Month: September 2021

In Dashcam, a new horror film that just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, a MAGA-hatted social media provocateur named Annie Hardy breaks quarantine in Los Angeles to travel to the UK, where she mistakenly believes life will be more relaxed.

Soon after she arrives, she encounters something much worse than COVID-19. It all plays out on the dashboard camera she uses to communicate with fans who tune in to watch her perform freestyle songs as she drives.

Dashcam is the latest of many low-budget films produced during COVID-19 lockdowns, and feels like a step forward. It plays more like a frantic Blair Witch than a socially distanced slow burn. Its British director, Rob Savage, and his co-writers, Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd, previously collaborated on another pandemic horror film, last year’s streaming success Host.

Some COVID movies wear their logistical limitations as a badge of honor, as if COVID protocols were a variation on Dogme 95. Others simply pretend COVID didn’t exist, and artfully shoot around the limitations without drawing attention to the added effort involved.

Dashcam wisely uses the lockdowns as a backdrop and then pivots in a completely different and giddily gross direction. It has gruesomely great set pieces, especially in a lake, a funhouse, and an un-fun house. The hand-or-dash-held camera moves constantly, making us really work to understand what’s going on — except in scenes where it falls eerily, effectively still.

The film mercifully avoids any sanctimony about pandemic protocols, and instead steps back to  just note the weirdness of this moment, especially in a scene where a restaurateur who is wearing his mask wrong (his nose is exposed, so what’s the point, really) becomes more and more furious at Annie for being unmasked.

Also Read: Spree Director Eugene Kotlyarenko Wrote All 7,000 Internet Comments That Appear in the Film

Annie Hardy is played by the real Annie Hardy, an L.A. musician who really did start livestreaming a dash cam show a few years ago in which she freestyles songs based on short suggestions from her viewers. The Annie Hardy in the film seems to be an outsized, more outrageous version of Annie Hardy in real life. It’s never clear if she’s an actual Trump supporter or just someone who likes the outrage she gets from wearing her Make America Great Again hat in public. But the character in the film shares the former president’s dismissiveness toward masks, and some of his followers’ belief that COVID is a hoax.

Annie-in-the-film is MAGAnificently unlikeable — rude, gross, hypocritical, selfish. One recent review of the film called her “the worst person on Earth.” (The real Annie is much more sympathetic — she has suffered unfathomable loss in recent years, including the loss of her infant son and her boyfriend, Robert Paulson, a rapper known as Cadalack Ron.)

You could read the film as a British criticism of a certain kind of American. But no matter how we feel about Annie, Dashcam wittily exploits the fact that we as audiences end up rooting for whomever occupies the frame the most, even if they have a tendency to do things like spitting in their hands and then slapping sleeping friends awake.

The poor awakened friend is played by Amar Chadha-Patel, whose character’s nickname, Stretch, may or may not be inspired by grotesque behavior he was known for when he and Annie were bandmates back in L.A. When Annie arrives in the UK, she clashes immediately with Stretch’s masked, sanitized girlfriend, played by Jemma Moore, and messes up Stretch’s job as a food delivery driver with her rejection of basic politeness or respect.

But then she stumbles into a job delivering a masked, obviously sick woman named Angela (Angela Enahoro) to a distant locale, and bodily fluids begin appearing in very unwelcome ways, and soon she Annie and Stretch are hunted by… something.

Internet commenters leave a speedy Greek chorus of comments as they watch, sometimes saying what we as viewers are thinking, and sometimes going to very dark places. The device was used to even better effect in last year’s terrific Spree, directed Eugene Kotlyarenko, which also involved social media, a car and lots of carnage. The running commentary is one of many places where Dashcam drops homages and inside jokes, including one commenter saying “you’ve got red on you,” a reference to Edgar Wright’s 2004 zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead.

Provocations abound. Annie rolls her eyes at Black Lives Matter signs, and Angela is Black, as many of the commenters point out. It’s unclear whether there’s some symbolism here, but let’s just say that Annie doesn’t learn any valuable lessons.

Dashcam is now playing at the Toronto International Film Festival.

 

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In today’s Movie News Rundown: R.I.P Eastbound & Down co-creator Ben Best; Werner Herzog’s advice on just doing it; a Hawkeye trailer for Christmas; Queen’s Gambit wins at the Creative Arts Emmys; The Card Counter is great.

Clint Eastwood on Aging: “I don’t look like I did at 20, so what?” the 91-year-old tells The Los Angeles Times in a profile pegged to his new film, Cry Macho. “That just means there are more interesting guys you can play.”

Recommendation: Saw Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter in a theater this weekend, and the writer of Taxi Driver and writer-director of American Gigolo is as good as ever. Try to go in knowing nothing. Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan and Willem Dafoe star. That’s all I’m saying. Okay, also, there are cards in it.

More Recommendations, from TIFF: So far I’ve seen Dashcam, Attica, and The Jockey though virtual Toronto International Film Festival Screenings. Dashcam, a horror film that unfolds through pandemic England via a dashboard camera, made me think about how some filmmakers treat COVID protocols like a new kind of Dogme 95. Dashcam isn’t one of them.

Creative Arts Emmys: Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, written and directed by Scott Frank and starring Anya Taylor-Joy, led at the Creative Arts Emmys, scoring nine awards for casting, cinematography, costumes, editing, makeup, production design, score, sound editing and sound mixing. The Mandalorian had seven Emmys, and RuPaul’s Drag Race won five. Here’s the full list of winners from all three of the awards ceremonies.

Advice From Werner Herzog: Nick Fituri Scown, co-director of the new documentary Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11, shares some advice he took from Werner Herzog: Stop telling people you’re thinking of making a movie, and start telling them you’re making a movie.

The Marvel Christmas Spectacular: The new Disney+ show Hawkeye, starring Jeremy Renner as the least powerful Avenger and Hailee Steinfeld as young archer Kate Bishop, will be a Christmas story. (The tagline on the poster is, “This holiday season, the best gifts come with a bow.”) The show also features a Broadway musical about former Captain America Steve Rogers. Here’s the Hawkeye trailer.

Do You Like Comics? If so, the collections Hawkeye Vol. 1: My Life As A Weapon and Hawkeye Vol. 2: Little Hits, by Matt Fraction and David Aja, are some of the best I’ve read, in terms of art, story, and flair. They collect issues 1-11 of the Hawkeye comic book series that looks to be a big influence on the Disney+ show. The issues were known for groundbreaking, understated storytelling — especially the issue told entirely from the POV of a dog.

R.I.P. Ben Best: The Eastbound & Down co-creator died yesterday at 46. “It’s with heavy hearts we say goodbye to our good buddy Ben Best,” Rough House Pictures posted on  Instagram. “We lost him the day before he would have turned 47. A hell of a friend and a creative force. He inspired us and made us laugh. Charming and hilarious. Gone way too soon. We love and miss you.” Rough House is run by Best’s friends and frequent collaborators Danny McBride, David Gordon Green and Jody Hill. Best co-wrote and co-starred in The Foot Fist Way with McBride and Hill, who directed. They later teamed up on Eastbound & Down, in which Best played hard-partying bartender Clegg. He also co-wrote Your Highness with McBride and acted in films including Land of the Lost, Superbad and Observe and Report. “RIP Ben Best. I remember seeing him as Chuck The Truck in Foot Fist Way and thinking ‘I have to work with this man,’” wrote former co-star Seth Rogen. “I’m honored I got work with him, and even more so and that I got to hang out with him and just be in his company. Watch Foot Fist Way today and bask in his genius.” No cause of death was given.

Main image: Ben Best as Chuck “The Truck” Wallace in The Foot Fist Way.

 

The post R.I.P. Ben Best; Herzog’s Advice; Hawkeye Trailer; All the Queen’s Emmys appeared first on MovieMaker Magazine.

In making his feature film debut We Need to Do Something, director Sean King O’Grady struggled with when to follow his original vision, and when to compromise. The film, starring Sierra McCormick (The Vast of Night), Vinessa Shaw (Hocus Pocus) and Pat Healy (The Inkeepers), follows a family who become trapped after a storm. Soon the family’s teenage daughter, Melissa, realizes that she and her girlfriend may have had something to do with the horrors that threaten them all. In this piece, O’Grady  — who has also produced films including last year’s Sundance darling The Assistant — shares what he learned about blocking, setups — and making adjustments.

This is a story about embracing reality — sticking to your vision, obsessing over details, but not letting what you thought would be your movie get in the way of the conditions the universe presents you with.

In the midst of pandemic-mania 2020, a bunch of crazy people decided to join me in Michigan to make an extremely contained movie, while living in a self-imposed “bubble” consisting of our set, and our hotel. For over a month, no one would see the light of day. Miraculously, we all survived without murdering each other, and that movie has now been released by IFC, and is called We Need to Do Something.

But let’s back up a little… During pre-production, the incredible cinematographer Jean-Philippe Bernier and I spent a week shot-listing every scene in the movie. We were psychotically organized. Because most of our movie takes place in one location, a bathroom, we matched our spreadsheet shotlist to an overhead diagram of the location — for every single shot. We knew the motivation for each shot, the blocking we wanted the actors to perform, and how we could fit each shot and desired move into the tight schedule. We had one particular scene with 26 setups. For two pages of dialogue. In one room.

More on that later.

We had our cast come in a week before production was to begin, so that we could rehearse on our set together. However, I kept torturing our poor art department to get the set the way I wanted it, and due to this, the set wasn’t finished on time. As a result, we had to retreat to the basement of our office, tape out the dimensions of the bathroom on the floor, and rehearse that way.

I walked the actors through the blocking based on our shotlist — and immediately realized everything sucked.

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And not just a little. It sucked horribly. The blocking that made sense in my head was insane when you saw real people doing it. It was like a bad play. So after a half a day of trying to walk through each scene the way I envisioned it (because I saw Steven Spielberg do this on an Indiana Jones bonus feature — true story), I had a sidebar with Jean-Philippe and asked his opinion. He agreed with me, and I asked the actors just to forget everything I told them and act out the scene based on their feelings in the moment.

This. Changed. Everything.

The scenes came to life. I quit stomping around the non-set telling my extremely talented cast how to move, and started learning from them what actual humans would do in these situations. I started watching from the sidelines, seeing from the camera’s point of view, and having a fucking blast. I started to see my movie in a brand new way, and it was way better than what I’d envisioned.

So we re-shotlisted. The entire movie.

Okay: That’s not totally true. There were a few highly technical scenes where we needed some blocking that matched our original shotlist (more on this later… again) and the cast made it look incredible, despite being a little unnatural.

Now we had our movie. We planned it all out. Only one handheld scene in the bathroom, aside from the flashbacks, which were all handheld. It was written in stone and blood.

Before we knew it, the set was finished, and we started shooting. And everything changed. Again. Blocking without walls is not the same as blocking with walls. But this time, we knew this was a moment for excitement, a chance to make things even better again. We embraced the change. And the movie got better.

We were extremely fortunate to have our editor, and writer, on set. And they edited everything we shot as we shot it — chronologically. Each night, we got to see the assembly of that day’s footage, and could then tweak the shot list and script based on how we all felt about the edit.

Days were going well and everything was coming together. But our 26-setup effects-heavy scene was starting to become a source of stress. It was a week away, but we were very concerned it could become a 24-hour shoot day. I’m not joking.

Then something happened. We shot our one planned handheld sequence. And we loved it. I knew immediately our 26-setup scene should be a much simpler handheld sequence. The energy would simply be better. But I didn’t want to feel like I was compromising. Yes, I’m a petulant child (like most of you reading this probably are) who refused to make his life easier, simply because I didn’t want to feel like I was compromising. I was willing to compromise the quality of the scene, and the sanity of the entire team, to not “compromise” my original vision. Mind you, I had successfully avoided this trap twice while making this film! Had I learned nothing? From myself?

We rode out this stress for another 10 days. Then finally, the day before we shot the sequence, our core team came together, and we all felt the same way. The handheld wasn’t a compromise. It was an improvement. We made the call. We did it. And to this day I love it.

The moral of this story is: Don’t worry about compromising your vision. You’re not going to do that. You came this far to get a movie made. Compromise isn’t in your DNA. However, leaving your mind open to the idea that evolving your vision to the reality that the universe presents to you can be extremely liberating, and will make your film better.

Now go make something.

We Need to Do Something, directed by Sean King O’Grady, is now in theaters and available on digital and VOD, from IFC Midnight.

Main image: Sean King O’Grady on the set of We Need to Do Something.

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The Card Counter writer-director Paul Schrader has been making classic films since the 1970s — but he still embraces digital cinematography.

“Certainly, there’s a lot to be said for film,” Schrader tells MovieMaker. “But the advantage of digital is obviously that it’s just so much faster — everything is faster.”

He continues: “There’s almost no relighting, and you never leave the set. You used to have all that trailer time. But now, if I had to set up a scene and enter my trailer, by the time I reached the door of my trailer, the PA would be tapping me on the shoulder: ‘Mr. Schrader, they are ready.’ So it allows you to move much, much quicker.”

Schrader rattles off more advantages: “You don’t have any reload time. You don’t cut gels as you can relight from your iPad. And that’s only half the story. The other half is that you can relight the whole thing in post.”

Schrader says shooting digitally gave him much more creative control on The Card Counter, which stars Oscar Isaac as a poker player consumed with guilt. Final cut is especially important to Schrader after he lost it on his 2014 film Dying of the Light.

“You’re dealing with the economics of a 20-day shoot. We didn’t shoot anything that’s not in the film. You can’t afford to take longer than you need to do something. That’s the price you pay for freedom — I have final cut, and no one tells me what to do. But I better make those 20 days, and I better keep the audience interested,” he says.

The Card Counter is Schrader’s third collaboration with cinematographer Alexander Dynan after Dog Eat Dog (2016) and First Reformed (2017), and all were lensed digitally.

Nighttime exteriors are a major perk of digital cinematography. In Schrader’s commentary track for the Blu-Ray release of his 1979 film Hardcore, he comes off a little hard on himself as he bemoans the lack of camera movement and points out sequences that seem over-lit. At one point he jokes that he needs sunglasses, and compares a location to a supermarket.

“I remember going in there as the grouchy old man, attacking my film for an hour and a half,” Schrader says of the commentary, which was recorded in 2016.

“Back in those days, everything was over-lit, and it really wasn’t until digital — the first one was Miami Vice — where they could really film with available light at night,” he continues. “Otherwise at night you’re always pouring all this light in. And you can always tell on some of these films, particularly exteriors, where the character is too bright. We were always afraid that you couldn’t see the characters.”

Also read: The Voyeurs Writer-Director Michael Mohan Hopes to Revive the Erotic Thriller With His Steamy Moral Dilemma

Schrader says one exception from that era was cinematographer Gordon Willis and Francis Ford Coppola’s collaboration on The Godfather trilogy. For those films, he says, “it didn’t matter. So what, you can’t see him very well?”

“But a normal film, you would get a call the next day after dailies from the studio yelling at you that everything is too dark.”

Asked about recent low-budget American indies that are shot on 16mm and allow viewers to miss details during dark sequences, he replies bluntly: “Well, it’s a bad choice.”

“That’s what digital was made for. I remember Michael Mann said to me, ‘You can even see the clouds at night.’ And there’s no way with normal film you could see the clouds at night.”

The Card Counter, written and directed by Paul Schrader, is now in theaters.

Main image (above): Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish in The Card Counter, from writer-director Paul Schrader.

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Alanis Morissette says in the new HBO documentary Jagged that she was raped multiple times as a 15-year-old — and that when she told people about it, no one did anything.

The film, now playing at the Toronto International Film Festival, focuses on Morissette’s breakout stardom in the ’90s and the difficulties of navigating the music industry as a young female star. The critical praise she received was often undercut by criticism of how “angry” she seemed. But she became one of the most successful artists in pop-rock history, and an inspiration to artists like Taylor Swift and Beyonce, both of whom are seen performing her song “You Oughta Know” in the doc.

At one point in the film, director Alison Klayman juxtaposes a decades-old interview in which Morissette talks about difficult relationships, with a new interview in which the Canadian icon, now 47, says she was a victim of multiple statutory rapes, and that no one helped her when she spoke out. She does not name any assailant, but it’s clear she’s talking about more than one case.

Also Read: In Dashcam, a Trump Troll Is Tormented by Anarchy in the UK

“I had no idea what the concept of a professional boundary meant, but it was me getting a sense of of boundaries, or lack thereof,” she says in the film. “Me not telling specific information about my experience as a teenager was almost solely around wanting to protect — protect my parents, protect my brothers, protect future partners, protect myself, protect my physical safety.”

At that point Morissette pauses, telling her interviewer: “I’m gonna need some help because I never talk about this shit.”

She then continues.

“There’s a lot of shame around having any kind of victimization of any kind, and it took me years in therapy to even admit that there had been any kind of victimization on my part. I would always say, you know I was consenting. And then I’d be reminded, ‘Hey — you were 15. You’re not consenting at 15.’ Now, like, oh yeah — they’re all pedophiles. They’re all statutory rape.”

Canada’s age of consent is 16.

She adds: “I did tell a few people. … It kind of fell on deaf ears a little bit. It would usually be a stand-up, walk-out-of-the-room moment.”

Then she talks more generally about women who come forward with sexual abuse allegations, and aren’t believed.

“A lot of people say, ‘Why did that woman wait 30 years?’ I’m like fuck off, they didn’t wait 30 years. No one was listening, or their livelihood was threatened, or their family was threatened. So yeah, the whole ‘Why do women wait’ thing? Women don’t wait. A culture doesn’t listen.”

The film premieres at Toronto tonight and is available now digitally. But The Washington Post reports that Morrisette is unhappy with the film for “unspecified reasons” and will not attend. The Post cited “a person familiar with Morissette’s plans.”

Klayman told Deadline in regards to Morissette not attending: “Of course, it would have been great if she could be here with us, but I’m so grateful for all the time that she did put into making this film.”

Morissette talks at length in the film about the difficulties of being a woman in a male-dominated industry — and says problems persisted even though she was the star. She notes her anger when she found at that the men in her backup band would leverage access to Morissette to meet female fans. (Morissette pointedly rejects the term “groupies” as dehumanizing.)

Jagged includes interviews with Shirley Manson of Garbage, critic Hanif Abdurraqib, and filmmaker Kevin Smith,  who cast Alanis Morissette as God in his film Dogma. The film takes its title from Morissette’s massive hit record Jagged Little Pill, which has sold 33 million copies — the 12th most in music history.

The film is produced by The Ringer founder Bill Simmons, who has a deal with HBO for a series of music-centered documentaries. Another, Listening to Kenny G, is also premiering at TIFF.

The Alanis Morissette documentary Jagged, directed by Alison Klayman, is now at the Toronto International Film Festival. 

Main image: Alanis Morisette in Jagged.

 

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