Nitehawk Festival Screening of our film “Best Picture”; Marriage Story, Honey Boy, The Good Liar, Ford vs. Ferrari and Horror Fest 2019 on Monday Morning Diary (November 18)

by Sam Juliano

You wouldn’t think I would be facing a laser iridotomy for normal “narrow angles” in my left eye on Monday morning, Nov. 18th and cataract surgery on my right eye on December 13th by the way I have been running around, seeing movies and fulfilling my regular work schedule.  In any case I have completed a bunch of appointments involving a retina specialist, a measurement expert (my cataract eye was too dense for my physician Dr. Geller to ascertain as a result of my waiting too long) and my primary care physician for clearance not to mention two more visits to Geller.  It has been truly a hectic time.

An amazing time was had at the Nitehawk Cinemas in Brooklyn Tuesday night where the first of our two festival-hopping 2019 short films “Best Picture”, about our annual Oscar party at Fairview’s Tiger Hose Firehouse, was screened in front of a sold out house in the complex’s main theater. I joined the film’s director Jay Giampietro on stage for a fabulous post-film discussion. What a bunch of astounding shorts were in last night’s lineup, including one starring Ethan Hawke’s daughter (Memory Experiment). After posing with Jay, his wife Leah, cast member Bart Talamini Jr. and family members who appeared in the film, we watched the nine shorts and engaged in the aforementioned discussion where I revealed the advent of our 42 consecutive Oscar party ritual. Jay spoke of his budding involvement with the annual event, and in responding to an audience question I asserted that this coming year’s best picture Oscar will go to either “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” or “The Irishman.” Programmers and festival patrons were all over us after the event in the lobby. Temperatures may have been freezing outside but indoors we witnessed positive energy in every sense. The Nitehawk Festival, in its eighth year, is one of NYC’s premiere shorts venues.

We saw four films in theaters this past week.  Actually one of those – Ford vs. Ferrari – will be seen tonight (Sunday), so I will revisit this post in the morning to insert the grade if not also a brief assessment:

Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” one of 2019’s greatest masterpieces!

The sometimes funny, but ultimately devastating “Marriage Story” featuring Scarlett Joahansson, Adam Driver and Laura Dern in extraordinary form is a coast-to-coast divorce drama that probes deeply and depicts the complexity of incompatibility in a relationship where both warring parties still love each other. The perceptive and nuanced screenplay is one of the year’s finest and three other supporting performances by Alan Alda, Julie Hegarty and Ray Liotta also hit the mark. Rating 5/5. The film is another netflix release that will go streaming after a few weeks in theaters. I count it surely as one of the top 2 or 3 films of the year. We saw it last night at the Claridge in Montclair.

Star grades and very brief commentary on two recently-seen theatrical films – “Honey Boy” and “The Good Liar”

“Honey Boy” is a raw, intense and powerful autobiographical account of Shia LaBeouf’s childhood that is uniformly well acted and an an effective fusion of humor, dysfunction and heartbreak. I did get a big laugh at Rex Reed’s personal John Simon-like assault on LaBeouf as a “no talent” and the film as “despicable” but again such juvenile film criticism tells us much more about the person writing the review than about the subject. That said the reviews overall were excellent. 4.5 of 5 “The Good Liar” is extremely well acted by Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen, and it is reasonably entertaining, but the screenplay is hopelessly convoluted 3.0 of 5.

James Clark’s new essay will be posted in the very near future.  J.D. Lafrance’s excellent review of Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money published this past week.

Jamie Uhler’s brilliant Horror Fest 2019 series continues with two new superlative capsules.  Though both are stupendous, the one he penned on the recently-released masterwork The Lighthouse is stunning!

TheLighthouse (R. Eggers… 2019)

TheWitch no doubt announced the arrival of a brilliant new talent in the world of artful cinema, made all the more appetizing for us genre fans that it was heavily grounded in psychological horror, the sub-genre most befitting the production of actual screen scares. I loved that one, a pitch-perfect exercise in period detail and growing menace, finding its terror in the world of spiritual twaddle; if you’re willing to accept all that those pre-colonial settlers do, then a terrorizing, demonic black sheep—named, appropriately ‘Black Phillip’ by the family’s two small children after several nightmarish visions—suddenly becomes all the more real. When the family is set adrift for such Pagan talk, they’re cast out to quite literally the edge of the world as they know it which director Eggers fashions as their field and an ever present, ominous forest line. This is the point where anything goes, and by films end, it just about does.

His newest picks up this point, and you could argue, right where TheWitch ends. TheWitch ends in chaotic delirium, which, surprisingly is more or less where we begin TheLighthouse, a tale of two wayward lighthouse keepers, roughly two centuries later in (I’d guess) the late 1870s-1880s. As I sat down to watch the film, I assumed this was an intensity that couldn’t be sustained, but over the next nearly two hours, an incredibly ferocious film is revealed, one that never labors or repeats itself, instead takes a slow, pounding march to eventual complete and utter destruction. William Dafoe is header keeper Thomas Wake, an ornery Simon Legree-like figure who lords over the managing of the lamp high upon the tower, and extols orders as much as he as passes gas in the small cabin home he stays with Winslow, the laborer he’s hired this season (played with incredible potency by Robert Pattinson). Over time, you get the sense the men might as well be on the moon, or to borrow my earlier comment on TheWitch, the exact edge of civilization, cast adrift to be marooned to their deaths. Eventually you begin to realize why: these are men of manufactured pasts, and we’re not totally sure of anything once they begin hallucinating as homemade hooch becomes almost their sole sustenance. How Eggers takes us there is magnificent—he seems to argue, ‘what else are outsiders to do when faced with nothing but isolation and daily, unending, back-breaking work’. Soon, we’re narrowing into WakeinFright territory, men in masculine battle with themselves and all those around them, a pity for these two that they only have their adjacent bedmate to scrap with. Scenes unravel where we see these two as potential lovers quickly spin into commentary on domesticity (you laugh as Dafoe pleads with Pattinson to say he likes his cooking) just as soon as they’re fighting to near death, a fact we read as growing ever closer by the moment as the gale force storm bears down on them.

The film comes off beautifully for the consistency in tone and atmosphere; the score and (especially) the sound design are wonderful excursions of dread, and the inky-black monochromatic photography is hellish. This photography, by Jarin Blaschke is rendered, faithfully in the aspect ratio if the silent era, 1.19:1, and given its tight, near perfect square constraints, traps these lost men into Rubik’s cube like box compositions to which they spend the film fighting to free themselves from. When they don’t, only the heavenly glow high atop the lighthouse provides possible respite, but, like everything else here, be careful what you seek, it’s a long tumble down. 

Us (J. Peele… 2019)
While most awaited Jordan Peele’s new Horror film with anxious zeal, I remained largely ambivalent, never hiding my tepid, to even disparaging feelings towards his first film, Get Out, from a year or so prior. I’d thought it OK, an interesting concept as an elevator pitch but bogged down in uneven direction. Buildup scenes were over-directed with an attention to detail and unnecessary camera moves born from watching art films and mimicking them, then as the horror ratcheted up, a sloppiness within tension, where the details suddenly could use some of that painstaking acuteness within action. In the end, perhaps a promising debut, Peele’s clearly a director with more on his mind than most genre stewards, but definitely not the work I saw topping so many year end lists. Thus, I’m only finally getting to Us now, more than 6 months after its initial release, nearly 2 dozen works into my annual Horror binge.

Here is the story of the Wilson family, largely centered around mother, Adelaide (the always terrific Lupita Nyong’o), whom with jovial husband Gabe (I hope Winston Duke gets away from the MCU quickly as I’d love to see him act in real roles like this), have 2 precocious children Zora and Jason. We’ve opened the film in flashback, a mid-1980s mysterious event where Adelaide is confronted with a perfect twin of herself, a happenstance that leaves her debilitated for a time, and apparently has lingering post-traumatic effects. When the family returns to Santa Cruz, the location of Adelaide’s childhood drama, she has to confront it again, and finally tells Gabe the events of the long ago night. Soon thereafter, a chilling group of strangers appears in their driveway, shadowy figures we soon learn are all perfect doppelgangers for the Wilson family. For the next 45 minutes or so, the films second act, it performs beautifully, visceral Horror bordering on mass chaos, a chaos that slows down into exposition as the film transitions towards the climactic third act. This is all a large government conspiracy gone wrong, like a classic 1950’s sci-fi yarn, and I sorta wished we’d just road the small, isolated grouping to an appropriate intense conclusion.

I say this because some of the sub-textual elements are a little clunky; the Tethered’s symbolic connection to privilege seems to argue that it’s hereditary and environment, a totally possible conundrum scientifically, but severs our films earliest body swap in the House of Mirrors as rather messy. Us opts to paint most of the larger themes wholly sub-textual though, so you can—unlike GetOut—just enjoy the film for its straight Horror passages which are considerably scarier from Peele this time around (and the direction much more assured). He’s right to borrow bits from Haneke’s FunnyGames, this is a home invasion story after all, but the cribbing of ‘Mirror Image’, a TwilightZone episode from the titanic show’s first season, reveals how his grafting movies so closely around ideological concerns first and foremost rather than the opposite, robs the tale of the sense of mystery and oddness that ‘Mirror Image’ gets so much terror from. Oh well, I still liked it, and after my tepid response to GetOut, I’m more aligned with everyone else about the future prospects of Jordan Peele the director. What’s next?