Review: The Black Phone

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

The quality of horror movies has been impressively high in recent years - while there remain a number of bad ones, many of the good ones have been especially rich - and this year has already seen two very strong 1970s-set horror pictures - Ti West's gleefully deranged "X" and Scott Derrickson's haunting "The Black Phone."

Based on a short story by Joe Hill - the son of Stephen King - the film is rich on 1970s period detail without being overbearing about it. There's a great opening sequence depicting a baseball game, and there are numerous scenes of youths in scraps that capture the skinned knees and fist fights prevalent among young boys. There are, of course, a few great needle drops - Edgar Winter Group, Sweet and a great use of Pink Floyd's "On the Run" - and references to "Emergency!" and "The Tingler." But the film's sinisterness is just lurking around the corner from the nostalgia. 

In the picture, young Finney (Mason Thames) - whose "mint arm" will be put to good use by the end of the film - is a shy baseball player in a suburb of Denver in 1978. He has a close friendship with his sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who possibly displays some psychic powers that you might expect in a Stephen King story, and they live with their alcoholic and occasionally abusive father (Jeremy Davies), whom they take turns "taking care of" when he's had too much to drink.

In the early scenes of the film, several young boys - two of whom Finney knows well - go missing, and the nightly news warns denizens of the burb of The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), a man who shows up at the scene carrying a bouquet of black balloons and wearing facial makeup. After he has dragged the boys into a van, he keeps them locked in a soundproofed basement in a home he shares with his brother - who is somehow clueless about it all. He pays visits to his victims donning a creepy mask, and taunts and punishes them before eventually killing them.

Finney becomes The Grabber's latest victim, but the twist is that the ghosts of The Grabber's previous victims call Finney on a black phone - which has a cut cord - that hangs on a wall in the basement room where he is kept. Each of the boys provides a piece of the puzzle to Finney in an attempt to aid his escape,  but it's ultimately the advice of a tough Latino kid (Miguel Cazarez Mora) with whom Finney is friends at school that is most important: Although he doesn't stand up for himself against the bullies at school who torment him, he'll one day have to do so.

For a movie in which much of the action is set in a basement, "The Black Phone" is fairly suspenseful, if not exactly scary. Hawke does a solid job of playing against type, and although we don't learn enough about his character in terms of a back story, he makes his scenes count with a sinister performance of the type I've never seen him portray before.

Both Thames and McGraw are also particularly good, and the latter's confessionals to Jesus - particularly one in which she gets a little frustrated - provided some much needed levity to this dark story. "The Black Phone" may be short on scares, but it's long on mood, features some solid performances, does a great job of capturing its era and makes you care about its characters. 

Derrickson is previously responsible for the pretty scary "Sinister," and similar to that film what makes some of his horror movies so effective is the level of detail and aura he creates for his spooky stories. "The Black Phone" is one of the genre's better offerings as of late.

Review: Elvis

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis" is less of a rock star biopic and more in line with - oddly enough - Milos Forman's "Amadeus," which chronicled the story of Salieri, the man who - according to the movie - accepted some form of responsibility for the titular musical genius' death. In "Elvis," the Salieri character is Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, playing against type as a villain and seemingly having fun hamming it up a little), the king of rock 'n roll's manager.

Similar to Eugene Landy, the psychiatrist/manager portrayed by Paul Giamatti in the Brian Wilson biopic "Love and Mercy," Parker is a manipulator who takes control of his talent's financial affairs and basically runs him into the ground physically in pursuit of more money - in this case, Parker has a gambling addiction.

Luhrmann deploys many of his usual cinematic tricks here - his films are flashy and exuberant, and "Elvis" has some a lot of stylish flair to rank with some of his best movies - namely, "Moulin Rouge" and "Strictly Ballroom" - while also exhibiting some of the more over-the-top elements of some of his lesser features, such as his remake of "The Great Gatsby."

But what holds the film together is, surprisingly, not Hanks - a great actor who gets to have some fun here overplaying the sleazy Colonel, a Dutch immigrant who somehow has people convinced that he grew up in West Virginia and whose penchant for "snowing" people at first impresses Elvis - but Austin Butler who brings Presley to life in ways that I found fairly surprising.

In many ways, "Elvis" takes the routine task of portraying the rise-and-fall epic of a musician - so, we get the rise to stardom; the scenes where Elvis doesn't listen to his wise mother, who warns him about the Colonel; the drug abuse; the divorce from the spouse, etc. - but there's a lot of fun to be had with the combination of stock footage mixing with recreated scenes from Elvis' career, and the live performance sequences are pretty impressive.

The film is, perhaps, a little too generous in how it depicts Elvis paying homage to the Black musicians whose musical styles he adopted for his own music. In other words, I don't think he did nearly so much as the film depicts him doing behind the scenes. The manner to which he was manipulated by his manager, on the other hand, as well as his harrowing descent into a pills addiction, felt pretty authentic.

"Elvis" isn't a great saga depicting a musical icon - some of the best of the past few decades include the brilliant Bob Dylan phantasmagoria "I'm Not There" and "Straight Outta Compton." That being said, it's still pretty fun, even when Luhrmann can't quite get over his trademark obsessions - seriously, what was with the scenes in which modern music played during scenes in the 1950s? The film is at times - to quote an Elvis song - too much, but it's often engaging, stylish and entertaining enough to warrant a recommendation.

Review: Memoria

Image courtesy of Neon.

Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes films that are on their own wavelength - and you can either take the plunge and try to tune in or not, although that likely makes little difference to the director, who answer to the name "Joe" for those not willing to give his long name an attempt. For more than 15 years, Weerasethakul has been making strange, slowly paced and hypnotic films that seem to exist in their own universe. "Memoria," which stars Tilda Swinton, is his first in English.

The best of Weerasethakul's work - the unusual, trance-like "Tropical Malady" and the Palm d'Or-winning "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" - require the viewer to lose themselves in the lush imagery, hypnotic pacing and style and almost unexplainable stories that the director likes to tell. His latest isn't any different, although while I found it compelling it didn't rank among his greatest works.

In the film, Swinton's character,  Jessica, is visiting an ill sister who has been hospitalized in Bogota - the reasons given for her potential illness vary from the family dog to a tribe of natives who have cast a spell to prevent outsiders from visiting their lands - and it's easy to see her sense of displacement. She wanders around trying to speak the language, and occasionally finding a disconnect - for example, a scene in which she tries to track down a sound technician with whom she'd struck up a friendly acquaintance.

The reason she'd met with the technician is that, one night in the middle of the night, she heard a loud thumping noise with no apparent cause. Over the course of several days, she continues to hear it while she's roaming the streets or having dinner with her sister and her family. It's unclear whether anyone else can hear the sound, and there's a long sequence during which the sound technician tries to replicate it on his sound boards in his studio.

Things begin to get stranger. Aside from the recurring noise, Jessica is told by her sister that someone she was sure who'd died is still alive, and she can't relocate the sound technician after she tries to find him a second time. Later, she wanders into the countryside and meets a fish scaler named Hernan (Elkin Diaz), and during their discussion about memory and dreams it almost seems as if her dreams have intertwined with his. At one point, he takes a nap on the grass and appears to have died before waking up again and continuing the conversation with Jessica.

So, what is "Memoria" about? The answer is: the same thing that any of Weerasethakul's films are about: the mysteries of our existence on planet Earth. In his previous and best films, a young man goes into a jungle to locate his lover, who has been turned into a tiger ("Tropical Malady") and a man is visited by mystical woodland creatures with glowing red eyes who are supposed to be his deceased wife and son ("Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives").

You might not find a satisfying answer as to what takes place in "Memoria" - although there is somewhat of an explanation in a startling image late in the picture - but as is the case in previous Weerasethakul films, the experience is more about the journey than the destination. "Memoria" might not rank among the director's greatest films - at least, in my opinion - but Weerasethakul's vision is singular, and it's unlikely that you'll see anything else in a theater - which is the only place you'll see this film due to a release strategy in which it will apparently only screen at theaters and never be released on DVD or streaming - like it this year.

Review: Cha Cha Real Smooth

Image courtesy of Apple TV.

 Cooper Raiff's "Cha Cha Real Smooth" might give off the vibe of the type of quirky indie American comedy that you'd see at the Sundance Film Festival - where the film, in fact, sold for a whopping $15 million - but it's a lot more than that as well as a gigantic leap forward for its writer/director/star, whose first feature, "Shithouse," was similarly awkwardly charming, if a little too low-key.

When I reference awkwardness, I'm referring to the type of character that Raiff plays - here, it's the fresh-out-of-college and not-quite-motivated Andrew, whose arrested development is more charming than grating - and in his previous film. In both "Shithouse" and "Cha Cha," the characters he portrays exhibit a mixture of awkward good-naturedness and seeming lack of sophistication in romantic relationships.

As the film opens, we meet young Andrew attending a bar mitzvah with his mother. He notices a much older female party planner as she leads children through a round of the limbo, and sneaks out into the hall to watch her take part in a seemingly fraught phone conversation. 

But back at the bar mitzvah, she jumps back into her role with enthusiasm as if the phone call never took place. Andrew is smitten at her strength and professionalism and the boy - who looks all of 12 years of age - asks her on a date. She kindly explains she's too old for him, and Andrew's protective but bipolar mother (Leslie Mann in a solid supporting performance) tries to provide the broken-hearted boy with some solace.

We jump ahead a decade and Andrew has returned home after graduating Tulane University to stay with his mother; Andrew's young brother, David (Evan Assante), who obviously looks up to Andrew; and Greg (Brad Garrett), the awkward stepfather who means well, but seems to frequently clash with Andrew. Our protagonist is fresh off another heartbreak as his girlfriend has left to study for a semester in Spain and, based on her Facebook profile, is seeing other people. With no other prospects on hand, Andrew takes a job at a fast food joint called Meat Sticks.

His mother tells him that her illness had recently caused her to make a scene at a party, so she asks him to go in her place to a bar mitzvah, where he runs into several old schoolmates and befriends a young mother named Domino (Dakota Johnson in what's likely her best performance) after she takes a shine to his kindness exhibited toward her autistic daughter, Lola (Vanessa Burghardt).

The whole scene clicks with Andrew and he comes up with an idea for a business: party planner for bar mitzvahs. His job is to get children dancing and having fun at the rites of passage, and he is often accompanied by his younger brother, who wants to pick Andrew's brain on how to land his first kiss with a girl he likes, unbeknownst to David that his older brother is fairly awkward when it comes to manners of the heart.

As his friendship with Domino and Lola grows - he offers to babysit her, and these scenes are often charmingly sweet and funny - he begins to develop feelings for the older woman, who has a depressive side that she is unable to hide, and he questions why she is engaged to Joseph (Raul Castillo), a brusk lawyer whose current case frequently takes him to Chicago.

All of this might sound like the makings of a quirky romantic comedy that came from the Sundance factory and is cute enough to make you roll your eyes. In this case, you'd be mistaken. "Cha Cha Real Smooth" is all of those things - funny, charming and displaying a warmth and sweetness that felt like a balm during this particularly downbeat period in current affairs - but it's also deeper and wiser than you'd expect.

For starters, the film is about the unexplainable nature of attraction and how two people click for reasons often unknown to those involved. Domino recognizes that Andrew is young, naive and far behind in life experiences - at age 29, she has an autistic daughter, a husband who left her and she battles depression - and yet, she feels comfortable around him. 

In some ways, the film is a kinder, gentler version of "The Graduate." Andrew in turn starts to fall for Domino, much like he did for the older party planner during the opening scene. He seemingly takes interest in older women who he believes are unappreciated and display an inner strength - and this includes everyone from the party planner and Domino to his mother - or are unnoticed - such as Lola, who is occasionally picked on by boys at the bar mitzvahs due to her being autistic.

Although the film goes in some directions that are inevitable and that you'd expect - for example, Andrew having to face the realization that Domino already has a full life, and that he's still basically a kid - there's a generosity in the picture that extends even to characters that we might initially misjudge. 

The friendship between Andrew and Domino is handled with a surprising delicacy, and both actors are particularly impressive, especially Johnson. "Cha Cha Real Smooth" might have its quirks - Andrew's over-exuberance might initially rub some the wrong way, although we later recognize it's a protective stance - but it's a genuinely kind-hearted, funny and well written and acted film that feels like a hug during a time when most of us could really use one.

Review: The Janes

Image courtesy of HBO Max.

Much like Audrey Diwan's recent film "Happening," the documentary "The Janes" is a heartbreaking, powerful and eerily prescient film about the devastating effects of a woman not having the right to make decisions about her own body. While Diwan's film was a drama about a young woman going to great lengths to procure an abortion in early 1960s France, Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes' documentary follows a group of young women in Chicago during the late 1960s who helped desperate women get the procedure.

Although the film follows the tried-and-true talking head style of many documentaries of years past - while sprinkling in stock footage clips from the era in which it takes place - and doesn't break much ground in terms of presentation, the story itself is what keeps one riveted.

It's also disturbingly timely, considering that a radicalized Supreme Court is likely to reverse the 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision that gave women the right to a legal abortion. The unsettling tales in "The Janes" of women facing grave health risks - and occasionally death - due to "back alley" abortions provide a frighteningly possible road map for the years to come in parts of the United States.

We meet the various women involved in "Jane," from a tenacious leader who founded the group and eventually checked herself into a psychiatric hospital due to stress to the seemingly ordinary women who felt they needed to do something to advance women's rights in the United States and joined the effort - often at their own legal peril - to help women get safe abortions. There's also the male abortionist who the women used - a large (and now obviously older) and surprisingly jolly man who was not an actual doctor, but apparently put the women's minds at ease while performing the procedure.

The film's title refers to the organization founded in Chicago known as "Jane." The group competed with the local mob, which women often had to pay to undergo somewhat dangerous procedures in hotel rooms, to provide the procedure to women looking to terminate their pregnancy. The way it worked was that a woman in need of the procedure would get ahold of a phone number, call and ask for "Jane" and then be delivered to a place - often through switcheroos involving several different vehicles - where they would be cared for.

We are told at the end of the film that the Janes helped to perform about 11,000 safe abortions during their years of operation. It's horrifying to think that such a group might one day have to exist again. "The Janes" is a powerful film that, although it's presented as your typical interview-style documentary, packs a lot of punch into its 100-minute running time. It's also a great testament to the courage of the women who risked a lot to help other women oppressed by a system in which they didn't have bodily autonomy. 

Review: Crimes Of The Future

Image courtesy of Neon.

 

"Long live the new flesh" was the tagline for director David Cronenberg's disturbing 1983 sci-fi thriller "Videodrome" and it could serve as one for his latest film, "Crimes of the Future," if the picture didn't already have its own new mantra: "Surgery is the new sex."

Set in the not-so-distant future, the next stage of human evolution appears to be slowing making itself known as several characters in the movie display bodily abilities not available to others. The film opens with one such character - a young boy sitting alone on the shore who is called inside by his mother. Moments later, she witnesses him taking a bite out of a plastic trash can and ingesting it without seemingly harming himself. Repulsed, she takes a pillow and smothers him to death.

Elsewhere, body performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen in an understated performance) is drawing his usual crowd of observers with handheld filming devices at the ready as his artistic partner, Caprice (Lea Seydoux) removes an organ and places it in a jar. This is their performance: Saul's body is apparently trying to kill him and continues to grow new organs for which he has no room; so, Caprice removes them, and an eager audience gathers to view these performances. Both Caprice and Saul also seem to get off on the whole thing.

Several people find their way into the duo's orbit - two of whom are bureaucratic investigators from the National Organ Registry named Timlin (Kristen Stewart in the film's oddest performance) and Wippet (Don McKellar). Although these two originally warn Saul and Caprice that their performances break various laws, they soon become intrigued by the performances and become devoted acolytes. Timlin especially becomes fixated on Saul.

A mysterious man named Lang (Scott Speedman) seeks out Saul and Caprice, and proposes a show that they can put on for their fans that involves dissecting his dead son. The boy, of course, is the one we saw being smothered at the beginning, and we are told that what viewers will witness when the boy's carcass is opened up will amaze them. A police inspector (Welket Bungue) with whom Saul has a previous relationship also starts poking around and seems to want to know what Lang is up to.

"Crimes of the Future" marks a return for Cronenberg to the body horror genre where he first found his start. It bears more in common with 1980s landmarks like "Videodrome" or "Dead Ringers" than it does the more stylish dramas and crime pictures he did earlier this century - the remarkable "A History of Violence," "Eastern Promises" and "A Dangerous Method" - although it also bears some similarity to his provocative and powerful "Crash," which chronicled the story of people who got off on getting into dangerous car crashes, whereas here they have substituted surgery for their erotic pleasure.

The film provides audiences with a lot to chew on - and there's one particular sequence of chewing on an open wound that is bound to make viewers squirm a little - and its bleak view of the future of the human race is certainly compelling. It's a good film and a godsend that Cronenberg has returned to filmmaking after an eight-year hiatus, even if "Crimes of the Future" doesn't quite rank for me among the director's best. It's well worth a watch and better than his two most recent films - his "Cosmopolis" adaptation and "Maps to the Stars" - but it's not on the level of the handful of movies that came directly before them.

Cronenberg has long been obsessed with the deterioration of the body - remember his version of "The Fly"? - which is another way of saying getting older, and his latest is no exception. There's also some jaw dropping freakishness on display - the aforementioned autopsy and a sequence in which another body artist with ears strewn about his body and eyes and mouth sewn shut dances for an audience - and some dark, absurdist humor. "Crimes of the Future" is a movie that could only have been made by Cronenberg - and as such, it's a pretty solid return to form.

Review: Happening

Courtesy of IFC Films.

Eerily prescient, skillfully made and often hellish to experience, Audrey Diwan's "Happening" joins a small group of powerful films from recent years - namely, Cristian Mungiu's masterpiece "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" and Eliza Hittman's somber "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" - about young women trying to procure abortions. This one is particularly grueling and, horrifyingly, timely.

Adapted from Annie Ernaux's autobiographical novel, the picture follows Annie (Anamaria Vartolomei), a young Frenchwoman in 1963 who is studying literature at a university when she discovers that she is pregnant. She seems to find her predicament impossible, as she only slept with the man whom she'd been seeing off and on once.

Although illegal in France at the time, Annie attempts to enlist help from several local doctors, and she gets nothing but smug indifference, judgmental tsk-tsking and, in one case, a repulsive betrayal in which a practitioner convinces her to take an action that ends up bolstering her pregnancy. The other men with whom she comes into contact - teachers, relatives, the man who impregnated her - aren't much better.

In terms of story, "Happening" doesn't necessarily go anywhere you don't expect it to go. Annie's friends are mostly unwilling to help her, so she undertakes the mission to find a doctor to carry out an abortion on her own. "Accept it," one tells her after he'd given her a hint on how to have a miscarriage, only to see it fail.

This disturbing piece of advice is not only something you'd expect to hear on Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale," but in American society at this moment. Nearly 50 years after Roe v. Wade, the possibility of women in specific areas of the United States being forced to cross state lines or have dangerous - for lack of a better phrase - "back alley" abortions is once again a potential reality.

Timing-wise, "Happening" is frighteningly of-the-moment. It's also a tough sit. An actual abortion procedure - of the back alley variety - is seen in unflinching detail, and the aftermath of it is even more horrific. The fact that it is shot in one take makes it all the more harrowing. 

Vartolomei's powerful performance carries the proceedings and really draws us in to Annie's experience, one that would resonate at any moment, but especially the present one. "Happening" is a powerful story about the horrors of the past that, if we're not careful, could become those of the present.