Author: mjbstaging

Personal Shopper

Posted on by mjbstaging

The world-famous American actress and model Kristen Stewart has teamed up with the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas for the second time (after 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria), now in a film with a peculiarly different premise. The helmer decided to focus on the subject of celebrity again, but this time moving from a Lesbian drama taking place in idyllic Switzerland to a ghost story set in a very urban Paris.

The big question of course is: how do you blend horror devices, which are meant to be jarring and unsettling, with a fashion environment, where beauty and splendour are meant to prevail? Assayas has set a very difficult quest upon himself, albeit not an impossible one. France does not a a strong and consistent tradition in the horror genre, and instead a few sporadic classics such as Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) and Eyes without a Face (Georges Franju/Claude Sautet, 1960). So Assayas had to use his very own blueprint in order to come up with personal variant of French horror. The outcome has been very divisive: Assayas received the Best Director Ex-Aequo prize last year at Cannes Film Festival, but the film was also booed in the same event. Personal Shopper is indeed an audacious and creative pieces, but a number of flaws make it a little incoherent and difficult to engage with.

Maureen Cartwright (Stewart) is a young American working in Paris as a personal shopper for a celebrity called Keira (Nora von Walstatten). She has the ability to communicate with spirits, just like her recently deceased twin brother. She is now trying to communicate with her recently deceased twin brother, and it’s other ghosts that cross her path. She is determined, however, to remain in the French capital until she has spoken to her dead sibling. She begins to receive strangely ambiguous text messages on her telephone, from an unknown source. She travels to London for a work errand, but she’s consistently harassed by the stranger on the phone on her way there. Are the dead now able to communicate through 21st century technology, or is someone pulling a prank on Maureen?

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There are elements of paranormal activity, fashion and erotica in this very unusual horror flick

The scares throughout the film are very sparse, maintain the “creepy-glam” atmosphere throughout. There are elements of erotica, paranormal activity, murder and fashion in this multi-flavoured film gumbo (or perhaps casserole?). But this multitude of genres and references make the film a little disjointed and fragmented, much like a broken mirror. For example, we never find out why Maureen is in Paris, what exactly happened to her brother and why the whole saga is in English. I wonder whether French nationalists were outraged at the absence of their own language, surely an American worker would working in Paris be expected to pick up French? Maybe Personal Shopper does not want to be perceived as French film at all, but instead as an international endeavour.

Aesthetically, the film is also very hybrid. Entities probably don’t care much about fashion (they always seem to wear the same attire, don’t they?), so the idea of them creeping into this plush and colourful world is a little preposterous. Some nicely timed flying objects and green ectoplasms will make you jump from your seat, but overall a feeling a awkwardness will linger, and the inevitable WTF will occasionally spring to mind. Assayas is a very talented and bold filmmaker, but he still has some edges to polish in this newly-created horror-fashion “genre”.

Personal Shopper was out in cinemas on Friday, March 17th (2017). On Disney + UK on Friday, July 22nd (2022). Also available on other platforms.

Get Out

Posted on by mjbstaging

First things first: this Hollywood movie has an amazing trailer and a very powerful black and white poster image. It would be nice to think that cinemas fill up for films that are of themselves excellent, perhaps because they get great reviews, but trailer and poster probably account for more bums on seats. Sadly.

You can probably see where this is going. Get Out isn’t a bad film. But it’s nowhere near as good as the trailer. Basically, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve more or less seen the film.

The real problem is that it’s got a really great underlying and, as luck would have it, timely idea which would probably have made an astonishing 35 minute short. But it’s been padded out to feature length by falling back on horror movie clichés and homages. It seems that ‘homage’ is an intellectual word for ‘rip-off’.

So, the great and timely idea. She’s white, he’s black, they go out to meet her parents and find a pleasant white couple with black servants. The black servants appear to under some sort of mind control to make them more palatable to white people. That’s all in the trailer along with a few other, nightmarish bits and pieces.

Oh, and the weekend they’ve picked is the one where annually all the parents’ friends gather at the family residence for a get together. So far, so good. And given that white America has just elected Trump as its president, very timely.

There is more here that’s good, actually. It’s a very good cast, particularly British-born Daniel Kaluuya as the male lead and veteran actress Catherine Keener as the mother. The mother’s role is one of the better things in the script, a very clever portrait of a hypnotist plus some smart filmic sleight of hand and Keener rises brilliantly to the challenge. The film’s other ace is the lead’s best mate played by LilRel Howery, who seems to have wandered in from a comedy and whose scenes light up the film whenever he appears. Indeed, although promoted as a horror film, it’s a moot point as to what Get Out actually is. A horror film? A comedy? A horror comedy? Maybe one shouldn’t try to pin it down to a genre.

There is an extraordinary and beautifully handled moment early on the when the young couple’s car hits a deer on the way to her parents’ house.

Where Get Out falls apart, though, is in its pilfering of ideas and tropes from other sources whilst hoping that no one will notice. Sadly, we’ve seen The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975) so to rework that as The Stepford Blacks smacks of plagiarism. As the plot progresses, you start to notice other borrowings – a man sinking in to black darkness from Under The Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2014), a man bound to a chair and watching a TV out of Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983) a surgeon’s home operating theatre taken from French classic Eyes Without A Face (Georges Franju, 1960). And a particularly silly sequence towards the end has one character attack or kill several others in an attempt to escape which has appeared in countless horror films.

That said, there are still some clever moments, such as the plot’s resolution for which producer-writer-director Peele pulls an unexpectedly neat trick out of his bag. Overall, though, this writer was disappointed. Peele is clearly a talent to watch, but first time out he doesn’t quite cut it. Mind you, the trailer and the poster deserve Oscars.

Get Out was out in UK cinemas in March, when this piece was originally written. It is out on DVD, Blu-ray and all good DoD platforms on July 24th.

Transpecos

Posted on by mjbstaging

Yes, DMovies publishes yet another review about immigration and the US-Mexico border. Yes, we insist on exposing inflammatory social-cultural themes. So if you are fed up with that, fair enough, maybe that’s not your thing. But if you still believe that cinema is a tool for change in the way we perceive the world, then go and watch Transpecos.

This film is less about building a wall and more about how border patrol agents deal with their daily tasks. It is less about pointing out who is to blame and more about understanding that there are no heroes here. The border patrol agents aren’t going to solve drug smuggling. Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water they sink as the same.

Their routine inspection goes from tracking footprints and impeding mules to enter American territory via the Chihuahuan Desert. Transpecos starts with a very brief introduction and then it moves to a hypnotic thriller. On a remote outpost along the US-Mexican border, the lives of three border patrol agents are forever changed when a routine vehicle inspection goes awry. During the stretches between inspections, the trio – Flores (Gabriel Luna), Davis (Johnny Simmons) and Hobbs (Clifton Collins Jr) – prevent a man from crossing the border. Hobbs is shot and they soon find out that there were drugs in the car. The problem is that Davis knew it and he was supposed to let him in.

The feature presents an insidious plot, co-written by the director Greg Kwedar and writer Clint Bentley, two newcomers in the cinema production. Davis is a corrupted officer but his dilemma is that the cartel threatened him to kill his relatives. On the other hand, Flores’ dilemma is that he is a Mexican man working for American police. He is a vendido, in other words a traitor.

Transpecos is beautifully shot and you won’t get bored. It has some curious elements, such as the fact that Hobbs cannot enter a hospital. If he does, then Davis will be caught. So there is a possibility that a Mexican female healer treats him. She speaks Mayan. In the healing ritual, it becomes transparent that all three border agents are cursed. In fact, there is a hint regarding it on the opening scenes. See if you can guess it.

The point of view is the most extraordinary aspect of Transpecos. By portraying the morals and ethics of each agent, it reveals how a bureaucratic action can shape the lives of common people. It also can be applied to the US agents who are carrying out Trump’s Muslim ban at airports. The press is listening to the stories of those who are detained. It would be curious to listen to the stories of those who detain.

Transpecos was part of Glasgow Film Festival that ends today. The film will be distributed in the UK by StudioCanal. You can watch the film trailer below:

Mimosas

Posted on by mjbstaging

When it comes to religion, most of us have very strong convictions which are very difficult to challenge. Mimosas (Oliver Laxe, 2016) dares to question faith in a time when intolerance against religious people from the Middle East and North Africa is at its peak. Its main characters are crossing a desert and the only way they can do it is by having faith in God, or Allah.

The feature is a Spanish/Moroccan co-production and it won the Grand Prize at Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique last year. Although it is set in the desert, there’s a sense of familiarity running through the film, partly due to Ben Rivers’ film-within-a-film The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid (2015). The first half of Ben Rivers’ feature observes the production of Mimosas; the second half adapts the Paul Bowles’ short story ‘A Distant Episode’. If you are unfamiliar to Rivers’ and Bowles’ work, bear in mind that the narrative is a stunning spiritual journey. More than a simple parable, it talks about faith when you are being persecuted.

Mimosas opens with a woman adjusting her turban in an open desert landscape. Then, it follows a workman recruiting taxi drivers to work. Some of them are never hired, which is the case with Shakid. Instead, he is hired to replace a moribund sheikh: he has to guide a caravan of people on foot and camel into a remote medieval city. There are thieves in the group, so the film also questions honesty and trust. Who would you trust if you have to cross the desert? Would you trust the sheikh’s words or would you trust your instincts? Would you trust a stranger to guide you?

The cinematography is magnificent. The ambiguity of the desert – with very hot days and very cold nights – says it all. Desolation, though, is not a question of location. It is a human condition instead. And that is Laxe’s message to us.

When the sheikh finally dies, his wife’s wishes to bury him in Sigilmesa, an ancient city once located close to what’s now the Spanish city of Ceuta. Apparently the film blends different periods: it shows contemporary taxis and mentions a city that doesn’t exist anymore. Shakid accepts this challenge, though he doesn’t know the way to the city. For the thieves and other caravan men, the sheikh’s final burial ground does not make any difference. But soon Shakid starts to illuminate their preconceived ideas. Faith is not a matter of choice. It is a survival tool. It is an ethical compromise.

Cinema here is not only universal; it is also an aesthetic experience. The use of music, for instance, is efficient. There is hardly any soundtrack at all for one reason: when the characters are feeling desolated, no music can comfort or inspire them. When a sound eventually becomes distinguishable, it comes in at the right time, and it gives the scene a transcendental aura.

Mimosas also speaks to women. There is a mute girl accompanied by her father in the caravan, when the journey suddenly takes an unexpected turn. The role of the woman who cannot speak assumes a powerful symbolism in the narrative. Women are the reason why men change and fight.

The feature showed at the Glasgow Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 25th,

This is how I made it to Netflix

Posted on by mjbstaging

It has been less than a month since the new Austin Indie author Macon Blair received his award at Sundance. His debut movie I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore won the U.S. Dramatic Competition Grand Jury Prize (click here for our exclusive review of the film). Before that, the young Blair’s face was seen in two films in which he worked as an actor: Blue Ruin (2013) and Green Room (2015), both by his close friend Jeremy Saulnier.

Traditionally films that are shown in Park City take a long time to reach a wider audience. Last year Sundance sensation, Manchester By The Sea was released in the UK a year later, and it is still running for big prizes in the international circuit. But people don’t like to wait. So the market search for a solution to this problem, rendering anxious movie-lovers happy and satisfied. Netflix was the first company to nail it.

Blair’s feature is out worldwide this Friday at Netflix. The American entertainment company has invested massively in cinema production and has acquired 14 titles of Sundance Festival this year. (You can check the list of films here.) By simultaneously broadcasting to 93 million members in 190 countries, Netflix is changing the way films are distributed. But does it affect the voice of creative and independent filmmakers?

DMovies writer Maysa Monção chatted with Macon Blair via Skype about such industry tactics, the creative process, Donald Trumpo, the UK and much more. The director is pictured at the top with a carrot which he grew in his own garden. As far as we are aware, this vegetable has not made it to the movie, and it has no connection whatsoever to the film industry.

…

Maysa Monção – You worked as an actor and as a writer. How did you become a filmmaker? Did Jeremy Saulnier inspire you?

Macon Blair – Very much so, yeah. He has been my friend for a long time, almost my whole life. I always knew that I’d like to direct something of my own. I didn’t know exactly when. I was always looking at Jeremy, just watching him work and trying to learn everything I could from him, because he is so good. He is so talented and I feel very fortunate to have worked with him.

MM – You casted Elijah Wood for your debut. How does a well-known actor contribute to an independent movie?

MB – Certainly he has so many fans, because he has been in those larger movies [including Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit in 2012], and this brings attention to the movie. Not that they would like it or not based on what he has done before but it certainly helps. Elijah is attracted to what he likes in movies and he responded to this script. He did me a huge service by agreeing to work in this movie. Very early on he joined us as well as Melanie Lynskey [who plays the main female role].

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Elijah Wood is one of the protagonists in Macon Blair’s debut

MM – I watched your movie during a midnight session at Sundance. I almost gave up because I was very tired, but I am so glad I went! But that’s one thing: I noticed that nobody could remember the title of your movie…

MB – I know. That’s my fault. I picked a bad title. It made a lot of sense to me. We tried to come up with another title but I couldn’t think of another one that I liked as much. The producers originally wanted something different but they changed their mind. By the end they realised that we should go back to the original idea.

MM – How was working with Netflix? Did they influence the creative process in any way?

MB – No! Netflix is the only reason why this movie got made. Because they were willing to go with the script that I wanted to make. They were very supportive with all the cast that I wanted to work with. And they were willing to finance at the right level. Once they got on board, they would call just to say “hello”. They did not interfere with the creative side of the filmmaking. They were very “hands off”. They also gave us a huge amount of space.

MM – But let’s imagine that your film was made for a theatrical release. Would you have done anything different?

MB – I don’t think I would and the reason is that I was trying to figure out how to do it at all. It is my first film. I didn’t have the luxury of being able to target it to a specific audience or a specific demographic. I was just trying to make it not suck. Hopefully people would watch it at some point…

MM – I will be watching everything you make.

MB – Oh thank you. The review you guys did was just amazing; I loved what you guys wrote. But if it had been theatrical, it probably would have opened in a small number of theaters. It wouldn’t be there out for very long, and it wouldn’t be seen by as many people as it will on Netflix. It goes worldwide. It can stay there indefinitely. It can work as a word-of-mouth. That is the best case scenario for this type of movie.

MM – What was the most ludrical thing that happened on the set?

MB – [he laughs] I think one of the funniest scenes was when everybody was together yelling at each other [he refers to a moment in which all cast is in a house, and there is some gun shooting]. It was the first time we had all the cast together in one room. But for the rest of us the funniest thing was when Melanie had the vomit apparatus attached to her face.

MM – I don’t know if I can tell this!

MB – For her it was not funny but we were all laughing at the monitor. I felt a little guilty.

MM – Was it only one take?

MB – It took a while. There were takes from different angles. It was probably not very pleasant for her.

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A very cheerful Melanie contemplates some food, still devoid of her vomit machine

MM – If you could cast Donald Trump for a scene in your movie, what use would you make of him?

MB – Oh.. [very disappointed]. I would quit moviemaking. I don’t know.

At this point the Skype call mysteriously disconnects. I must have been Donald Trump snooping on DMovies. Eventually Maysa manages to get in touch again and continues the interview.

MB – I had some time to think better my answer. I would make a sequel of The Human Centipede (Tom Six, 2010).

MM – I don’t get it. Can you explain?

MB – Hummm. This guy plans to surgically join his victims by sewing together their mouths and anuses, all in a row.

MM – You live in Austin but your film was shot in Portland, Oregon. Would you film in the UK? Your black sense of humour is quite British, with a touch of sarcasm.

MB – I would looove to film in the UK. Yeah, probably I would. And now that you mentioned I will try hard.

MM – Finally, do you feel your next movie will be easier or do you feel the pressure of a Sundance winner?

MB – Oh, I haven’t even thought of that. I believe it helps that people are aware of who you are. I don’t have to convince them as much but I would not say that it is easy. I still have to justify the expense of everything and build the team!

Without Name

Posted on by mjbstaging

Some films are a trap. The post-modern French philosopher Gilles Deleuze broke down the cinematic experience into three varieties of images: the perception-image, the action-image, and the affection-image. These images relate respectively to the perception of sight, the interaction between characters and their positions, and to emotional experience. In Without Name the images are a hypnotic poison. The three varieties of images are presented in such a compact way that your senses are magnectically caught by the screen. There is no way out but to watch the film until the end.

It starts by introducing the land surveyor Eric (Alan McKenna). He takes a job in a plot land inside a deep and dense forest. He has to measure the land but some strange events begin to unfold. He doesn’t really know who has hired him and where exactly he is, as the site is not on any map. His personal life seems to have driven him into a dead end road: his marriage is falling apart and he has a very distant son. He is having an affair with his young assistant Olivia (Niamh Algar), an inquisitive woman who brings him more trouble than help. Everything evades Eric’s control and you feel tempted to rescue him from the void in which he is falling.

Without Name‘s narrative is a clever construction of stimuli with the purpose of giving you fear and goosebumps. Eric’s disturbed state causes commotion. His motivations are similar to the clumsy police officer Jong-goo in The Wailing – Read our review here. Eric is also trying to decode the secrets of the dark woodlands surrounding him. Just like the South Korean character, he surrenders to the environment. He finds some notes written by the former surveyor, who has mysteriously abandoned the job as well as the house where Eric and Olivia sleep. The notebook describes “The knowledge of the trees”, including a hallucinogenic mushroom that grows in that hidden forest. Soon both Eric and Olivia succumb to the drug.

The plot then becomes a little bit predictable. Eric’s fragile psyche evolves into a pitiful condition. Suddenly people disappear. He can hear plants talking. His girlfriend leaves him alone. You become anxious to anticipate how the filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan will solve this mystery. Is it a simple tale of a revengeful mother nature?

The film goes very well in the first half, when the acid-trip descends into some sort of eco-horror.

Unlike Wernor Herzog’s filmography, in which the concept of individual ambition is pitted against the forces of natural world, Without Name has a silly ending. In the fiction Fitzcarraldo (Herzog, 1982), for instance, the Herculean hero takes a Sisyphean turn, which explains Herzog’s general animosity towards those who see themselves as masters of the natural world. The same happens in the documentary Grizzly Man (Herzog, 2005), in which a man is devoured by bears because he thought he had tamed them. The human ambition versus nature is present in several of Herzog’s movies.

Finnegan, though, chooses a very different solution, with plenty of spectral lights and visual effects, thereby losing some of the film focus.

Without Name is out this weekend in the UK. It is also showing at Glasgow Film Festival on 18th and 23rd of February. For more info about the festival, click here:

Watch the film teaser trailer below:

Taxi Driver

Posted on by mjbstaging

In the mid-1970s New York was a very dark and dangerous city and tourists were avoiding it. In 1975, a year before Taxi Driver was launched, violence was so widespread that here were posters around Manhattan that said “stay off the streets after 6pm” and “do not walk alone”. Urban people were suffering with unemployment, inflation, crime and corruption, with many experiencing loneliness and anxieties. Screenwriter Paul Schrader didn’t have to look far in order to find inspiration for Taxi Driver.

As you probably know, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) works as a taxi driver in New York City. He complains about how dirty New York is and talks about how he does not discriminate against his passengers. He drives around everywhere on a typical day. When he gets off work in the morning after driving for hours and hours, he begins drinking and goes to a local porn cinema, where he spends the mornings on his own. Travis confesses his inability to sleep and talks about wanting to become more normal. Deep inside he wishes he could find a different place to go and to fit in with other people. Travis Bickle is a Vietnam War marine veteran. But he also has a much darker, dangerous and murderous side.

Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay while he was divorcing from his wife. He had no home. He slept in his car and was obsessed with guns and pornography. His experiences are reflected on Travis. What’s more, the car suddenly impersonated his feelings of loneliness and maladjustment, which Martin Scorsese deftly transposed to the screen. More than the cab driver, the taxi is a character. It is the car that sees underground New York. It is the car that chases the scum of the earth: the pimps and hookers. From inside the taxi, there is a perspective of New York that must be eliminated. The marginalised inhabitants of New York don’t fit in Travis’s reactionary idea of a “clean city”.

If Travis was around today, he would be on a lorry similar to the white lorry whose driver delivered an expletive-laden attack outside a mosque in Florida last year. Instead of searching for half-naked, blonde and young hookers, such as Iris (Jodie Foster’s cinema first role), Travis would exterminate burka-clad and Muslism women in general. His hate-fuelled mind would be intoxicated with racist Trumpian vitriol.

In fact, on the first script, Travis was much more racist than in the film. All of his shooting victims were African-Americans. Taxi Driver is such a cult movie that offers different readings as time goes by. In the film, there is a plethora of hidden figures that reveal the psychotic side of the seemingly ordimary citizen..

What makes Scorsese’s feature so vivid is its authenticity. Robert De Niro worked as a taxi driver in order to prepare for the role (his taxi driver’s licence is pictured above). Harvey Keitel, who plays the pimp Sport, did improv for weeks with a pimp. Jodie Foster was only 12 years old. Her role was considered so bawdy that she had to have a social worker on the set with her. She also had to spend several hours with a therapist in order to prevent psychological damage. They all got deep into the roles. Such authenticity elicited a quick reaction from the audience. On the day the film came out in New York, the queues were huge, and there were many taxi drivers lining up.

The film associates pornography with romance. Travis falls in love with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a secretary for a politician running for mayor. She is clearly out of his league but Travis insists on a date. On their first date, Travis takes her to see to a porn cinema.

Taxi Driver shows ugliness for what it is. There is no glamour and nothing is picturesque. Quite the contrary: it is menacing and dirty. The film is out again in cinemas on Friday, February 10th.

In time: A year after Taxi Driver was launched, William S. Doyle, Deputy Commissioner of the New York State Department of Commerce and Dr. Mark Donnelly, Art Director for New York State, hired advertising agency to develop a marketing campaign for New York State. The logo has become a pop-culture meme used everywhere around the globe. “I ❤ NY” was conceived in a taxi over to a meeting for the campaign. Watch below the song for the radio ad:

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore

Posted on by mjbstaging

To begin with, everything about this movie is strange. The title is difficult to memorise. It comes from a gospel song, released in 1993, but does anyone recognise it? “Oh Lord, You know I have no friend but you/ If Heaven’s not my home, Oh Lord what would I do?/ Angels have taken me to/ Heaven’s open door/ And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore”. Strangely enough this is the kind of movie that will harrow you to the point that you won’t feel at home in the cinema anymore. It is a sweet discomfort, though.

There is this girl, Ruth (a splendid performance by Melanie Lynskey). She works as a nursing assistant, and she is a baby sitter on the side, but she is so bored!… She spends her time drinking beer from the bottle and chasing her neighbours who walk their dogs in her garden. She can’t stand that they don’t clean up their dog poop. One of those days, she meets Tony (the almost unrecognisible and sexed up Elijah Wood). He apologises for the negligence as his dog is not trained. Tony is also weird. He is a combination of a nerd and a ninja fighter. It feels the film is an ordinary comedy. Well, that’s not the case.

The film genre is unclassifiable: it shifts from comedy to drama, then veers to horror and finally turns into a thriller. There is a little bit of romance too. Not even the smart Quentin Tarantino, who worked in a video rental store, would find the right shelf for this movie. He would have to have four copies of it, at least.

Ruth’s days of boredom are about to end. Someone enters her house and robs her computer as well as some silver heirloom from her nanny. In fact, it was just a spoon, but nevermind. She goes to the police. In vain. They won’t move a single cop in search of her possessions. Enough is enough. Ruth incarnates a female version of Agent 86 – from the American comedy TV series Get Smart. The outcome is hilarious and irreversibly innovative. She and Tony pursue a gang only to prove them that people cannot be such assh***s.

Macon Blair’s debut picture – he appears as an actor in Blue Ruin (Jeremy Saulnier, 2013) and Green Room (Jeremy Saulnier, 2015), both of them are considered 21st century cult movies – conquers with its dark tone and captivating characters. The narrative is inventive and the music score is very catchy. It will drive you away from your seat, to a place where imagination and pleasure rules. This is all we ask of a movie, isn’t it?

Blair conquered Netflix: they produced the film and they will release it worldwide on February 24th. Blair also conquered Sundance Festival audience: its second screening was in a midnight session completely sold-out. Blair conquered Sundance Jury: the film was awarded by the Grand Jury Prize: US dramatic. Will it be a unanimously acclaimed? Maybe not. Who cares? I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is a very dirty movie indeed.

The good news is you can catch I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore from the comfort of your home from February – the film has been produced by and is soon available on Netflix. Just click here for more information!

Beatriz at Dinner

Posted on by mjbstaging

Mexican actress and producer Salma Hayek hits the US on the face with the dramatic comedy Beatriz at Dinner. The film played at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24th, one night before Donald Trump signed the construction of the border wall between US and Mexico. The president has started to reshape US immigration enforcement policies via executive action, building a border wall and punishing “sanctuary cities”. Salma’s character shows us that such wall is already firmly in place.

Salma Hayek plays a Reiki healer and a sensitive Mexican immigrant who lives in the outskirts of Los Angeles. She has an office in a cancer clinic, but she also serves rich people in luxurious mansions. One day, she visits Cathy (Connie Britton), the mother of a young woman whom she helped to recover from chemotherapy. After her usual holistic therapy session with Cathy, Beatriz is ready to go back home to her goats and dogs. Beatriz loves animals and she is a vegetarian.

Fate keeps Beatriz inside the house. Her car breaks down. Cathy invites her to stay for dinner, but the idea of having a Mexican employee in a business dinner is not welcomed by Cathy’s husband, Grant (David Warshofsky). The dinner is being held in order to celebrate a business deal with Doug (John Lithgow), who builds resorts in idyllic locations.

The other guests – played by Chloë Sevigny, John Lithgow, Amy Landecker and Jay Duplass – mistake Beatriz for a maid. At first, Beatriz doesn’t realise the huge class gap between herself and the rich Americans. She is proud of her work and tries to convince every guest of the importance of healing, spirituality, and of love for nature and animals. Cathy politely explains to the other guests how Beatriz helped her daughter to fight cancer, but soon she realises that Beatriz is a threat at dinner. She won’t stop embarrassing the hosts with her spiritual and social commentary.

The way Salma sees Beatriz is key to understanding the contribution that Mexicans make to the US, especially female immigrants. She brings strength, wisdom and innocence to her character. She is impulsive and gentle at the same time. She challenges the social barriers and respects mankind. She is the quintessential Latin American in Hollywood as well as in the indie scene – the film falls in the latter category.

Beatriz becomes increasingly unsettled. She thinks that she has previously met Doug. She asks whether he has ever built a hotel in her hometown in Mexico and begins to suspect that he is the man who caused many deaths and an environmental tragedy. The narrative then provides not one, but two twists, revealing Beatriz’s subliminal determination to take revenge on behalf of her people. The script is cleverly written so to reveal the ugly face of American society. People like Doug – who have no respect for immigrants and will still heap the financial benefits they offer – have now been legitimised by Donald Trump’s election. The film is a harsh criticism of the social barriers that already exist in Los Angeles.

We don’t know yet when the film will hit the cinema, but if you follow us on Twitter we will inform you in good time! Meanwhile, you can watch the film trailer below:

Call me by Your Name

Posted on by mjbstaging

Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash, 2016) has just twisted Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971) and he has the right to do so. Times have changed. A queer movie can be treated as a universal love story. Call Me by Your Name was praised by public and the critics at 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

In the summer of 1983 in northern Italy, Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a 17-year-old boy, is about to receive a guest in his aristocratic house. He is lending his bed to Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old American scholar who has some work to do with Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor specialising in Greco-Roman culture. Elio and Oliver will share the same toilet as well as a desire for each other.

Just like in Visconti’s masterpiece, the story begins when a foreigner comes to the Italian territory. In Call me By Your Name, though, it is the young guy who invests in the more mature gay professor. Elio is a talented musician who hasn’t been yet tortured by fame and perfection – as Dirk Bogart, a music composer, has in the earlier movie. Elio follows Oliver not throughout the Venetian canals, but in the spiral and labyrinthic building he lives in. Elio is sick: his nose bleeds. Maybe there is death on its way, too.

The image of Venus, the goddess of love, is present in both films. In Visconti’s film, the young and androgynous teenager Tadzio, is portrayed as a statue in the sunset by the sea; in Guadagnino’s feature the statue of Venus emerges from the deep waters. Another Venus appears on the slides Oliver is analysing for an academic paper.

The Venus stands not just for love, but for beauty and lust. Elio’s hormones are at their peak. When he cannot have Oliver, he goes for his girlfriend Marzia (Esther Garrel). Love and lust are the motivations for our main characters. They both forget about their Apollonian personalities as a musician and a scholar and instead reveal their Dionysian persona. The outcome is a stunningly sensual relationship.

Guadagnino’s films have often been criticised in his country. Sometimes critics say they are not Italian enough, for Guadagnino has often worked with English-speaking actors. His first film (The Protagonists, 1999) had Tilda Swinton as the lead. Some believe that he portrays Italians in a sterotypical way, which is gesticulating a lot and quarrelling for trivial reasons. Here Guadagnino presents an atypical patriarch, which embraces the homosexuality of a son.

Call Me by Your Name brought to Sundance a delicate and emotional story, to an audience used to search lovers on dating sites. This is when this piece was originally written. It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 27th.

Call Me by Your Name is in our top 10 dirtiest movies of 2017 – click here for more information.

Manifesto

Posted on by mjbstaging

Do you miss the chameleonic David Bowie? Are you a fan of Lady Gaga? Do you like the avant-garde side of artistic manifestations? Well, then don’t you dare missing Manifesto when it comes to your town. Cate Blanchett is a hybrid of Bowie and Gaga. She impersonates 13 characters in order to renew the meaning of the word “manifesto”. Even if she has nothing to say, as her opening line states, you will be mesmerised by her emotional and accomplished personas. In reality, she has tons to communicate.

French writer André Breton once wrote “When the time comes, when we can submit the dream to a methodical examination, when by methods yet to be determined we succeed in realising the dream in its entirety, when the dream’s curve is developed with an unequalled breadth and regularity, then we can hope that mysteries which are not really mysteries will give way to the great Mystery”. And this is exactly what Blanchett does.

The film is a collage of quotes taken from artistic and historical manifestos that reframe art itself in contemporary days. Filmmaker and visual artist Rosefeldt brings an innovative concept, by transporting the location of the manifestos. So to say, Cate’s first persona is Karl Marx, who appears in the shape of a loitering homeless person in a concrete and desolate urban ambient. Further on, she magnificently recites the Dada painters and poets words dressed as a widow in a funeral. And so on… There is a pinch of salt and surprise in each and every character.

The script does what every good art or literature teacher knows. It exemplifies and transposes history to present days with situations that are part of the pupil’s universe. By melting words from the past with images of our world now, the film delivers a dissonant layer of meaning. The manifestos made sense in the past, and they continue to do so. It is not by chance that since 2001 Rosefeldt has been a professor of media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He commands his craft.

The handcrafted props and wardrobe will also catch your attention. There are puppets, wigs and heavy make-up in order to help Blanchett in her masterclass. All contribute to entertain and enable transformation. And sometimes they can be very funny, too.

This is a very rich production with a creative cinematography. There is something fresh in recreating those manifestos. The imagery is gentle on the eyes because Rosefeldt handles his slow motion camera very well. In a nutshell, he conveys a sense of disruption in a soft and tender manner.

Manifesto premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 24th. On all major VoD platforms in April.