Drawn from the experience of writer/director Karen Maine’s own youth, the sweet coming of age comedy Yes, God, Yes, aims pointed jabs at religious hypocrisy. Bobbing in a sea of peer pressure, Catholic high schooler Alice (Natalia Dyer) heads off with the popular kids to a four-day retreat.
The retreat center is buried in the woods, and the retreat itself has some cultish aspects, with overly smiley/huggy teen youth leaders squeezing out highly personal confessions Authority-with-a-capital-A is present in the form of the high school’s stern young priest. The entire program is designed to make kids feel guilty about their normal, healthy feelings and to scare them from doing what everyone does naturally.
Amusing throughout, this is not a broad comedy, and there aren’t many guffaws. Instead, it’s a piercing satire based on arch observation of human behavior. The moment where Alice is able to leverage an adult’s hypocrisy against him is very satisfying,
The ironic title, of course, is something someone cries while literally coming a age.
Susan Blackwell is a low-profile character actor who just shows up and steals movies, as she did in last year’s Auggie. In Yes, God, Yes, she’s the character Gina, who owns a lesbian bar and rides a motorcycle, and it’s another great performance.
The Wife was raised Catholic, and she enjoyed this film. Yes, God, Yes is available to stream on Virtual Cinema and will be available from the usual VOD platforms after July 2
With Electrick Children, a first-time feature filmmaker has created an entirely unique teen coming of age story. Electrick Children employs an element of magical realism that requires the audience to accept a premise which cannot be real. The result is a highly original success.
A 15-year-old Utah girl has been raised in a remote fundamentalist Mormon enclave where everyone dresses as 19th century pioneers. She has been immersed in Bible stories, but hasn’t been exposed to any modern culture or to the facts of life. She happens upon a hidden cassette tape and finds her first rock and roll song revelatory – so revelatory that she thinks that the song has moved her to pregnancy. Here comes the magical realism – she really is a virgin, and she really is pregnant.
Because of her faith, she doesn’t find immaculate conception to be the least bit implausible. Not so with her parents, who wrongly blame her 17-year-old brother. Their answer is to kick the boy out of the home and to marry off the girl to a neighboring fundamentalist. Facing the unwanted shotgun wedding, the girl commandeers the family pickup and flees; her brother, seeking a way to prove his innocence, stows away.
The kids surface in Las Vegas, where they fall in with a band of runaway teens. Of course the Mormon kids are completely unprepared to navigate any modern city, let alone Vegas. Their guides, the more streetwise kids, are more comfortable with the glitz and sleaze of Vegas, but are just as untethered. The Mormon kids and the suburban runaways have life-altering adventures on the streets.
The girl embarks on a quest to find the singer who she thinks has fathered her child through song, not understanding that there is more than one rock band in the world (or that Blondie’s Hanging on the Telephone has not made her pregnant.) Central to the film’s success is that the girl is naive but never silly. The young actress Julia Garner shines in a performance that is never ironic and always completely sincere. The girl is determined and devout, seeking teen independence in ways that are logical for someone with her isolated upbringing. Garner is currently the best thing about the Netflix series show Ozark.
As good as Garner is, the real talent here is writer-director Rebecca Thomas, a Mormon from Nevada with an MFA from Columbia. This is her first feature film, and I can’t wait for her next one. Thomas is currently attached to several upcoming projects, including a live action version of The Little Mermaid.
Electrick Childrencan be streamed from Amazon (included in Amazon Prime) and can be purchased from several other VOD platforms.
In the Norwegian teen coming of age film Psychobitch, Marius (Jonas Tidemann) is his high school’s high achiever. Frida (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osbourne), on the other hand, is emotionally troubled and always on the verge of flaming out. To help Frida, a well-meaning teacher pairs the odd couple on a group project. Odd couple humor ensues.
Frida is more than just a misfit, a high school outcast. She is battling a serious psychiatric disorder, and she often thinks suicidal thoughts and pushes away those who could help. “Psychobitch“, the best movie title in this year’s Cinequest, is Marius’ initial assessment of Frida.
Marius is devoutly conventional, and there is nothing that Frida rejects more enthusiastically than conventionality. But both of these kids are smart and fun-loving, and being with Frida reveals a funnier and more spirited Marius than had been apparent. Frida is a bundle of vitality, and her constant defiance turns out to be a mask.
Marius learns that there’s something about himself, an aspect of his personality, that is not working out for him. For Marius to be happy and to become his own man, there’s a change he needs to make.
Of course, all of this plays out in a high school, with its classes and detentions, cliques and proms. Cinequest Director of Programming Mike Rabehl noted that it has the air of a 1980s John Hughes film. If you squint, you can almost see Pretty in Pink with a bipolar Molly Ringwald.
This an audience-pleaser. Cinequest hosts the North American premiere of Psychobitch.
Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in a scene from Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE. Courtesy of SFFILM.
Here is the best movie of 2018 – the unforgettable coming of age film Leave No Trace. Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie star as a dad-daughter team who challenge conventional thinking about homelessness and healthy parenting. Leave No Trace is writer-director Debra Granik’s first narrative feature since her Winter’s Bone (which I had rated as the best film of 2010).
When we meet Will (Foster) and his daughter Tom (McKenzie), they are
engaging in extremely low impact camping in a fern-rich Oregon forest,
to the point of solar cooking foraged mushrooms on a mylar sheet. Dad
and daughter are both survivalist experts and work together as a highly
trained team. They have the fond, respectful, communicative
relationship that most families with teen children aspire to but can
only fantasize about.
But Will and Tom are not on vacation. They do not consider themselves
homeless, because the forest is their home. However, their lifestyle
just isn’t consistent with contemporary thinking about child welfare.
Furthermore, living in a public park is illegal,and when they are
discovered, social service authorities are understandably and
justifiably concerned. Investigators find Tom to be medically and
emotionally healthy, Will to be free of drug or alcohol abuse, and there
has been no child abuse or neglect – other than having ones child
living outdoors and not going to school.
Will is a veteran who has been scarred by his military service, and
he is clearly anti-social. But Will is not your stereotypical
PTSD-addled movie vet. He is a clear thinker. His behavior, which can
range to the bizarre, is not impulsive but deliberate.
Fortunately, the Oregon, social services authorities are remarkably
open-minded, and they place Will and Tom in a remote rural setting in
their own house at a rural Christmas Tree farm. Will can work on the
farm, Tom can go the school, and there’s a liberal non-denominational
church filled with kind folks. It’s a massive accommodation to Will and
Tom’s lifestyle, only with the additions of living under a roof and
public education.
Tom blossoms with social contact, and particularly enjoys the local
4-H and one kid’s pet rabbit named Chainsaw. Tom begins to understand
how much she needs human connection – and not just with her dad,
But Will can’t help but feel defeated. When Tom suggests that they
try to adapt to their new setting, he scowls, “We’re wearing their
clothes, we’re living in their house, we’re eating their food, we’re
doing their work. We’ve adapted”. She argues, “Did you try?”, “Why are
we doing this?”, and “Dad, this isn’t how it used to be”.
Ben is so damaged that his parenting can nurture Tom for only so long. Leave No Trace
is about how he has raised her to this point. Has he imparted his
demons to her? Has he helped her become strong and grounded enough to
grow without him?
Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in a scene from Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE. Courtesy of SFFILM.
Winter’s Bone launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence, and Leave No Trace
might do the same for newcomer Thomasin McKenzie. McKenzie is riveting
as she authentically takes Tom from a parented child to an independent
young woman. At the San Francisco International Film Festival
screening, producer and co-writer Anne Rosellini said “there’s an
‘otherness’ to McKenzie,” who had “tremendous insight into the
character”. Rosellini added that McKenzie and Ben Foster bonded before
the shoot, as they rehearsed with a survivalist coach.
Foster is no stranger to troubled characters (The Messenger, Rampart, Hell or High Water).
Here, he delivers a remarkably intense and contained performance as a
man who will not allow himself an outburst no matter what turbulence
roils inside him. Rosellini noted that “Will is elusive, a mysterious
character to everybody”. It’s a performance that will be in the
conversation about Oscar nominations. Actors Jeff Kober, Dale Dickey,
Dana Millican and Isaiah Stone (the little brother in Winter’s Bone) are also excellent in smaller roles.
Leave No Trace is thoughtful and emotionally powerful. Superbly well-crafted and impeccably acted, it’s a Must See. Leave No Trace is available for streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
In the brilliant drama Mud, two Arkansas boys venture onto a river island and discover a man named Mud (Michael McConaughey) hiding from the authorities. Ellis (Tye Sheridan of The Tree of Life) is a hopeless romantic, consumed by an ideal view of love. His more hard-eyed buddy Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) is on the outlook for cool stuff. Both are ready for the excitement of a secret adventure.
Mud is another triumph for writer-director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter). The story has aspects of a boyhood adventure and of an escape thriller which hook the audience. But Mud is, at its heart, a coming of age story in which Ellis (primarily) gets a big dose of realism about love and human constancy.
Neckbone doesn’t have many illusions about human nature. His parents aren’t in the picture, and he lives with his wacky uncle Galen (Michael Shannon) in a trailer. Neckbone has a knack for immediately getting to the core of situation by bargaining an errand for a pistol or asking “Didja feel her titties?”.
A step down from Neckbone’s trailer lifestyle, Ellis lives on a floating shack tied to the riverbank. His parents are together, but, it seems, not for long. Somehow, Ellis believes in an ideal and forever love. There are many relationships for Ellis to observe: his parents’ troubled journey, the sacrifices Mud makes for his lover (Reese Witherspoon), the mysterious relationship between Mud and another houseboat dweller (Sam Shepherd), a rich man’s (Joe Don Baker) own obsession with his sons, his partnership with Neckbone and Ellis’ own first foray into dating. It’s all a bigger mouthful than Ellis was expecting.
The two kid actors are great. So are McConaughey, Shepherd, Witherspoon, Baker and Nichol’s favorite actor, Shannon. Mud primarily succeeds because Nichols has created compelling characters and woven a top-rate story, both gripping and thoughtful. I listed Mud as one of the best movies of 2013. You can stream Mud on Amazon (free on Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play; it’s also available on DVD from Netflix.
Mustangis about five exuberant Turkish teenage girls who challenge the repression of traditional culture. It’s a triumph for writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, and one of the best films of the year.
The five parentless sisters are living with their uncle and aunt on the Turkish coast “a thousand kilometers from Istanbul”. They’re a high-spirited bunch, and their rowdiness – innocent by Western standards – embarrasses their uncle. Overreacting, he tries to protect the family honor by pulling them out of school, taking away their electronics, putting them in traditional dresses (evoking the dress wear of fundamentalist polygamist Mormons) and conniving to marry them off as soon as possible. The uncle turns their home into a metaphorical prison that becomes more and more literal. The girls push back, and the stakes of the struggle get very, very high.
Our viewpoint is that of youngest sister Lale (Günes Sensoy), who is a force of nature, ever watchful (often fiercely). The poster girl for indomitability, Lale is one of the great movie characters of 2015.
Mustang is a film of distilled feminism, without any first world political correctness. These are people who want to marry or not, who they want, when they want and to have some control over their lives. They want protection from abuse. That is not a high bar, but because they are female, the traditional culture keeps these basic rights from them.
Although Mustang is set and filmed in Turkey by a Turkish writer-director, the actors are Turkish and all the dialogue is Turkish, it is technically a French movie. Director Ergüven works in France and the film was financed and produced in France. In fact, it was France’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar (over the Cannes winner Dheepan and the Vincent Lindon drama The Measure of a Man).
I happened to be in Sevilla, Spain during the Sevilla European Film Festival and saw Mustang there. I was rooting for Mustang to win the Best Foreign Language Oscar; it was nominated and SHOULD have won. .
You can stream Mustang on Netflix, Amazon, iTunes. Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
With Electrick Children, a first-time feature filmmaker has created an entirely unique teen coming of age story. Electrick Children employs an element of magical realism that requires the audience to accept a premise which cannot be real. The result is a highly original success.
A 15-year-old Utah girl has been raised in a remote fundamentalist Mormon enclave where everyone dresses as 19th century pioneers. She has been immersed in Bible stories, but hasn’t been exposed to any modern culture or to the facts of life. She happens upon a hidden cassette tape and finds her first rock and roll song revelatory – so revelatory that she thinks that the song has moved her to pregnancy. Here comes the magical realism – she really is a virgin, and she really is pregnant.
Because of her faith, she doesn’t find immaculate conception to be the least bit implausible. Not so with her parents, who wrongly blame her 17-year-old brother. Their answer is to kick the boy out of the home and to marry off the girl to a neighboring fundamentalist. Facing the unwanted shotgun wedding, the girl commandeers the family pickup and flees; her brother, seeking a way to prove his innocence, stows away.
The kids surface in Las Vegas, where they fall in with a band of runaway teens. Of course the Mormon kids are completely unprepared to navigate any modern city, let alone Vegas. Their guides, the more streetwise kids, are more comfortable with the glitz and sleaze of Vegas, but are just as untethered. The Mormon kids and the suburban runaways have life-altering adventures on the streets.
The girl embarks on a quest to find the singer who she thinks has fathered her child, not understanding that there is more than one rock band in the world (or that Blondie’s Hanging on the Telephone has not made her pregnant.) Central to the film’s success is that the girl is naive but never silly. The young actress Julia Garner shines in a performance that is never ironic and always completely sincere. The girl is determined and devout, seeking teen independence in ways that are logical for someone with her isolated upbringing. Garner is currently the best thing about the Netflix series show Ozark.
As good as Garner is, the real talent here is writer-director Rebecca Thomas, a Mormon from Nevada with an MFA from Columbia. This is her first feature film, and I can’t wait for her next one. Thomas is currently attached to several upcoming projects, including a live action version of The Little Mermaid.
Electrick Childrencan be streamed from Amazon (included in Amazon Prime) and can be purchased from several other VOD platforms.
Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in a scene from Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE. Courtesy of SFFILM.
Here is the best movie of 2018 – so far – the unforgettable coming of age film Leave No Trace. Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie star as a dad-daughter team who challenge conventional thinking about homelessness and healthy parenting. Leave No Trace is writer-director Debra Granik’s first narrative feature since her Winter’s Bone (which I had rated as the best film of 2010).
When we meet Will (Foster) and his daughter Tom (McKenzie), they are engaging in extremely low impact camping in a fern-rich Oregon forest, to the point of solar cooking foraged mushrooms on a mylar sheet. Dad and daughter are both survivalist experts and work together as a highly trained team. They have the fond, respectful, communicative relationship that most families with teen children aspire to but can only fantasize about.
But Will and Tom are not on vacation. They do not consider themselves homeless, because the forest is their home. However, their lifestyle just isn’t consistent with contemporary thinking about child welfare. Furthermore, living in a public park is illegal,and when they are discovered, social service authorities are understandably and justifiably concerned. Investigators find Tom to be medically and emotionally healthy, Will to be free of drug or alcohol abuse, and there has been no child abuse or neglect – other than having ones child living outdoors and not going to school.
Will is a veteran who has been scarred by his military service, and he is clearly anti-social. But Will is not your stereotypical PTSD-addled movie vet. He is a clear thinker. His behavior, which can range to the bizarre, is not impulsive but deliberate.
Fortunately, the Oregon, social services authorities are remarkably open-minded, and they place Will and Tom in a remote rural setting in their own house at a rural Christmas Tree farm. Will can work on the farm, Tom can go the school, and there’s a liberal non-denominational church filled with kind folks. It’s a massive accommodation to Will and Tom’s lifestyle, only with the additions of living under a roof and public education.
Tom blossoms with social contact, and particularly enjoys the local 4-H and one kid’s pet rabbit named Chainsaw. Tom begins to understand how much she needs human connection – and not just with her dad,
But Will can’t help but feel defeated. When Tom suggests that they try to adapt to their new setting, he scowls, “We’re wearing their clothes, we’re living in their house, we’re eating their food, we’re doing their work. We’ve adapted”. She argues, “Did you try?”, “Why are we doing this?”, and “Dad, this isn’t how it used to be”.
Ben is so damaged that his parenting can nurture Tom for only so long. Leave No Trace is about how he has raised her to this point. Has he imparted his demons to her? Has he helped her become strong and grounded enough to grow without him?
Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in a scene from Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE. Courtesy of SFFILM.
Winter’s Bone launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence, and Leave No Trace might do the same for newcomer Thomasin McKenzie. McKenzie is riveting as she authentically takes Tom from a parented child to an independent young woman. At the San Francisco International Film Festival screening, producer and co-writer Anne Rosellini said “there’s an ‘otherness’ to McKenzie,” who had “tremendous insight into the character”. Rosellini added that McKenzie and Ben Foster bonded before the shoot, as they rehearsed with a survivalist coach.
Foster is no stranger to troubled characters (The Messenger, Rampart, Hell or High Water). Here, he delivers a remarkably intense and contained performance as a man who will not allow himself an outburst no matter what turbulence roils inside him. Rosellini noted that “Will is elusive, a mysterious character to everybody”. It’s a performance that will be in the conversation about Oscar nominations. Actors Jeff Kober, Dale Dickey, Dana Millican and Isaiah Stone (the little brother in Winter’s Bone) are also excellent in smaller roles.
Leave No Trace is thoughtful and emotionally powerful. Superbly well-crafted and impeccably acted, it’s a Must See.
Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
Call Me by Your Name is an extraordinarily beautiful story of sexual awakening set in a luscious Italian summer. The film is gorgeous and magnificently well-acted, but flawed.
Each year, the family of 16-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) spends the summer in a villa in Northern Italy. Elio’s father is an American professor of ancient Greek and Roman culture, and each summer he invites a different grad student to live in their villa and work on scholarly pursuits. In this summer of 1981, that lucky grad student is the 26-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer). Elio is attracted to Oliver, who is a closeted gay man. Oliver is attracted to Elio, but initially resists Elio’s overtures. What follows between the two of them is an enthralling and authentic exploration of first love.
Timothée Chalamet is really perfect as Elio, a musical prodigy who is beating off the girls with a stick. Even really handsome and talented 17-year-olds have some awkwardness, especially while they’re trying too hard to be cool. Chamalet captures that perfectly, along with the obsessive longing of a first romance. (Chalamet is also in Lady Bird, where he plays the dreamy kid who plays in a band, the object of Lady Bird’s desire.) Armie Hammer is also superb as the more worldly Oliver, whose external confidence masks inner conflicts.
Timothée Chalamet in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
The story of the two main characters would have made a perfect film, but famed screenwriter James Ivory adds some distracting implausibility with the other characters. First, there are Elio’s impossibly cool and understanding parents (Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar) who practically push their teen son into the arms of an older man; nobody has parents like that, especially TWO of them. (And, yes, I did understand the dad’s motivation, made almost explicit in his final monologue). Second, Elio hurts the feelings of a girl (in a way that almost every male has hurt some girl). Later, she forgives him and it’s all made to be okay. This is just too convenient for Elio, and I didn’t buy it.
And then there’s one of my own movie pet peeves. I generally despise musical interludes in movies, when the dialogue is suspended and a song is played over a montage of imagery. This usually indicates a lack of imagination in the story-telling. A movie gets negative bonus points from me when the music is an insipid pop ballad. In Call Me by Your Name, there are two such Euro-pop interludes.
On the other hand, the depiction of the Italian countryside, with its rustling breezes, orchards heavy with fruit, ancient buildings and is pure travel porn. I think that The Wife would have walked out of Call Me by Your Name – not because she wouldn’t have liked it – but to make reservations for a return to Tuscany. Director Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash, I Am Love) has a gift for making his native Italy unbearably attractive on the screen. Between the work of Guadagnino and Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), Italy has been well-celebrated in recent films.
Call Me By Your Name is a very good movie, and the core story of Elio and Oliver is great cinema.
Since this is Imogen Poots Week at The Movie Gourmet, this week’s video recommendation is a totally overlooked drama from just last year, A Country Called Home. Somehow A Country Called Home missed out on any significant theatrical release even though it’s a very satisfying Finding Yourself drama.
Poots plays Ellie, a young Los Angeles woman with an underachieving job and a lousy boyfriend who takes her for granted. She hears that her estranged father has become gravely ill, and we learn that she has escaped a Texas childhood with an alcoholic father. Her brother (Shea Whigham) also lives in Los Angeles; he is flourishing and doesn’t care a whit about their father – the brother has moved on from his upbringing. But Ellie is a poster girl for low-self esteem, and she feels obligated to travel to her father’s bedside.
Ryan Bingham in A COUNTRY CALLED HOME
Once in Texas, she finds that her father has just passed, leaving the detritus of his alcoholic life. Everything in her old hometown is trashy, complicated or just plain unsupportive. She meets a misfit wannabe singer-songwriter (Mackenzie Davis, unrecognizable from Bad Turn Worse). And there’s a pressured-out single dad played by the sad-eyed Ryan Bingham (the Oscar-winning songwriter for Crazy Heart).
A Country Called Home is the debut feature for director and co-writer Anna Axster, and it’s a successful and engaging study of a woman finally emerging from a childhood with an alcoholic parent. It turns out that, to move on with her life, she needed another look at where she came from.
A Country Called Home can be streamed from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play. And last week’s Stream of the Week, Frank & Lola, is also available from those same streaming services.
