The Rental (2020): Despite Sheila Vand, Alison Brie, Dan
Stevens and Jeremy Allen White being no core cast to sneeze at, Dave Franco’s
film about two couples going on a weekend vacation and crashing against most of
them being pretty shitty people as well as someone really, really not liking
them doesn’t do a lot for me. In part, it’s the too slow pacing of Franco’s and
Joe Swanberg’s script, spending too much time on characters that simply aren’t
terribly interesting, until it finally gets up to very rote thriller tropes
realized competently but without verve.
The whole thriller/horror part certainly isn’t helped by the film never
getting around to telling the audience why we’re supposed to care for these
characters under threat anyway, so their fates aren’t exactly keeping one’s eyes
open.
The Wave (2019): Gille Klabin’s semi-trippy film about a
corporate lawyer on his way to become a total piece of human crap played by
Justin Long learning a valuable – and rather final – lesson about the universe
(apparently, it wants balance, maaaan) after not saying no to drugs, is
surprisingly bland for a film containing a giant drug trip, time jumps and the
stuff of “lost in the city” movies. The film’s surrealism simply doesn’t hit,
the drug visions and shifts having a blandly banal air to them rather akin to
the banality of its protagonist’s style of evil, really not breathing an air of
the actual surreal as much as one of the try-hard surreal.
Not helping is the banality (yep, that word again) of the film’s philosophy,
the sort of thing a film would need considerably more charm to sell than this
one shows.
The Cleaning Lady (2018): Ending on another film that leaves
me nonplussed, Jon Knautz’s horror movie about a woman with a “love addiction”
problem making the classic movie mistake of befriending a member of the lower
classes (it’s feeling rather Victorian around here) and landing in the hands of
a violent psychopath doesn’t just annoy me with its implied politics. It makes
the much bigger mistake of not being good enough as a thriller and a horror
movie to not let me overlook its politics. Sure, it adds some mildly crass
violence to at least give its villainess more of a background but not
really even attempts to sell her as an actual human being instead of a
caricature of suffering turned evil.
When it comes to the shock and the suspense, the film’s just okay, with a
couple of scenes that don’t quite work or simply lack the imagination for any of
this to have much of an impact.
Showing posts with label sheila vand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sheila vand. Show all posts
Saturday, August 22, 2020
Sunday, August 18, 2019
Prospect (2018)
In a ramshackle, lived-in kind of future. Damon (Jay Duplass) and his teenage
daughter Cee (Sophie Thatcher) work as nomadic miners and prospectors.
Apparently, the thing to exploit workers in the future is the return of an old
trick: renting them their equipment – in this case a drop capsule that can make
it from orbit to a planet or moon and back again and which turns out to be in a
deplorable state – and controlling their way of travelling – said ship where
they have basically rented a docking bay – clearly only leaving the miners just
enough to live on and stay just desperate enough to be willing to take terrible
risks. And even though the film isn’t explicitly saying it, you can bet the
prospectors are paid only a fracture of what the things they are risking their
lives for are worth.
Damon, popped up on pills and desperation, is hoping for the one score that’d make them rich. There’s really no time for proper preparation or planning on how to get to the particularly rich claim he has made a deal for – the toxic and heavily pollinated (nope, I don’t mean polluted) moon they have been working for a while is more or less mined out (goodbye, alien ecosystem), so the ship that’s carrying them and other people of their kind is just going to make one final orbit around the star system before it leaves, never to return. And clearly, it’s not going to wait if some freelancer or other doesn’t make it back on time.
Cee’s not happy at all with her father’s plan for one last drop in the time their carrier ship will take for that orbit, but then, there’s little love lost between the two anyway, thanks to the way of life Damon has landed them in, and his pretty obvious lack of care for his daughter and her basic safety. Her being a teenager hardly comes into the equation here, so certainly isn’t helping matters.
Not surprisingly, their capsule barely makes the landing and might not fly again. Even less surprisingly, Damon’s desperation and stupidity get the two into even deeper trouble, particularly once they meet those most terrible of creatures – other people (in particular a character played by Pedro Pascal). In the end, Cee will have to find some way to survive the troubles her father made for her, as well as the natural and human dangers of the moon.
Christopher Cadwell’s and Zeek Earl’s Prospect is one hell of a low budget indie SF movie, presenting the kind of working class – really working poor – future the more space operatic or the more out there films in the genre could not deliver for most of the genre’s history. And while I love an exciting space adventure with galaxy saving and so on, I’m always happy to encounter films that realize that it’s perfectly okay to tell a story about events that just threaten and change the private worlds of a handful of characters instead of the whole of existence.
That sort of thing is even better when it is as well realized as Prospect is, with worldbuilding that doesn’t need reams of exposition because the writers (also Cadwell and Earl) are willing and able to imply and suggest things about the world their film takes place in, letting the audience fill in the blanks about how things work. Obviously, this kind of approach lives and dies on the filmmakers providing not only the right amount of detail but also simply the right details to show. Prospect is pretty damn flawless in this regard, building a world out of a handful of lines of dialogue, a couple of special effects, and an awesome hand at using and creating just the right props to make the whole thing feel like it’s taking place in a world with its own history without needing to tell the audience this history or how the world works.
In part, the film does this by using elements of the US gold rush – and the audience’s knowledge about it – also giving the film a bit of a Western vibe in the process. It’s convincingly done, with the old school capitalist materialistic nastiness of the gold rush and its exploitation of the hopes and the lives of the poor for the gain of the few feeling like a probable and realistic way the exploitation of resources in outer space might go, if things down here don’t radically change. The Western vibe, for its part, is never overplayed, mostly working to place the film on the kind of frontier civilization hasn’t quite reached, all the better, cheaper, and nastier to exploit the resources at hand. None of which the film ever explicitly states, but suggests through characterization and detail.
The production design that also assumes a large part of the responsibility for the film’s quality is spot-on, making the objects the characters use at once logical and practical looking and clearly in their world so cheaply produced and often used they barely hold together. There’s a reason the only man-made thing in the whole film that looks as if it were made with an idea of beauty are the headphones Cee uses to shut out the world and listen to music, well, actually several reasons, because the film does tend to use its moving parts for more than one thing at the same time. The scenes on the moon are obviously shot in a forest on Earth, but with a bit of digital magic for the skies, a bit of pollen, and an eye for finding places in nature that look unearthly, the directors turn it into a convincing place somewhere else. Sure, it’s not the place of CGI dreams, but the more palpable feel of actual locations does add a layer of veracity instead of destroying an illusion.
Veracity is one of the film’s great virtues anyhow. This is one of those films where technology and the way people use it seem to make an innate sense, and even if the viewer doesn’t initially understand every step of what the characters do when they are mining, the film also gives the full impression that there is a reason for each of these steps the filmmakers have actually thought about. That sounds like a little thing, but does actually do wonders to convince a viewer of the reality of what is going on before them.
The character work is just as strong, again working from bases an audience will probably recognize but always going in the right directions from there without feeling the need to fill in all the blanks about the characters. We never quite do learn how much of a bastard Pedro Pascal’s Ezra is or isn’t (the film does something pleasantly ambiguous with his potential redemption arc), for example, or what Cee will feel about the fate of her father once she has gotten back to safety. We learn other things, though, like how Cee survives in her own head in a world that doesn’t give a damn about people like her.
Thatcher’s performance is strong throughout, really as good as anything you’d expect from an actress her age and with limited experience, not wallowing in the standards of teenage grumpiness even when her character is indeed a teenager and unhappy. She’s never putting it on too thick, every decision and emphasis seems just right. The rest of the cast is on the same level (and therefor much better than you’d expect from a film quite this indie), but then, this is a film that does manage to get people like Sheila Vand, Andre Royo and Jay Duplass for small but not unimportant parts, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.
If I do sound rather excited and positive about the film, that’s because Prospect is such a damn exciting and artistically successful movie, not the kind that will have many people dazzled – and more’s the pity – but one that quietly and calmly simply does everything right it sets out to do.
Damon, popped up on pills and desperation, is hoping for the one score that’d make them rich. There’s really no time for proper preparation or planning on how to get to the particularly rich claim he has made a deal for – the toxic and heavily pollinated (nope, I don’t mean polluted) moon they have been working for a while is more or less mined out (goodbye, alien ecosystem), so the ship that’s carrying them and other people of their kind is just going to make one final orbit around the star system before it leaves, never to return. And clearly, it’s not going to wait if some freelancer or other doesn’t make it back on time.
Cee’s not happy at all with her father’s plan for one last drop in the time their carrier ship will take for that orbit, but then, there’s little love lost between the two anyway, thanks to the way of life Damon has landed them in, and his pretty obvious lack of care for his daughter and her basic safety. Her being a teenager hardly comes into the equation here, so certainly isn’t helping matters.
Not surprisingly, their capsule barely makes the landing and might not fly again. Even less surprisingly, Damon’s desperation and stupidity get the two into even deeper trouble, particularly once they meet those most terrible of creatures – other people (in particular a character played by Pedro Pascal). In the end, Cee will have to find some way to survive the troubles her father made for her, as well as the natural and human dangers of the moon.
Christopher Cadwell’s and Zeek Earl’s Prospect is one hell of a low budget indie SF movie, presenting the kind of working class – really working poor – future the more space operatic or the more out there films in the genre could not deliver for most of the genre’s history. And while I love an exciting space adventure with galaxy saving and so on, I’m always happy to encounter films that realize that it’s perfectly okay to tell a story about events that just threaten and change the private worlds of a handful of characters instead of the whole of existence.
That sort of thing is even better when it is as well realized as Prospect is, with worldbuilding that doesn’t need reams of exposition because the writers (also Cadwell and Earl) are willing and able to imply and suggest things about the world their film takes place in, letting the audience fill in the blanks about how things work. Obviously, this kind of approach lives and dies on the filmmakers providing not only the right amount of detail but also simply the right details to show. Prospect is pretty damn flawless in this regard, building a world out of a handful of lines of dialogue, a couple of special effects, and an awesome hand at using and creating just the right props to make the whole thing feel like it’s taking place in a world with its own history without needing to tell the audience this history or how the world works.
In part, the film does this by using elements of the US gold rush – and the audience’s knowledge about it – also giving the film a bit of a Western vibe in the process. It’s convincingly done, with the old school capitalist materialistic nastiness of the gold rush and its exploitation of the hopes and the lives of the poor for the gain of the few feeling like a probable and realistic way the exploitation of resources in outer space might go, if things down here don’t radically change. The Western vibe, for its part, is never overplayed, mostly working to place the film on the kind of frontier civilization hasn’t quite reached, all the better, cheaper, and nastier to exploit the resources at hand. None of which the film ever explicitly states, but suggests through characterization and detail.
The production design that also assumes a large part of the responsibility for the film’s quality is spot-on, making the objects the characters use at once logical and practical looking and clearly in their world so cheaply produced and often used they barely hold together. There’s a reason the only man-made thing in the whole film that looks as if it were made with an idea of beauty are the headphones Cee uses to shut out the world and listen to music, well, actually several reasons, because the film does tend to use its moving parts for more than one thing at the same time. The scenes on the moon are obviously shot in a forest on Earth, but with a bit of digital magic for the skies, a bit of pollen, and an eye for finding places in nature that look unearthly, the directors turn it into a convincing place somewhere else. Sure, it’s not the place of CGI dreams, but the more palpable feel of actual locations does add a layer of veracity instead of destroying an illusion.
Veracity is one of the film’s great virtues anyhow. This is one of those films where technology and the way people use it seem to make an innate sense, and even if the viewer doesn’t initially understand every step of what the characters do when they are mining, the film also gives the full impression that there is a reason for each of these steps the filmmakers have actually thought about. That sounds like a little thing, but does actually do wonders to convince a viewer of the reality of what is going on before them.
The character work is just as strong, again working from bases an audience will probably recognize but always going in the right directions from there without feeling the need to fill in all the blanks about the characters. We never quite do learn how much of a bastard Pedro Pascal’s Ezra is or isn’t (the film does something pleasantly ambiguous with his potential redemption arc), for example, or what Cee will feel about the fate of her father once she has gotten back to safety. We learn other things, though, like how Cee survives in her own head in a world that doesn’t give a damn about people like her.
Thatcher’s performance is strong throughout, really as good as anything you’d expect from an actress her age and with limited experience, not wallowing in the standards of teenage grumpiness even when her character is indeed a teenager and unhappy. She’s never putting it on too thick, every decision and emphasis seems just right. The rest of the cast is on the same level (and therefor much better than you’d expect from a film quite this indie), but then, this is a film that does manage to get people like Sheila Vand, Andre Royo and Jay Duplass for small but not unimportant parts, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.
If I do sound rather excited and positive about the film, that’s because Prospect is such a damn exciting and artistically successful movie, not the kind that will have many people dazzled – and more’s the pity – but one that quietly and calmly simply does everything right it sets out to do.
Thursday, May 10, 2018
In short: Women Who Kill (2017)
Morgan (director/writer Ingrid Jungermann) and her ex-girlfriend Jean (Ann
Carr) may not have worked out as a couple, what with Morgan’s closed-off
emotional life and Jean’s tendency to put everything out in the open, but they
are working very well together with the podcast about female serial killers –
“Women Who Kill” - they are continuing to make. They aren’t just talking about
the serial killers, they are actually visiting the women in prison to interview
them.
Things could go on this way forever, but when Morgan meets the mysterious Simone (Sheila Vand) at her local co-op (full disclosure: as a German living in a small town, I had to look up what the hell that is about) and falls for her instantly. Quickly, the two become a couple, Simone’s general air of mystery enabling Morgan for once in a relationship to relax. For a time, that is, for there might be something too mysterious going on with Simone. What’s a gal making a podcast about female serial killers with a bunch of rather enabling friends to think?
If you’re like me, you probably think that a lesbian comedy about podcasts and serial murder sounds rather too twee or too produced for the hipster set. However, Ingrid Jungermann’s film isn’t any of that, and it’s too good a film for me to care what hipsters are thinking about it one way or the other. This is a clever, compassionate but never cowardly film about commitment phobia (why doesn’t English have a decent compound noun for this?), loneliness, and love that is as funny as it is sad, grounding its more outrageous moments (don’t worry, there’s no splatstick in this one) in surroundings built at least in emotional veracity, and never looks down on its characters.
It is the sort of comedy that has to be funny because otherwise, it would be a tearjerker of the highest degree. Instead of allowing its audience to wallow in misery, its humour actually helps us to look closer at the reasons for that prospective wallowing. The film also teaches the valuable lesson that taking relationship advice from a serial killer just might not be the best idea. Irony aside, the ending does pack quite an emotional wallop, one the film has worked hard to achieve and that resonates with quite a bit of metaphorical and thematic work it had introduced before without becoming loud about it.
The cast as a whole is rather on the brilliant side, with Jungermann finding great foils in Sagher and Carr and vice versa. After A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Vand is apparently now typecast as the Mysterious One, but she’s really rather good at it. Plus, Simone may be mysterious but feels like a very different character from the Girl.
I suspect in two decades time, this will not only be a great, intelligent little comedy about not so little things, but also a time capsule. Which mostly seems to happen to films that come about their naturalistic elements from a side angle, and not so much those where realism is the only reason for their existence. This is only an aside, though, for Women Who Kill is a brilliant independent film all around.
Things could go on this way forever, but when Morgan meets the mysterious Simone (Sheila Vand) at her local co-op (full disclosure: as a German living in a small town, I had to look up what the hell that is about) and falls for her instantly. Quickly, the two become a couple, Simone’s general air of mystery enabling Morgan for once in a relationship to relax. For a time, that is, for there might be something too mysterious going on with Simone. What’s a gal making a podcast about female serial killers with a bunch of rather enabling friends to think?
If you’re like me, you probably think that a lesbian comedy about podcasts and serial murder sounds rather too twee or too produced for the hipster set. However, Ingrid Jungermann’s film isn’t any of that, and it’s too good a film for me to care what hipsters are thinking about it one way or the other. This is a clever, compassionate but never cowardly film about commitment phobia (why doesn’t English have a decent compound noun for this?), loneliness, and love that is as funny as it is sad, grounding its more outrageous moments (don’t worry, there’s no splatstick in this one) in surroundings built at least in emotional veracity, and never looks down on its characters.
It is the sort of comedy that has to be funny because otherwise, it would be a tearjerker of the highest degree. Instead of allowing its audience to wallow in misery, its humour actually helps us to look closer at the reasons for that prospective wallowing. The film also teaches the valuable lesson that taking relationship advice from a serial killer just might not be the best idea. Irony aside, the ending does pack quite an emotional wallop, one the film has worked hard to achieve and that resonates with quite a bit of metaphorical and thematic work it had introduced before without becoming loud about it.
The cast as a whole is rather on the brilliant side, with Jungermann finding great foils in Sagher and Carr and vice versa. After A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Vand is apparently now typecast as the Mysterious One, but she’s really rather good at it. Plus, Simone may be mysterious but feels like a very different character from the Girl.
I suspect in two decades time, this will not only be a great, intelligent little comedy about not so little things, but also a time capsule. Which mostly seems to happen to films that come about their naturalistic elements from a side angle, and not so much those where realism is the only reason for their existence. This is only an aside, though, for Women Who Kill is a brilliant independent film all around.
Thursday, October 26, 2017
In short: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Thinking of slow movies, as I sometimes do, how about Ana Lily Amirpour’s
Iran-set (or at least a dream/nightmare of Iran filtered through many things)
film that’s publicized as “the first Iranian vampire western”? Of course it is
not an Iranian film but rather a Persian language film made by Americans with
exile Iranian roots and actually shot in California, and it is most certainly
not a western, unless having some spaghetti western like moments on the
soundtrack and some desert in it makes a film a western. But then, that’d make
Lawrence of Arabia a western too.
I’d rather call it an arthouse vampire movie, probably. Unlike with some (some, mind you) films whose slowness seems based on the filmmakers’ inability to be precise or to pace their work properly, slowness is quite obviously an intrinsic part of A Girl’s view of its (night-time) world, a world which might be an Iran interpreted as an embodiment of loneliness and desolation in which the titular girl (a fascinating, enigmatic performance by Sheila Vand) being a vampire seems only the right and proper thing for the place.
Stylistically, there are certainly moments that remind of the dreamy moments of David Lynch, and I can’t help but feel there’s a bit of Jean Rollin in it also, at least in the sense that large parts of it look and feel like very personal and very poetic expression that just happens to come together as something that has elements of the horror film as well as of old-school (I’d say early Jim Jarmusch) US indie cinema and the nouvelle vague. The really great thing about A Girl though isn’t that it feels related to some rather great kinds of cinema but how much it still feels like a film completely Amirpour’s own – the parallels and influences are just that. In fact, there seems not an imitative or ironically quoting bone in this film’s body, so it’s not much of a surprise that I found myself spellbound by it, its black and white poetry, its social and political consciousness that feels utterly organic and natural, and a slowness that’s there so a viewer really looks at what the film is showing her.
I’d rather call it an arthouse vampire movie, probably. Unlike with some (some, mind you) films whose slowness seems based on the filmmakers’ inability to be precise or to pace their work properly, slowness is quite obviously an intrinsic part of A Girl’s view of its (night-time) world, a world which might be an Iran interpreted as an embodiment of loneliness and desolation in which the titular girl (a fascinating, enigmatic performance by Sheila Vand) being a vampire seems only the right and proper thing for the place.
Stylistically, there are certainly moments that remind of the dreamy moments of David Lynch, and I can’t help but feel there’s a bit of Jean Rollin in it also, at least in the sense that large parts of it look and feel like very personal and very poetic expression that just happens to come together as something that has elements of the horror film as well as of old-school (I’d say early Jim Jarmusch) US indie cinema and the nouvelle vague. The really great thing about A Girl though isn’t that it feels related to some rather great kinds of cinema but how much it still feels like a film completely Amirpour’s own – the parallels and influences are just that. In fact, there seems not an imitative or ironically quoting bone in this film’s body, so it’s not much of a surprise that I found myself spellbound by it, its black and white poetry, its social and political consciousness that feels utterly organic and natural, and a slowness that’s there so a viewer really looks at what the film is showing her.
Saturday, October 7, 2017
Three Films Make A Post: There's a monster in all of u
Offerings (1989): At the tail end of the slasher cycle, one
Christopher Reynolds apparently set out to make a film that contained all other
slasher films. At least in so far as any given scene in his film is a more or
less blatant rip-off of a scene from another, mostly better, slasher, shot with
no sense of style and taste, and with actors who can’t – act, that is. While
this may sound rather tiresome, the resulting film is a surprisingly
entertaining concoction featuring nary a boring second. When you’re not gasping
in disbelief at the film’s utter shamelessness in its borrowings (even
Mattei/Fracasso would have balked at some of the stuff going on here, like the
not-Halloween parts of the score), you’re giggling about dialogue that
starts awkward and ends up really funny, or laughing about Sheriff “That Doesn’t
Look Like Sausage To me” Chism, some sort of overweight Wil Wheaton who spends
his on-screen time with things like stealing a kid’s porn magazine collection.
This may sound as if I’m mostly laughing at the movie, but when a film brings –
even unintentionally – so much joy, there’s only laughing with it.
Aaron’s Blood (2016): It’s certainly not a bad basic idea to connect vampirism and a father’s reaction to a child’s terrible illness, but in practice, Tommy Stovall’s treatment of the theme here just doesn’t work at all for me. Unfortunately, the film handles the situation with a sledgehammer, seemingly expecting that the whole “a father will do anything to protect his child” cliché can stand in for the rest of the characterisation needed to make the narrative actually work. Plot-wise, the film is full of improbable coincidences – like the kid’s school caretaker and a local barkeep just happening to be Fearless Vampire Hunters – and characters whose actions often feel highly improbable. The film is otherwise competently shot and decently acted, mind you, but it never did manage to convince me of the characters at its core at all.
68 Kill (2017): Trent Haaga’s adaptation of a Bryan Smith novel (probably one of his best, if you can stomach his stuff) as a dark comedy, on the other hand, managed to convince me of much more improbable characters doing much more improbable things rather well. It does help that leads Matthew Gray Gubler and AnnaLynne McCord are diving into absurdity and violence with the best of them.
Haaga softens Smith’s book a little in so far as he doesn’t show quite as much of the sex, the violence and the general depravity but he does so in a way that makes the film feel more focussed on its sad sack penis-piloted (like all men in Smith’s stuff, unless they are pure psychos) protagonist’s plight with various murderous, sexy, dominating, evil women (like all women in Smith’s stuff), like noir gone a bit explicit. The film doesn’t really critique Smith’s rather basic (and certainly problematic in more than just contemporary parlance) concept of humanity as a whole and women in particular, but as a caustic expression of it, it is pretty successful.
Aaron’s Blood (2016): It’s certainly not a bad basic idea to connect vampirism and a father’s reaction to a child’s terrible illness, but in practice, Tommy Stovall’s treatment of the theme here just doesn’t work at all for me. Unfortunately, the film handles the situation with a sledgehammer, seemingly expecting that the whole “a father will do anything to protect his child” cliché can stand in for the rest of the characterisation needed to make the narrative actually work. Plot-wise, the film is full of improbable coincidences – like the kid’s school caretaker and a local barkeep just happening to be Fearless Vampire Hunters – and characters whose actions often feel highly improbable. The film is otherwise competently shot and decently acted, mind you, but it never did manage to convince me of the characters at its core at all.
68 Kill (2017): Trent Haaga’s adaptation of a Bryan Smith novel (probably one of his best, if you can stomach his stuff) as a dark comedy, on the other hand, managed to convince me of much more improbable characters doing much more improbable things rather well. It does help that leads Matthew Gray Gubler and AnnaLynne McCord are diving into absurdity and violence with the best of them.
Haaga softens Smith’s book a little in so far as he doesn’t show quite as much of the sex, the violence and the general depravity but he does so in a way that makes the film feel more focussed on its sad sack penis-piloted (like all men in Smith’s stuff, unless they are pure psychos) protagonist’s plight with various murderous, sexy, dominating, evil women (like all women in Smith’s stuff), like noir gone a bit explicit. The film doesn’t really critique Smith’s rather basic (and certainly problematic in more than just contemporary parlance) concept of humanity as a whole and women in particular, but as a caustic expression of it, it is pretty successful.
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