In the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s ascendance to his pop culture throne in the ‘90s, dozens of imitators tried to mimic his approach to filmmaking, only to fall flat on their faces. It turns out that what he does is much harder than it looks. As all of those Tarantino wannabes were to “Pulp Fiction,” Neil Marshall’s “Duchess” is to the work of Guy Ritchie, particularly “Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels,” the filmmaker’s international breakthrough. Incongruent needle drops, freeze frames with character names, overheated narration, and tough tales of interconnected criminals – “Duchess” wants SO badly to be a Ritchie film that he almost deserves co-writing credit on the project. Although he probably wouldn’t want that. “Atrocious” might have been a better title.
The remarkably boring Charlotte Kirk plays Scarlett Monaghan, a woman approached by a suave gentleman named Robert McNaughton (Philip Winchester) while out with her deadly dull boyfriend at the club one night. Robert and Scarlett have instant chemistry, so they pretty quickly dispatch with Mr. Wrong and begin a steamy affair before Scarlett discovers how Robert makes his money. He’s a dealer in massive diamonds, which means he travels in an underworld of shady characters that requires that he have a couple of criminal allies of his own in the loyal Danny (Sean Pertwee) and Baraka (Hoji Fortuna). Colin Egglesfield plays an antagonist of Robert/Scarlett, while Stephanie Beacham is forced to deliver some of the film’s worst dialogue as a crime lord of the jewelry scene.
Without spoiling, Scarlett ends up forced into more action than she could have expected when she responded to the flirtatious, snappy dresser that fateful night. Marshall, Kirk, and Simon Farr’s script wants to be a Guy Ritchie variation on “Kill Bill,” a story of a woman pushed to vengeance by people who underestimated her. Still, they don’t come close to closing that sale in any notable capacity. Kirk just isn’t charismatic enough or believable when it comes to action (or character or dialogue or anything), which could explain why Marshall resorts to extreme violence to try to make a truly dull film more interesting. At one point, a hot iron is pressed to a torture victim’s penis. At another, oil is poured on a man’s face and lit aflame. It’s like the torture porn version of “Snatch.” Yeah, not fun.
It doesn’t help that the plotting and tone of “Duchess” are so exaggeratedly stupid that the whole thing plays almost like a parody of Ritchie instead of an homage, one that goes on for what feels like forever – it’s overlong at nearly two hours, and I swear to you it feels twice as long. And when it all ends with a door wide open for a sequel? It’s more of a threat than a promise.
The final words of his 1953 novel “The Unnamable” — “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” — are among the most famous written by Irish poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist Samuel Beckett. They epitomize both the hopelessness and the senseless resilience of what we’ll call the human spirit in an utterly plain and compelling way. They express despair and overturn it. They are, in a sense, exemplary of his larger work.
This movie’s title, “Dance First,” derives from his more famous dramatic work, the bleak absurdist comedy “Waiting for Godot,” a revolutionary work that changed theater forever. “Perhaps he could dance first and think later,” says Estragon of Lucky, the slave of the tyrannical Pozzo. Oppression has addled Lucky to the extent that he doesn’t quite know how to take that.
The conundrums of life are given a rather more conventional depiction in this fictional biographical film, directed by James Marsh, whose reductive work on Stephen Hawking in his 2014 “The Theory of Everything” doesn’t exactly give one hope that he’ll do Beckett justice. Shot in black-and-white, the movie almost giddily partakes in components that Beckett’s work abjures: treacly music (by Benoit Viellefon), ingratiating, potentially “relatable” characters, a linear series of linear mini-narratives of love and loss. Within the parameters it sets for itself, though, the mostly black-and-white movie is largely watchable, if not wholly easy to swallow. (But note this well: this movie doesn’t even have enough respect for Beckett’s work to give the “Dance first” quote its proper citation; late in the movie, it’s discussed as something he “said to a student.”)
That’s partially due to the work of Gabriel Byrne, who plays the older Beckett with a clipped intelligence. Beckett famously won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, an event he described as “a catastrophe.” He didn’t attend the ceremony or give the expected speech. Marsh’s movie depicts a Beckett nightmare in which he attends the award-giving and climbs a ladder out of the building to escape the accolades.
Finding himself in the cavernous gray foundation of the theater, Byrne’s Beckett argues with himself (literally — in these sequences, Byrne is doubled) about what he’ll do with that Nobel Prize money. Donate it to Trinity College, his alma mater, maybe? The discussion sparks recollections of the women and men in his life. There’s his brilliant and imperious mother, who takes exception to her child’s writing. Lucia Joyce, who serves as a conduit between Beckett and the family member he’s truly interested in, her father James (you know, the author); Alfred Peron, the friend who taught Beckett French, which language he adopted for his work. (Peron’s terrible fate is speculated to have inspired Beckett’s creation of Lucky.) And more.
The film itself isn’t too concerned with the work. Given the eventfulness of Beckett’s life, it doesn’t need to be. While young Sam (played by Fionn O’Shea) is a bit of a shy fellow — imagine! — he also has a kind of confidence that attracts the attention of women, some of whom are played here by Maxine Peake and Sandrine Bonnaire. A resident of Paris from 1937 on, he joins the French Resistance during World War II and exhibits considerable courage and resourcefulness. When he meets BBC translator Barbara Bray (Peake), he is immediately entranced but maintains his devotion to wife Suzanne (Bonnaire). The older and wiser Beckett of the film asks his double, “What does a snake look like, to you?”
The movie skips over a lot in the life: his medical issues (persistent cysts) and athleticism (he was a first-rate cricket player), the fact that prior to taking up with Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil he’d had a long involvement with the heiress Peggy Guggenheim. And it makes things up: placing him at the Nobel Awards ceremony in a non-dream sequence when, in fact, he didn’t go. It frequently seems that what the movie ultimately wants from Samuel Beckett is for him not to have been…well, Samuel Beckett.
Would you like to know the day you will die? It’s a tricky thought exercise. What if you find out you’ll die at a ripe old age? That sure would make retirement investing and travel plans easier. But what if the news was grim? That you’ll die within the year – before you’ve had the chance to meet that special someone or take that dream vacation? What then? Do you live your life to its fullest or mope and fret over what’s left? What’s a man like Mortimer the mortician to do?
“Running on Empty” (not to be confused with the far superior Sidney Lumet film or the catchy Jackson Browne song of the same name) begins with that playful premise yet quickly falls apart with repeated jokes and bits that grow stiff with each unfunny use, dead-eyed performances that looks like even the cast knew this movie was D.O.A., dialogue so mind-numbingly dull, it would have been painful to overhear in a coffee shop, let alone for almost 90 minutes. There’s almost nothing to savor from this movie past its initial premise, and, like a funeral that drags on in the summer heat, takes far too long to get to its inevitable conclusion.
Mortimer (Keir Gilchrist) is a mortician (sorry, funeral director) following in the family business in the San Fernando Valley with his slightly creepy uncle Barry (Jim Gaffigan). After Mort buys a house with his conventionally hot fiancée Nicole (Francesca Eastwood), the pair visit a clinic to find out their death date. The good news for Nicole is she’s expected to live many more decades. The bad news for Mort is that he’s going to die within the year. Nicole dumps him, setting him on a wayward quest to figure out how to make the best of his remaining time on Earth. Along the way, he meets the sympathetic Kate (Lucy Hale) and a nightmarish pimp named Simon (Rhys Coiro), who frequently returns to shakedown Mort for more money.
Written and directed by Daniel André, “Running on Empty” delivers little enjoyment for a romantic comedy. The premise is the most charming aspect of the movie, but as Mort’s misadventures start to stack up, like rounds of painfully awkward speed dating with LA’s worst bachelorettes and repeated tiresome visits from Simon, the charm wears off as Mort’s precious time on earth drips away like sweat in the heat. André must find humor in the tedium of bad experiences because he buries his character under the weight of one bad night after another. While “Running on Empty” may hold some hints of Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” it lacks the energy and ingenuity to make Mort’s race against time and death feel urgent or even poignant in any significant way.
As Mort, Gilchrist seems rather unmoved by his character’s predicament. Even in his most passionate or frustrated moments, his line deliveries feel flat, like a pulse that barely registers. I can’t tell if the main character is supposed to be played this off-key flat for a laugh or if it was so underwritten Gilchrist gave up on injecting any life into the role. But he looked bored, and I, in turn, felt bored.
By design, Nicole is also a relatively shallow character, but Kate is written like a Ramona Flowers tribute, minus any kind of self-reflection or emotional backstory. However, Hale at least tries to add some levity to the story, a feat not even Gaffigan’s Barry or Jay Pharoah (as Mort’s co-worker Sid) can pull off. She’s lively and effervescent in a movie where most of the cast looks like they’re sleepwalking. It’s not enough to save the movie or its dialogue, but it’s some sign of life.
Unfortunately, “Running on Empty” is one of those failed comedies that never quite achieve liftoff. Between the lackluster performances, dead-end jokes, gross humor, unremarkable visual style, and bon mots like “Simon says…,” I could feel my own mortality slipping away. With little to offer for its screen time, “Running on Empty” lives up to its title.
I have spent hundreds of hours in the worlds of Gearbox Software and 2K Games’ “Borderlands,” enraptured by its addictive structure, one that encourages exploration, teamwork, and a constant pursuit of new weapons to unleash on waves of enemies (I’ve written about it here and here, among many other places). While these games are undeniably repetitive – like any titles based on what they call loot farming, which means looking for better and better gear that you can call yoru own – they also exist in a massive world of truly memorable characters like Claptrap, Mad Moxxi, Tiny Tina, and Handsome Jack. The most common setting, the planet of Pandora, is populated by everything from dragon-like creatures to masked enemies who look a lot like the suicidal maniacs in “Mad Max: Fury Road.” And all of this comes with creative design choices and clever plotting that often includes jokes and twists that harken back to an old-fashioned, almost Vaudevillian sense of humor. It’s not unlike Mel Brooks meets George Miller. All of this is to say that my biggest concern after watching Eli Roth’s abysmal “Borderlands” is that it will now tarnish the legacy of a pop culture franchise that deserves better because nothing that works about the games has been adapted intact in this ugly, boring, truly inept piece of filmmaking, a movie that was mostly shot years ago and should have been shelved even longer. Like maybe forever.
Cate Blanchett (who made this before “TAR” and before Roth made “Thanksgiving” to give you some idea how long it’s been gathering dust) stars as Lilith, one of the beloved Vault Hunters from the video game that has made the jump from console to screen. In this version, Lilith is a bounty hunter, approached one night by employees of the all-powerful Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), who has a high-paying job for the tough-talking mercenary. When Lilith is swayed by the amount of money that Atlas is willing to pay for the gig, I laughed thinking (hoping) that Blanchett also got a life-changing amount of cash to star in a project that’s this far below her talent level.
The job is to find Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), the daughter of Atlas, who has been kidnapped by another classic video game character named Roland (Kevin Hart), a soldier who has gone rogue and escaped to Pandora with the girl and a “Psycho” named Krieg (Florian Munteanu). She may be the answer to a legendary vault on Pandora that had created an entire industry of treasure hunters trying to find it.
On returning to her home planet of Pandora, Lilith runs into a robot named Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black), who serves a sort of comic relief, which would imply there’s actual comedy in this film. There is not. Just endless rambling. Fans of the game will notice some other familiar personalities like Moxxi (Gina Gershon) and Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis). According to some published credits, Scooter and Hammerlock also make appearances, but blink and you’ll miss them. I must have blinked.
Lilith, Roland, Tannis, Claptrap, and Krieg should be an obvious variation on Guardians of the Galaxy, outcasts on a distant planet who have to use their different strengths to save the day as a team, but the script by Roth and Joe Crombie is flatly uninterested in giving them memorable traits. Blanchett is such a great actress that she sells a little bit of this defiantly shallow screenplay with a smirk, but Hart looks visibly bored at times, perhaps swallowed up in the reshoots that led to a lot of the delays on the release of this film. On that note, the script for “Borderlands” was once credited to Craig Mazin, the genius behind “Chernobyl” and “The Last of Us,” but he’s taken his name off the film now after the reshoots. When a film goes through that much turmoil, one can usually see where the final product has been Frankenstein-ed back together, but even that game is hard to play here. One can imagine a Mazin version that puts a bit more love and care into the world-building than this version, but so little of that has made it to the final cut.
Part of the reason it fails in that department is that Roth, a director that I’ve defended in the horror genre a few times, is remarkably inept at directing action. When the film bursts into gunfire, it would be polite to say that it becomes incoherent. I’m not sure if cinematographer Rogier Stoffers and/or editors Julian Clarke & Evan Henke deserve some of the blame, but the fight scenes are baffling in their construction, cut in a way that makes it impossible to know the geography of an action scene, or really to care about what happens in them. It may sound picky, but a movie based on an action video game needs to at least provide visceral, escapist entertainment in the guns-and-punches department, and there’s not a single memorable action beat in this movie. Not one.
Video game movies have earned something of a commercial and critical reappraisal in the last few years after decades of being considered poison for creative artists. A critical darling like “The Last of Us” and a commercial one like “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” means that Hollywood has found a new vein of beloved IPs to tap and they’re going to make ALL of your favorite games into movies. As my mind wandered in the mid-section of “Borderlands” to other games I love and how my affection for them could be ruined by similar projects, I had a vision of Eli Roth’s “Elden Ring.” I almost started to cry.
The most important things in life happen between the words. Subterranean noise is often louder than dialogue. This is a truth we all experience, but it is challenging to pull off in film, particularly if the subterranean moments are small shifts in consciousness where the character (and audience) understands that nothing will be the same again. A film camera captures thought, and yet so many films seem to distrust this, their air filled with unnecessary dialogue, either exposition or explanation. India Donaldson’s “Good One” is extraordinary in so many ways, but its most distinctive quality is how much Donaldson and her trio of actors (James LeGros, Danny McCarthy, and Lily Collias) trust the subterranean, and allow it to do its work far beneath the surface, between the words.
Chris (Le Gros) and Matt (McCarthy) are lifelong friends, with a relationship like an old bickering married couple. Chris is the responsible one, but his marriage has ended and he’s in a state of unwelcome middle-aged upheaval. Matt is a failed actor, openly flailing with disappointment. His teenage son wants nothing to do with him. Chris’ 17-year-old daughter Sam (Collias) is a senior in high school, gearing up for college in the fall. She’s a good kid and excited about the future. She’s looking forward to a weekend hiking trip in the Catskills with her father, Matt, and Matt’s son. When Matt’s son refuses to go, Sam is without a peer to keep her company. It’s too late to back out.
The hike isn’t a casual afternoon walk. It’s a three-day affair, everyone carrying gear on their backs, hiking long distances over sometimes arduous terrain. Chris and Sam are practiced hikers. They’ve got all the rituals down. Matt is a buffoon. He’s wearing jeans. He packs inappropriately. He can’t set up his tent. Chris is rigid and critical. The dynamic between the friends feels like a habit more than anything else. Chris is perpetually irritated with Matt, while Matt cracks jokes. His lightheartedness is a thin veneer placed over misery so deep it’s practically existential. “I don’t know how I became so untethered,” he says in a naked moment.
We see all of this through Sam’s eyes. She is perceptive and thoughtful. When the two men ask for her opinion on their grown-up problems, she surprises them with her insight. Something’s “off” about all of this, though. Sam is 17 years old, but she’s still a kid. These guys are a lot to handle, and one of them is her dad. They forget she’s young, they forget that maybe getting tipsy and swapping stories about infidelity isn’t something she needs to see. What starts off as a nice time (albeit chaotic with all the bickering) quickly becomes not so nice. In fact, there’s a feeling in the air, more and more distinct as the film goes on, that Sam is not safe with these two men she’s known all her life.
What happened, though?
“Good One” is intriguing in its disinterest in explanations. The film’s refusal to “satisfy” an audience with easy explanations or even cathartic moments pulls you into its atmosphere, dragging you into the weird dynamic which grows more claustrophobic by the moment. Sam has her period and keeps leaving the path to put in a tampon, as Chris and Sam wait in the background, completely oblivious to her extra burden. She’s got this whole world going on they have no idea about. The period is an intriguing detail (all the details are intriguing in this beautiful film, including its evocative title), highlighting the biological difference, but also highlighting her isolation. The only women in the movie are back home. Sam is on her own.
I took a friend to the press screening, and we walked home, talking about it the whole way. There was so much to discuss, and I can’t help but think it’s because what it all “means” is left unsaid. Donaldson does not take the easy way out.
The majority of the film takes place outside. Cinematographer Wilson Cameron (who also directed two of Donaldon’s shorts) captures the lush greenery, the way the bodies move through it, the vistas. In some of the more intimate scenes, he utilizes very interesting framing where one head looms in the foreground, and another head peeks out from behind the blockage. The characters are crammed into the frame, but in each others’ way. The sound design is exquisite: the vivid sounds of rushing water, bugs, and birds take the place of dialogue. There are long sequences where we watch the characters hike, set up tents, break down their campsite. The rhythm is soothing, but underneath, things are curdling, shattering.
Most of the film happens on Collias’ face. She is an astonishing young actress, where every flicker of thought, discomfort, humor, and shock shows. Her face leads us. The subterranean shift is Sam’s, a tectonic plate moving far beneath the surface of her life, marking her indelibly. When Sam exits the forest, she’s not the same girl as when she went in. Everything has changed.
In India Donaldson’s riveting “Good One,” a father-daughter hiking trip takes an uncomfortable turn after the shifting power dynamics of their relationship are gradually brought to the fore, first testing their bond then exposing its limits.
For 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias), embarking on a three-day backpacking trip in the Catskills with her middle-aged father, Chris (James Le Gros), is a time-honored tradition, less a rite of passage than a familiar ritual, albeit one that will fade into memory after she heads off to college in a few short weeks. Their latest excursion, though, has been slightly overshadowed by the presence of his recently divorced best friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy), who’s unprepared for the weekend in more ways than one.
After Matt’s son refuses at the last minute to join them on the trip, Sam finds herself alone with the two old friends. Though they all get along well enough, the men’s constant bickering and shows of one-upmanship put Sam in an awkward position; patiently listening as they air petty grievances and wallow in self-pity, she’s caught between mediating disputes and calling them out for the selfish, sexist attitudes they display toward the women in their lives — including Sam. Depressingly oblivious and ordinary though this behavior may be, Sam is nevertheless forced to shoulder the weight of it, until lines are crossed and her trust is betrayed.
Revelatory in its intimate, richly layered exploration of the flickering tensions between fathers and daughters, friends and family, and men and women, “Good One” poignantly, painfully distills that universal moment at which we learn to see our parents more honestly. Just as confidently, it charts a woman’s struggle to reconcile her increasingly sure sense of self with the expectations, presumptions, and violations thrust upon her.
For writer-director Donaldson and lead actor Collias, making their striking feature debut was an opportunity to dramatize what often goes unspoken about this time in every young woman’s life. Filming in upstate New York, “Good One” also gave them the chance to capture in naturalistic detail the experience of hiking in the woods: carrying everything on your back so as to leave no trace, reaping the rewards of thinking ahead, and finding oneself both isolated and empowered within nature.
“Good One” opens theatrically on August 9, expanding wider in subsequent weeks; it reaches Chicago on August 23, playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Marking the first feature to be distributed by Metrograph Pictures, the New York City theater’s newly formed distribution label headed by longtime A24 executive David Laub, “Good One” has been a standout of this year’s film festival circuit; it’s the only feature this year to play at both Sundance, where it premiered, and Cannes, where it screened in the Directors’ Fortnight section.
In between the two, “Good One” was an official selection of this year’s Chicago Critics Film Festival; while in Chicago this past May for a screening and post-film Q&A, Donaldson sat down with RogerEbert.com to discuss walking miles in someone else’s shoes, control and surrender on set, the “sense of permission” she felt seeing “35 Shots of Rum,” and much more.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
You wrote the first draft of “Good One” before you had a child, then you filmed it as a new mother. Especially given that you grew up taking hiking trips with your father, and that those experiences directly inspired this story, how did becoming a parent yourself further inform your perspective on the film you were making?
Being a parent informed every aspect of making this movie, in ways that I think I’ll still be learning about for years to come. That experience first came in when my son was about four months old, and I had written a draft of this script already; I revisited it with a new, extreme sense of urgency around making a film.
I’d had this idea in my head, for years, that I needed to make a feature film before having a child. I couldn’t reconcile how I could parent a young child and make a first film, given all of the challenges of making your first film with limited resources. I couldn’t reconcile how that would be possible. Then, the pandemic happened. It suddenly felt like making an independent film was even further away. I was getting close with a different film, and then it didn’t come together, the pandemic happened, I had a child, and everything seemed paused. I was going to move on with other things that I wanted with my life.
When he was about four months old, I came out of that sleepless stupor and felt that I needed to make a movie, so I reread the script and remember having a newfound sense of empathy for the two dads. I did a pass on the script, very much informed by that. I realized I had a lot of affection for these characters; so much of the writing process, for me, was about finding who they were and bringing out what I loved about them, because I know that these two men disappoint Sam, the protagonist, and disappoint the audience, but I wanted to them to be fully fleshed-out human beings. Disappointment is more deeply felt when you have higher expectations for the person. If they seem like dirtbags the whole time, it feels expected, and you care less. I really wanted to show how people that you love can let you down.
In making and discovering the film along the way, through the process of shooting it and editing it, then putting it out into the world and getting feedback on it, it’s been a process of letting go of control. I can’t control how the film makes people feel. I can’t control how other people do their jobs. All I can do is bring on the collaborators that I trust and feel excited about working with, to trust them to do what they do best. I keep thinking about all the parallels with parenting there. You can help a thing exist in the world, but you can’t control the life that it has. There’s a lot of symmetry with filmmaking there for me, at this particular juncture, at this point in my life.
There’s a surrender there. That process of letting go is emancipatory for Sam, as she realizes she’ll have to protect her own autonomy, to escape the control of the two men she’s hiking with. Filming in the wilderness of upstate New York for 10 of the 12 days you shot, you can’t control the available light, weather conditions, and so many factors. On set, I’m curious whether you felt a similar push-and-pull between control and surrender, and what it was like to gauge that in an instantaneous way while filming.
I probably was not articulating this approach leading up to it, but I can reflect on it now: what I could control was all the preparation that I put into it. I could devote all the attention in the world to the script. I could spend time bringing on the right collaborators, I could scout the location multiple times. Wilson Cameron, who shot the film, and I had made three short films together, and our joke is that the way that we shot a movie in 12 days was that we’d had eight years of prep. I live in Los Angeles now but, when I lived in New York, we would go on long walks and talk about making movies. All of that was an investment in the film that we made. Wilson and I have a near-wordless way of communicating, and I feel that I developed my visual language and collaboration with him in many ways. All of that was the part that I can control, all the preparation that went into it.
The way we designed the shoot, and the fact that I wrote a film that takes place mostly outdoors, made it easier to shoot a film quickly and nimbly, with a small crew. You can move quickly; you’re not spending a lot of time with lighting setups. You find the frame, and you find the light, with what’s available. Then, of course, you’re constantly having to adapt and think on your feet, because of thunderstorms or forest fires that come through and cause you to lose half a day, which happened. That took out a huge percentage of our schedule, so we were asking, “Okay, what can we cut from the script or do more quickly?”
But incredible, beautiful things came out of it, too: all the bugs that appear in the film. Even the rain gave one of the campsite scenes this slightly muddy, dark, wet feeling that totally adds to the mood of it. You can’t control those things. We had butterflies that were attracted to those rock towers. All of those spontaneous things that you have to harness in the moment are what makes the film 100% specific to the exact moment in which we made it. If we had shot the film two weeks after, it would have been a different film. The environment became this wild-card collaborator in a way that forced us to make choices that I couldn’t have anticipated, but that I think made the film better in the end.
For the actors, as well, I’m sure it was instructive to be in nature and to understand their own responsibility to take care of themselves in that setting. You can’t stop anyone from twisting an ankle and getting bitten by ticks.
I wish I could have protected the whole crew. I think I was the only one that actually found a tick that broke skin on my body, but we saw a lot of them. I was very worried about everybody else’s comfort. [laughs]
Taking camping trips with friends or family, you’re outdoors but also in close proximity to the same people for days on end. “Good One” beautifully captures what I’ve heard you call a counterintuitive claustrophobia. Thinking about the moment of silence Sam finds on the mountain, I was reminded of all those hiking trips I’ve been on with people who won’t stop talking or playing music. I don’t want to hear a drum solo in the middle of the forest.
Oh, totally. It’s real. [laughs] It’s meaningful to me when people like yourself, who spend a lot of time outdoors, feel that this film resonates with your experience, because I feel like in making a movie, you’re faking a lot. You’re crafting a sense that they’re going on this journey. I just love all the business of hiking, backpacking, and camping, the chore of it. There are so many sensory details I wish I could have crammed into the movie, that didn’t even make it into the movie, like that feeling of how amazing a seat feels when you’ve been walking all day.
I got that from Lily Collias, though, in that one shot where she’s leaning so far back in her camp chair.
[laughs] True, there’s that one shot. Those camping chairs drove the actors crazy. They were falling back in them, having to sit for way longer than anyone should ever sit in one of those chairs. All those details are the contents of the story, because that’s the joy of it. The amount of care you put into preparing a simple meal, because food tastes so f—ing good when you’ve been hiking all day, and nothing else is going on, so you’re paying attention to the process of it in a way that you don’t do in your everyday life. Out there, you can focus.
“Good One,” through those details, also illuminates the power dynamics between these characters. Sam does most of the cooking; she puts the fire out at night. She exercises control over that space in a way no one back home would know how to navigate. Yet, her capability creates friction with her father, who insists he knows what to do, at the expense of accepting she also knows.
It’s funny. In those relationships, and this is certainly true in the film, we inherit these things from our parents, but they are always going to be the expert. Even though Sam has been trained to be as capable as her dad, because he made her that way—and she genuinely shares a love for these things, because of him; it’s her way of connecting with him—she’ll never in his eyes be the expert. But he’s the one who trained her in the art of taking care of yourself on the trail.
What balance did you strike in the writing process between capturing precise nuances of dialogue and imagery and staying open to what you knew you’d discover during filming?
I write stories for myself to make, and I write in a way that feels interesting and honest to me, without feeling the structural pressures of whether it will be understood in a market sense. I always love triangles, narratively; it always creates a narrative tension to see relationships ping against a third party and bounce back, forming new dynamics.
A movie that rocked me when I first saw it in high school is “Days of Heaven.” What’s relevant there is the way that film takes an empathetic lens toward the Sam Shepard character. This third party who has it all, while they have nothing, suddenly becomes this full human being that you empathize with, and you feel for, as much as you feel for the other two characters. I’m drawn to triangles of people, so I approached this with a very clear understanding of who these three characters were. They go on this trip; the other son was supposed to come, and he drops out. From the beginning, that shifts her expectation; she realizes that the trip she thought she was on is suddenly very different. She has no agency. There’s no choice for her. She’s on this new ride.
I wrote it intuitively and followed my instinct about where it might go. That draft was probably much looser and more rambling than the film, but I went back and excavated the story from there: what emotional journey are these two guys going on, and what’s her role in that? From the first draft, I had the foundation of what I wanted to do structurally, which was to put what you might typically call an inciting incident two-thirds of the way into the movie, at the end of a really long, 13-minute scene. I wanted the audience to have the opportunity to get to know this guy, all the different shades of who he is and what he’s going through, and for that to reveal itself slowly over the course of the film.
In the scene you’re referring to, during an exchange between Sam and Matt, he crosses a line; the resulting tension not only lingers the next day but leads Sam to see the dynamic differently. What makes it so uncomfortable, in part, is that it feels like Matt—clumsily, disastrously—is reacting to how emotionally perceptive Sam has been in listening to him vent.
What I was drawing on from my own youth, which might be a little bit overshadowed by what happens in that scene, was this feeling that I remember feeling many times as a teenage girl, where you desperately want the respect of adult men. You want to be taken seriously, and there are micro-moments where you think that somebody’s interested in what you’re saying, taking you seriously, or treating you like a peer, and then there’s some small action or statement made where you realize, “Oh, that was not what was happening.” That realization comes when you’re 16 or 17, and into your early twenties, where you’re learning that the way you want to be seen is not always going to be how you’re seen. You can’t control that. You can’t control what other people need from you.
Though you map the relationships between these characters, “Good One” is grounded so strongly in Sam’s perspective. How did you go about capturing that point of view?
The idea I had going into the shoot, which I anchored our shooting style to, was that her experience of everything—even if it was a conversation between the two guys that had nothing to do with her, that was of no interest to her—was always most important. Oftentimes, she’s just a witness to what’s going on between them. She’s a listener and observer. And so, for me, while the natural instinct is to put the camera on the person who’s speaking, or the conversation that’s happening on the page, we needed to stay with Sam.
There’s a moment in the film where she’s filtering water, and they’re on either side of her having this competitive banter, and it’s for the most part grounded in what she’s doing and her listening. She says nothing in the scene, but that exemplifies the visual language of the film. What’s going on for her at that moment? I always made sure that we had coverage of her for an entire take, even if she says next to nothing. We put the most time into getting her non-verbal or sparsely worded performance.
Also, I was framing and blocking for power dynamics. I didn’t want the entire film to be so tight on her, because I also wanted to create a sense of connection with these two guys, so the audience isn’t overly alienated from them. In wider shots in the film, the way they’re situated might say something about the dynamic at play; they’re walking up a hill, and Chris is first, Sam is in the middle, and Matt is trailing behind, so she stops to wait for him, showing how the dynamics are getting spun out over many miles and many hours.
Earlier, you mentioned not focusing on narrative structure as you approached the script for “Good One,” writing more freely and intuitively. You were an English major in college. Did that grounding in structure allow you to move away from it later?
I’ve always loved reading and writing analytically. I’ve approached my love of film in that way, too. And I grew up around film; my dad, [“Dante’s Peak” director Roger Donaldson,] was a filmmaker. Perhaps partly because of that, I avoided film for a long time. I had a different career. I had to find the filmmakers, many of them women, who really cut deep for me, and I was still discovering in my early twenties that cinematic language could feel both intuitive and looser, while also being incredibly precise and emotionally structured.
I can’t remember how old I was when I saw my first Joanna Hogg movie, “Exhibition,” but I then went and watched everything she had made up to that point; this was before “The Souvenir,” but I saw “Unrelated” and “Archipelago.” Those films felt so tight and precise while not following any of the rules of cinematic storytelling that I had assumed were necessary. I remember writing a fan letter to her; I never sent it, but it was this pure expression of what I’d felt after seeing her work. I had moments like this with other films and filmmakers. When I saw Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy,” I had a similar feeling. Donna Deitch’s “Desert Hearts,” I have a profound relationship with that film, Claire Denis’ “35 Shots of Rum,” as well. I felt a sense of permission to do things in a different way.
I have an issue with critics overusing the term “minimalism,” including in reference to your film and the filmmakers you just mentioned, because it does often minimize what can be achieved through precise detail.
Oftentimes, films that are sparsely plotted are called minimal or are put under the banner of minimalism, but I think, in many cases, what happens emotionally or interpersonally between people can feel very minimal and sparse, but is actually quite dense and rich. I think something can be minimal, structurally or visually, in an outward way, but emotionally maximalist, complex, and meaningful.
The film closes with Connie Converse’s “Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains),” such a beautiful and haunting song even for those unfamiliar with the mystery surrounding her life, music, and disappearance. What does that song signify to you?
Taylor Rowley, our wonderful music supervisor, had that song on a list of ideas for the end. I’d read an article about her, knew the broad strokes of the story, and loved that album. Listening to Taylor’s playlist, the first lyrics of the song (“In between/two tall mountains”) were perfect, and it all clicked into place. There’s much symmetry, with this film and this artist, with this idea that life can become too much, and sometimes you just need to eject yourself from it. Obviously, there’s so much unknown about Connie Converse and what happened, but there’s also an incredible sadness in needing to disappear. You can infer so much, and I won’t do that. I’ll let the mystery remain.
But when I discovered that Sam needed to leave, in the story, I realized that she’d tried words. She’d tried talking to her dad. It doesn’t work. She doesn’t get what she needs. And there’s a symmetry with this story that the guys tell around the campfire, about a camping trip they went on in their youth, with a woman they’re making fun of, who just left. I wrote that bit of dialogue, probably in the first draft, and then didn’t even realize that it connects with Sam’s arc until later. Sometimes, themes just emerge; as people, we have our interests, and our themes that we’re drawn to, and you’re magnetically drawn to these ideas without knowing how they’re going to pop up.
“Good One” opens in New York August 9 at Metrograph and Film at Lincoln Center before expanding throughout August; it opens at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center on August 23.
I still remember the shock of seeing the first trailer for Michael Mann’s 2004 movie “Collateral,” starring Tom Cruise as a hitman named Vincent on assignment in Los Angeles, and Jamie Foxx as Max, the cabdriver that Vincent holds hostage and turns into his personal wheelman. The movie was shot on video, and looked like it.
Mann, who executive produced TV’s “Miami Vice” (1984-89) and had already directed some influential thrillers, including “Thief,” “Manhunter,” and “Heat,” was a master of a modern film noir look. And he excelled at shooting action sequences at night, even bringing a water truck to locations and spraying down the streets to create impressionistic reflections of streetlights. The “Collateral” footage was very grainy compared to Mann’s shot-on-film thrillers, and occasionally had a smeary, somewhat strobe-like effect that was recognizable from my own regular-definition video cameras. The smeariness was especially notable when the camera moved rapidly to follow action.
Did the look of “Collateral” seem like a step down for Mann, and for movies? I worried about that.
The actual movie, which came out 20 years ago this week and just came out on 4K Blu-ray for the first time, was a much richer experience. It didn’t look slick or solid like Mann’s shot-on-film projects. It had a rough look, as if we were seeing footage captured on the fly by somebody who wasn’t supposed to be present. It felt raw, like a lot of films in the late ’90s and early aughts that had been shot with standard-definition video cameras and then printed to 35mm film, creating a strange hybrid texture. (For examples, check out “The Celebration,” “Dogville” and “28 Days Later.”) I was struck by the fact that visual elements that most big-budget Hollywood movies would have avoided for fear of being called amateurish (such as lots of grain in footage captured at night, or obvious video “tells” like smeariness/strobing) were not only present in “Collateral” but seemed to have been leaned into rather than minimized. The movie seemed very comfortable in its own digital skin. This was not unusual in low-budget movies, but it was highly unusual in a $65 million production like “Collateral.”
Most striking of all — and to my mind, a big compensation for anybody who missed the solid richness of 35mm film — you could see pretty much everything that was happening at night in Los Angeles, including the way the city’s lights were reflected in in low clouds. There was no easy way to capture that distinctive characteristic of urban life on motion picture film. Not as vividly, anyway.
This was the look Mann wanted, according to an American Cinematographer article. Co-director of photography Paul Cameron (working with Dion Beebe) said the director “wanted to use the format to create a kind of glowing urban environment; the goal was to make the L.A. night as much of a character in the story as Vincent and Max were.”
Mann is a formalist who had already been experimenting with video in “Ali” (which was shot on 35mm but included a few subjective video shots of the title character) as well the CBS series “Robbery Homicide Division” (2002-2003), which was shot entirely with the Sony F-900, a high-definition video camera. The same camera would end up being used to shoot almost all of “Collateral,” though for the first day, they used another camera that was hot at the time, the Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream, which David Fincher would use on “Zodiac,” until realizing it wasn’t the right fit for the project and abandoning it.
On this movie, as well as all of his subsequent features (“Miami Vice,” “Public Enemies,” “Blackhat” and “Ferrari“), Mann would use increasingly sophisticated video cameras but would never seem to be trying to pretend he was shooting on film. He let the video be video. That was a different way of approaching Hollywood features. It was a statement — something like, “Yes, this format can’t do things that 35mm film can do, but it can do a lot of other things that film can’t and has its own identity.”
Mann is not, to my knowledge, a painter himself, but he’s fascinated by painting and takes inspiration from it. Famous shots in some of his contemporary-set films are influenced by David Hockney, and a painting by William Blake figures into not just the plot of “Manhunter” but the visual strategy. One of the first things I learned when I was studying fine arts as a young man was that you can’t force a medium to be something it isn’t. An oil painting doesn’t have the same textural properties as watercolor or oil pastels or charcoal. A sculpture made from wood can’t achieve the same effects as one made from marble or scrap iron. You can try to get as close as you can, if that’s the nature of the exercise.
But based on Mann’s work post-2002, I think he would say that such a project amounts to a misallocation of effort. Many of the technical developments in cinematography over the past quarter-century have been driven by a desire to make video look as much like 35mm film as possible, because 35mm film is what originally defined the word “cinematic.” Mann has gone in the opposite direction, and while I know it’s not to everyone’s liking, I appreciate the boldness. Visually he’s become one of the most radical filmmakers working with large budgets — his later films are more abstract-seeming than his early, shot-on-film work — and shooting on digital video is a big part of that. I wonder if he feels that digital video helped him become the moviemaker he was always supposed to be?
“What would you say if your daughter told you her boyfriend pushed her down the stairs but it’s okay because really it was just an accident?” Questions like this are at the heart of “It Ends with Us,” based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover. This is a message picture about what it takes to break the vicious cycle of domestic violence. It is not subtle.
After the emotional turmoil of her estranged father’s funeral in Maine, our heroine, the impeccably fashionable Lily Bloom (Blake Lively, the best clotheshorse movie star since Kay Francis), breaks into a rooftop to peer at the vast beauty of Boston’s skyline. Before she can do much introspection, she meets the impossibly handsome and impossibly named Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, also the film’s director), a neurosurgeon (naturally). Baldoni comes barreling into the scene like a hurricane, hurling a pair of steel chairs across the rooftop in anger. Instead of repulsion from this violent act, Lily finds herself intrigued and drawn to his charm and megawatt smile. Their playful patter, peppered with barbs veiled as flirtation from Ryle, ramps up until the dashing surgeon is summoned back to the hospital by his beeper.
This is of course not the last we see of Ryle. He just happens to be the brother of Allysa (Jenny Slate), the quirky rich and bored housewife Lily hires to help her run the Cottagecore florist shop of her dreams. Although Lily repeatedly insists that she just wants to be friends, Ryle pursues her, ignoring her many pleas just as flagrantly as she ignores all his red flags. Lust is a hell of a drug.
Quickly, Ryle’s negs and flirtatious barbs ramp up, transforming into toxic jealousy and other forms of obsessive behavior. This includes inviting himself to dinner with her mother by dropping the L-word for the first time, one of several such instances of emotional manipulation he brandishes like a silver-tipped dagger. Before she knows it, Lily is not only in a relationship she didn’t really want, she herself becomes an outlet for Ryle’s raging temper.
The early scenes of Lily and Ryle’s volatile courtship are interwoven with scenes in which teenage Lily (Isabela Ferrer) falls in love for the first time with a schoolmate named Atlas (Alex Neustaedter). The soulful boy is squatting in the abandoned house across the street from hers, fleeing his mother’s abusive boyfriend. The generous and nonjudgmental Lily offers both aid and friendship when Atlas needs it the most. He in turn offers her a caring shoulder and a safe place to finally express the fear she feels as she watches her father physically abuse her own mother over and over again.
These scenes are innocent and tender, the two young actors imbuing the teenagers with just the right balance of world weariness from the violence they’ve already endured and the irrepressible hope that comes with youth. Yet, Baldoni and his team of editors (Oona Flaherty and Robb Sullivan) can’t quite find the right balance between these scenes and the more erotic and violent scenes featuring Baldoni and Lively. However, once Brandon Sklenar (doing his best Harry Connick, Jr. in “Hope Floats“) enters as the grown-up Atlas, he is able to craft an effortless, natural chemistry with Lively that is nearly as strong as these early moments, although they both are far too fleeting.
This story of love, trauma and abuse is wrapped up in the same amber-hued autumnal glow of Lively’s bestie Taylor Swift’s short film for her autobiographical song “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” which itself is about an abusive relationship. Lily even has the same tousled strawberry blonde tresses as the short film’s star Sadie Sink. So naturally, the film’s most climatic moment of domestic abuse, like the short, takes place in the couple’s kitchen. Later, the moment where Lily comes into her own power as she attempts to rebuild her life is underscored by Swift’s “My Tears Ricochet” (which perhaps counts as a spoiler if you know the topic of the song. Swifties, I’m sorry.)
“It Ends with Us” is a fine-looking picture. Baldoni and cinematographer Barry Peterson know how to frame movie star faces in flattering medium close-ups, allowing every nuanced emotion, every twinkle in their eyes to transport the viewers on this emotional journey with them, even when the characters feel more like didactic cyphers than fully-realized human beings. Lily’s flower shop (which never seems to have any customers) is a Pinterest board brought to life. And Lively’s designer duds are nearly as showstopping as the ones she sports in “A Simple Favor.”
Lively does her best to add emotional layers to Lily so we see her internal growth, but this process is often hampered by the film around her. I kept thinking of “Alice, Darling,” Mary Nighy’s incredible film about intimate partner violence from a few years back in which Anna Kendrick finds herself suffocating in a psychologically abusive relationship. In that film, Kendrick’s character is given a full life and a group of friends who help her overcome the codependent trap she’s been caged in. Here, the few women in Lily’s life – her so-called best friend Allysa and her mother Jenny (Amy Morton) – are underdeveloped, relegated to a handful of scenes that largely exist as plot points.
The PG-13 rating keeps the violence Ryle inflicts on Lily, or her father’s violence in the flashbacks, to a minimum visually (and often seen in slow motion or in choppy montages), Christy Hall’s script unfortunately often falls into “as the father of daughters” territory, giving more care to explaining why these men are the way they are (especially in Ryle’s case, in the film’s most cringe-worthy twist) than it does to the psychology – let alone the economics – of why women often stay with abusive partners. Instead, this subject, which should really be the key to the whole story, is covered in one very short scene between Lily and her mother. The forced love triangle once Atlas re-enters Lily’s adult life also restricts things, causing Lily’s life to once again orbit mostly around the men in it.
“It Ends with Us” is certainly not a bad film. At times, it’s actually quite good and its central message is crafted with intention and care. I just wish it had a sharper focus on Lily’s interiority, her life beyond her trauma, and who she really is in relation to herself, and herself alone.
San Diego Comic-Con is known for its activations, and the best of 2024 were, by far, presentations by Paramount+ and 20th Century Fox. Outside the San Diego Convention Center, for the second year in a row, Paramount+ used Happy Does Bar as its base for The Lodge. Although the film “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” was already out, to help hype the August 27th home media release, 20th Century Fox hosted an entertaining and informative panel inside and an activation outside.
The lines were long over the weekend for all the activations, especially FX with its personalized parasols, Hulu’s fun Animayhem and Paramount+’s The Lodge, but The Lodge was in its last stop of 2024. The Lodge was in select locations in Colorado, Vermont, Austin (SXSW) and Lake Tahoe before hitting SDCC (Happy Does Bar).
That gave it the advantage of being a well-honed family-friendly experience. Star Trek fans got to order a free customized Star Trek-themed t-shirt, eat a generous slice of pizza in celebration of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (plus themed drinks), select a temporary tattoo and take photos with imaginary creatures from the film “If” and to commemorate SpongeBob’s 25th anniversary. There, I got to imagine being on vacation somewhere tropical, only to be attacked by three different creatures from the Star Trek universe. Am I just adventurously lucky or ominously jinxed?
Outside the convention center, the “Enter the Forbidden Zone! The Planet of the Apes Experience,” fans could view costumes, props, videos and comic books of the ten films of the cinematic franchise. The photos ops were bird-related though. You could get a photo with Lola, a Harris hawk and have a short video of you on a horse with a hawk coming to perch on your arm. Yet the most instructive and fun part of the activation was being taught by the film’s movement coordinator, Alain Gauthier, how to move like an ape and how the movement of apes differ from humans and from each ape type (e.g. gorilla versus orangutan).
That experience definitely helped prepare attendees inside the convention center for the panel: “Unveiling the VFX magic: 20th Century Studios’ Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” with cast members Freya Allen (“The Witcher”), Kevin Durand (“X-Men Origins: Wolverine“), Owen Teague (“It” and “It Chapter Two“), and Peter Macon (“The Orville,” “Family Guy”) alongside Halon Entertainment visualization supervisor Casey Pyke (“The Batman“), Wētā FX visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist (“Avatar” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness“), and one of the film’s editors, Dan Zimmerman (The Maze Runner franchise). Of course, the actors who were screen-captured to play the different apes talked about the ape school experience.
Owen Teague commented it was “the most deeply wonderful experience I’ve ever had making a film” and it “recalibrated the way that I think about acting as a craft.”
Freya Allan, who didn’t play an ape, noted, “I really didn’t have to imagine that there were apes in front of me because they’re so ridiculously good at it and still are. They can’t let go of it.” More seriously, she added, it was “incredible getting to see them go through that process.”
Winquist, who was nominated for a 2015 Oscar (Best Achievement in Visual Effects for “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes“) explained one aspect saying “the camera operators really needed to memorize the beats of the camera and be able to reproduce that because we would get the performance of these guys” and then “we would ask them to step out and then in shots where say Mae (Freya Allan) was by herself, having to pretend to play the same shot over again to nobody, sometimes like dragging herself around the room as she being you know tugged by a gorilla.”
He also noted, “having the experience from the previous movies really kind informed what parts of that process were the most important and allowed me to make a video of how we make these movies.” That video was used to “instantly calibrate the entire crew and the cast for what the process was about to be that we were all heading into together.”
Yet the actors can change the process and plans. In one specific scene Kevin Durand’s performance as Proximus Caesar stunned the production team and changed how the movie was originally storyboarded. Hearing him switch from his normal talking voice to the deep, menacing growly voice of Proximus Caesar was impressive.
The VFX magic of the Planet of the Apes franchise was mentioned in another animal-related panel: “Animals on Screen” which mostly looked at exotic animals and a means for promoting the work of the non-profit Lions, Tigers and Bears. The panel featured Lion, Tigers and Bears founder and director Bobbi Brink and included Emmy Award-winning VFX Supervisor Mark A.J. Nazal (“Gotham and “Westworld”) and producers PJ Haarsma (“Con Man”) and Drew Lewis (“Couch Soup”) of Redbear Films.
This panel was basically the same as this year’s Wonder-Con panel under the same name with a few tweaks such as Haarsma and Lewis recounting how problems on a commercial that used a monkey and a dog were resolved by using computer-generated images.
There were some misstatements made during the panel in reference to the American Humane Association and to Peter Jackson’s 2012 “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” Both at Wonder-Con and SDCC, no representative from the American Humane Association was present. While the AHA has been criticized in the media, it was also reported there was a problem of jurisdiction. “The Hobbit” was filmed in New Zealand.
Without the presence of AHA or animal trainers, the panel seemed like an echo chamber. Moreover, the presentation left no time for audience questions.
While the activation for “Those About to Die” was bloodless and relatively civil as four mechanical chariots with horses trotted around the slotted track, the TV series uses real horses and in one account, that can sometimes be dangerous. Yet the “Animals on Screen” panel didn’t comment on that. People familiar with animal welfare issues are often cautious when approaching animal welfare groups since PETA has come out against dog shows like Westminster and the training and showing of horses. PETA did join AHA in calling for expanded oversight as a result of “The Hobbit.” PETA seems to support the end of horseback riding, which is usually less risky than a four-horse chariot for entertainment. From the panel, it wasn’t clear how Lions Tigers and Bears sided on those issues.
Sarah Lasley’s sneaky and unsettling “Welcome to the Enclave” starts out looking like an overly corporate and sterile intro video for a virtual suburban neighborhood one can visit online. The music sounds like it’s straight out of an iMovie effects library and the graphics look like an outdated template for a 3-D Graphic Design For Beginners program or an ersatz, Minecraft-like world-building site that is still working out their glitches. You can almost hear the conversation between the two women (both played by Brenna Palughi) who put this neighborhood together and the IT person they hired to help them out, the one who gave them a list of production options and they went for the second-to-cheapest one (the one with minor security blockage).
This presentation purposely settles the viewer in for what might be… something. Not sure what yet. A satire on privileged, suburban white women? Maybe. One of the women, Moni, is a brunette in a real estate broker’s suit who hosts the intro with a southern drawl, promising a neighborhood “with a feminine touch.” Her sister Blair lives across the street and hosts all the social gatherings of the Enclave, including yoga and “spiritual and educational” activities to come. At the moment, the Enclave has about three followers and, judging by the harmless content in their intro, it likely won’t grow that much more unless they market and advertise it elsewhere.
And that’s where things go wrong. Once the Enclave is linked on Reddit, inviting viewers to donate and leave their mark on the neighborhood (the more you pay, the more you can add to the design), the Enclave falls victim to the kind of audience they never intended on reaching: pranksters, trolls and people who know way more about this stuff than these two women do. It gets to be too much and “Welcome To the Enclave” segues into one of the strangest and funniest closers to a short film I’ve seen in a long, long time.
Yet, it’s the last few minutes of the film that takes the concept of the piece even further. Without giving anything away (you really need to see it), the film perfectly conveys the online landscape anytime there’s a viral phenomenon that lives in a moment. I know this is going back a ways, but one that comes to mind is “Snakes On A Plane.” For months leading up to its release, people online contributed to the making of this film and got caught in the irony of it all. It became one of the most anticipated films of the summer of 2006. Or, so it seemed. It finally came out, everyone went to the Thursday midnight show and then stopped talking about it (it opened at #8 on the box office top 10). You’d go to the most active message boards after its release and they became ghost towns. Everyone moved on.
Some complained to Lasley that the final shot runs too long and I suppose if the film ended right at the peak of the sequence that precedes it (not giving it away), I probably still would’ve enjoyed it, but leaving in the uncomfortable and unnerving tracking shot gives “Welcome To the Enclave” a new voice that raises the film a few notches above just an exercise in irony and satire. It’s a beautiful mess, an apocalyptic dream, a journey through one’s abandoned idea that had been hijacked by cruelty, leaving nothing behind but glitches, mistakes and disturbing imagery. We go from laughing at the antics of both the women and the dark web pranksters, to being the main character in “I Am Legend,” wandering the wilderness looking for signs of life. It’s a brave choice to leave it all in, especially when watching it with a crowd who aren’t quite sure what to make of it.
In the best possible way, Lasley’s film reminded me of a “Kids In the Hall” sketch. I could easily see these two women being played in drag by anyone in the Canadian quintet, with the same result. Palughi inhabits both roles with the same enthusiasm and level of commitment and knows exactly where the joke is in this whole endeavor.
When I programmed this film for the Chicago Critics Film Festival (where it won the Audience Award), I knew it had to close the block. Every film had to, in some way, lead up to this one. It’s the kind of short film you watch and think “huh… I don’t know if I know what I just watched, but I know I want to see it again right now.”
Where does something like this come from?
Well, the project evolved over many years. At the time, I was thinking about how white women map their spiritual journeys onto landscapes that don’t belong to them—white spiritualism as a kind of colonization. I was working on a project about a woman who “finds herself” by swimming across the Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park, with no awareness of the violent history and current border crisis of that “magical” location. When COVID-19 hit, I had to cancel my location-based shoots and started learning 3D modeling (we were all picking up unrealistic hobbies at this time). I began building an idealized gated community in the game engine Unity and slowly realized I could tell the same story with the Internet as the landscape—a place where earnest, naive middle-aged white women are the most vulnerable prey. I started modeling the neighborhood and daydreaming about what might happen inside it. It took about two years before I had a working script, and that’s when I brought in Brenna Palughi, my collaborator and the actor for the two characters. I first made a 36-minute version of the film, with more scenes from the women and a longer finale, and then cut it down to 12 minutes for the final version.
It was actually Brenna’s idea! I insisted we choose a deep cut from one of the holy trinity of white boomer mom favorites—Carole King, Barbara Streisand, or Carly Simon—and Brenna suggested “Coming Around Again.” The message of the song is perfect for the film’s climax. I see it as a song about staying in a situation that’s breaking your heart and keeping up appearances despite the pain. That’s what Moni is doing in that final scene when she dances to it. Plus, the lines about burning the soufflé and kissing the dinner party host goodbye suggest a certain status quo that Moni wants to uphold with The Enclave. After I got a quote for using the track in the film, I realized I could save thousands by re-recording it myself. I’m an avid karaoke singer, and I thought a karaoke, low-fi version of the song would fit better within the world of the film. I like the “almost-ness” of the fantasy neighborhood. The 3D graphics for The Enclave are a bit second-rate, partially due to my own limitations, but I also purposefully built the neighborhood in Unity instead of Unreal, a more cinematic game engine, to give it a noticeably digital look. The 3D animation isn’t quite good enough to fool you into thinking it’s real, but if you, like the women in the film, wanted to believe badly enough, you could suspend disbelief and accept it as real enough. The karaoke track feels similar to me.
Is this your first deep dive into animation? Or a live action animation hybrid? (if yes, was that a challenge?)
This is definitely my first deep dive, but my background in visual effects means I’ve dabbled in more subtle forms of animation and compositing. I was a motion graphics artist for Martha Stewart for a handful of years and have worked on some indie films doing small animation projects. However, this project was a big step into the unknown because 3D is a whole other monster. That being said, it proved fruitful not to know what I was doing. In the end, my own failures in using the software became content for the film. The entire ending with the ruined landscape started as an accident. Initially, I wanted the mountains to close in slowly and subtly, but my code was wonky, and they started taking over the whole neighborhood. It was a real “aha” moment and became the poetic finale where the mountains dissolve as we move inside them, revealing the clunky artifice behind the beautiful exterior. I like to aim too high, be too ambitious, and land in the murky A-/B+ range. There are technologies available for syncing live-action camera movement to digital camera movement, but I decided to do the syncing by hand. As a result, the confluence of the characters and their world is a bit slippery. I enjoy the aesthetics of “not-quite”; they’re flawed in the way humans are. We are aware that something feels a bit off but can’t quite identify what it is. It’s uncomfortable. I wanted the animation in the film to feel like it’s holding on by a thread, just like the women are by the end.
How do you know Brenna Palughi?
Brenna and I met in 2007 when I was in art school at Yale and she was in the drama school. Someone recommended her to choreograph the dance sequence for my thesis film, and we had an instant connection. In the almost two decades since, we’ve worked on each other’s projects across film, music video, installation, and theater. For “Welcome to the Enclave,” we shot the green screen footage over three years in various locations from her living room in Brooklyn to my kitchen in Texas. Our director/actor relationship is almost non-verbal at this point because Brenna understands my work and vision so deeply. She’s a brilliant writer, director, and choreographer and also has a strong background in improv comedy, which you see in scenes like Blair’s glitter mug scene and Moni’s final dance.
Were these gifs and images you found on Reddit and other sites like that?
It’s a mixed bag. The penis and fart drawings inside Moni’s house I did myself (putting that art degree to good use), my little brother, who’s very tapped into internet culture and the dark web, sent me some of the more recognizable gifs, and my dear friend and the brilliant artist Porous Walker contributed some his work as well. The sexed-up, cartoon-style drawings that are mapped onto Moni’s house (such as the penis spewing pizzas) are from Porous Walker. I wanted a nice mix of sources so it felt like this was an army of folks trolling the women and not just one person.
What’s next for you?
I’m in post-production for my new project, “Climate Control.” It’s another hybrid 3D/live action short film that centers a climate activist trying to make a documentary about the perils of the fossil fuel industry who is constantly subverted by an AI bot who wants to tell a generic love story. It’s like 50% climate justice and 50% AI-generated Hallmark film, with some murky in-between moments. The film looks at how we process our eco-anxieties with cheap distractions, and true to my distrust of techno-utopianism, it’s also a critique of the evolving role of AI in art. I made the film entirely with my Gen Z students who traveled to Lutzerath, Germany with me last summer to shoot the documentary portion. I’m hoping to release it in early 2025.
