Week Ending 9/29/23
Fourteen new titles are hitting Buffalo area screens this weekend. Fourteen. That’s insane in the current climate. And four of them are wide releases running the full cycle of multiplexes. Maybe it’s less to do with the industry and more to do with Buffalo owners embracing Indian cinema as a local moneymaker (four titles fall under that umbrella too), but it’s still nice to see.
Despite that large number, however, I’ve seen none of them. While I’m hearing great things about THE CREATOR and know it would be cool to see STOP MAKING SENSE on North Park’s big screen, I’ll probably end up missing out on both.
The reason: it’s Buffalo International Film Festival time. Running October 5th through October 9th, the event has gone back to being fully in-person this year. That sadly means I won’t be able to attend (I just finished quarantining in the attic for seven days post-TIFF in case I contracted COVID from those crowds, so I’m not looking to do it again), but I will be seeing a handful of films early this week after accepting an invitation to serve on the “Narrative Feature – Domestic” jury.
So, along with a couple new release reviews next week, there will also be a few words on all seven titles in that BIFF grouping. I’m looking forward to checking them all out and chatting with my fellow jurors to decide on our favorite.
What I Watched:
FLORA AND SON
(now streaming on AppleTV+)
You know what to expect from a John Carney film at this point. There’s going to be music. It will be heartfelt romantically, platonically, or a mix of both. And a lesson will be learned through the cathartic power of songwriting—not just song, but songwriting. That’s an important distinction and I think a big part of his charm as a filmmaker. His films deal with process, both for his characters’ lives and the music they create.
FLORA AND SON is about a mother and son at a crossroads. They’ve cohabitated for fourteen years and the strain has become unbearable. Flora (Eve Hewson) had Max (Orén Kinlan) at seventeen after hooking up with ex-husband Ian (Jack Reynor) while he was on tour with his band. She hoped having him would change something in her, but she was still a kid herself wanting to go out clubbing and dancing without constantly having to worry about his wellbeing once Ian all but entirely exited the picture. Let’s just say she’s never been good at hiding those feelings from Max.
Now he’s an a rebellious age. Out all night. Getting arrested for shoplifting. Doing anything possible to get noticed by his parents regardless of the result making them resent him more. But the moment has arisen where their friendly neighborhood police officer is done giving chances. He warns that the next incident will result in juvenile detention and advises they find a hobby to keep Max occupied. Flora sees an old guitar and thinks, “Why not?” She isn’t close enough to him to know he does actually like music, though. So, despite him wanting it, he refuses because there was no “thought” to count. Especially since his birthday went uncelebrated the previous day.
It’s a familiar if relevant set-up that progresses into Flora deciding to use the guitar herself. Get her own hobby to have a distraction and not be so angry when Max screws up again. With the help of a twenty-dollar-a-session teacher via Skype in LA (Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Jeff), this Dubliner discovers she actually enjoys playing and even has an aptitude for writing songs. The path from that revelation to the finale proves super saccharine and cliché-ridden (despite Flora telling Max he isn’t living inside a movie), but it packs a ton of heart to win you over anyway.
Hewson is very good and Kinlan provides the perfect catalyst and contrast to both rile her up and thaw her heart. Max is a good kid who doesn’t feel loved—the heartbreak upon thinking he’s found something his mother is willing to do with him only for her to reply “Now?” is soul-crushing. And Flora is on the cusp of realizing that she has made a habit of putting herself first. Yes, it seems the film is saying you can use an activity to substitute in for love, but I think Carney sticks the landing insofar as using that activity to unearth the love instead.
FLORA AND SON might not be as great as ONCE or SING STREET, but it is charmingly sweet and funny en route to a rousing bow-tied ending performance that should have you leaving with a smile on your face. Like Flora’s critique of Jeff’s original song, however, I’m not sure there will be a need to watch it again.
- 7/10
SPONTANEOUS
(available on VOD/Digital HD)
Priorities have a tendency of changing when tragedy strikes. You start to wonder if you’ve been focusing on all the wrong things, realizing that life is too short to be afraid of following your impulses and desires. And if this is the case with “regular” tragedies, what must be going through the minds of teenagers exposed to witnessing the gruesome death of a classmate? A death so gruesome that you must go home and wash them out of your hair? You don’t come back from something like that—not fully. Just ask any survivor of the myriad school shootings our country still refuses to do anything about.
There’s a joke in Brian Duffield’s SPONTANEOUS (adapted from the novel by Aaron Starmer) where Mara (Katherine Langford) complains that the spontaneous combustion of her classmate ruined her Halloween costume idea. You can’t go full Carrie White without dousing your prom dress in blood, but you also can’t douse your prom dress in blood when everyone in that classroom was covered in Katelyn just a few days prior. In that same vein, you can’t really make light of school shootings via comedy unless you don’t actually make it about school shootings.
Therein lies the combustion. It’s still violent. It’s still psychologically destructive. It’s still mostly random insofar as the victims not having done anything to deserve their fate. But it’s also unrealistic—at least in this quantity since people do spontaneously combust, just not this many within such a focused grouping. (We used to be able to say the same thing about school shootings.) So, since the scenario is rendered absurd, the characters can be too. Especially with today’s generation of teenagers born in a world that demands they get the joke. Because if laughter and love aren’t there to distract you, what’s left but the fear of being next?
It makes the first hour of SPONTANEOUS must-see storytelling. Between the writing, acting, and cinematography (it always seems Mara is looking away just when it happens), we become fully engrossed in the high concept chaos of a senior class being quarantined as a result of no one knowing what’s happening let alone being able to stop it. Add romance courtesy of Dylan (Charlie Plummer) admitting his crush after realizing there’s no better time than now and you almost forget about the nightmare unfolding around them.
That’s how good Langford and Plummer are. Their snarky, sarcastic rapport makes light of everything so that they can smile through the horror. Stuck in hospital beds behind plastic walls with tubes coming out of your arms? Reach out and reenact a scene from ET to embrace the fact that you’re still alive despite it all. This blossoming romance becomes so sweet and funny that you also forget the PTSD that’s obviously affecting them to ignite drug and alcohol usage. At least until an unforgettable sequence akin to a war film jolts you back awake to the awful truth.
This means the last forty minutes will prove a much more somber affair as the inevitable reckoning occurs. You can only pretend you’re okay for so long because you can’t outrun the collective bad luck from taking someone away that you can’t just shrug off. Not that Mara and company are shrugging off Katelyn, Perry, and those that follow. It’s simply easier to accept the loss of faces you’re familiar with than it is those that you cannot fathom living without. That’s when the terror and anguish of these kids’ parents finally trickles down to the teens.
And while Mara might reject the idea that this story has a message about not giving up and living life to the fullest since no one should have to die to make us remember those things, it does exist. It’s kind of the point. Toeing the line of making that clear without going overboard either way isn’t an easy task, but I think Duffield succeeds even if the second half’s tone hits a bit too hard. But you need it to for everything that happens in the first half to mean something. Because, like I said in the beginning, this isn’t just a comedy about exploding teenagers.
- 8/10
STORY AVE
(now in limited release)
Art as commodity will always be a debate. I got it when I started art school as a graphic designer with the “fine art” majors looking down at us as sellouts. You have it in cinema now with the dynamic between art and “content.” And it has always existed simply in the reality that most great art needs a patron—whether beforehand to commission or afterwards to buy. The trick is finding a way to use that necessity to deliver your truth rather than allowing it to exploit your talent to give itself a platform instead.
That duality exists in street art too and Aristotle Torres’ STORY AVE presents it in all its complexity by both putting that world and culture on-screen and by allowing its lead character (Asante Blackk’s Kadir) to find his identity through it even if that means he must extract himself from being within it. Add the psychological and emotional drama of needing to come to this conclusion on the heels of his younger brother’s untimely death and at the foot of applying for colleges and it’s not so hard to see how he might end up losing himself in the process.
Because we are most susceptible to coercion when we are most vulnerable. Kadir blames himself for Malik’s death and can’t escape the nightmares or the unfortunate reality that his mother’s grief blinds her from realizing she blames him too. So, he craves a new place to feel wanted. A new family. And Skemes (Melvin Gregg) provides it with his OTL crew—a collective he and Skemes’ brother Moe (Alex R. Hibbert) have wanted to join since they were little boys. But that world is more than “vandalism” or art. It’s a life dictated by territory and violence.
So, everything hinges on the fight between nature and nurture inside Kadir’s psyche. Will he take Skemes’ gun and rob unsuspecting strangers to add to the gang’s reputation and bankroll? Will he be able to pull the trigger if things go awry? As fate would have it, he won’t have to answer quite yet thanks to his first target being a man with nothing to lose and empathy to spare (Luis Guzmán’s Luis). But giving Kadir an out and outlet now might have come too late. And Torres and co-writer Bonsu Thompson are unafraid to let these characters prove as much by placing them on the precarious line between self-discovery and self-destruction.
It’s a riveting narrative with authentically drawn mirrors to show Kadir that he’s not alone. Whereas that truth can supply him a window towards a brighter future, it can also reveal a perpetual struggle. Luis is haunted by many of the same feelings and has been unable to fully escape them. Gloria (Coral Peña) is a fellow artist who has chosen a path that embraces the commodification of her message, perhaps at the detriment of that message. And Moe is all-in with OTL to the point of being willing to forfeit his life to the cause. Are they victims of circumstance? Sure. But that doesn’t negate the fact they also made a choice.
We therefore watch to see whether Kadir makes the same one or if he uses their lessons to carve his own path. It’s a phenomenal performance by Blackk. He’s put through the wringer and portrays the pain of it in a way that makes us unsure of what side of the line he’ll land on by the end. And Guzmán has never been better. Funny. Soulful. Troubled. His character’s desire to help is as much about redemption as it is a backslide into volatile patterns since, at a certain point, his actions pivot from centering Kadir’s needs to focusing solely on his own.
The path forward is powerful and far from easy since Kadir will need to forsake one facet of his life for the other regardless of his choice. This isn’t therefore about compromise. As Skemes’ life exemplifies: you can’t do both. Kadir’s talent is unquestionable (Jasmin “Hera” Siddiqui is the real artist behind his gorgeous on-screen work). Whether it’s used to make him a street prophet risking his freedom each day or to provide him an escape and future is solely up to him.
- 8/10
WOLF LIKE ME - Season 1
(streaming on Peacock)
It’s a silly premise: Boy meets werewolf. Sillier still because of a prevailing sense of fate bringing them together as if their respective baggage can only be handled by the other. From one car crash to another (with a spilled coffee in between), Gary (Josh Gad) and Mary (Isla Fisher) cannot seem to stay apart even when they try. Because they do try. Desperately. Her to make sure he doesn’t find out. Him when he inevitably does.
Created by Abe Forsythe (who writes and directs all six episodes of the first season), WOLF LIKE ME isn’t subtle in its psychological metaphors. The two main characters like to say that “no one is perfect” because the sentiments are true regardless of whether the degrees of severity are skewed. That’s not to say what Gary did after his wife died of cancer is excusable. It’s not. Forgivable, but not excusable. But it also isn’t murder under a full moon.
The show isn’t trying to pretend they’re the same, though. It also unabashedly leans into its inherent silliness. For example: Mary running off into traffic when she realizes she’s stayed out too long on a transformation day. That the scripts constantly find a balance between saying something (mostly through the dynamic these adults have with Gary’s eleven-year-old, panic-attack-prone daughter Emma, as played by Ariel Donoghue) and entertaining us is a big part of its success. Because you can do both. Not everything needs a dour pallor of nihilistic gloom.
And Gary and Mary are perfect together. They make each other happy and that in turn carries over to Emma getting out of her own anxiety-riddled way too. The rocky road towards discovering this truth is fun and funny while the finale’s cementing of the bond finally lets the horror out in full (cheesily and, seemingly, via practical effects). Wielding the supernatural to confront real familial issues of grief, survivor’s guilt, and vulnerability doesn’t make the lessons about those things any less important. If anything, they’re made more so by providing audiences a palatable entry point to the experience.
It’s great to see Gad in a role that demands more pathos than an Olaf the Snowman too. Fisher is good here, but her character is dealing with obvious visible issues while his Gary confronts the opposite. He portrays his internal struggle well as a father drowning with no idea how to rise back to the surface. Maybe love conquering all to save the day is a bit too convenient, but it isn’t without purpose or meaning. Fun and emotional catharsis don’t need to be mutually exclusive.
- 7/10
Cinematic F-Bombs:
This week saw AMERICAN VIOLET (2009), LAND OF THE LOST (2009), THEATER CAMP (2023), TRANSPORTER 2 (2005), and TRANSPORTER 3 (2008) added to the archive. I’ve never seen LAND OF THE LOST, so I was surprised it had an f-bomb at all let alone such a prominent one. Always assumed it was a “kiddie” kid’s movie despite Ferrell and McBride’s inclusion. Seems I was wrong. cinematicfbombs.com
New Releases This Week:
(Review links where applicable)
Opening Buffalo-area theaters 9/29/23 -
ASTOLFO at North Park Theatre
THE BLIND at Regal Elmwood, Transit, Galleria & Quaker
CARLOS at Regal Elmwood & Transit
THE CREATOR at Dipson McKinley, Flix & Capitol; AMC Maple Ridge & Market Arcade; Regal Elmwood, Transit, Galleria & Quaker
DUMB MONEY at Dipson Amherst, McKinley, Flix & Capitol; AMC Maple Ridge & Market Arcade; Regal Elmwood, Transit, Galleria & Quaker
FUKREY 3 at Regal Elmwood
GADDI JAANDI AE CHALAANGAAN MAARDI at Dipson Capitol
THE KILL ROOM at Regal Galleria & Transit
ON FIRE at Regal Galleria, Transit & Quaker
PAW PATROL: THE MIGHTY MOVIE at Dipson McKinley, Flix & Capitol; AMC Maple Ridge & Market Arcade; Regal Elmwood, Transit, Galleria & Quaker
SAW X at Dipson McKinley, Flix & Capitol; AMC Maple Ridge & Market Arcade; Regal Elmwood, Transit, Galleria & Quaker
SKANDA: THE ATTACKER at Regal Elmwood & Transit
STOP MAKING SENSE at North Park Theatre; Dipson Amherst; Regal Transit & Quaker
THE VACCINE WAR at Regal Elmwood
Streaming from 9/29/23 -
DO NOT DISTURB – Netflix on 9/29
FLORA AND SON – AppleTV+ on 9/29
Thoughts are above.
NIGHTMARE – Shudder on 9/29
NOWHERE – Netflix on 9/29
APPENDAGE – Hulu on 10/2
MICKEY AND FRIENDS TRICK OR TREATS – Hulu & Disney+ on 10/2
HAUNTED MANSION – Disney+ on 10/4
RACE TO THE SUMMIT – Netflix on 10/4
BARGAIN – Paramount+ on 10/5
MONSTER HIGH 2 – Paramount+ on 10/5
OSCAR’S HANDMADE HALLOWEEN – Max on 10/5
Now on VOD/Digital HD -
ALL THAT BREATHES (9/26)
“While the brothers speak for themselves and the kites, [Sen] and his cinematographers capture the wild juxtaposition of nature and industry [with] amazing visuals courtesy of multiple slow pans devoid of artifice or intrusion.” – Full thoughts at jaredmobarak.com.
BAD THINGS (9/26)
THE BEASTS (9/26)
BLUE BEETLE (9/26)
THE CURSE OF WILLOW SONG (9/26)
DREAMIN’ WILD (9/26)
GRAN TURISMO (9/26)
THE JESSICA CABIN (9/26)
LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR (9/26)
MENDING THE LINE (9/26)
MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING 3 (9/26)
57 SECONDS (9/29)
DELIVER US (9/29)
HEAD COUNT (9/29)
MUZZLE (9/29)
THE RE-EDUCATION OF MOLLY SINGER (9/29)
From the press kit archive:
