“This Is the Stuff That Washes Out”: Short movie notes

aka A Criminal Christmas! (An Antisocial Advent?) Best film at the end.

Next of Kin: Atmospheric 1982 Australian film about suspicious deaths at a remote old folks’ home. Spooky, lushly-colored, slight and pleasurable.

Mandrake: New Irish horror film about the lengths a mother will go for her child. Has a compelling central character, Deirdre Mullins’s parole officer, and Derbhle Crotty is witchy and harrowed as our returning citizen who may be a battered wife or may be a serial killer. I did think this was a little overcomplicated, and the mandrake is literal which left me feeling a bit, “…The villain is plants?” By the end I was on board, and could see how the mandrake fits the movie’s themes of bloody birth, something broken and desperate and amoral within maternity, but idk, I’m circling around ways of saying, “This didn’t quite work for me, and I’m not sure why.”

Streaming on Shudder, so you can see if you disagree.

The Final Solution: 2001 hagiography of living person :/ in this case Gerrit Wolfaardt, a South African Neo-Nazi who repented and works for racial justice and reconciliation. There’s what I think is a fictional frame story about a white supremacist raid on a township, leading to a siege at a multiracial church in which Wolfaardt is trapped with a current Neo-Nazi and also one of his own former victims.

At first I was compelled; then I was willing to accept this as one of those well-intentioned Christian films you are not sorry you’ve seen, even though they aren’t exactly art; in the end, though, this film renders an accurate verdict on itself when one of the black characters complains that they’ve been hearing this whole time about the deep inner workings of a racist white man, and when will they get to tell their story? “Right now,” the film promises, but there’s only like fifteen minutes left in the runtime, and the emotional or spiritual arc of the main black character (also based on a real person) is both simplistic and compressed. Either commit to just giving me the Neo-Nazi’s story or (better) give me one of the black characters’ stories in depth also.

On a “what are movies for?” note, there’s a scene where we see the Neo-Nazi beat a black man, and it’s shown from the Nazi’s pov with slo-mo and music instead of diegetic sound. I thought that was a bit cliched. But then later we get the same scene from the victim’s pov–and the same techniques, slo-mo and (different iirc) music, and that was actually a striking illustration of music’s ability, through heightened unreality, to convey both the experiences of inflicting violence and of suffering it. Out-of-body, or out-of-conscience experiences.

I liked the raw acknowledgment that people often do evil things for a mix of understandable reasons (my family taught me this) and just sinful, chop-licking reasons: “I didn’t mind [the prospect of violence]. I enjoyed a good fight.” Was baffled by the decision to have the white wife character say that she had no idea how deeply her then-boyfriend was embedded in Neo-Nazism, right before he turns around and we see that he has a literal swastika on his backpack. Possibly this plays differently to a (white??) South African audience, as an indictment of social complicity and willful ignorance, instead of just making this one character seem stupid.

Spinning Boris: Jeff Goldblum (!) stars in 2003’s extremely Hollywoodized tale of three American political consultants called in to get Boris Yeltsin reelected as President of the Russian Federation–only to learn that a faction in high places doesn’t want the election to happen at all. Goldblum is charming, as always. The cynicism is lighter and frothier than the subject probably deserves: The Americans come in and use our impure, TV tactics to manipulate the public, but like, these degenerate Western tactics save Russian democracy (in the film) for… three more years!, and even convince Yeltsin’s people to listen to the peasants, so in the end, Coke Is It! I am sure this is how it went down irl.

“Gangster? He’s not a gangster! He’d kill you if he heard you say that!”

R-Xmas: Abel Ferrara fable about an early-’90s New York City of extremely Catholic drug dealers and possibly-benevolent corrupt cops. I enjoyed spending time with these schlemiels, I always enjoy Ferrara’s low-slung sensibility (and an especially low-slung and sidelong camera here–lotta fragmentary or child’s-eye view shots), but I don’t know that I bought what this film was selling.

Acting is uneven. Drea de Matteo is excellent as The Wife (I told you this was a fable), but the rest of the top-billed cast often seems like they’re reading lines or pretending to be people, which I know is literally the truth but not what I think the film was going for. Like, I always say that in Less Than Zero the weird actoryness of the line readings really serves the film’s feeling of alienation and lostness, whereas here I don’t think it helps that we see the seams.

It is both very criminal and very Christmassy, so a million points for fulfilling the remit. Also at the secret drug apartment there’s a beaded curtain with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. If I become a sketchy drug dealer, can I get a beaded curtain with La Virgencita?

Also rewatched Rachel Getting Married and it is basically a perfect film.

Chameleon Street: This was a surprise and a treat! Truly odd, showy “based on a true story” tale of a Black con man (/compulsive liar??) and his journey through late ’70s – early ’80s America. Writer/director/star Wendell B. Harris, Jr is phenomenal as William Douglas Street, Jr. (And uncredited–I get the impression he was going for a Blair Witch effect, where maybe this was all a documentary.) The Washington Post apparently hated this movie, and said it was just one d*** thing after another, but I loved it and found it propulsive. Every episode pushes the narrative further, and they’re all so intense on their own, too: the hospital sequence, the Yale costume ball (!!!!), the game with the daughter… the look in Street’s eyes, when the police show up at his office job. The rich deep voice, which I suspect is sometimes manipulated in editing; those hooded Tim Curry eyes.

Very racially-conscious but in an allusive, fairy-tale, imagistic way, rather than a moralistic way. I’m fine with moral claims on film but I also liked that this film didn’t really do that. It’s comedy and grotesquerie, with a layer underneath of something else, hiding.

Streaming on Kanopy, which means you might be able to watch it with your library card.

Senegal chameleon photographed by Charles J. Sharp and via Wikimedia Commons.