→ December 29, 2020
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The Prom.

The thing with musicals is that, even if the plot is good, shouldn’t you remember at least one of the songs after you’ve watched it?

I actually liked The Prom, which has received some scathing reviews and mixed marks overall, even with some obvious flaws, from a hackneyed plot to the choice to cast a straight actor as a gay character at the center of the film, but the biggest problem with the movie is that the music just isn’t any good. I couldn’t sing or hum a single tune from the movie within a few hours after we turned it off. No musical can work like that, even when the feel-good story feels good, the lead actress is a star in the making, and some great actors are quite game for a script that doesn’t always serve them well.

The premise of The Prom, which was a Broadway musical before coming to Netflix and may have seemed fresher or more current when it debuted, is familiar: A high school in Indiana cancels its prom rather than let a student bring their same-sex partner as a date to the event. The student, Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman), is out, but her girlfriend isn’t. Her principal (Keegan Michael-Key) is supportive, and sees this as a civil rights issue, but the head of the PTA (Kerry Washington) heads the opposition, spouting some typical bromides about family values, life choices, and ‘won’t somebody please think of the children.’ (I found it interesting that they cast a Black actor in that role, perhaps to avoid bringing race into a story about defending  LGBTQ rights.) Four Broadway actors, two of whom have just learned their brand new show has received such savage reviews that it’s likely to close after just one night, get wind of this story and decide to head to Indiana to rally behind Emma – and give their own careers a boost of good publicity. Needless to say, this isn’t how things go once they arrive.

The four actors are played by Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells, all of whom throw themselves completely into their rather absurd characters. Streep plays the diva, Corden her flamboyantly gay co-star, and both profess to be rather unaware of how the hoi polloi might live (although we later learn that’s a put-on). Kidman is a permanent understudy who never got her big break, and Rannells is “between gigs” and happens to be tending bar at the afterparty for Streep and Corden’s show. Kidman is, unsurprisingly if you’ve seen much of her work (like To Die For), the film’s secret weapon, sporting a convincing New York accent and giving her slim character her all, especially in her one big song, “Zazz,” a gentle satire of Chicago’s “All That Jazz” that unfortunately lacks the dancing part that would seal the homage. Rannells has even less to do, but does it well, especially in the song that sends up the show that made him a star, The Book of Mormon, where he responds to the argument that the Bible forbids homosexuality with a song that points out that it also forbids tattoos and the wearing of hats.

The story doesn’t really work if you squint at it, although that’s true of a lot of musicals, and many of the classics have plots that are little more than afterthoughts in service of the music. The resolution relies on a rather substantial plot contrivance, something the viewer knows for most of the movie, that is just too convenient. Some of the subplots actually work better – Key’s principal being a huge fan both of Streep and of Broadway in general, James Corden’s estrangement from his parents – but the script strains too hard to make the main storyline, which itself feels a few years out of date, work.

It succeeds in spite of itself, in large part because of Pellman, who makes her film debut in The Prom and looks every bit a star in the making. With her girlfriend still closeted, Emma carries most of the weight of the kids’ part of the storyline – her girlfriend is the only other teenaged character with any depth here – and Pellman is more than able to carry her share even in scenes with Streep and Kidman, two great actors who can be dominant on-screen, and when she finally gets a scene of her own, singing “Unruly Heart” as her character starts a Youtube channel and takes charge of her own side of the publicity battle.

Corden has come in for a fair amount of criticism for the fact that he’s a straight man playing a gay character, and for doing so with some effeminate flourishes that lean a little bit into stereotype. I can’t argue the point, but from a straight performance perspective, Corden was fine. He’ll never not be Smithy to me, but he was more than adequate here, and was enough of a presence to counterbalance Streep, who is the good kind of hammy for most of the film, even though the script really lets her down in several ways.

But all of this comes with the basic problem I had with The Prom: There isn’t a single song in it that I could still recall a few hours after we finished the film. I enjoyed the experience of watching it, but a musical without good music is a rather empty shell, with barely enough plot to fill a short film. The Happiest Season, a holiday film on Hulu starring Kristen Stewart, had a rather similar plot at the core of its story, and handled it more deftly and with bigger laughs, even though it relies on some hackneyed tropes in its story. So while I liked The Prom just enough, there’s no staying power to it, and, unlike with most musicals, I have no real interest in watching it again.

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→ December 14, 2020
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Yes, God, Yes.

Yes, God, Yes is a delightful indictment of the way many puritanical religions, in this case particularly Catholicism, treat basic human sexuality, in a devilishly satirical, 80-minute comedy that features plenty of little nods to the culture right around the year 2000. Starring Natalia Dyer (Stranger Things) as Alice, who gets an unexpected window into the world of sex via an AOL chat room, the story follows Alice as she goes on a four-day indoctrination retreat with her Catholic school and encounters the rank hypocrisy of the religion.

Alice’s morality teacher, Father Murphy (of course), teaches that sex is only for procreation, and that when it comes to sexual desire, boys are like microwaves (turned on easily, no warm-up required) while girls are like conventional ovens. This useful lecture comes right before she receives a pornographic image from a creep she encounters in that online chatroom, which leads her to try masturbating for the first time – something she’s been told, repeatedly, will send her to hell. She’s also the subject of a nasty rumor that she engaged in a sex act with another student, but she doesn’t even know what the act is because she’s unfamiliar with the term used for it. She then heads off on that retreat, which is Kairos by another name, where she discovers that many people in charge of the endeavor don’t exactly practice what they preach.

Masturbation, specifically a girl masturbating, is at the heart of the story here, and that alone makes Yes, God, Yes rather unusual – if that act appears at all in movies, it’s usually boys doing it, and usually just played for laughs. That’s notable in and of itself; women’s sexuality is generally ignored in movies, or seen as something immoral or sinful, as in horror movies that kill off any of the teenagers having sex. To this film’s credit, Alice’s masturbation isn’t treated as a joke, but as a natural part of the story, and a way to keep throwing her into religious doubt. Her sneaking around also lands her in trouble, which in turn lets her see what some of the other campers – and authority figures – are up to.

The script doesn’t pull its punches on Catholicism – not its treatment of all non-procreative sex as sinful, not its inherent subjugation of women – and even ends with a coda that depicts devout Catholics as both provincial and uncurious, even as Alice realizes there’s a world beyond the walls of her parochial school. The film doesn’t delve into questions of faith, but deals with the real-world impacts of the man-made doctrines, which require willful ignorance of human biology and sexuality, and allows the question of why these myriad rules even exist when the Christian Bible has barely anything from Jesus himself about sex to lay unanswered at the edges of the story. Once Alice goes through the looking glass by seeing that single pornographic image, she’s on a path where she’s going to question far more than just what the Church told her about sex.

Dyer was one of the weaker actors on Stranger Things, partly because her character wasn’t that interesting, but also because she played Nancy so flatly, only coming to life when she got involved in a combat scene. She’s better here, because she has more to do, although I still don’t get a lot of energy from her performances. She’s at her best in Yes, God, Yes when Alice is befuddled, confused, or surprised by something, but less convincing when she’s angry, spiteful, or, in one scene, trying to be passionate. The film does rest largely on her, as there isn’t another major character and most of the secondary ones are pretty one-note, and in that sense she is more than up to the task.

Yes, God, Yes premiered way back at SXSW in March of 2019, but the pandemic wrecked its release schedule, and after a very limited run in drive-throughs and via virtual cinema, it went to Netflix in October. At a scant 78 minutes, it’s just the right length for its subject, and if you’re a lapsed Catholic like me, I think you’ll especially enjoy it.

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→ December 3, 2020
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The Donut King.

The Donut King tells a rags-to-riches immigrant story worth of Horatio Alger, but with a twist, as its protagonist – a hero to hundreds if not thousands of his fellow Cambodians – turns out to be a deeply flawed man. It’s available to stream free via hoopla if you have a library card and your system is a member.

Ted Ngoy is the donut king of the title, a refugee from the Khmer Rouge who comes to the U.S. in 1975 with his wife and children, staying in the makeshift refugee camp at Camp Pendleton when they first arrived. He finds work at a gas station when he notices the smell of fresh donuts, which leads him to get a job at the iconic California chain Winchell’s. From there, it’s all straight uphill for Ngoy, who works his way to manager, buys an independent donut shop called Christy’s, and builds a chain of 32 shops by training fellow Cambodian immigrants and leasing the new stores to them. Ngoy amassed a fortune of about $20 million, by his own reckoning, and gave generously, sponsoring a thousand families (again, in his own telling) of Cambodian refugees. At the peak of his success, he owned a $2 million mansion, which we see in the film.

Director Alice Gu shows just how broad that success was, as Ngoy helped populate southern California with Cambodian-run donut shops, and he gave several members of his extended family their starts in the United States. Several cousins shown in the film run their own shops, although one of the subplots is the way the youngest generation is turning away from the business, especially as they’ve gotten the post-secondary educations made possible by their parents’ donut enterprises.

The real story here is that Ngoy developed a gambling problem shortly after emigrating to the United States, and it eventually cost him everything. The generous, assiduous immigrant from the movie’s first two-thirds throws everything away through his gambling and, eventually, even worse transgressions. He’s a rich subject for a documentary because of these contradictions, and even family members who owe their prosperity to the first chances he gave them have a hard time reconciling their feelings about him. (His children appear to no longer speak to him, however, a subject that didn’t get the exploration it deserved.)

Gu begins the film with a good ten minutes or so of explanatory content on the Cambodian civil war, which would probably be necessary for most American audiences, using first-person accounts from Ngoy and his family as well as American TV news clips from the time. The Khmer Rouge overthrew the U.S.-backed government, killing nearly 2 million people via torture, imprisonment, and execution, and via the famine caused by the new regime’s forced agrarian schemes. We see scenes of the emptied capital of Phnom Penh, and Ngoy walks through the Tuol Sleng prison, which is now a museum of the civil war. It’s a strong opening, and predisposes you to root for Ngoy and the many other Cambodians we see on camera, discussing their histories.

Yet The Donut King doesn’t give enough time to the back end of the story – to Ngoy’s gambling and other more serious transgressions, to the changes wrought by big chains on mom-and-pop operators like those we see here, and to how the next generation might not be so willing to take over from their parents. If anything, Gu spends too much time on the young woman who’s helping popularize her family’s shop through aggressive use of social media, which is very fun, but a complete digression from any of the main stories she’s telling here. Ngoy’s own arc would be enough to support the film if Gu gave more time to his decline, and to how little he really seems to take responsibility for the damage he wrought. The digressions just aren’t necessary, and they’re the main thing keeping The Donut King from being a great film.

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→ October 6, 2020
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Monos.

Multiple readers recommended Monos, the Colombian submission for last year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (which didn’t make the nine-film shortlist), when I talked about the best films I saw in 2019. Now available on Hulu as part of that service’s deal with Neon, this modern twist on a Lord of the Flies setting is disturbing and grim, casting a dark light on indoctrination and how cults and similar movements take control of malleable young minds.

The”monos” (“monkeys”) of the film are a dozen or so teenage guerrillas fighting the government in an unnamed South American country, although the similarities to the decades-long FARC insurrection in Colombia are obvious. They’re holding an American woman, known only as Doctora (Julianne Nicholson), hostage, and take most of their direction over short-wave radio, visited only twice in the film by The Messenger (Wilson Salazar, himself a former FARC child soldier), who drills them and gives them further orders. When left to their own devices, however, the monos act like teenagers, showing poor judgment, fighting among themselves, pairing off in couples, and doing a rather poor job of monitoring their one prisoner, while it becomes clear most of the kids have no idea why they’re fighting or even taking orders from unseen authorities.

Nearly all of the actors in Monos were making their screen debuts in the film; only Nicholson and Moisés Arias, who plays Bigfoot, had previous credits. You’d never guess by the performances, however, as the actors are entirely credible, perhaps because the script asks them to act like teenagers and because the shoot was so tough on all of the participants. Each has a distinct character and a nickname that sort of fits them, and despite the film’s brisk pace most of them have enough to do to make it clear who at least the key ones are, especially once their discipline begins to break down early in the film and multiple things go wrong.

The heart of the story is the kids, although Nicholson has more screen time than any individual fighter does because so much of the story revolves around their inability to handle any of the tasks they’ve been assigned, including guarding her. None of the child soldiers has a single line in the film that indicates any allegiance to or understanding of the cause for which they’re fighting – the audience never hears it from anyone, in fact. We just know they’re fighting the government, but not which one, or why, or what any of their goals might be. Their participation in this ragtag troop is the end in itself, and with none of them mentioning parents or other family at any point, you might assume they’re either orphans or kids who ran away from something at home, and have tried to replace that with their affiliation with this terrorist group. That leads to an inevitable conflict when interpersonal relationships interfere with their allegiance to the movement, and when obeying the orders from The Messenger and his superiors might mean betraying one’s friends, possibly even to the point of handing one of them a death sentence.

There’s also a political subtext here that I assume resonates more strongly if you know the history of armed insurrections in South America, especially Colombia (FARC, ELN) or even Peru (Sendero Luminoso, MRTA), which endured long, violent conflicts with guerrilla movements on the right and left. I’m not conversant enough with those histories to think I would understand all references within Monos, but at least know that FARC took many hostages during their 43-year terror campaign and conscripted children into their ranks, so I assumed we were watching a proxy for that group. Regardless of the real-world inspiration, this script shows the pointlessness of these guerrilla movements and the futility of the deaths they caused and lives they ruined by stripping the struggle of its ostensible goals, most of which would mean little or nothing to the children handed automatic weapons and a hostage to protect.

Monos is strongest when it focuses on the interactions between the child soldiers, though, getting into themes of homophobia and alienation as well as the sort of squabbling that readers of William Golding’s novel would recognize. They’re still just kids and they act like it, especially when they’re left to their own devices and handed responsibilities no teenager should have. When one of the soldiers realizes they’re no longer on board with the group’s mission or decisions, they try to leave, and then it’s clear that this hasn’t all been some elaborate game. It is that choice, to show what happens when we hand children and their underdeveloped brains adult responsibilities, that gives Monos meaning.

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→ October 2, 2020
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Enola Holmes.

Enola Holmes is utter dreck, a mediocre mystery wrapped in the cloak of a superior writer’s creation and some quality set design, wasting two solid actresses on a script desperate to tell you how clever it is. There have been worthwhile adaptations and continuations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work and iconic character, but this is just plain boring.

Enola Holmes, you see, is Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister, a fabrication by the author Nancy Springer for a series of books that posit that this 14-year-old girl, unmentioned by Doyle, was as quick-witted as her older brothers, with a special talent for cryptography. When her brothers try to send her off to finishing school, she absconds to London and starts a detective agency of her own, specializing in missing persons cases (as, I presume, murder was a bit much for the young adult literature market).

This Netflix adaptation of the series’ first book, The Case of the Missing Marquess, starts with Enola (Millie Bobby Brown, so critical as El on Stranger Things) at home with her mother (Helena Bonham Carter), but when the latter vanishes, Enola’s brothers show up to decide her fate. Mycroft is especially disdainful of her most unladylike ways and thus the stronger advocate of sending her off to a finishing school run by a Miss Harrison (Fiona Shaw, also wasted in a minor role), while Sherlock (Henry Cavill, decidedly un-super here) equivocates and shows a soft spot for his younger sister. Enola takes off and encounters another fugitive, Lord Tewksbury, and the two pair up while on the run, separating in London before circumstances throw them together again – while both are pursued by a mysterious, creepy man named Linthorn who looks too much like a young Willem Dafoe. Enola tries to secure her freedom while figuring out the mystery around Tewksbury’s flight and avoiding her brothers and the interference of Inspector Lestrade.

The story is a convoluted mess, overly reliant on coincidence and failing to give Enola enough of a reason to solve the Tewksbury tangle. Enola’s character is just Sherlock as a teenaged girl, transmuting his disregard for rules and cold manner into a mischievous pixie who breaks the fourth wall with irritating frequency. (And of course she has to say “the game is afoot,” a hackneyedphrase Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes said exactly one time in all of the stories.) She takes off for London with a pile of money her mother presciently left hidden for her in a location she’s disguised with a cipher that Enola cracks, and has little trouble tracking her mother’s movements through the London underground – that’s another preposterous subplot that I won’t spoil because it’s just so stupid. While there, she just bumps into Tewksbury again, because the story needs them to run into each other.

The Sherlock character is a softer and kinder version of the one present in most of the stories and in film versions, which has made the film the subject of a peculiar lawsuit by the Doyle estate. (The character of Sherlock is in the public domain because most of the works that include him have lost their copyright protection; the estate claims that this film uses a later version of Sherlock where he shows emotion, and thus isn’t in the public domain.) This poses two problems: It’s not the Sherlock most of us know from canon or from depictions like Benedict Cumberbatch’s, and it also makes Sherlock really, really boring. There are no pithy observations, no witty ripostes, and none of the charm of watching his brain at work, which is a huge part of the appeal of Doyle’s writing – the same as it is for Agatha Christie’s Poirot or Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Wimsey.

This feels more than anything like an attempt to profit from someone else’s creation, because it’s devoid of anything original or interesting. Brown might play the single most important character in Stranger Things‘ ever-growing ensemble, although I think there are times the script pushes her to overact. She never inhabits this character, however, and the reason is probably that the character itself is two-dimensional and cartoonish. For a movie that’s been heavily hyped and received positive reviews, Enola Holmes is a shocking dud. If you’re a fan of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, you’d do well to stay away.

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→ September 16, 2020
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The Personal History of David Copperfield.

When word came out in mid-2019 that Armando Iannucci (The Death of Stalin, VEEP) was filming an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, I read the book in anticipation of its release, also rectifying a rather large gap in my own reading history. (I’d read five Dickens novels, two in high school and three by choice, but not this one, which Dickens himself called his favourite, and which the Guardian called the third “most Dickensian” of his novels.) The movie came out in the UK last year, but its arrival in the U.S. was delayed by COVID-19, and it just hit theaters earlier this month. It is marvelous, the best 2020 release I’ve seen so far this year, with a mostly faithful script, wonderful casting, and excellent use of the humor in Dickens’ rags-to-riches novel.

If you haven’t read the book, which I had not other than one of those Moby Books’ abridged, illustrated versions back in 1981 or so, it is the life story of its title character, from birth into straitened circumstances, through his widowed mother’s unfortunate choice of a misanthropic, controlling husband, to his indenture at his stepfather’s wine-selling business, and on and on in somewhat picaresque fashion. He encounters a host of eccentric characters, a few of whom, notably the venal Uriah Heep, have gained lasting reputation among the pantheon of literary creations, with several others providing comic relief among David’s series of misfortunes before he finally turns to writing as a vocation and finds success and financial security for the first time.

The first theatrical film version of Dickens’ classic novel in a half-century, The Personal History of David Copperfield might be most notable for the color-blind casting, although I’d argue that this choice is notable for how quickly you’ll stop noticing it. The casting itself is so perfect top to bottom that casting all-white actors couldn’t have produced a comparable result, notably Dev Patel as David himself, handling the pivotal role with aplomb, adapting to David’s changing views of the world and greater understanding of the people around him over the course of the story. Characters who are related by blood don’t share skin tone, and it couldn’t matter any less.

Many of the side characters are superbly cast as well, but none more so than Hugh Laurie as the befuddled Mr. Dick, which sees Laurie at his Woosterian best, and also gives that character a bit more to do than just to serve as comic relief. Mr. Dick’s host, David’s aunt Betsy Trotwood, is played by Tilda Swinton, who can certainly dominate a film in the wrong way when she gets to play a severe character; here, she gives Aunt Betsy more depth than the character has in the novel, making her more sympathetic and thus making it easier to understand why David is so generous to her as her own circumstances decline and he finds their relations reversed. Ben Whishaw delivers an unctuous, loathsome performance as Uriah Heep, complete with bowl-cut and affected speech that Patel later mimics to great comic effect. Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, has a lot of fun with the shifty but good-hearted Mr. Micawber, making him a little less exasperating on the screen than he is on the page.

The movie is brisk at two hours, and spends far more time on the first half of the novel than on the second, with great length given to David’s childhood and early adulthood, including his relationship with Mr. Micawber and time in a boarding school where he meets James Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard). That choice gives us rather more prologue than David requires and rushes some of the resolutions, so that David’s marriage to Agnes is treated almost as an afterthought, and the unmasking of Uriah Heep plays out in a far less satisfying manner, because the audience has so much less time and reason to despise him, and also has less time to appreciate Whishaw’s deft portrayal of Heep’s scheming nature. The first half of the novel is important, but the second half is the payoff. The film gives you all of that payoff in the last thirty minutes, and it’s still fun, just condensed.

Iannucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell play the story extremely straight until close to the very end. The compression of the last half of the book requires a large change to the arc with Dora, which the screenwriters handle in a way that also comments on Dickens’ original story, where David marries Dora, realizes it’s unsuitable because she’s dull and needy, so Dickens has her conveniently die after suffering a miscarriage so that David can marry Agnes. Dora here is even sillier than she is in the book, making her a great comic presence, but rather than kill her off, the writers give her the perspicacity to find her own way off the stage. The Ham/Emily/Steerforth subplot, itself rather tangential to David’s own narrative, also has a rather significant change that I would argue is less successful even though Dickens’ own handling of that arc relied too much on coincidence.

I had no trouble following the plot, because I’d read the novel recently, but I do wonder how well viewers could follow the plot, especially the last half hour or so, if they had no exposure to the book or previous adaptations. It’s the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy problem – a novel of 500+ pages is hard to condense into a two-hour film without losing something, and you’d rather lose details or exposition than plot or character development. Perhaps the Emily subplot could have gone instead, as essential as it is on the page, because so much time is spent on David’s childhood visit to the seaside hovel where she lives, to give us more time with Heep and David at the law firm so we better understand their rivalry and why Heep is so odious. (We do see plenty of Mr. Wickfield, played by Benedict Wong, in various stages of inebriation.) Yet The Personal History of David Copperfield is joyous because of what Iannucci and Blackwell retained – Mr. Dick, Dumb Dora, the Micawbers – and how well Dev Patel brings that title character to life.

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→ August 26, 2020
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Palm Springs.

Palm Springs, available now to stream on Hulu, is a smarter reboot of Groundhog Day, without the cameo from an impossibly young Michael Shannon, but in some ways still falls prey to the flaws of its inspiration. It’s a time-loop story that explicitly rejects the idea that there’s some moral lesson the trapped protagonists have to learn to escape it, and instead forces one of them to confront the fears that have led him to accept his fate rather than fighting it.

Nyles (Andy Samberg) is a guest at the wedding of his girlfriend’s sister, and when we first see the ceremony, he comes to the rescue of another of the bride’s sisters, Sarah (Cristin Millotti), as she’s fumbling through the maid-of-honor speech she didn’t realize she was supposed to deliver. This leads to them hooking up, but that’s interrupted by something else and, long story short, they both end up caught in a time loop where they must repeat the day of the wedding over, and over.

It turns out that Nyles has already been stuck in this time loop for a while, and that itself leads to all sorts of complications, especially once Sarah tires of it after a few trips around the carousel and decides she wants out – with or without Nyles. It turns out that they each have a significant secret that they don’t reveal to the other for quite some time, and while Nyles’ secret infuriates Sarah, Sarah’s secret is the bigger revelation. There’s also one more person stuck in the time loop, Ray (J.K. Simmons), who throws a wrench, or an arrow, into the works, although his role is best left undiscussed.

For a swift movie with a thin, familiar premise, Palm Springs does quite a bit right. It’s often very funny, and it’s a lot more than just Samberg playing the same character he always plays (Nyles is little more than Jake Peralta without a badge). The whole subplot with Roy, including how he got stuck in the time loop in the first place, is frequently hilarious, as are some of the smaller bits in the first half of the film. Millotti displays quite a penchant for comedy, especially when outraged – there’s an art to dropping an F-bomb and making it funny, and she has it – and by about halfway through the film, it’s clear that she is, or at least should be, the main character here. While flawed, she’s the stronger, smarter, and wittier of the two, and she’s ultimately the one who finds a possible exit from their infinite loop.

Which brings up the two major problem with Palm Springs: Why is Sarah romantically interested in Nyles? True, he’s far more into her than she is into him, but she is into him, even though their connection beyond the shared experience of the time loop is thin. She does far more to make their time in the loop more tolerable than he does. She’s also more willing to examine her own misdeeds than he is. She’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, right down to her petite frame and “doe eyes,” and if you couldn’t guess from the fact that she’s into the aimless protagonist who can’t get out of his own way that this script was written by a man, well, it was.

There are some minor technical issues with the way Palm Springs handles its time loop, although that’s true of just about every work of fiction that includes time travel. (I’ll argue forever that Connie Willis does it best in her Oxford series of novels and stories, because she makes time travel itself extremely difficult and limited in scope.) The script is so concerned with getting its two protagonists out of the loop that it sort of forgets everyone else involved, which is understandable Sarah’s secret is left unresolved in the end, even though it affects more characters than just her and Nyles, and, if you’ve seen the movie already, I’d love to know what you thought of Sarah’s grandmother’s last comment to her near the end of the film. But ultimately, it was the unconvincing nature of Sarah’s interest in Nyles that brought Palm Springs down from great to merely good – still very funny, and sometimes thoughtful, just not entirely plausible form any perspective other than Nyles’.

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→ August 18, 2020
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She Dies Tomorrow.

She Dies Tomorrow is the latest film from actress/director Amy Seimetz, her first since 2012’s Sun Don’t Shine, both of which she also wrote. It’s a strange, subtle psychological thriller that doesn’t quite stick its landing but still gives the viewer plenty to ponder beyond the strange behavior on the screen.

The protagonist Amy (Kate Lyn Shiel) wakes up at the start of the film and realizes that she is going to die tomorrow, a fact she repeats regularly through the rest of the film, and she drops steeply into malaise, which scares her friend Jane (Jane Adams), who then breaks into Amy’s house to try to save her. Unfortunately, whatever has convinced Amy that she’s at death’s door is contagious, and Jane begins to say that she is going to die tomorrow, exchanging her fairly cheerful demeanor for a flat affect, eventually leaving her house in her pajamas to go to her brother and sister-in-law’s small cocktail party. She’s not exactly a hit there, telling everyone she’s going to die tomorrow, but when she leaves everyone else who was there has caught the bug too. Each of them devolves in their own way, and the film is deliberately ambiguous about some of what happens, but it doesn’t really go well for anybody.

She Dies Tomorrow is the slowest of burns; there are long passages where it seems like nothing is happening, such as when Amy plays the same classical piece four times in a row without any other action on the screen. It’s dark, but also often quite funny, as in the bizarre dolphin discussion at the cocktail party, or Jane’s reaction when the lights go out, or, depending on your perspective, in Amy’s obsession with having her skin made into leather goods after she dies. But the plot itself is short – not thin, but brief, with the spread of this fear-virus just about the only real thing that happens before the last few scenes. (There’s one brief bit of violence, but it’s off screen, and I think the script leaves it unclear who actually perpetrated it.)

The point of this film isn’t what happens, however, but how the characters react to this intense conviction that their deaths are imminent. Most tumble quickly into a “nothing matters” reaction, giving the entire movie a Camus/Sartre sort of atmosphere, although Jane’s reaction is a more intriguing combination of numbness and hilarity (which is why Adams is the real star of the movie, even if she’s not the one on the poster). Amy decides to joylessly try some dangerous activities, and eventually goes back to the vacation home she’d visited with her then-boyfriend, who may be the person who gave her this contagion. Jane’s brother and sister-in-law understand she gave them the pathogen, and believe she also gave it to their daughter, and discuss this with absurdist nonchalance, even as they consider whether to seek some sort of revenge. Jane eventually wanders into a house occupied by two women who say they also have the fear-virus, and who are confronting their imminent demise with thoughts of what they’ll miss about life, even without really considering whether there would be any ‘them’ to miss it. Jane’s response is to ask to swim in their pool, which produces a tragicomic scene as she does so while the two women sit outside and talk, apparently oblivious to and unperturbed by their visitor.

The ending of She Dies Tomorrow contributes to this terse script’s ambiguity, as we see Amy waking up on the rocks by the sea in a dress, and it seems like at least some of what came before this might have been a dream, which is extremely unsatisfying when it comes to plot; if you’re going to do that, just lean into it and put Bobby Ewing in the shower. The film works much better instead if you view it as an interpolation on several responses we might have to realizations of our own mortality and the finite nature of our lives, to how we might react if the plans we’ve made for the future turn to dust before an empty hourglass. She Dies Tomorrow doesn’t judge its characters or advise us on how to cope with the calamity of so long a life when it may be cut short at any moment. It’s as terrifying as any stock serial killer wearing a mask and wielding a weapon.

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→ August 10, 2020
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The True History of the Kelly Gang (film).

I enjoyed Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang when I read it ten years ago, but the new film adaptation of the book, released briefly to theaters this spring by IFC Films (now available via amazon), is a huge disappointment. It bears little resemblance to the book, revels in pointless violence, and makes use of some confusing camera tricks that left me with the impression that the filmmakers were more impressed by their technical ideas than they were concerned with making the film comprehensible.

Ned Kelly is a real historical figure, a bushranger and outlaw in 1800s Australia who has become a sort of Robin Hood-style folk hero in the century-plus since his capture and execution. He was born to an Irishman who was forcibly transported to Australia as a convict, and fell in with horse thieves before a violent confrontation at his family house with a Constable named Fitzpatrick led to Ned shooting the Constable and taking flight. He stayed on the run for two years with a ‘gang’ of fellow outlaws, gaining sympathizers across the continent due to antipathy towards the English or distrust of the corrupt colonial police, before he was caught and arrested in a shootout and conflagration that led to the death of Ned’s brother, several hostages, and a 13-year-old boy. Ned was tried and hanged for the murder of one of the officers who had been hunting for him, whom Kelly and his comrades ambushed at Stringybark Creek.

Carey’s novel follows the true story of Ned Kelly fairly closely, at least at the level of macro events, but this film goes its own way, inventing new events out of whole cloth, often to try to amp up the violence or depravity of the story. More than half of its two hours pass before Kelly (played by George Mackay) goes on the run, which happens earlier in the book and opens the door to most of the action in the story. The film dwells too long on Kelly’s upbringing, overdramatizing his tutelage under the bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe), then dropping the latter with a one-sentence narration, and jumping ahead in time to show Ned getting out of jail for a crime he committed under Harry’s direction. There’s a lot of underexplanation in this film, and knowing the book or the real story of Ned Kelly isn’t a lot of help because the script deviates so far from both.

The movie has Dan Kelly, Ned’s brother, and his fellow horse-thief Steve wearing fancy dresses on their escapades, a disguise that Ned adopts as well for his gang – something that appears to be pure invention on the part of the screenwriters. The film also implies multiple times that Ned and his friend Joe Byrne were lovers, which doesn’t seem to derive from any historical evidence at all. There’s also a brothel where Ned first meets Fitzpatrick, who later tries to woo his sister; the wooing is true but the house appears to be a fabrication, one that appears multiple times in the story.

The one shining light in the movie is Nicholas Hoult, who plays Fitzpatrick with a sort of disturbing yet genteel charm, although this again doesn’t appear to match the historical record. The real Alexander Fitzpatrick was only a Constable for three years, was a longtime alcoholic, and had a reputation for arresting and charging men on dubious pretenses – such as spiking Ned Kelly’s drink and then arresting him for drunk and disorderly conduct, a probably true story that would actually have made for a good scene in this film. Hoult plays Fitzpatrick less as a lush and more as a proud yet unscrupulous man, one whom you could understand Ned briefly befriending and young women possibly admiring. You might know Hoult as the boy in About a Boy, but he came to my notice more recently in 2018’s The Favourite, where he played the only male character of any substance in the film, a foppish dandy of sorts whom Hoult played to the hilt.

Mackay, unfortunately, plays Ned as a bestial figure, one devoid of nearly all personality or reason; it’s unclear why anyone would follow this madman, let alone why he’d eventually become a folk hero whose legacy is still debated to this day in Australia. Mackay was very good in 1917 and a pleasant surprise in the uneven Captain Fantastic, but this script did nothing to make use of his talents. Dismissive of its main character’s complexity, obsessed instead with pointlessly graphic violence, and shot in eccentric ways, The True History of the Kelly Gang does a disservice to its protagonist and to the book from which it came.

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→ July 29, 2020
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The Whistlers.

I doubt I would have even bothered looking for The Whistlers, which is free to watch on Hulu, if my friend Tim Grierson hadn’t named it one of his favorite films of 2020 so far. Submitted by Romania for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, The Whistlers missed the shortlist in a very competitive group, and perhaps was too quirky or absurd for the committee (who did nominate The Painted Bird, which you couldn’t pay me to watch given how much I hated the book). It’s a crime drama with a perfectly ridiculous twist that makes it one of the most interesting and unusual films I saw from last year, so even where the plot is a bit off, it still works and kept me engrossed till the end.

The Whistlers takes place in Romania and on La Gomera, one of the smaller islands in the Canaries, jumping back and forth in location and time to follow the main character, Cristi, a Romanian police officer, as tries to free a businessman named Zsolt who has been taken by an organized crime ring based on the island. I was completely unaware of this before watching The Whistlers, La Gomera has a whistling language called Silbo Gomero that has been used for centuries to communicate across the island’s valleys. (You can read more about it at UNESCO’s page, commemorating its inclusion on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.) To evade detection by foreign police officers, Cristi learns the whistling language, with comic misfires along the way, using it to talk to the various thugs with whom he’s working, along with the femme fatale Gilda, who is working with the criminals but also has her own agenda.

Cristi’s bosses suspect him of criminal involvement and have him under what appears to be nonstop surveillance, including bugging his apartment, which leads to all sorts of subterfuge, not least of which is Gilda pretending to be a sex worker, with Cristi a regular client, to fool the cameras. Of course, Cristi is hardly the only corrupt cop – one theme throughout every Romanian-language film I’ve seen is that pretty much everyone is corrupt – and it’s not really clear how effective their cover story is, especially given one detail towards the end of the film that was the only element I found hard to accept as plausible.

The Whistlers has a very neo-noir feel even with the comedic elements, thanks to a short list of named characters and a plot that has just about everyone in the story working multiple angles, including Cristi himself, reminiscent of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang orsome of the Coen Brothers’ work. The script plays the comedy very straight, respecting the whistling language even as Cristi looks utterly ridiculous trying to reproduce the sounds required for it, while also hiding enough of the byzantine machinations of all of the major characters to make the film’s resolution as suspenseful as you’d demand from a classic noir film.

Writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu is apparently better known for dramatic films, including Police, Adjective (which also stars Vlad Ivanov, who plays Cristi), so this script was a new turn for him, and his ability to write dark comedy is quite promising – and a welcome shift from the grim reputation of Romanian films. It also adheres to the spirit of traditional noir stories in that the actual crime at the heart of the plot, the theft of several million leus stuffed into a couple of mattresses, isn’t actually all that important to the film as a whole. This is about the interactions between the characters, with levity from Cristi’s difficulty mastering the whistling language, with an ending that ties the remaining threads together in clever, cohesive fashion.

Because The Whistlers was submitted and eligible for this year’s Oscars, I’ve included it as a 2019 film and added it to my ranking of all films from 2019 that I’ve seen.

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