Quick Takes: All the Rest

Short reviews of everything I haven't reviewed yet, almost

I try every time I do “Quick Takes” to actually be quick, but we have a lot to catch up on, so I’m really going to try to limit myself to capsules this time. Can I do it? Let’s find out.

Left-Handed Girl

I get why this may not have more awards traction: Sean Baker won big last year, and everyone’s thinking been there, done that. I don’t want to imply that Baker’s regular producer and collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou is simply an imitation of him, but I suspect they’ve worked together long enough to influence each other and combine styles somewhat. She’s solo-directing here for the first time, but aside from not being in English, Left-Handed Girl is of a piece with their other collaborations directed by Baker. Most notably, it’s (a) taking a visually evocative neighborhood, and imagining exactly who lives there and what goes on behind closed doors, and (b) one of the characters is at least sex-worker adjacent.

Mostly, though, we follow young I-Jing (Nina Ye) as her single mom-led family returns to Taiwan, leaving a terminally ill abusive ex behind. Mom’s trying to make a noodle stand work, while I-Jing’s older sister works at a place of dubious legality where she’s banging the boss. The title comes from grandpa having archaic superstitions about left hands being evil, which prompts I-Jing to use her left hand to steal, because after all, she can’t help that it belongs to the devil.

Baker’s script is so deceitfully slice-of-life natural that when it brings everything together for the emotional climax, it’s genuinely surprising yet makes total sense, like a murder mystery where the reveal of the culprit implicitly puts all the clues together.

Also, Tsou had me actually believing at one point that I-Jing might cut her own hand off with a meat cleaver. I always enjoy when a movie can deactivate my “focus groups wouldn’t let them do that on camera” mental filters.

Is This Thing On?

The way this movie was promoted, I thought it would be primarily about a guy who gets divorced and uses the trauma to become a stand-up superstar. It isn’t, quite. His wife is a former athlete who becomes a coach, though it isn’t about that, either. No, this is the sort of movie my friend Christian Lindke loves most, a reconnection rom-com about a separated couple who fall back for each other again when they see one another as new singles pursuing their passions and remember what that’s like.

It’s fun to watch – under Bradley Cooper’s direction, Is This Thing On has the gritty vibe of A Star Is Born while being almost pure romantic hokum, and it stars Will Arnett and Laura Dern, with Arnett cowriting the script. Still, it beggars belief that they didn’t even consider the new angles they examine before actually separating. That’s why it’s a feel good fantasy, and that’s okay, but don’t mistake it for an awards-level movie. On the other hand, I’d watch it again in a heartbeat over freakin’ Maestro.

No Other Choice

Lee Byung-hun so often plays the coolest or baddest guy in the room – known stateside as the top man in Squid Game, and Storm Shadow in the first two G.I. Joe movies – that it’s quite a stretch to see him playing an awkward dork. But he rules at it, as he does with every role he takes. As Man-su, he’s a successful employee of a paper-making company who suddenly gets laid off when an American company buys it. After pursuing many ineffective strategies, he hits on a real doozy: place an ad for a fake paper company so he can see who the top applicants for jobs like his old one are...and kill them. Here’s the thing: while many American movies make it seem like it’s really easy to snap and become a murderer, it isn’t for Man-su. He sucks at it. But dang it, he’s going to try until he gets it right. Perhaps luckily for him, he sucks at so many things that nobody suspects what he’s really doing.

Park Chan-wook based the movie on Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax, previously adapted by Costa-Gavras in 2005. The novel is from 1997, yet feels eerily prescient in its use of paper as a symbol of imminent obsolescence. Park adds elements of AI into the mix, and carefully withholds key pieces of information until they matter.

At 139 minutes, it feels like a couple of different movies spliced together, at least at first. I figured that the fate of the first potential victim would be the big resolution, but then, nope, the movie kept going as he confronted two more. I won’t spoil how it ends, but “be careful what you wish for” applies to almost all possible fates for Man-su. If you’ve watched any number of Park Chan-wook movies, you already know.

The Testament of Ann Lee

This season’s most unlikely full-on musical, not really promoted as such, depicts the origins of the Shakers, a charismatic subset of Quakers who sway in religious ecstasies and promote celibacy. Updated arrangements of Shaker hymns, along with clearly better-choreographed versions of their movements, enhance the tale of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), who led the group out of England in the 18^th century to the New World.

Seyfried nails a working-class English accent, and puts it all out there in the musical numbers, delivering one of the finest performances of the year. (After watching, my reaction was that she just knocked Rose Byrne out of my top three.) The story is as simple as musicals often are, with broad-strokes persecution and marital issues, but the goal appears to be to draw us into the sacred space the way a believer would enter it, offering the sensations of a religious experience the way it’s meant to be. Frankly, you’ve never heard church music this good. Not from White people, at least.

Hedda

I’ve seen many versions of Hedda Gabler, from my own high school to the Glenda Jackson movie version and Fiona Shaw doing it live on the Dublin stage. Jackson’s is the more traditional take, of Hedda as confident manipulator, while Shaw played her completely nervous and insecure. Tessa Thompson, in Nia DaCosta’s new movie, splits the difference: she’s nervous and manipulative, in part because of a gender-flipped character that makes her bisexual, and her reason for leaving her ex one wrapped up in social stigma and cowardice.

Setting the whole thing over the course of one large, Gatsby-esque house party is an interesting choice – to preserve the key scenes of a story that originally had a much-smaller cast, DaCosta frequently has characters pair off into side rooms where they spout theatrical dialogue at one another. The ending has also been changed, which...I mean, when you have a classic play that’s been done many times faithfully, you can do that, but does it make the story better? Hedda’s potential suicide source goes from phallic pistol to vaginal drowning pool – the notable “wet spot” on her property – and I get the imagery there. But I’m not sure in the end that the movie has much to say about societal structures forcing people to be who they aren’t, and allowing them to victimize others who are worse at it, except that Tessa Thompson does a flawless English accent.

Sorry, Baby

Sorry, baby, this ain’t it.

I like the kitten on the poster, but be advised it’s only in maybe three scenes – thanks to the time jumping this movie does, it’s replaced by an adult cat more often than not. Writer-director-star Eva Victor (they/them) could easily be poised to be the next Lena Dunham...or better, so long as they don’t say stupid stuff about giving away their pets or whatever, plus they’re more conventionally Hollywood-attractive. Sorry, Baby, is a whole lot of talking and navel-gazing reminiscent of more male-skewing mumblecore, so if you thought that needed a female corrective, you got it, and your reward for sitting through it is an ending that literalizes the movie’s title in the most obnoxious possible way.

Victor plays Agnes, an aspiring college professor at one point in her timeline, and an actual one at others. She (the character’s a she, I’m pretty sure) and her gay friend Lydie (Naomie Ackie from The Rise of Skywalker) have conversations that seem borderline flirtatious; she and her male neighbor have casual sex sometimes. At a certain point in the story, a clearly telegraphed act of abuse happens, leading the movie to being mostly about how recovery and even the actual act of abuse can be way more low-key and weird than people expect.

Also, another one of her friends seems strangely autistic and hateful. That part’s never really explained.

I wouldn’t mind seeing Victor act in more stuff, but unless they have something more to say than just this, I’ll pass on the next script.

Marty Supreme

I would not have guessed that in the Safdie brothers’ split to make sports-ish movies, I would prefer the ping-pong one with Timothee Chalamet over the Rock as an MMA fighter. Yet here we are. Marty Mauser is a fictional character, which helps things a lot, but it’s also clear that Josh is the better director of the two. Like many Coen brothers’ movies, it takes place in a period – the 1950s – that seems as much like the movie version of that time as it does anything resembling true reality; ‘80s songs on the soundtrack like Alphaville’s “Forever Young” add to the world-out-of-time vibe.

Like Adam Sandler’s Howard in Uncut Gems, Marty is a hustler who never knows when to stop pushing, so why is it that I don’t have a panic attack watching him like I do Howard? I think it’s the fact that Howard has a family, and is frantically plugging holes in a bursting dam, while Marty is just moving headlong forward until he meets a no that can’t be turned into a yes. And when he does, he backtracks to the last one that might have been more malleable. Practically, he could make a lot of money running a shoe store, but he’d rather be the world’s greatest ping-pong player, and con rich people into bankrolling him.

Bookended by the conception and birth of a child, Marty’s story is clearly delineated as the last chance to screw around and have purely selfish ambition, before adult responsibilities hit you and you become Howard, perhaps, at worst. In the meantime, Marty’s antics feel far more likely to get him punched than shot, which is better for comedy. The noir-ish production design keeps this thing feeling right on the line between dream and nightmare, in a reality where Marty maybe doesn’t truly know the difference.

The Secret Agent

I’m not surprised critics love The Secret Agent, but I’ll be more surprised if audiences do. If it lived up to its opening scene, in which protagonist Armando (Wagner Moura) pulls into a gas station where a dead body has been rotting under cardboard sheets for days, and the cops are more concerned with hassling Armando for bribes than finding the killer, I might have loved it. But while there are some nicely weird flourishes – a random guy in a stylized gorilla suit, a chewed up leg that in one sequence goes out hopping around on its own – the tonal confusion and narrative layers feel more clever than emotionally satisfying. And that’s before the time jumps, which take us from the main action in 1977 dictatorial Brazil to the present day, in which two young woman listen to audio archives of what happened back then.

Armando is searching for evidence of his mother in the national archives, and seeking to regain custody of his son, who has been left with grandparents, before he leaves the country. But there are also hitmen on his trail, stemming from a vehement disagreement with an electric company executive. There’s also a two-headed cat that kinda just hangs out.

Even as I write this, it sounds better than it is. Maybe part of the problem is the way a climactic chase scenes just turns into something else entirely that feels pointedly disruptive and tangential. Brazil, it turns out, is the real character here with the major arc; the other characters are there for it to bounce off of, not for us to really care so much about.

Scarlet

It’s Hamlet, but with a gender-flipped, pink-haired anime girl as the princess of Denmark, plus she’s dead and in Hell now. If that ain’t a hook, I don’t know what is.

Technically, this afterlife is the “Otherworld,” while there’s a happier “Infinite Realm” above, accessible by a mountain akin to Dante’s Purgatory. When Scarlet finds out that evil Claudius has built himself a castle on said mountain, amassing an army of doomed souls to storm their way into Heaven-by-any-other-name, she sets out for revenge. Because Hell is timeless, like the Nexus in Star Trek, she encounters a modern-day medic named Hijiri, whose medical gear, superior to those of the otherwsie medieval folks in the afterlife, makes him seem to them a near-miraculous, Christ-like healer. Because, yes, you can die again in Hell, disintegrating into leaves.

The visuals here are stunning, with many backdrops looking like photo-real ruins and vistas, though I suspect at least one layer of rotoscoping over them if that’s the case. The characters are nicely expressive when they need to be, and the flash-forwards to Hijiri’s time offer a sense of optimism in the future that feels refreshing – our time may feel dark, but we’re not dying of the plague [YET] or slaying potential heirs to the throne any more. Emotionally, the conclusion is somewhat preordained – once you know Heaven and Hell, even if they aren’t called that, are real, it should follow what the right thing to do is – yet nonviolent Christianity still feels like enough of a refreshing change from the “news” pundit version that it does the heart good anyway.

Together

For all my fellow ROBIN OF SHERWOOD fans:

“tooooo...gether...weeee. Tooooo...gether...weeeeee. DUN DANNA NA NA, DUN DA NANA NANA NAAAAAA NAAAAAAA...!

I find it best to start with the first thing that pops into my head. I don’t see Together winning any awards, but I loved it. I connected to it. And I’m glad we get screeners for stuff like this.

Real life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie play a couple with differing passion and goal levels in their lives – as in Die My Love, a dude wanting to be a musician is immediate shorthand for “this guy’s a fuck-up and probably a drunk too.” She’s an English teacher, which pays much better in the movies than real life. Anyway, their commitment differences get put to the test when they drink cursed water in an underground shrine, and it causes their bodies to physically need contact. If they move too far apart they might lose consciousness, but if they get close, their skin starts to stick together to try to fuse them into one being.

There are only so many places the narrative can go here, but that’s not really the point. It’s the way they react to crises together, believing or disbelieving, with good reasons on either side, and addressing past trauma (Franco’s character has some real jumpscare-y recurring nightmares) and current problems. Would you do what they do? Is there a way to beat the thing? Should you want to? If you don’t buy into the lead couple, none of it works. But I do, and for a guy as young as writer-director Michael Shanks seems to be – he names Ari Aster as an influence, for goodness’ sake – he understands relationships well. Dare I say I think there are even some interesting places for a potential sequel to go. Reminded me a lot of The Ruins, which I think I’m gonna go recommend my youngest brother watch right now.

KPop Demon Hunters

I’ve saved the best for last – and KPop Demon Hunters really is the best movie of the year, for everything I’ve seen. Neglect it at your peril and risk of being left behind – it still gobsmacks me that so many so called fan-sites or nerd sites cater very little to anime and anime-ish product that all the kids today are into.

KPop Demon Hunters utilizes elements I’ve seen before, but combines them in a way that’s fresh, creatively exciting, and feels like a whole new cinema for the newer generation. It’s like, what if the Jem and the Holograms cartoon in the ‘80s had actually been really good? (With the success of this and Barbie, there’s no excuse not to do right by Jem.) It fixes many of the smaller issues I had with Wicked, and helped me rationally understand exactly why animation can be the perfect medium for musicals. And it has the best possible answer for the question “Why is the bird wearing a tiny hat?” I’m not spoiling the answer for you. Go watch it.

In a furiously kinetic pop musical, the title characters are a female trio who make hit records and kill demons, even though one is secretly part demon herself (boy bands are ALL demon, as you no doubt suspected long ago). The songs speak to the girls’ insecurities – universal ones, to be sure, but pointedly heightened in adolescence: am I too annoying? Am I too mean? Would people hate me if they knew what I was really like? Our music tastes tend to form in our teens precisely because nothing expresses those feelings like a well-written tune, belted out.

As in Scarlet, anime Hell is a bit more forgiving than fundie Christian Hell – lost souls can still be redeemed. It’s thematically fitting even if it isn’t theologically so for all; most adolescent mistakes an be remedied, provided there’s true repentance and work done, and in time, the issues that scared you so will fade against your determination. Teenage boy superheroes so often want to take over the world; teenage girl superheroes want to take control of their feelings. We should ask ourselves which is really the more relevant example.

While understanding that everything is better with demon slaying, of course.

That’s me being quick. How did I do? Took almost the whole day, but there were a lot of interruptions at home. You don’t wanna know what my dog is going through right now.

Images via Netflix, Neon, Searchlight, WB, Sony, A24

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