Tag Archives: 2023

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CAPSULE: WAITING FOR DALI (2023)

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Waiting for Dali is currently available for rental or purchase on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: David Pujol

FEATURING: , José Garcia, Clara Ponsot

PLOT: A restaurateur in Salvador Dalí ‘s hometown of Cadaqués in the 70s dreams of luring the artist to visit his Dalí -themed “El Surreal” bistro, and catches a break when a master chef on the lam shows up in need of work (and a cover story).

Waiting for Dali (2023)

COMMENTS: Movie about Dalí (at least the ones we’ve covered) all seem to be rooted in realism: Little Ashes focused on Federico García Lorca’s crush on the young Dalí, while ‘s Daliland largely contended itself with depicting the extravagance of the painter’s lavish celebrity lifestyle. Perhaps Dalí himself would appreciate the irony; no director dares attempt to even approximate his hallucinatory genius. (We suspect surrealist will end this trend soon when he releases his “real fake biopic” starring multiple actors as Dalí later this year.) When Jules decorates his El Surreal bistro with plastic clocks melting in the trees, a lobster glued to the telephone, and mannequins seated at the tables, it seems like a cheesy Vegas-style tribute to the surrealist icon rather than anything legitimately surreal.

The surrealist cuisine crafted by master chef Fernando, however, does show originality: an airy mountain of carrot mouse modeled off a local landmark, “hot-and-cold pea soup,” various oddly shaped mini-loafs painstakingly decorated with tiny springs of herbs, and an array savory lollipops served on a bed of mud. The artistic journey in the film belongs to Fernando, who learns to incorporate controlled chaos into his craft, which had previously been ruled by strict order and proper French culinary procedures. Fernando’s gastronomical reinventions suggest the way Dalí mastered the basic techniques of painting before warping them to his own imaginary landscapes. Restaurateur Jules (who looks uncannily like a young Spanish Robert Downey Jr.), on the other hand, essentially serves as dapper comic relief: he is a Dalí fanboy who invents with multiple unsuccessful schemes to lure the object of his obsession to his dining establishment. In the end, it is only Fernando’s audacious menu that offers any chance of attracting the master.

Dalí himself is only an aspirational figure in the tale; if you are waiting for him to appear, you may be disappointed. You will also not learn a lot about the artist; the film, made for a Spanish audience, assumes you have a baseline of knowledge about the time, place, and players. A single introductory sentence explains that the story takes place at the end of the Franco dictatorship, and from there you’re on your own. The film expects you to know who Gala is when she appears, and to recognize the various Dalían tributes Jules has set up in El Surreal. Franco’s police play a role in motivating the plot, but they are hardly a serious threat; they are almost comic foils, and not even important enough to bother tying up the loose threads they leave at the end. The film is instead surprisingly light and frothy, like carrot mousse, and sunny like the Catalonian shore, a celebration of creativity that shines even in the darkest days.

Director David Pujol’s had directed two previous documentaries about Dalí, and also a television miniseries documentary about avant-garde chef Ferran Adrià, so he obviously knows his subjects well.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the cast’s willingness to do all the heavy lifting elevates the otherwise puzzling yet predictable film that wants to use a turbulent era for the setting of a feel-good, romantic film but ends up feeling random, inconsistent, and scattered.”–Sarah J. Vincent, Boston Movie News (contemporaneous)

 

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CAPSULE: CHRONICLES OF A WANDERING SAINT (2023)

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 Crónicas de una Santa Errante

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DIRECTED BY: Tomás Gómez Bustillo

FEATURING: Mónica Villa, Horacio Marassi

PLOT: A pious Argentinian woman finds a statue of St. Rita, which had mysteriously disappeared years ago, in her local church storeroom, and hopes that it’s a miracle.

Still from Chronicles of a Wandering Saint (2023)

COMMENTS: Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is one of those movies that’s hard to discuss because of a major plot shift that occurs at the end of the first act. Up until that point, we have been following a low-key story about a woman desperate to feel special who believes she may have encountered a miracle. Rita, who shares a name with the saint whose mysteriously disappearing statue she believes she has found, gets all of her identity and gratification from her involvement with the local church: participating in prayer groups, volunteering to clean the chapel, and rare discussions/confessions with the itinerant priest who rotates among the local villages. She thoughtlessly ignores her devoted husband Norberto, who tries in vain to rekindle their romance with a low-budget recreation of their honeymoon in their humble dining room, and who also has a gift for appreciating ordinary miracles that Rita lacks (“Is the wind really just the wind?”) As Rita’s obsession with the statue increases, her ethics lapse—not mortal sins, but sins that reveal her motivation to be seen as good rather than to actual be good.

Up until the twist, Chronicles is a slow-moving study establishing Rita’s character. You will know when things shift because of an amusing and audacious formal choice by the director. Afterwards, the pace of the film picks up, as Bustillo introduces much broader (and genuinely funny) elements of religious satire and magical realism, while simultaneously launching a redemption arc for Rita. The ending, while sentimental, is well-earned, and elegantly expresses Bustillo’s conclusion about performative religiosity versus genuine spiritual engagement with this world.

A first-time writer/director, Bustillo arrives on the scene with confidence and competence. Modestly budgeted, he keeps Chronicles‘ action within its limitations. There are few special effects—basically just occasional digitized glowing—but what gets onscreen is perfectly serviceable. One scene is cleverly staged during a midnight lightning storm, like a dreamy slideshow; but in keeping with the movie’s message, nothing here (with the possible exception of the end credits) is really flashy or demonstrative. That applies to the acting, which merits adjectives like “subtle” and “tasteful.” This restraint is especially suited to Villa’s portrayal of Rita. The character has the potential to become unlikable, but Villa’s slight hesitations, doubts, and internal struggles make her relatable and put us in her corner. Given the choice, Rita selects the premium religious experience—the slow path, with miracles—rather than the express option. It turns out to be the right choice, if not for the reasons she initially believed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…refreshingly unpredictable, surreal and outrageously funny.”–Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru (contemporaneously)

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CAPSULE: CRUMB CATCHER (2023)

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Crumb Catcher is available for VOD purchase or rental.

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DIRECTED BY: Chris Skotchdopole

FEATURING: Rigo Garay, Ella Rae Peck, John Speredakos, Lorraine Farris

PLOT: Two newlyweds are tracked down by a gregarious waiter who has an unlikely business opportunity to pitch.

Still from Crumb Catcher (2023)

COMMENTS: Skotchdopole’s directorial debut features the movie prop I’d most like to own. That’s not only because it has a sleek design, precision-engineered components, and is a fetching shade of cadmium red; no, not just that. It’s also the absurd centerpiece of a fun little home invasion thriller—one in which the home in question doesn’t even belong to the victims, and for which the “invasion” is a troublingly enthusiastic sales pitch. Crumb Catcher, like the titular invention, is a strangely compelling endeavor, devised with unsettling earnestness.

Shane and Leah have just married, and it quickly becomes clear that their shaky union is grounded upon some rocky relations beforehand. Shane is a promising new author of a collection of short stories; Leah works for a publishing house, and was instrumental in signing him. Despite the post-wedding awkwardness and reception headaches, its pretty clear they want to make a go of things. But among Shane’s weaknesses, drinking looms large, and during a blackout drunk wedding night he makes a big mistake. Enter John, the waiter. An eager beaver if ever there were one: eager to chat, eager to please, and eager to bring his long-simmering dream to life.

It is best to get it out of the way that much of Crumb Catcher is by-the-numbers, but the piece is painted so well that it’s still quite the beaut. (Which is more than might be said for some of the art festooning the walls of the newlywed’s remote hideaway.) This has much to do with the performances. Ella Rae Peck and Rigo Garay have a fractured chemistry, as their characters are both trying to feel the other out, while also working through their own complications. John Speredakos, as John the waiter, always steals the show—and I am happy to let him do so. When his character contrives to crash the couple’s vacation, his earnestness is tinged by deranged menace (morphing later to deranged menace tinged by earnestness). Lorraine Farris, who plays Rose—John’s wife and sales partner—rides her own razor line between dominance and desperation.

Crumb Catcher also succeeds from the production standpoint. Skotchdopole’s team is purposeful, but playful, with its lighting and camerawork. The film’s major set-piece—John and Rose’s presentation of the exciting new restaurant dining experience—is disorienting, claustrophobic, and a bit gigglesome. Shane and Leah’s harrowing escape attempt (driving to Kingston, NY, of all places) perfectly captures the drunk driving experience. A parting shot of Rose bathed in the red rear light of the couple’s vintage sedan is a moment of dark beauty. Throughout the production flourishes all the characters oscillate around their set axes, making for a vibrant inter-character dynamic to match the vibrant on-screen look.

Yessir, ma’am, child: you can tell I’m very excited. And you, too, should be excited as well: Crumb Catcher is an wickedly wonderful entertainment opportunity.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[T]he best – and most terrifying – thing about the movie is how true even the most absurdist parts of it are… Two outings of Funny Games didn’t teach us not to open the door to seemingly harmless looking strangers, but hey, maybe this beautifully shot and wonderfully weird pitch session from hell will?” — Olga Artemyeva, Screen Anarchy (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: DOGMAN (2023)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Jojo T. Gibbs, Lincoln Powell

PLOT: A boy, imprisoned for years in a dog cage by his sadistic father, grows up understandably misanthropic, preferring the company of canines.

Still from Dogman (2023)

COMMENTS: Luc Besson began his career in greatness with a string of three cult hits—La Femme Nikkita (1990), The Professional (1994), and The Fifth Element (1997)—before settling into mediocrity in his later years with the overblown sci-fi spectacles Lucy (2014) and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). After taking five years off from serious filmmaking to fight a rape charge—of which he was cleared in 2023—Besson fans might hope for a return to form with DogMan. This is not that, but it is a remarkably eccentric effort.

DogMan has one big asset that carries it over its rough patches: star Caleb Landry Jones, who throws himself into the role of dog Doug. Under interrogation, the unflappable Jones is unfailingly polite, calm, confident, weary, and only slightly menacing. The script requires him to repress his sadness when wooing a Broadway star, wield a sawed-off shotgun while wearing and evening dress and leg braces, and lip-sync Edith Piaf, all of which he does without a trace of irony. His relationship with his dozens of canine co-stars is remarkably matter-of-fact: he doesn’t dote on them like a pet owner, but treats them as comrades—while remaining the alpha and refusing to let them steal his scenes. Plus, he looks great in drag.

While Jones is steady, the script is another matter. A man who has a telepathic connection to super-intelligent dogs, I can buy. That’s magical realism. But when the police detain this man after an illegal warrantless vehicle search reveals nothing incriminating, just so a non-court-appointed psychiatrist can elicit a bunch of flashbacks? That’s lazy writing. The script is full of unanswered questions and depends on every character doing not what makes sense for their own interests, but whatever will advance the predetermined plot. In some ways, the story feels like it could have come out of a 19th century novel: man raised by dogs, seeking revenge, cursed with a romantic affliction (he can walk, but if he walks too much he might die). But it’s also all over the place: by turns, it’s a serious child abuse drama, a dimly-lit action thriller, a romance, a bizzaro heist movie, and even a sort of antihero-superhero flick, like 101 Dalmatians meets Joker. The lack of narrative rigor reinforces the idea that DogMan is really a gussied-up b-movie with art-house pretensions: a dramatic medium for delivering scenes like a mastiff munching on a gangster’s crotch. But, sloppy script and wavering tone aside, DogMan has just enough crazy energy and gonzo passion to save itself from being a disaster. Any movie with Jones as a wheelchair-bound, Shakespeare-quoting, asexual drag queen who communicates telepathically with dogs is likely to have at least a little oddball appeal.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the strangest, possibly silliest movie of the veteran director’s idiosyncratic career. It is also borderline brilliant.”–Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: FREE LSD (2023)

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Free LSD is available for VOD purchase or rental.

DIRECTED BY: Dmitri Coates

FEATURING: Keith Morris, Dmitri Coates, Autry Fulbright II, DH Peligro, David Yow, Chelsea Debo, Chloe Dykstra

PLOT: An aging sex-shop owner takes an experimental erectile dysfunction medication that sends him to an alternate reality where he’s lead singer of the punk band Off!.

Still from Free LSD (2023)

COMMENTS: Free LSD joins a small group of narrative movies made by bands. Not movies that are basically filmed concerts, or movies made by others to exploit the popularity of a band like A Hard Days Night or Head, or big-budget adaptations of prog-rock concept albums like Tommy or The Wall, or even movies written by musicians but directed by professionals (the Foo Fighter’s Studio 666, ‘ This Is Me… Now)—but movies written and directed and performed by the rockers themselves. Successful examples of this subgenre include ‘s 200 Motels, the Talking Heads’ True Stories, and (at least arguably) the Flaming Lips’ Christmas on Mars.

Of course, for every musician-led effort that’s a qualified success, there are many more that are mixed bags at best: the improvised psychedelia of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, Paul Simon’s box office bomb One Trick Pony, ‘ heartfelt but adolescent K-12. And so it is with punk supergroup Off!’s offering to the genre. Musicians bring a unique perspective to filmmaking, but they aren’t filmmakers. So when they try their hands at this new medium, we hope for something that departs from the usual, but expect something that isn’t overly polished: something raw and ragged and maybe not wholly coherent that nonetheless sustains a level of exotic interest for adventurous viewers. That is exactly what we get with Free LSD.

One of the first problems bands face when making their own movies is that the band members will act in it. Lead guitarist Coates, writing himself an alternate reality role as a coke-sniffing, secretary groping music exec, does the best in front of the camera—but since he also serves as director, it might have been stretching himself too thin to also play the lead. Bassist Fulbright is serviceable as a cult member/ladies’ man. Drummer Peligro has few lines and is in a coma for much of the film, but he had a good excuse—he was undergoing chemotherapy as the movie was being shot. It only seems natural to cast your lead vocalist in the lead role, but that becomes a big problem here, because whatever his talents as a frontman and singer, Keith Morris lacks any emotive qualities as an actor. (At one point the script requires him to do a spit-take; I wasn’t entirely convinced he actually spit, despite seeing the liquid spewing from his mouth). Hidden in a heavy wig and fake beard, Morris plays an aging hippie who runs a sex shop during the day and hosts an Art Bell-style UFO radio show at night, who is also the improbable erotic target of a hot twenty-something barista with pink hair who favors miniskirts and disfavors brassieres, and has a thing for sleazy graying bohemians who can’t act. Unfortunately, Morris’ monotonously-enacted story takes up the entire first act.

On one level, Free LSD serves as a sampler for Off!’s album of the same name: there are a handful of partial performances of album cuts, just enough to tease fans, but not so much that the concert scenes overwhelm the story. As for the plot—it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s not really an issue. It’s not even clear where the bad guys come from—they seem like they should be aliens, but the promotional material claims they’re an “advanced AI species.” Unless I missed a throwaway line, nothing in the actual movie attempts to explain their origins or motives. But Free LSD isn’t a serious hard sci-fi movie, it’s a movie about a group of eccentrics who take an experimental boner medication and find themselves in the region of the multiverse where they’re famous punk musicians. It is loosely structured in three acts—introducing the premise through Morris’ character, getting the band together, triumphing over the baddies at the end—but it wanders all over the place. In this case, the digressiveness is a feature, not a bug; it allows us to take in scenes like popping in for no real reason as a street hustler with pierced nipples and a red cowboy hat, an erectile dysfunction parody ad, stopovers at a never-explained inter-reality beekeeping waystation, and an ending where Off! goes metaphysically platinum by giving away free samples of their Viagra-based psychedelic (delivered via blotter tabs that look indistinguishable from LSD) with their latest album to inaugurate an era of peace and love. Given the level of acting here and the generally low production values, a conventional narrative would have doomed the film to failure for everyone but hardcore Off! fans. Instead, there’s just enough insanity in the mix to hold your interest.

Musician/comedian Jack Black produced, and has a small role in the film (appearing remotely via cellphone). On a sad note, DH Peligro, who stepped in at the last moment to replace Off!’s regular drummer (who had another commitment), died in late 2022, soon after the film was completed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this incoherent feature debut from writer-director Dimitri Coats of the punk band Off! is no The Wall.”–Josh Bell, Crooked Marquee (contemporaneous)