Movies – Page 101 – The Movie Gourmet

SFFILM: interview with DISCREET director Travis Mathews

April 8, 2017 by movie gourmet

Travis Mathews photo courtesy of SFFILM — Travis Mathews
photo courtesy of SFFILM

Here’s an interview with San Francisco filmmaker Travis Mathews, the writer-director of Discreet. Mathews has also directed Do I Look Fat?, I Want Your Love, Interior. Leather Bar. and the In Their Room documentary series. The San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) is hosting the U.S. premiere of Mathews’ newest film Discreet, which debuted at the Berlinale.

The Movie Gourmet: SFFILM is giving your U.S. premiere the prime Saturday 9 PM slot at the Castro. Must be a good feeling.

Travis Mathews: Two of my earlier films have been screened at the Castro in the Frameline Festival, but not at the San Francisco International Film Festival. I can tell you that it’s pretty awesome. It’s my favorite theater in the world.

TMG: Where did you find Bob Swaffar, and just how tall is he? [Bob Swaffer plays John, the child sexual abuser, in Discreet.]

Travis Mathews: He’s really, really tall. 6′ 7″, I think. At least 6′ 5″. I found most of our cast at an open call in Austin – which is its own interesting experience. Bob is a gentle, wise man who makes pottery. I had already decided that his character would not speak.

TMG: Did you see a menace in Bob?

Travis Mathews: No. I knew that menace would be created by the editing and sound design, and that the menace would be projected (on Bob) by the audience. It’s like a Rorschach Test.

TMG: And where did you find Joy Cunningham? She’s great in a brief scene as Alex’ mom Sharon.

Travis Mathews: She’s a friend of mine, a lesbian married to a great woman with a couple of great kids. At the time (of shooting Discreet), they were renting out the house where Sharon lives (in the movie). Joy is a comedic actress. She had never done drama, but I knew that she’d be great. She and her wife Gretchen, they were invaluable when I was writing the film, giving me notes on the screenplay.

TMG: You’ve made a revenge film where the final act of violence is off-camera. It’s kind of anti-Peckinpah, with none of the customary splatter for the genre. What informed this choice?

Travis Mathews: In previous films, I’ve explored the opposite and showed more, especially raw emotion. This time I wanted to play with withholding instead of showing. That was part of the fun in making Discreet. We did a lot of test screenings and the audiences told me, “yeah, I already knew that” or “this wasn’t clear”. That helped with the editing choices of what to withhold.

Travis Mathews: I didn’t want to be so clear who was in the body (the body bag floating down the river) at the end. I have an idea, but it is elliptical. I don’t want to be “I don’t know – who did YOU think it was?”. But it (the ambiguity) strengthened the movie.

[Note: If the body isn’t the most obvious character, as I’d thought, then it’s got to be…Holy Toledo! This movie would be even darker than I’d recognized!]

TMG: Why did you have your characters carry out clandestine acts next to a freeway, when we would expect you to have set them out in the woods where no one could see?

Travis Mathews: I was in Texas for a long time on another film project. I was driving around the same van that Alex drives in Discreet. I became fascinated by the freeway structure in Texas. So many are built almost like roller coasters for reasons that seemed arbitrary. It’s a like a Texas show of strength: We have the tallest freeways! So I found it both absurd and fascinating. I wanted them to be a man-made monster in the background. A freeway is in the background of every setting except Joy/Sharon’s house. It made sense.

TMG: What’s the distribution plan for Discreet?

Travis Mathews: It’s being released (theatrically) in the UK and Ireland. We’re playing the festival circuit (here in the U.S.) as part of our strategy to get distribution. It’s a tough movie. I know that’s it’s not a commercial movie in several respects. I hope that people see it – it is a film that lingers, as it did with you.

TMG: What is your next project?

Travis Mathews: I will be a little coy here. I’m working on two projects. One is a remake of a 1970s film. The other is an original with horror elements. I want to do a horror movie, and Discreet is inching me toward the genre.

TMG: Will these be films that you both write and direct?

Travis Mathews: Yes.

TMG: One last question – and it’s about Interior. Leather Bar. Do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that Friedkin had to cut an entire FORTY minutes of gay sex from Cruising?

Travis Mathews: Maybe not all gay sex, but forty minutes of what someone found too sexual, too violent or too something. Maybe 37 or 42, but about 40 minutes, yes.

On Sunday evening at 6 PM, Travis Mathews and author Karl Soehnlein will be speaking about art in the age of Trump, including Discreet, at Dog Eared Books, 489 Castro Street, San Francisco.

Bob Swaffar (left) and Jonny Mars in DISCREET photo courtesy of m-appeal World Sales — Bob Swaffar (left) and Jonny Mars in DISCREET
photo courtesy of m-appeal World Sales

SFFILMFestival: DISCREET

April 7, 2017 by movie gourmet

Jonny Mars in DISCREET photo courtesy of SFFILM — Jonny Mars in DISCREET
photo courtesy of SFFILM

The San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) presents the U.S. premiere of the psychological drama Discreet tomorrow, April 8 – and it should be the indie highlight of the festival.

Within a revenge tale, writer-director Travis Mathews has braided threads of social criticism and political comment. Most of all, Discreet is a compelling portrait of one damaged, very unwell guy and a thoughtful exploration of the alienating aspects of the current American zeitgeist.

Discreet is centered on Alex (Jonny Mars), who has drifted back through his Texas hometown to find that his childhood sexual abuser has re-surfaced. Alex is untethered either to home or sanity. Away from home for a long time, Alex has been roaming the country, oddly stopping to shoot videos of freeway traffic. The most hateful alt-right talk radio plays incessantly from the radio of his van. And, in a creepy juxtaposition, he’s obsessed with a New Agey YouTube publisher (the comic Atsuko Okatsuka).

Alex sets out to find and confront his abuser (Bob Swaffer), and Discreet takes us on a moody and intense journey, filled with unexpected – and even flabbergasting – moments. Only the ultimate vengeance seems inevitable – and even that act is handled with surprising subtlety. The catharsis is intentionally understated, and there is none of the customary splatter.

Swaffer’s physicality, along with his character’s condition, makes him a monster unlike anything I’ve seen in a movie before – a unique blend of the bone-chilling and the vulnerable.

Discreet is only 80 minutes long; keeping it short was a great choice by Mathews, allowing the film to succeed with a deliberate, but never plodding, pace. We’re continually wondering what Alex is going to do next, and the editing by Mathews and Don Swaynos keeps the audience on alert. Cinematographer Drew Xanthopoulos makes effective use of the static long shot and gives Discreet a singular look. The idiosyncratic sound design, with its droning and its use of ambient noises, sets the mood. It’s an effective package – and an impressive calling card for Travis Mathews.

While he’s in town, Alex is on the lookout for secret – and sometimes very kinky – sex with other men. It’s a comment on the repression in Flyover American culture that drives gay sexual expression underground. And furtiveness can make anything seem seamy. Indeed, the movie’s title comes from the Craiglist euphemism for anonymous sexual hookups.

One critic referred to Discreet as “Travis Mathews’ latest queer experiment”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s far too narrow a label. True, Discreet definitely comes from the point of view of a gay filmmaker, and it addresses the repression of gay sexual expression. But this is a film, with its broader focus on alienation, that is important for and accessible to every adult audience.

Mathews previously collaborated with James Franco on Interior. Leather Bar., which is nothing at all like Discreet. Interior. Leather Bar. is talky and centered on artistic process with a hint of sensationalism. Discreet more resembles an experimental film such as Upstream Color. Come to think of it, Discreet has more of the feel of a budget indie (and less languorous) version of Antonioni‘s The Passenger.

Jonny Mars is very effective as Alex, a character who is usually stone-faced, but whose intensity sometimes takes him completely off the rails. In her one speaking scene as Alex’s mom, Joy Cunningham’s stuttering affect gives us a glimpse into both her past parental unreliability and her current clinging to sobriety by her fingernails.

But the heart of Discreet is Alex and his unpredictable path. To what degree has Alex’s madness been formed by the childhood abuse? To what extent has he been deranged by absorbing random and unhealthy bits of American popular culture? Stylistically, Discreet is a near-masterpiece, and audiences that embrace the discomfort of the story will be rewarded with a satisfying, ever-surprising experience.

THE ASSIGNMENT: hit man becomes hit woman

April 6, 2017 by movie gourmet

In the gloriously pulpy revenge thriller The Assignment, a vengeful plastic surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) captures a hit man (Michelle Rodriguez) and performs sexual reassignment surgery on him, releasing a new hit woman (also Michelle Rodriguez) into the world – and lethal mayhem ensues.

The Assignment comes from the master of the genre thriller, director Walter Hill (The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs.). Hill is a story-teller who enjoys a brisk pace, and The Assignment flies along its 95 minutes.

Michelle Rodriguez, the toughest of the Tough Chicks, nails the hit man/hit woman roles. She plays the male character very naturally (with a little CGI help in a glimpse of his naked frontside). When the protagonist becomes a woman, Rodriguez keeps her eyes very male – and very pissed off. Her performance at the moment of gender reveal is perfect.

Sigourney Weaver had the audience roaring at her character’s narcissism. Weaver and Tony Shaloub successfully pull of the highly stylized genre dialogue. Anthony LaPaglia is excellent as a mid-level gangster.

Don’t expect Brokeback Mountain for the trans set. This is, after all, an involuntary gender reassignment. The main character is a man who is turned biologically into a woman, while still identifying internally as a man. The gender reassignment is a plot device, and it is a hostile act, not a means of self-fulfillment.

75-year-old Walter Hill was present at the Cinequest screening. Costing only $2.8 million, The Assignment was shot in Vancouver over only 25 days. Hill said that he was “wanted to do a neo-noir comic booky kind of thing” (which well-describes The Assignment). The film was adapted from Hill’s graphic novel, which has been out in France since last year; it will be released in the US before the end of March. Hill expects a sequel to the graphic novel.

The Cinequest audience – by no means the usual action thriller crowd – reacted very favorably to The Assignment. Shown at Cinequest with the title (re)Assignment, this film is being released with the title The Assignment. It’s available now on Ultra VOD and YouTube. It will opens nationally tomorrow, but only on 30 screens. I’ll let you know when it becomes more widely available – because I enjoyed it!

CARRIE PILBY: genius misfit afoot in Manhattan

March 30, 2017 by movie gourmet

The title character in the agreeable misfit comedy Carrie Pilby (Bel Powley) is literally a genius, a girl with such high intelligence that she enrolled at Harvard at age 14. That experience proved to be better for her intellectual development than for her emotional development. Now she’s 19, a year out of college and holed up in her Manhattan apartment pretending that she’s anti-social because no one is smart enough to engage with her. She emerges only to see her therapist (Nathan Lane), who assigns her some tasks to draw her out, and comic adventures ensue.

Carrie sequentially encounters three dreamy-looking guys and all of the male characters except one are very sensitive. But Carrie Pilby isn’t one of those Chick Flicks that men won’t enjoy.

Powley is very good at making the audience relate to someone by definition very unlike us. She has mastered the comic take and has excellent timing.

I watched Carrie Pilby at a Cinequest screening with director Susan Johnson. Johnson says that the source material, a popular novel, “was about not judging a book by its cover”. She continued, “Think about your own journey and not judging others – that’s kind of deep for a comedy”. Johnson, who shot the film in only 20 days, said that her favorite scene was the prayer scene.

Carrie Pilby is an enjoyable comedy. It opens theatrically on March 31, on VOD on April 4 and will be on Netflix in September.

PERSONAL SHOPPER: Kristin Stewart can’t save this mess

March 28, 2017 by movie gourmet

Kristen Stewart’s brilliant performance isn’t enough to save Olivier Assaya’s murky French drama Personal Shopper. Stewart plays a woman who is working as a personal shopper for an obnoxious celebrity, but she really identifies as a medium. She is grieving her twin brother, who died a few months before. He was also a medium, and the two had resolved that the first to die would contact the survivor from Beyond. As Personal Shopper opens, she is walking around her brother’s house and muttering his name without turning on any lights. Does she find him? Does she find something even scarier? Do we care?

Assayas takes Personal Shopper bouncing along between movie genres – from Ghost Story to a moment of Horror, then to Mystery Thriller and finally Ghost Story again. Some critics have credited him with a highly original approach to an exploration of grief. But, no, Personal Shopper is just a mess. Grief has shocked the main character into a malaise, but Personal Shopper keeps changing its focus to her fears and her sexuality. If you want to see a good movie about grief, try Manchester by the Sea, Five Nights in Maine or Rabbit Hole.

Near the beginning of Personal Shopper, there’s some very clumsy exposition – as if a character were reading from the Wikipedia page on spiritualism. The big mystery in Personal Shopper is who is sending her texts, and that question is never resolved. I’m usually OK with ambiguous movie endings, but this would have bothered me if I had cared.

Nonetheless, Kristin Stewart is superb. Stewart seems completely natural when her character feels deep terror, grief or fascination and also when her emotions are stunted or repressed and her affect is blunted. There’s a moment of auto-eroticism that is very, well, erotic. Stewart holds our attention in every scene. She’s so damned watchable that we always want to know what her character is thinking and about to do.

Stewart may be good, but Personal Shopper is not worth 105 minutes of anyone’s life.

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING: you can’t revisit the past and guarantee closure

March 17, 2017 by movie gourmet

The veteran actor Jim Broadbent paints a remarkable portrait of Tony, the main character in the British drama The Sense of an Ending, and he makes it look easy. Retired and long-divorced, Tony is entirely comfortable is a solitary life that he has chosen, perhaps not voluntarily, by being so damn selfish and curmudgeonly. In some very funny moments, we learn that he does not suffer fools. An incident revives a brief period of passion in his youth, and he can’t let it go (although we know that he really should). As he plunges on, he unpeels the mystery, layer by layer, and discovers more emotional turmoil than he is prepared to deal with. He learns that we cannot always find closure, especially if it depends on the feelings of others and acts and words with cannot be undone.

As good as Broadbent is, the best scenes are with Tony’s ex-wife (Harriet Walker – who really shines in this film) and the romantic interest of his youth (the irreplaceable Charlotte Rampling).

You are forgiven if, after reading a capsule or watching the trailer, you think that The Sense of an Ending is another 45 Years; after all both focus on a retired British gentleman whose life is rocked by an unexpected call or letter and both feature stunning performances by Charlotte Rampling. But it is not. 45 Years meditates on the power and durability of memories and then shifts into a study of relationships; we see intimacy without the sharing of all truths, and see how the truth can be toxic and destructive. In contrast, The Sense of an Ending explores how emotional detachment is very protective, and what happens when one ventures into emotional vulnerability. 45 Years was Charlotte Rampling’s movie, while she has only a couple of brief, although hard-hitting, scenes in The Sense of an Ending.

The Sense of an Ending played at Cinequest before its theatrical release and was well-received by the audience. I like The Sense of an Ending more than does the critical consensus, perhaps because it’s the best new movie widely released in the Bay Area this week.

THE LAST WORD: a forceful dose of Shirley MacLaine

April 14, 2017March 16, 2017 by movie gourmet

In the comedy The Last Word, Shirley MacLaine plays a control freak of absolutely unstoppable will. This is a person who is obsessed with getting her own way on even the most inconsequential detail. She is living a wealthy retirement, having been forced out of the company she founded when her behavior becomes too unbearable for everyone else. Facing her mortality, she decides to employ an obituary writer (Amanda Seyfried) to favorably pre-write her obit. The challenge, of course, is that no one – family members, former co-workers, anyone – has anything nice to say. This sets up an Odd Couple comedy until it becomes an Odd Trio when Harriet seeks to improve her obit profile by mentoring a disadvantaged nine-year-old (AnnJewel Lee Dixon).

Often contrived, The Last Word isn’t a masterpiece, but it has three things going for it:

Shirley MacLaine is in full willful grandeur, and her performance is tour de force.
Supporting players: Anne Heche is priceless in a “she is your daughter” scene. AnnJewel Lee Dixon is a force of nature herself, kind of a Shirley Mini-Me. Philip Baker Hall is a wonderful match for Maclaine. Thomas Sodoski is always appealing.
The remarkably smart soundtrack, which almost becomes a character of its own.

I did also appreciate the brief homage to Reservoir Dogs, the slo-mo power stride with sunglasses (pictured above).

I saw The Last Word at Cinequest at a screening with director Mark Pellington, who noted that The Last Word took 25 days to film. Crediting his music supervisor for finding obscure and affordable songs, he said, “the music works on an infectious level”. Describing the scene where the three actresses take a moonlit dip in a pond, he said, “I love that their laugh deflates the symbolism of it”. His favorite scene was the obne when Philip Baker Hall tells Shirley MacLaine, “I knew what I was getting when I married you”, which inspired Pellington’s next movie Nostalgia (now in post-production).

Cinequest: (re)ASSIGNMENT (now THE ASSIGNMENT)

March 12, 2017 by movie gourmet

The Cinequest audience – by no means the usual action thriller crowd – reacted very favorably to The Assignment. Shown at Cinequest with the title (re)Assignment, his film is being released with the title The Assignment. It’s available now on Ultra VOD and YouTube. It will open nationally on April 7, but only on 30 screens. I’ll let you know when it becomes more widely available – because I enjoyed it!

Cinequest: CARRIE PILBY

March 26, 2017March 12, 2017 by movie gourmet

Carrie sequentially encounters three dreamy-looking guys and all of the male characters except one are very sensitive. But Carrie Pilby isn’t a Chick Flick that men won’t enjoy.

Powley is very good at making the audience relate to someone by definition very unlike us. She has mastered the comic take and has excellent timing.

I watched Carrie Pilby at Cinequest; at a screening with director Susan Johnson. Johnson says that the source material, a popular novel, “was about not judging a book by its cover”. She continued, “Think about your own journey and not judging others – that’s kind of deep for a comedy”. Johnson, who shot the film in only 20 days, said that her favorite scene was the prayer scene.

Carrie Pilby is an enjoyable comedy. It opens theatrically on March 31, on VOD on April 4 and will be on Netflix in September.

Cinequest: THE PROMISE

March 12, 2017 by movie gourmet

In a predictable trudge through the Armenian Genocide, The Promise delivers nothing that we haven’t seen before. Oscar Isaac plays an impoverished Armenian from the Anatolian outback who dreams of becoming a doctor. To afford medical school in Constantinople, he uses the dowry available after his betrothal to a sweet and prominently-schnozzed local girl. For his studies, he moves alone to the big city, where he meets a cosmopolitan Armenian beauty (Charlotte Le Bon), who has been living in Paris with her boyfriend, an iconoclastic American journalist (Christian Bale). Just as sparks fly between Isaac and Le Bon, World War I erupts and the Turks persecute and then massacre Armenians, causing the two to flee separately for their lives. Isaac’s medical student finds himself hiding in his home village, married to his fiance. Le Bon’s sophisticate is on the run with Bale’s journalist as he covers the developments. Will the Armenian lovers meet again in Eastern Turkey, and will he stay true to his marital vows?

The talents of Isaac and Bale are wasted in this movie. Isaac’s character is so top-to-bottom decent and so buffeted by developments that are not his fault, there just isn’t much texture to portray. Similarly, Bale’s reporter, while purportedly an international man of mystery, is just a Jeff Bridgesey teddy bear of a guy at his core.

The Promise is not as bad as the epically bad epic The Ottoman Lieutenant, and has much higher superior production values and a moderately better screenplay. Both movies share the beginning of World War I and the Armenian Genocide, along with an American protestant mission in southeastern Turkey. As in The Ottoman Lieutenant, there’s an unintentional audience laugh – when Isaac’s mother intones “I told them you were dead”.

Keep walking.