SHADOWS Netflix Party Friday April 10@8.30 pm (EST): THOROUGHBREDS

"You know, the thing about this town is, the sawdust smells fantastic. But you are still in a hamster cage."

Present day Connecticut: the beauty of privilege conceals the same brutal competition as everywhere else but this is the land of the 1% and all of that gets sublimated. Amanda, fresh from her own alleged atrocity, is sent to childhood friend Lily for private tutoring. It's meant to help her grades but really it's about forcing Amanda to socialise. Lily is a top shelf student but awkward to the point of brittleness but it's a brief round of honesty (with some of the best dialogue you'll hear in anything from the past ten years). It's not so much things in common as a kind of trade in skills and it turns into a film noir plan that uses their rarefied world to attack it. Less Strangers on a Train than Conspirators in Paradise, perhaps, but darkly witty, starkly purposed and lean cut.

Olivia Cooke (The Limehouse Golem) turns deadpan into threat and develops it into a wealth of nuance. Anton Yelchin, in one of his final roles before his early death, goes to town with a bad boy who could only ever be a would-be. Paul Sparks (Boardwalk Empire and House of Cards) impresses as the step-dad: a corporate figure whose business is not as relevant as his success and whose fitness regime gets more of his attention than his marriage. And as his wife, Kaili Vernoff is a woman confined by stolen power: she appears at one point in a hi-tech tanning bed that resembles the kind of coffin you might get in Vegas if you had the money. Finally, it's Anja Taylor-Joy, fresh from her breakthrough turn in the VVitch, who bears the heaviest character arc, using her fear against itself and finding an intimidating strength.

Unlike post Trump fare such as Tragedy Girls or Ingrid Goes West (both good flix, btw), Toroughbreds pares all the potential camp away from the screen, knowing that the image of wealth and social place need only be suggested for the deadly events to take power. The climax takes place off-screen in a single static shot with only the sound and light of a television. That it's chilling is how good this film is.

Join me, won't you?

Notes from Behind the Front Door: Cinema in time of Isolation #1

This will be a series that will go for as long as it needs. I will be listing recommendations from the available video services. This will not be comprehensive and it will be driven by my taste. This means that you are welcome to expand on that in comments, making your own recommendations for me and the community of this blog.

NETFLIX

The biggest game in town as far as paid subscription goes. It also supports watch parties with a Chrome browser addon.

THOROUGHBREDS: like Heavenly Creatures as an episode of Daria. Two daughters of the 1% in Connecticut find that they have more in common than they would ever have admitted. This soon leads to a film-noire style co-operative plan. But what is the real goal here? Dialogue that could have been written by Diablo Cody channelling Samuel Beckett delivered by a very solid cast and almost cruelly lean filmmaking. Try this as a watch party as it will get you talking. I saw this first at MIFF and more recently as my first Netflix Party.

LADY BIRD: Greta Gerwig's solo directorial debut feature completely disarmed me after I was ready to condemn it. Gerwig wrote and starred in the excerable Frances Ha and, together with her creative and life partner Noah Baumbach, has committed some of the most repellent "indy cinema" of the past three decades. So, why does this story of a teenage girl with quirks who encounters narcissistic others, also with quirks, work? Because, unlike anything with Baumbach, it feels genuine. It has real heart and superb performances from the likes of Saoirse Ronan.

STAN

Local precursor to Netflix created by two media giants Fairfax and Nine (which are both the same thing now). More Australian content and a noticeably better selection of films from before the year 2000.

IN BRUGES: Colin Farrell and James Gleason, two Irish hitmen, are out of the country after a hit-gone-wrong (just how wrong I won't spoil) and have to deal with their new setting in the historic Belgian town and each other. Farrell's turn as a motor-mouthed bad boy can be screamingly funny but his motivations just screaming. Gleason, as the centre of gravity, seems overly gentle until you learn how important his patience is. Ralph Fiennes's cockney mob boss has walked out of a Harold Pinter version of The Krays. Clemence Poesy as the chief female role is given far more substance than her type of character usually gets in a story like this and runs with it. Long but constantly diverting.

TRIANGLE: A gang of bright young things sets out on a three hour tour except they don't end up on Gilligan's Island. Wrecked by bad weather they drift until catching sight of a ship. Boarding it, they find it deserted but for some terrifying presences. Things are not what they seem or even when they seem. A mind-warping tale of consequences taken into mathematical complexity only to reveal (after showing all that working) that it can take so little to change a world.

SBS on Demand

The online version of the tv station that always had the most interesting movies. Like Netflix and Stan the titles can fall off the shelf quite suddenly so, if you see something you like watch as soon as you can.

THE DRAUGHTSMAN'S CONTRACT: Intrigue among the landed gentry in Restoration Britain as a commoner artist is contracted to immortalise the lands and wealth of a family. The contract of the title provides the film with a plot about the artist's attempts to game the system while the dreary commission can be done. But who is gaming whom? Peter Greenaway's breakthrough art house hit with its strident Purcell-influenced score, lavish period tableaux and high humour formed a major thread of the cinema of its time, allowing a resurgence of wit both spoken and visual and a hard edged formalism as funny as it was cultured.

THE LIVES OF OTHERS: A tale from within the corridors of Stasi-infested East Germany as an agent gets increasingly involved in a particular case to the point where he seems to lose his old self-definition. Ulrich Muher carries this dark tale with the stoicism expected of his character which makes his transformation weigh a ton. 

Review: THE INVISIBLE MAN

Cecilia quietly escapes her abusive husband one night and leaves their designer home through the back way through his bizarre looking laboratory and runs to freedom. Freedom is tough as the PTSD still grips hard, even after news of her tormentor's suicide comes through. He's left her a lot of money with attached legal and sanity clauses. She starts to feel watched in her new home which starts to act like a poltergeist has moved in. No one believes her and she grits her teeth and bears it until the stakes are raised horrifying levels and she has a life or death cause to prove.

Meanwhile, the presence of the thing in her house that follows her everywhere grows nastier with behaviour breaking into some hard physical violence. It's the kind of violence that her ex might well escalate to if he knows that not only can he get away with it but that no one will believe his victim when she talks about it. This tough representation of domestic violence which packs in both physical assault and gaslighting on a massive scale might quickly run its course but Leigh Whannell in his difficult second album keeps the helm steady through surprisingly deep waters. Surprising because as co-creator of the Saws and Conjurings we're more used to him coming up with toy horror movies with stopwatch-timed jump scares and Halloween costume ghosties. This is as deep a plunge into real social issues as you can get before you crash through the mainstream wall and get into Ken Loach starkness. But it's a tautly constructed thriller with a sci-fi garnish that doesn't waste a second of its two hours on screen.

Part of why we don't mind spending the time, apart from the expertly handled action, lives in the casting of Elizabeth Moss in the lead. From the white-knuckled fragility of the survivor of abuse to the incredulity at a life again hit by abuse to the fury she must muster for the pushback, Moss goes through everything she has. Magnetic and powerful she owns her every scene (almost every one in the film). One second act moment is worth a note: she has resolved to believe that her abuser is invisible and in the house and sits, armed at the end of her room. She imagines he is in the doorway and addresses him in tones that she only now, her back literally against the wall, can find. The silent reverse shots of the doorway threaten to reveal something sudden and violent and we get the sense that the strength of her gaze, her words and voice alone are stopping the antagonist who, unable to conceive of them, hasn't planned on them and is surprised into his silence.

I have to note, also, the pleasure of a solid electronics-led score that can turn a scene from safe to weird and lightless in seconds and so dominate that its almost visible. The great bursts of real orchestra at key scenes didn't bother me as it might as this other choice was made and demonstrates the value of choosing a composer and letting them have at it. I'll be noting the future work of Benjamin Wallfish.

Leigh Whannell has done what few do in prising himself from a partner role in self-avowed popcorn cinema into use of the mainstream rules to speak of serious things. It reminds me of how the 2014 horror film It Follows used a trope of old slasher movies (sex=death) to broaden it out into a greater question of shared responsibility. A similar trek has happened here as H.G. Wells's fable of corrupting power has been brought into a tightly framed adaptation of a true life horror that fills the news. Yes, it breaks into battle in the third act - it is and must continue to be a mainstream movie - but along the way we have been shown again that even popcorn can teach us something about our tastes.

Review: THE LIGHTHOUSE

Willem Dafoe (this is true) in a speech about
his cooked lobster.

A novice and an old hand travel to a lighthouse on a rock somewhere off the coast of North America. The young man is quickly disabused by the elder of the possibility of him tending the light. Instead, his duties will be menial. The older man takes the opportunity to establish the distribution of power. This will keep happening and each time it does the performance of the pushback will be greater, more flamboyant and harsher. It's a living and it's only for four weeks and he's here now so at worst it's a few stories in the pub down the line.

But it's hard and only gets harder. His chores are difficult and he's given little instruction. Left to himself he finds the eroticism of a carved mermaid he found in his mattress a distraction and even powerful nourishment for his imagination. And on the island with the pushiest seagulls in the seven seas he has a vent for his frustrations. Above him, in the lighthouse gallery, the old wickie keeps an eye, chastising him over dinner for poor work or inviting bad luck by attacking the gulls.

The development of this relationship occupies almost all of the running time and for much of it the thought occurs that like the young man's lumping of his lot we are in for the kind of buddy movie that Samuel Beckett might have imagined. However, we are only given enough to follow as, piece by piece, a genuine narrative arc will appear and be fulfilled. All I'll say of that is that the ending will make sense to you if you have a passing knowledge of Greek mythology. My own is not more than glancing but I did get it and if it is giving you trouble plug a keyword description of what you see in the final shot into Google and you'll see, too.

Robert Eggers shoots in deep monochrome in a frame closer to a square than academy ratio, keeping the action and scenes breathless and claustrophobic. His two strong main cast maintain a near constant wrestle, verbal or physical, and we have so trouble understanding the powerplay. It's important here as without such concrete character establishment we would soon be lost in the increasingly interwoven fantasy images served us. Almost all of these are from the younger man and can render mermaids from the spray or turn the wickie into Poseidon with death ray eyes. Eggers isn't trying for an updated Eraserhead nor the camp of Guy Maddin but something I'll call the A24 universe. What I mean by that is that every significant release from the A24 studio is what with varying degrees of cringe is called elevated horror or, more accurately, horror adjacent by which narratives can veer as close as they like to horror cinema without ever having to commit to the genre. You can see this in Midsommar and It Comes at Night both of which find extra texture and flavour with a pinch of genre. Eggers' own The Witch (which I found disappointing) is happy to stretch into pure genre while still (mostly) keeping its feet on the ground as a gritty period drama.

My initial feeling on leaving the cinema was that Eggers had stuck his point early and indulged himself in too much repetition, restating the conflict between the two men and the puerile depths it could sink to. Enough, already. But letting the ending absorb changed my mind. The younger man reveals a secret while drunk which returns with consequences. His ambition toward the light will also have a payback. When these tiles fall into place we really have seen something extraordinary. However alienating the constant harshness is, the literally dazzling climax will cover all that with balm. And then we get the closing image. And then I think: no, this works.

Review: BOMBSHELL

We begin on the surface as Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly takes us for a tour around the Fox News offices. It's a world-wise but client facing monologue, just enough public professionalism, just enough sassy cynicism to make it feel human. So far it feels like The Big Short, the sprawling media-savvy epic of the GFC from a few years back. But we're not in for that kind of movie, this one is far more along the road of nuanced powerplay where films like All the President's Men live. Changes in the balance of power happen slowly and subtly as a result of out of office meetings or overhead phone conversations, of legal meetings where little is said directly and private consultations which can lead to downfalls.

In 2016 a lawsuit was brought against Fox CEO for sexual harrassment by a number of female staff. Each one of the plaintiffs stood to lose their jobs at Fox and perhaps all of US broadcasting as a result. It's a kind of Me Too origins episode.

The capsule moment in this film happens when young and ambitious Kyla sneaks a face to face with the CEO and ends up twirling before him and raising her dress until he sees her underwear. This has been done by such tiny degrees that she has hardly had time to notice the situation skidding out of her control. The moment I'm thinking of is when starts to reveal her legs, feels compressed and awkward and lets out a small embarrassed laugh and does a kind of squirming dance move. She has no other way of coping. Roger the Hutt is just doing it all by remote from his office chair and she's almost leaving her body. After a cinematic caesura she returns to her desk ashen and numb.

That tiny gesture feels like the last call for protest before her path is cast and it is pointedly twice performative being Margot Robbie understanding Kyla to the point of embodiment. Seldom has an onscreen sexual violation carried such weight. The only one I can properly compare it to is the scene in Neil La Bute's In The Company of Men where Chad demands to see the balls of a lower-rung staffer. There's an intensely uncomfortable creepiness about both but the Kyla/Ailes' scene wins (if that's the word) for its extra commitment. It's the only time we'll have to see this in the film. Other instances are either told in shorthand without need to be explicit or given a different approach (there's a strong inner monologue vs spoken response scene that works to a different effect but deserves mention).

The story is told as a triple stream converging in the final act. It concentrates on Megyn Kelly's story as she is at the peak of her power but the parallel tales of Gretchen Carlson and Kyla Pospisil are given distinct arcs that tell of one anchorwoman being edged out of her career and the third only starting hers. The title Bombshell and poster art triptych of Theron, Kidman and Robbie takes a ride on the notion of the blonde bombshell but the bombshell is one of litigation and the charging anger that fuelled it. For once the teaser for a current film is actually a teasing thing, making use of the confusion of the title. Clever. No, really, genuinely clever.

Theron's Megyn Kelly is all American Patrician, controlling her voice and expression according to the proximity of mics and cameras, in poised control but with the wily alertness of a lawyer. Theron uses the lowest register she has and the effect is less of perfect diction than continuously packaged information. Kidman as Gretchen Carlson plays for controlled frustration, building a case methodically, biting her lip at setbacks and keeping it cool in front of her kids. It's an actively still performance, possibly the hardest one to pull off but she does. Margot Robbie is at least free of a true life point of comparison as her character is a composite. From her scene described above she moves and speaks with a gathering wisdom. As Roger Ailes John Lithgow is a mesa of entitlement brought to physical dependency by a life of others' service, not without a supportive acknowledgement or his own wisdom. His uncontrolled sexual hunger in the scene with Robbie tells us he still thinks he's about seventeen.

Bombshell works and works against expectations that it might be more of a flamboyantly cynical satire like something by Sidney Lumet or Robert Altman but that opening tour is there to establish the status quo, not to unseat it, that comes later. It does beg your patience to follow leads that might not thrill but will form a pattern of behaviour that will form a massive tapestry of privilege and abuse and how the response to it had to work. It's single sides of phone calls, glances, meetings with closed shutters and unwritten rules writ large upon the light. This might be the tale of food fights at the carnival end of the news spectrum but it describes the heart of the Murdoch Modor, lightless and throbbing under the natural-look surface, without which wars might have been clipped by diplomacy and presidential candidates might have been buried under stadiums that rang with mockery. So, it matters. It's also bloody effective.

Review: 1917

Lance Corporals Blake and Scofield are woken from their slumber in a field by a sergeant who orders them to the general's tent where they are given a written order to be delivered through an extremely hazardous route. If they get through they will save thousands of lives. They set off through the British trenches to the point where they have to leave the protection of their own troops and go cross country.

That's the plot of the film. Thin? Well, it's war torn France near the end of WWI and the journey is the thing. Also, there's a plot point that my refusal to reveal severely limits my giving further detail. With a run time of a single minute under two hours, what is there left to say?

The look and landscape of WWI has been so well served throughout the history of cinema that refreshing it for a contemporary drama might seem unlikely. What Sam Mendes has chosen to do here is to suggest wars beyond it and even, perhaps, before it. The uniforms and haircuts are all correct. The bi-planes that buzz through the air can be done with CG. There's even a British Mk 1 tank upturned in a trench. However, the prospect of survival, moment to moment, and any scene that digs into the noise and destruction of warfare might as well be Crimean or Roman. The approach is not so much to present The Great War but to suggest war itself.

This can be overreached. There are decisions made by characters that need post hoc reasoning by audience members rather than flow from the circumstances. The course of this film could at several points be mistaken for a feature length theme park ride and at several other points resembles a first person shooter game more than a tough cinematic epic. But there we venture into one of the swamps of contemporary cinema: is a film lessened by its resemblance, however briefly, to another form or might that just be an expansion into greater culture. As an example outside of this one, I detest the previous decade's trend in mainstream horror to present a series of evenly timed jump scares. When I came to understand that this had been arrived at to cater to a young audience as equally engaged with their phones (and the wider connection through them) as they were with the film blaring and jolting in front of them. To understand is not necessarily to forgive (I still hate those films) but becomes indispensable. So, when we drop from a shooty-tooty bombed out village to a white water rapid rush we have to remember not to be too flat in our response. That can be a good thing as it just means that a movie is a movie and that can and should mean anything.

It surprises me that the "single take" trope has been paraded out for this one in the publicity as the experience of it is efficient and correctly unremarkable. When this became a trend in the 00s and beyond (e.g. Irreversible) we were instructed to marvel at it. Well, it was a feat, even if it really was (with very very few exceptions) one of good camera choreography and expert editing. Here, it adds an immediacy and sense of alertness and readiness to shift gear on a two cent piece. It's done so seamlessly and is so appropriate that this egg who notices editing forgot about it as a feature.

So, why make a movie about a war from over a century ago? Because war is war and whether its fought with dirty bombs or sticks and stones we will probably never shake it. 1917 is careful to let us know that notions of heroism are best left for the officers and media and that one journey through a constant threat of annihilation is the same as a million others when you're going through it. Some might well find some of the final scenes played for an emotional singalong but they struck me as controlled anguish. (But, really, go and watch Paths of Glory, sit through the final scene and tell me you didn't well up ... just a bit.) The final image is one of exhaustion which, as history has it, always seems to be war's last word.

Review: LITTLE WOMEN

Jo, Meg, Amy, Beth are ready to take on the world with their talents and ambition and they would were it not for the fact that they are poor (if genteel) and live during the American Civil War: prospect grim but for astute marriages, a point made the centre of Jo's meeting with a publisher. This film is about girls making choices, squandering them, being robbed of them by life or having them made on their behalf. For them the world is corsetted, crinolined and parloured where a girl's talents might grant them points on a marriage resume but, as with all their politics, tastes, joys and anger, are to be kept in place as "parts" rather than pursued as careers. As the 19th century source novel by the highly motivated and political Louisa May Alcott observes this as an expectation it also allows voice to the ambition. After Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig could not have made a choice more apt for her next feature.

The novel is a classic of American literature and beloved enough to have generated film adaptations from the silent era to now. Most of these concentrate on the girls' pursuit of marriage and the closer we come to this one, more of the undercurrents emerge. Gerwig's approach is to push the latter to the foreground, keep the marital stakes important but leave the weight of them to the other attempts for further discovery. This allows her to enhance the episodic nature of the source by managing the timeline according theme or character rather than a linear reading more appropriate for literature than cinema. At first this can be puzzling but only lightly so and as soon as you get the hang of it you relax into it and enjoy the episodes. The sense of an overall arc builds and the shifting of the time zones is deft rather than just stylistic.

Casting is key, as always. Saoirse Ronan as Jo shines, bringing fire and intellect (and frequent visits from Dublin in her accent: but with an actor this fine I just don't care). Meryl Streep clearly relishes the role of the grand dame Aunt March, adding sharp character to her patrician haughtiness. Emma Watson (whose accent also falters intermittently) brings a subdued suffering to her role and a sense that her character's strength lies in maintenance of the fragility of the humbleness she grows into. Laura Dern as the girls' mother, is the grown up version of that, endlessly supportive but feels every blow in private. It is Florence Pugh as Amy who I wanted to see more of, though. Amy's story struck me as a tougher battle, accepting her limitations as an aspirant artist, living as second best to Jo but biting on the bitterness to claim herself. It might be the performance that suffers her character's fate in the long run but for me it was the one I constantly waited for when it wasn't on screen. After the similarly thankless turn in Midsommar this year this just shows her growing fast as an artist. With all that Timothee Chalamet might well be trampled into obscurity but the easy aristocratic charm that hides his own frustrations at the world's constraints.

Gerwig is careful to balance the look and feel of the setting without giving in to the period drama wash which is why her parlour scenes always have a touch of claustrophobia to them. The shot of debutantes climbing the stairs with their hooped skirts creating a kind of traffic jam is funny, beautiful and mindful of the culture that demands it. The relief of the outdoors is palpable and a scene on a cold beach with Jo comforting the ailing Beth with the sand lifting in the wind in silvery wisps could have come from a Tarkovsky movie. This is a bitchy thing to say but in two features Gerwig has completely outclassed the entire output of her life and oft times creative partner Noah Baumbach. If he had done this it would have been hipsters in crinolines. Gerwig just makes it work.