“She Dies Tomorrow,” a surreal new horror film on VOD, is a timely and unsettling story where the fear of death is passed from person to person like a virus.
The story begins with Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), once a joyful young woman looking forward to setting up her newly purchased home. But now it’s a job that comes with no joy as Amy is gripped with deep, soul-shredding anxiety. For some reason she is convinced she will die the next day. Not by suicide or illness, just death. “There is no tomorrow for me,” she says. She’s so convinced of her inevitable fate she changes her voicemail message. “There’s no need to leave a message.”
Seeking a connection, she invites her friend Jane (Jane Adams) over. Jane swings by and after some awkward conversation about death leaves, also consumed by thoughts of her own, impending passing. As Jane moves through the night, visiting a doctor (Josh Lucas), her brother (Chris Messina) and friends (Olivia Taylor Dudley and Michelle Rodriguez) she leaves an existential trail of fear with everyone she meets.
Directed by Amy Seimetz “She Dies Tomorrow” is not a regular horror film. It’s an experiment in atmosphere building aided by a premise that feels very timely in the midst of a pandemic.
Questions are asked—What is this virus and how is it transported?—but no answers are provided. The film requires you to accept the situation and feel the anxiety of something that may or may not be real. For Seimetz’s characters the dread is palpable, forcing them to examine their choices, in relationships and life, and re-evaluate in whatever time they have left. In this time of real-life uncertainty Seimetz paints a vivid picture of mortality on a countdown that, while speculative, feels rooted in recent headlines.
Fittingly “She Dies Tomorrow” has a hallucinogenic, experimental style. Throbbing, flashing swaths of colour fill the screen as the virus—or whatever it is—attaches itself to a new host. It’s trippy, slightly psychedelic and may test the patience of less adventurous viewers but in a time where COVID-19 has spread worldwide, bringing with it angst and unease, a movie that examines human behavior in the face of transmittable trauma is, perhaps, a nightmarish artistic inevitability.
The cars of the early 1960s were sexy beasts. Sleek and metallic on the outside, perfumed with the sweet smell of fine Corinthian leather on the inside, they tore along the highways and byways like, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, like big old dinosaurs. The action in “Ford v Ferrari,” however, begins in 1963 with the least sexy things ever, a failed corporate takeover.
Suffering a slump in sales the Ford Motor Company tries unsuccessfully to take over the infinitely more seductive Ferrari. The Italian car company, on a winning streak with at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, replies in no uncertain terms. “Ford makes ugly little cars in ugly factories,” says Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone).
That’s a no.
Insulted, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) flip-flops an old maxim. If he can’t join ‘em, he can beat ‘em. “This isn’t the first time Ford Motors’ gone to war,” he says. “We know how to do more than push papers. When early attempts to create a race car to take the wind out of Ferrari’s sails fails Ford marketing executive Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) brings in car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) to make a Ford that will rule at La Mans. “My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business.” A former racer—he won the Le Mans in 1959 with partner Roy Salvadori—heart problems forced him off the track.
Shelby asks hot-headed British racer Ken Miles (Christian Bale) to help. “How long did you tell them that you needed?” he asks. “Two, three hundred years?” Together they work to make a sports car that will appeal to young consumers and “go like hell.”
Some basic knowledge of how cars work may enhance your enjoyment of “Ford v Ferrari” but the resonate part of the story has nothing to do with horsepower or Gurney flaps. At its fuel Injected heart the James Mangold-directed movie is a Davey and Goliath story about friendship and burning rubber.
The bromance angle comes in the bond between Shelby and Miles. The two men are like brothers who fight and love in almost equal measure. Damon and Bale share an easy camaraderie, fuelled by their character’s love of the art of racing and the desire to stick it to the big guys, the Ford Motor Company. Shelby is the diplomat, Miles the one more likely to punch a Ford executive, but both are underdogs who take pleasure in making the suits squirm.
“Ford v Ferrari” is formulaic in laying out the story. It’s a longshot tale with revving engines and many predictable twists and turns but Mangold injects some real excitement in the extended racing scenes.
Tough and tender, “What They Had” is a story of Alzheimer’s and dysfunction but never dips into the easy sentimentality of many other family dramas.
Writer-director Elizabeth Chomko begins the story with Ruth (Blythe Danner), in a dementia daze, dressed in a nightgown, getting out of bed and walking off into a blizzard. The disappearance is short-lived but serious enough for Ruth’s daughter Bridget (Hilary Swank) and granddaughter Emma (Taissa Farmiga) to fly to Chicago from California to come to her side.
Son Nick (Michael Shannon) thinks it is time to put Ruth in a home where she can be looked after but Burt (Robert Forster), her husband of decades, wants her to stay home where he can look after her. Caught between Nick and Burt, Bridget believes her mother should be put in a memory care facility called Reminisce Neighbourhood but is torn in the best way to make it happen.
The synopsis does “What They Had” no favours. It sounds like a downer, an earnest movie of the week style story of bickering siblings up against a stubborn patriarch. But it is more than that. There is pain, anger and heartbreak but there is also humour. Shannon’s outbursts, born of frustration and a certain amount of realism, are often amusing and always hit exactly the right notes.
There are strong performances across the board—Swank, Forster and Farmiga all feel completely authentic—but the film’s beating heart is Danner, who plays Ruth as though she’s wearing a shroud of sadness at her fleeting memory.
“What They Said” occasionally feels cluttered, as though the focus is spread to widely over all the characters, but its unflinching eye for detail is a strength not a minus.
There have been many nautical disaster films—everything from Abandon Ship! to Speed 2: Cruise Control to Titanic—but the granddaddy of them all, the one that started the disaster movie craze of the 1970s was The Poseidon Adventure. It spawned a series of catastrophic calamity movies with names that usually featured an exclamation point, like Earthquake! and earned producer Irwin Allen the title Master of Disaster.
The new version of the film, Poseidon, not only streamlines the title down to the bare essentials, it also cuts the running time from 117 minutes to 98. Also lost is most of the character development. Director Wolfgang Peterson returns to the watery milieu he knows so well, having made Das Boot and The Perfect Storm—this guy has spent more time underwater than David Blaine—but apparently left any well-rounded characters ashore. He dispenses with any sort of character study in the first twenty minutes of the movie, perfunctorily introducing us to the ensemble cast of stock characters before he gets to the main attraction—the ship flip. Once the wave capsizes the ship the movie takes on a video game tone, with a small band of generically stubborn passengers trying to find a way off the sinking ship.
With dialogue that reads something like this, “Wait! I think there is a way out over here! You’ll have to trust me if you want to get out of here alive!” it’s no wonder that the characters disappear, becoming little more than damp counterpoints to the special effects. The Poseidon Adventure starred five Oscar winners, including Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters—the remake can only boast one, Richard Dreyfuss—who chewed the scenery and made the best of the corny dialogue. The new cast, anchored by Josh Lucas and Kurt Russell with supporting actors who seem to have been chosen by who looks best when wet, play it straight, clichés and all. The camp value of the original is lost and with it, some of the fun.
As uninvolved with its characters as Poseidon may be the devastation is masterfully realized. The real star here is the special effects. The giant wave, the topsy-turvy ship and the claustrophobic vertical climb through an air conditioning shaft are worth the price of the popcorn.
Character wise Poseidon is little more than a wet t-shirt contest—I’ve played video games with better characters than we find here—but the special effects do offer some thrills and after watching 98 minutes of underwater action you will be grateful to have dry clothes to wear.
Daydream Nation chronicles the year in Carolyn Wexler’s (Kat Dennings) life in which “everything happened.” A precocious teen she seduces her handsome English teacher (Josh Lucas) by writing an essay about her favorite historical figure—Monika Lewinsky. She’s a savvy big city girl, but hasn‘t quite figured out life or love in her new town. Complicating matters is an amorous gym teacher, a serial killer and a sweet but troubled boy named Thurston (Reese Thompson). Textured with equal parts humor and drama this smart school story cleverly details the complicated, confusing aspects of teen life in a fresh, interesting way.
