It’s looking like a rainy weekend in Memphis. Lucky for you, there’s some new movies out.
Deadpool & Wolverine
The Merc with the Mouth teams up with Canada’s favorite mutant to repair a rift in the multiverse. Ryan Reynolds returns as Deadpool, the only Marvel comic book character who knows he’s in a comic book — or in this case, a movie. Hugh Jackman comes out of superhero retirement to reprise his role as Wolverine. This time he’s wearing that fetching yellow outfit Logan wore in the comics, but was deemed too cheesy for the screen. This is the first R-rated Marvel movie, so expect some cussin’.
The Fabulous Four
Bette Midler’s getting married in Key West, and her college besties Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullally, and Sheryl Lee Ralph are on coming to the party. This outrageous road trip will rekindle friendships and open old wounds.
Longlegs
The art horror sleeper hit directed by Osgood Perkins is the creepy slow burn you’re looking for. Maika Monroe stars as an FBI agent, who may or may not be psychic, assigned to a case that has stumped the agency for decades. Nicolas Cage delivers a tour de force performance as a satanic serial killer with a glam rock fetish. This film is even weirder than it sounds, and I mean that in a good way. Read my full review.
PlayTime
The eyes of the world are on Paris this week, as the City of Light hosts the Summer Olympics. So it’s an appropriate time for Crosstown Arts’ film series to feature one of the great masterpieces of French film. Jacques Tati’s PlayTime is something rare: an epic comedy. Shooting over the course of three years in the 1960s on gigantic sets built to mimic (and mock) the glass and steel architecture that was taking over Paris at the time, it was the most expensive French film ever made. It’s nearly wordless, nearly plotless, and hilariously slapstick.
Longlegs isn’t bad. Really. It’s got Nicolas Cage, who plays a pretty convincing creepy serial killer.
The Silence of the Lambs is frequently credited as the film that made horror respectable. Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Best Picture winner was not the first horror film recognized by the Academy — The Exorcist was the first horror movie to be nominated for Best Picture, and ultimately took home two Oscars in 1973. But when Silence won the Best Picture/Best Director/Best Actor/Best Actress/Best Adapted Screenplay combo, the genie was out of the bottle for good.
Silence’s influence has reverberated through the decades. “Serial killer stories” have become their own subgenre. Without Jodie Foster’s indelible turn as Clarice Starling, there would be no Dana Scully on TheX-Files, for example. Maika Monroe’s character Lee Harker in Longlegs also owes her existence to Foster’s genius. Her foil, a serial killer who calls himself Longlegs, has Hannibal Lecter’s eerily insane genius about him. But where Anthony Hopkins brought an eerie stillness to Lecter, Nicolas Cage brings … well, Nicolas Cage.
After an opening flashback to her childhood in the 1970s, we see Agent Harker on assignment for the FBI, going door to door searching for a killer in a normal-looking suburb circa 1995. She somehow knows exactly which house the suspect is hiding in, which turns out to have disastrous consequences. In the first of several striking psychedelic sequences director Osgood Perkins drops throughout the film, she is called to take a test to see if she has psychic powers. When she scores high on the test, she is assigned to assist Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) on the Longlegs case. It’s a baffling situation: a series of murder-suicides covering decades. But these seemingly unrelated cases are all united by presence of mysterious letters written in code and signed “Longlegs.” How is the killer persuading fathers to murder their whole families, then leaving without any physical trace? The answer will require cryptography, a little telepathy, and a deep dive into Harker’s past.
Perkins has a knack for deeply unsettling visual compositions. The first time we see Cage as Longlegs, his eyes are cropped out of the shot, emphasizing his creepy psychopath grin. Longlegs, with a modest budget of $10 million, lacks flashy CGI or gratuitous gore. Instead, Perkins relies on character work, impeccable staging, creative camera moves, and, when he is finally revealed as the villain, an all-out sensory assault by Cage. Everybody needs to stop pretending Nic isn’t a genius. He’s one of the greatest actors of our time. Everything about Longlegs, from his unnatural paleness to his obsession with glam rock mystic band T. Rex, screams “dangerously insane.”
Monroe is compelling, if a little one-note, as the deeply damaged investigator whose life intrudes on her investigation. She has great chemistry with Alicia Witt, who plays her mother, a homebody hoarder and religious fanatic who is both the traumatizer and the traumatized. Blair Underwood’s dark humor as Harker’s boss provides a welcome counterpoint to Monroe’s twitchy neuroses, until Perkins turns the relationship on its head.
I’ll admit to having pretty low expectations for Longlegs, and I was a little surprised when my Friday night screening was sold out. Not everything Perkins tries works (and while his experimental streak appeals to me, it might put some folks off), but most of what he’s throwing against the wall sticks. It’s once again proof that when you hire Nicolas Cage, you always get your money’s worth.
Maika Monroe wonders what it all means in Longlegs. (Courtesy Neon)
Looks like a busy weekend at the movies — which is good, because it’s gonna be a hot one.
Longlegs
The great Nicholas Cage stars as a serial killer motivated by his devotion to Satan. Maika Monroe (of It Follows fame) is Lee Harker, an FBI agent assigned to catch him. Blair Underwood (of Krush Groove fame) is her partner, and Alicia Witt (of Dune and Twin Peaks fame) is her mom. Writer/director Osgood Perkins is not super famous yet, but his dad is Anthony Perkins of Psycho fame.
Fly Me To The Moon
Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum star as NASA’s PR director and launch director for the Apollo 11 mission. His job is to get the astronauts to the moon. Her job is to fake the moon landing if the astronauts fail. This film probably sounded like a good idea at the time.
MaXXXine
Ti West and Mia Goth’s trilogy of twentieth century terror concludes with a slam-bang finale. Read my full review.
A Quiet Place: Day One
Lupita Nyong’o leads this hit prequel to 2018’s alien invasion movie. She plays Sam, a terminally ill cancer patient who witnesses the silent alien invasion in New York City. Can Sam and her cat Frodo survive the mass slaughter? Djimon Housou reprises his role as Henri from AQuiet Place Part II.
Despicable Me 4
You know those oval yellow Minons your batty aunty and drunk uncle are always sharing memes about? They’re from the Despicable Me franchise. And guess what? They made another one!
Kinds of Kindness
Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone follow the Academy Award-winning Poor Things with a triptych of stories about debasing yourself for the benefit of others. Read my full review.
Inside Out 2
The movie of the summer is all about anxiety, and it couldn’t be more timely. Amy Poehler reprises her voice role as Joy, whose hold on the mind of her 13-year-old charge Riley (Kensington Tallman) is jarred loose by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), just a a pivotal hockey game threatens her self image.
The Bikeriders
Director Jeff Nichols’ gritty portrait of Midwestern biker gangs stars Austin Butler and Tom Hardy looking mighty manly. Read my full review.
The good part about having a virtual Sundance pass is the wealth of great films it provides. The bad news is that, since you’re not fully immersed in the Park City bubble, real life goes on, and you may not get to watch everything that looks good. I’ve certainly been feeling that tension over the last week, and trying to be judicious with my picks. That means skipping everything that will be shown this weekend at Crosstown Theater as part of Indie Memphis’ satelite screening program.
A still from “What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada Del Muerto” by Hope Tucker.
The exception was the short film “What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada Del Muerto,” the short film by Memphian Hope Tucker, which will screen Saturday, January 29, at Crosstown. It’s essentially montage of shots from the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945, overlaid with online reviews from people who visited as tourists. You know me, I love the experimental stuff, and this one certainly scratched that itch.
Colin Farrel in After Yang (Image courtesy Sundance Institute)
Through happenstance, I watched two films in a row that dealt with the thorny question of our relationship with artificial intelligence. The first was After Yang, which was one of the first films I added to my schedule when the Sundance website went live. Mononym-ed director Kogonada adopted a short story from Alexander Weinstein that recalls the Brian Aldiss classic “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” which became Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. When Jake (Colin Ferrel) and Kyra (Jodi Turner-Smith) adopted a daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) from China, they wanted to make sure she felt connected to her roots, so they purchased Yang (Justin H. Min), an android who would be a surrogate older brother. Now, Mika is four years old, and Yang is a trusted part of the family. But when he suddenly malfunctions (in a great scene that shows the family competing in an online dance game), Jake runs into trouble. He bought Yang as a refurb from a fly-by-night store that isn’t there any more, and the manufacturer won’t honor the warranty. When he consults a gray market android repair service, he uncovers the secrets of Yang’s past, and the independent existence his “son” had hidden from him.
After Yang looks great, and the underlying story is strong, but it only has one speed. Ferrel and Turner-Smith are both more than capable, but they are reserved to the point of flatness. The film is interesting, but more admired than loved by me.
David Earl and Charles Hayward in Brian and Charles (Courtesy Sundance Institute)
The other half of my inadvertent A.I. double bill took an entirely different approach. Brian and Charles by Welsh director Jim Archer is a comedy about an eccentric inventor (David Earl, who shares a writing credit on the film) who is tired of developing the egg belt and pinecone bag, and decides to swing for the fences by building a robot. He succeeds beyond his wildest dream, and his creation dubs itself Charles. Brian is an unlikely Dr. Frankenstein, and he throws himself into parenting his creation, who progresses to toddler stage very quickly. Brian wants to shield Charles from the dangers he knows come with being an outsider, but the robot wants to explore and see the world. Their little household is thrown into crisis when Brian’s jerky neighbors discover Charles and steal him to work on their farm.
Brian and Charles is charming, with a pair of good performances by the leads and a well-attuned screenplay. But the jokes never rise above the chuckle level, and the indie film quirk level is set to “cloying.” Still, I enjoyed both After Yang and Brian and Charles for their thoughtfulness.
Aubrey Plaza breaks bad in Emily the Criminal. (Courtesy Sundance Institute)
Aubrey Plaza was the driving force behind Emily the Criminal, as she found the screenplay by John Patton Ford and spearheaded the production by agreeing to take on the title character. Emily is struggling as a caterer in Los Angeles, even though she has a degree that would qualify her for high-paying advertising jobs. She has a DUI on her record, because she was the least-wasted person in her friend group that went to a music festival, and had the bad luck of getting pulled over when she tried to drive everyone home. One of those friends (Megalyn Echikunwoke) is trying to help her get a good job out of guilt, but nobody wants to hire a felon. Meanwhile, a co-worker steers Emily toward a lucrative freelance opportunity: working as a “dummy shopper” using stolen credit card information to buy big screen TVs, which are then sold on the black market. Emily quickly learns that she can make a killing crime-ing, but she’s torn between the promise of the straight life and going full Walter White — especially since her natural talents seem to lean toward breaking bad.
Plaza, like many who started out in comedy, is an incredibly good actor when she turns her timing and control toward drama. Ford’s screenplay is a finely honed machine, and the jittery camerawork works perfectly, especially in a harrowing scene where Emily has to brazen her way through a car heist while surrounded by gangsters twice her size. You can be forgiven if you get a strong Uncut Gems vibe from Emily the Criminal, but I loved this film.
Maika Monroe gets paranoid in Watcher by Chloe Okuno. (Courtesy Sundance Institute)
Another strong entry in the narrative category is Watcher by director Chloe Okuno. A slick, Hitchcock-by-way-of-De Palma riff on Rear Window, the film is driven by some ace production design (one thing this Sundance has in abundance is great-looking interiors) and a charismatic performance by lead Maika Monroe as Julia, a newlywed who abandons her acting career to move to Romania with her husband, where she finds mostly ennui with a side order of menacing peeping tom.
Lucy and Desi (Courtesy Sundance Institute)
The nonfiction films continue to be very strong this year. Lucy and Desi is a passion project for Amy Poehler. Given full access to the Desilu archives and the couple’s personal effects by daughter Luci Arnaz Luckinbill, Poehler’s film goes a lot more in-depth into Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s unlikely and historic relationship, and explores the couple’s unrivaled legacy of television innovation more than the recent biopic starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem (which was infected with a terminal case of Sorkin-ism).
The Janes (Courtesy Sundance Institute)
The best doc I saw at Sundance is also superior to the fictionalized version of the story. The Janes from directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes is the story of the Chicago-area feminist collective which provided illegal abortions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The clearly told doc features some incredible interviews with people on both sides of the issue, including the policemen who ultimately busted the Janes in 1972. The cast of characters, it turns out, were much more interesting in real life, and the film’s stories of the day to day, cloak and dagger proceedings of the group, and the darkly funny story of how it all came apart, just exposes what an incredible missed opportunity its Sundance selection Call Jane was. The Janes is an HBO production that will premiere on the company’s streaming service later this year, and it is not to be missed.
The experience of being a film critic can feel like you’re trapped in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. You have to watch a lot of dispiritingly mediocre movies, and a few really awful ones. But then there are those rare moments when you are unexpectedly confronted with something truly great, and it restores your faith in film. It Follows is one of those moments.
Director David Robert Mitchell’s film arrives with little fanfare. Made for
$2 million in Detroit, the indie production debuted at Cannes in 2014, where it earned praise from virtually everyone who saw it and landed a distribution deal from a Weinstein Company subsidiary. The Weinsteins famously backed Quentin Tarantino’s career, and it’s not hard to see what attracted their attention here. Like Pulp Fiction, It Follows is something of a pastiche of films from a specific genre. In this case, it’s horror. But like Tarantino’s masterpiece, It Follows transcends its cut-and-paste methodology to become a work of true self-expression for Mitchell.
Like the great horror films of the 1980s, the premise is simple. A mysterious creature is stalking teenagers. It is invisible to everyone except its prey, to whom it appears as horrible versions of people they know. Once it sets its sights on you, the only way to get rid of The Follower is to have sex with someone. Then, the creature will turn its attention to your paramour, and once it has killed him or her, it will return for you.
It Follows
The slasher flick has always had an undertone of sexual guilt and punishment. If a teenager has sex in a Friday the 13th movie, odds are they’re about to die in a gruesome fashion. It Follows foregrounds and comments on the trope. Jay (Maika Monroe), the college girl whose attempts to flee from the demon form the story, is not a classic ’80s chainsaw fodder slut. She’s been seeing Hugh (Jake Weary) for a while when she finally decides to go all the way with him after a date to a classic movie palace is cut short when he sees someone who isn’t there. But their late night tryst turns very ugly in a way that invokes the constant fear of sexual violence that hangs around in the back of every woman’s mind. This is not a sadistic slasher flick that invites the viewer to take vicarious pleasure in the murder of a woman. We’re in her shoes from the very beginning, and when her friends band together to try to save her, we’re genuinely rooting for them to succeed.
It Follows
The list of Mitchell’s sly references to classic horror films reads like a greatest hits of the genre — Cat People, Frankenstein, Halloween — but foremost is The Shining. Remember the scene with the two ghostly little girls at the end of the hall? If you extended it out to feature-length, it would approximate the atmosphere of It Follows. Mitchell directs cinematographer Mike Gioulakis’ camera moves with Kubrickian precision, as in the bravado, one-shot opening sequence. He is equally at home staging deep action and intimate close ups. Imagine A Nightmare on Elm Street if it were shot like The Virgin Suicides. The whole thing is tied together with a dark synth soundtrack by Disasterpeace that resembles nothing less than Vangelis’ seminal score for Blade Runner.
I could go on at great length about the dark subtexts swirling underneath It Follows, but the most important thing is that the surface is genuinely terrifying. It’s an instant classic, and Mitchell just shot to the top of my list of directors to watch.
