Shorts and Film Reviews
Nosferatu
A peculiar and intoxicating movie—Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu transports us to 19th century Germany to the trials of Thomas Hotter (Nicholas Hoult) and his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp)—whose paths cross with Count Orlock—the legendary vampire based on Bram Stoker’s "Dracula".
Bill Skarsgård, who plays the vamp, and the makeup and prosthetic artists who brought Nosferatu, the monster, to life, might be geniuses. They wreathe Nosferatu in a halo of oblivion—a foul, mystical enchantment that would make fairies scream. Once he looks—croaks at you—you’re done. You might be him, by that point—so deep is his capacity for invading your personal domain. (If he was your coworker, you would definitely not share your lunch with him. That would leave you feeling low and him feeling too high—as if gluten was the only thing that could keep him alive.)
Eggers has a knack for portraying the time period. It really feels like a different era. The occult Swiss scientist—Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz—played by Willem Dafoe—baffles but cares—as if a member of some special erstwhile kind of philosophers. The paths to Transylvania roll through landscapes and villages recalling a real land and space. Eggers seems to be turning a spooky tale into a meditation on forms—leaving us nowhere to go.
Mickey 17
Poor Mickey (Robert Pattinson). A trapped young man needing escape from his debts to a loan shark—he offers his body as a clonable research subject to a privatized space mission to establish a new colony—led by Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and Ylfa (Toni Collette)—two weirdos with a strange cult-like following.
Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 works as a psychological thriller without a brain. More about styles than explaining—it feeds off Pattinson’s face and seems to blame no one. Loose, chilly—in a swaggering sense—ready to roll—maybe its real mission aims to leave us blissed-out.
Toni Collette makes a mean weirdo; Ruffalo too. They talk out of their asses in an exemplary way. Entire acting classes could be taught based on their dramas. As usual, Pattinson makes the hard look easy—using minimalism for max effect—sketching a performance out like a dancer or movement artist.
The textures and sights gel—as with all of Joon-ho’s movies. He excels at conjuring interesting images—gimmicks perhaps—but maybe slightly heavier than just tricks. More like gateways to the imagination. A satirist, in his movies, he pictures a society in which the broke must pay through the nose—whether it be on the streets of Seoul (Parasite), on a train (Snowpiercer), or, here, on a spaceship.
Companion
It starts with a heart. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) meets Josh (Jack Quaid) in a grocery store. She appears high on herself, looking at Josh with manic eyes, but that has a reason. She is a robot, designed to provide emotional and sexual companionship to lonely men. Complications ensue, and this warped, sick and fairy-like movie threatens to spin out of control, as she and Josh head to a gathering of his friends at Kat’s (Megan Suri) house, and he begins to manipulate her in ways the audience does not begin to suspect.
The prim, rosy and Goddess-like Sophie Thatcher portrays Iris—mixing sly comedic chops with a laser-like intensity that seems to lock in with a deathly stare on her objectives. She may appear sylvan and natural but she has some weird gears meshing in her mind. Her foil—the slick, jovial, and huggable (only if you can stand his bad lines)—Josh, teams up with her to tango—one throws a tantrum, the other goes for the throat.
This feels like a comedy about empathy or the lack thereof. Even Eli (Henry Guillen), Josh and Kat’s strange gay friend, has some rather nice pensive moments, amid a farcical mode. “Can man ever respect woman?” the movie asks. It explores this through the subversion of the usual tropes about romantic relationships, where the lady goes into a relationship with pure intentions—as a robot, Iris has no soul, supposedly, so where does her emotional side fit in?
Companion asks, “are we so wildly immature and lust-driven around each other that no genuine partnership exists? Are we all just sitting in a bathtub of each other’s filth, expecting the other to scrub us clean?”
Director Drew Hancock has a smooth visual flow and conjures some entertaining set pieces among the actors—dramatic dancing sequences, horny chases, and an interesting police search where Marc Menchaca makes a nice appearance, laconic and understated, but owning the road. It appears he, too, is searching for love.
A Real Pain
Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain presents a cult of one—co-star Kieran Culkin’s boyish, loud and perverse Benji. While the two cousins are touring Poland with other Jews—he presents a crisis course in his own inner workings, going on rambling monologues about mistrust in capitalism and the consumer culture, and about the standard shape of the tour itself. He does this all with a wicked gleam in his eye—as if to say to the audience: “I’m not done yet—brace yourself—there’s another diatribe coming.” The performance captivates—but also vexes the movie—makes it seem like it has only one point—to present a clown at the top of his powers.
Benji's eager and sullen charades both pain and shame his cousin David (Eisenberg). David can’t figure out whether he wants to stop him or comfort him—shove him away or hug him. Eisenberg and Culkin make a weird team—and they have fun playing off of one another—sharing scenes that range from bumbling—trading barbs on a train—to spicy—talking about an older mourning lady in their group with youthful aplomb. It almost feels like moaning for moaning’s sake—how hard can these guys try to hide their rage—but it succeeds because of this film’s sweet embrace of its characters’ grace: in the end everybody goes home without scars.
The score wafts along on feather wings—some nice piano playing holds it all in place—and the scenes sparkle due to some nice shots of Poland’s architecture, countryside and locals. The film almost meditates on grief—but lands in more in a sassy patch, serving as a career course for performers who want to know how to zazz up a scene without overdoing it. Eisenberg’s writing takes things almost to the point of dynamiting a few setups but lies back enough so that the real energy—of community presence—remains palpable.
Marcia—the older mourning Jewish lady—played by Jennifer Gray—emerges as the most interesting character. Still grieving the loss of her marriage, she comes on this quest seemingly ready to live again—but her eyes show a few unanswered questions—griefs which the main characters turn over in their spiels about life—“is she depressed?”, etc. They seem to be doing some of their own gazing at themselves when they consider her—but—in the end—land too much on juvenile abstractions to come to a better understanding of where their constant anxiety comes from. Maybe their Grandma was not allowed to be herself. Blasted out of her homeland—nothing remains to mark her earth. The stones the two cousins put on her former doorstep—promptly removed once the Polish neighbors see—supports this theory. The boys linger—but do they really stop to take in her memory? Most of the tour of Poland in the movie seems spent—as Benji points out—in rote narration containing many facts and numbers that fail to bring the inner truths of the characters’ experience completely to the surface.
Eloge—a Nigerian who immigrated to Canada and converted to Judaism—represents the deeper truth that Benji desires. He comes from a war-torn background—a survivor of the Nigerian genocide. Benji tries to assimilate his culture and identity throughout the movie—learning truths he could not have learned with his rational mind. Having spent just a week with each other, by the end, the two men feel like brothers.
