Jonathan Demme’s “Stop Making Sense,” his movie of an iconic a 1983 Talking Heads live show is considered one of, if not the greatest concert films of all time. Elegant and exciting, it made everything before it seem old fashioned and everything that came after feel like an imitation.
What “Stop Making Sense” was to the 1980s a new concert film, also starring Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, is to these uncertain times. “American Utopia,” directed by Spike Lee and now playing on HBO Max, is a joyful film about everything from protesting injustice and police brutality to optimism and the celebration of life.
It’s got a good message and you can dance to it.
Filmed during the show’s 2019 Broadway run at New York’s Hudson Theatre, the film captures the cerebral but exuberant concert that features Byrne, alongside eleven musicians, all dressed alike in skinny grey suits, and all unfettered from amplifiers and the like. With wireless guitars, keyboards and all manner of other instruments on an empty stage with no other gear or risers, Byrne and Company fill the space with intricate choreography, eclectic songs, new and old, and an uplifting social message of fellowship and faith in humanity. Byrne’s enthusiasm is infectious and Spike Lee, using a combination of you-are-there camera angles, including a beautiful overhead shot, captures the jubilant postmodernist performance in glorious fashion.
It is so much more than a Talking Heads greatest hits package. There are familiar songs like “Burning Down the House,” “This Must Be the Place” and “Once in a Lifetime,” but they seamlessly blend with Byrne’s originals, written for his 2018 solo album of the same name.
Highlights, and there are many, include “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” Byrne’s ode to inclusivity and a potent cover of “Hell You Talmbout,” Janelle Monae’s protest song about police brutality. The latter song, a call and response featuring names the names of African Americans killed by police, is given extra clout by the addition of Spike Lee’s graphics that update the names mentioned in the song to include dozens of others. It is a powerful moment and an urgent call for change.
“American Utopia” is a gem. A concert film that, like “Stop Making Sense” redefines what live performance can be.
Glen Keane brings 43 years of Disney character animation experience to a new film now streaming on Netflix. From “The Little Mermaid’s” Ariel, “Beauty and the Beast’s main character—the Beast, not the Beauty—to the eponymous folks in “Aladdin,” “Pocahontas” and “Tarzan,” he’s the Disney Legend who created some of the most indelible characters of several eras.
This week he turns his eye, as character designer and director, to “Over the Moon,” a fanciful animated musical loosely based on the Chinese legend of Chang’e, starring the voices of Sandra Oh, Phillipa Soo and Ken Jeong.
The action begins in modern China, four years after the passing of Fei Fei’s (Cathy Ang) mother. She’s smart, funny and a romantic who believes in the legend her parents told her about Chang’e (Phillipa Soo), the Moon Goddess who yearns to be reunited with her true love. Fei Fei is still grieving her mother’s loss when her father (John Cho) becomes involved with another woman Mrs. Zhong (Sandra Oh) and her 8-year-old child, Chin (Robert G. Chiu).
To prove that love is forever and that her father’s affection for Mrs. Zhong is misplaced, Fei Fei concocts a plan. She builds a rocket ship to visit the moon so she can get evidence of Chang’e existence to prove to her father that love burns eternal. Unbeknownst to her Chin stows away on the adventure to the moon that will help her appreciate what she thinks she is missing on Earth.
“Over the Moon” isn’t a Disney picture, but it feels like one thanks to the Keane touch. The familiar tropes, a deceased parent and adventure, are given a zippy new life with colourful, fun animation and some beautiful sequences like the cross cut between the CGI to the more traditional hand drawn animation in the telling of the legend. There are flashier more fluorescent sequences later on, particularly in the vivid and abstract Lunaria scenes, but the use of an organic style of animation to illustrate a time-honored story is the first of many of the film’s good decisions.
Also strong is the voice work. As Fei Fei, Ang is feisty and smart as a self-sufficient youngster on a journey of self-discovery. She is no damsel in distress, just a kid looking to make things right in her world. The supporting cast, like Margaret Cho in a dual role and Ken Jeong as Fei Fei’s sidekick Gobi bring the goods as does Soo, who earned a Tony nomination for her work on Broadway in “Hamilton,” but her work leads to one of the film’s minuses.
Soo is a great singer, and has one of the movie’s show-stoppers, a Broadway-by-way-of-Beyonce tune called “Ultraluminary,” but each of the songs feels tacked on in an effort to sell soundtrack downloads. A mix of show tunes, K-Pop and pop music, with the exception of “Rocket to the Moon” none of the tunes feel necessary.
“Over the Moon” is a beautiful movie that celebrates Chinese culture, tells a story of overcoming grief and has some great animation and while the main story beats feel familiar, the high gloss visuals are unpredictable and consistently interesting.
The folk horror of “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw,” now on VOD, is set in 1973 but feels very much of the moment.
Divided into chapters like I: The Incantation, II: The Descent, “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” builds an atmosphere of dread as it tells the tale of a tiny American community settled by fundamentalist Irish Christians in 1873. Isolated from the modern world, they live a simple agricultural and spiritual life frozen in time at the moment the settlers arrived.
Of concern inside this closed-off community is a pestilence that kills children, crops and livestock. The villagers think a 1956 eclipse is the source their problems. They see it as sign from God and feel powerless to do anything about it.
In that same year a baby was born in secret to Agatha Earnshaw (Catherine Walker), an outcast from the local church. Now, seventeen years later that baby, Audrey (Jessica Reynolds), has come of age. Suspicious eyes are cast at the Earnshaw farm which is unaffected by the plague. As the villagers starve, Agatha’s fields are ripe with crops and healthy livestock, leading the frantic locals to accuse the mother and daughter of witchcraft.
“The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” breathes the same air as Ari Aster’s “Midsommar,” Robert Eggers “The Witch” and Robin Hardy’s “The Wicker Man” (not the Nic Cage version). Like those other filmmakers, director Thomas Robert Lee uses isolation as an incubator for hysteria and horror. He takes his time with the story, creating the off kilter, claustrophobic feel that goes a long way to create the necessary dread to make this story work.
Lee also leans on two central performances. As Agatha, Walker is fiercely maternal, a mother with a secret to protect. She is a character straight out of H.P. Lovecraft, one of the movie’s other influences. Knowing, yet unknowable, Walker wears her character like a shroud.
Reynolds brings both innocence and a steely edge to Audrey. As she comes of age, she discovers her power and wields it like a sword, seeking revenge on the townsfolk who treated her mother disrespectfully.
“The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” is ripe with tension and bloody practical special effects that should satisfy the genre lover but more than that it mines the very timely idea of isolation. To varying degrees many of us have been cooped up during the pandemic and while this haunting movie takes place in a very specific place, it showcases the dangers inherent in cutting one’s self off from the world.
What the new remake of Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” starring Lily James, Armie Hammer and Kristin Scott Thomas and now streaming on Netflix, lacks in gothic thrills it makes up for in eye candy.
Taking over as handsome widower Maxim de Winter, the role Laurence Olivier made famous in Alfred Hitchcock’s Oscar winning 1940 film, is Armie Hammer. Max is a charmer, a trust fund aristocrat with a beautiful estate, called Manderley, and a dead wife, named Rebecca.
On vacation in Monte Carlo a young woman (Lily James) catches his eye when she is refused service on the balcony of a fancy hotel restaurant. She is not a guest, she’s told, but an employee of a guest and therefore must eat elsewhere, anywhere but among the wealthy tourists enjoying their canapes and champagne. He invites her to join him and a whirlwind romance ensues. When her boss decides it’s time to travel to New York for debutant season, Max asks her to stay with a marriage proposal.
They move to Manderley, his family home on the windswept English coast. The sprawling home has been in his family for generations and is so grandly appointed it makes Downton Abbey look like an outhouse. At Manderlay the romance, which blossomed quickly, fades as the specter of Rebecca, the late lady of the estate, hangs heavy over the house and on Max’s mind.
Keeping Rebecca alive in heart and in mind is Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas), Manderley’s baleful housekeeper. She is not impressed by Max’s naïve new bride who she thinks is trying to take Rebecca’s place.
Cue the dirty tricks, withering glances and gothic tomfoolery.
“Rebecca,” directed by Ben Wheatley, is undeniably beautiful looking. From its good-looking stars to the sumptuous production design is by Sarah Greenwood, it will make your eyeballs dance. The set decoration at Manderley alone is “Architectural Digest: Baroque Edition” worthy, but this is a movie that wants to appeal to more than just your eye and that’s where it disappoints.
The bones of the story seem perfect for a 2020 revisit. du Maurier’s exploration of the power imbalance between a wealthy man and a woman who must fight to find her own sovereignty is timely but undone by a story that never takes hold.
Hammer’s take on Max misses the essential coldness of the character. He’s short tempered, snippy and brusque but the icy core necessary to freeze out the new Mrs. de Winter is missing. Without that character element his reactions to events don’t bring the friction needed to engage the audience. At the pivotal ballroom scene, where the new bride is (MILD SPOILER ALERT) tricked into making a serious error in judgement, Max seems irked, pouty but the wound that is unintentionally opened doesn’t seem particularly deep. If Max doesn’t care that much, why should we?
From that moment on Wheatley drifts through the story with none of his patented risk taking—think his daring adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s “High-Rise” or his edge-of-your-seat “Kill List”—relying Clint Mansell’s score to provide the emotional highs and lows.
Like the story’s female protagonist the new version of “Rebecca” is haunted, this time by the ghosts of the story’s previous incarnations.
First, the history. One of the great nautical mysteries dates back to 1872 when a British brig called Dei Gratia came across a ship adrift in choppy seas. They were 400 miles east of the Azores in rough water when they changed course to offer aide to the Mary Celeste, a Genoa, Italy bound ship, now in distress.
What the Dei Gratia boarding party found on board the ship Mary Celeste unnerved them. The cargo load was intact, as was a six-month supply of food and water. What was missing was the crew. Ten souls, lost without a trace.
The fate of the Celeste crew has confounded historians for years. A new thriller, “The Haunting of the Mary Celeste,” now on demand and on digital, offers up a supernatural solution for the crew’s disappearance.
Researcher Rachel (Emily Swallow) has an idea that borders the scientific and the supernatural. It is her hypothesis that there are places on this planet where every now and again there is a rift when the tectonic plates shift. There is a physical change during the event and, like the blowback on a gun that sucks matter into the barrel, the crew members of the Mary Celeste were drawn into the rift, never to be seen again.
Rachel has determined the date of the next rift and is determined to prove her theory. With a small crew on a rented ship owned and operated by Tulls (Richard “Shaft” Roundtree) she sets off, only to have her theory proved in increasingly scary and weird ways.
“The Haunting of the Mary Celeste” is the kind of straightforward thriller where people optimistically say things like, “Hey Rachel, something’s going to happen tonight. I can feel it,” before everything falls to pieces. With characters straight out of Central Casting, the gruff old sea captain, the hot headed assistant etc, it offers up a soggy sea-bound adventure with very few actual thrills.
“Vampires Vs. the Bronx,” a “Goonies” style coming-of-age Halloween flick now playing on Netflix, is a throwback to the good old days when horror for kids had fun and an edge. That it also has a timely message is simply the icing on the cake, or in this case, the blood on the stake.
The story centers around Miguel (Jaden Michael), Luis (Gregory Diaz IV), and Bobby (Gerald W. Jones III), three Bronx teens trying to arrange a block party to raise money to save their second home, a bodega operated by Tony (The Kid Mero), from being forced out by a rent hike.
Meanwhile, a new business is buying up all the local businesses, bringing with them gentrification and outsiders to the neighborhood. “White people with canvas bags. That’s always the first sign!” Among the newcomers are Frank (Shea Whigham), the tough guy whose throwing all the money around under the name Murnau Properties and Vivian (Sarah Gadon), a well-meaning newbie who always seems to be nearby whenever the kids are outside.
When people begin to disappear Miguel, the neighborhood’s beating heart and soul, realizes the obvious, that vampires have come north of 120th street. “Sleep with one eye open and don’t get got,” says live-streamer Gloria (Imani Lewis). When they discover that the bloodsuckers plan on taking over the kids watch a “Blade” DVD to pick up vampire hunting tricks and rally the neighborhood to fight back.
“Vampires Vs. the Bronx” is both a loving tribute to teen horror—the guys call the vampires “Suckhead!”—and a carefully constructed condemnation of gentrification. Director Oz Rodriguez brings much personality to the film, bringing the dying neighborhood to vivid life. He builds the world, infusing the story with subtle and not-so-subtle references to racism—“We’re going to wipe you out like the vermin you are,” sneers one vampire—and the timely real world issues regarding marginalized communities—“It’s easier to live somewhere where no one cares when people disappear,” says another bloodsucker—nimbly balancing social commentary and jokes.
The story isn’t just a vampire story, although there’s fangs and stakes and blood. It’s more about the trio of charismatic kids who become heroes to protect something they really believe in. They have heart and humour, and while the horror may not satisfy hardcore gorehounds, the movie’s ebullience will.
“The Secrets We Keep,” a new revenge thriller starring Noomi Rapace and coming to digital and on-demand, is a riff on the claustrophobic revenge story of “Death and the Maiden.”
Set in 1960, Rapace plays Maja, a Romanian refugee and Holocaust survivor, now living in a small American town with her physician doctor Lewis (Chris Messina) and son Patrick (Jackson Vincent). One day at the park she hears a man whistle for his dog and a flood of memories come back. Following him home she gets a good look and her worst fears are confirmed. He is the SS officer who, near the end of the war, raped her and killed her sister as they fled a concentration camp.
Blinded by anger and horrific memories she kidnaps him, hitting him in the head with a hammer and shoving him in the trunk of her car. When Lewis gets home to find the man, who denies Maja’s charges and claims to be a Swiss citizen named Thomas (Joel Kinnaman, who, in real life went to high school with Rapace), tied up in the basement he is rightfully perplexed. Maja had never shared to the details of her ordeal with her husband but he trusts her and goes along with plan to get a confession, one way or another. “I’m not the man you think I am,” Thomas (or whatever his name is) says, begging to be let go. She is tortured by the memory of what happened and why her sister was shot and she wasn’t. “Help me remember,” she says to him. “It is your only way out of here.”
“The Secrets We Keep” raises questions of trust, survivor’s guilt and the corrosive nature of secrets. It’s a gritty, unsentimental movie that ratches up the tension with ideas, not action. How reliable is Maja’s memory? What amount of scepticism should Lewis bring to this situation? Is vengeance morally correct? Those questions and more hang heavy over the plot, confronting the viewer to assess their own feelings and biases. The story isn’t particularly tricky but it is carefully calibrated to make you wonder who is telling the truth, who is lying and even, who can trust their memories of long-ago events.
Rapace does her best work ever in an English film, bringing some nuance to a character who could have been played with a much harder, vengeful edge. Messina brings the sense of his character’s confusion to life—You said we were going to do things together,” he says supportively, “and you torture him while I’m not here?”—while Kinnaman remains a cypher, a person who may or may not be the man Maja thinks he is. Each performance fits in place, creating a mosaic of truths and lies that is as compelling as it is confounding.
“Totally Under Control,” the title of the new Alex Gibney now on VOD, is a bad joke. Kind of like nicknaming a tall guy Tiny it’s an ironic, sarcastic comment on President Donald Trump’s repeated denial of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. Made in secret over the five months leading up to the U.S. Presidential Election, it features damning interviews with scientists, medical professionals and government insiders.
The opening narration sets the stage, not that anyone alive needs reminding that we are living in very strange times. “2020. Since the 1980s, it’s been a magical year for science fiction writers, the year of predictions about the future, and the ruthless power of technology and humanity would be bound together by a world wide web. Artificial Intelligence would exponentially expand the powers of the human mind. And the world would be dominated and controlled by information based mega corporations without need for government intervention. But all that turned out to be a technocratic illusion when nature set loose a terrible disease that took advantage of the very connectivity we had manufactured.”
The narration goes on to say, “At a moment of crisis the world’s most powerful nation didn’t rise to the occasion it descended into division and chaos,” before asking the million dollar question, “Why did it fail to reckon for a danger for which it should have been so well prepared?”
To answer the question Oscar winner Gibney with co-directors Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger invented the “Corona Cam,” an easy and sanitary way to do interviews—this does not look like a Zoom meeting—to interview a variety of experts like whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright who says, “We, the scientists, knew what to do for the pandemic response. The plan was in front of us, but leadership would not do it.”
Add to that recent newsreel footage, investigative reporting and ominous narration and you have a portrait of catastrophic systemic bungling, beginning in January 20, 2020 when the U.S. and South Korea both discovered their first cases of COVID-19, that has left hundreds of thousands dead, many hundreds of thousands more ill with side effects that will linger for years and an economy in tatters.
It’s a haunting collection of facts that would be unbelievable if it wasn’t true. Gibney, Harutyunyan and Hillinger’s aim to expose “a system-wide collapse caused by a profound dereliction of Presidential leadership,” is methodical and urgent, digging behind the headlines to reveal a timeline that should be of concern to everyone reading this or watching the film. It is a difficult watch, not because it isn’t slickly made but because it an infuriating reminder of how we got into this situation.
The movie’s tagline says it all, “The truth will make you sick.”
Swedish filmmaker Nathan Grossman has been documenting teen activist Greta Thunberg since before she became a worldwide cause célèbre. From her early protests encouraging a “School Strike for the Climate” to her famous journey across the Atlantic Ocean en route to the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City, Grossman was there assembling the footage that became “I Am Greta,” a new documentary now playing in theatres.
Charting the course of the polarizing eco warrior’s life and career in two flashpoint years, 2018 and 2019, Grossman paints a glossy but ultimately superficial portrait. His unprecedented access to his subject allows for a lively look at Thunberg’s concerns about climate change, punctuated by her fiery addresses to world leaders.
The incendiary headline making speeches are all represented here—”You lied to us,” she admonishes London’s Parliament. “You gave us false hope.”—and her, “We haven’t taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us and tell us you admire what we do,” dismissal of bandwagon jumping celebs is as zingy a barb as we’re likely to hear from a public figure but as exciting as those public moments are Grossman never gets really up close and personal with his subject.
In part it’s understandable. Thunberg is a public figure who has been open about her activism and Asperger syndrome, which she describes as a superpower that allows her to cut through the information overload of her cause and focus on her mission, but she’s also a young woman thrust into the glare of a judgmental press and public. She isn’t obligated to reveal her personal life but the title “I Am Greta” promises insight that never appears.
Still, as a verité depiction of a time when the world was focused on Thunberg’s methods and important message, “I Am Greta” is sure to interest her supporters.
