchet and the back and forth goes everywhere. What unfolds is often quite startling from minute to minute and for me the movie was entirely unpredictable. I believe someone with more experience with tricksy movies might have seen this finish coming from a long way away, but I never. Sanctuary—for the kicks.

M3GAN (2022)

M3GAN has obvious primary roots in the Chucky franchise and it is equally obviously intended to be a franchise of its own, but don’t hold those things against it. You didn’t even need that last shot to foreshadow the sequel. No one was going to be surprised. We all know it’s coming. What surprised—surprised me, anyway—is how entertaining M3GAN is. It’s reasonably inventive given the narrow proportions of the malevolent-doll niche. And it’s funny in ways you never expect and I wouldn’t want to give away. The M3GAN robot doll (pronounced “Megan,” of course) bears all the hallmarks of classic doll horror (e.g., E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 “Sand-Man” tale), the latest in imaginary AI robotics technology (or maybe not so imaginary, although first it appears they want to perfect those mechanical police dogs), and the intense overattachment psychology of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (by way of Brian Aldiss and Stanley Kubrick). M3GAN is a movie-movie for this era, slick and instantly and fully engaging, funny, horrific, and scary by turns. The always competent Allison Williams is Gemma, a career woman working on toy robots when her niece Cady’s parents die in an auto accident. Cady survives and becomes the ward of Gemma, who at the moment is under heavy pressure to produce a robot for market. The sophisticated doll she has been working on—M3GAN—is not going to be ready in time, but at least it’s good enough to serve as a prototyping companion for Cady while Gemma gets her act together. And that was her first mistake, etc. You know how this goes, I promise—through the usual paces of being remarkable, then dangerous, and then remarkably dangerous. Gemma is good at this stuff but eventually she loses control and from then on it’s all M3GAN. The narrative arc is familiar (or even overly familiar) but M3GAN’s specific moves and personality are not as predictable. On the other hand, full disclosure, I have never seen a single Chucky movie and it’s possible everything here has an antecedent there. I suppose that’s something I should look into? As for now, well, M3GAN ends a lot like the first Frankenstein movie. Do we dare hope there’s a Bride of M3GAN waiting in the wings?

Master Gardener (2022)

I loved First Reformed but haven’t really kept up since with director and writer Paul Schrader, possibly due to his obnoxious online presence. I didn’t even know Master Gardener was his until I was looking up information about it before looking at it. But I might have guessed from the basic elements—the deliberate pace and stasis-oriented, off-rhythm editing style of his hero Robert Bresson coupled with one strain or another of American extremism. Here we have Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), former white supremacist hit man with a torso full of hate tattoos to prove it, now in witness protection, clean and sober, with a career as a master gardener. We catch up with him working the estate of Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), who in turn has a grand-niece, Maya Core (Quintessa Swindell), who she wants to put to work learning the trade from Roth. Maya is mixed-race and Norma is an uptight bigot, so it’s not a promising match. This is a movie that doles out information by bits as it goes. It takes a while to get Roth’s full backstory, which is brutal and unpleasant. But that’s all in the past now. He works and is good at his job, he attends NA meetings, and he loves flowers. It’s honestly a bit hard to believe and Edgerton’s studied low-key performance is not that helpful, except the way it sets up and adds to the high suspense that kicks in pretty quick. If there’s one thing Schrader knows how to do it is stoking monomaniacal tension. The best moments in Master Gardener are scenes of great economy that are purely kinetic, as when Roth is traveling on some deadly mission and we ride with him in the backseat, waiting for whatever is going to happen to happen. IMDb has the pictures as a “thriller” as well as “drama” and “crime”—and thriller is where it is best. On some levels it is trying way too hard, as with all the Nazi iconography. But trying too hard is also a long-time Schrader trait—compare Hardcore. Still, if there has ever been a time to think about deadly white supremacists who can be rehabilitated, it’s probably now. And Master Gardener is good enough as a thriller that even if you don’t care about deadly white supremacists you’re bound to get caught up in all the manifold scenes of riveting tension.

Talk to Me (2022)

Australian horror picture Talk to Me is packed full with a busy agenda: themes of grief and depression interwoven with a propulsive premise involving wild teens on the lookout for kicks. There’s a ritual to understand here a bit like the one in The Ring. Here’s how it works. Somebody got hold of an embalmed hand (so they say), which is encased in plaster or porcelain or something and all marked up with signatures and tags. They say it’s the severed hand of a medium. And it’s a left hand—yes, oh, the “sinister.” You take it in your own left hand, like shaking hands with it, and you say, “Talk to me.” Then you say, “I let you in.” What could possibly go wrong? Novices to the bit are strapped in to their seats because the visions are intense, different for everyone, and basically anything can happen. And lots of things do. In the clinch, what it reminded me of most were 13-year-olds at a summer camp I was sent to who had figured out how to “faint” one another, via hyperventilation and chest compression. It was dangerous, of course, but we whooped it up as each wanted a turn and slumped to the ground. I’ll never forget the sensation of being out for a few seconds that felt like weeks or months and a trip abroad. I’m not sure whether this Talk to Me routine is more dangerous—well of course it is. It concerns matters beyond our ken and severe things happen to these wanton experimenters. That’s why it’s horror. Times being what they are, it gets all mixed up with some stuff Mia (Sophie Wilde) is going through. Her mother Rhea (Alexandria Steffensen) recently committed suicide and her father Max (Marcus Johnson) has not been honest with her about it. As anyone might have predicted, the spirits these teens are conjuring at the other end of the hand do not mean any of them any good. Talk to Me is actually quite good on that point and there are some appalling things these spirits do—not just physically knocking some of them around, but even worse lying to and manipulating our favorite teens just when they are most vulnerable and likable. You hate to see it but you love to see it. Talk to Me is a bit muddled about its directions, but worth a look for the high-octane energy.

Lynch/Oz (2022)

Fans of filmmaker David Lynch and/or the most famous movie of all time are likely to get a kick out of this documentary project by director and writer Alexandre O. Philippe. He approached a half dozen or so other filmmakers and critics for their meditations on the connections between Lynch and The Wizard of Oz. In turn, Philippe has cut together montages of scenes from Oz and all of Lynch’s movies to accompany, highlight, emphasize, and make the ideas more concrete as they are discussed in voiceovers. The result is a series of fascinating video essay vignettes. The titles of these segments may give some sense of their flavors: Wind, Membranes, Kindred, Multitudes, Judy, Dig. The most famous of these contributors may be filmmaker John Waters (whose pencil mustache, remember, is an homage to Little Richard). Waters’s Kindred treats Lynch as a friend and peer, with warm memories. Not so famous, perhaps, is Rodney Ascher (Membranes), director and writer of the 2012 documentary Room 237, which throws a similar intense focus on the Stanley Kubrick movie The Shining. My favorite segment of Lynch/Oz was the first, Wind, “hosted” by film critic Amy Nicholson. One thing that’s not clear is who wrote these speaking parts. Because they seem uniquely personal, and more essay-like than the result of interviews, I assumed while I was watching that the person speaking wrote the words. But Philippe is the only writer given credit on IMDb, and the speakers are credited as hosts, whatever that means. Filmmakers David Lowery and, to a lesser extent, Karyn Kusama, speak of their own films specifically and the influences of both Lynch and Oz. I have often viewed Lynch through the lens of The Wizard of Oz myself, most notably Blue Velvet, which has always seemed to me very much a version of the journey down the yellow brick road. But one thing Lynch/Oz does, probably not by coincidence, is suggest how widely and deeply The Wizard of Oz has influenced so many movies, from Steven Spielberg to Kubrick and beyond, hardly just David Lynch. I happen to love people sitting around talking about movies, even more so when direct film clips are involved. I’m thinking of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema or Martin Scorsese’s Personal Journey Through American Movies. And I’m also thinking of Room 237. Lynch/Oz is probably closer to the latter—slightly insular, maybe not for everyone. But they are all along the same spectrum of film studies. If any of the constituent elements are your cup of tea, then I’d say go for it.

Showing Up (2022)

Director and cowriter Kelly Reichardt’s latest, her first feature since 2019’s First Cow, returns both to present-day Portland and to Michelle Williams, who plays Lizzy, a sculptor with a day job and a mostly unsatisfied life. Unsatisfied, but not without reason. Her hot water heater is out and her landlord Jo (Hong Chau), also an artist, is too busy and/or preoccupied with herself to take care of it. Her brother Sean (John Magaro) is mentally ill and her divorced parents—Jean (Maryann Plunkett) and Bill (Judd Hirsch)—are not inclined to recognize it, let alone do anything about it. It also seems likely they have neglected or downplayed Lizzy and her ambitions. They maybe aren’t the greatest parents. In one fraught scene, Jean tells Lizzy, obviously not for the first time, that Sean is a genius. He has just gone missing. Lizzy is fighting for equilibrium in all this as she prepares for a gallery show no one else in her life seems to care about. She has to push to get the show together in and around her day job, a significant breakdown of her brother, and a pigeon that her cat caught and harmed in the middle of the night. As in Wendy and Lucy, an innocent animal—this pigeon with a broken wing—delivers a lot of the deflected emotional weight here and certainly a payload of symbolism too, as its fate grows intricately tied to Lizzy’s. I’m not sure how well it works. It’s a little heavy-handed. But the performances in Showing Up are fine throughout, with a nice big cast of able character players. What I liked best was a sense of the artist’s life that felt true. They work out of compulsion, for the love of it, and as a responsibility to their talent. But people take them as indulgent hedonists. Then the work becomes hard and life can grow overwhelming, when all they wanted was the satisfaction of finishing a project and doing it well. Lizzy has to have good days. We just don’t see many of them. She is pushed to her limits preparing for the show. A lot of people in Showing Up are artists or free spirits and have built their lives around their own creativity, and they struggle with the fact that there is not more joy in it. Showing Up may be a little on the dreary side, but it hits a side of the creative life that most people prefer to ignore. It looks like fun, but it’s hard.

French Braid (2022)

Anne Tyler’s latest may sound like typical fare—a multigenerational story of a Baltimore family—but it flat surprised me how good it is. If her work in the past 10 years has sparked up some, I think it still has not been up to the heights of her 20th-century work for quite some time. But French Braid reasserts her novelistic powers with a large-scale story told in small, telling scenes. My favorite part is that it’s not particularly nice—not so feel-good, except it felt good to read a really good Anne Tyler novel again. For one thing, she found a way to write around her difficulties with the contemporary world and especially its technology. After an opening salvo in the present day, the novel retreats all the way back to 1959, and brings the action forward one decade at a time. The ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s were arguably her heyday and she obviously feels more comfortable in those periods—even thrives in them, with sharp insight on feminism and families. The first generation we encounter is Mercy and Robin, an interclass couple who marry in 1940. They quickly have two girls, Alice and Lily, and much later a boy, David. Each of them, in turn, marry and have their own families. It does start to get a little hazy and confusing with the third generation. In fact, with the occupations of the youngest we are veering close to Tyler’s slightly Mr. Magoo view of present times. She is actually pretty good on the initial 2020 phase of the pandemic anyway. And frankly it doesn’t matter that much, because Mercy, Robin, Alice, Lily, and David are drawn so well and come to such vivid life. Nearing 80 as she wrote, Tyler can take the long view of life with considerable credibility. It’s a chief virtue here. The family is decidedly US middle-class but unpredictable and surprising, always in believable ways. They are typical only because all their heartaches and their joys too are unique and specific to them. Tyler even finds ways to lean into her usual repressed character types, more or less her signature, by drawing back from them a little instead of focusing on their extremes of withdrawn behavior. There are still extremes. There is a story about a cat I can sense is going to haunt me for a while. Lily’s fate made me insanely happy because it felt like just one of those redemption stories that happen to people. Mercy, the family matriarch, is probably the main character in this cast. She’s prickly and difficult to be easy with. She makes some strange decisions. On the internet, she’s the reason many people don’t like French Braid. She is unlikable in many ways, but she’s also heroic, and sounds the feminist note with a good deal of cool clarity. I started this novel with low expectations and by the halfway point had an idea how good it was. One of her best.

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

Rewind & Play (2022)

Two things I can say about this eccentric, arguably found-footage documentary: 1) I don’t know what the intent of director Alain Gomis is, and 2) it comes alive every time Thelonious Monk starts playing the piano, which is not often enough. Rewind & Play is composed of footage shot for a French TV show in 1969 while Monk was touring and playing a date in Paris. I have no idea how much of what was shot that afternoon was left out of this picture. It feels like we’re seeing all of it the way it unspooled when they found it, raw and bloopy, with botched shots and technical problems, multiple takes, an interviewer who is not sure how to approach Monk, and a subject who is having a hard time even understanding some of these questions, let alone why they are being asked. Some on the internet think Gomis is out to show Monk being treated demeaningly. Maybe so, but it looked more like a language barrier than racism to me. It’s true a lot of the questions the interviewer asks are inane and/or awkward—“why did you put your piano in the kitchen?” “do you think you are too avant-garde for Paris?” so forth. This poor guy, last seen stranded at a fondue party in the early ‘70s, is smug, pious, and shallow. But that’s true of most TV celebrities and hosts of talk shows. The guy wants to pretend he’s hip to Monk. Maybe he was. Meanwhile, the picture is at least as instructive on the frustrations of shooting a documentary as it is on Monk. But when they let the piano player rip, which adds up to maybe a third? maybe a half? of the movie, it’s truly a great Thelonious Monk time. No one played the piano like him. It feels childlike but sophisticated, like he’s just picking out random notes up and down the keyboard, but backing it with compelling rhythmic chording as he chops up and purees his melodies. It makes a kind of intuitive mathematical sense and it’s a kick for the duration of his jams. I hope Gomis didn’t leave any of the playing out of this already very short movie, because if he did that’s a shame. It’s the only thing that’s really enjoyable about Rewind & Play.

The Quiet Girl (2022)

It’s not often that a movie can hit its highest sustained note right at the finish, but The Quiet Girl is one that can make the claim. It’s a coming-of-age story written and scripted by Irishman Colm Bairead about tweenager Cait (“introducing” Catherine Clinch), who is sent away for the summer while her mother has approximately Cait’s fourth sibling and the slouchy dad (Michael Patric) chews on toothpicks and tries to make ends meet without doing much. Cait has been sent to live with her mother’s people, a middle-aged couple who are second cousins to Cait, if I understand family trees. They are older, with no children, and something isn’t right about them. One thing The Quiet Girl does well, which I appreciated because I kept expecting it to veer off in that direction (too much horror and true-crime, doubtless)—one thing it does well is steer clear of explosive, unpleasant issues like sexual abuse. There is abuse here, in her family of origin and in the way many of these people live—the story plays a little like an episode from Chekhov’s “Peasants”—and there is grief and loss in the air and water and earth as well. At first Sean (Andrew Bennett) is so aloof as to be hostile toward Cait whereas Eibhlin (Carrie Crowley) is warmly open to her, taking tender care of her, bathing her, fitting clothes to her. Cait's loutish dad was in such a hurry to be off he took her suitcase with him and never brought it back. The summer passes quickly. Eventually Sean warms to the girl, who works with him on the farm. I like the quiet scenes that show Cait visibly growing emotionally under these terms of honesty and love. Which honesty, however, starts to become troubled by family secrets. There’s something this kindly couple is not telling her. That inadvertently falls to a family friend, Una (Joan Sheehy, who almost steals the show), who alone on a walk with Cait quizzes her about gossipy stuff like whether Eibhlin uses butter or margarine in her pastries, and then about much more intimate family details Cait had no idea about. The picture shifts here and ultimately makes the bonding between all three even tighter. However, the summer must end and Cait must go back to her family, where the newborn baby is squalling and everything is chaos. They must say goodbye under these conditions. The Quiet Girl is a wonderful small movie full of revelations and surprises and great characters. Recommended.

Pinocchio ’22 (2022)

The first film adaptation of the 19th-century Italian stories by Carlo Collodi is the 1940 Disney Pinocchio, but no decade since has gone by without at least one movie or TV version. Last year, in fact, there were two. With a third from 2021, a Russian picture called Pinocchio: A True Story, that means the 2020s are already holding up their end of this bargain. Pinocchio is a live-action / CGI Disney that was directed and cowritten by Robert Zemeckis, starring Tom Hanks. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is what it sounds like. I haven’t, full disclosure, seen any of the other versions but I got a look at those two anyway along with the 1940. Start with the Zemeckis. On IMDb, some 38,000 voters have ranked this remake an aggregate 5.0. That’s not good—compare GdT’sP’s 92,000 going 7.6. It’s not hard to see why. One of these movies is clearly better than the other. Tom Hanks makes a creditable enough Geppetto but he can’t carry the whole thing. It is faithful to the 1940 version to a fault, practically scene for scene. It feels notably uninspired and insipid. It has little to add to or improve on the Disney original and the changes it makes can be almost comical. Pleasure Island, the destination for wayward boys, if you recall, was populated by boys playing pool, wantonly vandalizing property, and, above all, smoking stogies—all of them, including Pinocchio, whose face turned funny colors as a result.

But in 2022, images of smoking are frowned on and now part of routine content warnings, even if smokers are shown paying the price. Disney decided to take the easy way out with movie-rating panels and just cut the smoking out completely. All things considered, it’s probably the better idea for society at large, and it shows some of the ways things have changed since 1940. Here’s another one. An interesting plot point, which is that Geppetto had a wife and son who are now dead, was not in the 1940 version. It completely makes sense as motivation for Geppetto, of course, but when I first saw it cropping up in the 2022 version I took it as unnecessary embellishment. As a plot point, however, it is really front and center in del Toro’s workup of the story, which arguably turns on it, and makes me think it must come from the original stories by Collodi (which I haven’t read). In turn, it makes me wonder why it was taken out of the 1940 version. Including the point is ultimately one of the few improvements, all relatively minor, that the 2022 Zemeckis makes on the 1940. For his part, del Toro seems to be trying to restore some of the qualities of Collodi’s original stories. His Pinocchio is refreshingly sassy and headstrong, much like reports of the Collodi stories. Del Toro, not surprisingly, certainly has the best Blue Fairy of all of them—even the Zemickis version is an improvement on the saccharine 1940 lady.

Unencumbered by Disney’s family-oriented priorities, del Toro lets the story range into much darker, more emotionally resonant and believable precincts. I’m not sure setting it in Fascist Italy was exactly the right way to go for this story, but at least it afforded a priceless cameo from Il Duce himself. And Del Toro is generally more focused on delving into Geppetto’s motivations to make a puppet and want it to be a real boy—it’s Geppetto who wants it, a simple and ingenious shift of emphasis that makes the story richer and more complex. Del Toro manages to take the story all the way into Cain and Abel stuff. Del Toro’s animation rivals the Disney original and is arguably even better, but there I think my judgment might be affected by how much better del Toro’s narrative is. The animation is very different but equally good in both. I’m not sure looking at these three Pinocchios in such close proximity is the way to do it. I’m sick of Monstro the whale and the nose-growing bits by now (del Toro goes to town on the nose thing much more than either of the others). I would recommend separating them out further than consecutive days. But the 1940 Disney and the 2022 del Toro are equally essential and I wouldn’t know which one to recommend first—probably the del Toro, if you’re an adult. The 2022 Zemeckis—sadly, because I have residual interest in his work—is eminently skippable.

Girl in the Picture (2022)

This may be the saddest and most wrenching true-crime story I have ever seen, vying with talhotblond and Dear Zachary in a competition where I don’t want to know the winner. One thing about true-crime stories is they are about things that more or less actually happened, squarely in the “you can’t make this up” category of things. Or you could make them up, but no one would believe you. This Netflix documentary delivers shocking twists and turns on the regular, launching the saga with the death of a 20-year-old woman on a lonesome highway in Arizona in 1990. The woman’s husband and kid hightail out of the region and so it all begins to unfold across years and decades. I will say I was annoyed with the style of the storytelling in the first third or so of this feature-length picture. It struck me as the “peekaboo” style of narrative, intimating it has things to tell us but not telling us, because too often it has little really to tell us. But no, this is actually an insanely complicated case and there were times I got a little lost in it, so in the end I appreciated getting the information one morsel at a time, carefully designed to clarify more than the obfuscations and delays of the peekaboo style. Girl in the Picture adds up to a story of great enormity and tremendous sadness. I don’t want to give much more than that away about it. Things are never quite what you think they are. It’s about the girl in the picture in the poster and her amazing indomitable spirit which is nonetheless trampled. It’s an elusive mystery and a terrible story of human depravity. It’s an indictment of the system and a cautionary tale about human predators—they are capable of more than you can even suspect, at least if you’re as naïve as I may be. It breaks your heart just to learn what they do. It’s not giving away too much to say it is heartening in the end but any feel-good was accompanied for me by a surprising amount of hard crying. I mean, maybe I was in the mood or something. Or maybe documentaries like this just do things to me and you.

The Scott Peterson Affair (2022)

I was intrigued to see Matt Orchard take up the Scott Peterson case on his Crime and Society youtube channel, because it was one I never got to and I was happy for the chance to see it laid out. Scott Peterson’s wife Laci, eight months pregnant, disappeared on Christmas Eve of 2002 while Scott spent the day fishing. Then news came he had been having an affair. Later Laci’s body was recovered from the San Francisco Bay. At the time the case broke, circa early 2003, I was too busy to wallow in the true-crime cable coverage (as I had with OJ Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey, and others). The coming of Nancy Grace was a turnoff, for one thing. She was and is an unpleasant presence on crime stories because her takes feel less like mama-bear instincts to protect victims (because she is one herself, etc., etc.) and more like bitter vindictiveness thirsty to punish miscreants. Partly because of that, and partly because all the evidence against Scott Peterson seemed circumstantial, and partly because I just wasn’t following it closely, something about the case seemed off to me. Aren’t there any number of spouse-on-spouse homicides in any given year? Why was this the one selected for the high profile treatment? Maybe because he seems like such a creep? OK, but it’s weak sauce. Orchard focuses on that—the visceral reaction Peterson provokes in so many (including me to some degree), which is almost uncanny—and then basically gives us the sequence of events and the theories and how they stack up. Then, with 15 or 20 minutes to go in the 70-minute video, he switches up and addresses the Scott Peterson truthers, those who believe he’s wrongly convicted based on public outrage and a rush to judgment. They have various evidence, including witness statements, to shore up their case. This had been my sense of it. But it’s all a red herring on Matt Orchard’s part as these theories quickly fall apart on close examination. A few key details of fact (via cell towers and such) make the circumstantial evidence of Peterson's guilt almost irrefutable. It’s a pretty neat trick—it might even be a spoiler for me to reveal it. But I feel like any doubt about the case is cleared away here with Orchard’s usual patient, straightforward explanations. And I think the notoriety of the case has less to do with Scott Peterson and more to do with the hungry maw of true-crime cable news coverage and Nancy Grace as its face. I still think she’s a shabby person to represent true-crime to the general public. Let’s make it Matt Orchard.