For the week of November 11th, Shout Factory is releasing Richard Franklin's 1981 thriller Road Games. I first saw this one after a recommendation from Quentin Tarantino; it's one of his favorite grindhouse-adjacent features, although if you know Tarantino's love for all things trash cinema, you've seen there's often a large disconnect between his ardor for the thing and the thing itself. I was expecting a sluggish genre exercise a la Rolling Thunder or The Great Silence; what I got was a witty, thrilling, and beautifully made thriller that feels like four or five different types of movies all gracefully synthesized into one (it's not unlike Tarantino's own movies, come to think of it). See, the Australian Franklin was a devoted acolyte of Alfred Hitchcock, but unlike Brian De Palma or Tarantino himself, he had no interest in subverting Hitchcockian tropes to service postmodernism. Franklin wanted to make modern Hitchcock movies, full stop. Franklin even directed Psycho II, which isn't better than the original, as Tarantino claims, but is still about six or seven times more interesting than you'd assume. And Road Games is his masterpiece. At its core, it's a recasting of Rear Window and The Lady Vanishes: a bored truck driver (Stacy Keach, in a performance that should have been Oscar nominated) crosses the Outback with only his pet dingo and his capacity for people-watching to keep him amused, but he soon becomes obsessed with an unseen truck driver (like Duel, Franklin conveys the person almost exclusively through his massive rig) who may have abducted a spirited hitchhiker (Jamie Lee Curtis, basically a glorified guest star). As with Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, we like Keach instantly. He might have the freedom of the open road, but he's also going a bit stir crazy, and he compensates by reveling in his boredom. The Everett De Roche script gives Keach reams of offbeat monologues (usually delivered to his animal companion), and Keach brings such elegant good humor to the proceedings. Cary Grant could have played this part no better. And once he turns into a reluctant hero, this character study with a side of horror becomes a muscular car chase adventure. The whole endeavor shouldn't work, but instead, it plays like a singular gem. The only reason Road Games isn't a canonical classic is because more people haven't seen it. Let's change that ASAP, okay?
Shout Factory is offering a new collector's edition of Hayao Miyazaki's Academy Award-winning Spirited Away. This animated fantasy represented the first of two or three swan songs for filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. The master animator had announced his retirement with the 1997 epic Princess Mononoke, yet here he was in 2001 helming another full-length feature. Short version: he made a masterpiece. Of Miyazaki's career triumphs - Princess Mononoke, The Wind Rises, or the underrated Porco Rosso - only Spirited Away feels both familiar and atypical. All his auteurist leanings are present: an approach to the fantastic that's alternatively magical and unsettling (No Face is the stuff of nightmares), the attention to the relationship between the community and nature (you can read this whole film as a metaphor for how austerity ruptured China in the early '90s), the focus on a preteen female protagonist (Chihiro, who has shades of Kiki from Kiki's Delivery Service and Satsuki from My Neighbor Totoro), and the borrowed structure from archetypal myths and stories. Just as Totoro was his E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Spirited Away feels like Miyazaki's Alice in Wonderland, as Chihiro casually stumbles into a magical realm with its own set of idiosyncratic standards and codes of behavior. However, Miyazaki develops these concepts at a pitch he's never quite attempted before or since. The clash between Miyazaki's gorgeous animation (if a little too CGI-heavy) and the dense thicket of understated fantasy (the bathhouse that occupies most of the film's narrative action feels like a sliver of a far larger, more diverse universe that's just off-screen) creates a dreamlike state, where characters merge and shift into bizarre iterations (the fate that befalls Chihiro's parents, or her relationship with the many-limbed Kamaji) and Chihiro's goals change suddenly even as her overall demeanor remains determined and resolute. We're deep in the realm of the subconscious here. This is one of two Miyazaki works that one could describe as "Lynchian," the other being Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which plays like his Dune. Perhaps the best way to accept its oddities is to just let it wash over you on a first viewing, but the strangeness at work serves a key thematic point. Ultimately, Miyazaki is making a film about how difficult growing up is, and that the only way to compensate is by following Chihiro's lead and adapting to whatever twists (and I mean whatever) life throws at you. A stunning piece of work.
Lionsgate Home Entertainment is releasing Lulu Wang's semi-autobiographical debut feature The Farewell. The film strikes me as boilerplate A24 fare: it's stylish and impeccably clad in up-to-the-moment sociocultural sensitivity, and it's channeled our collective hunger for mainstream independent cinema into surprising financial success. As of right now, The Farewell is one of 2019's few unqualified hits ($16 million grossed on top of a $3-million budget), which is all the more astounding considering the film has no mega stars or superheroes. Instead, the film focuses on the bonds of family, and what happens when Chinese-American writer Billi Wang (Awkwafina, who's terrific) learns her grandmother Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen, who's even better) is dying but can't tell her lest Billi risk violating Chinese traditions. See, in China, letting someone know about their terminal illness is tantamount to betrayal - it's the duty of the healthy to carry that knowledge for the sick - only Billi has grown so acclimated to Western life that she feels torn between her natural instincts (to scream and cry and comfort her grandmother) and her cultural heritage. At its best, Wang exploits that tension for comedy and no small amount of suspense. Everyone in Billi's family wants to see Nai Nai before she passes, but since she'd get suspicious if the whole Wang clan showed up on her doorstep, they rush the wedding of Billi's cousin Hao Hao (Chen Han) and his girlfriend Aiko (Aoi Mizuhara) as an excuse to gather around Nai Nai. One of the film's best running gags has Nai Nai musing aloud as to why everyone's always crying on such a joyous occasion, and from what we see of Hao Hao and Aiko, there's some question if they're even ready to wed. And no one thinks Billi can keep her mouth shut, to the degree that both her mother (Diana Lin) and father (Tzi Ma) try to get Billi to stay as far away from Nai Nai and the wedding as possible. This setup reads pretty high concept, but Wang builds to a philosophical dialectic rather than a series of plot twists. For Billi, it's less about whether or not she can keep a secret and more about her gradual understanding of the divide between individualism and collectivism. The Farewell is humanistic without being moralistic - it knows that life is too complicated to reduce down to a series of lie/bad and truth/good binaries.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "there are some odd detours along the way, though, and some may feel that a couple of them aren't especially helpful to the overall story. While the basic through line of a rushed marriage manages to provide momentum to the story, I found it somewhat unclear as to whether Hao Hao and his fiancée Aiko (Aoi Mizuhara) really want to get married, or are simply carrying through on a sham arrangement in order to facilitate a reunion with Nai Nai and the rest of the gang. Also, there are a number of weird little sidebars, including some odd moments in the hotel where Billi stays that seem to be pointing to the disconnect between the Chinese and American ways of doing things, but which are never developed fully enough to completely resonate. A subplot involving Billi applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship probably could have used a bit more filling in as well, especially as it's used a couple of times as the linchpin for a couple of scenes. There's also a rather curious moment, almost a throwaway of sorts, where it's revealed that Nai Nai herself has engaged in a similar subterfuge about not revealing a fatal disease to her husband, which might have borne fruit had Wang allowed Nai Nai to secretly 'know' what was actually going on with this family reunion. Finally, the repeated use of bird imagery seems to be struggling awfully hard to attain 'symbolism' status."
Also from Lionsgate comes 2019's other sleeper indie hit, Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz's gentle dramedy The Peanut Butter Falcon. Prior to this release, I'd heard nothing about the film, which only received limited exposure in major markets. No, the reason the film has gone on to gross over $20 million on a $6-million budget is due to a grassroots campaign that marketed the film more aggressively in the heartland. It's a smart move. The film shares a lot of DNA with American Gothic hits like Sling Blade and Jeff Nichols' Mud, and while The Peanut Butter Falcon isn't quite on the same level (both Sling Blade and Mud are stone masterpieces), it shares a lot of the same rich atmosphere and utter lack of condensation toward rural Americana. That sense of respect also extends to Peanut Butter's leading man, Zack Gottsagen, an actor with Down's Syndrome who so thoroughly charmed Nilson and Schwartz that they built this whole film around his unflappable, rascally energy. He plays a young man who'd rather learn pro wrestling than waste away in a Virginia assisted-care facility, so he breaks out and starts hotfooting it towards North Carolina in search of his wrestling idol (Thomas Haden Church). This setup reads as a little broad, and I was worried the film would turn mawkish and sentimental - there's a version of The Peanut Butter Falcon where Gottsagen's hero joins the WWE and teaches the whole world a valuable lesson about tolerance. Instead, the film pivots into a Huck Finn riff, of all things, as Gottsagen intersects with a troubled fisherman (Shia LaBeouf) on the lam from some very nasty men (John Hawkes and Yelawolf), and the two unlikely outlaws drift down the Eastern Shore on a makeshift raft. The film downshifts in the best way. While we don't go completely plotless (Hawkes provides the requisite menace, as does the threat of how the state will treat Gottsagen if he's reclaimed), Nilson and Schwartz prefer working in a more episodic vein, emphasizing Nigel Bluck's stunning widescreen cinematography and all the ways that LaBeouf and Gottsagen start to approach one another as equals. And here's where I admit something I thought I'd never be able to do: I have never seen LaBeouf give a more compelling and immediately sympathetic performance. For an actor who often confuses antagonizing his surroundings (and that often includes his audience, unfortunately) with burrowing into character, LaBeouf is so obviously delighted by Gottsagen that all his efforts work in service of his more cinematically untested costar. We feel like we're watching a genuine human connection develop in real time, and it liberates LaBeouf as an actor. Just a pleasant surprise all around.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "if parts of The Peanut Butter Falcon may therefore strike some viewers as being overly contrived, the film still manages to pack a rather sizable emotional wallop from the strength of its focal trio of performance. LaBeouf has always had a kind of interesting screen persona, one which can at least occasionally seem to tip over into snark, but he's rather touching here as a man with some massive emotional wounds who finds himself in the odd position of having to 'shepherd' someone like Zak. [Dakota] Johnson does what she can with a role that just seems to be there because someone decided the film needed a woman, but young Gottsagen is really impressive as Zak, bringing a wide eyed wonder but also a kind of unexpected wisdom to his characterization. I personally wouldn't be surprised if Gottsagen is one of the finalists for the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award when the nominations are announced in a few weeks."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing Greg Mottola's charming indie comedy The Daytrippers to Blu-ray. They say that an artist only tells one story over their entire life, and The Daytrippers certainly suggests that's true for Mottola. In its broad strokes - a family experiences a series of misadventures after traveling into Manhattan so that their eldest daughter Eliza (Hope Davis) can confront her husband (Stanley Tucci) about a love letter she found - the film resembles Mottola's 2008 smash hit Superbad. Both films unfold over a period of about a day; both films transmute an emotional crisis (a possible affair; a need to impress a crush) into some larger physical odyssey; and both mine so much humor from how we behave when we feel like we can no longer control our surroundings. Even Mottola's uneven road movie Paul reuses The Daytrippers' super-structure - they generate conflict largely by trapping people in a vehicle and forcing them to confront one another - while his Keeping Up with the Joneses takes the mystery of Tucci's character and applies it to Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot's covert spies. But what keeps Mottola's work from feeling stale is his emphasis on honest human interaction. In that sense, I don't think he's topped The Daytrippers. There are times the film feels like an extended episode of Bob's Burgers, and I mean that as a high compliment: The Daytrippers revels in the quirks that bind/divide its core family, from how matriarch Rita (a wonderful Anne Meara) overexerts herself too much because she loves all this J.V. sleuthing (at one point, she even passes out after trying to chase Tucci's cab) to how Parker Posey's little sister has adopted such a front of ironic distance that even she's no longer sure when she's being sincere. You understand why father Jim (Pat McNamara) is taciturn almost to the point of being mute - it is a lot trying to keep up with his family. And I haven't even gotten to Posey's obnoxious, faux-intellectual boyfriend (Liev Schreiber, stealing every scene he's in), or Paul Herman's fugitive divorcée, or Marc Grapey's sleazy book editor, who keeps peddling the same awful hook-up story to anyone in earshot. It's an inspired collection of oddballs and weirdoes. You get why Mottola has been chasing them his whole career.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "Mottola's directorial debut is the type of low-budget arty dramedy that can split folks right down the middle. On one end there would be the usual crowd of arthouse pundits and fans that will passionately argue that it is some rare gem bursting with originality in a sea of big-budget stinkers; on the opposite end would be the crowd that does not take seriously the noise that typically comes out of the coastal indie scene and Sundance and flat-out dismisses it because of its obvious pseudo-intelligence. This really is an unavoidable scenario because the film is clearly scripted to appeal to 'the crowd that gets it', and once its enthusiasm to be liked by it is revealed it becomes awfully difficult to accept as a witty and authentic charmer. Here's a slightly different description of the film's identity: Think of it as the authentic blind date that for a while says and does all the right things to make the right impression but then reveals itself as a serial dater that is only really good at reading the scene. Once the act is revealed the date immediately becomes annoying."