Kristine Froseth Lets Loose in Lena Dunham's 'Sharp Stick'
This review originally ran on January 23, 2022 during the Sundance Film Festival
It's been eleven years since Lena Dunham's directorial debut, Tiny Furniture, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Fans of the Girls star know that Dunham has a knack for speaking the language of "angsty (entitled?) young women" so fluently; whether or you not sympathize with their problems aside, there's no denying that Dunham's characters are constantly trying to evolve from helpless girl to independent woman. It's fitting, then, that she's back at Sundance over a decade later with Sharp Stick, a more mature coming of age story that places agency on female sexual empowerment, but still includes her signature splash of young person's angst.
Sharp Stick takes place in Los Angeles during the pandemic, although those two points aren't completely relevant to the story. Kristine Froseth plays Sarah Jo, an overly modest and reserved 26-year-old with the emotional intelligence of a girl half her age. Sarah Jo is a "good girl" to a fault, her naivety makes her feel out of place, even in the home that she shares with her overly blunt mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and attention-seeking sister (Taylour Paige). Sarah Jo is respected for her maturity and thrives in her role as a special needs caretaker for her young client and his family, working mother Heather (Dunham) and her immature husband Josh (Jon Bernthal) who acts like an aged-out TikToker.
Sarah Jo may be naive but she isn't devoid of feeling, and the growing question of what she's missing out on when it comes to sexual experiences comes to a boil almost overnight. In a bold move that, quite frankly, doesn't come across as honest or believable in the slightest, our pure protagonist boldly throws herself at Josh and starts confessing that she wants him to take her virginity. What gave her the confidence all of a sudden to share her deepest darkest insecurities with this man? That's not entirely clear. Perhaps it's the lack of stable men in her life or her biological father, who's MIA. In any case, Josh ruins any shred of trust when he agrees to have sex with her (without protection, too). Both consenting to the act, neither one could have imagined what the aftermath of this decision would bring: Sarah Jo turns into an out of control, sexually obsessed submissive who quite literally wants to do everything from A (anal) to X (xenophilia).
Kristine Froseth is fully in control of Sarah Jo's budding physical exploration, her transformation taking place almost entirely from within. Her sexual liberation goes from 0-100 in over 24 hours, and while it might be hard to believe that she becomes infatuated with a porn star and signs up as a member on the website "Clitty Clitty Bang Bang," Froseth does an admirable job playing vulnerable. Jon Bernthal can't make Josh redeemable, but he's a good character to laugh at if you don't mind the second-hand embarrassment.
For as progressive and bold as Sharp Stick is, however, it's ultimately a clunky and disorienting watch that lacks a strong finale and clear takeaway. Sarah Jo's stunted maturity and arrested development make for a sympathetic character arc, but her payoff feels shortchanged. Does being sexually liberated actually make her feel more confident as a woman, or is she really just searching for acknowledgment and reassurance that she is seen, and using sex is the quickest way to get that fix?
There are some great moments sprinkled in throughout the awkward ones though, specifically the kitchen scene where Heather tries holding it together as an overworked mother, the repeating action of Sarah Jo eating big spoonfuls of vanilla yogurt (foreshadowing a more graphic act later), and the energizing soundtrack that ends on Shuga's "Stay Wild." What's also worth mentioning is the special thanks section that reads like a who's who of celebrity friends, including Taylor Swift, Zoe Kravitz, and her husband (and Sharp Stick's composer) Luis Felber. It won't be everyone's taste, but sex-positive Sharp Stick certainly will resonate with the built-in Dunham fanbase.
Distributed by Utopia. 86 minutes.
In theaters Friday, July 29th. Expands to theaters nationwide on Friday, August 5th. Available on Digital platforms August 16th.
Enis Rotthoff Shares Track From 'The Good Neighbor'
Composer Enis Rotthoff (Guns Akimbo, The Sunlit Night) is on his way to becoming one of the leading voices in the German film scoring scene. His blend of classic orchestral arrangements mixed with progressive electronics provides a unique and layered approach to how he tells a story through sound. In his latest work, Enis lends his talents to the psychological thriller The Good Neighbor, directed by Stephan Rick (The Dark Side of the Moon).
Starring Golden Globe Award winner Jonathan Rhys Meyers (The Tudors, Dracula) and Luke Kleintank (Midway, The Man in the High Castle), The Good Neighbor unfolds during a horrific evening for neighbors David (Kleintank) and Robert (Meyers) when they accidentally hit a woman on her bike with their car and flee the scene. While David is increasingly plagued by feelings of guilt, Robert shows no remorse and becomes overbearing and possessive. When David meets Vanessa (Eloise Smyth), the victim's sister, he submits to a reckless passion and underlying sense of redemption before realizing Robert will do unspeakable things to protect their secret.
Cinemacy is proud to premiere “Welcome to Riga” from The Good Neighbor, below:
Injecting retro electronic sounds with a classical 42-piece string ensemble, and showcasing solo cellist Marianna Pleszkan, the score for The Good Neighbor – specifically "Welcome to Riga" – mirrors the film's more nuanced emotional arcs. "We wanted to get into the characters' heads and musically support the development of the story as well," says Enis. "The different themes and musical atmospheres helped us structure that experience."
Named a Sundance Composers Lab Fellow in 2007, Enis has also done work for small ensembles, bigger electronic works, and large scale orchestral pieces that include both rare and electronic instruments. He has collaborated and recorded with some of the finest European Orchestras and Soloists. He has composed the music for many feature films in the US and in Europe, including Silver Tongues, Free Willy- Escape from Pirates Cove, The White Orchid, A Quiet Love, The Price, and Stereo.
Scoring Records International is releasing The Good Neighbor (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) on Friday, July 22nd
'A Love Song' is a Subtle, Spectacular Meditation on Aloneness
This review originally ran on January 23, 2022 during the Sundance Film Festival
There's a difference between being alone and being lonely. The experience of being alone is a physical one and can be solved by calling a loved one or just sitting in a coffee shop, surrounded by strangers. However, the feeling of loneliness is one that hurts the deepest, usually leaving you to contemplate how you've found yourself in this situation. It's also true that you can feel both lonely and alone at the same time, perhaps the most isolating experience a human can endure. Writer/director Max Walker-Silverman points his lens at this human fragility in the beautifully meditative drama, A Love Song.
At first glance, the film's American West aesthetic and lone female protagonist echoes the 2021 Academy Award Best Picture winner Nomadland. It feels true that these stories could exist in the same timeline, but after absorbing everything the 81-minute runtime has to offer, A Love Song makes Nomadland feel hallow. A Love Song is absolutely incredible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDIqS-p1hJs
Dale Dickey gives an unforgettable performance as Faye, a nomad and widower, who has been eagerly anticipating a visit from her childhood boyfriend Lito (Wes Studi). Living out of her camper van next to the lake, she spends her days listening to the sounds of the birds–identifying them by their distinct chirping–fishing for crawfish, and listening to country tunes on the radio. The sounds of nature soothe her mind, grounding her back to the earth when the thoughts of reconnecting with another person begin to feel overwhelming. Faye doesn't even speak until about 10 minutes into the film.
Lito, himself a widower as well, arrives at Faye's campsite and it's not long before their small talk and pleasantries turn into gentle reminiscing about the people they were when they first meet, many decades ago. They comment on how much everything – the environment and themselves included–has changed since they last saw each other.
When you reach a certain age, you get to a point where you stop living for others and start living for yourself–authentically and honestly. At this stage in their lives, Faye and Lito have outgrown the need to impress and have adopted a "what you see is what you get" approach to life, which is quite refreshing to witness. It's honest, and pure, and leaves no room for regrets.
A Love Song is a bit misleading, though. Its title alone leads one to believe that this is a romance about two people falling (back) in love with each other, when in fact, that's not entirely true. Director Max Walker-Silverman crafts a love story about falling in love with yourself and your life, regardless of how unconventional and not according to plan you find yourself in any given moment.
Birthed from the film's natural purity is the sentiment that it's never too late to start living the life you want. A moment of happiness is more important than a lifetime of regret, so take the chance! Risk it all! Because as Faye so eloquently says, with this line that will haunt me for the rest of my life, "However long you get, that's long enough."
81 minutes.
'Living Wine' Gets to the Root of Organic Winemaking
Where to watch: Living Wine is releasing in theaters and watch now @ home virtual cinema on Friday, July 15, 2022
One of my favorite staycations is escaping to Temecula aka Southern California's wine country. The atmosphere, the ambiance, the chardonnay... it's hard to think of a better way to spend a long weekend. It never ceases to amaze me that the wine I'm drinking during those intimate tastings was once a small grape growing in a vineyard right outside the tasting room walls. The circle of life is really something beautiful. This sentiment–and sediment (sorry, wine joke)–is explored in the new documentary, Living Wine.
Living Wine, directed by novice filmmaker and wine enthusiast Lori Miller, is both an homage to the act of organic winemaking as well as an environmental documentary that highlights the risk our vineyards face today, including global warming, increasing wildfires, and unending drought. One thing that Miller wants to make clear is not all wine is created equal. Just because it grows in the ground doesn't mean it's organic. Calling on experience from winemakers Megan Bell of Margins Wine, Gideon Beinstock & Saron Rice of Clos Saron, Darek Trowbridge of Old World Winery and experts Elizabeth Candelario (Mad Agriculture) and Dr. Timothy LaSalle (Center for Regenerative Agriculture), Living Wine is an eye-opening journey into what it takes to go from vineyard to glass and everything in between.
The natural wine movement is about 20 years behind the natural food movement in terms of cultural awareness and accessibility. The subjects in the film passionately discuss their organic grape farming methods, which vary greatly from the methods of more conventional winemakers. Synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use are some of the biggest distinctions between what makes a wine conventional or organic. It's actually quite shocking to learn that less than 1% of the wine produced in California is all-natural, meaning that most of the wine we drink is full of additives and manipulation of flavors.
So the next time you're tempted to pick up a bottle of Decoy in grocery stores because you like the duck logo, remember that the little bit of extra effort it takes to acquire a bottle of natural wine is well worth the investment. The environment, your health, and your wine-drinking buddies will thank you.
Fire of Love
This review originally ran on January 21, 2022 during the Sundance Film Festival.
Where to Watch: Fire of Love is now playing at AMC Sunset 5
"This is Katia. This is Maurice... tomorrow will be their last day." Making its World Premiere in the U.S. Documentary competition at this year's Sundance Film Festival is Fire of Love, the incredible true story of a couple whose passion for chasing danger eventually caught up with them, but whose legacy made a lasting impact on their tight-knit community.
In an effort to show the world the strength and beauty of the misunderstood natural phenomena of volcanoes, wife and husband Katia and Maurice Krafft routinely put themselves in the path of danger. One day, they inadvertently found themselves caught in the middle of an unexpected volcanic eruption.
Although their love story ended too soon and their contribution to the scientific community feels incomplete, what they did leave behind is hundreds of hours of in-depth and deep archival footage, which director Sara Dosa weaves together fervently to create a sweeping portrait of two people passionately in love with science, nature, and each other.
"Have you ever loved something so much, you would sacrifice your life for it?" We're left to contemplate this stirring hypothetical question as we're led through the vividly rich life of French scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft. Voiceover narration is provided by filmmaker and performance artist Miranda July, who so sensitively captures the couple's self-proclaimed "outsider" and "weirdo" personas. From their first meeting in 1966 to the very last image before their untimely death in 1991, the common thread throughout Fire of Love is the Krafft's commitment to curiosity and exploration, which overrode any sense of fear.
Katia and Maurice documented volcanoes from all over the world, capturing some of the most breathtaking images in the process. Dressed like extras from Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic in light blue onesies and red beanies, Katia and Maurice are as goofy as they are brilliant, and were as close to soul mates as you can get (if you believe in that sort of thing). Their shared passion to educate the world on these natural wonders enabled life-saving research. It would prove to be bittersweet, as that same unwavering passion and fascination with danger ultimately led to their deaths.
In telling the Krafft's story, director Sara Dosa took inspiration from French new wave films with fun and light-hearted editing techniques (Dosa makes volcanoes and science fun!). Aesthetically, Fire of Love looks like it was pulled from a time capsule from the 70s with its retro fonts and text color, and it totally works.
If Katia and Maurice were alive today, I'd imagine they would be absolutely humbled by the attention this documentary will bring to their life's work. It encapsulates everything they sacrificed their lives for: an unfiltered look at the unmatched beauty of volcanoes and the mineral world, and how connecting with the earth can help us connect with each other, too.
93 minutes.
'Flux Gourmet' Serves a Wild, Off the Menu Culinary Experience
Where to watch: 'Flux Gourmet' is now playing at The Frida Cinema in Santa Anita and on-demand.
Director Peter Strickland likes to keep it weird. In his latest offering, Flux Gourmet, Strickland creates a devilishly obscure feast for both the eyes and ears. Keeping a comedic slow burn sizzling throughout its nearly 2-hour runtime, Flux Gourmet is singularly the most out-of-the-box, off the menu film I've seen this year.
Flux Gourmet tells the hilarious and horrifying story of one experimental culinary group's month-long residency at a secluded institute devoted to culinary arts, called the "Sonic Catering Institute." This isn't your typical culinary arts: this is unlike anything that exists in the real world. But in Strickland's world, culinary arts is a hybrid of performance art, experimental music, and live cooking demos. The sonic collective is made up of three artists: Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed), Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield), and Lamina Propria (Ariane Labed). They are given the opportunity to experiment with and perfect their craft, which consists of creating new sounds like hooking up microphones to blenders and running them through synthesizers.
Their progress is overseen by the institute's head Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), whose own insecurities with power dynamics leaks into the sonic collectives' tense relationship with each other. As tensions bubble within the immediate group, the institute's "dossierge," a man named Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), very candidly admits to the audience in VO that he is struggling to disguise his flatulence. Wrought with gastrointestinal problems, he laments in a stoic tone that holding in his farts has become a social nightmare. "The flatulence was relentless," he says in a hilariously poetic manner. "Why can one stomach be so free and another can't?" But Stone's internal pain sparks inspiration in one of the members of the collective, who convinces him to use his gas as an act in their culinary public performance.
Bold, bonkers, and savagely confident, Flux Gourment feels like familiar territory when compared to his previous films, including In Fabric and The Duke of Burgundy. In addition to its striking production design and ASMR tendencies, the real strength comes from its entire ensemble cast (imagine if the Knives Out cast was even kookier). Here, every actor does a fantastic job of toeing the line between untrustworthy and sympathetic.
If NTS internet radio collaborated with everyone's favorite guilty pleasure "Master Chef," the end result would be something very similar to Flux Gourmet. Satisfying in storyline and visual aesthetic, Flux Gourmet is quite a treat for the arthouse enthusiast.
1h 51m.
'Apples': It's Man Versus Memory in This Greek Weird Wave Comedy
Where to watch: Apples is now playing in select Laemmle Theaters.
One of my favorite film genres is Greek Weird Wave. Think Dogtooth, Attenberg, and Boy Eating the Bird's Food. Christos Nikou's directorial debut is an enjoyably familiar yet excitingly unique story that slots perfectly into this niche canon. It's darkly humorous; a dry and poignant study of how memories shape identity and what happens when we lose it all.
Our protagonist is Aris (Aris Servetalis), a middle-aged man who has been hit with amnesia. Amnesic spells have been spreading all across Greece, much like a pandemic, with those infected being sent to a hospital/rehab hybrid in order to either get claimed by family members or start over and rebuild a new identity.
When days pass and no one comes to claim Aris, he enters the facility's "Learning How to Live" program. This program, led by two scientists–one of whom bears a striking resemblance to Colin Farrell in The Killing of a Sacred Deer– puts Aris through various memory tests and challenges, like riding a bike and going to the movies, which he is instructed to photograph as proof of completion. Aris is determined to live an everyday life again, and undergoes the tasks with relative ease. He meets a woman (Sofia Georgovasili) in the same identification program as himself during one of his outings and there seems to be a spark, simultaneously Aris's memory becomes slightly less hazy. But is this the result of his new relationship, or his heavy diet of apples?
Following in the footsteps of Greek auteurs like Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, Christos Nikou's sense of direction further propels the genre of "Weird Wave" forward. If you're a fan of obscure comedy, 4:3 aspect ratios, and unconventional narratives that are far from mundane, then Apples is for you.
'Marcel the Shell with Shoes On' Gives Us More of a Good Thing
Where to watch: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On opens at AMC theaters this Friday, June 24th.
In 2010, a then amateur filmmaker named Dean Fleischer-Camp uploaded a nearly three-and-a-half-minute short film called "MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON" to YouTube. In it, a young, enthusiastic mollusk named Marcel talks to a man behind the camera (voiced by Fleischer-Camp) and invites him into his small, unique little world. Marcel shared his secret to the perfect skis (men's toenails) and what he does for fun (hang glide on a Dorito). The video quickly went viral and has racked up over 32 million views as of today. It's obvious that the people love Marcel, but as the new feature film hits theaters, the biggest question is: did we need a feature-length version of Marcel's saga as a shell?
To cut to the point: no. However, what Fleischer-Camp gives in this extended runtime of 89 minutes is more charming backstory to Marcel's life. Since the short film premiered 12 years ago, we learn that Marcel–impeccably voiced by Jenny Slate–was accidentally separated from his family in a hurried packing job by tenants of the house where they all lived. This has resulted in a pretty lonely existence in an empty house. The only family member left with Marcel is his grandmother, Nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini), who enjoys simple pleasures like gardening and watching 60 Minutes with Lesley Stahl. Another thing to note, Nana Connie was born in the garage and traveled by coat pocket all the way to the house, hence her foreign accent.
The hybrid of stop-motion/live-action is more finessed in the feature, bringing Marcel to life in a way that we've never seen before. Acknowledgment for the seamlessness of the visuals should be credited in large part to Animation Director Kirsten Lepore, whose own history of viral moments is plentiful. This, combined with the spontaneous, naturalistic approach of a real documentary, makes Marcel the Shell with Shoes On an enjoyable way to spend an hour and a half. It's really just more of a good thing.
Some jokes are recycled from the short (including the goof introduction as "Mar-shell" and the piece of lint portraying his pet dog named Alan) but there are plenty more relevant one-liners that gave way to multiple laugh-out-loud moments as well as introspective, serious ones. Marcel's relationship with his grandmother is the pinnacle of the film's emotional depth, their bond will lead you to think about the people in your life who you hold near and dear.
The music in the film is also worth highlighting. Composer Rich Vreeland aka Disasterpeace creates delicate, charming moments (in stark contrast to his other films, including A24's upcoming Bodies, Bodies, Bodies). More kudos go to music supervisor Joe Rudge (Hereditary, Blue Valentine) for including a handful of songs from one of my favorite artists, Hiroshi Yoshimura.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is lighthearted entertainment that aims to please. Fans of the short will get so much enjoyment out of Marcel's charming antics and chipper outlook on life and so it's hard to say that this film shouldn't exist at all. Sure, it's not the most necessary of films to hit theaters this year, but anything that brings a smile to your face is a film worth supporting.