In the slow burn thriller Hunting Lands, Frank (Marshall Cook) is living a solitary life as a subsistence hunter in a forest cabin, a long pickup drive outside his northern Michigan hometown. Frank is a guy with serious wilderness skills, loading his own ammo and field dressing the large mammals that he fells with a single shot. He witnesses a serious crime in the woods and is immediately driven to make things right – but not in the way we expect.
Frank has nobody to talk to, and we see him silently triage the situation and begin a hunt for the perpetrator. Silent observation comes naturally to a hunter, and we see him wordlessly patrolling the small towns in his pickup, as he tracks down his human prey. We see what Frank sees, and one of the most pivotal characters is only seen in long shot until the last 15 minutes or so.
HUNTING LANDSHUNTING LANDS
Hunting Lands is the first feature from writer-director Zack Wilcox, a story-teller who is thankfully willing to let the audience connect the dots. Because Hunting Lands is only 83 minutes long, Wilcox can take his time watching Frank watch others. Even as Frank is still and quiet, the audience is gripped by what he is going to do next.
An original character, Frank seems unusually self-aware for a hermit. When he finally gets in a conversation, he turns out to be an articulate guy who understands and can explain why he has become a recluse.
Wilcox follows Billie Wilder’s screenwriting advice – “don’t hang around”; the ending is not even one second too long. And Wilcox knows that a little ambiguity about what happens afterwards can pack a punch.
Cinequest hosted the word premiere of Hunting Lands. You can stream it now on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
I am aware that the new Avengers movie is taking up about forty percent of Bay Area movie screens. Be on the lookout for Her Smell, which is playing hardly anywhere, and the brilliant new release Long Day’s Journey into Night, along with Aretha Frankin’s gospel concert film Amazing Grace.
Writer-director John Singleton, who died this week, was the first African-American nominated for the Best Director Oscar (for Boyz in the Hood) and remains the youngest person ever nominated for that award.
OUT NOW
Elisabeth Moss’ powerhouse performance as a monstrously narcissistic and drug-deranged rock star in Her Smellis the acting tour de force of 2019.
Werner Herzog’s admiring biodoc Meeting Gorbachev is uncritical but insightful, especially as we meet the unfiltered Gorbachev himself in 2018 interviews.
The Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Graceis, at once, the recovery of a lost film, the document of an extraordinary live recording and an immersive, spiritual experience.
In The Chaperone, Downton Abbey’s writer Julian Fellowes and star Elizabeth McGovern reunite for a pleasing character study of self-discovery in 1921 America – it’s deeper than it first appears to be.
In Teen Spirit, Elle Fanning plays an underdog teenager who has the chance to win a talent contest and become an instant pop star – yes, it’s a genre movie, but it’s a pretty fair one.
Ramen Shop is a lightly-rooted dramedy about a Singaporean-Japanese family’s reconciliation. There’s also a metaphorical foodie angle.
ON VIDEO
The ingeniously original Prospect is a frontier coming-of-age movie. It’s just set in space, not in the Old West. A consistently unpredictable plot and superb performances by Pedro Pascal and young Sophie Thatcher make Prospect well worth streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube or Google Play.
ON TV
On May 7, Turner Classic Movies brings us a fantastic comedy, My Man Godfrey (1936). An assembly of eccentric, oblivious, venal and utterly spoiled characters make up a rich Park Avenue family and their hangers-on during the Depression. The kooky daughter (Carole Lombard) brings home a homeless guy (William Powell) to serve as their butler. The contrast between the dignified butler and his wacky employers results in a brilliant screwball comedy that masks searing social criticism that is sharply relevant today. The wonderful character actor Eugene Pallette (who looked and sounded like a bullfrog in a tuxedo) plays the family’s patriarch, who is keenly aware that his wife and kids are completely nuts.
William Powell and Carole Lombard in MY MAN GODFREY
Meeting Gorbachev is Werner Herzog’s admiring biodoc of Mikhail Gorbachev, unquestionably one of the 20th century’s most pivotal figures. Herzog filmed three conversations with the then 87-year-old Gorbachev in 2018.
Gorbachev is revered in Germany – particularly by Werner Herzog – for allowing the peaceful, and startlingly quick, reunification of Germany. This biodoc is, to a fault, uncritical. At one point, Herzog even tells Gorbachev, “I love you”.
As the leader of the USSR, Gorbachev’s concepts of Perestroika and Glasnost transformed the political, economic and foreign policy of the Cold War superpower. More than any other individual, Gorbachev can claim credit for ending the Cold War, abolishing and destroying mid-range and short-range nuclear weapons, and the unchallenged independence of the Iron Curtain countries.
Gorbachev is also a tragic figure of Shakespearean proportions. He was intending to reform the USSR, not to destroy it. A coup by fossilized communists knocked him out of power but couldn’t be sustained, spinning out of control and leading to a chaos taken advantage of by the strong man Putin,.
Herzog’s film is excellent in its well-researched and well-told story of the rise of Gorbachev from a modest agricultural backwater – a talented achiever on the rise. Herzog’s irreverent sense of humors, as always, peeks through in the state funerals of Gorbachev’s predecessors, each more absurdly funny than the last.
The greatest gift of Meeting Gorbachev is, as the title suggests, is the unfiltered Gorbachev himself – now a grandfatherly raconteur. We get to appreciate his intellectual curiosity and his clarity of thought and direction. His charm and charisma, even at 87, help us understand how he rose to world leadership.
Werner Herzog and Mikhail Gorbachev in MEETING GORBACHEV
Herzog was a charismatic and innovative leader of German New Cinema. Between 1972 and 1982, he created the art house hits Aguirre:The Wrath of God, Strozek Nosferatu the Vampyre, and Fitzcarraldo.
In 1997, Herzog switched gears with the underrated documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly and followed it with great docs like Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World. Most remarkably, Herzog has also become one of the greatest narrators of English language documentaries; somehow, his German-accented narrations are hypnotic. (In 2007, Herzog slipped in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans with Nicholas Cage in the Klaus Kinski wild man role and cinema’s funniest iguana hallucination.)
Meeting Gorbachev played at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). I saw Meeting Gorbachev at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club.
The ingeniously original Prospect is a frontier coming of age movie. It’s just set in space, not in the Old West. The teenage girl Cee (Sophie Thatcher) accompanies her dad (Jay Duplass) as he pilots their tired spaceship from planet to planet, seeking to extract something precious (hence the title Prospect as in prospectors). It’s an enterprise for misfits and hustlers. She has grown into an able assistant. He is a skilled pilot and prospector, but is very erratic in his judgment.
Sure, this is a future version of our world, but these characters live in a bottom-feeding sub-culture; their space travel hardware comes from the surplus store and has the look of NASA’s Mercury program – far less sleekly hi tech than the dashboard of a 2013 Prius. It’s a choice by co-writer and co-directors Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl to reinforce that we’re dealing with folks living on the margins.
Isolated by circumstance on a planet that is only populated by a few other sketchy transients and some disturbing settlers, Cee is thrown into a series of life-and-death situations. She must depend on her wits to survive a sequence of that can only be resolved through negotiation. I saw Prospect before its release at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. In the screening’s Q&A, co-writer filmmakers Caldwell and Earl affirmed that the story is centered on negotiation and that they drew from that under-recognized subgenre, the “loquacious Western”.
Pedro Pascal and Sophie Thatcher in PROSPECT
A key character that Cee must deal with is another rogue prospector Ezra (Pedo Pascal), a man of wit, charm, lethality and devoted self-interest. Pascal (Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) makes Ezra one of the most compelling and funniest movie characters of the year.
Someone has labeled Prospect at “True Grit in space”, which isn’t far off. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is also evoked. A consistently unpredictable plot and superb performances by Pascal and young Ms. Thatcher make Prospect well worth streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube or Google Play.
Jue Huang in a scene from Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Photo by Bai Linghai, courtesy Kino Lorber.
In the singular Chinese neo-noir Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Luo (Jue Huang) embarks on a search to find the mysterious woman he dallied with twenty years before. As he follows the clues, he plunges into an atmospheric underworld of dripping darkness and people who don’t want to talk. Along the way, he encounters the sultry, down-on-her-luck floozy Wan Qiwen (Wei Tang), whose lethal, fedora-adorned boyfriend does not want to relinquish her to Luo’s quest.
After a low burn beginning, Luo’s search reaches its climax in a spectacular ONE-HOUR single shot. It’s nighttime and both the exteriors and interiors are lit to evoke a surreal world stained by noirish danger. The shot requires the camera to follow Luo and Wan Qiwen, together and separately, inside and outside, between various levels and twice past a nervous horse, all while other characters interact with them. It’s right up there with the magnificent shots in Children of Men, Goodfellas, Touch of Evil, The Secret in Their Eyes, Atonement, Gun Crazy and the one-shot film Victoria.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the triumph of writer-director Bi Gan, who never forgets that he is telling his story in the medium of cinema. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is so atmospheric that sometime we feel the dankness of his set designs. Repeatedly, the richest of colors stand out against noirish backdrops. Wan Qiwen is unforgettable in her satiny emerald green dress, lit by Luo’s headlights as he tracks her by automobile in a dark tunnel. (Bi Gan has acknowledged his admiration for Wong Kar-wai, and Bi Gan has created a film as visually intoxicating as Wong Kar-wai’s.) Ban Gi used three directors of photography; the second cinematographer prepared the final shot for the third. There are recurring themes of spinning rooms, flooded floors and dripping ceilings, single flames and sparklers. The soundtrack centers on ambient sound, with very few musical cues.
Wei Tang, Yongzhong Chen in a scene from Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Photo by Liu Hongyu, courtesy Kino Lorber.
All of this enhances the story of Luo’s obsession with a doomed romance (and possibly more than one doomed romance). He can’t sure that what he hears is true – or even that what he sees is real. It’s a world filled with dissolute and murderous men and unreliable women. Luo asks a man, “Is that child yours?” and is answered, “She was a master story teller” (not a complement in this instance).
Bi Gan says, “It’s a film about memory”. Indeed, he has Luo say, “The difference between film and memories is that film is always false. They are composed of a series of scenes. But memories mix truth and lies. They appear and vanish before our eyes .”
That final shot is in 3D. Bi Gan says, “After the first part (in 2D), I wanted the film to take on a different texture. But I believe this three-dimensional feeling recalls that of our recollections of the past. Much more than 2D, anyway. 3D images are fake but they resemble our memories much more closely.”
Hong-Chi Lee in a scene from Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Photo by Liu Hongyu, courtesy Kino Lorber.
This film is entirely written by Bi Gan, with no apparent relationship to the identically-titled 1962 film of the Eugene O’Neill play, the famed four-hander with Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell. The Mandarin title of Bi Gan’s film is literally Last Evenings On Earth, a title which came from a short story by Roberto Bolaño. Bi Gan just liked the title Long Day’s Journey into Night and thought that it fit the spirit of his film.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the biggest Chinese art house hit ever, and won an award at Cannes in 2018. It opens this weekend in the Bay Area.
Elisabeth Moss soars in Her Smell, a portrait of epic self-destruction. Moss plays a talented and charismatic rock star, her narcissism exponentially magnified by drugs. She is so deranged that we can’t tell if she is possessed by demons or is a demon herself. While the drugs make her a monster, we learn that they are not the only influence on her damaged psyche.
Moss’ performance as the volatile and feral Becky Something is terrifyingly unhinged and explosive. Becky immediately pivots (even mid-sentence) between charmer and predator. Moss is utterly committed to this role and left nothing on the sound stage. It’s the powerhouse performance of 2019.
We first grew to appreciate Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson, perhaps the Mad Men character with the greatest arc. Since then, she’s anchored The Handmaid’s Tale, and I recommend her less well-known turn as an Aussie cop in the Top of the Lake miniseries. But after people see Her Smell, they’ll start thinking that she can play ANYTHING – and anything compellingly .
Moss also sings well enough to make a credible rock star. As I wrote about Elle Fanning in Teen Spirit, given that Rami Malek just won an Oscar for lip-syncing, we should bestow a Nobel upon Moss.
Elisabeth Moss in HER SMELL
The Wife noticed that writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s choices of chaotic camera and discordant musical tones mirror the character’s inner chaos; later, he uses serenity and stillness to help us distill Becky’s persona. I also agree with The Wife that Her Smell is unnecessarily long at two hours and fourteen minutes; this would be a much more powerful film at 100 minutes. (Ross also wrote Listen Up Philip, a very funny dark comedy about another dysfunctional protagonist and one of the very few successful mumblecore films; Moss co-starred with Jason Schwartzman in that one.)
Her Smell’s supporting players are superb, especially Agnyess Deyn and Gayle Rankin as Becky’s bandmates, Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) as her ex and art house vet Eric Stolz as her manager; in turn enabling Becky and being victimized by her, they are always walking on eggshells. Becky’s mom is played by the sublime Virginia Madsen. Former model Cara Delevingne was excellent in the teen film Paper Towns, and does well here as one of Becky’s bewildered acolytes.
Her Smell’s theatrical run is not likely to last long – try to find it. I’ll make a point of making it a Stream of the Week when it becomes available on video.
The Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Graceis, at once, the recovery of a lost film, the document of an extraordinary live recording and an immersive, spiritual experience.
In The Chaperone, Downton Abbey’s writer Julian Fellowes and star Elizabeth McGovern reunite for a pleasing character study of self-discovery in 1921 America – it’s deeper than it first appears to be.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote: after 25 years of misfortune and missteps, Terry Gilliam has succeeded in making a Don Quixote movie – and it’s good.
In Teen Spirit, Elle Fanning plays an underdog teenager who has the chance to win a talent contest and become an instant pop star – yes, it’s a genre movie, but it’s a pretty fair one.
The Brinkis documentarian Alison Klayman’s up-close-and-personal portrait of Steve Bannon, the outsized personality who coached Donald Trump’s race-baiting right into the White House. As Bannon unintentionally reveals himself to be pathetically craving relevance, I found The Brink to be irresistible, and I watched with fascination.
For the first hour-and-a-half of Sunset, I was convinced that I was watching the best movie of the year. Then the coherence unraveled, but I still recommend Sunset, even with its flaws, for its uncommon artistry.
The puzzling thriller Transit, with all its originality, just isn’t director Christian Petzold’s best.
Ramen Shop is a lightly-rooted dramedy about a Singaporean-Japanese family’s reconciliation. There’s also a metaphorical foodie angle.
My video choice, the psychological suspense movie Una, revolves around two twisted people who make for two unreliable narrators (Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn). I originally saw Una at the 2017 Cinequest. You can stream it from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
ON TV
On April 27, Turner Classic Movies will air the 1950 version of M, directed by Joseph Losey. This is a remake of Fritz Lang’s great 1931 M with Peter Lorre. The Losey version is not a masterpiece like the original, and I find it pretty odd. However, Los Angeles’ storied Bradbury Building, which has been in many a movie, was never been as gloriously revealed from basement to roof as in M. The Bradbury Building and the film as a whole benefit from the cinematography of Ernest Laszlo; Laszlo also shot D.O.A., The Well, The Steel Trap, Stalag 17, The Naked Jungle, Kiss Me Deadly and While the City Sleeps, before being Oscar-nominated eight times for more respectable, but lesser films. The cast is filled with film noir faves – Raymond Burr, Norman Lloyd, Howard Da Silva, Steve Brodie and Luther Adler. M is playing on TCM’s Noir Alley series, and I look forward to Eddie Muller’s intro and outro.
On May 1, TCM airs The Rack (1956): 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 and Walter Pidgeon co-star.
Ramen Shop is about a family’s reconciliation in light of troubled Singaporean-Japanese history. Masato (Taikumi Saito) is a young Japanese ramen chef who loses his father; his Singaporean mom had died when he was a young child. He heads to Singapore to probe his family’s past and encounters a smorgasbord of Singaporean cuisine, a helpful and comely food blogger and his relatives – some more welcoming than others.
The first thirty minutes – with the grief of the son, his memories of his saintly mother and the flashbacks of parental romance – are too schmalzy for me. On the other hand, the thread of family turmoil as the legacy of a specific trauma from the Japanese conquest of Singapore works well.
There’s a metaphorical foodie angle here, too, in Masato’s Holy Grail – fusion of Singaporean pork rib soup with Japanese ramen stock. The foodie scenes – especially the food exploration scenes in Singapore – are mouth-watering.
I saw Ramen Shop at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It opens this week in the Bay Area.
The Mueller Report has brought former White Counsel Don McGahn into semi-celebrity. McGahn was a major source for the Mueller Report, which portrays McGahn as one of the Trump Administration officials who, by disobeying and thwarting Trump’s orders, saved Trump from criminal charges of obstruction of justice. McGahn was the VILLAIN in last year’s gripping documentary Dark Money,an expose of our new political environment, with unlimited secret money unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.
The Mueller Report recounts an episode where Trump advised a note-taking McGahn that Trump’s lawyers never take notes; McGahn memorably replied “But I’m a real lawyer.” But McGahn worked his way up as a Republican Party operative, and was a GOP appointee to the Federal Elections Commission (when he wore longish preppy hair). In one particularly nasty segment of Dark Money, we witness Commissioner McGahn unashamedly grinding the FEC’s gears of enforcement to a stop. After the FEC, McGahn went on to serve as the Trump White House Counsel, with major responsibility for the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanagh.
Dark Money’s writer-director Kimberly Reed takes us to her native Montana as conservative (but independent) Republican legislators find themselves deluged by massive and monstrous attacks from some even more conservative out-of-state sources. Intrepid small-town reporter John S. Adams and the understaffed state regulators follow the money and try to hunt down who is pulling the strings.
As the mystery unfolds, Dark Money also takes us to Wisconsin, where dark money has assaulted an unexpected branch of government. And we go to Washington, DC, to the Federal Elections Commission, where Ann Ravel, the Obama-appointed chair of the FEC, has resigned in disgust after Republican commissioners have blocked all enforcement of federal campaign finance regulation. (Disclosure: I have worked with Silicon Valley native Ravel in my day job.)
Here are some of Dark Money’s most disturbing revelations:
While it’s bad enough that we don’t know the extent of wealthy Americans like the Koch Brothers trying to buy elections, neither do we know about the secret election participation of FOREIGN players.
Dark Money sources are not stopping at trying to buy legislators and governors, but are also trying to take over state supreme courts!
And just when we need MORE scrutiny of the attempts to buy the legislative and judicial branches of state governments, we are witnessing the death of statehouse journalism.
Dark Money keeps us on the edges of our seats throughout and culminates in a real-life courtroom drama
I attended the sold-out Bay Area premiere of Dark Money, co-sponsored by Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club and by Santa Clara County. Both Ann Ravel and John S. Adams appeared at the post-screening Q&A. You can stream Dark Money from Amazon (free with Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The psychological suspense movie Una revolves around two twisted people, one of whom has been damaged by trauma. Here’s what the audience can be confident really happened: at age 14, Una (Rooney Mara) was seduced by a much older man, Ray (Ben Mendelsohn); she became infatuated with Ray and they carried on a sexual relationship for three months until he was caught and imprisoned for four years. Upon leaving prison, he changed his name and started a new life. It’s now fifteen years after the original crime and Una has tracked him down.
We can tell that Una is obsessed with Ray. What we don’t know is whether Una is seeking vengeance or whether she is in love with him – or both. She’s so messed up that even she may not know.
Lolita was a novel with a famously unreliable narrator. Una presents us with TWO unreliable narrators. Almost every statement made by Ray COULD be true, but probably isn’t. He was in love with her, he came back for her, she was his only underage lover, he’s not “one of them”, he’s told his wife about his past – we just can’t know for sure. Ben Mendelsohn delivers a performance that tries to conceal whatever Ray is thinking and feeling but allows his desperation to leak out.
The excellent actor Riz Ahmed (Four Lions, The Reluctant Terrorist) is very good as Ray’s work buddy, who must deal with one totally unforeseeable surprise after another.
Una really relies on Rooney Mara to portray a wholly unpredictable character in every scene, and she succeeds in carrying the movie. Mara’s face is particularly well-suited when she plays a haunting and/or haunted character, and it serves her well here.
I originally saw Una at Cinequest. You can stream it from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
