Happy birthday, Erin Nicole!
Author Archives: Lisa Marie Bowman
Film Review: She Gods of Shark Reef (dir by Roger Corman)
Ah, Hawaii!
There is no state more beautiful than Hawaii and there are no people friendlier. When I was 17 years old, my family spent a summer in Hawaii and it was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I can’t swim to save my life and I have a morbid fear of drowning but, when I was in Hawaii, I happily walked into the ocean. Not far into the ocean, of course. But still, everyone in my family was amazed. Of course, eventually I saw a jelly fish floating towards me and I screamed and ran back to the beach. (After reaching the safety of the beach, I realized that the jelly fish was actually just seaweed but still, it was scary-looking!) Hawaii is just the type of state that makes you appreciate life and take risks.
For instance, consider the two main characters in Roger Corman’s 1958 film, She Gods of Shark Reef. Chris (Bill Cord) and Lee (Don Durant) are brothers who live in Hawaii. Chris has blonde hair and a good attitude towards life. Lee has dark hair and a criminal nature. Chris loves the ocean. Lee loves to run guns. After Lee kills two men, he stows away on Chris’s boat. When the boat then hits a storm, Chris and Lee wash up on the shores of an isolated beach. It’s a beautiful island but all Lee can think about is how he can make money off of his current predicament. Bad Lee, bad!
Anyway, it turns out that the island is inhabited by an all-female village of pearl divers. Everyone is excited by the arrival of two handsome, shirtless men. Everyone except for Queen Pua (Jeanne Gerson), who doesn’t trust either one of them and who doesn’t appear to want anyone in the world to be happy. She’s especially upset when Chris interrupts a plan to sacrifice a villager to the shark gods of the sea. Chris not only rescues but also falls in love with Mahia (Lisa Montell).
While Chris is busy falling in love, Lee is trying to figure out a way to escape from the island before a rescue boat arrives. Lee, after all, is a wanted criminal and the last thing that he wants is to go from being shipwrecked to imprisoned. Lee comes up with a plan for himself, his brother, and Mahia to escape the island. However, Lee being Lee, he just can’t overcome his greedy nature. As quickly becomes obvious, Karma is not only a bitch but it’s a shark as well.
She Gods of Shark Reef was directed by Roger Corman. Though the film’s low budget is obvious in every frame, Corman wisely decided to concentrate on the island’s beauty as opposed to the movie’s somewhat haphazard story. This is one of those films where the action stops for nearly five minutes so that Corman can film a hula dancer. But you know what? That’s okay! The beauty of Hawaii and the surrounding ocean carry the film. You don’t watch for the plot. Instead, you watch for the blue water and the green grass and the vibrant skies. This is a film that you watch for the island scenery and the sharks. Both of them are quite nice.
Film Review: Crawl (dir by Alexandre Aja)
Crawl is a masterpiece of the pulp imagination.
Kaya Scodelario plays Haley Keller, a swimmer at the University of Florida who has a loving but troubled relationship with her father, Dave (Barry Pepper). With a Category 5 hurricane on a collision course with the state of Florida, everyone has been ordered to evacuate the area. However, Haley is concerned that her father may not have gotten the message or, being the stubborn type that he is, he may have gotten the message and just decided to ignore it. (I could totally relate to Haley’s frustration. When Dallas got hit by tornadoes last month, my Dad not only refused to hide in his laundry room but he also called me up to inform me that he was sitting out on his back patio watching for any twisters.) With the storm raging all around her, Haley searches for her father. When she finally finds him, he’s in the crawlspace of their vacation home. He’s unconscious. He’s wounded. And he’s surrounded by alligators! It’s now up to Haley to save the lives of not only her father but also the family dog. And, of course, she has to do all of this without getting eaten by an alligator herself. Even worse, even if they do manage to outswim the alligators, Haley and Dave are still going to have to deal with the ever intensifying storm that is raging outside.
Crawl is an intense and exciting film, one that clocks in at a brisk 87 minutes and which has a lot more going on underneath the surface than might be readily apparent. Yes, this is a film about two people and a dog who are trapped in a flooded crawlspace by a bunch of hungry alligators. And yes, I’m sure that some people will be totally boring and predictable and make a big deal about the film’s environmental subtext. (“How many more innocent people have to be eaten by alligators before we pass the Green New Deal!?”) But, at its heart, this is a film about relationships. Dave has always been hard on Haley. Haley has always both loved and resented her father. The flooding and subsequent alligator attacks may justify the pressure that Dave put on Haley to become the best but, even more importantly, it allows Haley to show that she actually is the best and that she doesn’t always need Dave to tell her what to do. With Dave spending the majority of the film incapacitated in one way or the other, it’s often up to Haley to keep them both from getting eaten as they try to move from one flooded location to another. It’s up to Haley to keep fighting and fight she does. Haley never gives up and never surrenders and, for me, Crawl is a thousand times more empowering than Captain Marvel or any of the other more obviously heavy-handed “girl power” films that have come out this year.
As directed by Alexandra Aja, there’s not a single wasted moment to be found in Crawl. He plunges straight into the story and the film is pretty much an unrelenting thrill ride from beginning to end. Even more importantly, Aja is smart enough to trust his audience to be able to read between the lines of this genre film without necessarily beating the audience over the head with its message. This is a film that can be appreciated as both a thriller and a heartfelt look at a difficult but loving relationship. This is a grindhouse film with a heart, featuring a strong and committed performance from Kaya Scodelario. As Haley is, again and again, forced to prove her strength, she becomes a stand-in for all of us. Crawl is genre filmmaking at its best, along with being one of the most impressive films of 2019.
Music Video of the Day: Rocket Fuel by DJ Shadow (2019, dir by Sam Pilling)
Enjoy!
Here Are The 2019 Independent Spirit Award Nominees!
Here are the 2019 Indie Spirit Award nominations! These nominations are meant to honor the best independent films of 2019 and their announcement marks the official beginning of awards season (at least as far as this sight is concerned!) I hate to say it but I still need to see quite a few of the films nominated below so, for now, I’ll hold off on any editorial commentary.
For those looking for some sort of evidence of how the Oscar nominations can go, the Independent Spirit Awards can be an iffy precursor, just because several of the expensive, major studio contenders aren’t eligible to nominated. (For instance, neither The Irishman nor Once Upon A Time In Hollywood were eligible.) That said, for the record, the two biggest Spirit nominees are The Lighthouse and Uncut Gems. Waves and The Farewell, which have been the center of considerable Oscar speculation, did not do as strongly in the nominations as many people apparently expected. Make of that what you will!
Here are the nominees!
Best Supporting Female
- Jennifer Lopez – HUSTLERS
- Taylor Russell – WAVES
- Zhao Shuzhen – THE FAREWELL
- Lauren “Lolo” Spencer – GIVE ME LIBERTY
- Octavia Spencer – LUCE
- Best Supporting Male
- Willem Dafoe – THE LIGHTHOUSE
- Noah Jupe – HONEY BOY
- Shia Labeouf – HONEY BOY
- Jonathan Majors – THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO
- Wendell Pierce – BURNING CANE
Best Screenplay
- Noah Baumbach – MARRIAGE STORY
- Jason Begue, Shawn Snyder – TO DUST
- Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie – UNCUT GEMS
- Chinonye Chukwu – CLEMENCY
- Tarell Alvin Mccraney – HIGH FLYING BIRD
Best First Screenplay
- Fredrica Bailey, Stefon Bristol – SEE YOU YESTERDAY
- Hannah Bos, Paul Thureen – DRIVEWAYS
- Bridget Savage Cole, Danielle Krudy – BLOW THE MAN DOWN
- Jocelyn Deboer, Dawn Luebbe – GREENER GRASS
- James Montague, Craig W. Sanger – THE VAST OF NIGHT
Best Cinematography
- Todd Banhazl – HUSTLERS
- Jarin Blaschke – THE LIGHTHOUSE
- Natasha Braier – HONEY BOY
- Chananun Chotrungroj – THE THIRD WIFE
- Pawel Pogorzelski – MIDSOMMAR
Best Editing
- Julie Béziau – THE THIRD WIFE
- Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie – UNCUT GEMS
- Tyler L. Cook – SWORD OF TRUST
- Louise Ford – THE LIGHTHOUSE
- Kirill Mikhanovsky – GIVE ME LIBERTY
Best International Film
- INVISIBLE LIFE, Brazil
- LES MISERABLES, France
- PARASITE, South Korea
- PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, France
- RETABLO, Peru
- THE SOUVENIR, United Kingdom
Best Documentary (Award given to the director and producer)
- AMERICAN FACTORY
- APOLLO 11
- FOR SAMA
- HONEYLAND
- ISLAND OF THE HUNGRY GHOSTS
The John Cassavetes Award is presented to the best feature made for under $500,000 and is given to the writer, director, and producer. 2020 #SpiritAwards Nominees are:
- BURNING CANE
- COLEWELL
- GIVE ME LIBERTY
- PREMATURE
- WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY
Best Female Lead
- Karen Allen – COLEWELL
- Hong Chau – DRIVEWAYS
- Elisabeth Moss – HER SMELL
- Mary Kay Place – DIANE
- Alfre Woodard – CLEMENCY
- Renée Zellweger – JUDY
Best Male Lead
- Chris Galust – GIVE ME LIBERTY
- Kelvin Harrison Jr., – LUCE
- Robert Pattinson – THE LIGHTHOUSE
- Adam Sandler – UNCUT GEMS
- Matthias Schoenaerts – THE MUSTANG
Best First Feature (Award given to the director and producer)
- BOOKSMART
- THE CLIMB
- DIANE
- THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO
- THE MUSTANG
- SEE YOU YESTERDAY
Best Feature [award given to the producer(s)]
- A HIDDEN LIFE
- CLEMENCY
- THE FAREWELL
- MARRIAGE STORY
- UNCUT GEMS
Best Director
- Robert Eggers – THE LIGHTHOUSE
- Alma Har’el – HONEY BOY
- Julius Onah – LUCE
- Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie – UNCUT GEMS
- Lorene Scafaria – HUSTLERS
The Robert Altman Award is given to the ensemble cast, director & casting director of one film: MARRIAGE STORY – Noah Baumbach, Douglas Aibel, Francine Maisler, Alan Alda, Laura Dern, Adam Driver, Julie Hagerty, Scarlett Johansson, Ray Liotta, Azhy Robertson, Merritt Wever
The Truer Than Fiction Award, in its 25th year, is for emerging directors of non-fiction features and includes an unrestricted grant. Finalists:
Khalik Allah – BLACK MOTHER
Davy Rothbart – 17 BLOCKS
Nadia Shihab – JADDOLAND
Erick Stoll & Chase Whiteside – AMÉRICA
The Producers Award, now in its 23rd year, honors emerging producers who demonstrate creativity, tenacity and vision, despite highly limited resources. The award includes an unrestricted grant. These are the finalists:
Mollye Asher
Krista Parris
Ryan Zacarias
The Someone To Watch Award, in its 26th year, recognizes a talented filmmaker of singular vision and includes an unrestricted grant. The finalists are:
Rashaad Ernesto Green – PREMATURE
Ash Mayfair – THE THIRD WIFE
Joe Talbot – THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO
The Bonnie Award will recognize a mid-career female director with a $50,000 unrestricted grant. The 2020 Film Independent #SpiritAwards Bonnie Award finalists are:
MarielleHeller
KellyReichardt
LuluWang
Music Video of the Day: Sky Kisses by Kedr Livanskiy (2019, dir by Sergey Kostromin)
Yay! Kedr Livanskiy is back!
This video appears to be a nicely twisted take on Sleeping Beauty. Admittedly, I do seem to ascribe a supernatural theme to every Kedr Livanskiy film that I see. Usually, I’m assume that the videos are about vampires, just because Kedr Livanskiy’s surreal music often puts me in the mood for a Jean Rollin film. This time, however, I’m pretty sure that there aren’t any vampires in this video. Instead, there’s just a lot of sleeping, dreaming, and running.
Enjoy!
Documentary Review: Ernie & Joe: Crisis Cops (dir by Jennifer McShane)
The new documentary Ernie & Joe: Crisis Cops opens with police body cam footage of a man getting gunned down in the doorway of his own house.
Why was the man shot? Because he was holding a screwdriver and he apparently didn’t drop it quickly enough. Why were the police there in the first place? They had been called by the man’s mother, who warned the police that her son was schizophrenic and that he was hearing voices. When the cops shoot him, the man’s mother can be heard screaming in the background, begging the cops not to kill her son. But kill him, they did. He died for the crime of holding a screw driver while having mental health crisis.
Unfortunately, that’s a scenario the seems to be happening more and more frequently in the United States. The police are trained to quickly take control of dangerous situations, to show no emotion, and to bark out orders. How many times do we hear it whenever someone is gunned down for not immediately dropping whatever they were holding their hands? “If he had just done what the police said, he’d still be alive.” We hear that a lot but what if, like the man holding that screwdriver, you’re already hearing voices before the police start screaming at you to show them your hands. What if you’re already disorientated and not sure what’s real and what’s not? What then?
Unfortunately, it’s rare that the police are trained on how to deal with someone suffering from mental issues. Ernie Stevens and Joe Smarro are two cops in San Antonio who are trying to change that. As members of the SAPD’s mental health unit, Ernie and Joe are advocates for changing the way that the police deal with the most vulnerable members of society. As they explain at one of their training sessions, the police academy will spend days teaching recruits how to draw and fire their weapon without devoting one minute to discussing how to deal with someone who might be hearing voices or who might be suicidal. Ernie and Joe argue for compassion over brute force. (Unfortunately, while some cops are seen nodding along with Ernie and Joe’s lessons, several others are seen smirking and rolling their eyes.)
Shot in the style of cinéma vérité, the film follows Ernie and Joe as they deal with cases and attempt to teach their fellow cops that brute force is not always the solution. At one point, we watch them deal with someone who is threatening to jump off an overpass. We also listen as Joe, a former Marne, discusses seeing a child blown up in Iraq and how he is still haunted by PTSD. Ernie, meanwhile, is a family man who goes to church every Sunday and who is looking forward to soon retiring from police work. The film follows them as they talk, joke, and occasionally bicker like an old married couple. It’s a good, if somewhat low-key, documentary. One watches it and hopes that other police departments will learn from San Anotnio’s success.
As I watched the film, I found myself thinking about Vanessa Marquez. Vanessa was a former actress and a longtime member of the #TCMParty on twitter. Vanessa was always very open about her own health struggles. 14 months ago, the police showed up at Vanessa’s house in South Pasadena, California. They say they were doing a welfare check. They say that Vanessa was in obvious mental distress and that Vanessa resisted their attempts to force her to go to the hospital to be checked out. The police say that Vanessa pointed a BB gun at them. Unfortunately, we only know what the police said happened but Vanessa is not her to tell her side of the story. She was shot and killed. At the time, it was big news but, as always happens, the media eventually moved on to something else. After all this time, we still don’t know what really happened the day that Vanessa Marquez was killed in her own home. We probably never will.
Watching the documentary, I found myself wondering what would have happened if it had been Ernie and Joe or, at the very least, a cop with a similar outlook and compassion who showed up at her house on that day. Would Vanessa still be with us, watching movies on TCM and tweeting about her experiences in Hollywood? No one can say for sure but I think she would be.
Hopefully, this documentary will serve as a wake up call for some people. One need not lose their compassion just because they put on a uniform. In fact, it’s essential that they don’t.
Documentary Review: American Relapse (dir by Adam Linkenhelt and Pat McGee)
In general, I usually don’t get much out of watching documentaries about drug addiction. There’s a few reasons for this:
1. Drug addicts are depressing to watch.
2. Drug addicts are boring to listen to.
3. Since everyone knows that drug addiction is a bad thing and that there’s usually only two possible endings to a drug addict’s story — death or detox — it’s not like the majority of drug addiction documentaries have anything new or surprising to tell us.
4. I always find myself wondering about just how much the film crew is enabling the addicts that they’re following around. There’s always a feeling that the documentary crew is more concerned with putting addicts on display as opposed to actually getting them the help that they need. It’s hard not to feel that the point of many of these documentaries (and reality shows) is to invite the viewers to gawk and say, “My life may be messed up but at least I’m not passed out in the parking lot of Burger King with a syringe hanging out of my arm.”
Taking all that in mind, I do have to say that I found the new documentary, American Relapse, to be a disturbing and thought-provoking look at not only drug addiction but also the way that the rehab industry has become a big business in South Florida. Frankie Holmes and Allie Severino are two former addicts who now work as — well, they’re referred to as being “Junkie Hunters,” though Allie objects to the term. A junkie hunter is someone who searches the streets, befriends drug addicts, and eventually takes them to rehab. Frankie and Allie both say that they’re in the business because they want to help people and save lives. At the same time, they also admit that their industry is full of people who don’t care about the addicts that they’re claiming to help. Instead, they’re simply looking for addicts who have good health insurance so that the rehab centers can make money off of treating them and the hunters can make money off of finding them.
As American Relapse demonstrates, there’s a lot of money to be made in rehab. The simple act of giving someone a drug test can bring in a few hundred dollars, assuming that the person being tested has insurance. For a rehab center to make money, there has got to be addicts to make money off of and every time that a formerly sober person relapses, that means even more money. It leads to a viscous cycle, one where people will help but only so much.
The film alternates between scenes explaining how the rehab industry works and scenes of Frankie and Allie working the streets and searching for addicts. Frankie spends his time trying to get Conor into rehab. Allie spends most of her time searching for a missing friend of her’s while also trying to help a homeless couple. Adam Jasinski, who won Big Brother 9 and later went to prison for using his winnings to stet up a drug distribution network, shows up for a few minutes and acts like a dick. Unfortunately, there are no happy endings. By the end of the documentary, some people have died. Others have vanished. One of the “junkie hunters” has relapsed.
It’s certainly not a happy documentary. It’s also a bit too long as well. 105 minutes is a long time to spend watching people who aren’t going anywhere. (Then again, if you consider that Allie and Frankie spend their entire day doing just that, perhaps 105 minutes is not too much to ask.) Like a lot of recent documentaries, the film occasionally tries to shake things up by inserting animation and clips from old educational films and the results are a bit mixed. This documentary works best when it sticks to a cinéma vérité style. Still, it’s a thought-provoking if rather depressing look at lives of intense desperation.
Music Video Of The Day: Rushing Back by Flume, feat. Vera Blue (2019, dir by Jonathan Zawada)
I always enjoy a good car video.
Enjoy!
Here’s The Trailer For Spies In Disguise
Here’s the trailer for Spies in Disguise, an upcoming animated film that’s going to be released on Christmas! So, who knows? If you’re spending the holidays with the family, you may end up having to watch this. That said, this movie might be kind of fun. Will Smith getting turned into pigeon definitely has potential.
Here’s the trailer!
