Love Her, Love Her Dog: Naomi Watts Stars in Scott McGehee and David Siegel's The Friend

THE FRIEND 

(Scott McGehee and David Siegel, USA, 2024, 120 minutes)

The Friend is a film about a writer, a city, and the loves of her life, both human and animal.

In the prologue, Iris (Naomi Watts, who next appears in Audrey Diwan's Emmanuelle) dines with friends, including Walter (Bill Murray, who first costarred with Watts in 2014's St. Vincent). He's considerably older than everyone else, but they're all literary types of a kind. Walter and Iris are writers and instructors who have collaborated on each other's work. She's also friendly with his daughter, Val (a very good Sarah Pidgeon), product of a long-ago dalliance, with whom she plans to organize Walter's correspondence for publication.

After he passes, co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel shift the focus to Iris. Walter remains a presence through Val, his ex-wives Barbara (Noma Dumezweni) and Elaine (Carla Gugino), his widow Tuesday (Constance Wu), and his dog. Watts and Gugino are so good together as women both loved and let down by Walter that I wouldn't mind another film with these two.

Iris isn't morose, but like Elaine, she leans towards the cynical. 

Writer's block compounded by the sudden loss of a best friend and mentor can do that. I won't say how Walter dies, but the manner only makes matters worse. 

From the start, Watts proves ideal for Iris, because she makes her easy to care about rather than to find her a self-pitying bore. She's also believable as a professor, and her voiceover includes literary references which might come across as pretentious if delivered by an actress with a colder affect. 

In Scott Coffey's 2005 micro-budget feature Ellie Parker, Watts played an actress who can cry on demand, which she demonstrates in that film--and this one, too. She really is adept at making ordinary women compelling with the strength of her talents. The filmmakers understand this implicitly, because Iris even calls out a male student (Owen Teague from Montana Story) for critiquing a female colleague (Annie Fox) for focusing on an ordinary woman--as if that sort of thing was dull by its very nature. 

After attempting to make a go of it on her own, Barbara, who isn't a dog person, reaches out to Iris about Walter's dog, Apollo (Bing), who has been so depressed since he died that she's been boarding him at a kennel, except Iris prefers cats--though she doesn't have one--and her building prohibits dogs, but Walter instructed Barbara to contact her about him if necessary. Whether out of a sense of love or duty, Iris accepts the assignment.

The Friend isn't a comedy, but Apollo's conspicuousness generates some of the humor. 

He isn't a tiny pup Iris can tuck into a handbag like Demi Moore's ever-present, micro chihuahua Pilaf. Nope, he's a 150-pound, Marmaduke-sized Harlequin Great Dane; white with black spots and heterochromia eyes (one brown and one light blue). Quiet and mostly well behaved, but huge. 

Dilemma established, Iris attempts to make things work. Aside from the fact that she isn't supposed to have a dog, her rent-controlled apartment is realistically small. It's amazing how rarely filmmakers feature the kind of units non-wealthy Manhattanites actually occupy--Sofia Coppola's On the Rocks, also with Murray, was a case in point--but Iris has a lived-in, book-filled one-bedroom, which makes sense for a non-superstar academic. 

Beyond the practicalities, The Friend concerns the way both humans and animals mourn. Now it isn't just Iris feeling sad, but a dog sharing the same space and feeling similar emotions. Since she isn't a dog person either, she talks to Apollo as if he were a person. Then again, it's how I talk to my cat. I've never understood the baby talk some humans use with their pets.

Iris's efforts don't work at first. Dogs are gonna dog, and then, just as Apollo has made peace with his new environment, an eviction notice arrives before Iris has found someone to take him in. Leaving the apartment she inherited from her father would nullify a once-in-a-lifetime arrangement. It would also mean leaving behind family friends like concerned neighbor Marjorie (played by the always-welcome Ann Dowd). 

Throughout the film, McGehee and Siegel chart her course, but never stop to wonder why this attractive 50-something woman is single and childless. Those things aren't problems to be solved, which is refreshing, and she doesn't meet a handsome stranger at the dog park. The problem is Iris's unresolved feelings about Walter as represented by his inconvenient dog. 

Towards the end, the film swerves into her fiction. It's a risky gambit, especially since the film has a similar trajectory, though set in a different milieu, as Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, in which Michelle Williams' drifter has to figure out what to do with the dog (played by Reichardt's own yellow lab) she loves dearly and can't afford to keep. It also recalls Azazel Jacobs' recent, Manhattan-set His Three Daughters, which culminates in an imagined conversation with someone no longer able to communicate.

It's a reminder of the way fiction provides writers with a way to impose order on the messiness of real life. 

I'm not sure the film needs this sequence, but it does allow Murray to return, and he gives a nicely understated performance, though he isn't as prominent in the film as the marketing might suggest--and I won't deny that I lost some enthusiasm for the actor after claims of misconduct came to light in 2022. Walter was also accused of misconduct, which may have contributed to his retirement. As a womanizer, it's possible he overstepped the line, but the question goes unanswered.

Mostly, the film belongs to Naomi Watts, a consistently excellent actress who has done particularly strong work for David Cronenberg, Rodrigo García, Gus Van Sant, and, especially, David Lynch with Mulholland Drive, but it's only so often that she's provided the fulcrum upon which everything revolves. 

McGehee and Siegel, who debuted in 1994 with the John Frankenheimer-inspired thriller Suture, adapted The Friend from the semi-autobiographical 2018 novel by Ingrid Nunez, who also wrote the book that became Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door, which concentrates more on an impending death, and her thoughts about our four-legged companions, as voiced by Watts, hit home. Like the regret that I never knew my cat as a kitten. She wasn't as old as Apollo when I adopted her--he enters Iris's life as a senior--and cats of all breeds live longer than Great Danes, but I understand the desire to spend as much time with them as we can, like Iris's wish that Apollo lives as long as she does. No one wants to lose a friend. 

It's tempting to say they don't make thoughtful, intelligent motion pictures like this anymore, except they do; they're just less commonplace and don't always turn out as well, but Siegel and McGehee have a lot of experience in this area, and I was also impressed by their modern-day adaptation of Henry James's 1897 novel What Maisie Knew with Alexander Skarsgård as a compassionate stepfather.

The film's third character, in a manner of speaking, is New York, and the cinematography by Giles Nuttgens, who did particularly fine work for McGehee and Siegel in 2001 noir The Deep End, showcases the city to its best advantage. It looks appealing, but not unrealistically so, and most of the people in Iris's life are kind and caring, even superintendent Hektor (Ozark's Felix Solis), who would prefer not to enforce the no-dog rule, but doesn't want to lose his job anymore than Iris wants to lose her apartment. 

In a deviation from the novel, the directors introduce a psychotherapist (Tom McCarthy, who directed Watts's husband Billy Crudup in Spotlight), who plays a key, third-act role, which also reminded me of His Three Daughters in which Jay O. Sanders makes a brief appearance that ties things together, while also confirming the under-sung talents of these actors. That film, however, was denied a proper theatrical release. This one wasn't.   

In the end, Iris finds a solution. I cried, and you might, too. This is a film that could easily get lost in the marketplace, but I hope it doesn't. For what it's worth, it didn't turn me into a dog lover--though I have fond memories of my dad's huskies--but movies about humans and dogs have always been close to my heart, and of the many films I've seen that explore these relationships, from Vittorio di Sica's neorealist masterpiece Umberto D to recent Chinese award-winner Black Dog, The Friend is one of the very best.

The Friend opens in Seattle theaters on Thurs, April 3. Images from Bleecker Street by way of FirstShowing.net (Naomi Watts and Bing), FilmBook (Watts and Carla Gugino), Rolling Stone (Watts and Bing / photo: Matt Infante), Matt Reviews Movies (Watts and Bing), The Film Stage (Watts and Bill Murray), and Film at Lincoln Center (Watts, Bing, and Tom McCarthy).

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).