Getting Go, the Go Doc Project (Cory Krueckeberg, 2013)

 Cast: Tanner Cohen, Matthew Camp. Screenplay: Cory Krueckeberg. Film editing: Cory Krueckeberg. Music: Tim Sandusky.

A small surprise: an extremely low budget movie, much of it shot on an iPhone, that manages to explore issues like objectification and heteronormativity with intelligence and wit and even some tenderness. It takes a romcom setup and transcends it, turning stock figures – the nerd and the hunk – into real people, thanks to shrewd performances by its leads, Tanner Cohen and Matthew Camp, who improvised a good deal of their dialogue. Cohen plays a college student and aspiring writer whose sex life is almost entirely online, jerking off to images of men, particularly a go-go dancer in a gay bar. He becomes obsessed with the dancer, and one drunken night emails him, claiming to be a documentary filmmaker who wants to do a film about the life of a dancer in a bar. To his surprise, the dancer responds, and he finds himself rounding up the necessary camera equipment. The dancer, known in the film as Go, wants to know if he’ll be paid, and the student, whom Go calls Doc, agrees to give him five percent of any profits the film might make – although he knows full well that there will probably never be a real film. And then they fall into a real relationship, which, in conventional romcom fashion, we know will be damaged when Go finds out the truth. Except that it doesn’t quite work the way, a smart reversal of our expectations. Getting Go doesn’t seem to have found much of an audience beyond LGBTQ film festivals, but its attractive performances and intelligent dialogue make it a film that should be more widely known. 

The Knack … and How to Get It (Richard Lester, 1965)

 Cast: Rita Tushingham, Ray Brooks, Michael Crawford, Donal Donnelly. Screenplay: Richard Lester, based on a play by Ann Jellicoe. Cinematography: David Watkin. Art direction: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: Antony Gibbs. Music: John Barry. 

When I saw The Knack when it was first released, I was about the age of its principal characters, and I wondered why they were having so much more fun than I was. The obvious answer is that my life was not being directed by Richard Lester. But today, what seemed like a giddy delight of a movie, which so wowed the jury at Cannes that they gave it the Palme d’Or, feels a little tiresome and sad. It climaxes, after all, with Rita Tushingham’s character crying rape. And even though her cries, which are sometimes more like chirps, are played for laughs, we have learned to treat rape as no laughing matter, so a sourness has infected the movie that can’t be dismissed as misapplied “wokeness.” There are still things to like about The Knack: It does have a certain naïve charm and a great deal of energy, and the chorus of stuffy middle-class Brits commenting on the antics of the young is often funny. But the film is as dated as a farce about the flappers and flaming youth of the 1920s would have been to the “mods and rockers” of the mid-‘60s

Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022)

Cast: Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Stormee Kipp, Michelle Thrush, Julian Black Antelope, Stefany Mathias, Bennett Taylor, Mike Paterson. Screenplay: Patrick Aison, Dan Trachtenberg. Cinematography: Jeff Cutter. Production design: Amelia Brooke, Kara Lindstrom. Film editing: Claudia Costello, Angela M. Catanzaro. Music: Sarah Shachner. 

I haven’t seen a Predator movie since the original back in 1987, so I’m not up on the lore and the cross-references embedded in Prey, which serves as a kind of prequel to the series. But it stands alone for those of us not in the know, thanks to solid adventure movie-making. Amber Midthunder is a worthy successor to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley from the Alien movies and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor in the Terminator series – the determined woman up against an implacable foe. If that sounds like you’ve seen it all before, you have. Prey holds no surprises as a member of the supernatural action movie genre. It’s not a film I’m likely to cue up for a rewatch anytime soon, but I liked it for a first watch, especially because it gave us some fresh faces in its cast and does justice to its Native American setting.

Damnation (Béla Tarr, 1988)

 

Cast: Miklós Székely B.,  Vali Kerekes, Gyula Pauer, György Cserhalmi, Hédi Temessy. Screenplay: László Krasznahorkai, Béla Tarr. Cinematography: Gábor Medvigy. Art direction: Gyula Pauer. Film editing: Ágnes Hranitzky. Music: Mihály Vig. 

Damnation is all about lateral movement. It opens with a long, silent sequence in which we watch carts suspended from cables travel back and forth across a bleak, damp industrial landscape. Gradually the camera pulls back to reveal the window we’re watching through, and then the man sitting there looking through the window, until finally the back of his head fills the screen. This is Karrer, who is carrying on a love affair with a married woman who sings in a bar ominously called the Titanik. What story there is concerns Karrer’s attempt to get the woman’s husband in trouble by involving him in a smuggling mission. But mostly the film is about the back-and-forth of the two partners in the affair. And Tarr’s camera continues its slow, itchy travels back and forth, moving slowly across each scene as we await what it might reveal next. Karrer gets advice from a bartender and he gets lectures from the woman who runs the cloakroom in the Titanik. But there’s not much action, apart from a scene in which people are dancing, and one in which Karrer, traveling across the rain-drenched lanscape, comes across a dog, who barks and growls at him, whereupon Karrer gets down on all fours and growls and barks back.  Otherwise, there’s only the slow lateral movement of the camera, accentuated often by the steady downpour of rain. You know from this description whether you want to watch Damnation, but I have to say I found it oddly compelling. 

Uncharted (Ruben Fleischer, 2022)

 

Cast: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Antonio Banderas, Sophia Ali, Tati Gabrielle, Steven Waddington, Pingi Moli. Screenplay: Rafe Judkins, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway. Cinematography: Chung-hoon Chung. Production design: Shepherd Franklin. Film editing: Chris Lebenzon, Richard Pearson. Music: Ramin Djawadi. 

Tom Holland is such a likable actor, with true screen presence, that I wish him well in his attempts to venture beyond the Spider-Man franchise. But Uncharted won’t do. It’s action for action’s sake, scrapping all laws of physics and probability for the sake of its thrills. I mean, it opens with a sequence that features Holland’s Nathan Drake on a string of cargo bales that are dangling from the back of an airplane. Drake jumps forward from bale to bale, defying gravity and wind speed, even though the same wind keeps sweeping his pursuers off to their doom. I knew from that moment that the only thing to do was relax and treat the movie like the live action equivalent of a Road Runner cartoon, the ones in which Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff and remains suspended in air before he notices what he’s done. I’ve suspended disbelief for many scenes in an Indiana Jones or James Bond film, but Uncharted tested my limits – and failed. Still, Holland does what he can with the material, and he’s fun to watch doing dumb stunts. Mark Wahlberg is there for the buddy movie aspect, and Antonio Banderas is wasted in the role of the villain. Sophia Ali and Tati Gabrielle play treacherous women, and even though Ali’s and Holland’s characters share a room and a bed in one scene, there’s scarcely a hint of sex and romance. It’s all based on a series of video games that I haven’t played, and I guess there was some resistance to the film from those who have, but mainly about the casting choices.