2020: THE BIG WRAP UP

 

This has been quite a year for me. In addition to everything the nation has been going through, I moved from Georgia to North Carolina during a pandemic. Among other things, this pulled me from one theatre community to another, both of them closed down for the time being. I haven’t been in a movie theatre since February, but, oddly, I’ve probably seen more movies than I would have without the quarantine. I’ve only done three blogs, and only one of them was posted since my move. And although some multiplexes near my new home are open, I can’t quite bring myself to risk it. As a result, I’ve had a very hard time keeping up with more recent releases, even though a good many of them are streaming through services to which I subscribe. That hasn’t stopped me from writing about movies. I’ve written short reviews of everything I’ve seen, no matter how inconsequential, and posted them on my Facebook page and in whatever groups I felt were appropriate. So, here’s a sampling of the best and the worst of what I’ve written about this year. The bests are a decidedly eclectic group. The worsts are all horror films, because I just can’t keep myself from trolling the depths of that genre in hopes of finding hidden gems.

 

THE TEN BEST FILMS I SAW LAST YEAR

 

1. TOTALLY F***ED UP (1993)

 

 

If John Hughes and Jean-Luc Godard had a gay kid, it would be Gregg Araki’s amazing fourth feature. This portrait of disaffected gay and lesbian youth in Los Angeles is one of the liveliest depictions of nihilism I’ve ever seen. The characters are struggling to grow up gay in the face of homophobia, bashing and AIDS. No wonder it all seems hopeless much of the time. Yet the focus is on resilience, as the lesbian couple tries to get pregnant and the young men keep reaching out for relationship. Their cynicism is really just a game, a wall against a world that seems out to get them. It helps greatly that the most cynical of the bunch is played by James Duval, who positively radiates star quality. Araki combines filmed footage — often in long, static takes reminiscent of both Godard and Yasujiro Ozu — with video shot by one of the characters, whose habit of recording everything in his life leads to one of the plot’s mini-crises. Told in 15 movements interspersed with titles and character interviews, the picture is like a series of variations on the futility of everything, even futility itself.

2. BPM (2017)

 

 

If you want to give your tear ducts a good workout, try this feature from Robin Campillo. Set in the Paris ACT UP chapter in the 1990s, the film paints a gay landscape of sex, partying and protest, all of which come together in the cathartic final montage. It raises a lot of issues about personal responsibility and the politicization of health care (sound familiar?) while following the relationship of Nathan (Arnaud Valois) and Sean (Nahuel Perez Biscayart), a couple who meet in the group and whose relationship progresses as Sean's health declines. Campillo made an effort to cast gay actors to play the gay characters, and it pays off with deeply authentic performances, particularly from Biscayart, who helps make Sean a fiercely political and painful presence. Watching all those beautiful young men fight for their lives in the streets, in board rooms and even in bed, is intensely moving. I didn't find it erotic. I just wanted to take care of them (and get them to quit smoking). Oddly, this film elicited more negative comments than almost anything I posted about on Facebook. Some people seemed to take offense that a French filmmaker chose to make a film about the Paris division of ACT UP rather than the American divisions in which their friends had taken part. I guess it a sign of how deep feelings about the AIDS crisis still run.

 

3. PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (2019)

 

 

Exquisitely shot by Claire Mathon, with painterly compositions that fit its storyline, This) is a slow, lovingly detailed account of the brief affair between a painter (Noemie Merlant) and the woman (Adele Haenel) whose wedding portrait she’s been hired to paint in late 18^th-century Brittany.  This is a film of many joys — a peasant bonfire suddenly enlivened when the women start singing, the way the two women and their housemaid create an egalitarian society as soon as mother has gone off on business, the final, long closeup of Haenel as she reacts to a performance of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” Writer-director Celine Sciamma has put in one or two too many visual iterations of the title, but that’s more than made up for by the film’s subtle comments on class and gender and the delicacy with which the attraction between the two women develops. There’s also a lovely use of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that pays off powerfully toward the end and is well worth waiting for. This is streaming on Hulu and can also be rented at various locations. If you choose Hulu, pay to see it without commercials. You don’t’ want anything interfering with the film’s powerful cumulative effect. From the few negative responses I got on Facebook, I’d also point out that this film is not for all tastes. You have to be prepared for a slower pace than we’ve become accustomed to in gay films made for the mall audience.

 

4. ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959)

 

 

One of the most seamless blends of old Hollywood and the new generation of actors to arrive in the 1950s, Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama effectively melds James Stewart (in my personal favorite of all his performances) and Eve Arden with such relative newcomers as Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick and George C. Scott, not to mention an array of great character actors (who can forget Floyd the barber explaining the legal criteria for rape?). It’s still shocking to see the prosecution try to blame Remick’s character for her own attack, but probably more shocking to realize their attitudes are still held by many today. The film was based on a real case fictionalized in John D. Voelker’s novel. It was shot (very effectively by Sam Leavitt) near the places in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where it happened. Preminger keeps the camera moving during the first half of the film, mostly following Stewart around so we’re drawn into the character visually even as the actor is creating one of his most compelling characterizations. Once the trial starts, the camera is more still as Preminger focuses on the courtroom fireworks between Stewart and Scott, presided over by the hero of the Army-McCarthy hearings, Joseph N. Welch, who gets most of the best lines. The others go to Arden, who not only gets to crack wise as only she can but also does some effective listening and even has a nice dramatic scene as Stewart’s legal team awaits the verdict. Duke Ellington composed the jazz score and appears briefly at a local tavern. Can anybody envision Lana Turner in Remick’s role? Can you do it without snickering?

 

5. THE MORE THE MERRIER (1943)

 

George Stevens’ best comedy is an extended negotiation over space — the rooms in Connie Milligan's apartment and a place in her heart. Jean Arthur stars as the buttoned-down office worker who rents out half her apartment to eccentric billionaire Charles Coburn during World War II's Washington housing shortage. Seeing how sterile her love life is, he rents his portion of the apartment to Joel McCrea, who's waiting to ship out for military service (as was Stevens at the time). You know where this is leading, don't you? The surprise is how skillfully everyone involved keeps the whole thing afloat. It's a delight from beginning to end. Arthur subtly plays her growing attraction to McCrea from the moment she meets him, so none of Coburn's manipulations feel smarmy. And McCrea is so attractive and such an adept light comedian you can't help rooting for him to win her heart. The dialogue is thoroughly pixilated, and the pace is much quicker than you'd expect from Stevens' later work (sadly, it was his last comedy; filming the liberation of Dachau left him a much more sober artist, and he gradually forgot the lessons he'd learned during his apprenticeship with Hal Roach). Grady Sutton has a sweet bit as a waiter, and if you’re really good, you’ll spot Ann Savage.

 

6. THE BEGGAR’S OPERA (1953)

 

Peter Brook’s film-directing debut was way ahead of its time in its combination of cinematic conventions with 18^th-century theatrics. He stages the classic ballad opera with a sense of artifice. He keeps finding ways to frame the image so it seems as if you were watching some scenes live on stage. Laurence Olivier plays the role of the womanizing highwayman MacHeath to the hilt. He seems to be having so much fun juggling women and buckling his swash it’s almost like watching a different actor, a matinee idol in the tradition of Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn. And his singing is surprisingly good. Only he and Stanley Holloway — as Mr. Lockit, the jailer— do their own singing. The rest are dubbed quite effectively, and Sir Arthur Bliss has arranged the music with an eye for variety. In adapting the play to film, Brook and his writers (Denis Cannan and Christopher Fry) create a framing device, starting the piece in a prison where the real MacHeath meets a beggar (Hugh Griffith) who’s written an opera about him. From there the piece opens up to some lovely Technicolor shots of the English countryside. They also expand the role of Mrs. Trapes, the gambling hall proprietor, and Athene Seyler shows why she was an authority on comic acting (she even wrote one of the best books on the subject, ON THE CRAFT OF COMEDY). The film ends with a pair of dazzling crowd scenes. In the opera, MacHeath jauntily rides the tumbril to the gallows as the crowd around him responds as if it were some kind of carnival. In the real world, he escapes, too, and the other convicts run rampant through the prison in a scene that presages Brooks’ legendary stage and film productions of MARAT/SADE (1967).

 

7. EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960)

 

Although derided on its initial release, Georges Franju’s horror art film has more recently been hailed as an exercise in cinematic poetry. Pauline Kael called it “austerely elegant” after seeing the butchered, badly dubbed version initially released in the U.S. as THE HORROR CHAMBER OF DR. FAUSTUS. Fortunately, Criterion has a restored print that occasionally airs on TCM. The tale of a doctor (Pierre Brasseur)  kidnapping young women to transplant their faces to his daughter, hideously scarred after an accident he caused, is similar to dozens of B movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s and inspired a spate of horrid imitations by the likes of Spain’s Jesus Franco (Can we ever forgive Orson Welles for hailing him as his protégé?). It’s also a deeply subversive film. Instead of the mad scientist father, the film focuses on his daughter (Edith Scob), who wanders through his villa in Givenchy gowns and a featureless white mask. She’s the only one who can quiet the pack of wild dogs on which her father experiments, and that and her scarred face fit the archetype of the monstrous-feminine. Yet she’s ultimately the force for good in the film. In contrast, her well-dressed, socially acceptable father and his chic assistant (Alida Valli, who can make dumping a body in a river look glamorous) commit atrocities in an immaculately decorated salon. As in many of the great horror films, EYES WITHOUT A FACE renders the concept of monstrosity queer (you knew I had to get that word in somewhere), by questioning our most basic assumptions about the horrible.

 

8. BAY OF ANGELS (1963)

 

Jacques Demy’s second feature is almost a lightweight retread of themes from his first, LOLA (1961, q.v.). Once again, a feckless young man (Claude Mann) finds his life altered by a chance encounter with a mercurial woman (Jeanne Moreau). The film’s plotting seems to demonstrate how the idolization of the female is a form of misogyny. Moreau’s character could easily be seen as a mere device for changing the man’s character. What raises the film above its sketchy plot is Moreau’s performance as Jackie, a compulsive gambler who’s sacrificed everything — husband, child, jewelry — to her addiction. Jackie is a multi-faceted character so adept at posing she’s not always sure who she is, and somehow Moreau manages to dig through the layers of artifice to turn her into a compelling human being. And when she’s on a high, she’s almost painfully glamorous. During the gambling scenes, Demy’s cutting and Michel Legrand’s Mozartian score capture the thrill of staking your life on chance. It’s little wonder Mann gets swept up in Moreau’s folly. Were she a drug, she’d be the most addictive on the planet.

 

9. LOLA (1961)

 

Jacques Demy’s first feature is gently haunted by the past. The film is set in Demy’s childhood home, Nantes, and Raoul Coutard’s camera virtually makes love to the coastal city. The central characters, cabaret singer Lola (Anouk Aimee) and unemployed Roland (Marc Michel), are still stuck on their first loves, hers for the mysterious Michel who deserted her while she was pregnant, his for Lola, whom he knew as a child named Cecile. Even in the present, events echo the past. Lola tells of a blissful 14^th birthday spent at a fair with a sailor she met by chance, and then another Cecile visits the fair with a sailor on her 14^th birthday. Demy’s approach to all this is a kind of measured joy. He takes delight in the encounters that almost happen as characters just miss running into each other. Yet there’s also a sense of the pain in those missed connections and the way Roland yearns for Lola just as the older women he meets yearn for him. Although her character’s name and occupation are references to Marlene Dietrich’s Lola in THE BLUE ANGEL (1930), Aimee’s breathless, mercurial performance seems more an echo of another legendary blonde, Marilyn Monroe, at the same time as it points to Diane Keaton’s fast-talking quirkiness in ANNIE HALL (1975). All that referentiality seems natural for a Demy film. In a sense, LOLA is not a single film, but rather the birth of a cinematic universe. Aimee will return as Lola in his MODEL SHOP (1969), while Michel’s Roland will become the successful businessman who marries the pregnant Catherine Deneuve in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964). In that film, he even sings of his lost love, Lola, with a melody that first appears in Michel Legrand’s score for this film.

 

10. NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950)

 

Jules Dassin’s last Hollywood assignment before he was blacklisted is one of the great film noirs, a cynical view of the underbelly of post-war London. Richard Widmark never stops running as Harry Fabian, a nightclub tout so crooked his cons have cons. When he’s not dodging creditors, he’s feverishly trying to raise the money to set himself up to challenge the city’s wrestling kingpin (Herbert Lom). The only decent people he encounters are his abused girlfriend (Gene Tierney) , a flower seller (Ada Reeve) and a smuggler (Maureen Delaney). The rest are an assortment of crooks and cheats, all of whom seem to have it in for him. Most notable are Francis L. Sullivan and Googie Withers as clip joint owners trapped in the marriage from hell. Jo Eisinger’s script has the characters turning on an emotional dime, and the photography by Max Greene frames them against the night sky and cluttered, dirty rooms. Dassin stages a great impromptu wrestling bout between one-time world champ Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki. Unjustly derided by critics in 1950, the film found its audience more recently with the rise of interest in film noir.

 

THE TWO BEST 2020 FILMS I SAW LAST YEAR 

(lots more to come, I hope)

 

MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM (2020)

 

 

The wonder of the latest August Wilson adaptation is that almost everything done to open the play up cinematically adds to the meanings of the original. The film starts with a musical montage showing Ma Rainey in performance, first in a rural tent show and then in a Chicago theatre. It’s an electric sequence that makes it clear how completely Viola Davis has immersed herself in the role while also setting up her conflict with Levee (Chadwick Boseman). Although the play is shortened to just over 90 minutes, all the main points are there, and director George C. Wolfe keeps the camera moving during the longer, beautifully written discussions of African-American identity. He’s also assembled a sterling ensemble, including Colman Domingo, Glynn Turman, Michael Potts, Dusan Brown and Taylor Paige. Turman is so relaxed as Toledo he hardly seems to be acting. And Davis and Boseman, in his last film, capture the different kinds of totally justified anger driving their characters. The film is a fitting successor to Denzel Washington’s FENCES (2016) and has me very excited for the other film versions of The Pittsburgh Cycle.

 

LA LLORONA (2020)

 

 

The images in Jayro Bustamente’s hypnotic thriller are austere. With the exception of a few cases in which feverish action— the verdict in a controversial trial, a nightmare of racist oppression, a right-wing family’s attempt to get through a crowd of protestors — triggers frantic, jittery camera work,  Bustamente and cinematographer Nicolas Wong use long takes with almost imperceptible moves in or out. Were this a conventional horror film, which its status as a “Shudder Original” suggests, it wouldn’t work. But this is really a political thriller with elements of magical realism. Guatemalan General Monteverde (Julio Diaz) has just been convicted of genocide of the country’s Mayan population, only to have the conviction annulled by a corrupt government. He and his family are prisoners in their own home as it’s surrounded by protestors whose chants and music provide most of the score. Almost all the servants have already quit because of the General’s erratic behavior. When the mysterious Alma (Maria Mercedes Coroy) arrives in response to a call for help from the housekeeper (who’s also the General’s illegitimate daughter). the stresses tearing the family apart get stronger and stranger.  Diaz hears the sound of a crying woman and fantasizes the house filled with water. His wife, Carmen (a terrific Margarita Kenefic), has nightmares in which she’s a Mayan woman tormented by the military. The political ramifications are overwhelming. In courtroom testimony, a woman delivers a speech emotionally in Kaqchikel while her translator dispassionately repeats her tale of rape and murder. Carmen blindly repeats her husband’s justifications that the men killed were Communist terrorists and the rape survivors all prostitutes. Later, when her husband is accused of sexually harassing Alma, she acknowledges his lifelong womanizing but blames it on the women for exciting him and orders Alma to wear looser clothing. It’s a kind of poetic justice that she’s the one who experiences the genocide firsthand in her nightmares. This is Bustamente’s third feature, and he’s quite a find.

 

FIVE OF THE WORST FILMS I SAW LAST YEAR (BECAUSE POSTING TEN WAS JUST TOO DEPRESSING)

 

5. DEVIL’S PATH (2018)

 

There are some wonderful independent gay films available for streaming. This, alas, is not one of them. Two men meet in a gay cruising section in the forest. After misreading lines to each other, they decide they want different things. Then they have to work together to elude two gay bashers — if that’s what’s happening. The dialogue as they’re on the run is ludicrous psychodrama, as if the writers were in love with Albee and O’Neill but had no idea why. At one point, the more promiscuous of the two dismisses love as a chemical reaction, which made me wonder how the film would work as a Cole Porter musical. If the singing and dancing were on the same level as the acting, presenting such a film in public could be considered a capital offense.

 

4. MAUSOLEUM (1983)

 

We open with a rather unappealing child actress grieving in a cemetery after her mother’s funeral, though her acting is so bad you only know she’s grieving from the dialogue. She runs from the grave into a nearby mausoleum, where her eyes start to glow green, which provides her most expressive moment. She grows up to become professional scream queen Bobbie Bresee, who has two problems. She’s married to Marjoe Gortner, and she’s lusted after by some of Southern California’s less talented actors. Oh, she’s also possessed by a dyslexic demon named Nomed. The good news is he forces her to kill some of the bad actors. Even better, when he’s in full control her role is taken over by a stunt double and we’re spared her non-acting (another horror film where the leading lady is so bad you can’t tell when she’s in a trance and when she isn’t). There’s also a cameo by LaWanda Page as the housekeeper who saves her life by running off when shit gets weird with a cry of “No more grievin’; I’m leavin’!” I’m assuming there’s a semicolon because she’s in too much of a hurry for a period. With lyrics like “We’ve reached the end. Let’s hope we never look again,” the song over the closing credits seems like a review of the picture.

 

3. CAMERA PHONE (2012)

 

 

TANGERINE (2015) showed that you can shoot a really good film on a cell phone if you have the talent. Unfortunately, the people who made this waste of bandwidth didn’t. It’s not entirely shot on cell phone. Some of it purports to be police surveillance footage. Anyway, eight tiresome social influencers are invited to a party to further their careers. Then they start dying. You never see what’s doing it, but by the time they start kicking it, they’re so stupid that, like Kristianists attending mega-church services during quarantine, you figure it’s just Darwin at work. One fault with a lot of found-footage films is that the characters go on filming long after anyone else would have dropped the camera and run. In this film, after the power goes out, they wander around in the dark while pointing the light from their phones at themselves, the better to blind themselves with, my dear. There’s a sequel, but frankly, I’d rather set my hair on fire.

 

2. HOTEL OF THE DAMNED (2016)

 

When did telling a story in chronological order become uncool? I’ve been watching the new adaptation of THE STAND, and for some reasons they’ve jumbled the timeline, leading to flashbacks within flashback for no discernible reason beyond confusion. HOTEL OF THE DAMNED, which I’d hoped would be a horror film about Trump Tower, does much the same with even less purpose. The film opens by cutting between a woman racing from something in the forest and a car driving down the road. It’s so dark you can hardly see the people in the car, and the woman’s face is never seen. She dashes in front of the car, which swerves over an embankment and crashes as an ugly bald man kills the fleeing woman. Cut to an animated werewolf, which isn’t part of the plot; it’s the film company’s logo. Was this all a pre-credits sequence? Was it part of the logo? And who opens a film like this anyway? After the credits, we see a man (one of the less attractive Mandylors) getting out of a Romanian prison and meeting an old friend? Were these the people in the car? You don’t find out until they actually get in the car 20 minutes later and repeat the badly shot scenes we’ve already suffered through at the start. The ex-con kidnaps his daughter after beating up her new boyfriend. Why? We only find out later, in another flashback, that the boyfriend’s a junkie planning to take her to Italy so he can pimp her out to pay for his habit. Anyway, after the accident, they seek shelter in what looks like an abandoned hotel only to discover it’s the headquarters for a group of cannibals who are now chowing down on the woman from the opening. Remember her? At one point, after they’ve discovered the cannibal’s nest, they hear music, so of course they try to find the source without getting caught by the cannibals. They find a radio in a room with a window looking out on the hotel’s utility room. The door has no lock. There’s a trap door in the floor. And there’s clearly another doorway covered by just a curtain. So, daddy says, “Let’s hide here. It’s safe.” The picture is filled with howlers like that. You also get junkie-pimp-i-cide and lots of men running around shirtless who should not be allowed in public wearing less than three layers. At least I got some knitting done.

 

1. THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE (2019)

 

How could anything be worse than the previous nine films? Just wait. Picking up on an interview in which Sharon Tate spoke of a nightmare with similarities to her murder a year later, writer-director Daniel Farrands (writer of HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS, the worst of the HALLOWEEN movies, and that’s pretty damned bad) gives Tate multiple premonitions of her death in an effort to raise the horror stakes. Hillary Duff turns Tate into a whining bore, and why include photos of the real Tate that only point up how little the two actresses resemble each other. Jonathan Bennett plays Jay Sebring, and as an actor he makes a good Food Network host. It’s all bad in so many wrong ways — including an “it was all a dream” ending that mirrors the much better ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD (2019) —you can’t even laugh at it.

 

Remember, I watch these things so you don’t have to.

DRILL THE PIANO PLAYER

 

Film by Abel Ferrara; Color out of Dario Argento

 

I was at a loss last night for how to write about Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (1979), a challenging film not for everybody, but I hammered out something vaguely adequate and went to bed. Then I re-read Pauline Kael’s review of Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960). She argues that what other critics disliked about the film, the fact that it combined different genres that don’t gel, was exactly what she loved, because it reflects the real world at that time.

That postmodern approach to genre is exactly what The Driller Killer has. It’s a mix of video nasty horror film and black comedy in which an artist (Ferrara) is driven to psychosis by the pressures of urban life and eventually starts running around killing street people with a power drill. Ferrara lives in a broken-down apartment near Union Square (shot in Ferrara’s own apartment) with his girlfriend, Carol, and her lover, Pamela. He’s already under pressure to finish his magnum opus so they can pay the bills. And he lives in a city where he’s confronted with filth and violence every day. Then a punk band takes the place below them and drives him to distraction with round-the-clock practicing.

For all the horror, there’s an energy to the city scenes that’s oddly seductive. The homeless people Ferrara interacts with may be destitute, but they’re connected to each other and at times are endearingly funny. And it’s interesting that Ferrara chooses to score some of those city shots to an electronic version of Bach’s “B-flat Invention,” which creates a light-hearted, almost affectionate mood. This was his first feature, and it already displays the love-hate relationship with his home base that would come to full fruition in later films like Ms. 45 (1981) and Bad Lieutenant (1992).

The picture’s use of color almost makes it seem like the best film Dario Argento didn’t make. The opening scene is in a church where the crucifix is lit in bright red while the two alcoves flanking it are a sickly yellow with a touch of green. Ferrara’s fantasies of killing have him bathed in a similar red light. And there are neon signs all over the city. It’s a fascinating contrast to all the grit surrounding his character.

The plot seems based in psycho-drama. Early on, Ferrara rejects a homeless man who’s claimed to be his father, because he’s afraid he could end up similarly destitute. His choice of the homeless for victims isn’t just a crime of opportunity; it’s a form of self-loathing. That would be enough to make this an intriguing horror film.

But Ferrara doesn’t take the psychological undertones with plodding seriousness. The film is also wickedly funny in places. The punk band is not very good. Their main number opens with a  bass line identical to the opening riff of Henry Mancini’s PETER GUNN theme. And it’s led by a posturing egomaniac (D.A. Metrov), which befits their name, Tony Chicago and the Roosters Some of the scenes have an improvisatory feel and an edgy comic rhythm. Carol reads about the latest atrocities reported in the tabloids while Ferrara is falling apart. Pamela seems high on something most of the time and her lines ramble all over the place, yet often come back with a zinger. A homeless man terrorizes people waiting at a bus shelter before they leave, and Ferrara takes him out in a scene that’s borderline slapstick. There’s also one hilarious shot of Ferrara holding the power drill between his legs, the latest in toxic masculinity. 

 

 

Harry Schultz as Dalton, Abel Ferrara’s version of a gay art dealer (note the pink shirt) in THE DRILLER KILLER.

 

Eventually, however, the picture peters out. There’s no real pay-off to the victimology, and as the film loses focus, the killings stop being sickly funny and just become sick. When Ferrara comes on to his gay art dealer, Dalton, in order to kill him, the scene doesn’t have any zip. The dealer had been introduced in his office, where he’s on the phone setting up a date while dealing with business interruptions. The lines to the date are a nice bit of inversion. Dalton his date jewelry to get some action, only he’s talking to someone named “Antonio” when everything else sounds like he’s softening up a woman. But does the assistant who’s calling him have to be named “Bruce,” the quintessential name used to mock gay men?  Later Pamela suggests Ferrara have sex with Dalton to get more money out of him. When Ferrara responds with disgust, she explains that if he uses KY it won’t hurt, as if that were all it took to get a straight man to come across. Maybe she should have suggested he chug a six pack.

After Ferrara invites the dealer over with hints that they’re going to get it on, there are closeup shots of the artist putting on lipstick and eye makeup to get ready, but the finished product is a let-down. It’s neither a send-up of his straight notions of how to seduce a gay man, nor is it a full-on commitment to making himself more desirable. He just jumps out and drills him to death, which may be another attempt at a joke, but it’s sloppy pay-off to the scene’s setup.

From that point, the film pretty much falls apart. Ferrara stops killing the homeless, but the new victims don’t have any real resonance. When Pamela discovers the dealer’s body, Ferrara grabs her and threatens her with the drill. But then the film cuts to another location with no sense of what happens to her. Ferrara tracks Carol down to her ex-husband’s home (nothing like a little financial destitution to turn a girl straight?), but again there’s no clear sense of what happens. When she turns out the lights and climbs into bed with Ferrara thinking it’s her husband, who’s actually lying dead on the kitchen floor, it feels like the start of another darkly comic routine. But before the joke pays off, we just cut to the closing credits.

By that point, the film has moved from urban nightmare to being just another slasher film. The jokes have no point or pay-off, and the point of view seems to have been lost somewhere.  Maybe that’s a reflection of the production process. Ferrara shot the film on weekends over the course of two years, so the ending may have just been cobbled together to get something he could sell before moving on to his next project. But we can only go by what’s on screen, and audiences don’t usually give filmmakers an “E” for effort. More’s the pity, since the first part of the film is well worth seeing. My advice: turn it off when Ferrara calls Dalton and make up your own ending. That almost fits with the improvisatory feel of the film’s best scenes.

PARASITE: Who Can Afford a Future?

Park So-dam and Choi Woo-Shik try to find a signal in the midst of poverty in PARASITE.

 As the epigraph to the published edition of her deeply moving play about reproductive rights and Irish immigration, What a Young Wife Ought to Know, Hannah Moscovitch quotes political activist Linda Tirado:

Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain….Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don’t plan long term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.

In the play, it relates to the plight of Sophie and her husband, who desperately need to control the number of children they have in a society (1920s Ottawa, though it could be anywhere in the early 20^th century) that keeps all information about birth control away from the lower classes for fear of cutting into the pool of servants and unskilled labor.

I read the quote and the play while flying to New York, and it also applied to the first play I saw there, Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance, inspired by E.M. Forster’s Howards End. Henry, a well-off businessman, counsels his boyfriend and future husband, Eric (the equivalent of the novel’s Margaret Schlegel), about the need to plan for the future. The concept is alien to Eric. He’s a social justice worker living hand-to-mouth. Without solid financial prospects, Eric has no way of planning a future.

A month later, the quote came back to me again while watching Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, my choice for the best picture of 2019. At one point the father (Song Kang-ho) of a family living a tenuous life in the slums says he has the perfect plan to solve their problems. That’s no plan at all, “Because life cannot be planned.” Shortly after that, his wealthy employer (Lee Sun-kyun) tells him about his own future plans. Like Eric in The Inheritance, Song looks at the scion of privilege as if he were speaking another language, because to people like Song and his on-screen family words like “plan” and “future” seem to come from a vocabulary they never learned.

Yet planning is so much a part of modern culture it’s almost a conditioned response, no matter what the class. Song’s family lives in crippling poverty in Seoul after a series of failed business ventures. Their son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), has aced all the exams to go to university but can’t afford the tuition. They leach wifi signals from nearby businesses and fold pizza boxes to make any kind of money. Then Choi’s university friend asks him to take over a tutoring job while he’s out of the country. The student and her parents are loaded. Within a few days, Choi has gotten his sister hired as the younger brother’s art teacher/therapist. Then they push out the family chauffeur so Song can get his job and the housekeeper so their mother can take her place, all without letting on that they’re related to each other.

The scenes in which Choi and his family move in on their employers are a kick, and for its first third, the film recalls the best of screwball comedy. In films like My Man Godfrey (1936) and Easy Living (1937), have-nots move into the world of the rich and save the haves, who are emotionally crippled by their privileged lives. The difference here is that Song’s family isn’t trying to make life better for their employers. The long-term goal is to get everything from them they can, with Choi even planning to court his student when she’s old enough. Their opportunism feels liberating, particularly with the working poor now facing quarantine and unemployment. And the family they move in on is so foolish they almost cry out to be duped. Lee is narrow-minded and somewhat vacant about what goes on in his home. His wife (Cho Yeo-jeong) comes across as something of a ditz. She’s like a younger, prettier Alice Brady, and the scenes in which she falls for the family’s manipulation are delicious comic gems.

Of course, that’s just the first third of the film. As things progress, Choi’s family makes a few mistakes. Song keeps threatening to overstep his place as chauffeur, and we gradually come to see just how jealously Lee guards the social distinctions that tell him he’s better than his servants. Jo’s daffiness has a harsher side, too. She may be clueless enough to fall for the family’s manipulations, but she’s also clueless about basic human decency. When the wealthy family returns unexpectedly from a camping trip, she thinks nothing of calling the housekeeper to demand a hot cooked meal be ready for them when they get home in eight minutes. Later, she and her husband just expect the housekeeper and chauffeur to throw together a birthday party, with no real physical help. After all, they’re paying them extra.

That’s just part of the tonal shift that takes place during the film. As it turns out, the ousted housekeeper has more roots in the house than they’d expected, which takes the film in a more violent direction. Screwball comedy becomes absurdist thriller, and once again, the plans of the poor fall apart. Bong pulls off the transition almost seamlessly. The comic and the serious, after all, are only a question of point of view. As the stakes rise for Song and his family, the film’s absurdities grow increasingly dark. In one virtuoso bit of filmmaking father and children sneak out of their employers’ house in the middle of a rainstorm. To get back to their basement apartment, they have to descend a steep flight of stairs (staircases figure heavily in the film as markers of social distinction). As they go down the steps, things get colder and wetter until they discover their entire neighborhood is flooded. It’s a horrifying moment of abjection that underlines just how few resources they have without the jobs they’ve cheated their way into.

Bong also loads minor details with meaning. The younger child has been traumatized by seeing a ghost in the kitchen late one night. That’s why his mother thinks he needs art therapy. As it turns out, the ghost was the housekeeper’s husband, who’s been hiding out in the house’s sub-basement since the wealthier family moved in, because he’s on the run from loan sharks. Like Choi’s family, he’s one of the dispossessed who literally haunt the world of privilege.

At the birthday party, Lee and Song hide out wearing dime-store Native-American headdresses as part of an elaborate scheme to make Lee’s son feel better. They’re going to attack his sister as she brings in the birthday cake, so the child can play cowboy and rescue her. The levels of cultural appropriation here are dizzying. The westernized, wealthy South Koreans are imitating a culture the West has spent centuries trying to erase and doing so using standard Western tropes that render the colonized peoples’ reality invisible. They’re stereotyped right out of existence, much as Song’s family are often invisible to their colonizing employers. And yet even the wealthy family is, in a sense, colonized by globalization. Their dreams of opulence are empty as they move through their sterile mansion (a great piece of art direction) with no sense of what’s going on around them. They don’t even know where all the rooms in the house are.

After his attempts to take over the wealthy family are destroyed, Choi can’t stop planning. At the end, he fantasizes about going to university and eventually becoming wealthy enough to move his parents into the house where they once worked. We see his dreams, which makes them real for us, before we’re pulled back to the reality of his life and the crushing poverty from which his family has managed all too briefly to escape. Is this the best Western society has brought us? Empty dreams of affluence without humanity? Bong depicts a post-human world, where the poor have no time for anything but survival, and the rich have no sense of reality. No wonder the picture has struck such chord with U.S. audiences.

Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman

The Witcher

Freya Allan and Anya Chalotra provide most of the magic in The Witcher.

The female stars of Netflix’s adaptation of The Witcher are so much more interesting than the male lead, the series should really be called The Sorceress, the Princess and That Guy with the Cheekbones. While monster hunter Henry Cavill broods his way through the show’s impressive European locations, Anya Chalotra and Freya Allan are acting up a storm around him. They’re not the only ones strong women on hand. The recurring cast includes powerhouse performances from MyAnna Buring as Chalotra’s magical mentor, Mimi Ndiweni as an enemy sorceress, Emma Appleton as a female bandit and the wonderful Jodhi May as Allan’s grandmother. With her great, dark eyes, May seems way too young to be anybody’s grandmother (she’s only in her 40s). She’s also like the second coming of Kay Francis, one of the most unjustly neglected stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Cavill’s lack of primacy in a series named for his character can’t be blamed entirely on him. He’s saddled with some of the most turgid dialogue since the original Dynasty and a character who, though he’s destined to connect with Allan at some point, seems determined to avoid all human relationships. The script even has him spend most of the final climactic battle stuck in a flashback. For the most part his character is all about fighting. He has some limited magical powers, being a half witch (hence, “witcher”), but none of it is really defined, and he doesn’t rely on his magic all that much.

By contrast, Chalotra’s Yennifer is all magic, and the actress brings impressive levels of anger and wit to the performance. She’s a fascinating if somewhat maddening character, a half-elf (if this is starting to sound like an RPG, it’s no surprise: Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels have inspired two) born with physical disabilities. After a childhood of torment in the series’ pseudo-medieval world, whose inhabitants are anything but woke, she’s threatened with rape and magically teleports to another location. That leads to her being recruited for the local sorcery school, where she learns she has a powerful, dangerous and sometimes unpredictable connection with chaos magic. The physical transformation that makes her a full-fledged sorceress means she can no longer bear children. That eventually leads her to rebel against the society of sorcerers and go freelance while trying to cure her sterility because this whole thing is based on a series of novels by a man. I know I’m somewhat prejudiced by my status as a SINK (single income no kids), but every time a fictional character complains about not being complete because he/she can’t produce offspring, I wonder if they’ve ever heard of adoption. Surely in the near anarchy of The Witchers’ feudal society that doesn’t entail all the hoops people have to jump through here, or does their world have its own pseudo-Christian president out to deprive sorcerers of adoption rights?

Allan’s character is loaded with some mysterious power, too, apparently inherited from her mother (so at least for some women in this world power doesn’t necessarily entail sacrifice). When her kingdom is overrun with invaders, and May tells her she has to leave, she shouts, “No” and shatters a glass. Later she’s attacked by some peasant refugees she thought were her friends. After blacking out, she revives to the sight of their mangled bodies hanging from tree branches. That’s a rather satisfying moment in the current socio-political climate, and you can’t help wondering what she’d do to a Harvey Weinstein or Donald Trump. The actress does a good job at playing wide-eyed innocence convincingly, which is an accomplishment for any professional actor who’s survived the business long enough to land the lead in an international production like this.

While these two very gifted actors are exercising power, Cavill wanders the countryside taking out the occasional monster but never really getting anywhere. I’ve enjoyed his work in other pieces. He’s perfectly competent as a young partygoer done in by Cenobites in the direct-to-video Hellraiser:Hellworld (2005), which could be subtitled “Superman Gets a Blow Job From a Demon.” In the two films I’ve seen in which he plays Superman (I missed the first), he does fine in the one-on-one scenes. If the action scenes don’t work, it’s not his fault. They’re a hot mess even in Batman vs. Superman (2016), which didn’t have to be cobbled together from the work of two directors. In The Witcher he does his best work when he can just look someone in the eye and tell them the truth. Unfortunately, the series keeps saddling him with lines where he has to look off into the distance (or maybe at a vision of this world’s version of Jesus) and deliver something deep and sodden with meaning, and he looks lost. There’s also a problem with his physicality. Where other actors like the three Chrises (Evans, Hemsworth and Pratt) bulked up for superhero roles while maintaining a sense of ease and even grace in their physical work, Cavill just lumbers. At times it’s as if his muscles were wearing him.

Although the men clearly take a backseat to the women in The Witcher, they’re not totally lost. The sorcerers at least register. The strongest male supporting role is Jaskier (Joey Batey), a troubadour who attaches himself to Cavill for four adventures. Batey has all of the lighter moments in Cavill’s storylines, and they’re really needed. He has two main drives, sex and his art, and it’s a kick watching him come up with songs about their adventures. When he performs them, he uses some modern rock-star moves that are very funny.

There’s also something a little queer about the character. Although he speaks a great deal of his success with the ladies, when Batey and Cavill have a run-in with elves, he wishes their male leader were just a little more attractive. Were the writers with it, they might have followed up on that. Giving him a crush on Cavill would help explain some of the character’s choices a little better. As it is, when he finally exits the series, ostensibly because Cavill has hit him with one too many insults, you can’t help wondering if the actor simply wasn’t available for any other episodes, the motivation is that weak.

There are some satisfying moments in the series, particularly when the sorcerers get to fighting, but at other places it just doesn’t feel thought out. There are fights shot in such murky darkness it’s hard to tell what’s going on. One episode introduces a shape-shifter who takes on a mage’s appearance in an attempt to lure Allan into the enemy camp (the sorcerer, Mousesack, is her family’s house mage). That plays well, with a satisfying if predictable pay-off. But then he takes on the appearance of the enemy commander who hired him (Eamon Farren), and their fight scene is almost impossible to follow.

The series’ structure is a bit of a challenge, too. The story jumps around in time with little explanation. Complicating that is the fact that several of the episodes follow three different plot strands — one each for Cavill, Chalotra and Allan — that are all taking place in different decades. Picking up the context cues is challenging, and they don’t really become clear until halfway through the first season. This would seem to mirror the way in which the Witcher books were written. The first series is drawn mostly from the two volumes of short stories that precede Sapkowski’s five novels, which suggests season two will pick up with the first novel, making it somewhat easier to follow (unless they keep staging fight scenes in the dark). Why the series’ creators didn’t just follow a chronological approach is an issue. Perhaps they wanted to introduce Allan’s character earlier than she would have fallen in a more straightforward narrative. That doesn’t seem a good enough reason to justify all the confusion, however. In the first episode, she’s told to find Cavill, but you don’t learn why until the end of the fourth. By then, her failure to find him seems a rather clumsy delaying tactic.

I’ll probably give the second series a chance, assuming we’re all still alive when it drops in 2021. Chalotra’s Yennifer alone is a sufficiently compelling character to justify further watching. And there’s always the chance series creator Lauren Schmidt Hissrich will listen to the gay fans. Jaskier doesn’t turn up in the novels, but there are some queer characters in the games that could provide reason for more than hate watching. Lord knows, the series needs it.

Gloria Bell

Julianne Moore and John Turturro have beautifully rounded characters in Gloria Bell.

Julianne Moore’s acting is so effortless it’s easy to take her body of work for granted. That may be why she’s only got one Oscar. Her performances are never obvious enough to catch the eyes of the people voting for awards. It took a showy role as a woman succumbing to dementia in Still Alice (2014) to finally bring home Oscar gold, and even that was a bit of a surprise. Still Alice is hardly a disease-of-the-week movie but rather a very subtle exploration of the dynamics of a marriage. She isn’t the whole show, either, as she gets wonderful support from Alec Baldwin as her husband and Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish and Kristen Stewart (yes, that Kristen Stewart) as her children. I’m just so used to seeing her work wonders with any script she’s given my first response on seeing her in last year’s Gloria Bell was, “She’s incandescent…as usual.”

Adapted from the Chilean Gloria (2013), the film follows a divorcee (Moore) dealing with a delayed case of empty nest syndrome. She’s been single for about a decade, and her children (Caren Pistorius and Michael Cera) are grown. All she has is a job as an insurance claims representative, and she knows that won’t last forever. In one touching scene, she bids goodbye to a retiring co-worker (Barbara Sukowa) with promises to reconnect that neither knows they’ll keep. Her only outlet is the dance clubs of Los Angeles, where she goes to release her energy and look for some connection. That’s where she meets Arnold (John Turturro), a recent divorcé looking for his own form of connection.

Under the direction of Sebastian Lelio, who also directed the original Gloria, the film gently explores the title character’s plight as a single woman. She’s got a lot to give. You can hear it in the way she speaks to clients over the phone. And you realize her children are drifting further from her, and her other major relationship, with her mother (Holland Taylor), is cordial but a little distant. Her future before she meets Arnold seems to revolve around a stray cat that keeps getting into her apartment.

Moore plays all this simply and truthfully. She never asks the audience to love her. She just presents Gloria with all her little quirks — the way she sneaks cigarettes when her disapproving children aren’t around, the uncertain way she offers to help her son with the infant child his wandering wife neglects, the distant look in her eyes as she dances. She’s a fully formed human being, and it’s hard not to get caught up in her story.

At times she seems almost the only fully realized character in the film. The rest of the cast is perfectly solid, but Alice Johnson Boher’s adaptation of the original screenplay by Lelio and Gonzolo Maza doesn’t give them a lot to do. That’s a problem when you have actors as good as Taylor and Sukowa. They don’t do anything to draw attention to themselves, but the mere knowledge of what they could do given half a chance becomes a little distracting. You keep wondering what’s going on when they’re not on screen. At a family birthday, we meet Gloria’s ex-husband (Brad Garrett). There are a few nice moments as they share memories. Then he breaks down with guilt over having failed to be there as a father, but the connections are missing. It’s not Garrett’s fault. The script doesn’t give him a way to get from nostalgia to regret.

The only other fully realized character in the film is Turturro’s Arnold. The actor has played so many demented roles, you almost expect his courtship of Moore to turn the film into a thriller, but he quickly dispels that. Turturro has a lighter side that’s rarely exploited. You have to see him in Allison Anders’ Grace of My Heart (1996) to realize he can be charmingly silly without losing any of the realism he brings to a role. The Anders films is ultimately a misfire. The veiled attempt to make a biography of Carole King sinks under too many soap opera twists and some new songs that aren’t good enough for a character inspired by King. But if you’ve seen it, you’ll remember the goofy grin on his face as he dances to cheer up the leading lady. You almost wish he were the one pursuing a recording career instead of her.

It’s easy to see how quickly Gloria is charmed by Arnold. Turturro really connects to Moore in their early scenes together, and the two actors create a powerful rapport. His role is so lived in that it’s hardly a surprise when problems crop up. He’s such a rounded individual, you’re not surprised to see he has a negative side. Arnold has baggage from his previous marriage, and you can tell the first time a call from one of his daughter’s interrupts a date that this isn’t going to be a rom com.

Moore and Turturro are so good, you keep wishing the other actors had the same opportunities to shine. It would be nice, in particular, to get some sense of what being women alone means to Sukowa and Taylor’s characters. That’s not to say that Moore can’t carry the film on her own. She’s so at ease in the role that moments where she’s overcome with emotion to the point you can’t tell whether she’s laughing or crying are like little gifts from the gods. It’s just that, given the wealth of talent at the film’s disposal, she shouldn’t have to.