In the Middle of the Night, When There's No One Else: Alan Rudolph's Sultry Choose Me

CHOOSE ME 

(Alan Rudolph, USA, 1984, 106 minutes) 

Eve: I don't know why I ask you anything. You're a lunatic. 

 

Mickey: That's why you chose me. 

Music videos became all the rage when MTV premiered in 1981. It's not surprising that that's how many of today's more stylish filmmakers, like David Fincher, got their start. Some videos simply showcased the artist and the song; others were more like mini-movies with defined characters and three-act structures. A few, like Fincher's video for Madonna's 1989 "Express Yourself" ($5mil) cost more than some independent features. 

Alan Rudolph made Choose Me, his eighth feature, during the height of the music video era, which is relevant in terms of its genesis and aesthetics.

Two years after Teddy Pendergrass was paralyzed in a 1982 automobile accident, his manager, Shep Gordon, reached out to Rudolph, with whom he had worked before, about making a video for the Luther Vandross-produced song "Choose Me," which would become the film's title and theme. 

 

Gordon wanted to boost Pendergrass's profile to assist with medical care his label, Philadelphia International, wasn't providing. 

 

Rudolph agreed on the condition that he make a feature for the same amount of money. The $640,000 budget was modest, but substantial enough to attract some award-winning talent (I've read other accounts that claim budgets of $700,000 and $835,000, but under one million seems indisputable).

It's an amazing story, not just because it's so unexpected, but because Rudolph managed to pull it off. Granted, there isn't a lot of story, but the film never feels like a pop promo blown up to feature-film size. It feels like an actual motion picture. Granted, it's an odd one. Not as odd as Rudolph's futuristic Seattle-set 1985 thriller Trouble in Mind, another film named after a song that would become a title and theme, but then few things are. 

Choose Me opens with the Pendergrass song, and the next three minutes play like a music video, in the best of ways. It's after dark, and male club goers and female streetwalkers mingle within the neon glow outside Eve's Lounge, a speakeasy run by Lesley Ann Warren. Granted, Rudolph hasn't introduced her yet, but as the pink and blue neon-lit credits glide by, the dancers groove to Pendergrass's slow jam. They're mostly Black, even as the cast is mostly—but not completely--white. I see it as a nod to Pendergrass's Black audience. Eve, a former sex worker, joins them toward the end, and Warren has the moves. The dancing involves changing partners repeatedly. That's the gist of it, and it's quite effective. It also predicts a La Ronde-like narrative in which characters change partners repeatedly.

 

Right: Warren in Songwriter, which adheres to a similar red and turquoise color palette

It's the only sequence that plays explicitly like a music video, and Rudolph decided, wisely, that one Pendergrass song wasn't enough, so he purchased two more with assistance from the producers behind 1984 work-for-hire project Songwriter starring Warren, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson. It's possible that Gordon got him a discount, but I couldn't say for sure, since managers and record labels aren't exactly the same thing.

It's a Rudolph signature that Pendergrass's vocals set the tone for the film as surely as Marianne Faithfull's vocals set the tone for Trouble in Mind and Alberta Hunter does the same for Remember My Name. In each case, he helped to elevate a singer's profile at a time when they really needed it.

I became familiar with Gordon by way of Mike Myers' 2013 documentary, Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon. He inspired fierce loyalty in his clients, of which there were many, but he's probably best known for Pendergrass, Alice Cooper, and Groucho Marx, whose career he revitalized.

 

Left: Shep Gordon on the road with Alice Cooper, as featured in Supermensch; that t-shirt is...something

Pendergrass, according to Gordon, was more than a client, because they were tireless party pals. When Pendergrass was injured, Gordon felt a duty to see that he had everything he needed, because he and the R&B sex symbol had been living on the edge with their drinking, drugging, and sleeping around at a time when AIDS was ravaging the club scene (though sober at the time of the accident, Pendergrass was a reckless driver with a suspended license). Something was bound to give, and it did. In Myers' documentary, Gordon claims he changed his ways afterward, thus becoming the so-called supermensch of the title. 

Gordon served as one of Choose Me's producers, so it's fair to say he was a mensch to Alan Rudolph, too, not least since his company, Alive Films/Island Alive, was also behind 1980's Roadie, which features Cooper, and the 1983 Timothy Leary/G. Gordon Liddy documentary Return Engagement.  

Choose Me begins in earnest with Québécois actress Geneviève Bujold at the mic as Ann, a radio sex therapist known as Nancy Love (Bujold would reunite with Rudolph for Trouble in Mind and The Moderns). In the insular, dreamlike world of the film, everyone knows her name and trusts her advice. Little do they know that she relies more on instinct than experience. 

 

In a sign that Rudolph made the film long before the proliferation of websites and cellphones, no one knows what Nancy looks like, so she can navigate Los Angeles anonymously in her prim cotton shirts and sensible shoes. Eve's Lounge barfly and aspiring poet Pearl Antoine (Rae Dawn Chong) imagines her as tall and blonde, but there are no tall blonde women in the film. 

Ann meets Eve when she drops by the lounge to inquire about her ad for a roommate. Nancy could easily afford a place of her own, but she seeks to understand her callers better, so she sets out to live among them. 

 

Despite their obvious differences, the two women hit it off. As Ann tells Eve, who favors form-fitting dresses and high heels, "I don't have much success with men," and as Eve counters, "I have too much." In truth, Ann tends to be rather oblivious, because it's clear that her handsome producer, Ralph (artist Ed Ruscha), is interested in her, but she doesn't seem to notice. 

Throughout the film, Pearl and Eve call Nancy, while also using pseudonyms, to seek her advice, so the three women relate to each other both directly and indirectly. Though Ann's accent should give her away, she tells everyone she works at a "telephone answering service," and they believe her. 

 

Keith Carradine's Mickey, fresh from a stay in a mental hospital, enters the scene when he drops by Eve's Lounge to reconnect with the original proprietor, but she split the scene while he was away, and sold the joint to this other Eve. He doesn't seem too perturbed, and who can blame him. In the affectionate conversation included with the new Criterion release, Rudolph and Carradine admit they had a crush on Warren, and it's not hard to see why. Beyond her beauty, she gives a warm and vulnerable performance in the film, and has reportedly claimed it as her favorite.

Though Eve has been sleeping with both Billy Ace (John Larroquette, worlds away from his wisecracking ADA on Night Court), her chopper-riding bar back, and slick gangster Zack Antoine (Patrick Bauchau, just off Emmanuelle 4), Pearl's husband, she sparks to this tall, lanky stranger who orders a Guinness with "two inches of head," which sounds both dirty and gross.  

In the work of a more cynical filmmaker, a twice-divorced ex-mental patient might register as a blazing red flag, but not this one. It isn't so much that the women of Choose Me are more open and forgiving, on the one hand, or foolhardy, on the other. It's more that the film incorporates elements of fable and fantasy, and at the very least, Rudolph and Carradine establish that Mickey doesn't represent a threat, though he can defend himself as needed. 

 

Zack, on the other hand, does represent a threat. Aside from the fact that he cheats on his wife--and makes no effort to hide it--he also beats her, though she expresses no desire to leave him or to take her revenge. It's clear the director doesn't approve, though he subverts expectations by establishing that Zack carries a gun, except no one dies, no matter how often he wields it to intimidate. Though Choose Me flirts with noir conventions, it isn't a noir. 

And though Mickey and Zack engage in fisticuffs a couple of times, once over Pearl, who takes the drifter home to their classic movie poster-filled flat and lets him photograph her in the semi-nude, and again when he bests the gangster at a gambling parlor, these skirmishes blow over soon enough--especially once Zack forces Mickey to hand over his winnings.

Choose Me isn't an erotic thriller either, so it's little surprise that Karina Longworth excluded it from the "Erotic '80s" season of  her podcast, You Must Remember This. For my money, it's more sensual or seductive than erotic, and nor is it a thriller despite the crime elements. It's also lighter than the films Longworth covered, though never a full-fledged comedy. 

 

That said, the inclusion of an actress with a French-Canadian accent and an actor with a Belgian accent--who speaks French and quotes Goethe in the original German--contributes to the idea that this is a European film that just happens to take place in Los Angeles. Then again, it's no more the real L.A. than the "Rain City" of Trouble in Mind was the real Seattle. 

Because he doesn't yet have a fixed abode, Mickey takes up Eve's offer to stay with him, but when he gets to her art-filled home, he finds Ann. Though she suspects him of fabricating a colorful past that includes stints as a magazine cover photographer and other impressive achievements, she doesn't hesitate to sleep with him. Afterward, she adopt a more sexy, confident mode of dress, indicating that he freed something in her. 

Unlike Welcome to L.A., in which Geraldine Chaplin and Sissy Spacek disrobe, there's no female nudity in Choose Me. Instead, Rudolph sexualizes Carradine as much as the women, if not more so, since the actor is shirtless while staying with Pearl and completely, if covertly nude while bathing at Eve's. Rudolph made five films with Carradine--not counting their Altman collaborations--and if the director was said to have a muse, despite working repeatedly with Warren, Bujold, and other fine actresses: it was him. 

Though Choose Me is what now might be considered a hang-out film, it does have an ending, at least for the three main characters. 

 

Beyond the Pendergrass songs, the soundtrack includes ace selections from Archie Shepp, Augustus Pablo, and Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals. Though Shep Gordon was a marketing maestro, and though the film benefited Pendergrass as intended, since his 1984 studio album Love Language--his first for Asylum--went gold, there was no soundtrack; a missed opportunity, not least since Welcome to L.A. got one, though it isn't as deserving. 

I missed Choose Me at the time of its premiere. I was in college, and don't recall hearing a thing about it. I first became aware of Alan Rudolph when I moved to Seattle four years later, and have been catching up ever since. 

 

That said, I wouldn't have appreciated it as much in my 20s. Beyond the adult themes, the film's now-retro look adds to its appeal. This isn't the campy side of the decade with linebacker shoulder pads and outsized synths, but the sophisticated side represented by the soul/jazz/reggae soundtrack, Ann's dark lipstick and slicked-back hair, Zack's patterned jackets, and the bold red, black, and blues of the ladies' ensembles. 

By the end, Ann, Eve, and Mickey have all found what they were seeking, which makes for a happy ending, though one imbued with enough ambiguity to suggest that it might be fleeting; that sadness, disappointment, and the loneliness endemic to the director's work could be just around the corner. 

Beyond the fact that the film cost less than a million and wrapped in 20 days, Rudolph wrote the screenplay in a week. He could have made one music video and left it at that, but instead he made a film that stands the test of time. Choose Me may be a small film relative to the go-big-or-go-home '80s, but all things considered: it's an impressive achievement.

 

Choose Me, in a new 4K restoration, is out now on The Criterion Collection with a Rudolph/Carradine conversation, a featurette with Rudolph and collaborators, a wide-ranging interview from the Midnight Sun Film Festival, and an essay from Beatrice Loayza. Images from thrashard-banshee (Lesley Ann Warren), the IMDb (Warren in Choose Me and Songwriter and Rae Dawn Chong with Keith Carradine), Dogwood Documentaries (Shep Gordon and the boys), Criterion (Geneviève Bujold, Patrick Bauchau, and Warren with Carradine), and The Pink Smoke (Chong with Carradine and Bauchau).

Bar Hostesses and Electric Jellyfish: Yasuzō Masumura's Quasi-Feminist Film Play It Cool

PLAY IT COOL aka ELECTRIC JELLYFISH  (Denki Kurage, Yasuzō Masumura, Japan, 1970, 

94 minutes)

 "I hate men."

--Yumi (Mari Atsumi) 

I don't know if Japanese filmmaker Yasuzō Masumura ever saw Fellini's Nights of Cabiria–though he did study film in Italy in the 1950s–but without imitating the Italian master in any way, he proves just as empathetic to sex workers in this 1970 melodrama-meets-exploitation film about a fatherless young woman who turns to sex work when other options prove elusive.

As Play It Cool begins, 20-year-old Yumi (Mari Atsumi, a Daiei contract player like her director) shares a cramped flat on the wrong side of the tracks with her single mother, Tomi (Anatahan's Akemi Negishi), while attending dressmaking school. Her mother, who had her as a teenager, wants her daughter to get a useful education, work in a respectable field, and settle down with a good man–all the things she had to do without.

This isn't a Mildred Pierce or Imitation of Life situation with an all-sacrificing mother and an ungrateful, social-climbing daughter. The two genuinely care about each other, but they're just a couple of defenseless women living in a man's world, and they can't even count on the support of other women. 

Tomi works as a bar hostess–essentially a prostitute–so other students look down on Yumi. Though her mother is an attractive woman, she's considered over-the-hill by some clients, and because she sometimes drinks to excess, even her colleagues view her as inferior.

Worse yet, her live-in boyfriend, freeloading, semi-employed insurance salesman Yoshimura (Ryôichi Tamagawa), eyes Yumi lasciviously whenever she's around. She pays him no mind, and her mother looks the other way, because he promised he would leave her alone--she also believes that "without a man, life isn't worth living." Fate will soon prove otherwise. 

One night while Tomi is at work, Yumi and Yoshimura play poker. She's really good, but that isn't the problem. The problem is his libido compounded by a loss of sexual interest in Tomi. The minute Yumi lets her guard down, he grabs her, slaps her around, and rapes her. I wouldn't consider Masumura a timid filmmaker, but he doesn't get too graphic here–Play It Cool isn't a pinku eiga or pink film. He makes the point quickly and moves along.

Yumi doesn't fall apart or lash out, but she's numb with shock. She may be naïve, but she's no shrinking violet. When her mother returns home, she tells her what happened. Surprisingly, Yoshimura doesn't deny it, but blames Tomi. God forbid a woman age. In her anger and confusion, she tells him to leave and slaps her daughter. When he grabs Yumi to take with him–as if she possibly wanted more of his abuse–Tomi stabs him with a butcher knife.

Yoshimura goes down hard and fast, and Tomi doesn't hesitate to tell Yumi she'll turn herself in. 

She believes in paying for her crime, but she doesn't believe in telling the cops what motivated the attack. In the patriarchal world of 20th-century Japan, it's better to confess to murder than to acknowledge a rape. Just suck it up, and keep going.

By coincidence, I watched Shiori Itō's Oscar-nominated documentary Black Box Diaries before Play It Cool. When the 26-year-old Reuters intern was raped by a powerful media figure in 2015, she went straight to the police. In Japan, where 96% of rapes go unreported, this was highly unusual.

Then, when her criminal case was dismissed, she filed a civil case. All the while, she documented her eight-year ordeal, material that would form the basis of a book that became available worldwide and a documentary that still hasn't been released in Japan–even though she won her case. 

So, even if Masumura hews to the heightened tropes of melodrama or exploitation fare, it really is unlikely that Yumi or her mother would have reported her rape, and just as unlikely that Tomi would have claimed self-defense when the rapist grabbed his victim and threatened to abduct her. (That said, the authorities do respond when Yumi reports a later rape attempt.)

Nonetheless, it sets the plot in motion. With Tomi out of the picture, Yumi needs money, so her mother's employer offers to look after her–if she takes Tomi's place as a bar hostess. It's a form of indentured servitude, because the madam paid her bail, and Yumi has to work off the debt, but much like Otsuya (the magnificent Ayako Wakao) in Masumura's 1966 revenge thriller Irezumi, she proves adept at a job she never would have chosen were circumstances not quite so dire. 

If anything, it's a male fantasy for an innocent young woman to have her virginity taken by force only to turn around and become a successful sex worker, but in Masumura's pro-woman, quasi-feminist filmography, women tend to end up stronger and more independent than when they began.

That said, female solidarity proves scarce. At school, Yumi was lonely and friendless. When two classmates invite her out for drinks, she demurs that she's broke. They explain that men will pay for the drinks. That's when she says, "I hate men." To which one of them replies, dismissively,  "She's being weird as usual" before leaving her alone again, naturally, at the bus stop.  

Like Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria, though, Yumi has a certain effervescent quality. She's the living embodiment of a bouncy American pop hit from the 1980s: "Ain't nothing gonna break my stride, nobody gonna slow me down, oh no, I got to keep on moving..." 

So it goes with Yumi, who will meet an array of men throughout her bar gig, like the one who wants to marry her until he finds out about her mother. Another assaults her and forces her to work for him until Nozawa (Cruel Story of Youth’s Yûsuke Kawazu), a former lawyer who took the fall for a client, pays him off and recruits her for a high-class joint, marveling, "You're always so positive." Her mother warned her not to fall in love, but she can't resist the guy. He's drawn to her, too, but he's been seeing the madam.

Knowing she could use the cash, not least since she's been coercing johns to gamble for her services, Nozawa persuades her to serve as mistress for club owner Kada (Yojimbo's Kô Nishimura)--at the time, prostitution was legal, but gambling wasn't, so in addition to making her colleagues jealous, Yumi was putting the club at risk. Kada isn't a bad guy as these things go, but the arrangement ends sooner than any of them would have anticipated.

Beyond Yumi's unshakable positivity, Masumura keeps things humming with a swinging score from Kuroneko composer Hikaru Hayashi and a bevy of mod, mini-skirt outfits. Play It Cool isn't as dark as Irezumi, Red Angel, or the bonkers Blind Beast. It's more in the vein of the director's marketing satire Giants and Toys, but with less of that film's screwball energy. 

There's also a fun sequence with Yumi and Nozawa making love on a round, Pink Panther-like rotating hotel bed, though I have to admit that Atsumi looks uncomfortable in every single one of her nude scenes. 

Masumura had a way of shooting nudity so that you don't see much, best exemplified by abducted model Mako Midori in Blind Beast, and Atsumi often uses her arms to cover her chest, but it's one of the film's few discordant notes, because it doesn't fit her character and left me concerned for the actress, who would disappear in the 1970s. I'm not suggesting that this film had anything to do with it, but it may have been a sign that a career in motion pictures, which began in her teens, would not be for her.

Nonetheless, she's very good here. Atsumi makes Yumi into an appealing presence well worth rooting for. Much like the actress at the end of her run, she loses her naivete, but she does right by her mother and learns to look out for herself rather than to wait for a man to save her–and she won't do it through sex work, concluding that "it turns everybody into deceivers."

The way Yumi walks down the street at the end recalls Giulietta Masina's famous walk in the Fellini film. It isn't as devastating, but it's refreshing to see a 55-year-old film where a woman isn't shamed for her choices–including an abortion–and steps boldly into a future she imagines for herself.

Play It Cool is out now on a limited edition Blu-ray through Arrow Video with a commentary track from Jasper Sharp (The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film) and Anne McKnight (Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity) and a video essay from Mark Roberts (Masumura Yasuzô and the Cinema of Social Consciousness). Images from YouTube / Daeie (Mari Atsumi), the IMDb (Atsumi pictured with Akemi Negishi, Ryôichi Tamagawa, and Yûsuke Kawazu), and Documentary Campus (Shiori Itō).

Lost and Found Film and TV Reviews: Endless, The Glass Castle, Sanditon, and The Trans List

Between 2017 and 2020, I wrote a few reviews for both The Stranger and Video Librarian that fell between the tracks during a time of flux at both publications, so I have reproduced them here.

ENDLESS 

(Scott Speer, USA/UK/Canada/Germany, 2020, 95 minutes) 

Every generation gets the Ghost they deserve, and Scott Speer's supernatural romance puts a YA spin on the benevolent specter trope. 

It begins with a summer romance between a law intern and an aspiring motorcycle mechanic (with overcast Kelowna, BC unsuccessfully standing in for Southern California). She's from an upper-class, two-parent household, and he's from a working-class, single-parent one. "We didn't make sense on paper," Riley (Love, Simon's Alexandra Shipp) recalls in voice-over. 

When she gains accepted to Georgetown, it's clear that something's got to give. Chris (It: Chapter One's Nicholas Hamilton) thinks she should stick around and pursue her passion for art, but Riley has always planned to study law, or at least that's the plan her lawyer parents (Catherine Lough Haggquist and Ian Tracey from Da Vinci's Inquest) have laid out for her. 

After a party, at which Chris becomes inebriated, Riley borrows a friend's car to drive him home. Though it isn't her fault, they get into an accident, and Chris doesn't survive. His spirit, however, ends up in a kind of limbo. Though he can see Riley, she can't see him. He can also see his mother, Lee (Famke Janssen in a long, dirty blonde wig), crying over his body at the morgue. 

At first, it doesn't seem as if anyone can see Chris until he walks around town in his newly-invisible form, at which point he meets other ghosts, like perma-teen Jordan (Dear White People's DeRon Horton), who's been dead for 30 years. Jordan schools him on the pluses and minuses of ghost life, like the superhuman abilities to defy gravity and to zip from place to place. It's also how Chris finds out what really happened to his absent father. 

Meanwhile, Riley tries to apologize to Lee, but she doesn't want to hear it. Chris watches as she flails at most every attempt to return to normalcy, while an investigator keeps coming around and law school loses its appeal. 

One day, she swears she hears Chris's voice. Convinced he's trying to speak to her, she returns to their old haunts to widen the communication channel until more words get though. Eventually, she can see him, too, but when her health starts to suffer, her friends (Zoë Belkin and Eddie Ramos) think she's gone off the deep end, and Chris comes to realize that his spectral presence is disturbing her corporeal reality. Either he has to stay and watch her die or leave and let her live. He also has unfinished business to take care of with his father (Invasion's Aaron Pearl) who has started a new family. 

Like many movies of its ilk, from 1937's Topper to 2010's Charlie St. Cloud, Endless has hokey moments and generic music cues that add a soft-focus gloss, but it's more effective than not, and the actors commit to the premise. If Nicholas Hamilton can be a little wooden, he makes Chris sufficiently sympathetic. Fortunately, Alexandra Shipp has to do most of the heavy lifting, and she can handle all the twists and turns the role requires.

THE GLASS CASTLE 

(Destin Daniel Cretton, USA, 2019, 127 minutes)

On paper, The Glass Castle must have looked like a sure bet. 

Here are a few reasons why I had high hopes, too: 1) Jeannette Walls' bestselling 2005 memoir, from which the film takes its name, is a richly-detailed work about seriously irresponsible parents and their surprisingly functional kids, 2) Destin Daniel Cretton previously directed Brie Larsen (who plays the adult Jeannette) in an acclaimed performance as a troubled foster-care director in his 2013 film, Short Term 12, 3) There isn't much Naomi Watts (as Jeannette's mother, Rose Mary) can't do, and 4) Larsen and Woody Harrelson (as Jeannette's father, Rex) already depicted a believably strained father-daughter relationship in Oren Moverman's 2011 Rampart.

So, it comes as a disappointment to find that Cretton's adaptation doesn't work. The actors, including Ella Anderson as the young Jeannette, give it their all, but they look awkward and uncomfortable, particularly Larsen as a tightly-wound Manhattan gossip columnist engaged to a financial adviser (My Name Is Doris's Max Greenfield) who is obviously wrong for her. 

Worse yet, the director and co-writer (with his frequent collaborator, Andrew Lanham) doesn't have a feel for the material, not least because he invests Walls' clear-eyed remembrances with soft-focus sentimentality. 

By contrast, Jeff Preiss, who directed John Hawkes and Elle Fanning in Low Down, an episodic adaptation of Amy-Joe Albany's memoir about life with her itinerant father, got most everything right that Cretton gets wrong (it doesn't hurt that Glenn Close and Lena Headey provided vivid support). 

Both fact-based films portray men who loved their daughters even if they had no idea how to raise them, but Low Down allows jazz pianist Joe Albany to go out the way he came in, while The Glass Castle drowns Rex Walls in tears and treacle. Woody Harrelson deserves better, and you do, too. 

SANDITON 

(Oliver Blackburn, Lisa Clarke, and Charles Sturridge, UK, 2020, 360 minutes) 

Sanditon, which aired as part of PBS's Masterpiece, follows the template of previous Jane Austen adaptations, but with some significant differences: the ITV production draws from an unfinished novel (Jane Austen had written 11 chapters before her 1817 passing), it takes place at a seaside resort (rather than a country manor), and it features a significant character of color, Antiguan heiress Georgiana Lambe (Ordeal by Innocence's Crystal Clarke) a rarity for a Regency-era narrative. The similarities, however, are just as apparent, since Austen's interest in class, gender, and romantic relationships remains central. 

The story revolves around Charlotte Heywood (Reign's Rose Williams, open-faced and sympathetic), a resourceful young woman from a working-class family. Through a chance encounter, she meets the proprietors of the resort, who invite her to stay with them for a season. It's an unbelievably good deal, since Tom and Mary Parker (Kris Marshall and Kate Ashfield) ask for nothing in return. Eager to be of assistance, she provides a few minutes of bookkeeping assistance to the kindly, if financially-challenged Tom. 

Other residents include tart-tongued resort investor Lady Denham (Last Tango in Halifax's Anne Reid) and Tom's handsome, if imperious brother, Sidney Parker (Theo James, who played a small, but crucial role in Downton Abbey). If Sidney initially dismisses the naïve Charlotte, his overprotective-

ness threatens to smother Georgina, his spirited ward (Clarke, the cast's sole American, assumes a credible British accent). As the odd women out, Charlotte and Georgina naturally form a bond, which creates problems when Charlotte sides with Georgina's secret lover over her guardian. 

Edward (Jack Fox) and Esther (Charlotte Spencer), siblings through marriage rather than blood, provide more soapy intrigue by competing with their aunt's not-so-innocent ward, Clara Brereton (Lily Sacofsky), for her inheritance. If money wasn't an object, the semi-incestuous siblings would prefer to stay together, but Lady Denham encourages marrying into money. 

And it wouldn't be an Austen vehicle without two handsome suitors to compete for Charlotte's affections. Aside from Sidney, who softens after she assists an injured stonemason, she forges a convivial rapport with Young Stringer (Beecham House's Leo Suter), the mason's foreman son. 

Throughout these eight episodes, story strands involve cricket, regatta races, kidnapping, a devastating fire, and a life-threatening illness. If the costumes and sets are up to Masterpiece's usual high standards, Sanditon is a nighttime soap at heart, like Peyton Place, but with bloomers and corsets. 

Though ITV didn't commission a second season after the first one aired in England in 2019, the program's popularity on PBS a year later led to letter-writing campaigns in the States that continued for months afterward. 

The show's combination of suds and sumptuousness surely had something to do with it, but creator Andrew Davies (Bleak House) also ended the series on a bittersweet note, so it's understandable that some viewers might have hoped for the happier conclusion that Austen's Emma and Sense and Sensibility delivered, but at least the creators made sure to throw in a shirtless Sidney scene sure to remind viewers of Colin Firth's famously water-soaked scene in Davies' 1995 version of Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Update: in 2021, PBS joined forces with streamer BritBox to produce two more seasons that aired on Masterpiece in the US and ITV in the UK.

THE TRANS LIST 

(Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, USA, 2016, 57 minutes)

In the London of the 1970s, at the height of the Roxy Music cover-girl era, Caroline Cossey enjoyed a successful modeling career. Then a tabloid outed her as transgender, and that was the end of that (that's her, by the way, in the Power Station's 1985 "Some Like It Hot" video). 

Cossey is one of 11 trans subjects who tell their story in photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders's The Trans List, which follows six similar HBO documentaries, including 2008's The Black List and 2011's The Latino List.

In each documentary, his subjects look straight at the camera and explain who they are and what they do--I'm partial to his 2004 adult film documentary, Thinking XXX. In The Trans List, Pose writer, director, and producer Janet Mock provides an introduction and conducts the interviews. 

Though Greenfield-Sanders added filmmaking to his repertoire in the 1990s, he treats his films like fashion spreads. Everything is carefully lit and composed, but there's no camera movement, just cutaways to still images. This isn't a liability if the speakers are compelling, and they usually are. 

Aside from Cossey, the filmmaker includes soldiers, students, poets, actresses, and a certain Olympian. Many had the support of friends and family during their transition, but strangers could be cruel, and drugs and alcohol were issues for some, but if there's a point--and there is--it's that no one regrets transitioning. And that includes Ms. Cossey, the British beauty who paved the way for out trans models like Lea T and Andreja Pejić.

Endless, The Glass Castle, Sanditon S1-3, and The Trans List are all available on streaming. The Glass Castle and Sanditon are also available on home video. Images from Roger Ebert (Alexandra Shipp in Endless), the IMDb (Brie Larson in The Glass Castle), Vulture (Rose Williams and Theo James in Sanditon), and NPR (Nicole Maines in The Trans List).

The Rule of Jenny Pen: A Nursing Home Spy vs. Spy with John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush

THE RULE OF JENNY PEN 

(James Ashcroft, New Zealand, 2025, 103 minutes) 

As any self-respecting Brian De Palma fan will tell you, this isn't the first time John Lithgow (Blow Out, Raising Cain), with his mild-mannered features, has played a bad guy. 

In fact, he did so last year in Edward Berger's Oscar-nominated papal thriller Conclave. It's just that he also excels at playing good guys--as any self-respecting 3rd Rock from the Sun fan, like me, will happily attest. 

So it's no surprise that he plays a villain in James Ashcroft's The Rule of Jenny Pen, the New Zealand filmmaker's follow-up to 2021's SUV-invasion thriller Coming Home in the Dark, which he also adapted from a short story by New Zealand writer Owen Marshall. The surprise instead revolves around the efforts of Geoffrey Rush's nursing home colleague to bring him down. The question isn't so much will he or won't he, but how will he do it? 

Before suffering a stroke, Rush's Stefan Mortensen served as a judge. Afterward, he ends up in an assisted living facility, which he navigates by way of a motorized wheelchair, though he has some ability to talk and to move about, and believes he'll be able to leave once he fully recovers. 

Fortunately, Royal Pine Mews is quite pleasant as these things go—filming took place at the Wairakei Resort in Taupō--though Stefan witnesses a horrific accident shortly after arriving, and since this is a psychological thriller, it sets the tone as much as a prologue in which he rants hostilely from the judge's bench before collapsing, but when attendants aren't around to assist the residents at the facility: bad things can happen. And they most certainly will.

 

Ashcroft suggests that Stefan was always impatient and condescending, but present circumstances haven't softened his mien in the slightest. The other residents, many of whom have fewer cognitive abilities, get on Stefan's nerves—Lithgow's Dave Crealy above all, who laughs wildly at anything on the communal TV, stares menacingly at Stefan whenever het gets the chance, and won't go anywhere without his "dementia doll" Jenny Pen (an eyeless baby doll puppet). He turns especially surly if anyone tries to take it from him, but otherwise presents as a harmless, if addled senior citizen. 

When my mom, who was diagnosed with dementia in 2019, moved to assisted living, she also considered her fellow residents inferior, because they were slow-moving humans with whom she couldn't hold a real conversation. Six years have passed since then, and now she fits right in, since everyone is off in their own world. I found Stefan relatable. 

Dave is something different. He acts one way in public and another in private. 

When the attendants aren't around, he's cruel to the other residents in ways that go beyond Stefan's eye rolls and dismissive comments, but when the judge lodges a complaint, no one believes him. His roommate, Tony Garfield (George Henare), a former rugby player who has noticed similar behaviors, refuses to back him up, because Stefan has been such a jerk, though it also represents self-sabotage on Tony's stubborn, wounded part. 

It's possible Dave has dementia, since it can take forms more egregious than memory loss, but Stefan believes he's playing a sick game, not least because his victims are so largely defenseless. There are surely more enjoyable ways to spend one's twilight years. With no one to help, Stefan tries to figure things out on his own, and he uncovers some odd, Stanley Kubrick-like clues, not least because they're hiding in plain sight, but in a series of objects to which no one appears to have taken a second look.

In the meantime, Dave's reign of irritation includes spit, urine, weird voices, racist jokes, and cruel tricks. "You do really seem absent of any positive attributes," notes Stefan drily, though Tony, a member of the Māori tribe, bears the brunt of Dave's painful and humiliating wrath. Gradually, his schoolyard bully antics escalate into something even more nefarious, and so Stefan ramps up his makeshift investigation. Along the way, he comes up with a way to make the asthmatic Dave pay for his evil deeds.

It's a clever plan, except the way Stefan keeps blacking out makes him uniquely vulnerable to Dave's retaliatory measures. 

I'm not completely certain if the blackouts are due to stroke, dementia, or surreptitious drugging, but one minute, Stefan is in one place, and the next, he's in another. Did Dave move him, did he lose track of time--both? Stefan also has strange dreams involving Dave and Jenny, and it's increasingly unclear what's really happening and what Stefan imagines happening, especially since Dave does all of his dirtiest deeds in the dead of night.

All the while, a small calico cat named Pluto (played by Marbles) with a bell on its collar roams the halls and collective spaces, impassively watching the goings on, and stopping for the occasional scritch. Pluto plays no part in the proceedings, but I like the way the cat is always there, presumably thinking, "What fools these mortals be" or, more likely, "I could use a snack."

Having now seen both of Ashcroft's features, I was struck by the differences and similarities, since one film takes place on Wellington's backroads at night and the other takes place at a well-lit institution. There are other differences, as well, especially the disparate ages of the characters, but in both cases, deadly situations that at first seem random turn out to have some history behind them. I'm not sure the explanation for Dave's callous disregard makes as much sense as it should, whereas the explanation for Mandrake's explosive rage in the first film possibly makes too much. 

As for the acting by these award-winning gents--more internationally-recognizable than the cast of talented locals in Coming Home in the Dark--I found George Henare's low-key performance a tad more compelling than those of John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush in go-for-broke mode.

If anything, The Rule of Jenny Pen flirts with the kind of enjoyably silly menace of Richard Attenborough's 1978 ventriloquist dummy horror Magic whenever Dave and the doll go to town--singing, dancing, the whole bit. 

Henare plays a more reserved, but no less dedicated character, and it's especially satisfying to see him finally rise to the occasion at the end. And I'm happy to report that Pluto lives on to roam the halls with abandon. 

Disclaimer: I was not aware of this history when I wrote this review.

 

The Rule of Jenny Pen opens in theaters on Fri, Mar 7, and will be coming to Shudder later this year. Coming Home in the Dark appears on a number of streaming services. It's well worth a watch, especially if you enjoy the work of American independents Jeremy Saulnier and Jim Mickle. Images from the IMDb (John Lithgow and friend), First Showing (Geoffrey Rush), Entertainment Weekly (Lithgow), YouTube (George Henare and a quote from Stephen King), and Cinemablend (Lithgow getting down with his bad self).

Stranger Flashback: Jay Reatard Lives Again in 2011 Documentary Better Than Something

This is a revived version of a Line Out post (The Stranger purged them from the internet some time after they pulled the plug on their music blog in 2014).

Film/TV Feb 29, 2012 at 11:01 am

The Lost Sounds of Jay Reatard

Kathy Fennessy

BETTER THAN SOMETHING: JAY REATARD
(Alex Hammond and Ian Markiewicz, USA, 2011, 89 minutes)

During his relatively short stint on Earth, Jay Reatard poured his heart into his work. Love it or leave it, there's no denying his dedication to his music, but extreme careers often go hand-in-hand with extreme lives, and Reatard, born Jimmy Lee Lindsey, Jr. in 1980, isn't here anymore.

If he doesn't always come across as the nicest guy in this even-handed portrait—he could be a total dick—he was never a dilettante or a poseur.

Alex Hammond and Ian Markiewicz, associates of director and cinematographer Albert Maysles (Gimme Shelter), start by soliciting reminiscences from Reatard's colleagues at 2010's SXSW before backtracking to interviews and performance footage from 1999-2009, including video of a screaming, howling, short-haired teenager—more hardcore than garage-punk at that point in time. Admits Reatard, "If I wouldn't have found music, I'm sure I'd have been a petty criminal."

"I'm more like a jack-off of all trades."

By the new millennium, Reatard was still having on-stage temper tantrums and battling audience members in a series of bands: Lost Sounds, Destruction Unit, Angry Angles, and the Reatards. Shangri-La Records founder Sherman Wilmott says that he wasn't a very popular figure in Memphis. Friend Jonathan Boyd adds, "He couldn't care less if people didn't like it or didn't think it was good or worthwhile."

Other speakers: In the Red founder Larry Hardy, Goner Records co-owners Zac Ives and Eric "Oblivian" Friedl, Memphis Flyer writer Andria Lisle, Cheap Time leader Jeffrey Novak, and Wavves bassist Stephen Pope.

Despite his enfant terrible reputation, Reatard comes across as friendly and forthcoming in the latter-day interview segments. He clearly felt comfortable with the filmmakers, who hang out with him around town and at a few in-store performances (I attended one at Sonic Boom). He submits that touring tires him out and that he prefers to work on music when he's bummed out, hence the bummed-out sounds he produced.

"I know I'm not gonna be able to make records when I'm dead...it's that simple really."

Better Than Something isn't bad at all, but it never really gets to the bottom of Reatard's anger issues. He grew up poor, but his mother and sisters supported his music career, so why would he sometimes turn on trusted associates? He acknowledges a tendency to self-sabotage, but it isn't clear why. There may be no easy answers, but I wish the co-directors had tried to dig deeper. That rage lives on in Reatard's music, though, where you can tap into it at will, even if he was never able to let it go.

The duo also fails to mention when and how he passed away, though they certainly don't ignore his death. Reatard died in 2010 of a drug overdose, nine months after the interviews in the film, which reveal a cogent and healthy-looking musician. Clearly, their intent was to focus on his short, fast life rather than his seemingly sudden death, but films aren't often made about the under-30 set, and death will always define Jay Reatard. 

Better Than Something plays the Grand Illusion Cinema Mar 2-8 at 7 and 9pm (plus 5pm on Sat and Sun). No 9pm screening on Sat. The theater is located at 1403 NE 50th. For more information, click here. All images: the IMDb. Another image to come, taken by me, of Stephen Pope and Jay Reatard at Sonic Boom in Ballard. If I can find it.

Monkey Business: W.W. Jacobs, Stephen King, and Oz Perkins' Horror Comedy The Monkey

THE MONKEY 

(Osgood Perkins, USA, 2025, 98 minutes) 

"Everything dies, and that's a fact."--Bruce Springsteen, "Atlantic City"

"Everybody dies. And that's fucked up."--uncensored tagline, The Monkey 

It's hard to imagine horror cinema without the inspiration provided by a nine-page story written 123 years ago, and yet the name W.W. Jacobs isn't as famous as that of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker...or Stephen King.

Granted, 1818's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and 1897's Dracula were full-length novels, but Jacobs' punchy parable features a distinct beginning, middle, and end–even a prologue with an Indian fakir and a British sergeant-major. Osgood Perkins also adds a prologue to his darkly funny adaptation of King's 1980 short story, which otherwise lacks one. 

Just as King used Jacobs' 1902 story, "The Monkey’s Paw," as inspiration, he didn't merely update it for a new era, he turned it into a distinctly King creation as an ordinary father grapples with something he doesn't understand--something that endangers his entire family--kind of like The Shining, except he doesn't lose his mind. There's no fakir or soldier; just some creepy toy his long-gone merchant mariner father picked up abroad. 

Perkins has done something similar in his fifth feature. He retains the bones of King's 42-page story, but changes the tone, condenses the number of characters, invests one of them–and not just the toy monkey itself–with malevolence, and amps everything up to 11. 

Subtle, it ain't, but for my money, it works marvelously, and King, who famously dismissed Stanley Kubrick's auteurist 1980 take on his 1977 novel, has proclaimed, "You've never seen anything like 'The Monkey.' It's batshit insane. As someone who has indulged in batshittery from time to time, I say that with admiration." He's not wrong. 

If you're all about creative kills, this Monkey is for you--you'll find the most creative one in Neon's red-band trailer. If not, you may want to look elsewhere, because this is Perkins' first full-fledged horror comedy, though the loopy Longlegs with a pasty Nicolas Cage was a step in this direction. 

In the prologue, Adam Scott–currently weirding up TV screens in the second season of Apple's Severance–plays Capt. Petey Shelburn, an airplane pilot trying to return the creepy toy to the pawn shop from which he picked it up (in a nod to Jacobs' anti-colonialist story, the shopkeeper, played by Shafin Karim, appears to be of South Asian descent). The encounter doesn't end well for either gentleman, and Petey disappears from the scene. 

Lois (Tatiana Maslany, who appears in Perkins' fall follow-up Keeper) goes on to raise twin sons Bill and Hal on her own. Remarkably, Sweet Tooth's Christian Convery plays both boys--I never would've guessed they weren't played by two different actors. If they kind of get along in King's story, in Perkins' conception, Bill is a bully and Hal is an inarticulate, bespectacled weakling who doesn't know how to stick up for himself. They'll grow into adults, both played by Theo James, who haven't changed in the slightest. 

One day the boys find the toy their father had tried to keep from them. It's a mystery as to how it got into their house in the first place, and it will continue to bedevil them no matter where they go or what they do. 

In King's story, the monkey was a broken-down thing with patchy fur, akin to the drumstick-wielding rabbit in Irish filmmaker Damian Mc Carthy's 2020 horror film Caveat, but it's more robust here with a toothy, humanoid grin and penetrating brown eyes. I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. 

Naturally, the boys can't resist turning the key in the back of the creature to see if it still works, but nothing happens–at first. Then, after a few beats of the drum, friends and neighbors start to drop dead. Once they figure out what’s going on, they try to rid themselves of the thing. Hal’s plan, which involves a well, works for 25 years, but the monkey eventually finds its way back to solid ground. By which point, the brothers are fully estranged.

James, a classically-trained British actor, appears to be having a ball as the adult brothers, though he spends most of his time as the hapless Hal, who could make everything better if he just knew how to express himself. 

I've always thought James was a fine actor–he received an Emmy nomination for The White Lotus a couple of years ago–but it's a treat to see him getting his hands dirty, a marked contrast to the glossy, James Bond-like Range Rover commercial currently making the televisual rounds.

Hal, a divorced dad who works in a convenience store, has the shitty life he believes he deserves, largely because he's been haunted by this terrible toy that just won't leave him alone. His sober-sided son, Petey (Colin O'Brien), thinks his father doesn't love him, whereas Hal stays away, because he believes he's better off without him, though Petey's soon-to-be-stepdad, Ted (Elijah Wood, also having a ball), is a different kind of awful: a preening narcissist whose wealth comes from self-help books about fatherhood. 

Despite their differences, Hal, Bill, and Petey band together in an attempt to defeat the nemesis that has claimed their nearest and dearest, including a swinger with mutton chops played with relish by the director himself (like his father, Perkins started out as an actor before shifting to filmmaking). 

This isn't to suggest that the unhappy Shelburn men have put their grievances aside. The Monkey remains a prickly enterprise from start to finish with plenty of gore along the way. By contrast, Perkins drops the climactic sequence from King's story in which Hal, who has a wife and two sons, tries something foolhardy that actually works, and father and son walk off into the sunset, as it were. 

Granted, it's a King creation, so there are dark clouds on the horizon. Though Hal bonds with nine-year-old Petey, it doesn't change the fact that he doesn't like 12-year-old Dennis. In Perkins' adaptation, Bill is a bully who grows up to be a mullet-headed loser, but in King's story, he's mostly just unlikeable, the kind of thing no parent wants to admit to themselves. 

As with Ted, Perkins adds other characters who weren't in the original story, like Ricky (Rohan Campbell), a leather-jacketed, faded-jeaned, floppy-haired slacker who becomes obsessed with the monkey when he spots it at an estate sale. He looks like the sixth Ramone. If the real band members were smart guys playing at being dumb, this fellow is a cretin born to hop. 

I had a great time at The Monkey, better than I did at Longlegs, and I hope other viewers have as much fun. Perkins' approach to "The Monkey's Paw," by way of "The Monkey," never stirred my emotions, like Bob Clark's Vietnam parable Deathdream, a darkly dramatic illustration of fucking around and finding out, but it proves the durability of a story written in another century that has also powered episodes of the Twilight Zone and Night Gallery–Rod Serling was clearly a fan–as well as The X-Files and Tales from the Crypt, both in EC Comics and TV form. 

Even horror maestro Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us, Nope) got in on the act by naming his production company Monkeypaw Productions, complete with an image of a shriveled simian appendage, seen in animated form as a severed paw stirring a cup of tea (in Get Out, Catherine Keener's spoon-stirring is as creepy as the rat-a-tat drumming in Caveat and The Monkey). Notably, Monkeypaw produced CBS's 2019 Twilight Zone reboot. Just as notable: Perkins directed alien invasion episode "You Might Also Like" with Gretchen Mol and Greta Lee. It's quite good. 

I can't say whether anyone will adapt King's story again, but it's worth a read. Though I haven't seen every film adapted from his stories, Oz Perkins' contribution became an instant favorite, up there with Rob Reiner's coming-of-age drama, Stand By Me, an adaptation of 1982 novella The Body. (I was initially impressed by Frank Darabont's 1994 The Shawshank Redemption, also from a novella, but have increasingly mixed feelings about it.)

In 1985, King included "The Monkey," which premiered in skin mag Gallery, in his Skeleton Crew collection, which also spawned Darabont's adaptation of The Mist, but W.W. Jacobs' story as a source of inspiration will never go away, kind of like the toy in the 1980 story, always watching and waiting for some intrepid individual to ignore the warning…and…turn…the…key.

The Monkey opens on Fri, Feb 21. Images: the IMDb (the toy monkey), The Dark Crusade - A Karl Edward Wagner Podcast (The Monkey insert cover), That Hashtag Show (Christian Convery as Bill and Hal), Screen Rant (Theo James as Hal), and Neon (James as Bill and an alternate poster).

Social Realism with Flare: Dead Man's Switch

DEAD MAN'S SWITCH / Arillo de Hombre Muerto

(Alejandro Gerber Bicecci, 2024, Mexico, 118 minutes)

Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Gerber Bicecci's third feature is a social realist drama with Godardian flair. 

The story centers on subway car driver and mother of two Dalia (award-winning Mexican actress Adriana Paz), who sets out to find her husband, Esteban, when he disappears without a trace, but few people care. 

The Mexican Missing Persons system is a pervasive problem due to drug cartels, corrupt police and politicians, and a powerless populace. Plus, it shows no signs of stopping. As Carlos Aguilar wrote in The New York Times in a Feb 8, 2025 piece about the controversies swirling around Emilia Pérez, "Since 2006, over 400,000 people have died and more than 100,000 have disappeared as a result of ongoing drug-related violence across Mexico." 

With no one to assist her, Dalia turns detective, which puts her job in jeopardy, and she starts to wonder if her lover (Noé Hernández), a driver hoping to take Esteban's place, or the union opposition had something to do with it, since she and her husband were both outspoken union members. 

Hatuey Viveros Lavielle's black and white cinematography is gorgeous and inventive, and since Bicecci shot during the pandemic, streets are largely empty and the occasional face mask appears, bringing to mind the alienation of artful science fiction features, like Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 Alphaville and Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo B. Ragona's 1964 The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price. 

Granted, the streets are emptier at night than during the day, but that only adds to the tension, since a woman walking alone in the dark through some of Mexico City's sketchiest neighborhoods takes her life in her hands.

This is a vital subject and Adriana Paz is fantastic. Dalia is strong, sexy, and caring about her children, who have unique lives of their own--her son, who is openly gay, has recently taken a lover--and other subway car drivers. 

At Cannes 2024, Paz shared the best actress award with the cast of Emilia Pérez, which is ironic, because Jacques Audiard's embattled musical, which was shot in France, also deals with the Missing Persons system, and it's by far the inferior effort, even as it's gotten significantly more exposure, more awards consideration, and more attention overall--some of it quite scathing.

For another moving take on the subject, I would recommend Fernanda Valadez's haunting 2021 film Identifying Features, which revolves around a middle-aged mother (an excellent Mercedes Hernández) searching for her migrant worker son. Little wonder Mexican filmmakers are making the least clichéd, hardest-hitting, most personal films about this ongoing crisis.

Dead Man's Switch has been making the film festival rounds, but isn't currently available on video or streaming in the US. As Bicecci told Director's Notes, "Mexico produces around 200 features a year and a lot of colleagues can shoot their films; however, independent author driven social realist films are not exactly the easiest ones to fund, and certainly are the most difficult to distribute." I'll update this post if that changes. Images from Director's Notes (Adriana Paz), Eventival (Paz and Noé Hernández), and Mubi (Paz).