Tag: stan

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A Hero, The Staircase, Angelyne

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A HERO

* * * *

Asghar Farhadi’s latest feature A Hero continues his trademark examination of the stresses of everyday life in Iranian society, constructed as suspenseful, captivating social thrillers. This one focuses on a twenty-something man who’s found himself in ‘debtor’s prison’; allowed out on two-day leave, he tries to take up an opportunity to rid himself of his debt, only – of course – to find himself getting deeper and deeper into trouble. Farhadi’s typical themes of responsibility, morality, personal ethics and the law all get a full workout here; once again his schematic script is tight as a drum. Involving, challenging, and a terrific after-movie conversation starter.

ANGELYNE and THE STAIRCASE

Two new shows dip into the ways we display ourselves in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Angelyne, a real Los Angeles ‘character’ played here in an astonishingly entertaining performance by Emmy Rossum, has displayed herself on billboards throughout Los Angeles for decades; her only product is herself. Meanwhile (in The Staircase), Michael Petersen (played beautifully by Colin Firth) allowed a documentary crew to follow him while he was on trial for his wife’s murder in 2001; the original resulting TV series of the same name essentially gave birth to the modern true-crime docuseries. Both shows are compelling; Angelyne is witty while The Staircase is thematically ambitious and very well directed by Antonio Campos.

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Nitram

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Now in Cinemas

* * * *

You have every right and reason not to go see Justin Kurzel’s new film Nitram, despite its impeccable craftsmanship and staggeringly effective performances. It chronicles events leading up to the worst mass shooting in Australia’s history, and it’s as bleak and depressing as cinema gets. Stay away, by all means. This is not for everybody.

Is it for anybody? And by that, what I really mean is, does it have a reason to exist? About halfway through I wasn’t so sure; by the end I was, absolutely. For Nitram is a thorough, methodical, detailed, unsensational and sincere examination of mental illness; it is also a quietly powerful anti-gun plea for common sense.

The film makes the effective case for the shooter’s mental health leading directly to his actions, and along the way reminds us that, often, warning signs of serious trouble are evident. It is not so much that it’s sympathetic to the shooter; rather, it tries to wrestle with how things like this could happen: not because of ‘evil’, but when certain very disturbed people get their hands on guns. Without blaming society, or any one person in particular, the film couldn’t be clearer that mentally ill people need help, and we shouldn’t have guns circulating in society. Both concepts sound self-evident, obvious, but the film delivers the message with great impact and fresh clarity.

Caleb Landry Jones won Best Actor at Cannes for his lead role, and it is truly an astonishing performance, the best I’ve seen this year. We have come far in the depiction of mental illness on film, and this surely sets the new benchmark. Everything he does rings true. He is supported by equally precise naturalistic performances from Judy Davis (as his mother), Anthony LaPaglia (his father) and particularly Essie Davis as Helen, a woman with whom he develops an unusual and impactful relationship.

This is clearly similar territory for Kurzel to Snowtown (2011), his terrifying examination of the events leading up to the Adelaide serial killings. There are great tonal and aesthetic similarities, and a similarly bleak sense of existential despair, but there are also crucial differences. Snowtown featured graphic scenes of horrific violence and essentially operated as a horror film, albeit one of impeccable integrity and craftsmanship. Nitram has no onscreen violence and operates as a cautionary, sad drama. They are easily Kurzel’s two best films, and Nitram is one of the best films of the year, but one I can only recommend with reservations. Put it this way: if you think it’s not for you, you’re probably right.

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Only Murders In The Building, Hacks, Foundation

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Milieu is everything in Only Murders In The Building (Disney+), a half-hour cosy mystery set in a gorgeous, sprawling, classic Manhattan apartment building. Steve Martin and Martin Short continue their forty year or so on-again off-again collaboration as two mature show-biz types whose prime days are way past; true-crime podcast obsessives, they hook up with a third, a young woman played by Selena Gomez, to solve a murder in the building. It’s warm, charming and sweet: total lockdown comfort food. It’s also underwritten, at times rather casually directed, and features a very weird, even off-putting, performance by Gomez. But watching Martin and Short together is a treat, and the milieu is delicious.

Sometimes the right actor just gets the right TV role, and hits the jackpot. That’s an intentional, albeit lame, pun, as Jean Smart’s role in Hacks (STAN), as Deborah Vance, a Joan Rivers-like stand-up comedian, sees her revelling in all things Las Vegas. Vance, as Rivers was, is a star of the Vegas Strip, performing a hundred shows a year, and making unimaginable amounts of money. But the guy who owns the casino she works in wants to slowly decrease her workload, so to give the appearance of sharpening up her act, she agrees to her agent’s request to hire a young joke-writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder), who is at least 45 years younger than her and light years away in all sensibilities.

Their culture clash forms the spine of this feted half-hour comedy, but the depiction of a ludicrously lavish Las Vegas lifestyle is more than half the fun. Rivers was famously loaded, as is Vance, and the wealth porn on display is magnificent and eye-opening. Why would you ever work Vegas? Well, this house is why, and this lifestyle. Much like Rivers herself was, Vance is simultaneously a fan of Vegas and a woman of some taste, and seeing that culture clash – how to be tastefully obscenely wealthy in an obscenely tasteless place – is fun indeed. Smart won the Emmy recently, and she’s the reason to watch: she’s fantastic, making the most of every single moment.

On Apple TV+, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation gets a very expensive outing. One of the first vehicles we see in the first episode is extremely close to Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder from Star Wars, and myriad other references – especially to ‘Empire’ – make it clear that Asimov’s novel was indeed, for George Lucas, a foundational text. But Star Wars is fantasy, and this is ‘hard’ sci-fi, so everyone is giving a stoic performance, and solemnity is the key tone. Sometimes the mood is deliberately lightened, clearly to aid accessibility, and when it is, the tone clashes jarringly. I’ve not read the Asimov, but I doubt there was such importance played to a shipboard romance as there is here. Thankfully, there’s an awful lot of science, or pseudo-science, and mathematics going on as well, which is, I gather, what the Asimov heads will want, along with spectacular VFX world-building (and there are a lot of worlds). It feels mostly respectful to Asimov’s tone and story, which may make it good for the fans and incomprehensible to the rest of us.

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The White Lotus and This Way Up

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Australian actor Murray Bartlett gets the kind of mid-career, middle-age role most jobbing TV actors dream of in Mike White’s pandemic-shot, Hawaii-based ensemble dramatic comedy The White Lotus (Foxtel, from HBO). Bartlett plays Armond, the manager of a luxe Hawaiian resort dealing with a contingent of needy guests. They’re not all bad people, but they’re all privileged, and different degrees of difficult. Watching Bartlett as Armond navigate their demands is often very, very funny; it’s a sublime performance, playing against an ensemble of famous and instantly recognisable faces including Connie Britton, Steve Zahn, Jennifer Coolidge, Alexandria Daddario and Sydney Sweeney. All of them are playing to type, well; Daddario and Sweeney are particularly good. But Bartlett steals the show: his Armond is the centre of the resort and the drama and he takes seemingly effortless control. Mike White’s writing is never subtle but unfailingly well observed and often very sharp, and his direction is moody and evocative. HBO (and hence Foxtel) are doling out the six episodes weekly; all three so far have been crackers.

On STAN, Aisling Bea’s half-hour comedy This Way Up has just dropped its second six-episode season. I’m just discovering it – halfway through Season One – and it’s a total delight. Bea plays Aine, a thritysomething Irish lass living in London and just trying to cope (at the beginning of ep one she’s being discharged from a facility after a nervous breakdown). Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe) plays her older sister who seems to have things a bit more together. The sisters’ relationship is the core of the show and the scenes between Bea and Horgan – they’ve played sisters before, on the BBC series Dead Boss – sparkle with natural affection and sharp wit. Lovely.

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Physical and Blindspotting

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Rose Byrne has emerged as an astonishingly versatile screen actress; witness her Gloria Steinem in last year’s Mrs. America. Now she’s got herself a big, heavily promoted Apple TV+ series of her own, Physical; the material is good, but she is great. This could be her Emmy; she seems destined for one.

Byrne plays Sheila, a once active activist who has settled into a seemingly comfortably mundane domestic routine in 1980s San Diego: she takes her and her husband’s daughter to day care, shops for the groceries, takes a ballet class, picks up her daughter from day care, cooks dinner. There’s one huge problem: amongst all that, she routinely buys large amounts of junk food, eats it, and then ‘purges’ it (vomits it up), telling herself every time, in an almost non-stop interior monologue voiceover that is the show’s coup de télé, that it will be the very last time.

This is tough stuff for a half-hour ‘dark comedy’, which is how the show is being marketed (I read it, two episodes in, as a drama), so much so that the show carries a content warning before it rolls. But Byrne makes it work. There is a lot of good work going on around her – the production design is excellent – but so far, the singular sensation of the show is Byrne’s performance. She’s truly ready for her close-up: as a vehicle for her, this is as good as anything, and I’m in.

STAN is making Blindspotting available one episode at a time, and based on the first, it’s a little hard to predict how things will pan out. It’s adapted from the extremely idiosyncratic (and enjoyable) 2018 film of the same name by that film’s writers, Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, but this time around, they’re not the stars: Casal is in it tangentially, but Diggs not at all, and, frankly, Diggs the actor was a huge part of what was interesting about the film. The TV adaptation follows Ashley, Casal’s girlfriend from the film, as she adapts to life in Oakland, California while Casal’s Miles serves a prison term. Back in the day, they’d call this a ‘spin-off’, giving a minor character their own show with occasional drop-ins from the original leads to remind viewers why they’re there. On the basis of the first episode, I’m not convinced Jasmine Cephas Jones, as Ashley, was ready for her close-up. We’ll see; thus far, it’s touch and go.

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Girls5eva

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Over the course of its seven seasons, Tina Fey’s 30 Rock gathered and maintained a very particular comic style, and now a show in its wake, Meredith Scardino’s Girls5eva, uncannily echoes it. Scardino wrote for Fey on Fey’s second show, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Fey is an Executive Producer on Girls5eva. It’s Scardino’s show, but it’s Fey’s unmistakeable style, which is fine, because it’s a vibe we all need a little of: fast, funny, and deeply silly.

There are more tropes too, including a kind of third-wave feminism reclamation of such stereotypes as the bimbo, the fat chick and the b*** h. They’re proudly represented here, the creators being comfortable in their own skin as, well, women, and they fit neatly into the show’s simple set-up: a girl group whose moment has long passed gets a chance at another one.

All the acting, all the gags, all the situations, everything is over the top, gleefully so. Of the four main characters, the standout is Wicky Roy, played by Renée Elise Goldsberry, who was the original Broadway Angelica in Hamilton. She plays a diva’s diva, divinely. Luckily we get a lot of her as her three co-horts don’t sparkle as brightly. No matter. This show is one thing and one thing only, escapism, and it works as such.

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It’s A Sin

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Full Season Available Now On STAN

Russell T. Davies is at the top of the heap of queer television, paving the way for all who followed with his seminal series Queer As Folk. His new show, It’s a Sin, seems destined to have a seismic impact.

Davies knows how to write TV, and It’s a Sin is extremely well scripted, zipping along with total watchability even as it tackles deeply sad subject matter. It’s a Sin is about AIDS tearing through the London queer community in the 1980s, and there is tragedy at every turn. But there are also a cast of buoyant and almost immediately loveable young people – that must be Davies’ true alchemy, the ability to create instantly appealing characters – whose exuberant energy is as upbeat as the plague they face is devastating.

The style is hyper, elevated, almost cartoonish; everyone’s acting is dialled up to 11 (and sometimes beyond), particularly when called upon to ‘act happy’ (there is sooo much forced gaiety – pun not really intended – and badly faked laughter, and it grates). But the script, the milieu and the themes of the show add up to an undeniably addictive, entertaining and, dare I say it, deeply important package.

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BELOW

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LaPaglia and Corr.

* * * 1/2

Bold, ambitious, colourful, a big swing, Maziar Lahooti’s feature debut Below, now available on STAN, is full of ideas. Set in the daunting milieu of a migrant detention centre in a (very slightly) alternative-reality Australia, the film takes black-comedy aim at all manner of hot button issues swirling around our – Australian – sense of identity, as well as cancel culture, the dark web, gambling, corporate-speak, privatisation, and, inherently, the ethical and moral quagmire of migrant detention itself. It’s loaded to the brim, thrillingly, bracingly, at times almost gluttonously – the work of someone with a lot to say and only 93 minutes to say it.

Ryan Corr plays Dougie, a young man forced by circumstance to work in a private detention centre in an arid region that’s been effectively erased from Australia – a no-man’s land of no accountability. There, he encounters a punitive system of cage-fighting that’s been set up to keep the detainees in line, and sees an opportunity to profit.

A kind of unholy cross between Catch-22, Fight Club and The Road Warrior, Lahooti’s nihilistic, anti-heroic and at times ferociously angry film is visually energetic and excitingly paced, creating a vibrantly dangerous world with one foot in reality and the other in low-key science fiction. Corr is an entertaining – if amoral – guide, and Anthony LaPaglia is ridiculously enjoyable as Terry, Dougie’s step-father and head honcho at the detention centre who gets him into this mess. As black comedy it’s not the funniest, as political satire it’s not the sharpest, and as sci-fi it’s not the most rigorous, but part of its charm is how it resists trying too hard to excel as any of these. You might say that it’s tonally inconsistent; I would suggest it’s tonally bold. It’s its own thing, original and unique, not for everyone, and all the better for it.

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Love Fraud (Showtime / STAN)

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Screen Shot 2020-09-04 at 3.19.26 pm.png

Another week, another well-built multi-part doco series about crime in America. In this case, Love Fraud (Showtime / STAN) is about a serial internet dater, Richard Scott Smith, who meets, woos, marries and ultimately fleeces an astonishing number of women in a surprisingly compact area (at least, in the first episode, where most of the women seem to be from Kansas). That he does it time and time again is eyebrow-raising; that what he’s doing is kind-of-legal is pretty astonishing. But the series isn’t really about Smith: it’s about his victims, and their quest for vengeance, as they find each other online, band together, and – with the filmmakers along for the ride – hunt him down. It is this immediacy, of the filmmakers being in the back seat, literally, as their subjects pursue their own story, that makes Love Fraud pretty gripping. What makes it most entertaining is the ally the women enlist: a tough-as-old-boots sixty-something “lady bounty hunter” named Carla who, if you encountered her in a fictional show, you wouldn’t believe. She’s a truly unique character, funny, wise and brave, and emblematically, undeniably American. Indeed, all these shows, from Making a Murderer on, aren’t really about the crimes: they’re about America, and the strange things taken for granted there that play like absurd fiction everywhere else.

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Showbiz Kids and Saint Frances

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Showbiz Kids.png

SHOWBIZ KIDS
HBO / Foxtel Showcase
* * * 1/2
 
Written and directed by Alex Winter – Bill from Bill and Ted’s excellent adventures, of which another is coming very soon – the HBO documentary Showbiz Kids lets level-headed survivors of child stardom speak with level heads, rather than revel in sordid and sad tragics and their tragedies.
 
Evan Rachel Wood, Milla Jovovich, Henry Thomas, Wil Wheaton, Mara Wilson and Cameron Boyce all get about equal screen time, while Todd Bridges, Jada Pinkett Smith and ‘Baby Peggy’ – hundred-year-old Diana Serra Cary – also speak their pieces.
 
It’s sober and sobering and not at all trashy. Essentially these adults aren’t moaning, seeking pity nor trying to scare us to death lest we let our kids go on the stage, but their overwhelming message is clear: kids should get to be kids.
Saint Frances.png
 
SAINT FRANCES
STAN
* * * 1/2

When Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg declared their Dogme 95 Manifesto in Paris at the centenary celebration of cinema, they were advocating for a digital democratisation of the filmmaking process: basically, they were saying, let’s let handheld digital movies about real people in real settings with tiny budgets and no tomfoolery get cinema releases and paying audiences. I think they’d admire Saint Frances, which adheres to most of the original 10 Rules to achieve Dogme certification, but which won’t be seen in cinemas in Australia because of the big bad virus; instead, it’s lurking quietly on STAN, where it deserves far more attention than it’s getting.
 
The feature directorial debut from Alex Thompson, surprisingly a man, Saint Frances is a compassionate, funny, warm and super-enjoyable slice-of-life about modern American female life. Bridget (Kelly O’Sullivan, who also wrote the script) is a thirty-four year old midwestern “server” – waitress – who becomes a nanny for the six-year-old daughter of a lesbian couple. Her relationship with the child, Frances (Ramona Edith Williams), grows alongside her consistent embarrassment as she deals with a particular physical irritation. The interweaving of themes of maternity, responsibility, maturity and sexuality is seamless and engrossing. But the film goes further, tackling – with rather exquisite tact and taste – the ongoing culture wars dividing even seemingly affluent, progressive American neighbourhoods in such theoretically neutral spaces as the playground. Unafraid to stand its ground, Saint Frances is also unafraid to engage the enemy with empathy. It’s a lovely movie, and lingers in the mind.