"Ghostlight" and "Sing Sing"

I had trouble figuring out how to write about "Ghostlight" and "Sing Sing," which are two of the clear standout films of the year so far.  They're both about how their main characters find redemption and meaning through their participation in amateur acting troupes.  In "Ghostlight," a construction worker named Dan Mueller (Keith Kupferer) stumbles across a tiny group of performers and joins them, which helps him to emotionally connect to his wife (Tara Mallen) and daughter (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) as they weather a family crisis.  In "Sing Sing," we watch a group of prisoners take part in a Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program, including long timer Divine G (Colman Domingo) and newcomer Divine Eye, who plays himself.  

What's difficult for me is that both of these films spend a lot of time examining the acting process, which has always been the aspect of movies and moviemaking that I know and care the least about.  I know good acting when I see it, and have always been - to my discredit - incurious about the actual mechanics of what goes into performances.  Media about the profession of acting hasn't been of much interest to me either - it's a big reason why I abandoned "Barry" pretty quickly.  "Ghostlight" and "Sing Sing," however, are much more accessible.  They're about amateurs who have few pretensions about what they're doing on the stage.  These are people who act because they enjoy it and get something positive out of the act of participating in the shows being staged.  

And the shows being staged are pretty chaotic affairs.  The "Ghostlight" players put on "Romeo and Juliet," with the leads being played by middle-aged adults, as a one-night-only performance.  The RTA group has more funding and experience, and decides to do an original time travel comedy that incorporates ancient Egypt, Freddy Krueger, and "Hamlet," complete with "to be or not to be" soliloquy, to appeal to their inmate audience.  However, both films take pains to demystify the process and capture the positive communal experience of putting on a show like this.  We see a few acting exercises and sit in on a few rehearsals, getting to know the actors as they struggle with their Shakespeare. 

"Ghostlight" strikes me as more successful at doing this.  I didn't recognize any of the actors, with the exception of Dolly de Leon, playing a former professional who is in the group because it's the only way she'll ever get to act in lead roles.  The Mueller family is played by a real couple and their daughter, who bring their existing family dynamic to the screen to good effect.  The conceit that "Romeo and Juliet" is mirroring the Muellers' real life tragedy feels a little too tidy, but the emotional journey that we watch them navigate as a result is handled beautifully.  In both films acting becomes a form of therapy for the actors.  It serves as a way for Dan to access and process emotions that he's been closed off from, helping him transform and heal from the past trauma.

"Sing Sing" is a very different kind of film, with documentary elements and more of a traditional character study with Colman Domingo's performance serving as the main event.  The play is a big part of his story, but the "therapy through acting" arc is given to a supporting character, Divine Eye, while Domingo's Divine G is struggling with a more existential crisis related to his incarceration.  This is a prison drama at the same time that it's a narrative about the creative process.  "Sing Sing" makes it clear that there are limits to what this kind of rehabilitation offers, and there's more emphasis put on the relationships formed between the prisoners in the program.  Nearly all the other actors are real RTA participants playing versions of themselves.  

It's curious, but the characters in "Sing Sing" feel more fictional than the ones in "Ghostlight," often coming across as very idealized versions of real people.  The ones in "Ghostlight" are more well-rounded, and often more relatable.  I'm not sure which take is the better one, and perhaps it's wrongheaded to be comparing these two films at all, but I suspect it's a matter of taste.  And in that spirit, I can happily recommend both.  

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Doubling Back on "Blink Twice"

Spoilers ahead.

I was not originally going to write a full post for  "Blink Twice," the directing debut of Zoe Kravitz.  I did a little capsule write-up as part of my post on 2024 summer thrillers and chillers.  This was one of the better ones, but not at the top of the rankings.  I found Kravitz's direction impressive, but you really don't want to scrutinize the mechanics of how any of the drugs or other mind-altering substances in "Blink Twice" work.  However, I couldn't stop thinking about the movie, so I feel compelled to write a little more.  Let's treat this as a post-viewing spoiler discussion.

I think the arrest of Sean Combs and the details coming out about his crimes had a lot of do with my continued interest.  I think watching a couple of interviews with Zoe Kravitz did too.  And seeing the film dismissed in some corners as "Get Out," but with #MeToo and anti-one percenter themes kinda riled me up to defend it.  Yes, all the themes in "Blink Twice" are familiar and topical, but Kravitz really tackles them in a way that not many other directors have.  There's a literal, prominent trigger warning at the beginning of the movie for a reason, but at the same time "Blink Twice" isn't difficult to watch.  There's a lot of humor, action, and smart framing of events to get the horror and depravity across while still being very entertaining.  The multiple jump scare sequence is one of my favorite parts, and I love the casual "what were we thinking?" banter when the women start putting the pieces together.  

I also keep noticing similar imagery in other media.  The private island vacation, the high end clothing, the beautifully plated food, and the luxury items in little gift bags are all things that you see again and again in modern media aimed at women, especially reality programs.  All the Cinderella narratives seem to involve shopping sprees and makeovers, and so many happy endings involve shots of lazing on a tropical shore.  Kravitz sets up these things as a trap, turning everything from the fancy drinks to the specifically designed clothing against our protagonists.  People have pointed out that Olivia Wilde did similar things with "Don't Worry Darling," where the perfect version of the '50s was supposed to be the draw to keep the victims complacent.  However, not very many people view the '50s as some kind of perfect ideal anymore - even the tradwife trend ditches the old aesthetics - and plenty of media from the last thirty years have happily subverted it.  "Blink Twice" hits so much harder because it's using current signifiers of wealth and privilege, all the things that people aspire to have right now.    

And let's not forget that Channing Tatum's Slater King is part of the package.  As we've seen over and over again in recent years, a man with too much money and too much privilege usually turns out to be a monster.  And yet, there's this terrible impulse to keep lionizing the people who win at capitalism, the Elon Musks and the Donald Trumps who have way too much control over our lives, even though they've demonstrated their total lack of decency and morality.  Tatum's over the top performance as this unbelievable narcissist would seem implausible if we hadn't seen this kind of behavior normalized by real people in the upper echelons.  And Haley Joel Osment and Simon Rex are there to remind you that even the harmless-looking funny guys can turn out to be predators.

I want to talk a little bit about the ending, which has attracted some controversy.  Frieda, played by Naomi Ackie, decides to turn the situation to her advantage rather than expose the truth.  She proves just as cutthroat as her subjugators, and just as willing to exploit her newfound power.  It's a dark turn, but a smart one.  I choose to interpret it as a reminder that women are just as susceptible to being monsters, and men can certainly be victimized.  And this kind of nuance is why I think "Blink Twice" comes across so much better than most of the socially conscious horror that I've seen recently.  If you want a happy ending for Frieda, it has to come with a price.  

    

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"KAOS," Year One

"KAOS" is a fantasy series with a fun premise.  What if the Greek gods existed in the modern day, and the world functioned the way that it did in Greek mythology?  Well, to start you'd have a much more abusive and contentious relationship between the gods and humanity, with the all-powerful Zeus (Jeff Goldblum) and Hera (Janet McTeer) as the heads of a dysfunctional family of deities that lives in immortal opulence.  The mortals on Earth spend much more of their lives devoting themselves to worship, knowing that at any moment they could be wiped out by a god-created disaster or turned into an insect.  Defiance of the gods is almost unheard of, and a desecrated monument means a national emergency.  

However, a reckoning is coming, as explained by our narrator Prometheus (Stephen Dillane), who is comically chained to the side of a mountain like in the myth, except for the times when Zeus snaps him over to Olympus to have someone to vent to.  A prophecy has been made that spells the end of Zeus's reign, and Zeus's paranoid, selfish efforts to safeguard his power make his already bad relationships with everyone around him worse.  Hera is constantly machinating behind his back.  His dealings with his brothers, Poseidon (Cliff Curtis) and Hades (David Thewlis) are fraught.  The only one of his kids who will talk to him is Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), the underachiever who is still hanging around, trying to get some paternal approval.  These Olympus antics take up roughly half of the show's running time.

Meanwhile, the other half is about the humans - specifically three humans who will spell the end of Zeus.  These are Riddy (Aurora Perrineau), short for Eurydice, a woman who has fallen out of love with her husband Orpheus (Killian Scott), a man with a secret named Caeneus (Misia Butler), and Ari (Leila Farzad), short for Ariadne, the daughter of the President of Crete, Minos (Stanley Townsend).  If you know your Greek mythology, don't worry about spoilers.  Each classic story is given a few updates and subject to significant reinterpretation.  We see the whole Orpheus and Eurydice story from Eurydice's point of view, for instance, which means spending a lot more time in the underworld right as things are going metaphysically sideways.  However, despite the involvement of notables like Suzy Izzard and Billie Piper, the human storylines don't come off nearly as well as the ones about the gods, as they're often played straight.  All the fun, absurdist comedy, seems to be reserved for the immortal types.    

Created and written by Charlie Covell, "Kaos" delivers what it promises.  The production design is excellent, often incorporating clever little gags and motifs, like the underworld being entirely in black and white, and the Fates (Suzy Izzard, Ché, and Sam Buttery) all being played by trans or nonbinary actors.  The writing is pretty solid, with good pacing, and some resonant themes related to subverting systems of belief and authority.   Where the satire really hits is the material showing those in power to be totally undeserving of it, such as the narcissistic, contemptuous Zeus being thrown into turmoil because he thinks he's found a new wrinkle on his forehead, or the well-tanned Poseidon who of course swans around in a megayacht.  I wish the whole series had been about the gods' domestic squabbles - Hera being nasty to Persephone (Rakie Ayola), and any other woman she views as a threat, is a joy.  Goldblum and McTeer expertly camping it up is just the tip of the iceberg.

I should warn the prospective viewer that "KAOS" is only the first season of a planned three season show.  I'd initially thought this was a miniseries, and was disappointed to discover that the last episode didn't wrap up the way I was expecting.  There are resolutions to be found, but "KAOS" is also clearly just getting started.  I'm crossing my fingers that enough Netflix viewers feel the way I do about the show, and we get to that ultimate ending sooner rather than later.     

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"Int. Chinatown" Comes to the Screen

"Int. Chinatown" is a television show aimed at critiquing how television shows work, specifically cop dramas like "Law & Order," and more specifically how Asian-Americans are portrayed onscreen.  Based on the book by Charles Yu, which was written in screenplay format for extra meta fun, "Int. Chinatown" is about a generic Asian background character, Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), who decides to be something more.  I never watched much of "Kevin Can F**k Himself," but this functions kinda similarly.  

Willis works as a waiter with his best friend Fatty Choi (Ronny Chieng) for his Uncle Wong (Archie Kao) at a restaurant in Chinatown.  He's close with his parents (Diana Lin, Tzi Ma), and has never gotten over the disappearance of his older brother Johnny (Chris Pang) twelve years ago.  One day a detective named Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet) comes into the restaurant and into his life, spurring Willis to get involved in her case.  However, neither of them can seem to get much attention from the lead detectives, Turner (Sullivan Jones) and Green (Lisa Gilroy), who always seem to be at the center of the action.  Even the lighting gets more interesting whenever they show up.  However, that won't stop Willis and Lana from digging into the mysteries of Chintatown, uncovering the conspiracy around Johnny's disappearance, and finding their way into the spotlight.  

"Int. Chinatown" is not remotely subtle about what it's doing, which is to show how limited the depictions of Asian American on TV have been through a genre that everybody is familiar with.  The episodes are even named after common roles for Asian actors like "Delivery Guy," and "Interpreter," as Willis figures out new ways to insert himself into the story, working his way toward leading man status.  It's also constantly taking apart common police procedural tropes in the process.   We get glimpses of the show that Willis is stuck in, called "Black & White: Impossible Crimes Unit," where the photogenic leads are constantly trading quips, the tech guy's job is to "enhance" everything, and of course there's a grumpy chief (Michael J. Harney) laying down the law.  There are a lot of fun gags with framing and blocking to denote the different levels of reality, and pointing out things that make no sense, like everyone insisting that Lana is a "Chinatown expert."  Eventually, the writers also take aim at old 70s and 80s action shows, and more modern prestige television too.   

There's a lot to like here, but the execution hits some bumps.  At ten episodes "Int. Chinatown" runs too long, and some of the concepts are messy.  There's a subplot with Willis's mom becoming a realtor that feels like part of a different show.   A whole episode is devoted to the super warped reality of advertisements, which never quite comes off right.  There have also been several very good recent movies and shows about the Asian-American immigrant experience, like "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once" and "The Brothers Sun" so a lot of the Chinatown tropes that are being taken to task in "Int. Chinatown" feel very out of date.  I'm also a little surprised that B.D. Wong's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" psychiatrist character wasn't referenced at all, considering that he was one of the few Asian regulars in the genre.  The material that tends to work better revolves around broader, more general cop show nonsense, like a throwaway line about having to specify that the orchestra violinist murder and the string quartet murder are two different murders.    

However, Fatty inexplicably becoming a beloved celebrity because he's such a mean waiter is fantastic stuff.  Ronnie Chieng frequently steals every scene that he's in.  And I'm always glad to see Jimmy O. Yang in anything, because he's got such a terrific screen presence, and works well as a leading man in spite of his character actor looks.  I haven't seen Chloe Bennet in anything since "Agents of SHIELD" either, and she's great here, especially when Lana starts going off the rails. As someone who watched a lot of cop dramas, and recall a lot of terrible Chinatown episodes, I came for the meta, but I stayed for the ensemble.  It's always wonderful to find Asian actors like Diana Lim and Charles Pang who I wasn't familiar with before.  

  

I doubt we'll get a second season, but I'm still rooting for one.

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Growing Up with "Didi"

We don't learn the name of the title character of "Didi" (Izaac Wang) until pretty late in the film.  We know his friends, Fahad (Raul Dial) and Soup (Aaron Chang) call him Wang Wang.  He tells the older skater kids he's trying to impress that his name is Chris.  However at home, with his ever-nagging mother (Joan Chen) and paternal grandmother (Chung-Sing Wang), who speak very little English, he's Didi, which means younger brother in Mandarin.  Notably his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), who is about to go off to college, doesn't call him Didi.  Vivian and Chris Wang have grown up in the suburbs of Fremont, California, and don't speak Chinese to each other.  They only speak Chinese to their mother and grandmother.  Their father is absent, said to be working in Taiwan.

"Didi" captures a very specific time and place, but also a more universal experience.  Chris is thirteen years old, and it's the summer before he starts high school.  His sister, who he bickers and fights with constantly, is about to leave for university.  He hangs out with his friends, pulling pranks and posting stupid videos on Youtube, which is just starting to become popular.  The movie takes place in 2008, so Chris chats with his friends through AIM, and gathers information about his crush, Madi (Mahaela Park), through her Facebook page.  He works up the courage to talk to her, one thing leads to another, and then everything in his life starts to change much too fast.  And when Madi asks him what she should call him, at first he's not sure what to say.    

I was initially very apprehensive about watching "Didi," which was written and directed by Sean Wang.  As much as I am invested in Asian-American representation, Chris Wang is exactly the kind of teenage boy - constantly pulling pranks, talking like a wannabe rapper, and indulging every stupid notion that comes into his head - that I loathed being around when I was growing up in not-so-dissimilar circumstances.  To be blunt, I was always the Vivian in this story, though my relationship with my younger brother was never anywhere near as bad.  I wasn't keen on sitting through ninety minutes of teenage male nonsense, wrapped in skater-boy nostalgia, like Jonah Hill's "mid90s."  I'll admit here that I had a harder time trying to decipher some of the mid-2000s vernacular and acronym-heavy chatspeak used by Chris and his friends than I had with the Mandarin dialogue.    

However, it wasn't hard for me to find some empathy for the kids in "Didi."  Despite being about half a generation older, I recognized a lot from my teenage years in the film.  Sean Wang captures the look and feel of California suburbia better than most - the sunbaked sidewalks, the kids being a mix of ethnicities, and not being able to go anywhere without a car.  This version of the Chinese-American immigrant community also rings true - the achievement-oriented chatter among the adults, the test prep classes, and the endless unsolicited advice from family members forever highlighting your deepest inadequacies.  The most important character in the film after Chris is his mother, played with just the right amount of warmth and steeliness, by Joan Chen.  I don't know that I'd characterize "Didi" as a film about the mother-son relationship, but it's a big piece of the picture, and done beautifully.  

And by the end of the film, I found I liked Chris Wang very much.  I got invested in his search for identity, his missteps with his friends, his attempts to become a skateboarding "filmer," and finally finding some meaningful connection to his family.  I appreciate that a lot of his journey to maturation comes from  reacting to negative social pressures in a constructive way, and realizing that he doesn't have the luxury of staying an adolescent asshole forever.  Sometimes it's painful to watch, but it's also tremendously satisfying to see Chris figure things out.  Even though a lot of what came out of his protagonist's mouth got lost in translation, Sean Wang got all the important parts across just fine.    

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My Favorite Michael Haneke Film

This "Great Directors" entry was almost titled "The Michael Haneke Film I Dislike the Least."  Haneke makes films I don't enjoy - bleak, depressing, hopeless, anxiety-inducing, and psychologically grueling.  Of course, they're also brilliant.  Haneke films are absolutely thrilling in the way they control and manipulate the audience's perceptions.  What you don't see is as important as what you do see, and you can't trust what Haneke shows you.  He will use the language of cinema to trick you, to mislead you, to pull the rug out from under you, and leave you at the cliff's edge.  There will be mysteries with no solutions, buildups with no payoffs, and suffering without hope of salvation.

Haneke's first feature film, "The Seventh Continent," is one of his most conventional.  It's one of the most horrific, disturbing features I've ever seen, but it follows a fairly straightforward narrative.  Over three years, we watch a well-to-do family live out an ordinary life, but a terrible tension is building in each scene of mundane domestic activity.  We rarely see the characters speak to each other, but simply watch them carry out their repetitive daily chores.  There are many Bressonian shots of hands and objects.  Letters to relatives, read aloud, provide some bare bones exposition.  We are given clues to why the members of the family are so unhappy, but nothing concrete.  There is nothing to explain why they take such drastic action in the last act of the film.

Many of the usual elements of Michael Haneke films are already present in "The Seventh Continent." The married couple, like many Haneke leads, are named Georg and Anna.  Much of the action (or inaction) is relayed in long, unbroken shots.  The editing is very abrupt, cutting to black screens between certain scenes.  Sometimes those black screens linger, emphasizing that more is going on that we're not seeing.    The themes are familiar - existential malaise, nihilism, and the corrupting effect of modern society.  Haneke's filmmaking approach is extremely assured, honed by a long career in television.  "The Seventh Continent" is similar to Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman" in structure, very formalist and very simple, except that the ending has a more defined escalation, and drawn out climax.  

Even though we're never clued into the why, the family's acts of violence are made very explicit.  I don't think that Haneke would have chosen to show this later in his career.  He's never shied away from depictions of violence, but his later films don't focus on them the way he does here.  Frankly, this is the part of the movie that had me the most engrossed, especially the long, hypnotic scenes of deliberate property destruction.  The way the film is set up, they act as a release or punchline to the earlier, repetitive establishing shots of the family living in this stifling, airless life of alienation and mundanity.  These were the scenes that I found the most disturbing, because I felt a visceral thrill at watching this aspect of the family's self-annihilation.  The much-discussed shots of money being destroyed and flushed down a toilet are more jarring than the scenes of violence against human beings - almost surely because the former is almost never seen in media, while the latter is commonplace.      

I don't find any of Michael Haneke's films entertaining, and I'm not meant to.  Many Haneke films can be described as mysteries or thrillers, but they don't follow the rules for these genres.  In many cases, they actively subvert them, such as the two versions of "Funny Games," which actively seek to frustrate the audience over and over again.  "The Seventh Continent," at least, seems more interested in enlightening the audience than denying them.  Haneke claims that the film is loosely based on a real incident - I've never been able to find confirmation as to whether this is true or not - and if the mystery was taken from real life, I expect that limited how horrible Haneke was willing to be to the characters.  It's strange, but Haneke's films are usually so cold and so inhumane, I feel nothing for the people in them.  "The Seventh Continent" is a rare exception, where I had nothing but sympathy for everyone involved.         

What I've Seen - Michael Haneke

The Seventh Continent (1989)

Benny's Video (1992)

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)

Funny Games (1997)

The Castle (1997)

Code Unknown (2000)

The Piano Teacher (2001)

Caché (2005)

The White Ribbon (2009)

Amour (2012)

Happy End (2017)

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"Twisters" and "Rebel Ridge"

Catching up on summer action movies.

"Twisters" is the kind of simple, old fashioned disaster movie that is designed from the ground up to be a crowd-pleaser.  You've got Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell as the photogenic leads, Lee Isaac Chung directing - seemingly an odd choice until you remember "Minari" was about living in the American Midwest - and the best inclement weather that ILM can provide.  In addition to the disaster sequences and the obligatory romance, "Twisters" also features a plot that panders shamelessly to Middle America.  The well-funded scientists Edgar-Jones initially teams up with are positioned as the baddies, while the ragtag, thrill-seeking gang of storm chasers, who cultivate a social media following, are positioned as the heroes.  And to the credit of the filmmakers, it mostly works.        

There's been a lot of attention around Glen Powell's participation in "Twisters," since his star is on the rise and he has the showiest part, but the main character is Kate Carter, the meteorologist played by Daisy Edgar-Jones.  I'm more impressed with her than with Powell, as she has no trouble carrying the film and holding my attention, despite being saddled with a pretty dull trauma recovery arc.  I wish the film had made more use of its supporting cast, which includes Anthony Ramos, Sasha Lane, Brandon Perea, and Katy O'Brian - most of them in bit parts.  However, a big mark in the film's favor is that it has no overt connection to the 1996 "Twister" film, and I wouldn't even treat "Twisters" as a direct sequel.  There are a couple of common elements and homages, like the Dorothy doppler device, but otherwise "Twisters" wastes no time on nostalgia.  

And now for something completely different.  "Rebel Ridge" is possibly the most un-Jeremy Saulnier movie that Jeremy Saulnier has ever made.  The director is best known for slow-burn thrillers like "Blue Ruin," and "Green Room" - always very grounded narratives with realistic violence and consequences.  "Rebel Ridge" is designed to be a subversion of one-man-army films like the original "Rambo," or more recently the Amazon Prime "Reacher" series.  However, while it's shown that a single, righteous man on a mission can't defeat a corrupt police force on his own, "Rebel Ridge" makes one big concession to Hollywood-style fantasy.  Terry Richmond, played by Aaron Pierre, is a man of superhuman competence who makes for an incredibly appealing action hero.  I've liked Pierre in other roles, and it's great to see him in a fantastic part that makes him look like the coolest man alive.   

 

"Rebel Ridge" is slow paced, and more concerned with making its case against police abuses and civil forfeiture laws than delivering big action sequences.  The initial transgression against Terry involves two police officers running his bike off the road, and then seizing the cash that Terry intends to use to bail his young cousin out of lockup.  Still,  the action that we do get, and more importantly the long lead-up to that action, is very effective.  The confrontation scenes between Terry Richmond and the cops are tense and engrossing.  Fine one-liners abound.  Saulnier makes sure that both sides get their say, and we're made to understand the systemic incentivization for police misconduct before Terry makes the wrongdoers pay for it.  Those wrongdoers include the Chief of Police, played by Don Johnson, and officers played by David Denman and Emory Cohen.  Anna Sophia Robb shows up as one of Terry's few allies, Summer, a law student who helps him dig into the legal record.

Not everyone will have the patience for "Rebel Ridge" or appreciate its insistence on de-escalating most bad situations instead of going for the big payoff.  There are definitely politics and social commentary in play - economic, governmental, and of course racial.  Quite a lot of "Rebel Ridge" is actually an investigation story, and it zigs where you'd expect it would zag.  The ending will likely infuriate some as much as it satisfies others.  Frankly, I'm pleasantly surprised that the movie is as entertaining as it is while not being subtle at all about its messages.  I hope Saulnier has a few more movies like this in him.

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