Honey Don’t: kinda funny, disposable. In theaters.
Sorry, Baby: smart, funny and on the path to healing. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
ON TV
Joan Crawford in SUDDEN FEAR.
On September 13, the classic noir suspenser Sudden Fear plays on Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley with intro and outro by Eddie Muller. Sudden Fear showcases Joan Crawfor as a highly successful woman who marries a guy (Jack Palance) who really just wants her money; he plots with his longtime girlfriend (Gloria Grahame) to do in his wife for the inheritance. The wife discovers their scheme, and plans to get them before they can get her.
The riveting final twelve minutes is movie perfection. Now, it’s a pretty good movie for the first hour and thirty-eight minutes, but its ending takes Sudden Fear up a couple of notches.
Photo caption: Irina Starshenbaum and Douglas Booth in SHOSHANA. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.
The thriller Shoshana is a historical drama set in pre-Israel Palestine that revolves around a love story between two people on different sides. The Jewish journalist Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum) is a committed Zionist and a supporter of the paramilitary group Haganah. Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) is the Assistant Superintendent of Criminal Investigation for the British authorities.
All of the significant characters in Shoshana were real people, and the story takes place from 1933 to 1944. We don’t see many movies set in this time and place. The Ottoman Empire had ruled Palestine for 400 years, until the Ottomans were expelled by the British in WW I. The British then took over governing Palestine, with its majority Arab population and small Jewish community, under an international agreement – the British Mandate – and with a policy that there should be a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Arab residents have been living with a few Jews, but are horrified by the specter of mass Jewish immigration, and they revolt. Tit for tat murders begin between Arabs and Jews, which the British try to suppress. Soon there are rival Jewish paramilitary organizations, each with a different take on how to deal with the British, with the Arabs and with each other. When the British sharply limit Jewish immigration and frustrate the efforts to form a Jewish-majority state, the Jews react with anger against the British.
It becomes a lethal gam of three-dimensional chess. Shoshana does a pretty good job in helping the audience track who is who – and who wants to kill who. Shoshana was directed by the veteran Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo, Jude, The Claim, A Mighty Heart and The Trip movies).
Thomas Wilkin and Shoshana Borochov forge an 11-year relationship in an environment that becomes more stressful every year. But Thomas is unwilling to stop being a British policeman, and Shoshana is unwilling to put aside her Zionist beliefs. They love each other, but not enough for either to abandon deeply-held values or their personal identities.
What could doom their relationship is not just arguing politics at the dinner table, but something more ominous – there are plenty of players who want each of them dead. The situation is explosive – often literally. And neither can hide in a Tel Aviv still small enough that everybody knows each other.
The British are trying to cope with what we now know as asymmetrical warfare. A British officer sneeringly asks a Zionist terrorist why he is blowing up women and children, and gets the reply “Because we don’t have the resources that you do“. Ironically, the British in Shoshana are themselves employing mass reprisals, extrajudicial executions and torture that would clearly be considered war crimes today.
Of course, British colonial rule was known for arrogant, racist, and culturally tone-deaf twits, and they are represented by Shoshana‘s villain, police official Geoffrey Morton (the fine actor Harry Melling).
Arabs and their cause may not be depicted in depth in Shoshana, but are shown as victims of both Jewish terrorism and British atrocities.
The historical events constitute the origin stories for both the nation of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The British throw up their hands and fal to provide for Palestinian self-determination within the borders of Palestine. The Jewish organizations in Shoshana later evolved into the two major Israeli political parties of the past 75 years, and the Haganah morphed into the Israeli Defense Forces. Israel has since become a military power and now faces its own asymmetrical warfare.
Given the impact of this history upon the current day, we might have expected more films about this period. After all, there are a zillion films about the Holocaust and a lot set in post-1948 Israel. In 1960, Otto Preminger made the blockbuster film Exodus from the 1958 Leon Uris novel which was the biggest best seller in US since Gone With the Wind. Exodus was set in the period between 1946 and 1948. (My parents saw Exodus at a drive-in with me as a small boy in the back seat.) No less than the pioneering Zionist leader and Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion said of the novel, “as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel“.
Shoshana is far more clear-eyed and nuanced than Exodus. Shoshana reflects a historical setting that was complicated, and tells the story of lovers’ inner conflicts amid a dynamic and perilous external conflict. Shoshana, which I reviewed earlier this year for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, is now streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.
Photo caption: Liz Larsen and Michael Strassner in THE BALTIMORONS. Courtesy of NashFilm.
The always exquisitely curated NashFilm, the Nashville Film Festival, opens on Thursday, September 18 and runs through September 24 with a diverse menu of cinema. The Nashville Film Festival is the oldest running film festival in the South (this is the 56th!) and is an Academy Award qualifying festival. The program includes a mix of indies, docs and international cinema, including world and North American premieres.
The most high profile events at NashFilm will be:
Opening night’s Man on the Run, the story of Paul McCartney’s life and career after the breakup of the Beatles, fresh off its world premiere two weeks ago at Telluride. Director Morgan Neville has delivered two of the very best recent biodocs (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain).
Nicole Kidman will appear personally for Q&A and a special screening of Cold Mountain.
The centerpiece biodoc John Candy: I Like Me.
The closing night film, Kiss of the Spider Woman, starring Diego Luna, Tonatiuh and Jennifer Lopez.
Omaha, an indie drama starring John Magaro that garnered buzz at Sundance.
Rebuilding, another Sundance indie drama starring Josh O’Connor.
The Baltimorons, the first film directed by Jay Duplass since 2012, a sweet and funny film that won the Best Narrative Feature Audience Award at SXSW.
The Nashville Film Festival embraces its home in Music City with a strong program of music films. This year, NashFilm celebrates the beloved John Prine with You Got Gold. There’s also Finding Lucinda, a singer-songwriter’s road trip to explore the stories that formed the powerfully raw songs of Lucinda Williams. There are also documentary features on genre-buster Sun Ra, grunge icon Eddie Vedder, Gospel artist Carl Bean, emerging flamenco star Yerai Cortés and Christian rappers LeCrae and the 116 Clique. It’s hard to imagine a more diverse slate of music docs.
My favorite element of most NashFilm fests is the discovery of new auteurs with their ballyhooed first films. This year’s slate includes these first films:
Peacock: new Austrian director Bernhard Wenger won a prize at Venice, where his droll debut was also nominated for Best Film in the Critic’s Week.
Mad Bills to Pay: the Bronx’s Joel Alfonso Vargas was nominated for Best First Film at Berlin and won a NEXT Special Jury Award at Sundance
Color Book: Atlanta’s David Fortune has won eight festival awards in the US and France with his inaugural film.
Fucktoys: Nashville’s hometown girl Annapurna Sriram, who also stars, won a Special Jury award at SXSW with her first feature.
Slanted: Chinese-Australian filmmaker Amy Wang won the Grand Jury Prize at SXSW with her calling card.
All in all, this year’s NashFilm presents 140 films from 30 countries. Peruse the program and get tickets. I’ll be publishing my fest recommendations on September 16. Here’s the trailer for The Baltimorons.
Photo caption: Liev Schrieber, Austin Butler and Vincent D’Onofrio in CAUGHT STEALING. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
Caught Stealing is a genre picture by Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan, The Whale), who must have thought he was slumming by directing a genre movie. This is a darkly funny, violent thriller, the kind of movie that I almost always enjoy. But Aronofsky, working off a screenplay by Charlie Huston, has wasted a superb cast and a Hollywood-level budget on a movie so ordinary, that it’s not even worth streaming. It’s not even as good as Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t or half of the fare on BritBox.
It didn’t have to be that way. As I watched Caught Stealing, I kept thinking of director Steven Soderbergh, who has made Oscar movies like Sex, Lies and Videotape, Erin Brockavich and Traffic, but now churns out genre movies like Kimi and No Sudden Move that may be less artsy but are solid entertainment. Or Richard Linklater, who could make the Before Midnight movies and Boyhood, the very best American cinema of our century, and still entertain us last year with Hit Man. Hell, Rian Johnson and Questin Tarantino ONLY make genre movies – and they’re wonderful. But the director has to love and respect the genre.
In Caught Stealing, Austin Butler plays Hank, a guy who has run away from his past to bartend at a scruffy Lower Manhattan bar in the early 2000s, in a neighborhood that people hoped that Giuliani would clean up. His dodgy punk neighbor (Matt Smith) has to suddenly leave town to visit his stricken father in Britain, and asks Hank to care for his cat. Unsurprisingly, lots of dangerous people show up who think that the neighbor has double-crossed them and that Hank must know where the loot is hidden. They beat him up, and threaten to kill him and his loved ones. This results in lots of chases through NYC as Hank, some scary Russian mobsters, a pair of Hasidic gangsters and a tenacious cop all pursue each other. There’s a bit of sex, lots of violence, and some mild laughs. There’s not a surprising or unpredictable moment here.
Austin Butler is an appealing hunk who was excellent in The Bikeriders and plenty good enough in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood and Masters of the Air. He even dared to play Elvis Presley and was not the reason that Elvis was bad. Same here.
It’s an impressive cast, with Matt Smith (funny to see The Crown’s Prince Philip sporting a giant mohawk), Liev Schrieber and Vincent D’Onofrio, and Carol Kane and Laura Dern have brief cameos. But the performances by Regina King, Zoe Kravitz and Griffin Dunne are so good, that justice requires them to work in a better movie.
The movie/s title comes from Hank having sabotaged a once promising baseball career, but Darren Aronofsky didn’t even make it to the bag at second base – he was picked off at first.
Photo caption: Dylan O’Brien and James Sweeney in TWINLESS. Courtesy of Roadside Attractions.
In the refreshingly original dramedy Twinless, Roman (Dylan O’Brien) has been rocked by the sudden death of his twin brother Rocky. Roman and Rocky were inseparable in their Moscow Idaho, childhood, but the more adventuresome and cosmopolitan Rocky had been building his own life in Portland. Roman, admittedly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and burdened with anger management issues, has been stuck in a dead end rut back home with their bitter mother (Lauren Graham). After the funeral, Roman, at loose ends, is sticking around Portland and finds a support group for people who are grieving the loss of their twin siblings.
Roman meets another support group participant, Dennis (James Sweeney), who has very little in common with Rocky, but, like Roman is gay, worldly and quick-witted. What Roman and Dennis share is their grief and loss of connection, and they build a most unlikely friendship. It seems like we’re in for an amiable Odd Couple comedy until something in their back stories is revealed to the audience, but not to both of them. Will the new friends be able to face and overcome this history? The drama is leavened by comedy as Twinless explores grief, loss and identity.
Dennis is played by James Sweeney, Twinless’s writer director. Sweeney has written a character of remarkable ambiguity and vulnerability for himself. Sometimes a person remains sympathetic, even though they have a loathsome character flaw and have done something very wrong. It’s really hard to write (and play) a movie character like that, and that is Sweeney’s triumphant achievement in Twinless.
Dylan O’Brien is well known for the Teen Wolf (as Stiles) and The Maze Runner franchises, with which I am unfamiliar. I’m generally impressed by actors who can convincingly play characters much dumber than they are in real life, and O’Brien is very good as a dopey innocent who we can laugh at but still root for.
Aisling Franciosi plays Marcie, a sunny goodhearted ditz who turns out to be far more formidable than either Dennis or Roman expect. Twelve years ago, in The Fall, I first saw Franciosi’s compelling performance as Katie Benedetto, a troubled Northern Irish teen who is infatuated by a serial killer (Jamie Dornan). Gotta say this – if she can play both Katie Benedetto and Marcie to perfection, she can play any character.
Reflecting both the sweetness and edginess we find in life, Twinless is one of the smartest and most satisfying comedies of recent years.
Coming up next week on The Movie Gourmet – reviews of some movies just opening in theaters this week and a preview of the Nashville Film Festival.
REMEMBRANCE
Graham Greene in DANCES WITH WOLVES
Dignified yet down-to-earth Canadian actor Graham Greene, a member of the Oneida First Nation, garnered almost 200 screen credits, including Dances with Wolves, Powwow Highway, The Green Mile, Longmire and Wind River.
CURRENT MOVIES
East of Wall: horse riding through trauma. In theaters
Sew Torn: a thriller like none you’ve seen before. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
Bonjour Tristesse: not the life lesson she was expecting. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
ON TV
Paul Newman and Edmond O’Brien in THE RACK
On September 10, Turner Classic Movies offers the overlooked Korean War film The Rack. A returning US Army captain (Paul Newman) is court-martialed for collaborating with the enemy while a POW. He was tortured, and The Rack explores what can be realistically expected of a prisoner under duress. It’s a pretty good movie, and Wendell Corey, Edmond O’Brien, Walter Pidgeon, Lee Marvin and Cloris Leachman co-star.
Artist Joe Caroff created the unforgettable movie posters for West Side Story, The Last Temptation of Christ and many others, including the iconic 007 for the James Bond franchise. His comprehensive NYT obit includes other examples of his work.
CURRENT MOVIES
East of Wall: horse riding through trauma. In theaters
Sew Torn: a thriller like none you’ve seen before. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
Bonjour Tristesse: not the life lesson she was expecting. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
ON TV
Victor Buono in THE STRANGLER
Coming up on Turner Classic Movies, the 1964 serial killer movie The Strangler; it’s the masterpiece of director Burt Topper, who specialized in low-budget exploitation movies. First, we see that lonely lab tech Otto Kroll (Victor Buono in an especially brilliant and eccentric performance) is twisted enough to murder random women and return to his lair to fondle his doll collection. Then we learn his motivation – he dutifully visits his hateful mother (Ellen Corby – later to play Grandma Walton) in her nursing room; she heaps abuse on him in every interaction. Pretty soon, even the audience wants to kill Mrs. Kroll, but Otto sneaks around taking out his hatred for his mom by strangling other women. Because Otto is outwardly genial to a fault, it takes a loooong time to fall under the suspicion of the cops. The character of Otto and Buono’s performance elevate The Strangler above its budget and launches it into the top rank of serial killer movies.
Javier Botet and Bray Efe in THE FANTASTIC GOLEM AFFAIRS. Courtesy of Gluon Media.
The Spanish comedy The Fantastic Golem Affairs is unlike any other movie you’re likely to see this year, and the absurdity starts in the opening scene. After a night of partying, the pudgy slacker Juan (Bray Efe) and his best buddie David (David Menendez) are goofing around on the roof of Juan’s Madrid high-rise apartment building. David accidentally falls off and plunges to the roof of a car parked many stories below. That reveals that David is made of ceramic, as he shatters into hundreds of shards.
While still in a state of shock, Juan is annoyed by a shady car insurance agent, his late friend’s obnoxious and venal lover, apathetic cops and a woman with an outrageous computer dating profile. But he is obsessed by the mystery of a ceramic man, and keeps on the investigative trail until he stumbles on an unworldly conspiracy rooted in his own family. Along the way, a bizarre freak accident keeps recurring, killing people that he encounters during his investigation.
It’s been accurately written that there is magical realism in The Fantastic Golem Affairs, but it’s not the sweet, mystical kind in, say Like Water for Chocolate – The Fantastic Golem Affairs is bawdy and in-your-face.
The playfully, irreverent tone strongly reminds me of Pedro Almodovar’s early work (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, High Heels and Kika) and his VERY early work (Pepi, Luci, Born and Other Girlds Like Mom). Indeed, one of the characters observes, “This is like a Spanish movie from the 90s“. The Fantastic Golem Affairs is not as riotous as early Almodovar, but it adds that magical realism and much more absurdism.
Javier Botet in THE FANTASTIC GOLEM AFFAIRS. Courtesy of Gluon Media.
The Fantastic Golem Affairs is highly imaginative work of Spanish writer-directors Juan Gonzalez and Nando Martinez, who call themselves Burnin’ Percebes. They hit us with the absurdity of the shattering ceramic man right at the beginning, juxtaposed with the peppy music underneath the opening credits. The music combines with an often static camera, long shots, and colorfully retro sets that are unabashedly cheap. This is a zany, raunchy movie with some mild body horror.
[Gratuitous digression: I’m always proud to point out when I actually get a joke in Spanish. The directors’ pseudonym is Burnin’ Percebes, and percebes is Spanish for gooseneck barnacle, a hideously ugly (Google it) and delicious shellfish from Northern Spain. They are dangerous to harvest from oceanside cliffs, and are accordingly expensive – about ten times the price of a regular tapa. Of course, The Movie Gourmet himself has enjoyed percebes in San Sebastian.]
The Fantastic Golem Affairs is opening in theaters, including LA’s Alamo Drafthouse.
Photo caption: Margaret Qualley in HONEY DON’T. Courtesy of Focus Features.
In Ethan Coen’s dark comedy Honey Don’t, the potential clients of private eye Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) keep getting killed, and she suspects that the deaths are connected to a sexually predatory sham preacher (Chris Evans). She’s a whip-smart lipstick lesbian, and she sizzles with the local cop MG (Aubrey Plaza). Honey and the phony pastor have lots of robust sex, none of it with each other. We think we know who the big villain is going to be, but there’s a big surprise twist.
There’s a lot of sassy dialogue, and there are some LOL lines like “no, but I saw Palmdale” that could have become iconic if this were a better movie. It’s kinda funny, dotted with a few inspired moments, but, on the whole, a disposable movie.
Director Ethan Coen co-wrote Honey Don’t with longtime Coen Brothers editor Tricia Cooke, who also co-wrote his Drive Away Dolls. In a twist on the detective genre, the oversexed, badass characters are women – Honey, MG and a mysterious, motor scooter-riding drug importer (Lera Abova). The two main male characters are Evan’s predatory minister, a doofus who thinks he’s a mastermind, and a smarmy cop (Charlie Day), who knows that he’s a doofus and is blissfully content with being one. That being said, Honey Don’t is all about the carnage-laden comic violence that men tend to enjoy, and I doubt that the female-centric angle is enough to draw women into the audience.
Qualley and Evans are both very good, and I will watch anything that features Aubrey Plaza. There are excellent comic performances by Josh Pafchek, as an impressively dim thug, and Kale Browne, as an old man whose identity isn’t revealed right away.
One of the most distinctive and fun stars of the film is its setting – emphatically downscale Bakersfield. I’m not convinced that there is a nice part of Bakersfield, but, if there is, we sure don’t see it here. Californians will also enjoy the references to Lancaster and Palmdale.
Honey Don’t is a mildly enjoyable 87 minutes, but not a Must See.
I loved Terence Stamp. Stamp, of course was a 1960s British star as a dreamy leading man (Billy Budd, The Collector, Far from the Madding Crowd). I’ve felt that his best work was in his middle age and since: still magnetic in The Hit, The Limey, and The Adjustment Bureau. And as recently as 2021, in Last Night in Soho, with his still striking features and dead-cold eyes, he looked dangerous from at the first glimpse.
CURRENT MOVIES
East of Wall: horse riding through trauma. In theaters
