I guess I lost track of director Kelly Reichardt since
the pandemic but I have enjoyed all of her films that I’ve seen (particularly
Old Joy, 2006, and First Cow, 2019). With The Mastermind, Reichardt has brought
her technique and themes to the heist drama. (It is always hard to know whether
these arthouse directors choose to make genre films to attract a wider
audience, for commercial prospects, or because, like many of us, they are truly
fond of the genres). The setting is Framingham, Massachusetts, circa 1970.
Reichardt and her team (including longtime cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt)
use film stock and camera techniques to evoke films shot in this period (gauzy,
washed-out colour) alongside pitch-perfect art design and set-decoration and costumes
(furniture, cars, buildings, shirts, dresses, etc.).The plaintive jazz soundtrack by Rob Mazurek
lends an emotional note to the proceedings even when some scenes are scored
only by extended drum solos. The plot centres on Josh O’Connor’s failing
carpenter/architect/art-school graduate, married (to Alana Haim) with two young
sons, who concocts a plan to steal some abstract paintings from the local art
gallery with a couple of local guys/friends. Reichardt takes us step-by-step
through the caper and its aftermath in true slow-cinema style, allowing viewers’
awareness of the genre to fill in some of the gaps in the plot as she hones in
on a character study of O’Connor’s “mastermind”. Rather than using other
characters to psychoanalyse him, Reichardt allows O’Connor’s actions (and the little
bit of context we glean about him and his past) to help viewers to draw their
own conclusions. The film concludes, with Vietnam War protests on TV and on the
streets, with a sort of sudden ironic joke and no denouement (possibly one could
see 2/3 of the film as a long long denouement, I guess!). Slow but always absorbing.
Ostensibly narrated by a primary school girl from
whatever small town in America the film takes place, lending a fable-like
quality to the proceedings, we begin the tale with the key mystery to be
solved: on one particular school day, all of the students in one classroom
(save one) fail to turn up to school (in fact, they each left their houses at
2:17 AM and disappeared). Distressed parents focus their anger on the class
teacher, played by Julia Garner. The film is divided into three parts: Justine’s
story (the classroom teacher), Archer’s story (one of the parents, played by
Josh Brolin), and Alex’s story (the one boy who did show up for school, played
by Cary Christopher). Everyone is desperate to understand what happened to the
missing children – and, of course, to find them. Amy Madigan, playing Alex’s
Aunt Gladys, was nominated for a Golden Globe for best supporting actress for
this film but did not win. To say any more would be criminal but I left the film
thinking about the Brothers Grimm (and although I was hoping for a strictly supernatural
film, I did wince on a few occasions that involved some violence and gore).
Worth a look (if you dare)!
I will have to watch this one again, having only seen
it on my trans-Pacific flight to the USA on the tiny back-of-the-seat screen
(possibly with an airline crash edited out).However, even with these conditions, I’m confident that this is director
Wes Anderson’s best feature since The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Although I
enjoyed them well enough at the time, Asteroid City (2023) and The French
Dispatch (2021) felt like a letdown. Here, Benicio del Toro stars as
businessman Zsa-Zsa Korda, who may have a shady past and also the target of
various attempts at his life (possibly leading to multiple airplane crashes,
all survived). He is trying to put together the financing for one last
engineering feat, which involves visiting a series of former business partners
around the globe. Along with him are Mia Threapleton playing his daughter
Liesl, now a nun, to whom he plans to bequeath his estate, and Michael Cera
playing Bjorn, a tutor hired to teach him about insects. The characterisations (including
from the many, often familiar bit players) are sublimely eccentric. Although
not scaling the droll comedic peak that Grand Budapest conquered, Phoenician
Scheme offers many amusing moments as Korda seeks to eliminate “the gap” in his
financing. As could be expected, the art design, set decoration, and music
(Alexandre Desplat, plus curated classical and jazz selections), are highly stylized
and exquisite.Recommended, particularly
if you’ve more or less given up on Wes recently.
In preparation for a family visit to the Deep Space escape
room at Ukiyo.com.au (courtesy of Nanna & Vaari) – and because I recently
played Alien: Isolation (the survival horror videogame) – I rewatched this sequel
to the original Ridley Scott 1979 horror sci-fi classic.This time with James Cameron at the helm
(fresh off his success with The Terminator, 1984), the franchise takes a
distinct turn to the action film, as a group of marines (including Bill Paxon,
Michael Biehn, Jenette Goldstein, and synthetic Lance Henriksen) are sent to
THAT planet, where a human colony has now disappeared, approximately 57 years
after the first film. Ellen Ripley (played again by Sigourney Weaver) has been on
ice in hibernation all this time on the Nostromo’s escape pod but, ultimately, is
encouraged to join the rescue mission (by slimy corporate shill Paul Reiser) after
a traumatic recovery period on Earth. When they arrive on LV-426, they find
only 9-year-old Newt whose parents and brother have been killed, along with all
of the colonists (except those used for incubating offspring), by the swarm of
aliens that has infested their base.And
with that premise in place, the rest of the film is one long fight between the
space marines, Ripley, and the aliens (including their queen), with a few subplots
for character development along the way.Cameron ups the tension and plays up the “maternal instinct” angle by
mirroring Ripley (with Newt standing in for her now dead real daughter) and the
alien queen.It’s a relentless ride,
although not quite up to the spooky-scary benchmark set by its
predecessor.If I recall correctly, none
of the subsequent films in the franchise are as good as the first two.
One of those
movies that I couldn’t remember whether I had actually watched it or not, with
T2 probably overshadowing any earlier memories. It turns out that this first
film in the series is a cracking good time, with raw gritty action that retains
a link to low budget masterworks like John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13
(1976), even as it points toward the big budget spectacles of the future (of
which director James Cameron would play a key role). This film took Arnold Schwarzenegger
from his previous beefcake roles (e.g., Conan the Barbarian, 1982) into
something even more iconic and weird – a futuristic cyborg time-travelling to
the past to kill the mother of the resistance hero fighting the A. I. machines
who have taken over the Earth. Suffice
it to say that Arnold’s Teutonic accent is perfect (and he does say “I’ll Be
Back”). Although the special effects do dominate before the film concludes
(whetting Cameron’s appetite, I guess), Linda Hamilton (as the target) and
Michael Biehn (as a futuristic human pursuing the Terminator) maintain their sense
of purpose, using every possible means to escape the unrelenting robot revealed
under Arnold’s skin. Having caught lightning in a bottle, I guess no one could
resist a sequel (or three).
One of the reviews
on Letterboxd suggests that a viewer at a film festival needed to google
Pavement to learn about the band – if this is you, this is not your movie.
However, if you’re like me, owning all of their records which were on steady
rotation back in the day (and therefore virtually memorised), then Pavements
will be something of a trippy experience. Or let’s just say director Alex Ross
Perry capitalises on the sense of absurdity and ridiculousness that was an
undercurrent in the band’s work (so if that’s also something that brings a smirk
to your face, I say go for it). The film has 4 or 5 strands all interwoven but
skilfully edited to provide not just an historical narrative of the band but an
emotional one which crescendos at the end, celebrating Pavement’s 2022 reunion
shows (which I somehow skipped here in Melbourne; but did see Malkmus’s
subsequent emergence in The Hard Quartet this year). We see scenes of the band rehearsing
for the reunion as well as clips from the past, all the way back to the
beginning, but we never get a complete song – everything is excerpts, offering
tantalising primes that trigger longer memories and complete versions of unplayed
songs as earworms. Everything else in the film is a form of fiction, a staged “meta”
take on the “what if” aspect of the Pavement story, as in “what if” they
actually became as famous as contemporaries Nirvana.In that fan-fiction future, there’s a
Pavement museum in NYC – we see the gallery opening featuring other Matador
bands playing Pavement songs (snippets only, naturally), and an array of celebs
(Thurston Moore et al.) mingling with the members of Pavement and the assorted
hipsterati, amongst the many (catalogued) artefacts (t-shirts and weirder) from
the band’s past. It seems that this event really happened, but how staged it
was is hard to say (clearly there is no such museum).Weirder still, the producers may have really
issued a call for auditions for a proposed Pavement stage musical (“Slanted! Enchanted!”)
– we see earnest Broadway wannabes singing their hearts out via Gold Soundz and
a few dance numbers (cringeworthy, yes, but fitting in some way?). It’s
possible to see Stephen Malkmus’s guiding hand behind some of this, as absurdly
self-mocking as it seems. The final strand is the hardest to digest and the
most distancing (at least for this viewer – is it Brechtian?). To provide more
narrative grit to the Pavement story (and align it with the cliches of the music
doc?), and again as a kind of fan-fiction, we are treated to a parallel version
of the band’s story in which Spiral Stairs (Scott Kannberg, played by Nat Wolff)
is bitter about the band’s lack of success, Malkmus (played by Joe Keery) is
visibly alienated from the possibility of fame, and there’s a faux climax
focused on Lollapalooza’s mud-slinging incident which leads to an intense band discussion
(in contrast to the reality of the band laughing in the green room after the
incident which is shown in split-screen). The producers cast actors in the role of band
members and relevant record label execs (Tim Heidecker as Gerard Cosloy; Jason
Schwarzman as Chris Lombardi; founders of Matador records who also appear as
themselves) and we see actors preparing for their roles by emulating historic
footage of the band (e.g., using a voice coach to get Malkmus’s vocal fry just
right and examining a photo of his tongue) which takes us further into bizarro-world.
Ultimately, the film offers an opportunity for an extended (128 minutes)
meditation/reverie on the band (with Perry using all the cinematic techniques
at his disposal to keep it interesting), if that’s what yer looking for; if you
don’t know the band, I suspect the film would be nearly incomprehensible. I haven’t
pulled this out for a while but for a straight-up documentary of the band you
might try Lance Bangs’ Slow Century (2002). For my part, I enjoyed these
moments of (self-)indulgence.
Have I over-rated
this film? I think not. As a morality
play, set in the early days of television as a growing mass-medium, it
interrogates the psychology of its characters, the contestants’ motivations
(and rationalisations) for accepting the offer to cheat (on the game show
Twenty-One), as well as the producers’ greed and anti-Semitism. The tension created by director Robert
Redford (rest in peace) is real, as federal investigator Dick Goodwin (Rob
Morrow) starts honing in on the deception, aided by a developing relationship
with Charlie Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) supported by their shared Ivy League
backgrounds (Harvard for Goodwin – with Morrow sporting a terrible Boston
accent; Columbia for Van Doren, son of noted poet Mark Van Doren). Van Doren famously beat Jewish Herbie Stempel
(John Turturro), purportedly because the producers (and sponsor Geritol, headed
by Martin Scorsese) wanted a more attractive WASPish winner. Did Redford take notes while acting in All the
President’s Men? This film does not reach the dynamic heights of that thriller
but the structure feels similar. Reflecting back on this time in the early ‘90s,
it is hard to remember that Fiennes was just fresh from his triumph in
Schindler’s List, Morrow was a TV star (Northern Exposure) seeking to make the
leap to the big screen (unsuccessfully), and Turturro was already an
established character actor (for Spike Lee and the Coen Brothers). It seems
like a lifetime ago – and the quiz show scandal seems like ancient history,
though I recall watching The Joker’s Wild as a child, not realising it was host
Jack Barry’s comeback after a decade in the wilderness following the scandal of
Twenty-One. Engrossing.
