movie gourmet

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Jeremy Allen White and Anaita Wali Zada in FREMONT. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – the good-hearted and entertaining Flora and Son is in theaters and on AppleTV, and Fremont, one of the best and most overlooked movies of the year, now watchable at home. Another of the year’s best, Past Lives, is also streaming.

REMEMBRANCE

Michael Gambon, the venerated actor of the British stage, ended his career famously as Dumbledore in several Harry Potter movies. He had also played LBJ in Path to War, the lord of the manor in Gosford Park and the king in The King’s Speech, and elevated smaller movies like Page Eight, Quartet and Layer Cake.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

Ronald Zehfeld and Nina Hoss in PHOENIX

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

  • Phoenix: riveting psychodrama, wowzer ending. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Undefeated: an Oscar winner you haven’t seen. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Kimi: an adequate REAR WINDOWS ends as a thrilling WAIT UNTIL DARK. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Lune: funny, searing, and richly authentic. Amazon.
  • Summertime: no longer invisible and unheard, giving voice through verse. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • I’m Fine (Thank You for Asking): a desperate dash for dignity. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Making Montgomery Clift: exploding the myths. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Our Kind of Traitor: Skarsgård steals this robust thriller. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • ’71: keeping the thrill in thriller. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.

ON TV

Lon Chaney in THE UNKNOWN

OK – work with me here. On October 19, Turner Classic Movies will present The Unknown with Lon Chaney, and I think that Chaney’s charisma is worth sampling. And as a fun experience, not a “this is good for you” experience.

I will fess up that I am not a huge silent movie fan. I usually watch only one silent movie each year (out of the 250-300 movies that I see annually). I like the Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton comedies, but I usually find sitting through most of the silent dramas to be “eat your broccoli” experiences. But Lon Chaney really enlivens his films. It’s like he is acting in a more modern movie than are the other actors.

Chaney was an expert with makeup and is well-known for grotesque roles like Quasimodo, and the Phantom of the Opera.  Accordingly, I had always thought of Chaney as his nickname, “Man of a Thousand Faces”.

But, for all his reliance on changing appearances, Chaney was NOT a gimmick actor.  He was very naturalistic, a relaxed actor whose screen-acting was very modern.   His course features and his charm combine for a unique magnetism.  I think that he would have been very successful in today’s cinema.

Unfortunately, Chaney died suddenly at age 47, so he was able to make only one talkie – the 1930 remake of his 1925 silent The Unholy Three.  You can find snippets of the remake on YouTube and hear his voice.

The Unknown has a completely outlandish plot.  Chaney plays Alonzo, a circus freak with no arms, who throws knives and shoots rifles with his feet.  But actually, Alonzo is a criminal on the lam who is merely PRETENDING to be armless.  He’s love with his much younger assistant, played by 21-year-old Joan Crawford (already in her 18th film), who spends much of the movie in a bikini top.  The thing is, she has a phobia and only feels comfortable with Alonzo because she think he has no arms.  Alonzo starts contemplating amputation to get her to marry him.  Yep, this is about a farfetched as a plot can get, but Chaney’s expressive face transcends the weirdness.

I also recommend the 1925 silent The Unholy Three, like The Unknown, directed by Tod Browning.  (After Chaney’s death, horror master Browning went on to make Dracula and Freaks.) 

(Don’t confuse him with his son Lon Chaney, Jr., who also counted many horror pictures among his 197 screen roles.  I remember Lon Jr. most for playing Lennie in Of Mice and Men and the old retired sheriff in High Noon.)

Lon Chaney in THE UNKNOWN

FLORA AND SON: a bad mom turns it around

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Photo caption: Eve Hewson and Orén Kinlan in FLORA AND SON. Courtesy of AppleTV.

In John Carney’s delightful Flora and Son, Flora (Eve Hewson) is a boisterous, messy and mouthy Dubliner with a bad attitude. Her life sucks, and she knows exactly why – she dropped out of school at 17 to have a baby. As an unskilled single mom, she is barely scraping by on babysitter gigs, and her motherhood status is scaring away potential boyfriends. And the baby has grown into Max (Orén Kinlan), a teenager with a tongue as sharp as his mom’s, and he’s smart and sensitive enough to appreciate his mom’s resentment of him. Max has been acting out, understandably, and already has a probation officer.

Flora dumpster-dives for a discarded guitar, intending it as a free and belated birthday gift for Max. He sees thru her thoughtlessness and rejects the gift. Flora, on a whim, decides to take guitar lessons from a guy on YouTube, chiefly because he is laid back and looks like a movie star. Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an unsuccessful musician in Topanga Canyon, connects with Flora on Zoom and somehow unlocks music as a way to express herself.

Will Jeff become more than a fantasy figure to Flora. Will Max stay out of jail? Most importantly, will Flora redeem herself as a mother?

Flora is a force of nature, and Eve Hewson’s performance carries the film. It takes a lot for an audience to root for an unashamedly bad mom, but Hewson wins us over with the depth of her passions, both misplaced and well-placed ones.

Gordon-Levitt is excellent as always and gets to show off his impressive musical chops.

Flora and Son’s themes of songwriting and romance remind us of Carney’s 2007 film Once, starring Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who won the Best Song Oscar for their Falling Slowly. Once is even a better film than Flora and Son and has better music; it can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.

But Flora and Son itself is good-hearted and entertaining. Flora and Son is playing some theaters and is streaming on AppleTV.

FREMONT: self-discovery and a fortune cookie

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Photo caption: Anaita Wali Zada in FREMONT. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

Good news – one of the year’s best and most overlooked movies is now valuable to watch at home. Fremont is the absorbing and frequently droll portrait of a woman, having landed in a new place, who has paused her life and needs to find her path to self-discovery. Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), having worked as a translator for the US military in her native Afghanistan, has fled Kabul for her life. She is living in a stucco-box apartment in the Bay Area suburb of Fremont and is working for a San Francisco manufacturer of, absurdly, Chinese fortune cookies.

Her life is lonely and boring, and her social life is anything but what one would expect for an attractive Bay Area. single woman in her mid-20s. What’s holding her back? It’s not fear, shyness, the bounds of traditional Afghan culture or PTSD from the war. She could have landed an entry level job in Fremont and saved herself the 45-minute commute, but she has intentionally left the insular enclave of Afghan refugees for a job that exposes her to folks with other backgrounds. That clues us in to Donya’s curiosity and fearlessness.

Donya is quiet without being shy, engaging in conversations with her benevolently goofy boss, her know-it-all co-worker and her oddball psychiatrist, and indulging their need to explain things to her. It’s clear to us that she knows more than all of them except for the old owner of an Afghan café, whose life experience tells him what she needs to do with her life.

Donya is the only member of her family in the US precisely because she is the only one whose life has been expressly threatened by the Taliban. That presents her with a form of survivor’s guilt that she needs to confront.

Donya needs to pivot, and the spark is a fortune in a fortune cookie – a fortune written by Donya herself.

Fremont and the character of Donya are the creations of Iranian-born and Belgium-based director and co-writer Babak Jalali, a master of deadpan, absurdist humor. (I love his even more droll Radio Dreams, also set in a Bay Area immigrant community.) After all, what is more disposable or trivial than the fortune in a fortune cookie? I especially enjoyed the scenes where Donya listens implacably as her shrink earnestly (and, he thinks, therapeutically) reads her passages from Jack London’s White Fang.

Donya borrows her friend’s beater of a car for a quest to, of all places, Bakersfield. At a remote gas station along the way, she meets Daniel (Jeremy Allen White of The Bear), a kind and lonely mechanic, and very, tentatively and more than a bit awkwardly, a connection forms.

Jalali captures and distills the profound attraction between mutual soul mates. Donya’s and Daniel’s encounters are so spare, you wonder how much of our courtship rituals are superfluous.

In her screen debut, Anaita Wali Zada effectively inhabits the fresh and original character of Donya, whose reserve masks her strong will. Essentially all of the cast (including his leading lady) are first-time actors, except for Jeremy Allen White and Gregg Turkington, who plays the shrink. You gotta wonder what Jalali could do with trained actors.

Fremont is now streaming on Amazon and Vudu. The more I think about Fremont, the more I like it.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Ashley Judd in William Friedkin’s BUG. Courtesy of Lionsgate.

This week on The Movie Gourmet, it’s William Friedkin Week – with reviews of three of the director’s underseen films, To Live and to Die in L.A., Bug and Killer Joe.

Just got back from two weeks in Spain. Gotta say that I was impressed with the movie choices on Iberia Airlines, all free: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Jerry and Marge Go Large, A Thousand and One, Hypnotic, Cocaine Bear, The Return of Casanova (Italy), Do Unto Others (Japan), Argentina 1985 and Adios, Buenos Aires (Argentina), The Cow Who Sang etc. (Chile, The Crime Is Mine (France) and Asteroid City. Plus big franchise movies: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Spider Man and the Spiderverse 3, Avatar: The Way of Water, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Creed III. Coupled with above-average airline food (included), there are worse ways to spend 11 hours on a plane.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

SUMMERTIME

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

  • Summertime: no longer invisible and unheard, giving voice through verse. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Undefeated: an Oscar winner you haven’t seen. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Kimi: an adequate REAR WINDOWS ends as a thrilling WAIT UNTIL DARK. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Lune: funny, searing, and richly authentic. Amazon.
  • Phoenix: riveting psychodrama, wowzer ending. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • I’m Fine (Thank You for Asking): a desperate dash for dignity. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Making Montgomery Clift: exploding the myths. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Our Kind of Traitor: Skarsgård steals this robust thriller. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • ’71: keeping the thrill in thriller. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.

KILLER JOE: you sure ain’t gonna be bored

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OK, this is NOT FOR EVERYONE.  Here’s a movie that will either thrill or disgust you. Either way, you sure ain’t gonna be bored.

It’s William Friedkin Week at The Movie Gourmet, and we’re looking at three of the director’s more overlooked films. We’ve covered the neo-noir thriller To Live and to Die in L.A., and the psychological horror movie Bug. Today’s Friedkin classic is another neo-noir, that paragon of perversity, Killer Joe

In Killer Joe, Thomas Haden Church, Gina Gershon and Emile Hirsch play a white trash family with a get-rich-quick scheme.  They give a hit man (Matthew McConaughey) the teen daughter (Juno Temple) as a deposit.  They’re all as dumb as a bag of hammers, so what could go wrong?

Killer Joe was directed by William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) and shot by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Right Stuff, The Natural) in just 20 days.  These guys know how to tell a story, and Killer Joe pops and crackles.

Emile Hirsch, Gina Gershon, Thomas Haden Church and Juno Temple in KILLER JOE. Photo credit: KillerJoeTheMovie.com.

Killer Joe is rated NC-17 for good reason and Friedkin accepts the rating without complaint.  Indeed, Killer Joe has its share of Sam Peckinpah-style screen violence and an unsettling deflowering scene.  But the piece de resistance is an over-the-top sadistic encounter between McConaughey and Gershon involving a chicken drumstick,  at once disturbing and darkly hilarious.   But Sam Fuller and Quentin Tarantino would have loved it, and so did I.  Nevertheless, some viewers will feel like they need a shower after this movie.

Matthew McConaughey in KILLER JOE. Photo credit: KillerJoeTheMovie.com.

The cast does a good job, but the picture really belongs to McConaughey and Temple.  McConaughey was recalibrating his career a la Alec Baldwin – he had just started his move from playing pretty boys in the rom-coms to taking meatier, more interesting roles.  He is both funny and menacing as Killer Joe (and I liked him in Bernie and Magic Mike, too).  Killer Joe preceded his roles in Mud, The Dallas Buyers Club, True Detective  and The Free State of Jones.

The movie slowly makes Juno Temple’s character more and more central, until she takes command of the denouement.  Temple is always sexy (Kaboom and Dirty Girl), and here she is able to ratchet down her intelligence to play a very simple character, always exploited by others, who is finally empowered to take control.

I saw Killer Joe at a screening where Friedkin said that the screenwriter (famed playwright Tracy Letts) saw Juno Temple’s character as the receptacle for all feminine rage.  Friedkin himself sees it as a Cinderella story – just one where Cinderella’s Prince Charming is a professional killer.  That’s all pretty deep sledding to me – I see Killer Joe as a very dark and violent comedy – kinda like In Bruges with twisted sex.

Killer Joe is available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Hulu.

BUG: the “paranoid” in paranoid thriller

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Photo caption: Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon in BUG. Courtesy of Lionsgate.

It’s William Friedkin Week at The Movie Gourmet, and we’re looking at three of the director’s more overlooked films. We’ve examined the neo-noir thriller To Live and to Die in L.A., and today’s choice is the psychological horror movie Bug. We could also describe Bug as a psychotic horror movie.

Ashley Judd plays Agnes, a woman who seems well-balanced but has been made vulnerable by circumstance. She has been shattered by the most profound family tragedy. She’s justifiably terrified of her monstrous estranged husband Jerry (Harry Connick Jr.), and she’s unsettled by being on the run from him and in an unfamiliar environment; there are signs that Jerry is closing in on finding her. She’s found herself living so far from a regular, stable life that’s she’s become profoundly alienated.

Ashley Judd and Lynn Collins in BUG. Courtesy of Lionsgate.

Agnes is street-wise and, in normal times, she could handle herself, but she’s just being overwhelmed by too much shit. She needs some comfort and acceptance, some of which she finds in a new pal R.C. (Lynn Collins), although R.C. enables Agnes’ tendency to get too wasted.

But Agnes could also use some male companionship and physical security and protection. She meets Peter, who, in contrast with Jerry, is civil, kind and not abusive. He’s socially awkward, but he seems really safe and non-threatening.

As soon as they bond and start sharing the same motel room, Peter believes that he has found, first one aphid, and then a slew of them. More alarmingly, Peter is attaching the bugs to a conspiracy theory. Is Peter paranoid, delusional, hallucinating, or is it really a conspiracy? Friedkin and the Tracy Letts screenplay start to play with movie genre conventions.

Agnes is in a place where she is inclined to join Team Peter, and she starts seeing thing Peter’s way. Unfortunately, the two become ever more unhinged, begin deploying vast quantities of aluminum foil and, finally, go to EXTREME LENGTHS.

Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon in BUG. Courtesy of Lionsgate.

Friedkin’s final shot messes with us one last time. Memorably.

What happens in this story is a real thing, called folie à deux, shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder. The person whose delusions become shared by the second person is called the inducer, which gives a new, chilling meaning to the phrase “he drove her crazy“.

Michael Shannon is an actor with an uncommon gift for projecting creepiness. He shot Bug just a year before he broke through in Jeff Nichols’ brilliant indie Shotgun Stories and five years before Nichols’ Take Shelter. Writing about Take Shelter, I described Shannon’s character’s behavior “which starts out quirky, becomes troublesome and spirals down to GET ME OUT OF HERE.”

Ashley Judd in BUG. Courtesy of Lionsgate.

But Bug really depends on Ashley Judd’s performance as Agnes. After all, we can accept that Shannon’s Peter is just balls-out wacko, but Judd has to make us believe that an absolutely sane person can become completely insane on 48 hours. She’s dazzling here. I also recommend Mick LaSalle’s fine review of Bug, focusing on Ashley Judd’s performance

Bug can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.

TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.: obsession without an iota of redemption

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Photo caption: William L. Petersen in TO LIVE AND TO DIE IN L.A. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

It’s William Friedkin Week at The Movie Gourmet, and we’re looking at three of the director’s more overlooked films. First up is his 1985 neo-noir To Live and Die in L.A., now a cult fave of noir fans. It’s a study of amoral obsession without any iota of redemption. Along with directing, Friedkin co-wrote the screenplay.

The secret service agent Chance (William L. Petersen) is consumed with tracking down the counterfeiter Masters (Willem Dafoe). Both are very dangerous men, and it’s pretty clear that no more than one of them is going to survive. Chance’s new partner Vuckovich (John Pankow) has to go along for the ride – and it’s a doozy.

Friedkin begins To Live and Die in L.A. with a thrilling set piece, involving terrorism in a highrise, that introduces Chance as a nervy stud. Then we meet Masters, and learn that he is anything but an ordinary criminal. Just when we have caught our breath, Friedkin toys with us in a scene that establishes that Chance is a reckless adrenaline freak.

The stage is now set for a manhunt, and Chance unleashes all his ruthlessness. Poor Vuckovich stands in for the audience as he and we are repeatedly shocked by Chance’s amorality, even corruption.

The car chase in Friedkin’s The French Connection remains the gold standard, but the one in To Live and Die in L.A. is also extraordinary. This one careens through LA’s freeways (including wrong way on the freeway), industrial areas and the cement channel of the Los Angeles River. The LA River has since been the site of countless movie chases, but it first was prominently featured in Point Blank and To Live and Die in L.A. may have been the river’s first car chase in a mainstream movie. All of the action is photographed by master cinematographer Robby Mueller.

Of course, along with the thrills of the chase and Chance’s astonishing behavior, we also get a counterfeiter procedural as Masters combines art, craft and greed as he prints his own faux money.

Willem Dafoe in TO LIVE AND TO DIE IN L.A. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

This was Willem Dafoe’s first major film role, just before Platoon and The Last Temptation of Christ. Dafoe, in an understated performance, oozes menace as the smooth, but very lethal, Masters.

William Petersen inhabits Chance with none of the gruff lovability he would show on CSI. It’s a balls-to-the-wall performance. Interestingly, Petersen didn’t get high profile jobs for the next fifteen years until CSI.

Dean Stockwell is perfect as a shady lawyer. Debra Feuer, John Tuturro and the renegade filmmaker Robert Downey, Sr., also appear in supporting roles.

William L. Petersen and John Pankow in TO LIVE AND TO DIE IN L.A. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

The ending is so dark that the studio insisted that Friedkin shoot an alternative ending, in which a main character improbably survives. Fortunately, that alternative ending was not affixed to the final cut of the film. You can view the alternative ending on YouTube, with the comments of Friedkin, Petersen and Pankow.

To Live and to Die in L.A. is available on Blu-Ray from Shout! Factory and in 4K from Kino Lorber. I’ll let you know when you can stream it or if it shows up again on TV.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Shere Hite in THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SHERE HITE, playing at the Nashville Film Festival. Courtesy of NashFilm.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – Must See at NashFilm, Under the Radar at NashFilm and a streaming recommendation of Charm Circle, a film I discovered at an earlier NashFilm. Plus, I got around to recommending Master Gardener.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

Aviva Armour-Ostroff (left) in LUNE, world premiere at Cinequest. Photo credit: Samantha Falco. Courtesy of Cinequest.

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

  • Lune: funny, searing, and richly authentic. Amazon.
  • Undefeated: an Oscar winner you haven’t seen. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Kimi: an adequate REAR WINDOWS ends as a thrilling WAIT UNTIL DARK. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Summertime: no longer invisible and unheard, giving voice through verse. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Phoenix: riveting psychodrama, wowzer ending. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • I’m Fine (Thank You for Asking): a desperate dash for dignity. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Making Montgomery Clift: exploding the myths. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Our Kind of Traitor: Skarsgård steals this robust thriller. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • ’71: keeping the thrill in thriller. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.

Under the radar at NashFilm

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Raymond David Taylor in CATERPILLAR. Courtesy of NashFilm.

While the Nashville Film Festival has its share of high-profile movies, don’t miss the gems that are screening under the radar. These movies are why we go to film festivals. Here are my top picks.

  • Caterpillar: In this riveting documentary, we meet David, an engaging man who is consumed by changing one aspect of his appearance – the color of his eyes. He decides to seek cosmetic iris implant surgery at a shady clinic in India. Is his problem the color of his eyes, or that he is obsessed with the color of his eyes? David’s loving but unfiltered mother is very important to him, but she is damaged herself and ill-equipped to communicate with or support him emotionally. In India, David meets other patients, who seem to have more superficial rationales for the surgery than does David. They have all been enticed by commercials on YouTube, and neither David or his fellow patients have asked the question – why is this procedure not legal in the US or any developed nation? Caterpillar becomes a profound exploration of body image, swirling amid issues of race, sexuality and gender identity. David is easy to root for, right through a series of MOG moments. David’s intensely personal and harrowing journey is expertly told by director Lisa Mandelup in her second feature. NashFilm hosts what is only the second screening for Caterpillar, which premiered at SXSW.
  • A Strange Path: With a trippy beginning, writer-director Guto Parente lets us know that we’re in for a bizarre, often absurd, but ultimately redemptive experience. After growing up with his mother in Portugal, the twenty-something filmmaker David (Lucas Limeira) returns to his native Brazil to premiere his first feature at a film festival. It’s the very onset of the COVID pandemic, and the festival is postponed, his flights are canceled, his hotel closes, and David finds himself marooned in the lockdown. He shows up on the doorstep of his long-estranged father, and has increasingly surreal interactions with him. It turns out that David is on a strange path to a destination that he does not, and the audience cannot, anticipate. A Strange Path, which swept the international film awards at Tribeca, is like a COVID fever dream. In a good way.
  • Cypher: Filmmaker Chris Moukarbel toys with us in this ingenious narrative in the form of pseudo documentary about rapper Tierra Whack. As in any music doc, we meet Whack (smart, genuine and naturally charming) and trace her artistic emergence. Whack’s real life team and Moukarbel’s real-life crew play themselves. Fifteen minutes in, they meet a fawning fan in a diner, an interesting woman who soon veers into conspiracy talk. Whack continues with a world tour, on the road to shooting a music video. Whack and Moukarbel are unsettled when secretly-filmed video of them shows up on social media. Moukarbel is hounded by the unbalanced daughter (Biona Bradley – perfect) of the woman in the diner. The intrusions become increasingly menacing, and are tied to the same conspiracy theory. Reeling, the film crew visits the daughter, but the threats only escalate, all the way to a showdown on a video shooting set. It’s hard to tell when the story dips in and out of fiction, and this is definitely not a movie you’ve seen before.
  • Dusty and Stones: For an unadulterated Feel Good movie, it’s hard to beat this little documentary that layers on the improbabilities. It’s about a Country Western duo from Swaziland (since renamed Eswatini) who get a chance to visit Nashville and compete in a Texas country music festival. Who knew there was a Country Western music scene in Swaziland, complete with line dancing and Stetsons? There are plenty of nuggets here., beginning with the guys’ unbounded joy at hearing their music recorded with the very best Nashville studio equipment and session musicians. And they explain to the denizens of an African-American barbershop that they are headed for a country music festival in a small East Texas town. And, sitting in a Nashville motel, they contemplate their first Taco Bell cuisine. It’s a little movie, but it’s a hoot. Dusty and Stone will appear in person at NashFilm.

Also see my Previewing the Nashville Film Festival and Must See at NashFilm . Check out the program and buy tickets at the festival’s Film Guide. 

Lucas Limeira in A STRANGE PATH. Courtesy of NashFilm.

Must See at NashFilm

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Shere Hite in THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SHERE HITE. Courtesy of NashFilm.

The Nashville Film Festival opens tomorrows and runs through October 4. Overall, it’s a strong program, but here are two films that you shouldn’t miss.

  • The Disappearance of Shere Hite: This film, a triumph for director Nicole Newnham (Crip Camp), explores the life and times of the groundbreaking sex researcher and best-selling author. A woman of uncommon confidence, determination and resourcefulness, Hite sailed into the face of the patriarchy. Denied resources and respect by the academic establishment, her guerilla research uncovered pivotal truths of female sexuality and spoke them for the first time. The resulting sensation brought fame, acclaim and notoriety to Hite, accompanied by both financial success and a vicious backlash. The persistence of that backlash, and its personal toll, caused Hite to essentially revoke her own celebrity. Hite did not suffer fools, and was fearless until she wasn’t. We meet a slew of Hite’s intimates in this superbly sourced film and gain insight into her personality. Shere Hite speaks to us directly in file footage and in her writings, voiced by Dakota Johnson. For those of us who were roaming the earth in the 1970s, it’s still jarring to see the cultural resistance to what we now accept as biological fact. For those experiencing this story for the first time, it’s astonishing and powerful. I understand that women under age forty-five, having missed Shere Hite’s moment of ubiquitous media presence, are responding strongly to this film.
  • Caterpillar: In this riveting documentary, we meet David, an engaging man who is consumed by changing one aspect of his appearance – the color of his eyes. He decides to seek cosmetic iris implant surgery at a shady clinic in India. Is his problem the color of his eyes, or that he is obsessed with the color of his eyes? David’s loving but unfiltered mother is very important to him, but she is damaged herself and ill-equipped to communicate with or support him emotionally. In India, David meets other patients, who seem to have more superficial rationales for the surgery than does David. They have all been enticed by commercials on YouTube, and neither David or his fellow patients have asked the question – why is this procedure not legal in the US or any developed nation? Caterpillar becomes a profound exploration of body image, swirling amid issues of race, sexuality and gender identity. David is easy to root for, right through a series of MOG moments. David’s intensely personal and harrowing journey is expertly told by director Lisa Mandelup in her second feature. NashFilm hosts what is only the second screening for Caterpillar, which premiered at SXSW.

Also see my Previewing the Nashville Film Festival and Under the Radar at NashFilm. Check out the program and buy tickets at the festival’s Film Guide.