Review: THE WRETCHED

Ben goes to live with his dad while the divorce is panning out. His left arm is in a cast from a mishap and he isn't much of a fan of his circumstances but he gets a job at the family business which is not taxing so he can't really complain. Meanwhile the young rednecks next door get a special visit from the local witch of the woods and the woman turns from lumbering young parent to a forbidding siren like horror who leaves flowers wilted in her wake. Children, including her own, begin to disappear. Ben sees this and has to act but first he has to be right about it.

It's the complications that make this supernatural gaslighting tale nudge a little over the mass of off the shelf supernatural tales cramming the horror section of the VoD services. The people next door are being taken over by the witch but they also know how to appear normal when needed. Ben's broken wrist came from an impulsive theft and escape attempt so he has a history as a troubled teen which diminishes his credibility as a witness to atrocity. The more he has to report and investigate the more he has to trust an increasingly hostile field.

John-Paul Howard in the central role gives us a relatable teenager. Bright enough to understand the signs of foul play but sexually eager enough to miss sight of a trick being played on him and philosophy enough for us to see how much of a sport he is about it. This is important as while the film as a whole progresses without a great deal to offer beyond a standard genre outing without the warmth of this character we'd probably just hit pause and get back to it some time down the track if at all.

But while the stakes could be higher and the tension tighter The Wretched turns out to be a perfectly fine genre outing that will engage both the genre vets and casual tourists. Even the sequel wink at the end has just enough cleverness to it that we might not even mind if there is another one. As well there might be given the purpose-built evil figure that is flat enough to be malleable for future outings with minds as or more creative than here. Giving the dough a little extra time to rise? You could do worse.

Hired from Apple movies.

HOLIDAYS!

Yo, folkeroons of the edges of the screen, hope you are all coping with the ashen grind of the plague outside. This post is to announce that I'm putting Shadows Contacless in suspended animation for at least four and a bit weeks. Have I run out of movies to show you? Never. But as October is rapidly approaching I must attend to one of the few religious holidays in my annual calendar: 31 Nights o' Horror. (Oh, come on, you all know that friend who takes a hol every year camping (like in The Blair Witch Project), fishing (like in Jaws), caving (like in The Descent) or going to Grandad's place (like in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Well, it's just like that.

Yes, from Oct 1 to Halloween I will be watching a horror movie per night. I'll be plundering the fare on Shudder and anything even vaguely attractive on the other VoD services. That and digging my chattering teeth into some auld favourites and new players in my own collection like the 4K discs of Suspiria or US as well as the great mass of horror pieces in my greater collection.

I'm not including Shadows in this as this is a holiday and I want to relax into this fare, however nerve-wracking, without having to worry about the sensitivity, values or tolerance of anyone else at all. Some of these will probably be shared but with a very few others and I will happily take suggestions for shared screenings along the way.

Also, I'll be polling the folk in the Facebook group to see if they want it to continue after my holiday. This will require a response as I won't be putting the effort in if faced with a vacuum. So, let's see how that goes.

On a less whingey note it has been 24 weeks of lively chats with some great films and a building sense of community. This has been a great comfort to me in these bleak days of plague. The engagement alone has kept me from feeling I was doing this alone. For which, I thank each and every one of you who joined in and got stuck into some great cinema. Felt like old times.

Shadows Contactless: Friday 25 9 pm, Netflix Party: SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

Cassius is out of luck and debt ridden and stumbles one step further down towards rock bottom. So, he gets a job in a call centre selling ... whatever crap he has to. It's tough at first but the old timer next to him tells him to use his white voice. Skeptical, Cassius tries it and starts raking in the sales. Soon he gets the invite from management into the deluxe realm in the upper floors he's been noticing, with the golden elevator peopled by the ostentatiously confident. 

It's good but some things aren't.  He's made friends back in the sweatshop who are chasing industrial action and he's now on the wrong side of them. His performance artist girlfriend is getting restless, politically and romantically, and the vibe he's getting from management is getting sinister. All the while people are being invited to leave their cares at the door in a kind of industrial slavery and it's working. The most popular show on TV is called I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me.

Boots Riley's full scale assault on contemporary exploitation, race relations, the gig economy and savage capitalism is the kind of movie that can make you laugh out loud when recalling a scene or line. It's dark and brutal but lifted at all times by a disarming comedic timing and constant wit, like Fight Club directed by Michel Gondry. At its centre, LaKeith Stanfield plays a contemporary Candide, going along with the good but never quite thinking it through. You will not expect the final act.

OK, we're changing at least for this one by going back to Netflix Party. I understand that this might lose me some regulars but I need to seriously rethink how to get us connected for shared screenings independent of platform. Meantime, here's how to get it.

You'll need to use the Chrome browser.

Find your way to Extensions (through settings) and search for Netflix Party and add it to the browser. A logo with the red letters NP will appear among the icons beside your address bar.

I will pick the movie and create a Netflix Party with a chatroom and post the link on the SHADOWS group page in Facebook. Click on that as the start time (I'll post it) approaches and you should end up in the Netflix chatroom (you will have an avatar and will be able to choose you own name for the chat). You'll notice that the movie has not started yet. 

If you don't see the chatroom and the movie starts playing you are in the wrong place. NB - you can only do this with a browser which might well mean you need to watch it on a computer. I get a laptop and connect it to my tv with an HDMI cable. This is the bit where we start losing people. You might also be able to use Chromecast (don't have that so can't try it).

When the time comes I'll start the movie and every one will see the same thing at the same time.

So, join me, won't you?

Shadows Contactless: Friday 18 September 9pm, SBS on Demand and Messenger: DELICATESSEN

 

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I've only seen this once and when it was new. It's from so long ago and there have been so many movies since that I'm struggling to recall it. Except, of course, that there are scenes and images from it that might as well be from Youtube clips they are so well shared. Delicatessen is one of the arthouse staples from the early '90s that everyone had seen. If you had a Valhalla or Astor calendar on your fridge at the time and for a decade on you would recall the word in the thick typeface under the pig. Thing is I can recall it so little that I can't remember if I enjoyed it or just said I enjoyed it. It will almost be a first viewing.

What I can say is that this is the first feature of the team Jeunet and Caro who also gave us (together or apart) The City of Lost Children and Amelie. If you know them you know the deal. They get into a look and vibe like steampunk or comic book and tell extraordinary tales, never so cute that they can't also gross you out, never so gross that they can't also filter it through humour. Mostly, they offer invention, wit, visual wonder and engagement and invite you to the party. Let's go.

Shadows Contactless: Friday 11 September 9pm: SBS on Demand + Messenger: THE UNKNOWN GIRL

 

A young doctor in her first senior job prevents a trainee from answering an after hours call at the clinic as she judges it not to be an emergency. The next day police officers arrive to request the surveillance tape from the door. It shows one of the last actions of a woman who was murdered that night as she sought refuge at the clinic. Sounds like the start of a thriller. It is, kind of. This 2016 film from les freres Dardenne concentrates on character, the character of the doctor who seeks to know the deceased woman posthumously. Still sounds like a thriller.

Well, it is and it isn't. The Dardenne brothers have for decades been serving up the grimmest of social realism for decades from their base in Belgium and here they stretch out to genre to see what they can find out about their characters. The good news is that it works. We do get a hefty load of realist gravity but we also get a kind of lightening effect from the performances and an openness to cinema beyond the indignant eye of the usual fare. It is grim but it's also entertaining.

The Dardennes always cast perfectly and they place at the centre of the intrigue the luminous and compelling Adele Haenel who keeps the centre heavy but vital. (Actually, if you like the central perofrmance of this film I'll just slyly direct you to Portrait of a Lady on Fire which you can see on Stan. It's an extraordinary two hander which topped my favourite films of last year.)

If you like your verite don't worry about the thriller aspects, they're kept in rein. If you like your thrillers, don't worry, you'll enjoy getting to know the lady in the centre of the frame.

Join me.

Shadows Contactless: Friday September 4 9pm SBS on Demand and Facebook Messenger: WADJDA

Wadjda is a schoolgirl. She wants her own bike. To do this she enters a competition that could get her there. She has to be careful about this. Her mother isn't keen for her to go riding a bike around town as one wrong prang might break the girl's hymen. Wadjda is ten years old and lives in Saudi Arabia.

You might get a couple of impressions from that description that you are in for either a grim tale of oppression or a knockabout comedy of innuendo but this is neither of those things. There is a lot to be said for the position of women in this particular society and expectations of them and Wadjda's growing awareness of the kind of hurdles she will be facing in the not too distant future. But this film does something that many of its kind don't do, it remembers she's a kid and how kids pursue their things of great import. This prevents the film from preaching or being too sentimental and I can safely promise that you will be neither bored nor lectured and right up to the final gesture before the end credits you might well be charmed.

See you on the couch.

MIFF 68 1/2: Festival of Ether

In a world where celebration was life one festival stood up...

They were falling like dominos. Performance feasts like Melbourne Comedy, crowd magnets like the Grand Prix all tumbled before the microscopic player COVID-19. When I read that my beloved MIFF, too, was plummeting from the sky. And then toward July the wreckage stirred, dust blustered out and the thing rose to its feet and declared it would be going ahead, it would be a little different, given the times, but it would be there for us. It even gave itself a cinephilic joke as a name: MIFF 68 1/2.

The program was up by mid-July. It was expectably slimmer than normal and the pricing was acceptable (mostly). You couldn't do anything with the information on the handsomely refurbished website. Members were given earlybird benefits and were the first to be let loose on the fare but, really, apart from the festival itself that reaped some extra lolly, who really got anything out of membership this year?

I wasn't caring a deal about that as I was trying to work out how ticketing was being handled. Minipasses? Single Tickets. What delivery were we looking at? It had to be streaming but what was the platform would they take advantage of the flexibility? Finally, we'd see an end of the sold-out session or the issue of popular titles being uncomfortably full (when it's a physical event, I have switched tickets away from too full sessions). All of that would, however temporarily, be a thing of the past. Right? Later....

PROGRAM
At first glance it looked bland and unadventurous: documentaries, contemporary auteurs, verite. Then I noticed Dau. Natasha a product of the infamous Ilya Khrzanovsky's Dau. project (Google it) but then I recalled the film 4 from a few years back and passed. The plain packaging of Women Make Film almost had me passing on it, too until I realised how massive and compelling it might be (and was) A few more picks later and I had a modest five or so which was enough to take a week off work from home and feel like I was part of an event. The second week brought new titles and I added three.

What's Happening?
It was hard to find out how it was going to work until a breath before the festival itself. This made it difficult to plan. Were they going to replicate the effect of physical screenings by limiting their availability. Would there be a bulk deal like a minipass? What platform were they going to use and would I be able to plug into it? And so on. Without knowing most of these I decided to play it safe and take the second week off work from home (yes, that means something). It meant that, worst come to worst, I'd have a work free week off. The shape of the festival and access to it were to remain mysteries until the big launch on YouTube. It felt like an attempt to juice up the sense of event but it just felt like a grasp at the old normal.

The Website
The website was redesigned from the ground up and was an attractive and useful thing, eventually. I failed to get in until I asked on the FB group and was told that the redesign required new account creation from everyone which should have been on the landing page. Ok, done but I used to be able to go back and check previous years' activity which could come in  handy. That's gone forever.

If you used Chrome on Windows 10 it was anyone's guess where to click on the thumbnail to get to a given film's page. It really did seem randomised. On other platforms it was more consistent.

Ticketing
The main thing was the admission that there was no control to be had as to the numbers of viewers per household. Indeed, the sole means of policing was the silence in the streets after curfew (for Melburnians, at least).

There were bundles offered of like films for any who wished for a more controlled experience and these were well priced. While there was an adjusted membership pricing and benefit list it held no better lure than under the old circumstances. I could still have done with a minipass but as the pricing was acceptable I went with a list about the same size as a mini.

Pricing was in two tiers: $14 (most of them) and $20 (spotlights) which is more or less on par with services like Apple Movies. Exceptions included the epic Women Make Film series which was $20 for the lot (viewing windows per episode, a relief for a 14 hour series).

Delivery
When it was unveiled the delivery method was via the website with a number of recommendations. I chose plugging a laptop into my tv via HDMI which mostly worked a treat (problems I had with this were pretty much due to which device I was using). Once started, punters were given a decent 30 hour window to complete the film which allowed a rewatch if needed (see below for issues with this).

Anyone puzzled by this or without the means was stuck with watching on a computer or smaller screen device.

If you needed to pause a film for a later resumption within the window you were faced with the entire introductory slideshow and ads again, you couldn't just pick it up. So what? Well, the slides for sponsors etc., while I understand why they're there, are on screen forever as the ridiculously high volume background music throbs. Then you get a few commercials. Normal fare and then an age restriction warning and any notes about the screening itself (captions etc.). Is there no way at all to allow that to be bypassed for a resumed screening? I timed it a few times and was able to potter about getting food or drinks ready while it blared away.

Films designated "Spotlight" were unable to be played until a given timeframe on a single date. This struck me as an idea to inject a sense of moment to highlighted features, to add a feeling of communal festival going. Wouldn't that be most effective if the after chat (or the simultaneous chat) were allowed by agreement between friends who'd organise it anyway? A complete absence of popular participation in available forums (Twitter and FB were crammed with publicity posts which caught a very few responses by comparison with previous fests. I used to enjoy seeing the live Twitter wall at MIFF venues; it really gave out a sense of community. I can't, then, quite comprehend the decision to limit particular titles to such constrained windows when the advantage of having a VoD platform is that it frees the punters of that entirely.

And what's with limited ticketing? Is that really a licencing restriction? A technical one; is there a limit to the amount of connections? Any of these might be true but because they are so constricting it would be useful to know why this is so as it makes it a lot easier to deal with and plan by. If anything like this form of MIFF happens again, just tell us why you are constrained to limit certain films. It will be a lot less annoying knowing that it isn't just someone's futile attempt at creating buzz.

What I Saw Ranked

Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema - An encyclopedic epic of how cinema works using only the output of women filmmakers. Mesmerising and ocean deep.

Shirley - Good stab at biographical film that uses the themes of the subject over a timeline of significant events and creates a film that would be interesting if it were about anyone.

She Dies Tomorrow - The thought of mortality as a virus plays out among some ten percenter Californians. More effective for its subtlety.

Prayer for a Lost Mitten - A cinematic poem of charm and quiet power.

The Tango of the Widower and its Distorting Mirror - A puzzle rewarding the adventurous.

The Go-Gos - A good rockumentary tells of how an act works, for better and worse

Black Bear - A serpent of invention eating its tail.

La Llorona - Sombre and deep felt magical realism about the resonance of tyranny.

Anne at 13,00 Ft - Effectively difficult. Too effectively difficult.

So...

I had gripes about the teasing approach which felt tiresome rather than exciting and the delivery method could stand a lot of work and a few other whinges but, look, after all the other major events had to cancel, MIFF found a way of forging ahead and provided a decent generalist program that still shied form the mainstream. They delivered.