Review: THE INVITE

Music teacher Joe grinds his way home and collapses on the floor of his apartment to find out that his frantically tidying partner Angela has invited the loud-sex couple from upstairs over for nibbles and drinks. The ensuing argument is interrupted by the appearance of the other couple who take the sounds of argument in their stride. Two couples, one almost estranged and the other open and engaged. There's a lot of working out to do. That's the film. 

No, I'm not being dismissive. The awkwardness of the beginning gets ironed smooth by candid talk and the spirit of sharing which replace it with a constant tension. This needs nuanced performance to work as its sheer verbosity will need a lot of care. Director and actor Olivia Wilde steps up and mostly succeeds in giving us an ensemble piece that charges along. The actor in the director knew, also, that the way to making a talkfest work is a lot of physical action; not big, just supportive.

Where this gets strained is in an uneven hand with techniques like overlapping dialogue. While this can suggest confusion and add tension it can also be frustrating to view and distracting. From His Girl Friday to The Thing From Another World, contrapuntal speech should compact information and suggest urgency. Here, it enhances awkwardness risks vagueness and alienating chaos. The other factor is the score. Apart from some needledrops, the music in this film consists of harsh stabbing bowed solo strings that spike up as a kind of dialogue helper. The effect is disruptive, informationally noisy. It is never welcome.

What keeps saving The Invite is performance. It's a quartet that responds to an expert handling by a quarter of it. Seth Rogan's bitter Joe is ready to flee the scene for life until he hears what Pina and Hawk are into, the hard nut of his resentment of his life takes a lot of battery until the promise of responsibility-free hedonism appears. Pina, a sultry and sullen Penelope Cruz, and Hawk a masking Ed Norton who seems forever on the point of breaking, think of their activity with more of a new age leaning. Finally, there is conductor Olivia Wilde herself, frenetic, alert, hankering to trust something beyond the slow plunge into formlessness that her life has become. 

In earlier outings like Booksmart and Don't Worry Darling, Wilde had a tendency to overplay the comedy, pushing it toward a kind of Ken Russell psychocamp. That is mostly done here through the score and her own performance as Angela but what happens is that it fits perfectly into The Invite. Soon after, she would present a more tempered and naturalistic expression of it in I Want Your Sex under Greg Araki's direction. In place, among the other three distinct personae, her Angela provides a square-completing corner.

From the off, this reminded me of the kind of late 'sixties sex comedy. Taking its cues from recent French and Italian cinema, Hollywood affected a controlled explosion of risque issues-based movies, cleansed with the likes of the previous decade's aging stars like Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. If one pops up on a streamer, give it a spin. Wilde's cinephilia makes this stagey fare a movie rather than a theatre piece as the various spaces in the house are used to strong effect.

The Invite works despite its moments of overplay like the score and counterpoint dialogue and it works because the cast make it work. The issues harboured by the couples might seem spare but their handling that reveals vulnerability and fear through fine acting craft brings the whole thing home. I have not seen the Spanish original but will now hunt it down. This is a comedy that works best if you do some work but it will be work well done.

Review: PENNY LANE IS DEAD

Penny has just got into Uni after all that schooling and gets two best and oldest friends down to her family's beach house for a weekend of celebration. Just the girls, Toni and Amy. Then Kat turns up. The wild girl who, as Penny's cousin, demands to join them, offering a commemoration of a cup cake for each. We've already seen her making these and we know that the icing isn't just vanilla. Penny crashes and the others put her to bed in her own room. Then there's a knock at the door. It's Kat's loose canon boyfriend, his worryingly older companion Merrick and the unknown quantity Rodowsky. Maybe they do just want to use the phone. It's 1986 and they don't have their own. 

This is Mia Kate Russell's debut feature and feels like it. High production values, solid performances and good action choreography cannot turn messy writing into cinema. As a home invasion story, we need establishment of characters, some inner conflict and then the hold off as the invaders negotiate with their captives before the big showdowns. Don't look at me, this is genre cinema and I don't make the rules. 

Here, we have Penny and Toni finally admitting their attraction to each other is deeper than classmate, Amy's probaby lifelong trauma recovery, and Kat's chaotic anger at everyone she's ever known. We also get the hazardously unstable trio of bad boys balanced by a pair of good boys who are kind of off screen until the story needs them. You get the issue? It's less a stressful standoff than a writer's chessboard in a game against herself.

The first half hour contains almost everything in the plot and the rest is just elongation of that: the bad guys enter and then variously argue with each other or act impulsively with either no consequence or major plot shifting violence. But then we know so little of these people that it's hard to care for them even at the point of death. By the hour mark the film feels more like one and a half hours old and the final half hour is stretched to snapping until some very ill-advised plotting suddenly appears. 

Home-invasioners need careful tension to be played with an expert bow. If there is anything to be had from ennui in the process it should add to the plot's frustration, not transferred to the viewer as a waning care. I will, give props to Tahlee Fereday for her Toni. Toni is the best written and has most agency out of the original trio and her Joan Jett tough girl offering keeps what remains workable of the movie ... working.

Of less importance but annoying to one of my vintage is the parade of anachronisms. It's 1986 because no one has mobile phones. Apart form one or two instances, the needledrops are more like 1976. By 1986, The Angels track that opens the film had already garnered its cheeky audience response which would have played much better than the seventies original. Then again, that might have been a permission that didn't land. No one exchanged a low five with anyone else and (though this might have been for a potential US market) people didn't apply for college now or then in Australia, but Uni. Of the girls only Kat looks like she gets her fashion sense from mid-80s magazines, the others could be, as they are, from now. (I did say this was of less importance.)

I think there's enough here to form a promise of what Russell can deliver. The market has changed and the new barbarians of cinema are charging in from years of YouTube training, literate, cheeky and effective. It's not just the old guard that has to mind that.

Review: WHISTLE

A group of school friends come across an ancient artefact, a Mayan battle whistle that suggests it can summon the dead. One of them, at her boyfriend's goading, blows it. At this stage we've already seen people die horribly after doing this and now it's up to the chums to work it out and do something about it. The closest thing to a spoiler I'll give is the second act revelation that the inscription on the side of the grim object doesn't mean summon the dead but summon your own death. People who blow this whistle meet their deaths but accelerated. If they die of heart failure at seventy that's how they are going to go at seventeen, with their future selves delivering the bads.

I didn't go to the cinema to see this as it looked like yet another late '90s style teen horror with a decent budget and low level scares. Between Scream and its clones that had a good three years before The Blair Witch Project made them irrelevant. While there has been a return to this format with outings like Thanksgiving and Clown in a Cornfield, I just didn't want to sit through another. Add online movie hire and a quick argument-settling choice, we landed on Whistle, come what may. So, how does it do?

As for new themes or tints, a little queerness minus judgement is a welcome addition but by now long established in the genre. Mostly, it's tropes added for a purpose-built unit. However, if you consider how the heyday of the slasher movie was composed of a continual loop of tropes and is now evaluated as a good old day, what fault this film for doing the same. It's greatest debt is to the Final Destination series in which, title by title, a group of friends was stalked by death having cheated it in some way. What Whistle adds is a personal touch where the future death visits the young, leaving the question of fate against potential of the youth. It's not much but it does work.

The cast is up to scratch, led by the charismatic Dafne Keen who binds all behavioural and narrative gaps with promise. The cast is typically more solid than the writing and the direction. We meet the weirdo religious psycho who is also a drug dealer and his persona goes from kindly alpha to bad guy in a few lines of dialogue and believably but we have already clocked him singling out heroine Chrys in the opening school morning scene. His character, eventually, little more than a plot device for the final act, providing stakes that it doesn't really need. But what are we expecting, Ingmar Bergman?

What really brings this one up beyond the level of serviceable is some solid art direction and well crafted kills and, really, if you can't sail through a genre piece on those two features what are you doing in front of this one? It works. You will forget it the next day but it helped the pizza and beer go down and ended under two hours later.

Viewing notes: Whistle is no longer in cinemas but can be hired online or watched as part of a Prime subscription.  

Review: I WANT YOUR SEX

Artist and gallery owner Erika hires generationally timid Eliot on the spot and soon reveals it's because she wants him for sex, dom and sub BDSM. This is framed by Erika as a kind of job perk and Eliot, wading sluggishly through a loveless and near sexless relationship, acquiesces. This only gets more complicated until the big third act showdown which changes everything  ... or does it.

What feels like an early '70s sex comedy produced by High Hefner but dragged ragged into the twenty-first century could easily look like a cake (with too much icing) of workplace assault and exploitation to the Eliots in the audience but that's the point. Director Greg Araki, like, me has no skin in this inter-generational gundown. He's an X (I'm a Jones) which is also part of the fun. And fun there is with Millennial Erika morphing from Ice Empress to sourmouthed dominatrix in her journey of terraforming Eliot's low social-skilled Zed boy who is by necessity as comfortable admitting his masturbation while in a relationship as he is pretending that the relationsihp itself has any substance. 

If you cannot see beyond the depiction of an abusive power game and that your recognition of that aspect is essential to your seeing the comedy, then this film is not for you. Araki doesn't shy from the darker side of the situation by trowelling on the wit: Eliot is fully aware of the unethical imbalance and calls the abuse what it is; he just likes the perks of it when they do come. Would this work if the genders were reversed? This is tested, in a way, by the threesome scene towards the end of the second act in which roles and points of atraction are so dizzily confused that it threatens a few disintegrations. You are, in other words, invited to speculate about gender roles while within this specific reversal. This is so well served by the pace and performances that you can enjoy the counterpoint of thinking what-ifs along with following some fast paced storytelling.

Performances? Olivia Wilde's always-on screen is dizzying in its caprices, declaring a loud paradox one minute and then crumpling it into the bin as nonsense the next. Her energy constrasts with Cooper Hoffman's listless timidity that masks fists of frustration. Araki is clever enough to mete this out so that it doesn't just lead to a climactic explosion in the finale. He has a more complex plan in mind which you'll get to.

Araki fills his screen with thick neon swatches and neo-pop art cheek. Interventions of other genres trade screen time with sudden breakouts of animation which look like the kind of thing that is leading YouTubers to cinema auteurism. Araki doesn't have to do any of this but in this more conventional narrative style that he must adopt to bring off this central conceit, it also feels like a little nod to the auteurs of his own generation, Natural Born Killers-era Oliver Stone or Wes Anderson: it doesn't feel like he's claiming the interventions for himself.

The satire Velvet Buzzsaw from a few years back did something similar using the contemporary art world and, while it had some genuinely funny ironic scenes, never quite outran its own quest for cleverness. I Want Your Sex does work because the cleverness is split between the affectations of the characters and the overall wit of the tale: it's made funny to be funny, all else is collateral. That means that the willing audience shall be the winner.

PS - if you're reviewing this for anything online and need a picture, DO NOT search for the title, even if you add every qualifier from cast crew, date, production company etc. I finally found the image I used by removing the title.