NZIFF 2018 Diary: Little Woods

Ollie (Tessa Thompson) is in a bind. Days away from the end of her probation (for smuggling medicine over the border from Canada), Ollie wants to leave North Dakota, and make a new life for herself elsewhere, leaving the family home to her ne'er-do-well stepsister Deb (Lily James).

Ollie's plans get derailed by a series of new pressures: the bank is coming for her mother's house and Deb needs an abortion.

As time ticks away, and the obstacles pile on, Ollie finds herself heading back toward her old career. Can she get the money together to save her family? Or will she have to risk her life in another run across the border?

The first time I saw Tessa Thompson was in an episode of Cold Case where she played a lesbian poet in the Depression. I had no idea who she was until Creed when I looked at her filmography and realised she had been around for awhile.

There is something old about Thompson, a sense of hard-won wisdom, that always comes through in her performances. Think back to her un-Adrian-like, no-nonsense performance in Creed, or her role as the only adult in the room in Thor: Ragnarok. I have always wanted to see her play the lead in a noir, and Little Woods is the closest thing to it.

Thompson imbues Ollie with a strong sense of drive and intelligence. Ollie is in a struggle to move mountains, and every aspect of Thompson's performance resonates with the stresses the character is under. At the same time, there is a weariness and wryness to her portrayal that prevent her from coming off a s two-dimensional martyr. Ollie has been through all of this before, and Thompson oscillates between exhaustion, bemusement and terror as she is drawn back into her old ways.

America's healthcare system is the perfect fodder for a noir-like drama like this (Breaking Bad is the prime example), with the context of the Dakota oil fields providing another layer of economic pressure to the characters and their struggles.

There are no good guys and bad guys here. Ollie's past business kept her mother alive, and the workers she previously sold to are either uninsured or so poor they cannot afford time off. The drugs are not cure but a distraction, a way to minimise pain rather than heal it.

This movie feels like a dystopia - the jobs are dangerous, law enforcement is arbitrary and discriminatory, there is no healthcare, and if you are a woman...

Little Woods is a small movie, but it ultimately feels like the perfect encapsulation of the pressures facing ordinary people in present day America. There are no explicit references to the current occupant of the White House, or his policies, but such commentary is unnecessary. Little Woods may be the story of two sisters learning to come back together, but the picture it paints of the inequalities built into the American system is terrifying. The sisters may win or lose their personal battle, but in the grander scheme of things, in a society where every basic necessity comes with a price, it may mean nothing at all.

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Skate Kitchen

Let The Corpses Tan

NZIFF 2018 Diary: Let The Corpses Tan

Following a bank robbery, a group of robbers retreat to a hilltop villa to divvy up the spoils. Their plan goes wrong when a series of unexpected visitors - including a single mother and a pair of motorcycle cops - arrive at the house.


Eventually the house turns into a battle ground as the thieves battle the visitors and each other to control the loot... 

This review is going to be something of a self-own. I was not a fan of Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani's Amer, and because of that I skipped the duo's second effort, The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears.

Now I want to re-watch/evaluate all of their work, because this movie is awesome!

Watching Let The Corpses Tan, one word kept popping into my brain: sensuality. From the sound design to the Super 16 photography to the Morricone-style score, everything about this movie is pungent and idled up to hit all of your senses.

The sound is so foregrounded, you can almost smell the flavour of the meat hanging in the house, the sweat, the cordite from the gun discharges, the leather jackets, the sweat skin...

This movie reeks.

One of my earliest movie memories is the sound of feet on cobblestones in Mary Poppins. This movie's soundscape dialled me into the primal rush of sound and image. And while these aesthetic choices are cranked to the max, they do not feel extraneous, or a stand-in for content. This movie is pure cinema.
The obvious reference point is the Italian police thrillers of the 70s, but stripped down to the bare essentials. It is as if someone took the opening scene of Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West and extended it for 90 minutes.

This is a story of outsiders, motivated by self-regard, greed, violence and sex. The overheated visuals and soundtrack feel keyed into the characters' avarice. There are points during the stand-off where the filmmakers cut away from the claustrophobic interiors to god's eye shots of a model of the house with ants scurrying through it in a primal evocation of the humans' self-involved mediocrity. In the grander scheme of things, these people and their struggle over the gold is fruitless.



If that sounds a little highbrow, never fear. This movie is genre piece as race car, with all the non-essential parts taken off. It is a classic pressure cooker of a thriller, filled with double-crosses and one-upmanship. It also features a deep, rich vein of pitch black humour.


This movie is a blast.


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Skate Kitchen

NZIFF 2018 Diary: Skate Kitchen

Starring the real-life group, Skate Kitchen dramatises the introduction of a new member (played by Rachelle Vinberg).

Camille is a lonely teen who is obsessed with skateboarding, much to the disapproval of her mother (Elisabeth Rodriguez). When she stumbles upon the titular crew, she believes she has found a community to be a part of.

One of the recurring themes of a lot of the movies I gravitate towards involve friendship and community between women. Maybe it is the result of being raised by a single mother, the lack of movies involving women/femmes where they are not playing heterosexual love interests, or maybe I just need to join a book club.

Whatever the reason, it is one of my favourite story hooks.

I have no knowledge of - or interest in - skating, but there was something about the premise for this movie that pulled me in. There is something so intriguing about a group dynamic.

Whether it is a movie about a sports team, a group of friends, soldiers or anthropomorphised toys, there is something incredibly satisfying about following a group of characters with a shared sense of identity.

With a non-professional cast made up of a real-life group of skaters, Skate Kitchen is a movie that foregrounds a real group dynamic. Captured in handheld style that evokes documentary, there is a scrappy run-and-gun quality to the photography that captures the youthful fixation on moments ala the Instagram videos the skaters use to memorialise each other's feats.

Some of the performers are a little flat, but as an ensemble, they have an energy and sense of family and community that is infectious. The way they talk, the way they think, and the way they joke is so organic and unpredictable that - by contrast - the professional cast (Elisabeth Rodriguez and Jaden Smith) come off as weirdly fraudulent.

I don't think Jaden Smith is the worst actor in the world, and maybe he just needs to find better parts, but he feels really out of place here. He is meant to be a lothario, an attractive male presence who draws Camille away from the crew, but Smith never projects any of the allure that makes the character such a threat to the group.

He is really the only bum note in the movie. The real draw is the dynamic among the crew, as they ride around New York City, hang out, make jokes, get in fights and come back together. There is a sense of love and community to their scenes which cannot be faked. I watched this movie very late on no sleep and I was completely riveted. Every time he appears, the movie's unique energy dissipates.

There is not really a plot, and it really is not necessary. The focus of the film is this group of young people, and the world they have created for themselves.


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NZIFF 2018 Diary: The Miseducation of Cameron Post

America, 1993. After she is caught with her girlfriend at prom, Cameron (Chloe Grace Moretz) is shipped off to a gay conversion camp in the middle of nowhere.

She quickly falls in with a pair of rebels, 'Jane Fonda' (Sasha Lane) and Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck), and together the trio plot their escape.

Man, there is something off about this movie. The performances are good and the overall approach feels rather understated and empathetic. But I left the movie with the nagging feeling that it did not accomplish what it set out to do.

I wonder what the US audience response is, because mine found the movie hilarious. The movie does have its blackly comic moments (the concept of gay conversion is a perfect site for satire), but with the priorities of the current administration, gay conversion is not something from the distant past.

It feels weird to write this but I was a little underwhelmed by the whole thing. The focus on a white female POV feels a bit old-fashioned, and it does not help that the execution of her story lacks dimension. What makes it worse is who Cameron is in juxtaposition with, like Adam (Goodluck), who has to deal with his roommate's castration (a subplot that feels sidelined because the movie is framed from Cameron's perspective); or Erin (Emily Skeggs), her roommate who channels her sexual frustration into following the camp's edicts to the letter.

Chloe Grace Moretz  is solid as the lead - I have never really believed her in the past, but she has finally reached an age where her world-weariness reads. However, while this is intended to be Moretz's movie, if anyone shines it is Sasha Lane. As the worldly Jane Fonda, she is funny, whip-smart and radiates charisma.

I needed more character and conflict from the main character. Cameron does not seem to change or learn that much throughout the movie, and it was hard to track what her conflict was. She is secure in her sexuality, and when she faces pushback, there is no escalation between her rebellion and the repression from the people running this shit show.

It is heartfelt, and treats all of its characters as human beings, but there is a listless, undercooked quality to the story that prevented me from becoming fully invested in it.

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NZIFF 2018 Diary: Mandy

Welcome to my rambling thoughts on the NZIFF 2018, starting with the most Nicholas Cage movie ever made!

When his lover Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is murdered by an evil cult and a hellish gang of bikers, Red (Nicholas Cage) goes on a fiery rampage of vengeance.

To paraphrase How Did This Get Made?, this is the most un-caged Nicholas Cage movie I have seen in years.

It is also a cinematic tribute to Dario Argento and the best Ronnie James Dio video Ronnie James Dio never made.

The second film from Panos Cosmatos (son of genre filmmaker George Pan Cosmatos), this movie is extremely simple in terms of story: a loved one is killed and an enraged man hunts the killers down and kills them.

Andrea Riseborough as Mandy

The film is set in 1983 and there is an audio snippet of a Ronald Reagan address about America's spiritual renewal. The film does feel like it is making a vague point about the end of the 60s, with the story's hippies have becoming self-obsessed spiritualists who use their power to serve themselves.

Trying to work out what to label this movie is pointless. Mandy is set in a cinematic world where bikers take bad drugs and turn into blood-drinking psychos who can be summoned by a rock flute. 

The movie's simplicity is a major boon, but there are points where scenes drag on far longer than they need to (Linus Roache gets one monologue too many). However those moments are balanced by the movie's single-minded need to be the most mythically metal tale of vengeance imaginable. 

Scenes of Cage forging and making his fearsome blade ala Conan the Barbarian; facing off against the biker gang; or engaging in a gnarly chainsaw duel with a burly cultist feel like a fever dream of seventies and eighties pop culture. This is a berserk genre exercise, awash my vivid colour, hyper-real sound design, simple exposures and animated visions.

Despite the energy and viscera of the movie's key sequences, Mandy comes across as rather mournful and melancholic about the past - all the characters feel like they are attempting to deal with unstated past trauma - Red and Mandy have found solace in each other, while the film's villain (Linus Roache) has insulated himself with sycophants and a penchant for the black arts.

Roache is an interesting choice for the antagonist. At first he seemed miscast. He has an everyman quality that feels a bit at odds with both the character he is playing and the overheated diegesis that character exists in.

About midway through, it becomes clear that he is a pathetic loser with no real control over what he is doing. Like our heroes, there is a sense that his time has passed. While the movie feels like a fantasy, there is a sense of loss and age that - weirdly - grounds the movie.

Strange and haunting, Mandy contains many of the tropes of exploitation cinema of one era, but also feels like an oblique commentary about the end of a preceding one. Simple yet complex, over-stylised  yet incredibly functional, histrionic yet subdued, Mandy is as surprising and hard to categorise as its leading man's performance choices.

IN THEATRES: The Meg & The Darkest Minds

It's the long-awaited return of the double bill review!

The Meg

When a scientific expedition to the bottom of the ocean accidentally releases a prehistoric shark, an oddball team led by Jason Statham try to hunt it down before it eats 200 bathing tourists. 

This movie is exactly what you think it is, if it was a co-production with China, from the director of National Treasure.

Jon Turtletaub is a journeyman filmmaker who never really brings anything of interest, either visually, or in terms of performances, to make his genre offerings sing. On paper, The Meg could go any number of ways. There is no 'right' way to make a movie - the problem with The Meg is that it tries to play between two different versions of what it could be.

This movie suffers for trying to hew a midway between horror and goofy, and ends up not really satisfying as either. It is watchable, but because it never figures out what kind of movie it wants to be, it ends up a little dull.

The other problem is that the filmmakers completely forget where their leading man's capabilities lie. In his book Blockbuster, Tom Shone had a great line about Arnold Schwarzenegger, and how his forte was physics not chemistry.

Jason Statham works in a similar way - he does not have the capacity for a great palette of emotions. He has a very specific skillset and outside of a few cases - someone is going to yelling Hummingbird/Redemption - he flounders when he is not allowed to use it.

Statham's forte is grizzled stoicism which - when combined with his physical talents - make him great as an action hero, or a comic foil (The Transporter, Crank and Spy).

This is a long way of saying any movie that tries to spark romantic chemistry with Jason Statham is up a blind alley. There is more chemistry between the Stath and that decapitated head in Crank 2 than there is between him and Bingbing Li. I am not familiar with her work, but she has an impossible task - acting in another language against a guy who is better at fighting a room full of dudes with a fire house is a no-win scenario.

While it is never outright terrible, The Meg is kind of dull and repetitive. Ranin Wilson has some moments as the smarmy billionaire trying to cover his own ass, but the movie never really finds its sea legs.

If you are looking for a goofy giant shark movie, you're better off sticking with Deep Blue Sea - or just go watch Jaws.

The Darkest Minds

Kids gain powers. Government gets scared and imprisons kids. Our protagonist discovers she is the most rare and unique of the super-powered kids and goes on the run to try and get back to her family.

Ugh, that sounds more exciting than it actually is.

Whatever.

This movie is the worst thing I have seen this year.

It was also the longest-feeling movie I saw this year. I spent three hours on my feet ushering a documentary about the New York Public Library, and that movie was so much more interesting than this pile of garbage.

I don't want to waste time on it, so I'll run through the list of the things I did not hate:

a) The little girl who played Young Amandla was pretty good.

b) These two good lines: "It's a mini-van, not a Viking" and "You caught me starring at a lake. I am turning into my own grandmother"

This is a movie where the problems are obvious from the jump: a combination of a bad script with too small a budget to realise its massive canvas. 

IN THEATRES: BlacKkKlansman

Torn between his desire to be a cop and to help his community, rookie officer Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) comes up with a scheme to infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. With the help of fellow officer Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), he successfully poses as a prospective member.

But as Ron's success at penetrating the Klan grows, so does the danger of his cover being blown...  

It is only August, but this might be the best movie of the year. 

Funny, caustic and totally contemporary, BlacKkKlansman is the movie for these times. What elevates it is that its commentary on race is not restricted to its period setting, nor the concerns of today. 

The film is filled with portents of the future - David Duke's belief in getting the KKK into public office; Richard Nixon campaign posters in the back of a KKK initiation - that feel like a convergence of Duke's political ambitions and the Republican Party's race-baiting of the last 40 years.

Harry Belafonte shows up as an elder statesman to talk about civil rights struggles from when he was young in the 1910s. Having Belafonte, an actual elder statesman of the Civil Rights movement, as the spokesperson in this scene, gives the scene a power and sense of history that it would otherwise lack.

That interweaving of meta-narratives carries throughout the film, as the filmmakers weave in elements of American racism, from Birth of a Nation through Trump, that grounds BlacKkKlansman not just in the context of race relations in the seventies, but in the broader context of structural racism as an enduring, evolving institution.

The greatest irony of this movie is that the racism the main character is fighting cannot be contained to the opponents in front of him. He never effects structural change in the police department, and he does not derail the KKK.

The movie's ending is incredibly bittersweet - although he has stopped the villains, his case is closed and Patrice breaks up with him.  

The final scene is so haunting - I watched the movie on Friday night, but it is still burned into my mind's eye. Ron hears a noise outside the apartment. He and Patrice both leave and walk down the hallway - at the end of the hall is a window. In the distance, but perfectly framed through the window, is a burning cross. Ron's ultimate goal remains out of his grasp.

The filmmakers then cut to a montage of the Charlottesville protests, Trump's 'both sides' equivalence and the real David Duke asserting Trump's desire to make America great again aligns with his goals.

In the lead role, John David Washington is really good. Ron is a man caught between different worlds, the police who see him as merely a token, and his community, who treat with suspicion for representing the institution that oppresses them. Washington manages to balance between Ron's pride in being a part of the force, with his growing disenchantment with the bigotry of his colleagues. He's also a great straight man to the BS around him.

As far as the other leads go, they are all good - Adam Driver is good as Ron's partner, and Topher Grace is also great as the completely gormless David Duke - it is always exciting to see an actor with a set image get an opportunity to really break out.

If the movie has standouts, they are supporting players Paul Walter Hauser and Ashlie Atkinson. Hauser plays one of the sleepy-eyed Klansmen, and Atkinson as a female member of the Klan chapter who is constantly trying to prove her worth to her husband and the other members of the cell, despite the misogyny she faces. 

A pointed critique at the chasm between white women and other women of colour, her character feels like the embodiment of this aspect of white supremacy (considering 53% of white women voted for Trump, it feeds into the film's broader relevance to the current moment).

An urgent call to action, BlacKkKlansman is the first movie that really feels keyed in to the existential crisis facing the United States. One of the best movies of the year.