Carnival of Souls (1962)

 Happy Memorial Day!  Here's a movie about dead people.    

Mary (Candace Hilligoss) miraculously survives a terrible car accident that kills her two friends.  She moves to a new town and takes a job as a church organist but has recurring visions of a strange man (Herk Harvey) following her.  She feels it's somehow connected to an abandoned pavilion that once was a carnival and keeps returning to it, despite warnings from her boss (Art Ellison) and landlady (Frances Feist).

This isn't very substantive.  It's basically an extended Twilight Zone episode, but the vibes are absolutely impeccable.  Hilligoss is killing it as the disaffected Mary and the ghoul makeup is so simple but still really effective in black and white.  This would be a 10/10 instant buy if it weren't for the whiny loser who keeps bugging her for a date.  That guy was so annoying that I kept hoping a ghost would eat him.

It's considered a cult classic and I can see why.  It's moody and atmospheric without ever really being frightening, so it's good to show your horror-adjacent friends.  It's streaming on HBO Max, the Criterion Channel, and is also embedded into the Wikipedia article.  Score one for free education.

Brat (1997)

Content warning:  sexual assault, homophobic slurs, racial slurs, domestic violence

Danila (Sergei Bodrov, Jr.) has just completed mandatory service in the Army and is looking for a new path.  His brother, Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov), has been working as an assassin for a gangster (Sergei Murzin) in St. Petersburg and outsources a hit to Danila.  Viktor knows that he's gotten a little too expensive and is hoping some new blood will throw off a possible double-cross.  Danila, flush with cash after a successful execution, seeks out life and music but the gangster is not so easily put off.

I didn't like this one as much as Assa.  It also meandered but less whimsically, which just made it boring instead of a journey.  Also, it didn't really feel like a complete story.  In an American movie, this would just be Act 1 and would probably only be a 30-minute montage of various criminal scenes to set up the rise of a new empire.  

According to Wikipedia, this was made for about $10,000 and it looks it.  Everything is appropriately grimy and DIY.  Music features very heavily, especially some band called Nautilus, who even make a cameo at a house party.  

There are better crime films and probably better Russian films.  This is not one to get very worked up over which is probably why it's not available for streaming outside of a VPN.

Assa (1987)

  Content warning:  homophobic slurs, racial slurs  One of Movie Club's members is in a Russian film and literature class so this week, we helped her with her homework, and indirectly helped me with this blog because I have been trying to catch up on TV while I'm waiting for my new job to start.  I've watched season 4 of Downton Abbey, season 1 of Severance, season 8 of Game of Thrones, tried to watch Carnival Row and bailed, and now I'm on season 3 of Sons of Anarchy.  

Alika (Tatyana Drubich) is on vacation with her gangster sugar daddy, Krymov (Stanislav Govorukhin), when she meets a young musician named Bananan (Sergei "Afrika" Bugaev).  While Krymov is running around setting up all his little schemes, Alika and Bananan see the sights of Yalta in winter.  

The plot is really very simple, but it's so meandering that it feels like it should be more complicated.  But it's just boy meets girl, girl has mobster boyfriend, mobster boyfriend gets jealous of boy.  Everything else is a distraction.  It's probably a metaphor for the dissolution of the Soviet Union and massive social change that happened in the late 80s/early 90s.  Cold War Russia is not one of my areas of expertise.  At least, not the parts that actually happened in Russia.  It also has a weird subplot about the assassination of a Tsar, again I assume a more heavy-handed metaphor.

If you are into music, this features a band called Kino that was apparently very famous for bringing Russian underground rock into the mainstream.  I don't even watch Eurovision so again, not my area.  

The whole thing is streaming on YouTube in very good quality, either in one complete shot or in two parts.  It was entertaining enough, in that cold, bleakly humorous Russian way.

The Farewell (2018)

  Just a depressing-ass trio of family movies this week.  

Billi (Awkwafina) is devastated to learn that her beloved grandmother, Nai Nai (Zhao Shu-Zhen), has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.  Nai Nai is the only one who doesn't know, and Billi is told repeatedly by other family members that the knowledge must be kept from her so as to keep her from succumbing to despair.  As an American, Billi struggles with this cultural clash but agrees to keep the secret.  The family organizes a wedding for Billi's cousin (Chen Han) as an excuse for everyone to see Nai Nai for potentially the last time.

Once again, this was billed as a comedy but it is extremely not funny.  Cancer sucks and watching someone die from it also sucks.  As an American, I vehemently disagreed with withholding someone's medical information, but I also know it's not my job to police other cultures.  Part of building empathy is exposure to new and unfamiliar ideas and practices.  

So, once you get past the idea that this is somehow meant to be funny (and even the director called it a "nuanced drama" not a comedy), you can focus on the performances which are good but a little underbaked for my tastes.  The movie focuses a lot on how adorable and feisty Nai Nai is and how much everyone loves her but I didn't really get much of a sense of who they were outside of their grief.  If anything, I felt terrible for the cousin who was pressured into marrying his girlfriend of three months to sell this lie.  I think he maybe has four lines of dialogue, the fiancée maybe two.  Felt like the antithesis of My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

It's streaming on Tubi for free or Kanopy with a library card.

Kajillionaire (2020)

  Another depressing ass movie about families.

Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) is a scam artist with her parents (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger).  She has never questioned their treatment of her until they meet Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) on a plane and immediately rope her into their schemes.  Then she questions everything she knows about herself, them, and their way of life.

This is kind of like Shoplifters meets Dogtooth.  I originally thought it was going to be like Captain Fantastic, but that guy at least loved his kids.  It's billed as a comedy but it's the kind of cringe comedy that I absolutely hate.  I will give Wood credit for playing against type, even though her hair was giving me absolute fits the entire time.  How can you see??  It's all in your face!!!  How are you not constantly getting it caught in stuff??  

Anyway, all the performances are technically good; I just didn't like it.  It's streaming on Peacock.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

  Content warning:  drug use, overdose

David Sheff (Steve Carell) struggles with his son Nic's (Timothée Chalamet) drug addiction, sending him to rehab after rehab only to watch him relapse time and again.

This came to me highly recommended as a tearjerker and maybe, for other people, sure.  I was sympathetic but not empathetic.  If you're a parent, maybe you have a stronger emotional response.  

I don't think I like Timothée Chalamet.  I've now seen him in several things and he seems very one-note.  And I don't find him attractive, so I can't forgive that.  Maura Tierney and Amy Ryan aren't given a lot of work here.  They most just hover anxiously in the background.  This is very much The Carell Show and to his credit, he does a solid job playing a fairly unlikeable protagonist.  

It was not for me, but it is streaming on Amazon Prime if you think it may be for you.

Female Trouble (1973)

  If I just said this was a John Waters film, would that count as a content warning?  Just in case it doesn't, Content Warning:  blood, attempted sexual assault of a minor, child abuse, general lechery

Dawn Davenport (Divine) is a bad seed.  Expelled from high school and a teenaged runaway, she hooks up with the first dude who picks her up hitchhiking, Earl (also Divine), and gets knocked up.  Unsurprisingly, Earl is a deadbeat who refuses to support her, so Dawn takes a series of crap jobs before joining her friends Chicklette (Susan Walsh), and Concetta (Cookie Mueller) as a house burglar.  She meets Donald (David Lochary) and Donna Dasher (Mary Vivian Pearce), a couple who have a fetish for photographing crime, and continues to spiral further out of control.

If you are not into John Waters' filmography, this is not going to be a good entry point.  It is one of his earliest features and way before he became anything approaching mainstream.  It is a cult classic, however, and surprisingly sweet.  NOT in content, but in how Waters very obviously loves his cast and crew.  He films them with such an eye for their humanity, even as he allows them to be disgusting.  

(It might get a little confusing pronoun-wise because Divine the actor never used she/her, only he/him, but in this instance he was playing a female character, so I'm going to use she/her when I'm talking about Dawn, and he/him when I'm talking about Divine.)  As I said, this was early in the partnership between Divine and Waters, but it's very clear that Divine was born to be a star.  He's utterly magnetic in this, even when shrieking and chewing scenery.  Everyone else is...trying their best.

This movie was made for approximately $27.50 and features Waters' beloved Baltimore as well as good-natured family and friends, including Susan Lowe's literal newborn son.  I cannot stress enough that this is NOT for everyone.  Hell, it's not even for mostly anyone.  But it's available for rent on Amazon.  For some reason, I had $9.99 in credits so they literally gave me this movie for free and I still don't know if I'd ever watch it again.  But I'm enough of a freak that I probably will.

Turbo Kid (2015)

  Content warning:  blood, gore

In the post-apocalyptic future of 1997, The Kid (Munro Chambers) scavenges for relics of a bygone age, especially media of a comic book superhero, Turbo Man.  The Wasteland's water supply is controlled by Zeus (Michael Ironside), a warlord who kidnaps people to fight to the death for his entertainment.  Zeus kidnaps The Kid and his manic pixie dream robot Apple (Laurence Leboeuf) and force them to fight for their lives.

I think I was just not in the right mood for this.  I can see how it could have been a really fun watch, maybe with a group of friends, but it just hit me the wrong way.  I didn't find it funny and I think it succeeded a little too well at pretending to be a shitty 90s action movie.  It would have been one thing if it acknowledged every bad, lazy trope and had something to say about it, but it just presents them as is.  As a parody, this could have been great.  But instead, it's an homage and what exactly are you celebrating?  

Maybe for you it's a so-bad-it's-good film to watch with your friends, Mystery Science style.  If so, it's streaming on Tubi.  But this was not for me.

A Bigger Splash (1973)

  So I was actually supposed to watch the 2015 Tilda Swinton movie called A Bigger Splash but watched this one accidentally.  

This is another experimental 70s film.  It's kind of a documentary about David Hockney, a pop artist, and his breakup with partner/muse Peter Schlesinger.  There are elements that are fictionalized, flashbacks and so on, but mostly it's just following Hockney as he tries to recover his inspiration by wandering through 70s New York and southern California.

It is very meandering and even though it's barely more than an hour and a half, it feels way longer.  It's a little whiny and self-indulgent for my tastes, but I do think it's an important snapshot of queer life in the 1970s from someone who isn't Andy Warhol.  Probably why it's on the Criterion Channel.

Poetry (2011)

  Content warning:  suicide, rape (discussed)

An elderly, fragile woman, Yang Mija (Yoon Jeong-hee), takes up a long-dormant interest in poetry but finds herself struggling to connect with the beauty she feels it needs to be created, when all around her is ugliness.  Her grandson (Lee David) and five of his friends raped a girl from their school until she killed herself, and now the fathers of all the other boys are pressuring Mija to come up with the money to settle out-of-court with the dead girl's family.  So that this little incident doesn't ruin the boys' futures.  Mija feels isolated, torn between a lifetime of fading into the background and standing up for herself.

This is a very heavy movie.  It is beautiful in its way, but it's definitely not an easy watch.  Yoon gives a masterful performance as Mija.  You can see the delicacy of her character, the tatters of an easy, even frivolous life falling away as she's forced to confront the darkness.  

If you're prepared, give this a try.  It's streaming on Criterion.

The Preacher's Wife (1996)

  Happy belated May Day.  Here's a Christmas movie.

Reverend Henry Briggs (Courtney B. Vance) can feel everything slipping away: his church, his family, his faith.  Desperate, he prays for help.  And receives Dudley (Denzel Washington), a charming man claiming to be an angel.  Briggs doesn't have time for foolishness but he can't deny that Dudley seems to have a certain way about him, especially with regards to Briggs' neglected wife, Julia (Whitney Houston).  As Julia and Dudley grow closer, Briggs discovers that he might be focusing on the wrong things.

Man, I miss Whitney Houston.  Talk about a generational talent.  

The movie is fine.  It's got an incredible cast including Jenifer Lewis, Gregory Hines, Loretta Devine, and Lionel Ritchie with an uncredited appearance by Shari Headley.  If you like gospel music, the soundtrack is world-class.  It's the kind of easy, light Christmas movie that Hallmark has been churning out in batches for decades, diluting the appeal through sheer volume.  But it's worth tracking this one down.  

Celine and Julie Goe Boating (1974)

  Content warning:  child death, blood

Julie (Dominique Labourier) is minding her own business, learning witchcraft in the park --as one does-- when she sees a woman drop a scarf.  This simple act leads her to meet Céline (Juliet Berto), a stage magician and general pathological liar.  One of Céline's side-gigs is at a mansion in Paris that appears to be abandoned except for the days that she shows up.  She walks inside the house, and then some time later is violently pushed back out, remembering nothing, but with a piece of hard candy in her mouth.  Julie switches places with her one day, and the same thing happens.  Only when she eats the candy later does she remember the events, where two women --Sophie (Marie-France Pisier) and Camille (Bulle Ogier)-- scheme over a recent widower (Barbet Schroeder) with a sick child, Madlyn (Nathalie Asnar).  Julie or Céline find themselves in the body of Madlyn's nurse, Angéle, playing out the same events over and over, unable to stop Madlyn from being murdered.  The women decide that they must do something to save the little girl by figuring out whether Sophie or Camille is the killer.

This movie is 3 hours and 14 minutes long.  Just going to put that out there first.  It is incredibly shaggy, as in you just follow Céline and Julie around for like half the runtime before you even get to the central mystery.  That may put some of you off and I get it.  But if you give it a chance, this movie is incredibly entertaining.  Labourier and Berto are so charming and lively that it's not a hardship to watch them run-around like Lucy and Ethel on the set of a Twilight Zone soap opera.  

It's streaming on the Criterion Channel.