This week we zero in on a handful of outright, if sometimes weird, recommendations for new streaming movies. Let’s celebrate the absurd! Revel in the creepy! And we are not above applauding a film critic now and again.
Deerskin
by Hope Madden
Streaming at gatewayfilmcenter.org.
What makes a good midlife crisis? What gives it swagger? Physicality? Style? Maybe a little fringe?
Deerskin.
Oscar-winner Jean Dujardin (The Artist) is Georges, a man willing to pay an awful lot for a jacket—so much that his wife locks him out of their account. No matter, Georges will just hole up in this little French town, learn how to use the digital camera that came with his purchase, and spend some quality time with his new jacket.
If that sounds absurd, it should. You’ve just stumbled into the one-paragraph synopsis of the latest bit of lunacy from filmmaker Quentin Dupieux. As he did with 2010’s Rubber (a sentient tire on a cross-country rampage), Dupieux sets up one feature-length joke.
It’s funny, though.
Again the filmmaker draws hysterically deadpan, even confused performances from the many nameless characters supporting his leads. Adèle Haenel (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), playing town barkeep and would-be filmmaker, offers a wily and enjoyable counterpoint to Dujardin’s earnestness.
Aside from a couple of utterly priceless Dupieux flourishes, it’s Dujardin that sells this film. He’s deeply committed to the wildly wrong-headed internal logic of the film and the character. There’s an underlying sadness to it, and the willful obliviousness required of a character so willing to commit to a plan as ludicrous as Georges’. He’s wonderful.
Deerskin is also slyly autobiographical in a way Dupieux’s other films are not. An odd duck wants to follow his vision (in this case, the obsessive love of a deerskin jacket) and make a movie. Creative partnerships and collaboration, while possibly necessary, also soil the vision and make the filmmaker feel dumb.
No one understands him!
Or maybe they do and his ruse is up.
No matter. He still has killer style.
Grade: B+
What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
by George Wolf
Streaming at wexarts.org.
Even with the fragmented and ubiquitous nature of film criticism in the social media age, Pauline Kael’s summation may still be the best.
Kael believed it was her job to “alert or interest people,” and without critics, “it’s all advertising.”
Falling into a movie reviewing gig almost by accident in the 1950s, Kael rode her obvious passion and expressive prose to a seat of tremendous power in the film industry. Many credit her positive review of Bonnie and Clyde with saving the film from ruin, while her negative reaction to Lawrence of Arabia made director David Lean question his future.
For What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, writer/director Rob Garver gathers interviews with Kael, her daughter and various film industry faces, weaving in passages from Kael’s writings amid snippets – with occasionally cheesy placement – from hundreds of movies.
It’s a spirited, engaging celebration of not only Kael, but of film itself as a source of entertainment, inspiration and discussion.
Garver supplies pertinent biographical info, showcasing Kael’s unlikely rise through sexist attitudes and editors uneasy with a critic unafraid to buck popular sentiment. And though it never quite feels as if we get to know Kael well, Garver makes sure we are aware of her complexities and contradictions.
She was grateful to be “paid for thinking,” not caring much about dissenting opinions or any hurt feelings on the other end of her sharpest barbs. She championed American New Wave cinema, but openly dismissed arthouse elitism for a populist lean, favoring sentences with the “sound of a human voice.”
It is that voice that speaks loudest in What She Said, with clear illustrations of how her self-assurance (and yes, self-promotion) elicited hatred, praise, and even the respect of those whose work fell below her standards.
And though Kael died in 2001, the film’s parting shot shows her approach as one both original and prescient. Putting some of Kael’s memorable thoughts inside imagined tweets, Garver leaves little doubt her following today would be impressively large.
That’s what she said.
Grade: B+
The Wretched
by Hope Madden
Available on traditional streaming platforms.
A tidy opening sets the stage, spilling enough beans to prepare you for the full tale while creating an atmosphere of genuine horror. Some excellent soundtrack choices establish a time and generate a mood.
So far so good, The Wretched!
As sometimes happens when a horror movie starts out strong, this one falls into familiar tropes to move things forward. Writers/directors Brett and Drew T. Pierce (Deadheads) stumble slightly as they usher in Act 2, relying on stock concepts as well as shorthand character introductions: rich asshole, hot girl, unfussy hot girl wearing eccentric socks who you should actually care about, Dad who’s trying but just isn’t that good at this.
Basically, there’s too much here that you’ve seen before and may not need to see again. If horror movies have taught me anything (they have, too!), it’s that Never Have I Ever is a lame game that only brings on death.
Still, the Pierce brothers and a game (if mainly unknown) cast keep even the familiar pretty fresh.
High school kid Ben (John-Paul Howard) finds himself out at the lake, working the docks with his newly-single dad (Jamison Jones). Sure, he’d planned to spend the summer tooling around town in the Lincoln his mom was passing down to him, but he got himself into a little hot water and now it’s a summer job catering to pampered townies and vacationing families.
If only that was going to be his biggest problem.
Zarah Mahler is especially effective in breaking through tropes as the neighbor lady who is not what she seems, and The Wretched uses the “child in danger” plotline to worrisome effect throughout its running time.
Weird behavior from those tourists next door finds Ben doing a little sleuthing. Quickly, The Wretched turns into Rear Window/Fright Night/Disturbia—but without the actual house arrest kind of thing, which seriously limits its tension.
There are other, lesser-known films that are thematically closer and, honestly, better, including last year’s Irish horror The Hole in the Ground and Oliver Frampton’s almost entirely unseen 2014 gem, The Forgotten.
At about the time you begin to weary of the film, it recovers with a nice surprise that reaffirms the promise of Act 1. There’s far too much borrowed and rehashed between Acts 1 and 3 for it to stand the test of time alone, but The Wretched delivers enough to entertain and to leave you interested in what’s next for the Pierce brothers.
Grade: B-
Blood Quantum
by Hope Madden
Available on Shudder.
It’s 1981 on the Red Crow Indian reservation and white people have lost their damn minds.
Since it is 1981, no way they know it’s zombies. Sure, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead came out in ’69, but the genre doesn’t really take off until later in the Eighties. No, they have to figure this out for themselves – no meta commentary, no preconceived notions.
It wouldn’t help them anyway because Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum is a zombie movie with a twist, which he uses to his advantage to subvert your knowledge of the genre.
Traylor (Michael Greyeyes) is having a busy morning. He had to shoot his ex-wife’s dog, his sons have both been arrested, Sugar keeps calling the station because his woman’s sick, and Traylor’s dad needs him to come see something down at the store.
It’s always nutty like that right before the zombie apocalypse, though. Although, to be honest, Blood Quantum often works a little more like 30 Days of Night and Stakeland – both vampire films that riff on zombie tropes—but the filmmaker utilizes Romero when it makes sense.
Barnaby takes common horror themes and bends them to serve the film’s purpose as an apt allegorical nightmare. It’s the combination of social commentary and intimate family drama that makes the film memorable.
Blood Quantum would have been interesting solely on the basis of “plagued up Opies” invading indigenous space—sometimes wrapped in infected blankets, even. But the film derives its real strength from a more intimate struggle. Yes, a diseased white population threatens to overwhelm and destroy the folks of the Mi’gMaq reserve, but Barnaby’s focus is internal.
Whites are a mainly nameless burden, a privileged but parasitic condition of life. Traylor and his boys need to take care of their own shit if they want to survive this.
Greyeyes offers a level performance to build around. Kiowa Gordon brings sinister charm to the bad boy Lysol role, balanced nicely as favorite son Joseph by The Revenant’s Forrest Goodluck, (“He killed my boy!”)
Better still are longtime character actor Gary Farmer (love him!) and relative newcomer Stonehorse Lone Goeman as a couple of guys who’ve lived through a lot and bring rich, if not always valuable, perspective.
Performances are not always exceptional, and you would not call this a feminist effort, but the underlying wry, weary wit separates the film from anything else like it.
There’s also an excellent use of resources – minimal sets maximized results: claustrophobia, tension, horror. Barnaby’s spare but effective use of animation is another reason Blood Quantum delivers a vital new perspective for the genre.
Grade: B+
Read more from Hope and George at MADDWOLF and listen to their weekly movie review podcast, THE SCREENING ROOM.