Ewan McGregor (right) in MOTHER COUCH. Courtesy of Film Movement.
In the nightmarish fever dream Mother Couch, Ewan McGregor plays a man trapped in an absurd situation – his obstreperous, estranged mother (Ellen Burstyn) is refusing to leave a couch in a furniture store. His adult siblings (Rhys Ifans, Lara Flynn Boyle), whom he barely knows, are present but not supportive. The oddly singular furniture store is itself a bizarre construction, and this fable of parental emotional abandonment just keeps getting ever more surreal.
The now elderly mom has been a terrible mother – selfish, emotionally unconnected and not the least bit nurturing – and unashamed. Now that she needs care, her two oldest kids are prepared to giver a dose of her own medicine. But the youngest son (McGregor) feels obligated to take care of dear old mom, as hateful as she is.
Ellen Burstyn in MOTHER COUCH. Courtesy of Film Movement.
McGregor’s and Burstyn’s performances are very strong, and the depth of the cast is extraordinary: Taylor Russell, F. Murray Abraham and Lake Bell. I particularly admired Rhys Ifans’ subtle performance as guy who doesn’t want to be as apathetic and irresponsible as his behavior would indicate. We get to enjoy Abraham as two characters – twin brothers with very disparate personalities.
Mother Couch is the first narrative feature for writer-director Niclas Larsson, an acclaimed director of car commercials, and it’s a remarkable calling card.
This is the most surreal film that I have seen in a long while. I screened Mother Couch for the SFFILM in April; it releases into primarily arthouse theaters on July 5.
Photo caption. Jodie Comer and Austin Butler in THE BIKERIDERS. Courtesy of Focus Features.
The Bikeriders is Jeff Nichols’ engrossing exploration of the culture of a 1960s Midwestern motorcycle gang and its (unfortunate) evolution. The source material is a book by a photographer who embedded himself with a real biker gang, and taped interviews as well as photographing them.
The gang was founded by Johnny (Tom Hardy), inspired by a TV rebroadcast of The Wild One, in which the biker played by Marlon Brando is asked what are he is rebelling against, and replies, Whadda you got? The bikers are a collection of misfits who share an ethos of breaking every available rule. Of course, none of these guys know what an ethos is, let alone intend to have one.
The most reckless biker is Benny (Austin Butler), whose girlfriend Kathy (Jodie Comer) is fiercely in love with him, but at most agnostic about the biker lifestyle. We see the story of the 1960s gang in flashback; Kathy, from the 1970s, narrates the story.
The Bikeriders bears out Nichol’s great gift as a storyteller – recognizing the humanity in his characters. I guarantee that I would, in real life, not care one whit about any of these characters. But, in The Bikeriders, I did care and was deeply invested in them.
Nichols’ previous films Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, Mudand Loving, have each made my list of their year’s best movies. Those films, three fictional and one historical, tell the stories of redneck brothers betrayed by their father, a quasi-supernatural psychiatric decompensation, a backwoods coming of age and interracial love in the Jim Crow South. What all of them have in common with The Bikeriders are the authentic, compelling characters.
After all, what mostly happens in The Bikeriders is drinking, fighting and riding motorcycles – and the plot traces the natural consequences. Motorcycle riding is a relatively dangerous activity, as are binge drinking and fighting, so you won’t be surprised that not everyone comes out unscathed
Tom Hardy and Austin Butler in THE BIKERIDERS. Courtesy of Focus Features.
As Johnny, Tom Hardy is an amalgam of world weariness and alpha power. Hardy is known for his physicality, but his Johnny looks like more of an average guy than his characters often do; he doesn’t look scary at first glance, but no one wants to mess with him. Hardy is able to project internal steeliness.
The Wife noted that Austin Butler just looks like movie star. Indeed, when a barroom crowd parts so that Kathy can first glimpse Butler’s Benny at the end of a pool table in all his hunkiness, the scene evokes when John Garfield first sees Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, or when Burt Lancaster first sees Claudia Cardinale in The Leopard. Benny is so devoid of emotion for most of the movie, the key to Butler’s performance is making us wonder whether there’s any empathy buried deep down in there someplace. Is Benny a one-dimensional sociopath or somebody able to repress his feelings?
Jodie Comer in THE BIKERIDERS. Courtesy of Focus Features.
The Bikeriders is a showcase for Jody Comer, whom I had most recently seen playing a medieval French noblewoman in The Last Duel, as the biker girlfriend brimming with ambivalence. The Bikeriders works because of Comer’s matter of fact and perceptive narration; Kathy is the only surviving character who is observant and articulate enough to tell the story. Comer’s performance definitely merits an Oscar nomination.
As Kathy, Comer, who grew up in and lives in Liverpool, sounds like a lifetime Chicagoan; it’s the best American regional accent in the movies since Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson in Fargo.
Nichols essentially discovered and launched the career of Michael Shannon in Shotgun Stories; Shannon has acted in all of Nichol’s films except Loving. Shannon is again wonderful here in a small, juicy role. Emory Cohen and Norman Reedus sparkle as gang members Cockroach and Funny Sonny, respectively.
Nichol’s character-driven slice of biker life is a grand movie, and Jodie Comer elevates it even more.
Photo caption: June Squibb and Fred Hechinger in THELMA. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures | photo by David Bolen.
This week on The Movie Gourmet – a new reviews of the important documentary The Grab, the family drama Ghostlight and the clichéd western The Dead Don’t Hurt, which is not always plausible or understandable. Ghostlight joins Hit Man and Thelma as the Must See movies.
CURRENT MOVIES
Ghostlight: a family saves itself, in iambic pentameter. In theaters.
Hit Man: who knew self-invention could be so fun? Netflix.
The Rider: a life’s passion is threatened. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
ON TV
Just for fun – on July 3, Turner Classic Movies will air A Bucket of Blood, a campy minor horror movie much more interesting as a window in beatnik culture. By 1959, beatnik consciousness was ripe for exploitation by low-budget movie wizard Roger Corman, who produced and directed A Bucket of Blood. The story is about a loser who covers a dead cat with plaster of Paris and is acclaimed as a talented sculptor. He embraces the hoax and starts hunting victims to cast into human “sculptures”; hence the horror and the bucket of blood.
“Beatnik” conjures up 20-somethings adorned in black turtleneck sweaters (and black leotards for women), berets, goatees and dark glasses; they’re in coffee houses snapping their fingers to applaud poetry and jazz. And they’re conversing in hip cat patter. Watch A Bucket of Blood and you’ll get a dose.
A Bucket of Blood stars Corman favorite Dick Miller, the subject of That Guy Dick Miller; ubiquitous game show host Burt Convy, as a young actor, played Lou. Can you dig it?
Photo caption: Keith Kupferer and Katherine Mallen Kupferer in GHOSTLIGHT. Courtesy of IFC Films.
In the endearing family drama Ghostlight, we meet Dan (Keith Kupferer), a middle-aged hardhat who is at the end of his rope. Dan seems to be a gentle and profoundly decent guy, but he is stressed to the point that he’s ready to explode in rage, and he’s sinking out of his marriage to Sharon (Tara Mullen). Their precocious and spirited daughter Daisy is insolent even by teen standards and out of control.
Eventually, we learn that the family has suffered a loss. Sharon can’t grieve because it’s taking all of her energy to hold the family together with Dan refusing to acknowledge anyone’s feelings and Daisy’s behavior blowing up. Dan describes himself as Old School , which, in his case, means he doesn’t acknowledge anyone’s feelings, especially his own, he doesn’t believe in therapy or understand art. This is a family processing (or not processing) grief at the pace of its slowest, most recalcitrant member.
Dan has a chance meeting with Rita (Dolly De Leon, who stole Triangle of Sorrow), who inveigles him into a tiny community theater’s table reading of Romeo and Juliet. Dan, of course, is ill at ease among the touchy feely theater types. Dan has heard of Romeo and Juliet, but doesn’t know how it ends, yet it strikes a chord with him, and he comes back for more. Daisy, who can quote passages from the play, wisecracks, “Here’s a hint – it’s a tragedy“.
Dolly De Leon and Keith Kupferer in GHOSTLIGHT. Courtesy of IFC Films.
What happens next is that Dan takes the family on a journey that is funny, heartrending, and ultimately redemptive. There’s never a false moment.
The acting in Ghostlight is superbly authentic. The family members are played by an actual family. Teen actor Katherine Mallen Kupferer is the daughter of actor Keith Kupferer and theater director and actor Tara Mallen.
Here’s another real family aspect of Ghostlight – it’s the first feature from director and co-writer Kelly O’Sullivan, who just had a child with co-director Alex Thompson.
Ghostlight won the audience award at SXSW. This little movie is one of the best films of the year and a Must See.
Photo caption: Viggo Mortensen in THE DEAD DON’T HUNT. Courtesy of Shout! Studios; photo credit Marcel-Zyskind38.
I sure do like me a western and I admire Viggo Mortensen, so I was very disappointed in The Dead Don’t Hurt, which Mortensen wrote, directed and stars in. Mortensen plays a guy who finds a woman (Vicky Krieps) in San Francisco, takes her to his Nevada homestead, and immediately heads off to the Civil War and must deal with the consequences when he returns. Cliches ensue, culminating in a lousy movie.
The central problem with The Dead Don’t Hurt is that Mortensen, as screenwriter, developed a story where the behavior of the two main characters is not always plausible or understandable and the other characters are all one-dimensional. Consequently, we don’t care about the characters; I will allow that I did care about the villain, a psychopathic villain, whom I wanted to see dead, but he was perhaps the most one-dimensional of the lot. I take notes while I watch movies, and, at one point, I scribbled this is Viggo’s movie; this is Viggo’s fault.
This screenplay was a terrible waste of Garret Dillahunt, Danny Huston and W. Earl Brown, some of our most gifted and colorful character actors, who were assigned to play roles which are essentially cardboard cutouts.
Only Ray McKinnon (Reverend H. W. Smith in Deadwood) gets enough singularity to work with, and he sparkles as a perversely random-behaving judge. (The other good thing about The Dead Don’t Hurt was the music in the closing credits, which was composed by Mortensen.)
Much of the movie rests on Vicky Krieps, whose screen appeal has eluded me. The Luxembourgian actress Krieps received much critical buzz for Phantom Thread, but I wrote then that I wouldn’t cross the street to see her next movie.
I usually watch movies alone, unless I’m with The Wife, and she and I have pre-arranged silent signals when one or both of us want to walk out of a movie. I saw The Dead Don’t Hunt with my friend Keith, and it occurred to me, about 30 minutes in, that we don’t have that kind of signal, and I couldn’t figure out how to see if he wanted to leave, too, without disturbing other patrons.
Keith and I are gonna have to develop a signal; we have been going to movies together for decades, and we’ve sat all the way through bad movies like Bite the Bullet and Le Quattro Volte, but I’m now too old to waste an hour of my remaining lifetime.
[SPOILERS FOLLOW] I usually can write a full review without a spoiler, but I just need to explain elements of cinematic misfire that entirely distracted me from the story. It begins with the rape revenge, which has become one of the laziest of plot devices. The psychopathic bully murders for sport and immediately starts leering at the Krieps character, telegraphing the most obvious movie rape since Billy Jack. She is impregnated in the rape and bears a son. Now, the Civil War was four years long, and human gestation is nine months; this means that when Viggo returns to find his wife with a son, the kid should be three years old. But the kid in the movie is five at the youngest, and more likely six. He doesn’t look or act like a three year old, speaks English, French and a little Spanish, and is learning to write numbers. He’s a six-year-old who is supposed to be three and It’s VERY distracting.
The one novelty in The Dead Don’t Hunt, the one thing I hadn’t seen in a movie before, was a death from syphilis.
When Viggo’s character despondently throws his military medal away, I was wishing he had tossed the script, too.
A scene from Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s THE GRAB. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The exposé The Grab is an important documentary at the level of An Inconvenient Truth. The Grab documents and clearly explains the global grab for food and water resources by corporations and nations. Think about water as a matter of national security. Imagine an OPEC for food.
The grab to control agricultural land and water rights is happening in secret – but in plain sight. It’s difficult enough to impose any accountable on actors of this scale – global mega-corporations and even nations – so The Grab’s bringing some transparency is essential.
Documentarian Gabriela Cowperthwaite is known for Blackfish, an exposé of Orca handling at SeaWorld and an arthouse hit in 2013. Cowperthwaite has also directed a narrative space station thriller, I.S.S., set for release in June 2023.
Cowperthwaite describes The Grab as a “6-year investigative deep dive“. Impressively researched, The Grab is engrossing and sobering.
I screened The Grab for the 2023 SLO Film Fest. It’s now available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.
Richard Roundtree and June Squibb in THELMA. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures | photo by David Bolen..
This week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of the audience-pleasing comedy Thelma, the good-hearted Catalan farce Waiting for Dali, the thoughtful artist biodoc Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life, the unpretentious 1976 ground-breaker Car Washand 1964’s The Strangler, which is pretty perverse even for a serial killer movie. Plus a preview of Frameline, the oldest and longest-running LGBTQ+ film festival in the world, now underway in the Bay Area.
Wow – in just two weeks, the Movie Gourmet has produced reviews of six new 2024 movies and three revivals, along with previews of two film festivals. Whew.
REMEMBRANCES
Donald Sutherland became a famous character actor playing quirky misfits in The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes, and became a star as an iconic subversive in M*A*S*H*. His performances in Klute and Invasion of the Body Snatchers are indelible. Sutherland finished with 199 IMDb credits, including the Hunger Games franchise, and had three films released in 2023.
Anouk Aimée starred in some of the most iconic European art films of the 1960s: Fellini’s 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita and Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman.
Tony Lo Bianco first made his name in a perverse movie that became a cult film, The Honeymoon Killers. He went on to act in the 1970s classics The French Connection, The Seven Ups, Jesus of Nazareth, and lots and lots of TV work. I especially admire his performance in John Sayles’ City of Hope.
CURRENT MOVIES
Hit Man: who knew self-invention could be so fun? Netflix.
The Lost City of Z: the historical adventure revived. Amazon (included with Prime), AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
ON TV
Richard Widmark in THE KISS OF DEATH
On June 25, Turner Classic Movies airs the classic film noir Kiss of Death. Victor Mature plays an ex-con with horrific luck – he gets caught on a heist and takes the rap for his cohorts; this leads to a long sentence and a double-cross with impacts to his wife and kids. Seeking to see his kids again, he is released back on the streets to set up the double-crossers for the DA. Mature, too often dismissed for his campy sword-and-sandal movies, did his finest work in film noir – especially I Wake Up Screaming, Kiss of Death and The Long Haul. But the flashiest performance in Kiss of Death is Richard Widmark’s film debut as psychopath Tommy Udo, who chortles maniacally as he pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs to her demise; Widmark went on to play indelible neurotics and sleazes in noir for the next three years (Roadhouse, Panic in the Streets, Night and the City, No Way Out, Pickup on South Street) before becoming an A-lister.
Photo caption: Geoff McFetridge in GEOFF MCFETRIDGE: DRAWING A LIFE. Credit: Andrew Paynter; courtesy of Gravitas Ventures.
The thoughtful documentary Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life examines a great artist who is decidedly not tortured. No ear-slicing, overdoses or bratty rampages here, just a guy whose disciplined lifestyle and commitment to his family subvert the stereotypes of an artist fueled by torment.
Where’s the interest in a movie about someone who creates without turbulence? This is a guy who is unusually fierce with both his artistic and family lives. He refuses to compromise his art; his attitude is, take it or leave it (although, as a good Canadian, he is polite about it). Just as tenaciously, he safeguards his family time.
At one point in Drawing a Life, McFetridge makes it explicit. He sees it as too easy to make everything else – good behavior, responsibilities – subservient to art. The achievement is to do great art while maintaining life balance.
You may not know McFetridge’s name, but you’ll recognize his art. McFetridge has exhibited in major cities around the world, collaborated with filmmakers like Spike Jonz and Sofia Coppola, and designed for brands like Apple, Hermes, Vans and Patagonia.
Director and co-writer Dan Covert has filled Drawing a Life with McFetridge’s art, and viewing the film is to be immersed in the art. The editing, by Covert and co-writer Eric Auli, is magnificent. Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life won the 2023 Audience Award for Documentary Feature at SXSW.
Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life opens in NYC theaters tomorrow, in LA next week and digitally on July 2.
On June 21, Turner Classic Movies will air one of my Overlooked Neo-noir – and it’s not available to stream. The 1964 serial killer movie The Strangler is the masterpiece of director Burt Topper, who specialized in low-budget exploitation movies. It’s pretty perverse.
First, we see that lonely lab tech Otto Kroll (Victor Buono in an especially brilliant and eccentric performance) is twisted enough to murder random women and return to his lair to fondle his doll collection. Then we learn his motivation – he dutifully visits his hateful mother (Ellen Corby – later to play Grandma Walton) in her nursing home room; she heaps abuse on him in every interaction. Pretty soon, even the audience wants to kill Mrs. Kroll, but Otto sneaks around taking out his hatred for his mom by strangling other women. Because Otto is outwardly genial to a fault, it takes a loooong time to fall under the suspicion of the cops. The character of Otto and Buono’s performance elevate The Strangler above its budget and launches it into the top rank of serial killer movies.
Frameline, the oldest and longest-running LGBTQ+ film festival in the world, opens tomorrow, June 19 and runs through June 29. The program includes over 120 screenings from around the globe, curated from over 1,600 submissions and invitations. Frameline films will be presented in San Francisco’s Roxie Theater, the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, the Herbst Theatre and the Vogue Theatre, and Oakland’s The New Parkway Theater.
As always, Frameline’s program is very rich. I’ve selected three films to highlight – two highly inventive nuggets from international cinema and the restoration of a groundbreaker.
Gondola: This charming comedy is the work of a unique filmmaker, German writer-director Veit Helmer, who has been making dialogue-free films in Central Asian nations for a decade. A gondola links two mountainsides in rural Georgia, and the two female gondola operators fall in love as they pass each other over the valley. It’s remarkable how Helmer is able to pack so many story elements into a film without dialogue. (I also love Helmer’s The Bra, which I tagged as just your average silent Azerbaijani comedy.) Gondola is ever funny, sweet and imaginative.
Bruna Linzmeyer and Mirella Façanha in CIDADE; CAMPO. Courtesy of Frameline.
Cidade; Campo: Frameline hosts the North American premiere of this third feature by Brazilian auteur Juliana Rojas, which won her the Encounters Best Director prize at the Berlinale. There are two female-centered stories of relocation between city and countryside. One woman, forced from her rural home by a flood, moves to Sao Paolo with her sister and her vulnerable, floundering grandson; she takes an office cleaning job and joins her so-workers to push for better conditions. In the other story, a woman inherits her estranged father’s farm and moves to the sticks with her partner. She discovers that he was working with ayahuasca in an impossible business climate. The lengthy, robust sex scene will be talked about, both for its duration and its body positivity. Rojas anchors each story in in often harsh reality, but but explores grief by dotting them with the supernatural.
Guinevere Turner and V.S. Brodie in GO FISH. Courtesy of Frameline.
Go Fish: This pioneering lesbian classic by writer-director Rose Troche and writer-star Guinevere Turner exploded at the 1994 Sundance. Funded by Frameline’s Completion Fund Grant, a new 4K restoration will screen at the Palace of Fine Arts to celebrate its 30th anniversary. (BTW, if you get a chance to see the new doc Chasing Chasing Amy, not at Frameline, Guinevere Turner discusses the Go Fish experience at Sundance.) Both Troche and Turner are expected to appear at the Frameline screening.
There are over 100 other offerings in the Frameline48 program. Peruse the program and purchase tickets at Frameline48. Here’s the trailer for Gondola.
