Authors: Alice Stoehr Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019)

November 4, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Documentary, Theatrical

**½/****
directed by Midge Costin

by Alice Stoehr "Sound is half of the experience," says George Lucas over a muted excerpt from Star Wars' opening shot. The din of laser artillery and John Williams's score have fallen away, so the director's voice accompanies two vessels drifting in the silence of space. This sequence caps an introductory montage darting from Jurassic Park to The Elephant Man to Lawrence of Arabia in order to sensitize viewers (and listeners) to the intricacies of film audio. Midge Costin leans a lot on such montage in her documentary Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound. They're groupings of iconography à la Chuck Workman, part of her bid to demystify the craft. She structures two-thirds of the film as a rough history via sound-design heavyweights while leaving the rest for anecdotes from other luminaries in the field. Oscilloscopic sound waves are her primary graphic motif. It's instantly accessible, very Film 101. Costin, like the film's writer, Bobette Buster, is a professor at USC. (Lucas and Steven Spielberg endowed her position.) Their work together has all the clarity of a syllabus. The 1992 doc Visions of Light went deep into the art of cinematography; this, decades later, is its ear-oriented counterpart.

Gwen (2019)

August 21, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, UK, VOD

***/****
starring Maxine Peake, Eleanor Worthington-Cox
written and directed by William McGregor

by Alice Stoehr The place is Wales. The time is the past. The subject is a penniless family of three. Mancunian actress Maxine Peake plays the sallow, unsmiling mother of two girls: little Mari (Jodie Innes) and teenage Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox). They live in a ramshackle farmhouse amid mossy boulders and fields of emerald grass. The sky tends to be thickly overcast; particles of soot get everywhere. Wind rasps the valley and pervades the sound design by Anna Bertmark, whose credits include You Were Never Really Here. The soundscape is much like that of Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse, another film about rural privation on an uncaring earth. Snow falls, thunder cracks, and the family's meagre assets dwindle. This is the starting point for Gwen, William McGregor's flinty debut feature. McGregor started in British television, with shows like "Misfits" and the period drama "Poldark", on both of which he collaborated with Gwen's cinematographer Adam Etherington. The two of them put tremendous discipline into the film's style, shooting across the Welsh countryside in early winter. They apply a rich visual lexicon to this desolate space: focus pulls, slow pans and zooms, reflections in sullied glass. Due to the era's lack of electricity, they favour backlighting, with pale sun penetrating the house's gloom. Night scenes rely on the unsteady and audible flames of candles or torches. It's a world of fog and fire and dirt.

Adam (2019)

August 19, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Nicholas Alexander, Bobbi Salvör Menuez, Leo Sheng, Margaret Qualley
screenplay by Ariel Schrag, based on her novel
directed by Rhys Ernst

by Alice Stoehr The first five minutes of Adam offer a concise sketch of its title character. He’s an unsuave 17-year-old from a Bay Area suburb; his parents fret over his social life; and he’s spending summer 2006 in a closet at his lesbian sister’s Bushwick apartment. Screenwriter Ariel Schrag condenses the first 40 pages of her 2014 novel into this prologue, after which the credits accompany Adam’s first cab ride through Brooklyn. A montage of murals and graffiti flashes past. Nicholas Alexander plays Adam, his hair floppy, his expression glazed, as a vessel ready to be kiln-fired and filled. (He looks a little like Ice Storm-era Tobey Maguire.) He’s the star of this bildungsroman about a young man’s initiation into the LGBT community and the glaring fact of his own cisness.

Ophelia (2019)

June 30, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Daisy Ridley, Naomi Watts, George MacKay, Clive Owen
written by Semi Chellas, based on the novel by Lisa Klein
directed by Claire McCarthy

by Alice Stoehr A century ago, English animator Anson Dyer adapted Hamlet into a one-reel satirical cartoon. A couple of years later, Danish actress Asta Nielsen played her melancholy countryman, recontextualizing him as a woman. Since then, filmmakers have transposed the Bard's source material into the beer industry, the animal kingdom, and (on several occasions) the corporate boardroom. Film history, in other words, is full of revisionist precedent for Ophelia, which begins with its title character floating in a brook as she intones in voiceover, "You may think you know my story… It is high time I should tell you my story myself." Daisy Ridley–Rey of Star Wars fame–stars as this strong-willed young woman, done up like a Pre-Raphaelite painting with long red tresses. Quick with a turn of phrase, she registers unease in her hazel eyes and indignation in her jaw. Her Ophelia would rather go for a swim than attend to the queen, and the other ladies-in-waiting tease her for her coarseness. Screenwriter and "Mad Men" alum Semi Chellas, working from the 2006 YA novel by Lisa Klein, retells Hamlet's tragedy from the women's point of view. She begins decades before the play, with Polonius's arrival at Elsinore and his daughter's courtly education. The film builds into a Shakespearean Revenge of the Sith, depicting Hamlet's meet-cute with Ophelia, his growing rivalry with his uncle, and his rage when he learns of his father's death. At each turn, new twists reshape a familiar story.

Domino (2019)

June 1, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Belgium, Crime, Denmark, Directors: Brian De Palma, Espionage, France, Italy, Netherlands, Thriller

***/****
starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Carice Van Houten, Eriq Ebouaney, Guy Pearce
written by Petter Skavlan
directed by Brian De Palma

by Alice Stoehr When Brian De Palma was 17, relates Julie Salamon in her book The Devil’s Candy, he tried to prove his father was having an affair. “All summer long he recorded his father’s telephone calls,” she writes. “On more than one occasion he climbed up a tree outside his father’s office and snapped pictures of him and his nurse.” Though perhaps too pat as an origin story, this experience–oft-repeated by biographers, as well as the director himself–haunts his filmography. From Dressed to Kill to Blow Out to Snake Eyes, his characters and camera fixate on audiovisual evidence. They foreground how film itself can act as documentation, to either reveal or distort the truth. These same preoccupations shape Domino, his thirtieth feature and the first he’s directed since 2012’s Passion. The espionage thriller, penned by Norwegian screenwriter Petter Skavlan, intertwines three sets of characters as they bound across Western Europe. Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is a Copenhagen cop who sees his partner’s throat slit in a set-piece modelled after the opening of Vertigo. He seeks vengeance against the assailant, Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney), who’s blackmailed by a handler at the CIA (Guy Pearce) into tracking down the same ISIS cell that beheaded his father. It’s tawdry material, nesting two revenge narratives and plenty of terrorist intrigue inside a film that’s under 90 minutes long.

Starfish (2019)

June 1, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi

**½/****
starring Virginia Gardner, Christina Masterson, Eric Beecroft
written and directed by A.T. White

by Alice Stoehr Leadville, Colorado is a couple hours’ drive from Denver. Ensconced among the Rockies, it has the highest elevation of any American city. The town’s forbidding winter serves as the backdrop for the apocalyptic horror of Starfish. Essentially a one-woman show, the film stars actress Virginia Gardner (of last year’s Halloween) as Aubrey, a DJ with tousled blond hair and a mustard sweater. She’s visiting for the funeral of her friend Grace, whose loss devastates her and sets a pervasively wistful tone. That night, she sneaks into Grace’s apartment, immersing herself in what are now keepsakes: her vinyl collection, her yellowing letters, her surviving pet jellyfish and turtle. Fernanda Guerrero’s production design is precise and analog, suggesting a place where dust has recently begun to settle. Aubrey peeks through an antique telescope and sees a neighbour’s window, this distant vertical block in a sea of darkness. A man and a woman strip, then climb into bed together. “Perv,” laughs Aubrey. Later, she lies on her late friend’s couch and stares up at the wooden ceiling, where she envisions that same couple superimposed as she tries to masturbate. The first quarter of the film abounds with these lonely details. A slow zoom into an old TV’s convex screen reveals Aubrey’s faint reflection as she talks to her mom on a curly-corded landline. Eventually, she falls asleep, and the plot begins in earnest.

The Public (2019)

April 6, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Alec Baldwin, Emilio Estevez, Jena Malone, Taylor Schilling
written and directed by Emilio Estevez

by Alice Stoehr "They're on the wrong side of the law for all the right reasons," runs the tagline for Wisdom (1986), Emilio Estevez's directorial debut. The star of Repo Man and The Breakfast Club was in his mid-twenties when he cast himself opposite then-fiancée Demi Moore, the two of them playing Robin Hood figures on a crime spree. In the decades since, he's had a patchy career as a filmmaker, garnering few awards and little acclaim for one passion project after another. Reviewing the period drama Bobby in 2006, critic A.O. Scott wrote that Estevez "sets himself a large and honorable task. It is important to appreciate this in spite of his movie's evident shortcomings." The same applies to The Public, in which Estevez stars as Stuart Goodson, a Cincinnati librarian fretting over the ethics of his job. One winter night, his branch's homeless clientele stages a sit-in over the city's lack of shelters, and as the police and press get involved, the library becomes a political battleground. Estevez's ambitions are transparent: This is a Capraesque fable for our troubled times, with Stuart as its Mr. Smith or Longfellow Deeds. Most of the film takes place over a matter of hours in a single location, and each figure in the stand-off symbolizes a different ideological perspective. Some sample dialogue: "The public library is the last bastion of true democracy that we have in this country." Lest the viewer get confused.

Madonna and the Breakfast Club (2019)

March 17, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Documentary, VOD

**/****
written and directed by Guy Guido

by Alice Stoehr Madonna Ciccone was born in 1958. She left Michigan for New York City in 1978. Her debut album “Madonna” saw release in 1983. After that, she rocketed to stardom. But for several years in her early twenties, she paid her dues as a musician, working menial jobs while learning drums and guitar. The semi-documentary Madonna and the Breakfast Club tells the story of that period through a bundle of techniques. The bluntest and most expedient of these is voiceover narration. When Madonna moves to then-boyfriend Dan Gilroy’s home in a former synagogue, a woman’s voice says, with studied neutrality, “It was here that Madonna would begin her journey into music.” More versatile are the talking-head interviews with old friends like Norris Burroughs, who introduced her to Gilroy (no relation to the Nightcrawler director); Stephen Lewicki, who directed her in the no-budget movie A Certain Sacrifice; and Ed Gilroy, Dan’s brother and housemate. These subjects recall those years with some nostalgia and mild disbelief over this woman they used to know. “I had a sense that she was somebody who was gonna do something in the world,” says Burroughs, his stance no doubt bolstered by hindsight. The Gilroys go so far as to display photos and demo tapes from Madonna’s tenure in their band, Breakfast Club. These artifacts, which include an embryonic draft of Like a Virgin‘s “Over and Over,” sketch a portrait of the artist as a young tunesmith.

The Amityville Murders (2019)

February 9, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Horror, Theatrical, VOD

**½/****
starring John Robinson, Chelsea Ricketts, Diane Franklin, Paul Ben-Victor
written and directed by Daniel Farrands

by Alice Stoehr The case of Ronald DeFeo Jr. is a gruesome true-crime tragedy. On November 13, 1974, the 23-year-old shot his parents and four younger siblings to death in their Long Island home. A year later, a jury found him guilty of the murders. He’s been in prison ever since. The family’s house beside the Amityville River now has pride of place in the annals of American haunting. George and Kathy Lutz’s one-month stay there served as the basis for a novel, then a film franchise whose second entry, Amityville II: The Possession (1982), fictionalized the DeFeos as the Montellis, with their son in a demon’s thrall. Decades and many more sequels and reboots later comes The Amityville Murders, which depicts the family under their real name in the last couple weeks of their lives. Though loosely based on actual events, it’s less a docudrama than an extrapolation, sticking to the timeline of the murders while ascribing them to the supernatural. Writer-director Daniel Farrands, whose slasher bona fides include Halloween 6‘s screenplay and a 4-hour Elm Street doc, applies a measure of realism in his retelling. The opening credits feature a faux home movie that surveys a family barbecue. It introduces the teenage sisters and little brothers before turning to worn-out mom Louise (Diane Franklin), abrasive dad Ronnie (Paul Ben-Victor), and lastly Ronald Jr. (John Robinson)–known to all as “Butch”–sporting a shaggy beard. The DeFeos’ home, from the very start, is emphatically middle-class and Italian-American. Recipes for cannoli and marinara are points of pride. Floral blouses and turtlenecks help set the film during the Ford administration, as do a wealth of cultural reference points: Cher, Angie Dickinson, The Exorcist, and the puppet show “New Zoo Revue”.

Close (2019) – Netflix

January 20, 20192019, Action, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Streaming, Thriller

**/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Olivia Jewson, Abdellatif Chaouqi, Sophie Nélisse
written by Vicky Jewson, Rupert Whitaker
directed by Vicky Jewson

by Alice Stoehr "I've always been so fascinated by female bodyguards," Noomi Rapace recently told ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY. "It's just a very intriguing, kind of hidden and secretive world." The erstwhile Girl with the Dragon Tattoo steps into that realm as a brooding close-protection officer in her new thriller Close. She stars as Sam Carlson, who's signed on to protect a spoiled heiress flying from England to Morocco. It's a short gig, in and out after one night at a compound high in the hills. But since it wouldn't be much of a movie otherwise, everything goes horribly wrong. Following a bloody siege and a mix-up with the authorities, Sam and her charge find themselves in a race for their lives. These circumstances force the pair to get a lot closer as they evade their attackers and investigate a deadly conspiracy.

The New Romantic (2018)

November 16, 20182018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jessica Barden, Hayley Law, Brett Dier, Camila Mendes
written and directed by Carly Stone

by Alice Stoehr Sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw wakes up in a hotel room after a fling with a Frenchman to find a thousand dollars on the nightstand. This is midway through "The Power of Female Sex," episode five of HBO's "Sex and the City". She summons her friends, sensualist Samantha and hard-headed Miranda, to ask them, "What exactly about me screams 'whore'?" Samantha counsels keeping the money; Miranda tosses around the word "hooker"; and Carrie weighs the gesture as either "an incredible compliment or an incredible insult." The episode has little to say about sex work and the attendant stigma beyond articulating some knee-jerk squeamishness. Twenty years have passed since then in the realms of feminism and pop culture. Twenty years, yet here's The New Romantic, a romcom with the same level of nuance on the subject of sex for money. Its heroine is Blake (Jessica Barden), a college senior who writes about her sparse sex life for the school paper. With the editor poised to take her column away, she tries to spice it up by interviewing a local "sugar baby"–a young woman who barters dates for luxury. It's not long before Blake herself is sipping wine opposite Ian (Timm Sharp), a well-off professor twice her age. Nor is it long before she, as a Nora Ephron devotee, starts to worry she might be sacrificing romance for the sake of journalistic material.

Summer ’03 (2018)

September 30, 20182018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Comedy, Coming of Age, Teen, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Joey King, Jack Kilmer, Andrea Savage, June Squibb
written and directed by Becca Gleason

by Alice Stoehr Jamie (Joey King) sits beside her grandmother's deathbed as the old woman imparts some wisdom. "There's just one more thing," she says, "one thing in this world that you need to know. No one's gonna have the guts to tell you. I wish I had been prepared for it." Then, after all this build-up, the punchline: "Learn how to give a good blow job." So begins the coming-of-age story Summer '03, with an impish smile on grandma's face while Jamie gapes at her advice. June Squibb plays the the grandmother in a foul-mouthed mode familiar from her work as Bruce Dern's wife in Nebraska. Her character will flatline a few minutes of screen time later, but not before confessing at length to her progeny while "In the Hall of the Mountain King" swells on the soundtrack. She tells her daughter that she once locked her in a closet; implores her young grandson to enter gay conversion therapy; and reveals to Jamie's dad the existence of his secret biological father. Most of the film takes place over the following week, with the family in chaos (and blow jobs on Jamie's brain) as they plan the funeral.

Night Comes On (2018)

August 5, 20182018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Theatrical, VOD

***/****
starring Dominique Fishback, John Jelks, Max Casella, Tatum Marilyn Hill
written by Jordana Spiro and Angelica Nwandu
directed by Jordana Spiro

by Alice Stoehr Social workers reel off exposition: this cagey black girl in their midst is Angel (Dominique Fishback), nearly 18. She has a 10-year-old sister, Abigail, but hasn’t seen her in a couple years. Since their mother’s death (at their father’s hands), Angel’s been in foster homes and juvenile detention. Now she’s on parole and plans to stay with her girlfriend. These government employees briskly summarize her life while the camera holds her in close-up. It’s efficient filmmaking that establishes both the heroine’s circumstances and the system that’s confined her. Moments later, she’s out on the street, looking for someplace to charge her phone. So begins Night Comes On, the debut feature from white actress-turned-director Jordana Spiro, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Angelica Nwandu. Its 80 minutes will chart Angel’s next 48 hours as she pursues an objective of which her caseworkers are unaware: to acquire both a handgun and her father’s new address. The film extends outwards from this premise in a straight line. First she meets with the father of her former cellmate, a scumbag dealing in black market firearms. (Max Casella plays him the same way Harvey Keitel might’ve a few decades earlier.) A phone call interrupts their negotiations, which have involved him groping her; to buy time, he has his wife stop at the store for milk. On Angel’s way out, he hands her a half-gallon jug from the fridge. “Do me a favour,” he says. “Throw this out.” A beat later she’s outside tossing the jug against a wall with casual disdain.

The Year of Spectacular Men (2018)

June 23, 20182018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, VOD

**½/****
starring Madelyn Deutch, Avian Jogia, Nicholas Braun, Zoey Deutch
written by Madelyn Deutch
directed by Lea Thompson

by Alice Stoehr Movie star Sabrina Klein sits in a bathtub, distraught. She bawls at her companion: “Can you try to be my big sister for one second of your life, please?” Her big sister Izzy is a wannabe actress who relies on Sabrina for housing and cushy work as an assistant; emotional maturity is not her métier. Nonetheless, she tries. “We should do a song,” she says, so they call up their mom and sing her “Give My Regards to Broadway.” They both perform with such gusto that this must be a tradition for them, a holdover from their shared childhood. These may be women in their mid-twenties, yet as they dance around the bathroom they seem momentarily like a couple of kids.

Sequence Break (2018) – Shudder

May 24, 20182018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Horror, Romance, Streaming

**/****
starring Chase Williamson, Fabianne Therese, Lyle Kanouse, Johnny Dinan
written and directed by Graham Skipper

by Alice Stoehr SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Arcade games, with their bulky cabinets and rudimentary controls, are dinosaurs in the world of gaming. They recall a bygone era when you had to play in public, quarter by quarter, instead of on a console in the comfort of your home. They’ve become outmoded, yet the passage of time has also imbued them with a primordial mystique. As the object of nostalgia, they’re imposing, antique, sometimes faintly sinister. Writer-director Graham Skipper banks on these qualities in Sequence Break, premiering this week on the streaming service Shudder. The film stars Chase Williamson as Oz, a repairman toiling away in a garage full of old stand-up games. One night while sipping beer in a dive bar, he meets free spirit Tess (Fabianne Therese), and the two soon fall in love. But an unusual game in the corner of his workshop threatens to derail their courtship as it enfolds them in its eldritch aura.

Film Freak Central Does the 2018 Ann Arbor Film Festival

April 11, 20182018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Blog, Documentary, Film Festivals

by Alice Stoehr "I can't imagine what you must think of me!" laughed Cecelia Condit. The audience had just seen her groundbreaking shorts Beneath the Skin (1981) and Possibly in Michigan (1983 (left)), plus a swath of her 21^st-century work, and she seemed a bit sheepish about her own films' morbid sense of humour. Between the murders, masks, and nursery rhymes, a streak of dark whimsy runs through them, orienting her as a woman in the world. Condit's a garrulous storyteller in life as in her art and was forthright about the layers of autobiography in her work. Annie Lloyd (2008) shows her mother pressing leaves between pages at the end of her life. Within a Stone's Throw (2012) has Condit herself hiking Irish hills in the aftermath of her mother's death. Images of carrying and collecting recur across these films, a motif that suggests both affection and the assertion of control. These are rough-hewn fables that plumb the possibilities of video.

November (2017)

February 22, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Esoterica, Estonia, Fantasy, Netherlands, Poland, Romance

***/****
starring Rea Lest, Jörgen Liik, Arvo Kukumägi, Katariina Unt
screenplay by Rainer Sarnet, based on the novel Rehepapp by Andrus Kivirähk
directed by Rainer Sarnet

by Alice Stoehr A propeller-shaped demon drags a cow into the sky. An elder bargains with the plague, which is incarnate as a large and ornery pig. A lovesick girl changes into a wolf and back again. Such is the occult world of November. Adapted from Andrus Kivirähk’s Rehepapp, a blockbuster novel published in 2000, Rainer Sarnet’s film takes place a century or two ago, in an Estonian village where the boundary between life and death is porous. A procession of ghosts files through the woods at night. The raucous devil, his voice echoing, arises at a crossroads to barter for blood. Dirt-smudged townsfolk heed their every superstition, even when it means donning trousers on their torsos. The episodic narrative meanders through these folkloric scenarios, expanding its impressions of rustic life across a single late-autumn month. Insofar as the film tells any overarching story, it’s that of a love triangle between Liina (Rea Lest), the sometime-werewolf, unwillingly betrothed to a friend of her father; intense local boy Hans (Jörgen Liik), all scruff and tousled hair; and the young baroness Hans moons over as she sleepwalks through a manor house. The three of them have their hearts vexed and hexed over the course of November. Imagery takes precedence over plotting, though, and the latter often gives way to cryptic allegory. The film returns now and again to elemental motifs: barren trees, ripples in a river, a damp and leaf-strewn forest floor. It’s an environment where civilization holds little sway.

The Road Movie (2017)

January 15, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Documentary, Russia, Theatrical

**½/****
directed by Dmitrii Kalashnikov

by Alice Stoehr Dashboard-mounted cameras are surveillance tools. They can prove who's at fault in an accident, counter insurance scams, and record run-ins with the police; in the corruption-riddled nation of Russia especially, they've become widespread as legal safeguards. But the footage they capture can also double as entertainment. For what, in the whole history of moviegoing, has stimulated a viewer's lizard brain better than a car crash? In The Road Movie, documentarian Dmitrii Kalashnikov has compiled dozens of clips shot by his countrymen on dashcams and uploaded to video-hosting websites. Their lengths range from a few seconds to a few minutes, and the events they document are unpredictable, but they all share the same vantage point: gazing through a windshield onto the road. The director's input is subtle. He's present mostly in the curation and arrangement of the videos, with signs of trimming here and there. Kalashnikov achieves a seamless flow that keeps the film's 70 minutes from growing monotonous. So, for example, during one stretch a cloud of smoke pours from a burning bus; runaway horses block a car's progress through the snow; then a driver ricochets off a snowbank and right into oncoming traffic. Kalashnikov doesn't impose any context on them, so that task falls to the vehicles' occupants, whose faces usually go unseen and whose subtitled chatter is only sporadically relevant to the scene in the road.

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (2017) – Netflix

November 17, 20172017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Documentary, Streaming

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton
**/****
directed by Chris Smith

by Alice Stoehr A few decades ago, Jim Carrey was a rising star of stand-up comedy ready to leave the Toronto suburbs. In mid-'90s Hollywood, he became a household name. Now he's wistful and solidly middle-aged. "Every time you open your mouth you learn something about yourself," he says. "Especially when you play characters." This introspection forms the spine of Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, a documentary about his performance as Andy Kaufman in the 1999 biopic Man on the Moon. The present-day Carrey wears a leather jacket, with a salt-and-pepper beard on his famously rubbery face. Shot head-on or from a three-quarter view, he recounts turmoil on the film's set: "Most people felt that the movie was happening behind the camera." A trove of long-suppressed behind-the-scenes footage woven around the interview shows Carrey disappearing into his role, much to director Miloš Forman's chagrin. He insists his co-stars address him as "Andy;" parades around as Kaufman's loathsome alter ego, Tony Clifton; and repeatedly antagonizes wrestler Jerry Lawler, who plays himself in the movie. Kaufman's real-life family drops by the set and can hardly believe the resemblance.

What Happened to Monday (2017) – Netflix

August 18, 20172017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Belgium, France, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller

Seven Sisters
**½/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Glenn Close, Pål Sverre Hagen, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Max Botkin and Kerry Williamson
directed by Tommy Wirkola

by Alice Stoehr The bad news manifests itself in a flurry of stock footage and newscasters' voices. "Too many people, not enough food," declares one near-future pundit. "It is the biggest crisis in human history," adds another. Dr. Nicolette Cayman, a politician so Thatcher-esque that Glenn Close plays her in pearls and a navy blue suit, helps Europe's now-federalized government institute a strict one-child policy. Her Gestapo-like Child Allocation Bureau (or "CAB") patrols city streets, threatening hidden siblings with indefinite cryogenic stasis. So far, so familiar. It's much like Soylent Green or Children of Men or any of a dozen other dystopian thrillers. But What Happened to Monday's knotty premise continues: What if, say, seven identical sisters grew up in this political climate? They could each leave the house exactly one day a week, each time assuming the same collective identity. And what if one of these sisters, while out and about, happened to disappear?

Outfest LA ’17: Something Like Summer

July 18, 20172017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, Romance

*½/****
starring Grant Davis, Davi Santos, Ben Baur, Ajiona Alexus
screenplay by Carlos Pedraza, based on the novel by Jay Bell
directed by David Berry

by Alice Stoehr Musicals bloom from effusive emotion. When Catherine Deneuve strolled down the streets of Cherbourg, when Judy Garland hopped on a St. Louis trolley, their yearnings were too intense to merely be spoken. They had to be sung. In Something Like Summer, newcomer Grant Davis stars as Ben Bentley, a Texan teen and aspiring singer who’s heartsick (like Deneuve and Garland) over a boy. But his sweetheart Tim, played by Davi Santos, is a “good-looking jock,” as Ben puts it–closeted, Catholic, and deeply ashamed. After a few sub rosa liaisons, the two bitterly part ways. The film cuts to a dim, empty theatre, where Ben sublimates his sorrows into a cover of the break-up song “Barely Breathing”: “I know what you’re doing,” he warbles. “I see it all too clear.” While Deneuve had Jacques Demy and Garland had Vincente Minnelli, Davis has first-time director David Berry, who stages the handful of musical numbers with minimal panache. No dancing, some haphazard camera movement, the actor emoting on a stage. Later, handheld close-ups will peer at Davis during his halting rendition of “La Vie en rose.” (He sings it in a Parisian café, the Eiffel Tower shining through a nearby window.) The soundtrack includes a couple of new compositions alongside songs originally by Regina Spektor and Ne-Yo, many of them intercut with bland montage, none of their lyrics especially salient to the story. Cohesion and spectacle both receive low priority versus the endless reams of plot.

Sand Castle (2017) – Netflix

April 25, 20172017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Streaming, UK, War

**/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Logan Marshall-Green, Glen Powell, Henry Cavill
screenplay by Chris Roessner
directed by Fernando Coimbra

by Alice Stoehr Nicholas Hoult's signature expression requires that his lips be ajar and his buckteeth be visible. The English actor then furrows or flattens his brow; narrows or widens his limpid blue eyes. It's a concise look, one that makes the most of his open, boyish face. He affects it whether flirting with his professor in A Single Man or playing the bashful Beast in the X-Men movies. That barely-open mouth can suggest uncertainty and impotence. It admits that he can neither understand nor control the world around him. Hoult assumes this expression throughout his performance as PFC Matt Ocre in Sand Castle. Ocre is fresh-faced fresh meat, too tender to handle the theatre of war in which he's abruptly immersed. ("I joined the Reserves for the college money," he explains in voiceover, a detail that screenwriter Chris Roessner plucked from his own life.) The Jordanian desert stands in for Iraq in 2003 as Ocre's platoon plows through the aftermath of the American-led invasion. Hoult's joined by hunky rising stars like Glen Powell as the macho Falvy–a far cry from his work as a pretentious ladies' man in Everybody Wants Some!!–and Logan Marshall-Green as the no-nonsense sergeant. The film follows these men as they drive from one makeshift base to another. It emphasizes their scruff, their sweat, and their loud-mouthed braggadocio. The dialogue, which oozes naturalistic profanity, is thoroughly plausible, if increasingly monotonous.

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) + This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967) – DVDs

March 26, 20171960s, 2017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Brazil, DVD, Esoterica, Horror

À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring José Mojica Marins, Magda Mei, Nivaldo Lima, Valeria Vasquez
written and directed by José Mojica Marins

Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring José Mojica Marins, Roque Rodrigues, Nadia Freitas, William Morgan
written and directed by José Mojica Marins

by Alice Stoehr Zé do Caixão, known to English-speaking audiences as Coffin Joe, is like Mr. Hyde without a Dr. Jekyll. Although nominally a small-town undertaker, he has the mien and rap sheet of a supervillain. Attired in top hat and cape, he stalks the countryside, bent on perpetuating his bloodline. He luxuriates in his own depravity. He's a horror-movie monster, and he loves it. Joe is the brainchild of Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins, who's been playing the role for decades. He introduced the character back in the 1960s with a pair of colourfully-titled films: At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul and, three years later, This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse. Both of those phrases are threats spoken onscreen by Joe's victims; both hint at ghostly mischief and a lurid tone. Unhindered by understatement, these films dispense atrocities at the rate of about one per reel. Joe's first evil act, mere minutes into Soul, is blasphemy: he spends Good Friday noshing on a leg of lamb–an unthinkable sin to his pious Catholic neighbours–then, like a schoolyard bully, forces an unwilling bystander to take a bite. Further iniquities pile up quickly in the form of bullwhipping, blinding, and immolation. When an elder dares to challenge him, Joe lacerates the man's face with a Christ figurine's crown of thorns.

Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. (2015) – VOD

February 16, 20172015, 2017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Horror, Netherlands, Thriller, UK, VOD

*½/****
starring Megan Maczko, Edward Akrout, Matt Barber, Sadie Frost
screenplay by Mark Rogers
directed by Ate de Jong

by Alice Stoehr “You cannot fight,” explains the villain to his rope-bound prisoner. “Your only chance of survival comes from compliance.” This lecture is the starting point for Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. [sic], an erotic cat-and-mouse thriller that takes place over a long weekend in a suburban English home. Said villain is Aaron, an intruder played by handsome French actor Edward Akrout. He has a sparse moustache and a head of unkempt hair, locks of which fall dashingly across his forehead. The camera adores him. Megan Maczko, playing Aaron’s prisoner Alison, receives far less flattering treatment. She spends much of her screentime tied up and in some degree of undress, her face contorted with faint disgust, eyes averting her captor’s gaze. Like Akrout, she has to look hot, but hers must be a hotness coloured by mixed emotions and performed under duress. As her co-star murmurs the lion’s share of the dialogue, Maczko needs to indicate reluctant arousal blossoming into full-on emotional liberation. She fails, but so would any actress, because the film’s greasy sexual politics set her up to fail. Meanwhile, the third member of the cast–Matt Barber, as Alison’s husband Tom–has to squirm in a bathtub and howl as Aaron mutilates Tom. He acquits himself adequately, especially given paltry lines like, “Did you touch my wife?” and, “I can’t have anyone else inside you.”