Category Archives: Movies

CineFix’s Top 10 A24 Films

The YouTube Channel CineFix-IGN, which releases regular and top-notch film analysis and exploration videos this week dropped another of their ‘Top 10′ lists, this time for movies released by those lovers of indie cinema A24.

Consistent with their previous top 10 lists they broke the list down into categories. I found it amusing that I had seen 7 of the 10, a personal record for me I think, and own 3 of them on physical media.

Here is the listing of their top 10 A24 titles.

10) Debut features: Lady Bird (2017) dir. Greta Gerwig

9) Science Fiction: Ex Machina (2015) dir. Alex Garland

8) Fantasy: Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) dir. The Daniels

7) Coming of Age: The Green Knight (2021) dir. David Lowery

6) Survival Horror: Green Room (2016) dir. Jeremy Saulnier

5) Supernatural Horror: Hereditary (2018) dir. Ari Aster

4) Existential Horror: The Witch (2016) dir. Robert Eggers

3) Traumatic Drama: Midsommar (2019) dir. Ari Aster

2) Quirky Character Drama: Uncut Gems (2019) dir. Josh and Benny Safdie

1) Capital ‘D’ Drama: Moonlight (2016) dir. Barry Jenkins

The three I have not yet seen are, Lady Bird, Green Room, and Moonlight. The owns I own are Ex Machina, The Witch, and Midsommar.

Green Room is the film I have the most anxiety about watching. It is a strange quirk of character that fantastical horror, monsters, witched, zombies, cam create dread in me but far from enough to cause any hesitation in starting the film, but grounded realistic horror, such as trapped in a back room while a gang of fanatical neo-Nazis led by Patrick Stewart try to kill you can set my hand trembling. The utter banality and real-world nature makes such a prospect more terrifying than all the zombies or Swedish death cults.

Of the seven that I have seen the one that worked the least for me was Uncut Gems. While exceptionally made and Adam Sandler’s performance was fantastic, I found his character so repellent and unsympathetic that I cared nothing for his fate. Nor was he interesting enough as a character to leapfrog over his repulsive nature. It was not the actor, but the character as written that left me cold.

Still, when the A24 logo appears on the screen I know that quality and vision will follow.

Noir Review: Pickup Alley (1957)

As part of the collection Noir Archive #3 Pickup Alley is a British police and crime film that in the UK was released as Interpol but retitled for its American distribution.

Victor Mature plays narcotics detective Charles Sturgis, a man with a personal vendetta against a major drug smuggler Frank McNally, the incomparable Trevor Howard, who murdered Sturgis’ sister. When drug mule Gina Broger, Swedish Actor Anita Ekberg, shoots one of McNally’s underlings when he attempts to assault her, this creates the crack in the operation that finally

Warwick Films

allows Sturgis to properly begin the chase. With teamwork from Interpol and Across the ocean and the European continent Sturgis follows Gina in his dogged pursuit of McNally, a criminal so talented and intelligent that no police force has even a decent sketch of him much less a photograph.

Pickup Alley is a mediocre film, neither great nor terrible. Mature is good enough as the vengeance obsessed detective but doesn’t rise to the heights of some of his other performances. The stand-out actor here is Howard, thoroughly enjoying himself, reveling in his character’s evilness, with only occasional forays into eating the set. It’s worth watching this film just for his performance.

Ted Moore’s cinematography and John Gilling’s direction are competent journeyman work lacking any particular flair. The film is shot and the frames composed professionally but feel like that are missing that extra bit that elevates work from competent to artistic. That said the budget appears to be fairly limited and that may have hampered the overall look of the production.

Pickup Alley, a nonsensical title, is neither great nor bad but at 92 minutes neither does it overstay its welcome. worth watching once but unlikely to become anyone’s favorite noir.

Movie Review: MEN

From writer/director Alex Garland, screenwriter of 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd, Ex Machina, and Annihilation and director of the final pair of that list comes the strange horror film Men.

Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley), retreating for two weeks in a rental house in the English countryside following the traumatic loss of her husband James, finds that all the men in the local village, all played by Rory Kinnear, are demanding, disturbing, and vaguely threatening,

A24 Studios

from the tween insisting on playing hide and seek with her to the naked vagrant who follows her home. Harper is confronted by both internal threats, guilt, and sorrow over her husband James, and external, the men of the village, while trying to come to a new emotional balance.

Rory Kinnear’s multi-part performance is non-diegetic, Harper shows no reaction to the fact that all the men she encounters are all variations on the same individual and as such it is a symbolic expression intended solely for the audience.

Garland’s previous scripts can be roughly divided into straight forward descriptive narratives, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd where the images on the screen represent an objective reality, and symbolic expressions such as Annihilation, where the scenes represent emotional, psychological states of the characters. Men lives deeply in the symbolic side of Garland’s creative process. The film follows its own nightmarish dream logic, particularly in its third act when objective reality is apparently discarded entirely. And yet the final sequences of the movie would seem to indicate that the fantastical events of the story climax were also reality the chaos’ detritus is seen by characters beyond Harper.

Men is a brilliantly crafted film that luxuriates in long shots and sequences that layer tension but the open to interpretation and symbolically charged elements of the imagery I found, while expertly executed, difficult to connect with and unclear in their meaning.

This movie is no doubt someone’s jam, and I have no question that it will be divisive, but I found it impossible to lose myself in the film as I was constantly battered by the question if I should be taking this literally or symbolically? Garland never gave me a clear direction on that and so I left the theater confused and without any strong emotional reaction.

Men is highly subjective, and it is a film that is impossible to either recommend or oppose as each individuals reaction is likely to be highly idiosyncratic.

Streaming Review: Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

Doctor John Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) is a talented and empathetic neurosurgeon working in a deeply under-funded southern hospital just before the outbreak of world war II. A wealthy local widow Violet Venable (Kathrine Hepburn) offers to fund an expansion of the hospital, but she wants her niece Katherine (Elizabeth Taylor), currently confined to a Catholic asylum, treated by Cukrowicz’s lobotomy technique. However, when he examines Katherine, he

Columbia Pictures

suspects that Venable is more interested in suppressing the truth of her son’s death while vacationing with Katherine than in her niece’s wellbeing. With the future of the hospital at stake and relatives pressing for the procedure to please the family’s matriarch Cukrowicz is in a race against time to discover the truth that has unbalanced and disturbed Katherine before another specialist, one not so constrained ethically as himself, is brought in to lobotomize the young woman.

Suddenly, Last Summer is actually my fist encounter with the works of celebrated playwright Tennessee Williams, though the screenplay was adapted by Gore Vidal. The film is an example of Southern Gothic replete with eccentric characters, mystery, and a dark heart. The driving mystery of the film is the death of Mrs. Venable’s son, Sebastian, a poet, and charming person adored by all who knew him and portrayed in the film to preserve the illusion of a person uniquely different from the rest of his family and society. While the official cause of Sebastian death is reported as heart attack it is clear that this is a cover story and the doctor’s attempts to uncover the truth and help Katherine confront the terrible memory lay at the story’s emotional heart.

I must admit that my enjoyment of this film was somewhat depressed by the fact that I was already aware of the truth of Sebastian’s demise from the documentary that sparked interest in this film, but I will neither reveal the mystery nor the documentary instead suggesting that you see this film blind and unspoiled for its full effect.

Elizabeth Taylor was 27 when she made Suddenly, Last Summer and, having drawn on personal tragedy to power her performance, was reportedly inconsolable after filming Katherine’s emotionally fraught recounting of the tragic death at the film’s climax. Hepburn dominates every scene she speaks in with a patrician’s command and turns in a stunning performance as the cold matriarch hiding a dark secret.

Suddenly, Last Summer is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel but leaves at the end of May.

Movie Review: Firestarter (2022)

Previously adapted in 1984 from Steven King’s novel of the same title Firestarter is another go at bring the story to the screen and like the 1984 adaptation this one also ultimately fails.

In 1984 the lead role of Charlie, a young girl with pyrokinetic powers, was performed by 8-year-old Drew Barrymore, and, while she has become an accomplished actor and producers, at 7 she was not ready to carry a film, few that young are, and that, along with middling production values and lackluster cinematography produced a lifeless dull film.

The 2022 interpretation is led by 11-year-old Ryan Kiera Armstrong and the three additional

Credit: Blumhouse Picture

years are a multiplier for her to shoulder the burden of lead character in a major motion picture, yielding a more credible performance and with greater emotional depth. 2022’s Firestarter also sports more talented filmmaking, less exaggerated physical acting, and a subtle light touch to the photography that raises the film’s quality considerably.

Sadly, the script in the final act crashes and burns, jettisoning the story line of emotional manipulation and abuse for a fire spectacle for a finale with a final resolution that breaks all disbelief and insults the character’s trauma and breaks entirely with the source material.

At a quick hour and a half the filmmakers still managed to wedge in pointless scenes that had they been edited out no one would have noticed. What should have been a slow burn, pun intended, of tension drags in flat chemistry-less scenes. The story’s antagonists, are both all-knowing in their surveillance, spotting a random heat spike on a FLIR camera when supposed they had no concept of Charlie’s locations, and monumental ignorant of how to proceed.

The film is not worth your time, and I would suggest if you have a burning, again intentional, curiosity to see it, wait for cable or streaming.

Movie Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Sunday evening, after seeing the latest MCU film that morning, I went and watched Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAO) from A24 Studios and ‘The Daniels,’ (Dan Kwan & Daniel Scheinert) another multiverse hopping storyline with a villain threatening all of existence.

Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn a woman estranged from her very western daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), her very Chinese Father Gong Gong (James Hong), and who ignores her geeky and meek husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan.) With both their laundromat business and marriage failing

A24 Studios

Evelyn and her husband, accompanied by Gong Gong who due to infirmity cannot be left home, are summoned to the local IRS office to confront a cold and unsympathetic auditor Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) but everything is derailed when Waymond from an alternate timeline confronts Evelyn and insists she is the key to saving the universe from Jobu Tupaki, a pan-universal creature bent on chaos and destruction.

EEAO gives its actors a real meal of characters to portray, meek, bold, strong, weak, heroic and depressed most of the cast gets a shot at playing wide and diverse versions of their characters. Despite the on-screen insanity, fun, and sheer inventiveness at its heart the film grapples with extensional dread and the nihilistic fear that nothing at all truly matters. Love, Joy, Happiness, and even life itself is fleeting eventually becoming nothing but dust. The script doesn’t shy away from this truth but also finds ways to recognize that those fleet moments are the value and that because there is no permanence doesn’t mean that there is no meaning.

The film’s characters speak in combination of English and Chinese with liberal use of subtitling for those like me who are stuck as a monolingual talent. While dealing with heavy themes such as the meaning of life and the push and pull of generations and culture EEAO also dips into crude humor and exhilarating action presenting a mixture of tones and styles as diverse as life itself.

I thoroughly enjoyed Everything Everywhere All at Once and I am already looking forward to some future repeat viewing.

Movie Review (Spoiler Free): Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness

Six years, and after several appearances in other franchise properties, Doctor Strange has its the sequel in Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness (MOM).

Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), master of the mystic arts, grappling with lost years dues to snapture (Hat tip to NPR’s Glenn Weldon for that) and lost loves as Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) marries another is drawn into a multi-universal threat rescuing a teenage, America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), witchcraft summoned demons intent of capturing the young

Disney Pictures

woman for their master’s plan. Recognizing that this is witchcraft and not sorcery Strange seeks out Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) for assistance kicking off a chase across parallel universes, cameos from Marvel characters yet established in the MCU’s cannon and director’s Raimi’s long-time collaborator Bruce Campbell, with homages to their cult classic The Evil Dead, climaxing in CGI saturated battles but with a resolution that ultimately turns on seeing oneself as you truly are rather than how you think you are.

MOM is not the worst MVU films to play the silver screen, but neither is it the best. While heavy handed with some exposition it doesn’t fully its narrative momentum in the second act as did Eternals nor is it as light in character drama as The Incredible Hulk, but Strange’s emotional arc is flat, nearly absent, and with minor script changes that could have been corrected without signification plot deviations. Newcomer Xochitl Gomez does an impressive job holding her own in the presence of such acting talents as Cumberbatch, Olsen, and the film’s other Benedict, Wong, selling her character’s emotional truth without big expansive expressive displays

That said the film’s MVP actor is Elizabeth Olsen. In addition to playing variants of her character she excelled as the displaying depths for these individuals, giving a natural realism that penetrated the plots incredible nature and the CGI’s attempts to steal attention with spectacle. While Strange’s name is in the title the film is really her and I do wonder what viewers who have not seen WanaVision, whose theme composer Danny Elfman slipped into the score, made of Wanda’s principal motivation?

I did find the visual effects not quite on target, but I do not think it was primarily a failure of good rendering or models but rather the final composting left a disquieting disconnect to the varies elements harming the verisimilitude.

Overall, I would rank this MCU entry in the 3rd quarter with about half of the franchise better than and about a quarter not as good.

Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness is currently playing theatrically.

My Upcoming Geeky Artistic Weekend

Which artistically is starting tonight, Thursday.

Tonight, I plan to go out and see the foreign language Finnish horror film Hatching before it vanishes from theaters in my area. (I must admit I adore my AMC A-List subscription that makes rolling the dice on movie so much easier.)

Also tonight is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. My sweetie-wife and I will be giving the series a try. Now, I’ll confess that lately the trek shows have not been working for me but hope springs eternal.

Saturday evening I plan to venture to San Diego’s Balboa Park for more experiments in night photography. Last weekend when I left the secret morgue I spied the California Tower lit by colored lights and thought it would be a good subject for my meager photographic skills.

Sunday morning my sweetie-wife and I will go out and catch the new Doctor Stranger movie.

All in all I am looking forward to this weekend.

Secret Morgue #3: Final Report

The Secret Morgue, hosted by Film Geeks San Diego, is a one marathon festive for themed horror films with 12 hours of movies, munchies, and madness where the titles of the presentations are secret until actually screened.

Returning after a two-year pandemic hiatus the theme for Secret Morgue #3 was ‘witches.’ IN addition to the films and catered food we were treated to a lecture on the history of witches and witched in Comics.

Film #1: HAXAN (192) From Sweden this silent film, in a beautifully restored edition, if part ‘history’ and part narrative focusing on the myth of witches in the Middle Ages. I had never seen this movie and it was a pleasure.

Film #2: The Witchfinder General (AKA The Conqueror Worm) (1968) Vincent Price stars as Mathew Hopkins self-proclaimed Witch Finder General dur the English Civil war of the 17th century. The story presents no actual witches but the very real terror of unchecked power and prejudice. My sweetie-wife reminded me that we had watched this on DVD together but somehow I had forgotten it entirely.

Film #3: City of the Dead (AKA Horror Hotel) (1960) A flawed film with a bunch of brits pretending to me Americans as a small New England town is beset by a witch burned there in the 17th century. College students and professors arrive searching for a missing friend and unravel the mystery. With a better budget and script the core concept could have been quite good but a lackluster production and meandering script undercut what works.

Film #4: Inferno (1980) Written and directed by Dario Argento this is the middle film of Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy, between Susperia (1977) and The Mother of Tears (2007). The narrative of the movie is quite fractured, split among several viewpoint characters, most of whom come to grizzly ends, and as is typical of Argento’s work, mood, image, and style supersede story. It doesn’t quite have the dream logic of a David Lynch film nor the defined narrative of a typical story leaving it somewhere in a no man’s land between the two.

Film #5: Black Sunday (AKA The Mask of Satan) (1960) Director Mario Bava worked in a number of genres, mystery, Giallo, and of course horror. This film stars Barbara Steel in two roles as the 16th century witch, condemned along with her vampire lover, and the 18th century princess destined to be the witch’s vessel to revivification. Set in the eastern European country of Moldova, Black Sunday is a stylish gothic horror with impressive in camera transformation effects.

Film #6: Lvx Aeterna (2019) Written and directed by Gasper Noe of Irreversible fame this film is in a mock documentary style following two actresses, playing fictionalized version of themselves, who are about to portray witches burned at the stake. It is a short film, 50 minutes, but the late hour, my exhaustion, the foreign language soundtrack, and promised intense flashing sequences cause me to fear a possible migraine trigger and I instead left early but this is in no way a comment on the film’s quality only my own self-preservation in face of possible intense agony. (Driving into headlights at night with a migraine is not recommended.)

The Three Lorraines of Back to the Future

In this essay I am going to look at the three representations of the character Lorraine Baines-McFly presented in 1985’s Back to the Future and what might be suggested about the character and her history. This piece will not deal with subsequent variants presented in the two sequels.

Lorrain — Prime

Lorraine McFly as she first appears in the film is a woman struggling with alcoholism, a prudish defensive approach to sexuality, and who is deeply unhappy. She doesn’t give voice to the unhappiness, having long ago surrendered to her despair with all traces of self-confidence and agency vanished from her personality. She is in short, a broken person. Adding to the tragedy is that her pain, her shattered nature is invisible to the men in her life. Her husband, George McFly, blindly laughs at the dinner table while watching re-runs wholly unaware of his wife’s grief. Neither of her son appear to notice. the painful evening, the large amount of alcohol is so routine as to be invisible. This suggests that Lorraine’s fractured psyche is decades old.

The only other male present in the prime timeline that has any notice of Lorraine is the bully Biff Tannen. While the two characters have no direct interaction in the establishing scenes of the film Biff does tell Marty, Lorraine’s youngest son and the story protagonist, ‘tell your mom I said hi.’ An innocuous statement but actor Thomas F Wilson’s line reading fills it with menace and meaning. There is a clear implication of a deep and unsettling history.

Lorrain — Base

Lorraine Baine, Marty’s mother before marriage and a lifetime of crushing pain, in 1955 is a vibrant, outgoing, and bold teenager. She is unafraid in her risk taking, groping crushes under the dinner table with her parents present, venturing to a stranger’s house in pursuit of that crush, and adventurous in her dating, willing to make confident first moves rather than wait on her partner. It would seem to be inconvincible that this self-confident teenage loses all her fire and vitality simply from the confines of matrimony.

Lorraine — variant

After Marty’s excursion to 1955 and his interference with his parent’s courtship and lives, including alteration that prompted to his father to interrupt Biff sexually assaulting Lorrain, Marty returns to discover that his entire world has changed.

Lorraine now is fit, healthy, and confidence. Vanished has all traces of her sexual prudishness and defensiveness as she exhibits both an open sexuality with her husband, a George variant that is successful and confident, and accepting of her son’s sexual life. The Lorraine variant is logical progression of the teenage Lorraine the audience was introduced to. Marty’s meddling has dramatically changed both his parents.

What broke Lorraine prime?

It would seem to be down to two possible explanations. Life with a George that never found his self-confidence or success drained Lorraine of his own agency and vitality. This explanation reduces Lorraine to simply an extension of George and would seem to be tension with the Lorrain that existed before George entered her life. It also ignores the relationship between Biff and Lorraine. 30 years after their high school days Biff still feels the need to make vague and unsettling comments about Lorraine.

Everything seems to suggest that Lorraine suffered a deep and shattering trauma that psychologically damaged her and coming to adulthood in an era that disparaged psychological health and treatments she was left to suffer, dealing with her trauma by self-medication with alcohol.

The alteration of history with George interrupting Biff’s sexual assault in a manner that forever reduced Biff to simpering subservient character is the also the event that prevented Lorraine’s trauma, providing her with the space to blossom into the woman she always had the potential to be.

Perhaps not the night of the ‘Enchantment under the Sea’ dance as it happened in the Marty altered timeline, but it would seem likely that at some point in the original timeline Biff completed his sexual assault on Lorraine, and bereft of resources and mental health treatments, she shattered.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur