Steve Starr and Gay Walley in EROTIC FIRE OF THE UNATTAINABLE
Cinequest’s October virtual festival CINEJOY. runs through October 14. I’ve written about the best of Cinejoy, and here are five more Cinejoy films.
Erotic Fire of the Unattainable: My favorite discovery so far at Cinejoy, this is a captivating study of a free spirited woman of a certain age and her asymmetric relationships. It’s docufiction – “people playing themselves in stories that relate to their own real lives”. Here’s my full review.
The Last Days of Capitalism: Taking place entirely in a Vegas hotel luxury suite, a rich forty-something extends his encounter with a much younger hooker into several days of verbal probing and sparring. It’s kind of My Dinner With Andre with spa robes and sex. It turns out that he is hedonistic for a purpose, and she is more than she seems, too.
Far East Deep South: In this genealogy documentary, a Northern California Chinese-American family is stunned to discover that they have roots in Mississippi.
Watch Me Kill: Filipino actress Jean Garcia stars as a pitiless and prolific contract killer. Something from her past is haunting her, and there is a mind twisting thread. I was okay with the relentless violence, as would Quentin Tarantino, but not every viewer would be.
The Return of Richard III on the 9:14 am Train: This French comedy of manners centers on a crew of neurotic actors holed up in a vacation rental to rehearse a project. Although it’s got the best title in Cinejoy, it’s only mildly funny.
Gay Walley in EROTIC FIRE OF THE UNATTAINABLE. Courtesy of Vital Productions.
My favorite discovery so far at Cinejoy, Erotic Fire of the Unattainable is the captivating study of a free spirited woman of a certain age and her relationships. Gay (Gay Walley) is a NYC author in her 60s who has a boyfriend, but there are other men available to sample; she’s had a history of struggles in trying to find a guy who is the best fit.
Her relationships are all asymmetric – either she loves the man more than he loves her, or he loves her more.
We don’t see many movies about the romantic lives of women of a certain age, but assessing the relative appeal of lovers is a universal quandary. Unless you have lucked into the Ideal Partner (like I have with The Wife), there are trade offs.
As the actress Gay Walley says about the character Gay, “She is a free spirit. All the men come with strings. She clearly wants to be with someone but she can’t take the strings.”
Steve Starr and Gay Walley in EROTIC FIRE OF THE UNATTAINABLE. Courtesy of Vital Productions
Director Frank Vitale works in his own form of cinema, docufiction – “people playing themselves in stories that relate to their own real lives”. He casts non-actors and their friends, who act out stories that spring from their own real life experiences. His star, Gay Smalley, gets the screenwriting credit. Smalley, who in real life has published a novel entitled Erotic Fire of the Unattainable, plays the author Gay, who has penned a book of the same name.
He may use non-actors, but there’s nothing amateurish about Vitale’s filmmaking – Erotic Fire of the Unattainable looks great. The cinematographer is Niav Conty, who directed another Cinequest/Cinejoy gem, Small Time.
You can stream Erotic Fire of the Unattainable through October 14 at CINEJOY. After the film, there’s an insightful interview with Vitale and Walley.
Michelle Rodriguez and Debbie Evans in StUNTWOMEN: THE UNTOLD HOLLYWOOD STORY. Photo Credit Shout! Factory
“Actresses play characters, but stuntwoman play actresses playing characters, while driving fast and kicking ass.”
That’s one of the professional movie stuntwomen summing up the business in the documentary Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story. Stunt performing and stunt coordinating are underappreciated by most of us – and certainly kept in the background by the industry (and the Oscars). It’s hard and dangerous enough to perform movie stunts, but females have also had to battle against persistent gender bias.
Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story takes us back to the first decade of silent films, when actresses did their own extreme stunts, until they became too valuable in box office terms to be expendable. At that point, women were frozen out of the stunt business for half a century. Michelle Rodriguez, who is currently our most kickass/badass actress, helps introduce us to today’s world of women who specialize in fighting, crashing cars, falling off great heights and getting set on fire.
We meet Jeannie Epper, who doubled Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman and Jadie David, who doubled Pam Grier in all those Blaxploitation action movies. (Epper fell backwards out of tall buildings, and then the film was reversed to create the effect of Wonder Woman zooming upwards.)
We also learn the meaning of “wigging a guy”. And we are reminded that stuntwomen often double actresses who are wearing high heels, and that skimpy outfits don’t allow for much protective padding.
This is solid women’s history and a great inside glimpse at the movie biz. Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story can be streamed from iTunes and Google Play.
Documentarian Al Bailey and his subject “Christian” swiping though Tinder. Photo courtesy of DTF and Gravitas Ventures.
In all fairness, the wild and unpleasant DTF is not the documentary that filmmaker Al Bailey planned to make. Bailey wanted to explore the world of dating apps by following a heavy user of Tinder as he coursed through a series of casual hook-ups.
Bailey thought he had the perfect subject, his friend Christian, a widowed, globe-hopping airline pilot. Bailey expected to harvest lots of prurient fodder from the horny Christian’s meeting and dating lots of single ladies across the world. And Bailey, who had introduced Christian and his late wife of 14 years, justifiably thought he knew Christian.
But Christian had become an altogether different person, not just a party hound, but someone who had descended into a vortex of sex addiction, depression and substance dependency. And when Christian is drunk, we see a despicable torrent of misogyny and racism.
“Christian” is not the pilot’s real name – and his face and voice are obscured throughout the film. If identified, he would certainly lose his job because DTF documents alcohol and drug use that violates the restrictions for long haul airline pilots.
“Men behaving badly” has become a genre of its own in narrative cinema and even documentaries. DTF is not that. Christian’s behavior is not just hedonistic, but jaw-droppingly dangerous to others. He is not just a jerk, but a public menace.
Now Bailey is not blameless here. There are several cringe-heavy moments where Bailey reneges on promises to Christian and his dates to stop filming them. And Bailey tries a Michael Moore-style ambush of Tinder’s corporate HQ, a tactic that I despise even when Moore or 60 Minutes deploys it. And there are moments where Bailey and his colleagues debate the ethics of continuing when the film itself may be prompting Christian toward even more risky behavior.
Sometimes I’ll watch a movie and feel like I need to shower afterwards. After DTF, I felt like I needed to dive into a pool of disinfectant. DTF is available to stream from on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and other platforms.
In director Justine Triet’s sex-filled (and sometimes darkly funny) melodrama Sibyl, the psychotherapist Sibyl (Virginie Efira) decides to phase out her practice and return to her primary obsession – novel writing. Sibyl is changing the trajectory of her own life, and she reflects on the one true love in her past (Niels Schneider), her sobriety, her parenting and the family of her sister (Laure Calamy).
While off-loading most of her patients, Sibyl picks up a new one – a needy young actress (Adèle Exarchopoulos from Blue Is the Warmest Color). The actress is about to jump start her movie career, but she’s having an affair with the other lead actor (Gaspar Ulliel), who is inconveniently married to the director Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann).
Each of these threads is its own melodrama, and Triet braids them together into an always entertaining story. We are our choices – and we can be our impulses.
Sibyl may be a psychotherapist, but she hasn’t mastered the concept of boundaries. Most egregiously, she doesn’t hesitate to use the personal secrets of her patients as fodder for her novels. Yikes! And she doesn’t resist rampant boundary-crossing by the actress, the actor and the director, either, and she’s used by all of them.
The characters, especially Sibyl, fill the camera lens with passionate sex – on the floor, up against a door, on the beach, on an apartment bathroom’s sink, on the deck of a boat, but not, to the best of my recollection, on a bed.
Niels Schneider and Virginie Efira in SIBYL
There’s lots of sly, dark humor, beginning with the over-intellectualized mansplaining in the very first scene. The sister is hilarious, especially when she coaches her niece on how to manipulate her mother. At one point, the director of the film-within-the-film responds to a lover’s meltdown on the set: “Guys, let’s keep the drama fictional if you don’t mind.“
The scene where the director first meets the actress who has just been impregnated by the director’s husband is another comic masterpiece from Hüller.
Many of us so revere French cinema that we forget that one of the things French filmmakers do well is trashy. And Sibyl is every bit as trashy as Fifty Shades of Grey. However, the editing (Laurent Sénéchal) and the acting are so exquisite that it masks the trashiness of the story.
Sibyl is streaming on Virtual Cinema; I watched it at the Laemmle.
Ah-In Yoo in #ALIVE, Photo courtesy of Perspective Pictures.
Just suppose there’s a pandemic and you can’t leave your home. Oh, wait…
In #Alive, a pulmonary affliction is causing people in a Korean metropolis to savagely attack and bite other humans, further spreading the pandemic. The young gamer Jun-woo (Ah-In Yoo) is isolated in his eighth floor apartment, under siege from what are essentially zombies. It’s kind of Home Alone with zombies.
The hook here is that, like in Home Alone, our hero must depend on his ingenuity to survive, both in fighting off the cannibalistic attackers and in harvesting equipment, food and water from the ravaged apartment building. Fortunately, he discovers another, much smarter survivor, a girl (Shin Hye-Park) holed up in the apartment building across the courtyard. There are two surprises in the final 20 minutes.
Ah-In Yoo (wielding golf club) in #ALIVE, Photo courtesy of Perspective Pictures.
This is the first feature for writer-director Il Cho. He peppers #Alive with funny bits, all the more effective because he doesn’t linger on any of them. One example is when Jun-Yoo presses a button to wait for an elevator as a horde of zombies rush toward him.
#Alive contains the requisite amount of throat biting, brain eating, amputations and bloody splatter for a zombie movie. If you don’t like gore, there are better choices for you on my list of Zombie Movies for People Who Don’t Like Zombie Movies.
This isn’t great cinema, but it has its moments. #Alive is streaming on Netflix. On Netflix, the Korean dialogue is both subtitled and dubbed into English.
In the indie comedy Lucky Grandma, an elderly woman resists leaving her apartment in New York City’s Chinatown to join her son’s family in the burbs, Her plan is to invest her savings on a wild night in a New Jersey casino, but she falls into an ill-gotten treasure, running afoul of a murderous Chinatown gang that wants their loot back.
Tsai Chin (the mother in The Joy Luck Club) plays Grandma as a crusty curmudgeon who believes that the best defense is always a good offense.
Hsiao-Yuan Ha, a massive Taiwanese-born (just under 6’7″) actor, is winning as Grandma’s amiable mercenary bodyguard.
Lucky Grandma is the first feature for Asian-American female filmmakers, director Sasie Sealy and her co-writer Angela Cheng.
There’s not that much to Lucky Grandma except for Tsai Chin’s tour de grouch performance and the Chinatown setting. Lucky Grandma is moderately entertaining and is streaming on Amazon.
Throughout the seven seasons of Prime Suspect, Helen Mirren is surrounded by generations of Britain’s finest actors. Some of the finest performances are by the actors least known to the American audience.
John Benfield in PRIME SUSPECT
Jane Tennison is always beset by the sexism of other police officers. In the first four seasons, John Benfield plays her boss, Mike Kernan, who is out to get her at first. Kernan cautiously warms to Jane, but never reliably has her back.
Tom Bell in PRIME SUSPECT
If Mike Kernan is Old School, then Tom Bell‘s Detective Sergeant Bill Otley is Neanderthal. Openly hostile and insubordinate to Jane from the outset, Bell’s Otley evolves over seasons 1, 3 and 7.
Zoe Wanamaker in PRIME SUSPECT
In season 1, the prime suspect’s partner is played by Zoe Wanamaker in a searing performance. Full of piss and vinegar, her character sloshes buckets of defiance on the police. Wanamaker is unforgettable when her character gets a revelation about her own unknown tie to the murders from Jane.
Here are more of the very best supporting performances in Prime Suspect:
Struan Rogers in PRIME SUSPECT
John Bowe as the narcissistic sociopath of a serial killer in season 1.
Colin Salmon as the charismatic but troubled Black cop Bob Oswalde in season 2.
Jenny Jules as Sara, the sister of a teen who may be a victim or a perpetrator in season 2.
Struan Rodger as Jane’s commander in season 3, who silently appreciates Jane’s moxie when she turns the table on their boss.
David O’Hara as the terse and unsmiling Manchester street detective in season 5.
Ciaran Hinds in PRIME SUSPECT
Other notable actors in Prime Suspect:
Tom Wilkinson, before The Full Monty and his two Oscar nominations for In the Bedroom and Michael Clayton.
David Thewlis, the same year as his acclaimed performance in Naked.
Ralph Fiennes gets his very first screen credit, before Schindler’s List and The English Patient.
Ciarán Hinds, one of my favorite character actors (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Rome, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows).
Peter Capaldi, playing a drag queen before his Doctor Who.
Mark Strong, before his string of popular action pictures.
Prime Suspect, the perfect Labor Day weekend binge, pairs one of cinema’s greatest actresses, Helen Mirren, with one of the most compelling characters ever on episodic television, Detective Jane Tennison. At once a sensational crime show and a high brow character study, the seven seasons of Prime Suspect follow a female protagonist over fifteen years.
Prime Suspect is a set of nine separate stories over 25 hours. Jane Tennison’s career spans from Chief Detective Inspector to Superintendent to Chief Superintendent. The episodes were created between 1991 and 20O5, and Helen Mirren herself ages from 46 to 60 in the role.
The core of Prime Suspect is the character of Jane Tennison, forged by writer Lynda La Plante and Mirren. Jane is a driven woman, in a career that ranges from when women cops were unwelcome novelties to more politically correct times. In the entire span, Jane is, at best, barely tolerated.
Jane gives as well as she gets. She can force her superiors to promote her by using the same heavy-handed methods they use to suppress her.
Indeed, each Prime Suspect story has multiple threads of conflict. There is, of course, Jane against the criminal she is trying to catch. At the same time, Jane is being distracted and hampered by forces inside her own department. And Jane is in a constant battle to hold herself together amid overbearing stress.
Jane Tennison is a solitary figure, alone with her demons. She faces the daily challenges to her career survival and advancement with an ever-prickly demeanor.
Jane is a person of overwhelming ambition. In the very first season, it’s clear that she cannot advance by being pleasant and waiting her turn. She recognizes that sometimes she has to be unpleasant, and she will need to seize advancement at other’s expense; (in season 3, she receives a critical favor from a peer and then swipes his dream job).
Jane Tennison is also a fully sexual Woman of a Certain Age, but career rock stars like Jane can’t have it all. Her obsession with career leaves a trail of relationship carnage. At one point, Jane has fallen in love with the one man who gets her and adores her, but she has learned about herself and about life and…
And there’s always too much stress. Jane smokes too much and drinks too much. In Prime Suspect 3, her jaw is constantly pounding away on nicotine gum. In one later episode, she drops into her neighborhood market to buy four microwaveable frozen dinners and two fifths of whisky.
At first, Jane faces the most open and unapologetic misogyny, which evolves in later episodes into more veiled and insidious sexism. Being a flawed feminist hero is complicated. As the series evolves, Jane herself discriminates against a subordinate who is parenting. And she is betrayed by a female protege and, later, fights being forced out to pasture by a gender-integrated set of bosses.
Prime Suspect is always topical. Besides the ever-present sexism, the stories touch on race, abortion, postpartum depression, AIDS, sex work and pedophilia.
Most of the Prime Suspect plots are serial killer whodunits, and one story turns on whether she got it wrong in solving her breakthrough case. In one story, we know the culprit right away, but Jane is a race against the clock to prevent further victims.
In an astounding performance, Mirren grips us each time she fiercely deflects yet another indignity, as she waves her hand through her hair when she needs a reset from a setback and as her eyes reveal that she is connecting the dots. Her entire body coils in frustration and stiffens in insubordination. It’s a tour de force.
Between seasons of Prime Suspect, Helen Mirren was compiling an imposing body of work: The Madness of King George, Gosford Park and her Oscar-winning Elizabeth II in The Queen.
I believe that Mirren’s Jane ranks, with James Gandolfini’s run as Tony Soprano, as one of the greatest in episodic dramas. I’m guessing that Mirren was on screen for over twenty hours of Prime Suspect and that Gandolfini was on screen as Tony Sopranos for about 35 of The Sopranos‘ 86 hours. Of course, Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison is distinguished from most episodic protagonists by being female and by aging fifteen years.
This is one of the best and most entertaining episodic series ever on television. All seven series of Prime Suspect can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime).
The Cold War espionage documentary Coup 53 brings astounding new source material to the history of the 1953 coup which replaced the democratically elected Premier of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, with the Shah.
The key to the success of Coup 53 is that filmmaker Taghi Amirani uncovered troves of never-before seen source material. Amirani brings us oral histories of Iranian witnesses to the coup, including a play-by-play from Mosaddegh’s head of security. He adds a video interview with the last surviving Iranian coup plotter, an especially cadaverous and repugnant individual. There are also boxes of more recently-declassified CIA documents.
COUP 53. Courtesy of Coup 53
But, most essential are the tapes and transcripts of interviews for a 1970s BBC documentary. The testimony of Norman Darbyshire, the British spy who masterminded the coup, was cut from the BBC doc, but Amirani found an uncensored transcript. Ingeniously, Coup 53 reconstructs Darbyshire’s interview in the same room in London’s Savoy Hotel, with the same camera operator present (!) and actor Ralph Fiennes reciting Darbyshire’s actual words.
Why did Darbyshire spill the beans? He may have resented that CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt (TR’s grandson) exaggerated his role as a last minute bag man, when Darbyshire had laid the groundwork for years and was the real instigator.
Although the UK’s involvement has never been officially acknowledged by the UK government, everyone has known about it for decades. There’s even a clip in Coup 53 of Richard Nixon explaining it on TV in the 1970s or 1980s. But this is very personal to Taghi Amirani, and he puts great import on the smoking gun – an interview with the British spy who designed and directed the coup.
Although I think that Amirani oversells the proof of British involvement, there is is lot of exciting new stuff for the moderately informed rest of us. For example, we get a deeper-than-usual dive into Mohammad Mosaddegh himself, a man many of us have only seen as a victim of Western over-reaction to communism. We also learn that:
Harry Truman opposed the regime change, but newbie President Ike was persuaded by Wall Street’s Dulles brothers to green light the coup.
The CIA was walking away after an initial coup failure.
After the UK did the dirty work, the US got the most influence with the Shah, and, with Israel’s help, set up the Shah’s brutal and hated secret police, the Savak.
From Mosaddegh’s nephew, we learn about Mosaddegh’s final years under house arrest, his last secret joyride through Tehran and his unusual dining room burial.
There’s one stunning What If moment – revolutionary Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr explains that after the first coup attempt failed, Mosaddegh had the list of all the coup plotters. Had he executed them all immediately, there would have been no coup in 1953, no revolution and Hostage Crisis in 1978 and today Iran would be a stable, 70-year-old Muslim democracy in the Middle East.
Coup 53 is directed by Taghi Amirani and its editor, Walter Murch. The Iran-born and UK-educated Amirani is the researcher and on-camera interviewer. Murch is probably our greatest living film editor and the person who invented the entire field of movie sound design in the 1970s.
Coup 53 is available to stream on Virtual Cinema; I watched it at the Roxie.
