BONES AND ALL

Directing: B-
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

I left Bones and All unable to decide what to make of it. I’m still feeling that way, to a degree. Maybe I would feel differently, or have more conviction, about it after a rewatch, maybe after some time has gone by. I’m not sure I’ll ever want to watch this movie again. The closest I can get to sincerely complimenting it is to acknowledge that it’s not just fucked up, but fucked up in a way we’ve never seen in cinema before.

It also could be argued that some innovations are entirely unnecessary. Indeed, one of the questions I keep coming back to is: why? Luca Guadagnino, who directed and wrote this adaptation of the novel by Camille DeAngelis, has married two very disparate genres: tender love story, and horror. But why?

Maybe because there was something more obviously valuable to the story as it existed in the novel. I can’t speak to that, as I’ve never read it. And when it comes to Guadagnino, that guy is all over the place: Call My By Your Name (2017) was a modern masterpiece of queer cinema; he followed that up a year later with Suspiria, which was a wild mess. Then, in 2020, he gave us the immersive and deeply ambiguous limited series We Are Who We Are, which absolutely was not for everyone but really spoke to me.

Maybe it’s just when Guadagnino shifts into horror that he no longer speaks to me. He has a unique sensibility that, when married to the horror genre, just puts me off. And what purpose does it serve for us to see a tender love story about cannibals? It’s possible there is an allegorical element here, except that I fail to see any need for allegory when we live in a time when it’s easier and more effective just to be straightforward.

Guadagnino hires very talented actors, and then doesn’t seem to direct them very much. And clearly there is loyalty to him here: Timothée Chalamet was previously in Call Me By Your Name; we also get a single scene each from Michael Stuhlbarg (also in Call Me By Your Name, here stunningly reinvented as a redneck) and Chloë Sevigny (previously in We Are Who We Are). The talented actors command the screen regardless, and are often unrecognizable in this film—I did not realize the nomadic and vaguely sinister old man and would-be cannibal mentor was Mark Rylance until I viewed the credits. Other, less significant characters, though, are portrayed by actors whose deliveries feel just barely this side of unrehearsed. There is a naturalistic looseness to Guadagnino’s approach that works spectacularly some of the time, and not at all at other times.

The primary protagonist is Maren (Taylor Russell), a teenager only just turned 18, at which point her heretofore stunningly protective father (André Holland) finally abandons her, no longer able to cope with the responsibility of moving them to a new town every time she bites off a friend’s finger.

There is a curious establishment of rules in the universe of this film, where cannibals have a kind of sixth sense about each other. More specifically, they can recognize each other’s scent, which is how the creepy old man finds Maren to begin with. He teaches her how to recognize and use their smell, as well as some rules to live by that he’s established for himself. Eventually it becomes clear there is an invisible minority that the public at large cannot see, but they have ways of recognizing each other.

But then Maren meets Lee (Chalamet), and she’s more interested in being taught by him. A friendship blooms, and eventually romance too. It’s all very tender and sweet, except they are feeding on the corpses of fellow human beings in the meantime. This scenario doesn’t lay out any moral dubiousness, instead revealing elements of self-loathing and guilt over the things they are compelled to do. This all feels very on the nose as a metaphor for, say, queer people in the closet, especially at the time this is set (the 1980s). Except that cannibalism actually is literally grotesque, and I don’t know what any of this really has to offer the year 2022.

It’s entirely possible I am missing something. As it is, I kind of just don’t get it. I was fully engaged and consistently intrigued by this film, but I can’t say it enriched me in any way. Does it offer any useful insights? Is it actually entertaining? An older couple sitting in my same aisle got up and left the theater after the first onscreen feeding. Honestly they likely had a better time of the following two hours than I did, or at least had an easier time making sense of it.

Oh did I mention this movie features cannibalism as an act of love and mercy?

Overall: B-

MR MALCOM'S LIST

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Mr. Malcom’s List is basically Bridgerton in feature film form. It’s fine entertainment, pleasant enough if otherwise unremarkable, except for its similarly “color conscious” casting. I suppose in this case it might be more accurate to fall back on the “color blind casting” phrase, given that in this case, unlike Bridgerton, none of the characters comment on their ethnic differences.

I’m never against this sort of approach, although it’s inevitably distracting when placed squarely within the context of a deeply patriarchal Regency-era society which is afforded none of the same revisionist history. Why make the cast unrealistically diverse but make no change to the subjugation of women? Because then we wouldn’t get the same Jane Austen-lite period pieces we love, I guess. Not that it would be impossible to change this aspect of society and still tell basically the same story, about a spurned woman’s attempt at revenge.

I can’t find any source online as to whether the Suzanne Allain novel on which this film is based also featured principal characters of different races, as though they all lived in 19th-century England harmoniously. All I can speak to is the film, which clearly serves as a salve for people going through Bridgerton withdrawals. The story telling is incredibly similar, right down to the narration by an older woman. Mercifully, the voiceover narration here is used sparingly.

The spurned woman at the center of the story is Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton), a woman reaching a ripe old age of mid-twenties and apparently running the risk of becoming a spinster. She is taken to the opera by one very wealthy and very eligible Mr. Malcom (Sope Dìrísù), who doesn’t bother taking Julia out again after she responds to an intellectual question with ignorance, and somehow this gets around and results in Julie’s public humiliation. When Julia learns from her cousin Lord Cassidy (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) that she was rejected by Mr. Malcom due to not meeting his list of qualifications to be his bride—hence the film title—she is quite unproportionately indignant, and enlists the help of her childhood friend Selina (Freida Pinto) in exacting revenge: she will meet all of these qualifications, then reject him with her own list.

Where this is going it easy to see from virtually the first frames of the film, and to say Mr. Malcom’s List is packed of conventional contrivances is an understatement. Most significantly, though, I had a hard time with Julia’s cousin Cassidy, who is bizarrely subservient to Julia’s many bizarre demands. Then again, there’s a minor twist later revealing ulterior motives on his part as well, and it barely works.

The bottom line is that Mr. Malcom’s List is a period romance just like countless others, but employing a template that has long proved effective. I can’t deny that I was engaged from start to finish, and found myself modestly charmed by the performances across the board—with the possible exception of Julia, who is insufferably self-involved, and her romantic resolution in the end is arguably the most contrived of all. It says a lot about the rest of the movie that the rest of the movie basically makes up for this. This movie is just another pleasant diversion, and of course there are times when that’s all you’re looking for.

Generally lovely isn’t it?

Overall: B

CYRANO

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Music: B-

Here we have yet another victim of unfortunate circumstances, a movie whose release date was postponed seemingly endlessly. “Seemingly” is perhaps the operative word here, as it was originally scheduled for wide release on Christmas Day 2021, and finally got its wide release February 25—exactly two months later, but with two other wide release dates and two limited release dates in between, all of them either scrapped or postponed. This on its own might not have been such a big deal, except that I was sitting through this film’s trailer for months before Christmas, only to wind up having to keep sitting through it for another two months. Getting to see it now, when I don’t have to sit through a trailer I practically have memorized anymore, was a relief.

One might wonder, then: was it worth the wait? For the most part, yes. Granted, it would have been much better to get to see it in December, but the later postponements were clearly brought on in large part by the Omicron variant wave, which are now on the significant decline. That said, while I did enjoy this film and I always love the chance to go to a movie theater, I can’t say this one demands to be seen on the big screen. A few more weeks to see it on a streamer at home will be just as much worth the wait. Unless, I suppose, you’re a massive fan of star Peter Dinklage, and there are certainly those people out there.

Somehow, I did not realize that Cyrano had already been a stage production, written by Dinklage’s wife Erica Schmidt and also starring Dinklage, as well as co-star Haley Bennet as Roxanne. It ran first in Connecticut in 2018 and then off Broadway in 2019. As for Covid, acquisition of the rights to the film wasn’t even announced until August 2020, which means Cyrano as a film was conceived as well as completed in a post-pandemic world. It would seem that only the Omicron variant truly had any affect on its release, so compared to a lot of other movies that died on the vine over the past two years, this one was kind of lucky.

How much audiences like it seems to be somewhat mixed, a reflection of my own personal reaction to it. I’m a little mystified as to why the choice was made to make this a conventional musical, except perhaps that it’s what the stage production was. And while Dinklage’s voice is serviceable and Bennett’s is beautiful, the songs themselves are uniformly forgettable. Adapting this as a straightforward tragic romance, without the breaking into song, likely would have been to its benefit.

A lot of Cyrano is pretty fun otherwise, especially seeing Dinklage as an implausibly accomplished and lethal fencer. I have to admit, I found myself thinking about how unrealistic it was to depict Dinklage as someone who could easily dispatch ten men at a time. But, then I realized that none of the other onscreen depictions of swashbuckling heroes, regardless of their size, has ever been realistic. It’s always a fantasy, so why not let the likes of Peter Dinklage in on it? It’s great to see that, even though Cyrano is deeply insecure about his stature in light of the woman he secretly pines for, he has great agency otherwise—ridiculous amounts of it, in fact,

I suppose some might like to be warned, though, that this is only occasionally lighthearted, and is very much conceived of as a romantic tragedy, very much in the vein of Romeo and Juliet. The love between Cyrano and Roxanne isn’t so much forbidden as misdirected, as Roxanne convinces herself she has fallen in “love at first sight” with Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr., also a very good singer), having made the mistake of not finding out first whether he has the level of intellect she’s also looking for. This is arguably a flaw of the original plot of Cyrano de Bergerac, wherein Roxanne makes some pretty goofy assumptions that could easily have been disproved had she taken some real initiative on her own. But, then we wouldn’t have this classic story, in which Cyrano writes Christian’s love letters for him, seducing Roxanne to fall more deeply in love with both Christian’s beauty and Cyrano’s intellect and, most significantly, poetry.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know the original physical issue with Cyrano was his unusually large nose, but there have been many adaptations since the debut of the original French play in 1897, including ones where Cyrano is simply “ugly.” Playwright Erica Schmidt, under the directorial vision of Joe Wright in the film, offers a new take with Peter Dinklage standing in, his being a dwarf being the source of his romantic insecurity.

One major sticking point in this film is the one usage of the m-word, which Dinklage utters, as Cyrano, in reference to himself. It’s a genuinely shocking moment, and I can’t tell if it was meant to be—except that it’s surprising that an actor who has spoken out against its usage would agree to say it onscreen in 2021, it being a period piece notwithstanding. Miriam-Webster says the first usage of the word dates back to 1816, so it’s not anachronistic, at least from an English perspective. But what about in French? Google translate says the French equivalent is nain, except when you translate that the other way around, French to English, it comes up as “dwarf.” So why the hell doesn’t he just use the word “dwarf” in the movie? I don’t get it. Maybe we’re meant to see it as a reflection of Cyrano’s self-hatred, but if that’s the case, the word is not at all necessary to make that clear.

Once you get past that, Cyrano is a fun, deeply romantic, and relatively moving story, a movie that works in spite of its occasionally inexplicable imperfections.

It’ll reach the romantic in you.

Overall: B

SUBLET

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

If you like movies that feature almost exclusively characters hanging out and talking, having interesting conversations, then Sublet is the kind of movie for you. That is, if you also find the contextualization of gay queer characters exploring Tel Avid compelling. That contextualization aside, if you’re not into “talky” movies, then this is one you’ll want to avoid. It’s all a matter of cinematic preference, really.

I quite enjoyed it. Sublet is directed and co-written by Eytan Fox, who has a history of exploring queer character in his films. He did the 2002 film Yassi & Jagger, a gay romance between two Israeli soldiers; he also directed the phenomenal film Walk on Water, about a bereft Israeli widower hit man who befriends a gay German tourist with the intent of gathering information about his Nazi war criminal grandfather, which wound up being my fourth-favorite film of 2005.

Fox is not especially prolific—he hasn’t directed a feature film since 2013—but he clearly has talent. That said, Sublet feels like a smaller film than some of his earlier works, at least in terms of production, theme, and ambition. That’s no major reflection on its quality; sometimes a story benefits a great deal from stripping down to simplicity. And even this film has its share of layers and nuance.

It’s the story of a short term relationship between men of two very different generations. We never learn the respective ages of Michael (John Benjamin Hickey), a New York Times travel writer visiting Tel Aviv for five days, and Tomer (Niv Nissim), the young man from whom he sublets his apartment and who winds up showing him around the city. But, we can find the ages of the actors, which are 57 and 27, respectively. That’s a thirty-year difference—an almost shockingly wide difference now that I consider it with actual numbers. It could be argued that the most impressive achievement of Sublet is that for most of its run time it depicts this relationship as platonic, until it isn’t. But it’s never creepy or especially salacious; in fact it’s surprisingly sweet. I can think of few, if any, other movies that manage to make such a relationship feel totally acceptable and natural.

Part of it is that the relationship is very brief, by design: Michael and Tomer only know each other for five days. Michael has a partner back in New York, and is processing a tragic event that occurred recently in their lives. Tomer actively avoids labels, which is why I hesitate to call him “gay” but he definitely qualifies as queer; he has idealistic ideas of living without any constraints of monogamy or even commitment. There’s a uniquely realized scene in which Tomer invites another young man over via “the Israeli Grindr,” as he puts it, “for both of us,” and ultimately it qualifies as the one sex scene in the film. It’s the kind of scenario in which one participant could easily be manipulating another, but it never comes across that way. At that point, though, Michael politely leaves the two younger men to each other, in that particular moment making the right decision.

Even this is a few days into Michael’s visit, his and Tomer’s connection developing organically. Fox introduces each day as the beginning of what becomes basically five chapters (“Day One,” etc). Tomer is intent on crashing on friends’ couches for the week, but Michael suggests he just stay at home and sleep on the couch, and in exchange Tomer will serve as his tour guide to see “the real” Tel Aviv for his travel piece.

As the story thus progressed, I was reminded of the Before Sunrise films, with such a focus on two characters forging a connection through a succession of intellectually stimulating conversations. The themes and topics covered in the Before Sunrise films are far denser than they are here, but it’s broadly the same idea. And in contrast to the Richard Linklater films, Eytan Fox throws in minority sexuality and cross-generational ideas and ideals. It makes for very compelling viewing, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I very much am. At times, the acting in Sublet feels slightly unrehearsed, but its well crafted script is its greatest strength. By the end, I was more moved than I might have expected to be at the start. That kind of pleasant surprise is always a welcome turn of events.

Sometimes it’s not so hard to bridge the gap.

Overall: B+

[available VOD, $4.99.}]

Advance: FINDING YOU

Directing: C+
Acting: B
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

Call it YA fiction, because that’s exactly what it is: Finding You is based on the YA novel There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones. Evidently, the film significantly departs from its source material, as reading through the Amazon user reviews of the novel, the story originally incorporated both anorexia and the main character’s “faith journey.” One book reviewer from 2019 writes, I'm looking forward to seeing the film adaption in 2020 and hope that the faith theme and Finley's personal struggles aren't glossed over since these are the heart of the story. Well, I’m sorry you’ll be disappointed, anonymous user from Hershey, PA!

I can’t really tell who this movie is for, which means, oddly, maybe the movie would have worked better for the same target audience of that novel, if it had been more faithful to it? Finding You says nothing about the faith of the main character, Finley (Rose Reid), until she finally locates the gravestone her late brother had sketched—and the camera lingers on an epitaph with a direct reference to God. I think that lady from Hershey will indeed think the “faith theme” was “glossed over.”

Instead, Finding You focuses on the context of Beckett Rush’s movie stardom, and how he and Finley fall in love while he’s filming another in a series of dragon fantasy movies in the small Irish town where Finley is studying abroad. As written and directed by Brian Baugh, to say that the entirety of Beckett’s life as a famous actor is contrived is an understatement. He’s a young but grown man, and somehow his father (Tom Everett Scott) has total control over every aspect of his professional and personal life, right down to making up romantic stories about Beckett’s relationship with his costar, Taylor (Katherine McNamara, in a much smaller role but somehow getting top billing). There’s a scene in which Taylor is trying to convince Beckett to stick with their made-up life in order to keep public interest turning into box office earnings. She says to him, “So few understand the life that we lead,” and I found myself thinking, Does this movie’s director even understand that?

This movie lost me within its first few minutes, when Finley is boarding her flight to Ireland from her hometown of New York, and a flight attendant just up and offers her a seat in first class because there happens to be an empty seat. Oh I see, so this movie is a complete fantasy. By the way, the airline is “Aer Lingus.” I thought that was ridiculous too, until I googled it and found out that is real. They get pretty prominent product placement in this movie. Am I the only person who sees the name “Aer Lingus” and thinks of mile-high cunnilingus? But I digress.

Finding You has some redeeming qualities. Rose Reid as Finley and Jedidiah Goodacre as Beckett have genuine onscreen chemistry, not to mention a natural screen presence that gives their performances a sincerity that transcends much of the bland formula of the script. It is perhaps for this reason only that I found myself sucked into the story in spite of its many flaws—well, that and Vanessa Redgrave in a supporting part as a local crotchety old lady. It’s always nice to spend screen time with Vanessa Redgrave.

But then the narrative cuts to Beckett on set, where the throwaway actor playing his director has the most ridiculous “European” accent I’ve ever heard. Trying to say the word “joke,” he literally says, “I made a yoke!” Is this supposed to be comedy? It’s embarrassing, is what it is.

At least the rest of the characters are well cast, including the Irish host family with whom Finley stays. And it’s helpful, actually, to cast relative unknowns as the leads (Jedidiah Goodacre played Dorian Gray in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina; this is Rose Reid’s fifth-ever acting credit), although it’s amusing to think how Goodacre’s personal life is still nothing like that of the famous actor he’s playing. In any event, those two are compelling enough to elicit hope that they both get better opportunities for meatier roles in far better films than this in their near future.

Can you believe this script?

Overall: C+

[Opens Friday, May 14.]

SIFF Advance: SUMMER OF 85

Directing: C+
Acting: B
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

I suppose it’s refreshing to see a movie about young gay men in the 1980s that doesn’t focus on AIDS, or even mention it. We’ve all had more than our fair share of that. Whether we need what Summer of 85 offers up instead is a different question.

This is a gay love story, and still a sad one, but also sweet, and then, just plain odd. Young Alexis and David (Félix Lefebvre and Benjamin Voisin) are teenagers falling in love as they contemplate whether to finish school or move into the work force. And, as the narrative cuts back and forth between the present-day legal trouble Alexis is in, and the back story of their affair, it becomes clear why Alexis is in trouble. It has to do with a promise David made him make.

This promise is the crux of the whole plot in Summer of 85, and it is also the film’s central problem, the reason it falls apart upon even the slightest inspection. Even though I would not recommend anyone watch this movie, I still won’t spoil it—maybe you still want to find out for yourself. Suffice it to say that the promise is utterly ridiculous. To be fair, that is clearly David’s intent: something he wants Alexis to do should he ever die. After tragedy strikes, Alexis takes the promise seriously, and director François Ozon, adapting from a novel by Aidan Chambers (you can look it up; the title of the novel is the spoiler) plays it for serious, dramatic effect. It doesn’t work, however: playing the scene as a moving fulfillment of a young lover’s promise doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.

Until that happens, the development of a romantic and physical relationship between these two young, cute gay men is genuinely sweet. But, then it takes some bizarre turns—even before the “promise” is carried out (which, by the way, gets Alexis arrested). Suddenly Alexis is visiting a morgue disguised as a young woman. Wait, what? This left-field bit of cross-dressing is something I would hesitate to judge as “insensitive,” but it’s still a weird choice. When it comes to the writing and direction, it might still qualify as clueless.

There are other odd moments early on, which perhaps should serve as warning signs of strange turns to come. When Alexis’s sailboat capsizes and David rescues him—this is how they meet—David takes him home. This is where Alexis meets David’s widowed mother, who not only insists Alexis take a hot bath, but even insists on undressing him herself. She pulls his pants down, the camera behind him so we see his bare ass, and she is knelt in front of him so that she is suddenly gawking at his penis. “Your mother can be proud,” she says. There is nothing sexual suggested beyond this, and it seems as though it’s just meant to be a throwaway gag. And I . . . just don’t get it. Granted, this is a French film and the French have a different and more open sensibility, but, I have to wonder if even the French would think this scene in any way moves the story forward. (It doesn’t.)

I was willing to overlook this scene in the first half of the film because, at first, it seemed to be an anomaly in an otherwise sweet movie. Then a mutual young lady friend of Alexis and David, who becomes in essence part of a love triangle between them, helps him dress up as a girl in disguise to visit David’s body in a morgue. Wait, what? Alexis’s grief causes him to behave in very strange ways, which is a normal part of grief to be sure, but Summer of 85 takes it to unusual extremes.

Then, he’s researching Jewish burial traditions—this is how we learn David’s family is Jewish—and things just get more uncomfortable from there. By the time Alexis is delivering on David’s deliberately ridiculous promise, I found myself laughing out loud. Not because the scene is funny, as it is absolutely not intended to be, but because it is utterly preposterous. I have not read the novel on which this is based, but it’s easy to imagine this playing out in a more successfully moving way in written prose. Actually watching it, there’s just no way to avoid being taken right out of the movie. Like: why the hell am I watching this?

The two main actors are decent performers, doing what they can with this script that takes a while to reveal its own insanity. I suppose it might have been better if, for instance, Félix Lefebvre had some other talents. Summer of 85 might have been at least somewhat improved if he were—spoiler alert!—a better dancer.

All of this could have been avoided if he had just worn a helmet!

Overall: C+

SYVLIE'S LOVE

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Syvlie’s Love is very much an old-school, standard love story, right down to its mid-twentieth century period setting. And, ironically, that’s what makes it special. How often do you see fairly standardized romances in which the primary characters happen to be Black, particularly set in the fifties and sixties? Honestly, this type of movie isn’t typically what I immediately go for, but I’m sure glad it exists. I can only presume plenty of others are as well.

Inevitably plenty of others aren’t, for varyingly stupid reasons. It’s no surprise that the user scores on sites like MetaCritic.com and RottenTomatoes.com are notably lower than their aggregate review scores, although the difference is still narrower than it might have been just a few years ago. And this gets into my favorite thing about Sylvie’s Love: this is not a fantasy in which history worked differently and in Black people’s favor, as in the Netflix series Bridgerton (which gets no hate from me, for the record; I very much enjoy it). Instead, even though the characters acknowledge its existence, this is a movie in which marginalization has nothing to do with the story it’s telling.

In fact, Sylvie’s Love allows its characters to enjoy successes in historical context, which were unusual but still plausible. Furthermore, it is surprisingly feminist, as one of the road blocks for the central couple is Sylvie’s ambition as a TV producer, and Robert—gasp!—not wanting their relationship to get in the way of her success. In fact, both characters make choices that postpone their inevitable union not with selfishness as in so many other movies, but with selflessness.

Nnamdi Asomugha plays Robert, and pulls double duty as one of the movie’s many producers. Tessa Thompson steps into the role of Sylvie, as we first meet her briefly in 1963 and then the story flashes back to her young adulthood five years earlier, in 1953. She has a fiancé who is away traveling; Robert is part of a jazz band soon set to leave for a gig in Paris. And so it goes with these sorts of romances: multiple barriers to these two people getting together even though they are in love with each other, until one day they get past those barriers. For Sylvie and Robert, it takes many years, which only adds to the romance, to which writer-director Eugene Ashe lends a subtly sweet, comfortingly mellow tone.

We return to that opening scene from 1963 about halfway through the film, at which point the two lovebirds find themselves facing an all new set of barriers. It’s all pretty contrived, honestly, but it’ll still work just as well as any other romance for the type of viewer who is interested in such things.

I keep thinking of the oft-repeated notion of Black people having to work twice as hard, or be twice as excellent, as their white counterparts in order to achieve the same success. And while I hesitate to call Sylvie’s Love “mediocre”—it’s a step above mediocre—it still follows the same formulaic story beats as countless movies that came before it. I certainly can’t speak to how difficult it might have been to get made, but it’s here, it exists, and it offers a kind of representation not seen before. This movie in particular is no more “excellent” than any other romance, but its existence still means something. It seems a step in the right direction when plenty of viewers might react with an “Eh” (I lean closer to that), and yet plenty of others might still be into it. We’re slowly getting to a point where a variety of films can get made with diverse casts without it having to be either exploitation or tragedy porn.

Granted, a lot is more difficult to gauge in a world with no actual box office revenue to speak of. There’s no real way to decide whether this movies is a “success,” and that’s the case with virtually any movie in 2020 or 2021, unless it miraculously generates a ton of buzz on social media. All I can say is, this movie is right there, on Prime Video, and if you love romances, it’s well worth watching. Its characters are just regular people, who exist in a regular movie, living and loving. I can’t call it a romance for the ages, but it’s certainly a romance for our time.

Isn’t it romantic?

Overall: B

AMMONITE

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

I wonder if there’s a more overtly lesbian-themed title that could have been given to Ammonite. The term refers to a group of extinct molluscs closely related to today’s octopi, squids and cuttlefish. So, maybe . . . Cuttlepussy? Okay, I admit that’s a little much. That sounds a little like a James Bond movie, and this is about as far from that as it gets. Except of course that it’s a British film.

Ammonite is much more romantic, and thus befitting this memorable love story written and directed by Francis Lee, who also wrote and directed the wonderful gay farm worker love story God’s Own Country in 2017. Evidently after gaining such critical acclaim for the earlier film, Lee wanted to give the ladies a crack at a same-sex love story. This time around features much more famous movie stars: Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan. They are also two consummate performers, and they ground the story, which ultimately becomes very erotic, with palpable chemistry.

Ammonite is mostly Winslet’s movie, however. This is Mary Anning’s story, which Ronan’s Charlotte Merchison moves in and out of. Mary is older, well established in her life as an paleontologist who, in nineteenth century England, made seminal discoveries ultimately credited to men. She lives in the south coast of England in a place called Lyme, barely scraping by selling cleaned-up fossils from the nearby beach to tourists and occasionally much larger discoveries to scientists who take her work back to London. It’s when a man interested in learning from her arrives with Charlotte, his wife, that the two women meet. Charlotte falls ill and then Mary finds herself nursing her in recovery.

Francis Lee makes a lot of curious decisions here, as both Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison were both real, historical figures, known to be friends but with no evidence of them having been lovers. Also, the real Murchison was eleven years older than Anning, whereas Kate Winslet is 19 years older than Saoirse Ronan. It seems to me this story would have been just as effective, and perhaps even more so, had these characters been fully fictionalized but in the same era and respective circumstances. Why use real women from history and then apply such radical fictionalizations of their actual lives?

All that aside, Ammonite is well worth watching. You might call it this year’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, albeit not quite as close to a masterful work of art. Ammonite is much grittier, about a single working class woman who never married and lives with her mother (Gemma Jones), and gets a visit from a much younger and more well-to do woman. Mary spends a lot of time getting very dirty on wet beaches, and Winslet plays her with the gruffness of a hermit with few social skills. The opening scenes are devoid of dialogue, following her around as she rolls up her sleeves and dives into her work. Once people start talking, Mary immediately proves to be an unusually direct woman indeed. Particularly for the 1840s, this is rather fun to watch.

Even once Charlotte arrives, she is even quieter than Mary for quite some time, as at first she feels abandoned there, prescribed rest by a doctor while her husband must travel abroad. This allows the relationship between the two women to develop at a gradual but fully organic pace, romance not sparking until about halfway through the movie. Then, Ammonite features at least two sex scenes between them that are fairly graphic. Knowing neither of these actors are actually lesbians, I do find myself curious as to how lesbian viewers might take in those sex scenes. Do they seem authentic? I’ve never had lesbian sex so I couldn’t say for sure. At least there’s no “scissoring.” And to Ammonite’s credit, even though it has a male director, its sex scenes were reportedly choreographed by the stars themselves, and shot with an all-female crew in the room.

The sex scenes are indeed pretty steamy, and the one place in the film where the slightly shaky, hand-held cinematography works best. Its unconventionally ambiguous ending, which takes us to places we don’t expect—both figuratively and literally—sticks with you. Ammonite has a certain lack of polish, but it stands firm on the strength of its writing and particularly its performances. This is a period piece with production design that feels lived-in rather than overdressed, a uniquely transporting romantic love story in spite of what’s easy to nitpick..

Let’s see what latent homosexual tendencies we can dig up.

Overall: B+

HAPPIEST SEASON

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Listen, Happiest Season won me over in a way that I truly never expected, even after about a third of the way into the movie. But let’s get the truly negative out of the way first, because we have to talk about that absolute turd of a title. It bears repeating, because I literally keep forgetting it: Happiest Season? What kind of generic-holiday randomized generator title is that? I hate it. It sounds like a spit balled title place holder that no one bothered to replace.

For much of the first half of this movie, I found myself thinking about how great it is to be getting a Christmas romantic comedy that features a gay couple, and how great it would be to have such a movie that is special enough to be rewatchable every Christmas, and . . . this movie is not it. Except, maybe it is? It pains me to say: probably not. But not because it’s not worthy. It’s because the title sucks. It sounds like the title of the holiday episode of a third-tier network sitcom.

So, please. Please, please, please! Forget about the title. Or wait, strike that. Write the title down! HAPPIEST SEASON. Put it somewhere you can reference it easily, lest you fall victim to how forgettable a title it is. Because this film is absolutely worth watching.

Directed and co-written b Clea DuVall, in her sophomore feature film effort, I’m still not convinced directing is her calling. This was my biggest issue with the film early on, that its direction was adequate at best. Sometimes, however, a script can make up for a lot, and the writing here absolutely does that. Granted, I have a specific bias here: as a gay viewer, I can not only relate to the issues related to coming out to one’s family, but in the end, I was deeply moved by this story. As such, I can see a pretty widely varied response among audiences, depending on their own personal experiences. To be sure, anyone with the slightest capability of empathy, this movie will work. But this movie will also really speak to some people in a way it just can’t to others. And I am definitely among those some people.

Luckily, Happiest Season also has a great cast. The gay couple at the center of it are Abby and Harper, played respectively by Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis. They make a believable couple, although I found Davis’s height occasionally distracting. Abbey’s sisters Sloane and Jane are respectively played by an uptight Alison Brie and a rather funny Mary Holland; stepping into the role of the sisters’ parents are Victor Garber and Mary Steenburgen. We even get Aubrey Plaza as one of Abby’s exes, and best of all, Daniel Levy as Harper’s close friend. This movie would not have suffered without a gay male character to throw a bone to the gay men in its audience, but I sure was delighted to see him, and he provides a good amount of the comedy, without ever quite overdoing it.

In fact, Levy’s character John is essentially the heart of the movie, being the caring friend that every decent person deserves. Abby could use a friend of the same caliber, and does not seem to have one; she’s far too preoccupied with keeping up appearances for the sake of her dad’s campaign for mayor of his town. And this is another thing I love about Happiest Season (ugh, that title!): it breezily sidesteps gay clichés from start to finish: no melodramatic histrionics, and no reducing family members to small-minded caricatures. They aren’t even presented as especially conservative, and when it comes to how scary it can be for a person to come out, this is a key point: the family doesn’t have to be conservative for it to be a frighteningly uncertain prospect.

DuVall, to her credit, offers a great deal of empathy for Abby, even as she basically makes by far the shittiest choices, often to the detriment of her partner. But the broader point is that a person must be ready for such a huge step, and this actually fits perfectly with movies about the spirit of Christmas: the spirit of giving and of goodwill. Considering this is a romantic comedy—albeit one that made me cry much more than expected—it’s no spoiler to say that things work out in the end. The predictability here is immaterial; the very real struggle before such inevitably happy endings is what we are meant to understand. And we are still reminded that not every story is so happy, as told by Harper’s friend John. This isn’t his story though; it’s Abby and Harper’s, and Christmas movies must end with uplift. Happiest Season delivers on that front, in more ways than one.

Just be sure to write that title down so you know what to look for when you go looking for it on Hulu.

You’ll be happy you watched it this season.

Overall: B+

REBECCA

Directing: C
Acting: B-
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

Why does anyone bother trying to remake an Alfred Hitchcock Film? The impulse is mystifying. Hitchcock was an unparalleled master of the craft, and it seems telling that it’s never another master of the craft trying to recapture the quality of one of his original films. Ben Wheatley’s 2020 version is so regressive, it might as well have been made in 1940. But guess what? Hitchcock made his version in 1940. Seriously, why not just watch that? That’s what I shall do: I’ve already placed a hold on the DVD at my local library. I suppose you could say I watched this new, clearly inferior version just so that I would enjoy the original that much more. I wouldn’t necessarily say that you should do the same. You could say, rather, that I watched it so you don’t have to.

I mean, what a waste of time, when there is so much better stuff at your fingertips to watch. And this is not the same as the comparison of a film to a book on which it’s based. Those are two different mediums, and I still say a film should be judged on its own merits. But that standard gets muddied when the film has already been made.

It’s kind of shocking how many Hitchcock films have been remade, or gotten sequels Hitchcock himself had nothing to do with. The closest thing to a great filmmaker remaking his work is Gus Van Sant’s 1998, shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, which might just be the most utterly pointless cinematic exercise in history. And yet, even in its pointlessness, it’s more interesting than the 2020 film Rebecca.

With Ben Wheatley at the helm, it’s not that much of a surprise. He directed the 2015 film High-Rise, which was a complete mess. At least it wasn’t dull. Rebecca is the dullest movie I’ve sat through all year. For once I am truly grateful I did not waste the time and money to see it in a theater.

And to think, there was some anticipation for this movie. Rebecca will get no buzz, will get none of the awards attention clearly desired once upon a time. It wouldn’t have even if it had managed a theatrical release. This film would never have made any real box office money. Period pieces of this sort never do anyway anymore, but this one would have been dead on arrival. Wheatley should thank his lucky stars the film is already on Netflix. It will get more viewers than it ever would have in theaters, just by accident.

And who wants to watch an entire film, in 2020, about a woman feeling increasingly helpless after hastily marrying an emotionally distant man? Rebecca is not a movie for our time. It’s a movie for the 1940s, and it should have stayed there. Lily James, in the lead role, seems almost typecast in second-rate movies; she isn’t helped by Armie Hammer as her husband, stripped of any of his usual charisma. It’s always nice to see Ann Dowd, here occupying the early scenes as the woman paying a young lady (James) to be her traveling companion. But, both she and Armie Hammer don’t quite fit here, with their barely-serviceable fake British accents.

If there is anything that makes Rebecca worth watching, it’s Kristin Scott Thomas, as the sinister head housekeeper constantly plotting against the new young wife. Thomas elevates every scene she’s in—an impressive accomplishment—although she still doesn’t much elevate the movie itself. Rebecca is clearly intended to be both romantic and suspenseful, and it manages to be neither. I look forward to watching the original, appropriately placed in the context of its time, with a director who shows how it should be done.

The least you could do is take your shirt off, Armie. I’m bored!

Overall: C+