Filmsuck

NATCHEZ: Mississippi Goddam

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores praise the complex and ultimately harrowing Susannah Herbert documentary NATCHEZ, currently streaming on YouTube and Apple TV+ and soon to arrive at PBS. It focuses on the engine driving this Mississippi River port town's economy, which is tourism—specifically the guided tours through plantation houses that have, for nearly a hundred years, "stuck to the script" of the romantic fantasy of the gracious Old South. However, new tour guides and local activists, several of them Black locals, have emerged recently who insist on factually accurate tours that include the history of slavery and the people held in bondage who actually built those plantation houses and kept them running. In exploring the tensions around this issue in Natchez, a town of complex demographics that is considered a politically progressive "blue dot in a sea of red," Herbert gets representative citizens to talk more and more freely—and sometimes appallingly—about what they really think of their fraught history and current experience.

Chris Fleming: Saving Stand-up Comedy

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores express their admiration and affection for comedian Chris Fleming and his hilarious new HBO special CHRIS FLEMING: LIVE AT THE PALACE. Highly recommended!

You may know Fleming from his dazzling comic flights on YouTube and Instagram, but as Fleming puts it, this special is designed to expand his audience beyond "women who brought a knife to prom." Wearing a four-way-stretch purple jumpsuit made by Prince's longtime costume designer Anthony Sartino, Fleming is able to prance, race, strut, flap, tumble, and moonwalk freely around the stage characterizing the freaky eccentrics and wanna-be-freaky normies who populate our world. He's pinpointed unerringly by the theater's spotlight operator who was "on the team that got Osama." Acknowledging his own unique appearance and category-busting affect that revives the old dream of queer liberation, Fleming says there's already been "a nationwide manhunt for my pronouns" and he/she/they will answer to any of them, leaving it up to the audience: "You tell me. You're looking at it."

HAMNET: Good Grief

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores resisted seeing HAMNET, so they both marvel at the emotional impact it achieves by the poignant ending, when almost everyone in theater audiences dissolves into tears. HAMNET is a period tragedy by Chloe Zhao (NOMADLAND) that’s been playing in arthouse theaters for two months. It’s still drawing crowds, and it’s nominated for a number of Academy Awards including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay (by Zhao and the author of the source novel by Maggie O’Farrell), and Best Actress (Jessie Buckley). It deals with the relationship of husband and wife William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Hathaway (Buckley), which is tested by the death of their eleven-year-old son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). The film’s seemingly grandiose theme is the way art can transform experiences such as grief over the loss of a loved one into a sense of meaning in terms of human life in the universe. But don’t scoff. You’re probably more susceptible to this idea than you think you are. Just wait till you cry through the final sequence.

THE BRIDE! A Messy Monster Mash

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores agree that the title character in writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s THE BRIDE!, played by Jessie Buckley (who also portrays the wry, raddled spirit of author Mary Shelley) is terrific. She has a brilliantly disheveled look of undead glamor featuring wild bleached-blonde hair, wonderfully garish orange dress, black lips, and the inky splotch that spews up from the corner of her mouth, a chemical stain left over from the process of reanimation. Dolores is forgiving of the way THE BRIDE!, especially in its addled second half, fails to live up to central character and best scenes, whereas Eileen can’t condemn Gyllenhaal hard enough for the dopey, unfocused, pretentious way she blows her opportunity to make an electrifying film.

The Schism Over THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE

Co-hosts disagree on THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE, a new film about the title character (played by Amanda Seyfried) who founded the Shaker religion. Eileen liked it because she has a morbid religious streak that makes her obsessively interested in movies about old-time people who see visions and start mad spiritual communities. Dolores, on the other hand, hates movies set in the 18^th century “when everything was so ILL” and found THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE a dull empty frustrating would-be-hipster work that makes the artfully simple utilitarian structures of Shaker architecture look like Restoration Hardware stores. A lively debate ensues!

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER: Here's to Strained Family Relations

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores found Jim Jarmusch’s new indie film Father Mother Sister Brother a sleep-inducing slog. It’s a comedy-drama anthology film in three chapters about difficult family relationships that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and stars Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Mayim Bialik, Cate Blanchett, and Charlotte Rampling. Jarmusch calls it an “anti-action film” that avoids commercial expectations of such typically hard-hitting effects as “drama, violence, revenge, sex” in order to create a film that’s minimalist, focused, delicate, and deliberately simple, like “three flower arrangements.” So consider yourself warned!

A Very TV Christmas

In honor of the season, co-hosts Eileen and Dolores take on the made-for-TV holiday movie, focusing especially on the perennial Hallmark Channel favorite, A SHOE ADDICT’S CHRISTMAS (2018). It’s about a thirtysomething department store employee and shoe-lover named Noelle (Candace Cameron Bure) who’s lost both her creative and romantic mojo, which leads her guardian angel Charlie (Jean Smart) to use her Ghost of Christmas Past and Future powers in showing Noelle how to find a man and a plan. Naturally several Christmas miracles ensue. Eileen, a Hallmark Channel newbie, is appalled by these eye-hurting spectacles while Dolores points out how to read against the grain and discover the socially critical women-centered melodramas that survive in surreal forms in these ultra-popular movies.

FRANKENSTEIN: Guillermo Del Toro's Grand and Goofy Obsession

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores disagree when it comes to their basic reactions to the new FRANKENSTEIN, written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro and currently playing on Netflix. Whereas Dolores finds a number of aspects of the film compelling, such the opulent production design, the sensitive performances of Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth, and the all-out melodramatic emotionalism typical of Del Toro, Eileen experienced such a blinding hatred of the whole thing she could only gradually realize that…yes, Mia Goth is always interesting.

BUGONIA: The Rhetorical Impasse

Co-host Eileen Jones and special guest Conan Neutron of the Movie Night Extravaganza podcast enthuse about the wild and riveting new Yorgos Lanthimos film, Bugonia. It concerns a pair of rural cousins, played by Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis, who abduct the CEO of a pharmaceutical company (Emma Stone), convinced she’s an alien come to destroy planet Earth through corporate means. Their plan is to force her to arrange a meeting between the cousins and the “Andromedans” on their mother ship in order to negotiate an agreement for the aliens to leave Earth in peace. Which is a fairly reasonable account of what’s happening on Earth recently, compared to some of the explanations we hear.

It's a Good Time for ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores agree that Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is a must-see movie and a model for American filmmaking right now. An adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel VINELAND, ONE BATTLE makes brilliant use of such dynamic genres as action, dark comedy, and the political thriller to drive this depiction of an aging radical leftist in hiding, hilariously played by Leonardo DiCarprio, who’s trying to protect his teenage daughter from his past. Then they’re targeted by rightwing political forces led by the repulsive Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and compelled to go on the run. Don’t miss it!