drama – Podcasting Them Softly

Sean Penn’s Flag Day

November 3, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Sean Penn has always been one of the most fascinating, honest and down to earth filmmakers in terms of tone, style and theme and his latest father daughter drama Flag Day is a magnificently acted, deeply sorrowful piece of work that shows us this artist still has a lot to give and to say in his medium. It tells the autobiographical tale of Jennifer Vogel (Dylan Penn, his real life daughter), a teenage runaway with a painfully tumultuous family life whose mother (Kathryn Winnick) is married to an abusive prick and is blind to his ways and whose father (Penn) is a degenerate con artist and perennial fuck-up who tries to do right by his family but seems star crossed with his own self destruction. I’m not sure if the real Jennifer Vogel had it *this* bad (I guess I should read the book) but it’s a testament to this girl’s spirit, bravery and resilience that after abuses, years on the road, hopelessly dysfunctional family life and unspeakable hardships she came out on top as a successful college graduate and influential journalist, here chronicled in wistful, hazy, fragmented episodic memories that have a genuine disarray and scattered quality to them, the same way memory feels to us when we try to recall things in a straight line and our minds grasp at keystone moments out of space and time for a recollection that isn’t always coherent. The strongest quality and beacon of light the film has is Dylan Penn, daughter of Sean and Robin Wright in her first lead role. She is unbelievably talented, emotionally truthful and intuitive in her craft and her performance is jaw dropping, for starters. Sean Penn himself is great, playing a character that’s very hard to like and bringing heart to his scenes with her but she is positively on another level with her performance here, selling the hurt, strength, feeling of being betrayed by her own parents and her eventual arc from scared, lost teen girl to assured, battle hardened young woman with a grace, ease and flow that has to be seen to be believed, the best female performance this year easily. The film itself is your call, I loved it but the marketing makes it seem like this “father and daughter against the world” thing when in truth it’s daughter against the world, including her father, mother and most around her who are either absent, untrustworthy or not up to the task of being in her life. Only a kind, sympathetic uncle (a brief Josh Brolin) is anything close to a constructive influence on her journey. Penn has always made challenging, melancholic films about human beings going through unimaginable changes and sometimes taking pretty devastating falls, from The Indian Runner to The Crossing Guard to Into The Wild to The Pledge (my personal favourite), he always has an uncanny eye for the middle class, the people that don’t often get their voices heard in majorly produced scripts, the ones who tend to fall by the wayside unless someone is willing to tell their story. In this case Vogel took it upon herself to tell her own story and Penn has adapted it in a beautiful, moving, incredibly depressing but ultimately very human story, giving his daughter a voice and a canvas to paint her masterful portrayal of one girl who, despite everything, made it to a better life. Phenomenal film.

-Nate Hill

Lauren Fash’s Through The Glass Darkly

October 10, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

A mother’s search for her missing daughter takes a turn for the surreal in Lauren Fash’s Through The Glass Darkly, a thriller that I really admired for its willingness to be different and get downright strange in tone, style and narrative twists. It stars Robyn Lively, an actress I only know as the hilariously sultry mayor’s gold digging wife on Twin Peaks and at this point I didn’t think I’d ever seen her surface in anything again, but she has and is seriously excellent here in a role that demands heavy dramatic skill and some trickier aspects that I won’t spoil but she handles wonderfully. She plays a mother whose daughter vanished some years before and spends her days wandering a rundown Georgia county looking for her. The disappearance haunts both her and her now ex girlfriend (Bethany Ann Lind) and no one, from law enforcement to locals, seems to want to help her or even hear about the incident, in fact many apparently blame her for it. Only one reporter (Shanola Hampton, Shameless) who is compassionate enough and cares about the truth helps her in an investigation that covers everything from the hazy memories of the past to a corrupt conspiracy involving the county’s richest and most rotten family. I don’t want to say much because there is one mid film twist I promise you won’t see coming, and adds a fascinating layer of psychological depth to the story. This isn’t exactly a horror film although there are some quite dark elements, it’s more along the lines of True Detective with a splash of Winter’s Bone. There’s a deep sadness to it as well that got to me, and any film that uses the song On The Nature Of Daylight by Max Richter to accent a particularly emotional passage of story should come with an automatic disclaimer to “bring a box of Kleenex.” Spooky atmosphere also plays a part and there are some beautifully lit nighttime shots of rivers, eerie empty streets and the memory flashbacks have a genuinely worn, moth-winged burnish to them. It’s a nice, melancholic, terrifically directed and acted thriller with a truly unconventional feel to it and a very strong performance from the lovely Lively, who is a world away from her bubbly, flirtatious Twin Peaks nymphet. Good stuff.

-Nate Hill

CBC’s Schitt’s Creek

August 15, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

CBC’s Schitt’s Creek was kind of an unassuming watch for me in the sense that I don’t usually go for sitcoms and when I do it’s for breezy background noise, or simply reruns of stuff like That 70’s Show that I’m already intimately familiar with; the genre just isn’t really for me. This show, however, grew on me like no other and from the first quaint little episode to the emotionally uplifting grand finale it has now become one of my all time favourite pieces of television. Ostensibly the story of one disgustingly rich family who is embezzled out of their fortune by a disloyal employee and forced to relocate to a tiny backwater town they once purchased as a prank, this is so so SO much more than just a “riches to rags” comedy lark and such an important piece, and what’s more is it becomes important and essential without even trying to be, which isn’t easy to do. Eugene Levy is Johnny Rose, former video store tycoon relegated to rural life with his frequently hysterical prima Donna wife Moira (Catherine O’Hara) and two adult children David (Dan Levy) and Alexis (Annie Murphy). As they are jarringly propelled from their ultra-bougie existence into a bucolic world of motels, diners and quiet country life we are swept up in a pithy, hyper-satirical slice of life small town dramedy that gradually and cunningly becomes something so good, so well developed and so engrossing the effect is almost profound. Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara already have roots in SCTV satire from their days of yore and bring every inch of that pop culture sendup energy here, as Levy’s own kid Dan co-creates with pops and we get the sense that every creative engine involved here is just firing on all cylinders and perfectly in sync. The epic and incredibly dense yet somehow blessedly lighthearted six season run see these four characters go through unbelievable, surprising, touching, hilarious and always realistic arcs as they adjust to life in the sticks, make friends, find love, bicker absolutely non stop in the most lovable of ways and simply just… live their lives. Others orbit them including the town’s incredibly offbeat mayor (Chris Elliott is too funny for words here), his darling of a wife (Jennifer Robertson), the local motel owner (Emily Hampshire, who I fell in love with within minutes), David’s eventual boyfriend and colleague (Noah Reid) and many, many others all portrayed wonderfully. What makes this show so special and such a standout amidst the absolute galaxy of sitcoms out there is a delicious mixture of a few things: it’s relentlessly, consistently funny, like you don’t even get a chance to breathe in between the airtight, intimidatingly verbose jokes especially when O’Hara and her priceless pronunciation is concerned. The characters here are real, developed human beings who you grow with, learn to care for deeply, are frequently exasperated with and the sense of community, family and love permeates everything. The themes are relevant and the tone is compassionate, understanding and candid in terms of LGBT content and the whole thing just hums on every level, it’s about as close to perfect as you can get in the television storytelling world. It’s a bittersweet turn that the show only achieved real, worldwide acclaim near the end of its run because I feel like it could go on to say and do so much more, and influence so many more people with its fun, positivity, empathy, masterclass writing and once in a lifetime performances. Could not recommend this highly enough for how great it is.

-Nate Hill

Steven Adam Renkovich’s The Awakening Of Lilith

July 13, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Grief. Mental illness. Turbulent family dynamics. A battle to maintain one’s identity amidst a myriad of struggles both internal and external. These are deep, difficult themes to work through in film and it’s so often that we see them not done proper justice, not explored in a fashion that feels fair, realistic or respectful and overall misses the mark. Steven Adam Renkovich’s The Awakening Of Lilith is a film of strength, assuredness and striking meditative intuition that approaches these themes from a refreshingly, staggeringly mature and relatable standpoint, between his his strong, hypnotic direction and an otherworldly, deeply instinctive lead performance from Brittany Renée as Lilith, a woman lost in the darkest corners of her own mind following a shrouded tragedy that we learn more of bit by bit. I always think of depression, anxiety and any mental illness as a relationship between space and time: these affliction are spaces we wander into, for an indeterminate amount of time, and while you are in them it quite literally feels like you will never, ever make it out; it’s like tunnel vision in fog. Lilith and her fiancée Noah (Justin Livingston) both suffer from variations on this and we see in flashbacks the strain it puts on their relationship as they try to work through their issues, individually and as a couple until… well, until we get back to present day Lilith, living with the fact that Noah, for reasons made agonizingly clear, is not around anymore. Lilith is not only navigating life without him but everyone else in her life who is not properly there for her including a coldhearted mother (Mary Miles Kokotek) and some friends who don’t quite have the proper empathy to support her. Renkovich’s script approaches the subject of mental illness with a precision, understanding, blunt realism and compassion that is all too rare in cinema overall, and the medium is immediately stronger with his feature debut voice in it. He uses eerie, haunting sound design and blurred, Rorschach-test like imagery to disorient and draw us into Lilith’s tempestuous and confusing internal landscape with terrific support from Seth Anderson’s often terrifying, frequently beautiful and always atmospheric score. Renée is a revelation as Lilith, possessive of the kind of old world poise, timeless anachronistic aura, clearly annunciated, carefully thought out expression and ethereal essence that is so rare in human beings and is always a truly special quality for an actor to have. She imbues Lilith with the kind of resolute, lonely sadness of someone who is used to living in their head and fiercely facing their demons in implosive silence. Livingston as Noah plays it a bit more clipped but underneath the curt vernacular we see someone who is sensitive but has never been allowed to outwardly own it, who guards a hurt so deep it’s clear he’s only ever allowed Lilith in to share it, a dynamic that both strengthens their relationship and puts it to ultimate test. My favourite scene is the two of them in a camping tent, together beyond the world; Lilith gives him a gift that has immense personal meaning to her and their bond is so deep the silence in the air around them can hear it, it’s a wonderful moment that’s made all the more affecting and heartbreaking when you look at their arc overall, accented in finality by a gorgeous ending credit song sung by Renée herself that leads you out of the narrative perfectly. There is a lot to unpack here for a film that clocks in just under 90 minutes, and I’ve only just brushed the surface of this textured, complex, beautifully crafted piece. Wondrous film.

-Nate Hill

Steven Adam Renkovich’s The Awakening Of Lilith

July 13, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

-Nate Hill

Viggo Mortensen’s Falling

July 5, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I love to see it when a cherished and talented actor makes their debut as a director, especially if they absolutely nail it, and Viggo Mortensen’s Falling is an astonishingly terrific first time effort behind the camera, in front of it and collaborating with one of cinema’s most prolific and underrated character actors, the mighty Lance Henriksen. Mortensen paints a deeply personal and seemingly autobiographical portrait of a stormy father son relationship here, a dynamic put to the absolute test in its twilight years as dementia throws a curveball. Henriksen is Willis Petersen, a conservative, sexist, crass, bigoted, bitter, flint-edged old goat whose emotional problems and inability to properly communicate made life extra tough on his wife and two kids growing up on a farm in chilly upstate New York. He is now a snowy haired senior citizen who can barely remember what day it is, and journeys with his grown up son John (Mortensen; patient, restrained, meticulously pensive until the breaking point) to live with him, his husband (Terry Chen) and their young daughter (Gabby Velis) in sunniest California. Willis is utterly and completely out of his element in this setting, while John, his family and the rest of the city do their best to ignore, endear and diplomatically deflect his brittle onslaught of angry, bigoted, rude and altogether inappropriate behaviour. Willis is a tough cookie to love or care for, especially in this golden age of hyper-tolerance, but Henriksen, in an absolute career best tour de force, makes him not just another angry old man but a human being who is so scared of dying, losing his memories of life and slipping away from the life affirming groove of his routine that he’s lashing out at basically everyone around him. Except for his young granddaughter, his relationship with her is perhaps the only genuinely warm-hearted and easygoing interaction he allows himself to inhabit. Mortensen masterfully edits together their present day life in Cali with picturesque, auburn laced and earthen flashbacks to Upstate NY where we see a young Willis (Sverrir Gudnason) raise John and his sister, struggle to be there for them without letting his flaws run amok and navigate through two marriages, one to the children’s sensitive mother (Hannah Gross) and later to another (Bracken Burns). Laura Linney gives a reliably focused and mesmerizing turn as Willis’s grown up daughter, who does everything she can not to get emotionally compromised by her father’s issues, and there’s a sly cameo from Viggo’s longtime pal David Cronenberg as a stoic butt doctor whose scene with Willis highlights some of the films coarse black humour, often at the expense of his son’s homosexuality as John himself looks on in almost unfathomable patience. It’s easy to condemn and dismiss a difficult character like Willis, but Mortensen’s complex direction and Henriksen’s volcanic yet finely shaded nuance refuse the viewer in drawing such hasty, narrow conclusions. Mortensen’s surreal editing, fluidly washed transitions, the wonder of the natural world and the magic of music to remind us that human beings are never just one thing and that a seemingly lost, scared and downright mean old man is still capable of compassion, patience and a modicum of self reflection, even in the eleventh hour. This is an astonishing film and a staggering debut for any filmmaker of any background with a central performance by Lance that anoints his entire epic career with that one last minute entry to crown it all, he and the film overall are truly magnificent.

-Nate Hill

Nikole Beckwith’s Stockholm Pennsylvania

March 14, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I struggled with Nikole Beckwith’s Stockholm Pennsylvania on several levels, despite it having a wicked strong cast and premise so full of potential I almost want to write my own version that does it more justice than this incredibly frustrating film. Saoirse Ronan gives a typically superb performance as Leia, a young woman who was kidnapped when she was very young by doomsday obsessed, ill adjusted Benjamin (Jason Isaacs) and raised in his captivity and care for over a decade. When she’s eventually found and freed, she returns to a life she barely has memory of, to two parents (Cynthia Nixon and David Warshofsky) who feel like strangers to her. Her life with Benjamin was never filled with abuse or horror or anything like that, beyond kidnapping her and filling her mind with all sorts of end of the world, anti-humanity nonsense he actually cared for her as his own kid and treated her decently, all things considered. So there’s this alienation from the real world, this wall of separation from parents who desperately try and reconnect with her and this strange bond with her captor who is still out there in jail, thinking of her. How does the script take this situation and evolve it into something challenging, believable and emotionally resonant? Well, it doesn’t really. Ronan, Isaacs and Warshofsky are terrific but Nixon gives this shrill, unpleasant and altogether inexplicable portrait of tyrannical maternal instinct gone wrong that curdles into her own version of holding Leia captive when she can’t reconcile that her daughter just isn’t the same person she used to be. I’m not sure what Beckwith was going for or drawing on with this original script, it seems as if she is deliberately trying to tell a knowingly obtuse, in-your-face uncomfortable story and the result is a maddening experience, or at least was for me. It’s a shame because the idea, setup and execution of the first act is really good and drew me in and then it just goes off the deep end appears to lose itself in histrionic, grim, unnecessary Mommie Dearest nonsense that feels like it walked in from a much lesser film, and as such it drags the whole experience down and you just feel emotionally depleted afterwards, with no reward, pathos, thought provocation or narrative satisfaction. An interesting experiment that needlessly nosedives and betrays both the audience and its characters to masochistic doom and gloom that doesn’t feel warranted.

-Nate Hill

David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels

February 25, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels is a film that asks the viewer to accept hard truths: that any given human being is capable of maliciousness, compassion, mistakes, volatility, naïveté and the desire to do better within the same lifetime. It presents to us an ensemble of small town characters at penultimate crossroads of their lives where decisions will be made that cannot be unmade, and may shape both their futures and our perceptions of character but we must remember… they’re only human. Resisting the urge to use any sort of filmmaking gimmickry, Green forges a blunt, unforgiving yet unusually honest portrait of these people: Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale give heartbreaking, career best performances as hopelessly dysfunctional divorced parents who lose their way both as a unit and as individuals following the tragic death of their infant daughter. This event spirals out around them into the community as we see murder, adultery, budding teen romance and all manner of human interaction transpire. Rockwell is a careening time bomb of emotional immaturity, a man who loves his ex wife and loved his daughter dearly but cannot reconcile his own mental health issues and his performance implodes upon itself like a dying star in a work of art that has never seen this actor more vulnerable and raw. Beckinsale ditches her glossy, restrained pretty girl image for a character that it’s easy to dismiss as unlikeable and irresponsible until you see the depth and dimension she pours into the performance, and it’s not so easy to pass judgment or condemn. Others provide vivid impressions including Griffin Dunne, Amy Sedaris, Nicky Katt, Jeannetta Arnette and Tom Noonan who bookends the film in haunting profundity as a no nonsense high school band teacher who seems almost like a godlike force or deity watching over the souls of this small northwestern town. The single uplifting plot thread is a teen romance between Olivia Thirlby and Michael Angarano, who flirt adorably, fall for each other awkwardly and discover sex, conversation and each other’s company in a realistic, down to earth and warm-hearted way, it’s a cathartic oasis of love and light amidst the dark onslaught of this overall bleak snowstorm of a narrative. What makes all of this tragedy, pain and sorrow so palatable then, you may ask? Green is a terrifically intuitive director who gets genuinely believable performances from his actors, full of naturalistic dialogue, believable idiosyncrasies and a sense that nobody in this story is simply good, simply bad or there to serve one archetype, they are all flawed human beings capable of the deepest acts of love, caring and compassion or the most callous, nightmarish violence, neglect and abuse. There’s a scene where a mother comforts her teen son who has made a traumatizing discovery and she tells him how important it is not to keep that pain bottled up, but to feel through it and it’s one of many strikingly intimate, uncommonly intelligent scenes in a film that is a meticulously edited and shot carousel of human experience. The tag line read: “Some will fly, some will fall,” and it’s applicable to our our experience as human beings overall: life is not easy for everyone, mistakes are made, love is found and lost and the cycle continues. A lot can be learned, felt, internalized and reflected upon after watching this miracle of a film.

-Nate Hill

Indie Gems: Paolo Barzman’s Emotional Arithmetic

February 15, 2021 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Paolo Barzman’s Emotional Arithmetic is a stunning independent drama that, despite a ridiculously prolific cast, ultimately slipped through the cracks into obscurity. It’s well worth hunting down to see four seasoned professionals as the top of their game in telling the story of various characters dealing with the lingering horrors of the Holocaust, both directly and indirectly. Susan Sarandon plays a Canadian woman sometime in the 80’s who survived a concentration camp at a very young age, and has invited two fellow survivors (Max Von Sydow & Gabriel Byrne) to a reunion at her house in the Quebec countryside where they will reconnect after decades of separation following a tragically abrupt parting from each other and will have the chance to meet her much older husband (Christopher Plummer) and their son (Roy Dupuis). It’s a pleasant, cathartic enough reunion but the collective scars they share from enduring such a horrific phase of their lives are apparent in each of them, in different ways. Byrne’s quiet, introspective character has buried his trauma under a cloak of calm, Von Sydow deliberately tried to forget using electroshock therapy, while Sarandon herself has obsessively documented, scrapbooked and reflected on their past very openly over the years to employ her own process. Plummer’s character is the outsider, having never gone through what they did and starts the film off in a sort of cavalier, borderline insensitive way until the grave reality of what his wife and her friends have suffered through hits home and he becomes more compassionate. All of the performances are absolutely magnificent and I really wish more people were able to see this moving film because each of these actors provide showcase work and should be very proud. If you are lucky enough to find a DVD, please ignore the misleading, stupid Hallmark style artwork and silly alternate title (Autumn Hearts, are you kidding me? Lol) because it’s as if the distribution company didn’t even watch the film and just did whatever the hell they wanted. This is not a sappy, syrupy film at all, it’s a deep, thoughtful, challenging interpersonal drama that stirs the soul in a realistic fashion without cheap manipulation. Highly recommended, wonderful hidden gem of a film.

-Nate Hill

Thomas Vinterburg’s Another Round

December 29, 2020 by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Alcohol and the culture, customs and traditions surrounding it have permeated society to a saturation point over the years (cinema included), whether we want to admit it or not. I myself am a bit of a self proclaimed lush, and as such I always gravitate towards films that tackle the issue head on, whether the context be cautionary, celebratory, purely unbiased anthropological study or other. Beerfest, Leaving Las Vegas, Flight, Barfly, 28 Days, A Star Is Born. They’re as varied and illuminating as in any sub-genre stable and now we have Thomas Vinterburg’s Another Round, one of the best films of the year and one that manages to do a carefully calibrated dance between comedy and tragedy while showing us the shortcomings, shattered dreams and collective woes of four high school teachers from Denmark, with the focus resting primarily on Mads Mikkelsen’s Martin, an introverted, emotionally stunted man who was perhaps not always this way, but the years have made it so. He and his three buddies decide during a booze soaked night out to follow in the footsteps of an unconventional philosopher who says that any human being will fare better in life with an average of 0.5 blood alcohol level… 24/7. This little experiment proves invigorating at first when each of them finds themselves a little looser, a little more effervescent in both their work and personal lives… until such an endeavour inevitably careens towards a downward spiral, for each in gravely different ways. The thing is, alcohol is a bandaid, not a magic curative elixir for all problems psychological and interpersonal. One can use at first, even at as benign a level as this experiment suggests, but the incremental nature of how it affects our bodies soon takes control and self destruction can be imminent. We see Mikkelsen’s already inert marriage detonate like a dying star, his younger colleague can’t act appropriately around his wife and young children anymore and their older friend seems to suffer from some kind of repressed pain that he and the film are too scared to even unpack, it’s so bad. I don’t want anyone to label this as a ‘midlife crisis’ film because that’s a cheap and patronizing term; anyone at any point in their life can not be okay and their struggles shouldn’t be relegated to labels like that. These are simply four human beings who naively experiment with alcohol and realize that not only will excessive use *not* fix their problems, it will emblazon them further into the forefront of their psyches and force out a fierce reckoning from each, whether they’re ready for it or not. Some are, some aren’t, and that’s the beauty of this narrative. Mikkelsen has never been better, he’s got that observant subtlety we’ve come to know him for but there’s also a vivacity and deepest emotional burn to the work that is a new and mesmerizing formula from him as an artist. Also he’s rocks some dance moves I never expected him to have in a joyous, blessedly cathartic ‘jazz ballet’ sequence near the end that nails the film’s desire to be thoroughly bittersweet but ultimately uplifting. Like the best cocktails, the mixture has to be in utmost equilibrium or the flavour is off. The same can be said for a film that wants to bridge genres or simply evoke multiple complex emotions at once: Another Round is jubilant, compassionate, loving yet doesn’t shy away from the dark, bleak and dysfunctional corners of life, using alcohol as a narrative avatar to unearth what was already there in its human characters. Masterful film.

-Nate Hill