Movie review by Greg Carlson

Veteran cinematographer and documentarian Kirsten Johnson follows one directorial masterwork — 2016’s “Cameraperson” — with another. Stylistically distinct from “Cameraperson,” “Dick Johnson Is Dead” captures the filmmaker’s relationship with her father, a longtime Seattle-based psychiatrist whose declining health necessitates retirement and a move across the country to Kirsten’s place in Manhattan. During the physical and metaphorical journey, the Johnsons talk candidly about the Alzheimer’s disease that has now begun to erode Dick’s neurocognitive abilities and in 2007 led to the death of his wife Catherine Joy, Kirsten’s mom.

The creative enterprise, which combines Johnson’s instincts for investigation and her eye for memorable visual storytelling, operates with a sleight-of-hand premise misdirected by the movie’s title. Dr. Johnson is most definitely not dead, but his mortality looms large, reminding moviemaker and audience member alike of the impermanence of our lives on earth. Johnson places her dad, who is always cheerful and game, in a series of elaborately-staged gags dramatically depicting Dick’s potential demise(s). The results, including the hilarious implausibility of an air-conditioning unit dropping, cartoon-like, from an apartment window, are paired with a gorgeous diorama of Dick in heaven — a heaven complete with Buster Keaton, Bruce Lee, and a number of other artists and historical figures.

The several gruesome vignettes in which Dick meets his end are reminiscent of the imaginative mock suicides in Hal Ashby’s “Harold and Maude.” Both films examine big picture considerations, including the philosophical standard often referred to as “life and how to live it,” and anyone who has experienced the cruelties of seeing a once vivacious loved one succumb to dementia will recognize the catharsis that can come from laughing in the face of an utterly impossible set of circumstances. Kirsten and Dick refuse to reject content that some will argue is undignified. They make a great team.

Assuredly, the bond between daughter and father here is strong and special, and “Dick Johnson Is Dead” resonates as a kind of intimate therapy for both Johnsons. Dick, even as the sharpest elements of his mental acuity and short-term memory capacity dissipate, recognizes the closeness to Kirsten afforded by their strange collaboration. And Kirsten exorcises the unthinkable by anticipating what it will be like to ultimately lose her beloved parent. One of the movie’s most compelling motifs revolves around the role of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the personal history of the Johnson family — along with the ways in which they were, and were not, bound by that theology.

Johnson brilliantly arranges and organizes the vignettes that account for her unique “living obituary.” These constructions, which are routinely exposed via cutaways to wide shots of sets that contextualize Johnson’s intentions, move in a deliberate and inevitable direction. I love the way Johnson intersperses the more quotidian milestones. Dick packing up his office is just as poignant as the aftermath of a harrowing Halloween sequence, for example. And the best scene in the movie might be one that takes place while a camera is tipped on its side at floor level. It is every bit as good as any of the show-stopping resurrections.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Polymath artist Miranda July adds an excellent new title to her filmography with “Kajillionaire.” As hard to reduce or simplify as “Me and You and Everyone We Know” and “The Future,” July’s latest movie — which contemplates parenthood and family ties under the idiosyncratic lens of the filmmaker’s built-from-scratch microscope — blends slapstick and sorrow like a latter-day Charles Chaplin. Thematically related to July’s previous films, “Kajillionaire” fixates on the human, pondering and prodding the things that separate us from one another as well as the stuff that brings us together. Along with Chaplin and July’s contemporary Wes Anderson, she is the rare moviemaker who can conjure a smile and a tear in the space of a heartbeat.

July introduces the Dyne family, a nuclear unit whose logic-defying domestic decisions involve skimming, or getting by without all the burdens of holding traditional jobs and conforming to the expectations of society. Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Theresa (Debra Winger) have raised daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) to be fluent in their system of petty larcenies and labor-intensive scams. July handles the variety of grifts and cons with aplomb, but she complicates the quirkiness with a shattering revelation: mom and dad treat their only child as a business partner and have always withheld the most basic expressions of love and affection from Old Dolio. No birthday gifts, no kisses, no embraces.

Old Dolio’s name — she was dubiously christened in honor of a derelict lottery winner in the hope of some kind of cosmic lucky rabbit foot payoff — is a great gag in a film full of them. July applies her prodigious imagination to surprises both verbal and visual: cartoon contortions as the family attempts to sneak undetected by their landlord; the cascading wall of bubbles cleared daily in exchange for a place to crash; the ninja stealth required for evading security cameras during daylight mail theft; a poignant, touch-free massage. In one of the movie’s best scenes, the Dynes playact routine family banter at the request of an elderly mark whose house they burglarize.

The arrival of fellow con artist Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) upends the lifelong patterns imprinted upon Old Dolio by her folks. It is through Melanie that July realizes another gear, introducing an unanticipated conflict that disrupts Old Dolio’s allegiance to Robert and Theresa. Wood’s performance as the late-bloomer is her best to date. Behind a curtain of Cousin Itt tresses and hidden in a shapeless track jacket that functions like a suit of armor, Old Dolio comes to life through Wood’s total commitment. Speaking in a flat monotone, Wood somehow manipulates potential caricature into something fully alive.

The Dyne family might exist on the fringe, but July has always used the unexpected as a Trojan horse for deep looks at universal experiences. Never weird for the sake of weird, July’s movies are perfectly prismatic, refracting facets of recognizable life experiences through the singularity and peculiarity of her vision. Even as we might seek to avoid awkwardness and discomfort at all costs, July’s characters can’t seem to escape it. So the next time you return the acceptable and socially-sanctioned response when someone announces that “we’re all in this together,” you can conjure up Old Dolio and fantasize a different answer.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Well-deserved praise for writer-director Amy Seimetz’s efficient and provocative “She Dies Tomorrow” almost inevitably points to the film’s eerie timeliness as a metaphor for pandemic-inspired malaise and disequilibrium. More interesting, however, is the split among observers who interpret Seimetz’s intended tone in different ways. Some claim the movie is hilarious, others see it as terrifying, and another faction argues that it is tragic. Of course, it’s entirely possible for the story to encompass all those descriptions and then some, but individual reactions to the filmmaker’s carefully calibrated vision will vary. For my money, that’s a positive thing.

The movie’s central rhetorical device manifests as a kind of highly contagious, virally-spread sense or premonition of impending death. Passed from one hapless victim to the next in a manner reminiscent of the linked-chain transmission in David Robert Mitchell’s “It Follows,” “She Dies Tomorrow” trades Mitchell’s sexual panic for a more disquieting and interpersonal apocalypse. We come to understand the nature of the “disease” through Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), an alcoholic who, certain her life is going to end the following day, calls her friend Jane (Jane Adams) to share the bad news.

Confused, concerned, and more than a bit annoyed at what she perceives is Amy experiencing a relapse, Jane does her best to offer some comfort. But Jane soon falls prey to the same strobing colored lights and pulsating sounds that signal the advent of next-day mortality. Jane attends her sister-in-law’s birthday party and infects the guests. And so on. In the film’s press notes, Seimetz writes about the film’s origin: “I was dealing with my own personal anxiety and found I was spreading my panic to other people by talking about it perhaps too excessively – while simultaneously watching a ton of news and watching mass anxiety spreading on the right and left politically.” It’s a grim coincidence that the movie’s eventual release lined up with COVID-19.

Even though Seimetz’s “ideological contagion” might have its roots in coping strategies for depression and a range of mental health issues, the director works wonders imagining how we might react if we knew we only had a few hours to live. The vignettes, which swing from poignant to bleakly comic, are among the movie’s highlights. Especially noteworthy is the droll, deadpan, and beautifully underplayed relationship between Brian (Tunde Adebimpe) and Tilly (Jennifer Kim). Their hard truths surrounding a striking, even shocking, hospital scene exemplify the gallows humor to such an extent we wish we could spend more time with the doomed duo.

The movie’s modest budget — reportedly covered by Seimetz’s “Pet Sematary” earnings —  is an asset; domestic spaces are vividly photographed  (Seimetz used her own home and yard as a key location) and situated for maximum impact. “She Dies Tomorrow” lacks the impact of “Melancholia,” but even though Seimetz’s film has been frequently compared to von Trier’s, there is a crucial distinction to be made: “She Dies Tomorrow” elects not to confirm whether the characters will, in fact, meet untimely ends. Instead, Seimetz ponders whether predictability or unpredictability would govern our choices and actions when the clock is running. Her answer? It’s personal.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Charlie Kaufman, the unfairly talented and imaginative cinematic magician whose screenplays and films have explored the realms of art, artifice, and identity over the course of a dizzying career, lifts the curtain on another masterful storytelling exercise. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is based on Iain Reid’s 2016 novel, but like the hall-of-mirrors treatment Kaufman gave to “The Orchid Thief” in “Adaptation,” the source material is twisted in several significant ways. What results is one of the most rewarding and satisfying movies of 2020, a year in which film lovers have come to expect the unexpected.

Jessie Buckley narrates as Lucy — or Lucia, or Louisa, or Amy/Ames; we can’t entirely be sure. She is a young woman with a protean range of occupations that encompass painting and poetry and physics and scholarship and food-serving. Lucy’s inability to grasp the contours of her relationship with Jake (Jesse Plemons) are all the more troubling as he appears to be able to hear her thoughts during their snowy road trip to visit the farm where he grew up. Point of view and selfhood have assumed for Kaufman a place of great consequence from “Being John Malkovich” to “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” to “Anomalisa,” and “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a remarkable extension.

Once Lucy and Jake arrive at the farmhouse, Kaufman turns the duet into a quartet, adding Jake’s parents — Toni Collette and David Thewlis, both hilarious and heartbreaking — to an unfolding weirdness exacerbated by the shifting ages of mother and father. Not since David Lynch’s unforgettable meet-the-parents dinner scene in “Eraserhead” has a filmmaker so vividly rendered the awkwardness and anxiety of making a good first impression. One could offer an argument that the influence of Lynch, particularly in Kaufman’s comfortable mix of horror, humor, dream-states and surrealism, is the lodestar of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.”

When contemplating the work of Kaufman, it should go without saying that a spoiler-free viewing beats anything a critic or reviewer might have to say. Even so, the literary, theatrical, and cinematic allusions rain so thick and so fast, it would take a special kind of savant to identify all the layers of references and homages. Au courant recognition of the durability of “Oklahoma!” (which recently reported for duty in Damon Lindelof’s “Watchmen” series) joins a long list that includes the wide-ranging echoes and quotations of William Wordsworth, Guy Debord, Eva H. D., Ralph Albert Blakelock, David Foster Wallace, Anna Kavan, Frank Loesser, and Pauline Kael, to name a few.

The raspberries of Gena Rowlands’ Mabel Longhetti mingle with Kael’s bruising 1974 New Yorker review of “A Woman Under the Influence” in one of the movie’s many wonderfully eccentric scenes. Buckley performs both in a tour-de-force consideration of the “Misogynist! Genius!” dispute laid out in Le Tigre’s “What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes?” The theme comes into even sharper focus when Kaufman steers us to the rural high school that will serve as the setting for the movie’s brain-melting finale, which, among other things, includes a mashup of “Wild Strawberries” and “A Beautiful Mind.”

Outside the school, Jake leaves the vehicle and Lucy says to herself, “It’s hard to say no. I was never taught that. It’s easier just to say yes. Anyway, sometimes you’re just caught off guard. And the request comes, can I have your number? And the easiest way out of it is just to say yes and then that yes turns into more yes, and then it’s yes, yes, yes.” Lucy’s agency and her frustration with the extraordinary demands placed on women resonate, especially given Kaufman’s decision to deliberately avoid springing what could be construed as a kind of twist or device. What we are instead invited to discover about the real and the imagined is a joy and a gift.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Director Arthur Jones makes his auspicious feature debut with “Feels Good Man,” an engrossing and timely documentary that examines the phenomenon of artist Matt Furie’s Pepe the Frog. Created by Furie in 2005 for the comic “Boy’s Club,” Pepe’s now iconic visage morphed into a surprisingly durable meme — made all the more confusing and controversial when internet trolls and supporters of the alt-right nationalist movement adopted and appropriated Pepe as a symbol of white supremacist hate. Pepe’s transformation ramped up during the 2016 presidential election, when candidate Donald Trump retweeted a mash-up of himself as Pepe.

While Jones’ film will appeal directly to anyone with an interest in media, intellectual property, and the labyrinth of web-fueled culture wars, the onscreen presence and participation of Furie grounds the movie as a deeply human story. Once the most vocal 4chan users twisted Pepe for their own ugly agenda, Furie was faced with the challenge that sits at the heart of the film: give up, overwhelmed by the seemingly Sisyphean task of reclaiming his character, or devote himself to the legal and intellectual battle to take back Pepe.

Jones tackles mountains of bizarre Pepe-related incidents on Furie’s exhausting odyssey, and the way in which they accumulate transforms “Feels Good Man” into a time capsule irrevocably linking Trump’s covert and overt support of the far-right through the originally innocent amphibian. As a consequence of his crossover into the mainstream, and recognition by “normies” and celebrities like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj, Pepe is dragged to the dark side, relentlessly depicted as a swastika-adorned Nazi and worse.

Jones stacks up numerous examples of the injustices suffered by Furie after Pepe was stolen. Extremist Richard Spencer is punched in the head on-camera just as he was explaining his Pepe the Frog lapel pin. “The Adventures of Pepe and Pede,” an Islamophobic publication presented in the style of a children’s picture book, incenses Furie, who successfully files suit. Furie also takes on malignant InfoWars prevaricator and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who sold posters that included Pepe among a constellation of Trump-world figures.

“Feels Good Man” earned Arthur Jones a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and the moviemaker’s narrative instincts serve the film. Jones has a background in animation and motion graphics, and one of the most uplifting aspects of “Feels Good Man” is the use of colorful animated sequences featuring, as Furie describes them, the “chill” Pepe, “party animal” Landwolf, “wise guy” Andy, and “fashionable dancer” Brett. The psychedelic phantasmagoria of the anthropomorphic Boy’s Club quartet presents the most convincing argument for the future of Pepe, Hong Kong protest scenes notwithstanding.

The manipulation of popular characters outside the control of original creators has existed for hundreds of years, but what makes “Feels Good Man” especially significant is the entanglement with “fake news” during the era of Trump, who so easily denies affiliation with fascists while winking otherwise. Some viewers might take issue with Furie’s failure to immediately set up the necessary legal protections that might have prevented some of his later copyright infringement despair, but the portrait of determination that builds during the course of the film, abetted by Furie’s live-and-let-live stoner persona, is an overwhelmingly sympathetic one.

“Feels Good Man” will be available on demand starting September 4, 2020.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Peter Medak, the veteran filmmaker who met with early career success directing Peter O’Toole in “The Ruling Class,” puts together a fascinating cautionary tale in “The Ghost of Peter Sellers.” Haunted for more than four decades by the catastrophic disaster of his ill-fated relationship with the legendary comic genius, Medak revisits the painful memories of his “collaboration” with Sellers on the DOA feature “Ghost in the Noonday Sun.” Approaching 80 when he decided to exorcise his demons, Medak tracks down the surviving participants of the debacle. The story that emerges — part apology, part accusation, all therapy — is essential viewing for cinephiles and Sellers fans.

Medak was hand-picked by the mercurial star to take the helm of “Ghost in the Noonday Sun,” a pirate comedy loosely based on Sid Fleischman’s 1965 book for young people. And almost immediately, the 1973 shoot was plagued by Sellers’ idiosyncratic behavior and bottomless unprofessionalism. Medak, who accesses a wealth of files including budgets, logs, scripts, still photos, behind-the-scenes footage, and clips from “Ghost in the Noonday Sun” itself, recounts one jaw-dropping anecdote after another. Sellers’ lack of interest in the role he was to play was so poisonous, he reportedly didn’t bother to read the screenplay.

When Sellers arrives at the location in Greece, he won’t enter his rental quarters until an assistant sets up the stereo system and puts on a certain record. Not long after, Sellers more or less entirely fakes a heart attack and sneaks out of the local hospital and back to London. An apoplectic Medak discovers the deception when he sees a photo of his star out to dinner with Princess Margaret. Sellers falls out with pal/co-star Tony Franciosa and refuses to appear in the same frame with him, forcing Medak to restructure all their scenes. Sellers manipulates Medak, cajoling him into shooting a Benson and Hedges cigarette commercial — even as the actor reportedly represents the anti-smoking league.

In one of the many on-camera interview sessions, Medak says, “I want to kill people, but they’re all dead.” We understand he primarily means Sellers, but there is enough blame to go around. Medak’s talking-head interviews, often touching and poignant, remind us that the inevitable creep of time slows even the most vital lions. Lessons from the late producer John Heyman are particularly illuminating in this regard. But the visual spark of Medak’s film jumps out at us whenever we see the charismatic Sellers. And the funny thing is, Medak refuses to throw the man under the bus, recognizing that Sellers was positively sui generis.

“The Ghost of Peter Sellers” can be added to the shelf containing worthwhile movies about movies that didn’t turn out the way they were originally envisioned. “Burden of Dreams,” “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” “American Movie,” “Overnight,” “Lost in La Mancha” “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” “Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau,” “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,” and a number of others could make up the screening list on a syllabus for “Abandon Hope 101: Filmmaking as Folly.” If failure is the greatest teacher, then Peter Medak has earned his doctorate.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The line is repeated so often that it does an instant, sexist disservice to the band’s greatness: The Go-Go’s were the first group composed entirely of women who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments to climb to the top of the charts. And the next cold fact, cited more than once in Alison Ellwood’s new documentary on the group, rings with the subtext that no matter how good they were, in an industry dominated by men, misogyny, and the gatekeeping of the patriarchy, the band members continue to be judged by their gender: The Go-Go’s have not (yet) been added to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Ellwood’s film, now on Showtime following a January premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, makes the case for their inclusion.

Presented with straightforward diligence, “The Go-Go’s” moves confidently through a chronological account of pop and rock’s oldest plot. The exegesis of the rise-and-fall arc, however, comes courtesy of the participants themselves. All five members of the key lineup — Charlotte Caffey, Belinda Carlisle, Gina Schock, Kathy Valentine and Jane Wiedlin — contribute candid and heartfelt onscreen commentary. So much of what they have to say vibrates with raw, emotional power, you might think they broke up yesterday rather than in the mid-1980s.

One of the very best aspects of Ellwood’s storytelling is the extent to which the movie takes us from the intensity of the Los Angeles punk scene of the late 1970s to the glossy clips and colorful magazine cover shoots of the early MTV era, when the band reached an undreamed-of popular zenith. Fans new and old will appreciate learning more about the group’s punk bona fides. In both realms, “The Go-Go’s” boasts a treasure chest full of archival content in all shapes and sizes, and the imagery almost always complements the anecdotes told by the subjects with delightful detail. As Glen Weldon has pointed out, “the film’s determination to show its work is striking.”

And along with the sights, Ellwood curates just the right sounds. For viewers of a certain age, especially the ones who wore out our records and cassettes of “Beauty and the Beat,” “Vacation,” and “Talk Show,” the durable songcraft contained within the grooves of one of modern recorded music’s most infectious one-two combinations could sustain its own separate documentary (or at least a thorough track-by-track examination and breakdown in cult favorite series “Classic Albums”). Both “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Our Sealed” continue to live as electrifying Mount Olympus earworms, and when the film turns its attention to their origin stories, you might feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Several valuable and eloquent guests stop by, including manager Ginger Canzoneri, Miles and Stewart Copeland, Lee Thompson of Madness, and Lynval Golding of the Specials. The most riveting revelations, however, are the ones recounted by the Go-Go’s. The movie is very funny — Ellwood has even claimed that an early cut was “too funny” — and Schock might just be the most hysterical storyteller of the bunch. But alongside the humor is plenty of heart, and viewers might be surprised to find themselves blinking back a few tears when the women share the depth of sorrow, pain, and frustration caused by the demons of drugs, ego, and money.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Jeffrey McHale’s “You Don’t Nomi” lines up a colorful gallery of defenders and detractors ready to reflect on the serpentine journey of Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 spectacle “Showgirls.” Contemplating the movie’s gradual redemption as a kind of cult trash masterpiece balanced on the wire between self-aware satire and so-bad-it’s-good embarrassment, McHale has made a potent film essay investigating the boundaries of camp, reception, and artistic intention. No matter how one feels about the NC-17 Las Vegas odyssey of Elizabeth Berkley’s Nomi Malone, McHale’s feature is a thoughtful consideration of the multitudinous ways that some popular texts take on new and unexpected life long after their original theatrical engagements.

After viewing the documentary, I shared some thoughts with my friend and fellow cinephile Dan Hassoun. He noted that the movie “nails that sense of being awed/horrified/fascinated by something all at once, which is rare for a labor-of-love fan film to acknowledge,” and observed “how the film operates as both an auteurist exploration of Verhoeven while at the same time allowing for an anti-auteurist sense of how reception evolves past the intentions of the director.”

Packed with archival goodies that include time-capsule news media clips (featuring some great pearl-clutching, finger-wagging, and eye-winking from several recognizable presenters) and enough footage from Verhoeven’s own oeuvre to test the limits of fair use, McHale skips talking heads for all of his new interviews. It’s a good choice, as our eyes remain glued to the many scenes being deconstructed by deeply invested cinephiles like “It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls” author Adam Nayman and writer David Schmader, whose hilarious and heartfelt scrutiny at “live annotated” screenings led to an MGM invitation to record a special edition DVD commentary.

McHale covers a lot of ground and sprinkles a lot of catnip. In one delectable sequence Jeffrey Sconce talks about Jack Smith’s adoration of Maria Montez’s total commitment in “Cobra Woman,” comparing it to the “hysterical energy” of Berkley. In another, “Showgirls” is anointed as the third jewel in a triple crown that includes “Valley of the Dolls” and “Mommie Dearest.” Drag performer Peaches Christ explains the participatory thrill of the midnight movie phenomenon and April Kidwell speaks candidly about her own intense identification with the star of “Showgirls.”

I was taken with the film’s comfortable attitude toward the complexity and ambiguity of work that can support and sustain such wildly opposite readings. Several times, McHale juxtaposes voices in sharp contrast with one another: “Showgirls” as pedestrian and mainstream versus “Showgirls” as rare and on the edge. Haley Mlotek’s compelling claims that Verhoeven is a misogynist abusing his position of power as a white male clash with Susan Wlosczyna’s opinion that Verhoeven is a filmmaker who “gets women” and doesn’t view them as “fragile creatures who need saving.”

Whether it is possible for him to be both manifests in the rise-and-fall trajectory of Elizabeth Berkley, the “Saved by the Bell” performer whose career was thoroughly dismantled by the failure of “Showgirls.” Much time is spent on Berkley’s performance, and McHale reminds us that the exaggerated emotional pitch of Nomi owes as much to the dialogue written by Joe Eszterhas and the precise demands and instructions of Verhoeven as it does to Berkley’s own choices. The one thing upon which it seems all agree is that Berkley got a very raw deal that she did not deserve.