Summer’s over and it’s back to school for teenaged girl protagonists in several otherwise very disparate new movies, all of them worthwhile. (It’s also a rare week in which most of the incoming major commercial releases are women-centered narratives: Halle Berry in thriller Never Let Go, Margaret Qualley and Demi Moore in body-horror fantasy The Substance, and Elizabeth Banks in medical drama A Mistake, the last two also directed by women.) The relatively big noise amongst those tales of adolescence is Canadian actor turned writer-director Megan Park’s My Old Ass, which made a splash at Sundance early this year. At that festival in particular, a decent, modest seriocomedy can be greeted with somewhat hysterical enthusiasm—is it the high altitude?—that in the sober aftermath of regular release some months later seems an overreaction.
In this case, however, the kudos are pretty well-deserved. This is one of those “crowdpleasing” sleeper hits that really earns its laughter and tears, rather than playing audience emotions like some sort of Pavlovian experiment; it’s a movie that can be recommended to just about anyone—although prudes may be bothered that at the start, 18-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella) strongly identifies as lesbian, something that seems perfectly accepted by her parents (Maria Dizzia, Alain Goulem) as well as her BFFs (Kerrice Brooks and Maddie Ziegler as Ro and Ruthie). Indeed, her few remaining weeks at the cranberry farm-owning fam’s lakeside home will be made sweeter by a fling with the cafe barista (Alexandria Rivera) she’s finally gotten up the courage to approach.
Otherwise, however, Elliott can’t wait to get outta here, leaving behind annoying younger brothers, boring parents, and small-town life for the University of Toronto. In fact, she’s borderline-offensively bratty in her disdain for the above soon-to-be-memories. Meanwhile, there are distractions, like doing ‘shrooms on an overnight campout with Ruthie and Ro. Each eventually drifts off on their own trip, though Elliott professes to feel nothing until she suddenly finds a stranger sitting next to her. It’s Aubrey Plaza—well, Aubrey Plaza as Older Elliott, a plausible (if notably darker-haired) evolution. She claims she was “summoned” by her younger self, announcing “Dude, I’m 39-year-old you.” She offers some cautious wisdoms in a droll mode, growing serious only when urging El to appreciate the relatives she’s rotely dismissed, and to “avoid anyone named Chad.”
The groggy morning-after, this interlude is written off as a bizarre hallucination. But in the film’s disarmingly matter-of-fact treatment, it turns out something in the time-space continuum really has been disrupted… so the two Elliotts continue to communicate. The junior edition does begin making an effort with her immediate kin, realizing she’s been missing out in treating them so cavalierly. More alarming is her getting introduced to a new farmhand who just happens to be named Chad (Percy Hynes White). Despite all panicked attempts to avoid him, as ordered, she finds the boy ingratiating—to the point of wondering if maybe she’s not quite the Kinsey Six she always assumed she was.
Plaza, in good form, has great bantering chemistry with Stella (who played Connie Britton’s daughter in the series Nashville). But she’s not really in the film much, only towards the beginning and at the end. She is the deliverer of a late twist you might see coming, but which is quite effective anyway. Though My Old Ass may hinge on a narrative gimmick, it doesn’t play out as another Freaky Friday, Back to the Future or Peggy Sue Got Married. It’s firmly rooted in everyday reality, with an eventual poignant sense of “the big picture”—what we might lose or gain in making choices that seem ordinary in the moment—introduced sans any gratuitous tearduct-yanking or other manipulation. It’s a very likable movie that in the end is easy to love. It opens Fri/20 at SF’s AMC Metreon and Alamo Drafthouse, then expands to other Bay Area theaters as of Sept. 27.
Another well-received title from this year’s Sundance (where it won the World Cinema Audience Award) is Indo-French coproduction Girls Will Be Girls, which opens at the Roxie this Friday (more info here). Writer-director Shuchi Talati’s debut feature is an autobiographically inspired tale about smart, driven Mira (Preeti Panigrahi), a student at a boarding school in the Himalayas. She’s won the honor of being its first-ever female head prefect.
But that doesn’t sit well with the resident boys, whose immature pranks reflect a very trad misogyny. And Mira complicates things for herself by falling for a handsome, worldly new arrival (Kesav Binoy Kiron), their mutual sexual curiosity inevitably risking condemnation in what remains an essentially prudish cultural environ. We wrote at greater length about this excellent drama, which is somewhat reminiscent of prior films like An Education and Dead Poets Society, when it played CAAM last May (more info here).
Also at the Roxie, albeit for just one afternoon show on Sat/21, is another slice of female coming-of-age life. Directed in tandem with an older professional filmmaking team, Hummingbirds has young Laredo, Texas residents Silvia Del Carmen Castanos and Estefania “Beba” Contreras taking a freeform look at their own bordertown existence during the summer after high school graduation.
Both are queer-identified Latinx very invested in artistic self-expression (via music, dance, poetry and more), though they’re also teenagers—meaning capable of finding almost anything helplessly funny. There are serious issues on the horizon, however, including a possible threat of deportation for the protagonist who came here from Mexico illegally. Contreras and co-producer Dawn Valadez will be present for a live Q&A after the 1 pm screening (more info here) of this playful, adventurous documentary self-portrait.
Surviving school is a rather literal urgent concern for Jessica Harper and other students at the sinister German ballet academy in 1977’s original Suspiria, also playing the Roxie (more info here) this Sat/21 and Sun/22. A commercial and artistic peak for erratic, still-active Italian genre specialist Dario Argento, it’s an eye-popping explosion of blazing colors, garish set design, gory setpieces, and minimal plot logic, set to rock outfit Goblin’s driving original score. While Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake had its points, this witchier predecessor remains more memorable, an exercise in pure, feverish style arresting as it is nutty.
Two new movies going straight to streaming this week also take stylistically bold leaps into terrain close to horror, though both also have elements of noir-ish crime thriller. In Alan Scott Neal’s debut feature Last Straw, Nancy (Jessica Belkin) is already having a bad day when a solo late shift at her father’s small-town diner takes a drastic turn—the joint is surrounded by masked intruders who are seemingly the same teenage hoodlums she threw out earlier, and who clearly mean her harm. But what looks like a variation on The Strangers grows more complicated midway, when a flashback reveals that some of our (and Nancy’s) assumptions about who is doing what to whom (and why) are incorrect. Which misunderstanding does nothing to staunch the pileup of corpses.
Taylor Sardoni’s script aims for the kind of twisty cleverness recently mined to good effect by Last Stop in Yuma County (another diner-set bloodbath) and Strange Darling. But it lacks their ingenuity, so after a good buildup things kick into high gear…with enthusiasm, but minus much credibility or emotional involvement. None of these characters are more than one-dimensional, ill-tempered Nancy actually growing less sympathetic as the action proceeds. Last Straw is a confident, promising effort that’s not dull. But it overestimates the degree to which we’ll be wowed by ideas and turnabouts that feel more like random contrivance than the exacting, ironical game of cruel fate intended. Though bypassing Bay Area theaters, it releases simultaneously to Digital platforms Fri/20 from Shout! Studios.
Going for a contrasting effect of full-on phantasmagoria is another first directorial feature, Pirie Martin’s Australian Psychosis. It’s an enterprising attempt to mix the absurdist humor of a quasi-mystery like The Big Lebowski with the claustrophobic retro B&W aesthetic of cult no-budget original noirs like Detour and Dementia aka Daughter of Horror. Cliff (Derryn Amoroso) is a professional fixer who cleans up other people’s messes in the criminal world—starting with the grisly scene created in an apartment at the start by two stoner-type doofuses, recalling the interaction between Harvey Keitel, Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. That would be enough to deal with if Cliff didn’t also appear to be schizophrenic, constantly plagued by warring internal voices (plus a BBC-style voiceover narrator). He usually manages to keep it together. But this case drags him down a serpentine path in which auditory hallucinations are joined by visual ones, plus possibly-real monsters, mortal criminal sleazebags, and more.
Its square aspect ratio occasionally host to brief, jarring color, Psychosis is a noirishly styled nightmare that in content is closer to the arch surrealism of something like Donnie Darko, albeit on a much smaller budget, plus the snarky rogues’-gallery banter of an early Guy Ritchie joint. All of which is a pretty ambitious mix for a DIY project like this one. I’ll admit I enjoyed Martin’s chutzpah more than his results. The film is hard to follow, perhaps intentionally. But there’s not a lot of incentive to try sorting it out, since the tone is jokey and self-consciously quirky from the start, leaving little room for a sense of mystery or madness to build. Its eccentricity is diverting, for sure, but even the visual invention stays pretty much on the same plane throughout—making for a novel object d’art that feels overextended at nearly 100 minutes. Nonetheless, those looking for some retro midnight-movie weirdness may well be delighted. Released a couple weeks ago to US digital/vod platforms, Psychosis will also be available on TUBI as of Oct. 4.
Finally, after the weekend and back at the Roxie, there’s a screen warmup to the Folsom Street Fair on Sun/29 with three nights of LeatherWeek programming. On Tues/24, it’s none other than William Friedkin’s notorious 1980 Cruising (more info here), with Al Pacino as a straight NYPD detective undercover in the gay kink scene in order to catch a serial killer. Of course he is disturbed to find he likes it—the gay part or the serial-killing part, take your pick. Protested then, its reputation semi-salvaged since, it’s still a very problematic movie nonetheless valuable for its glimpse of a flourishing pre-AIDS fetish milieu.
How kink sorta saved sex during the AIDS era is one tale told the next night in Mike Skiff’s 2014 Folsom Forever (more info here), a documentary about what remains the world’s largest, most diverse such event. It actually started in 1984 without much involvement from the leather community, being focused instead primarily on opposing SOMA gentrification. But when that demographic got involved, its popularity exploded, as did the eventual embrace of populations beyond the gay and male.
Drawing on interviewees including Sister Roma, Cleo Dubois, Audrey Joseph, Race Bannon, Mark Leno, Danny Williams, and Scott Weiner, plus urban anthropologists, BDSM educators, performance artists and a Mr. SF Leather, the film also touches on related local/national issues. It notes that the Fair has a history of bringing in adventuresome indie music acts—something I wish had remained true in the decade since. On Thurs/26, a program with the umbrella title “Puppies and Leather and Boys!” (more inof here) corrals seven shorts of variably erotic, informative and playful content from our own backyard as well as Italy, Germany and the U.K.
