Keith Uhlich (The Completist)

November 2019: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for November 2019. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

November 1

• Queer Eye: We're in Japan!, Episode 1, "Japanese Holiday" (2019)

November 3

• Twin Peaks, Season 3, Part 3, "Call for Help" (2017)

• Twin Peaks, Season 3, Part 4, "…Brings Back Some Memories" (2017)

• Twin Peaks, Season 3, Part 5, "Case Files" (2017)

• Twin Peaks, Season 3, Part 6, "Don't Die" (2017)

• Twin Peaks, Season 3, Part 7, "There's a Body All Right" (2017)

• Twin Peaks, Season 3, Part 8, "Gotta Light?" (2017)

November 4

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Season 6, Episode 28, "November 3, 2019"

• Queer Eye: We're in Japan!, Episode 2, "Crazy in Love" (2019)

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 21, Episode 6, "Murdered at a Bad Address" (2019)

• Mr. Robot, Season 4, Episode 5, "405 Method Not Allowed" (2019)

• Watchmen, Season 1, Episode 3, "She Was Killed by Space Junk" (2019)

October 2019: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for October 2019. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

October 1

• The Deuce, Season 1, Episode 7, "Au Reservoir" (2017)

• The Deuce, Season 1, Episode 8, "My Name Is Ruby" (2017) 

October 2

• The Cotton Club Encore (1984/2019)

October 3

• American Horror Story: 1984, "Slashdance" (2019)

• Uncut Gems (2019)

October 4

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 21, Episode 2, "The Darkest Journey Home" (2019)

October 5

• The Deuce, Season 2, Episode 1, "Our Raison d'Être" (2018)

• Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (Gojira vs. Kingu Gidorâ) (1991)

September 2019: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for September 2019. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

September 3

• Succession, Season 2, Episode 4, "Safe Room" (2019)

• The Terror: Infamy, Episode 4, "The Weak Are Meat" (2019)

September 5

• A Hidden Life (2019)

• Honey Boy (2019)

• The Report (2019)

• The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)

September 6

• WAVELENGTHS 1: WLS19: "Austrian Pavilion" (2019)

• WAVELENGTHS 1: WLS19: "SaF05" (2019)

August 2019: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for August 2019. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

August 2

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 4, Episode 17, "Privilege" (2003)

August 3

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 4, Episode 20, "Dominance" (2003)

August 4

• I Could Go On Singing (1963)

• Succession, Season 1, Episode 1, "Celebration" (2018)

• Succession, Season 1, Episode 2, "Shit Show at the Fuck Factory" (2018)

Joan the Maid (1994)

Courtesy of Cohen Film Collection

Joan the Maid, like many Rivette films, can be intimidating. Get past the length, and you may still need to acclimate to the movie's vision — courtesy Rivette and his frequent co-scenarists Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent — of a thoroughly mortal Joan, in addition to an aesthetic that is wholly presentational. Cinematographer William Lubtchansky favors unshowy tracking shots and full- and medium-body compositions that keep us at an objective remove. The medievalist score by Catalan composer Jordi Savall doesn't emphasize or augment emotion so much as it wafts in and out of scenes like a gentle common breeze.

In many sequences, the blocking of the actors, coupled with the spare, yet detailed production design by Manu de Chauvigny, lends the proceedings a stage-bound feel (several of the minor characters are even allowed fourth-wall-breaking testimonials). This underlines Rivette's fascination — much like one of his heroes, Jean Renoir — with theater and how it intersects with the cinema. As is his wont, Rivette is interested in how people, in whatever era they may inhabit, perform their lives.

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I was delighted to get the assignment to review, for The Hollywood Reporter, the restoration of Jacques Rivette's great Joan the Maid (1994). It opens this Friday, August 2nd at Quad Cinema and is well worth your time.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/joan-maid-review-1228515

July 2019: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for July 2019. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

July 1

• Big Little Lies, Season 2, Episode 4, "She Knows" (2019)

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Season 6, Episode 17, "June 30, 2019"

• Too Old to Die Young, Volume 6, "The High Priestess" (2019)

• Too Old to Die Young, Volume 7, "The Magician" (2019)

• Too Old to Die Young, Volume 8, "The Hanged Man" (2019)

• Too Old to Die Young, Volume 9, "The Empress" (2019)

• Too Old to Die Young, Volume 10, "The World" (2019)

July 2

• Legion, Season 3, Episode 2, "Chapter 21" (2019)

• Years and Years, Episode 2 (2019)

July 4

• Stranger Things 3, "Chapter 1: Suzie, Do You Copy" (2019)

• Stranger Things 3, "Chapter 2: The Mall Rats" (2019)

• Stranger Things 3, "Chapter 3: The Case of the Missing Lifeguard" (2019)

• Stranger Things 3, "Chapter 4: The Sauna Test" (2019)

Straight Up (2019)

Todd (James Sweeney) is trapped in a box. Literally, if you consider that Sweeney, who also wrote, directed and produced the rapid-fire queer (or am I?) dramedy Straight Up, constricts his characters to a 4:3 frame familiar from many a Golden Age Hollywood rom-com. Performance anxiety is prevalent. You get the sense that the twenty-something, OCD-afflicted Todd speaks so rat-a-tat because to slow down would mean certain death, or at least the need to deal with a highly shambolic reality.

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Read the full review at The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/straight-up-review-1224334

Pier Kids (2019)

Filmmaker Elegance Bratton lobs no softballs in his documentary feature debut Pier Kids, which premiered in Los Angeles as part of Outfest 2019. The first onscreen title: "In the wake of the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the world cheered the advancement of white queers and ignored the fates of queer people of color." A harsh truth frequently ignored — even oppressed minorities have strata of privilege, and any revolutionary strides more often benefit those of a certain economic, social or genetic bent. Bratton aims to shine a light on a community within the community, specifically the 40% of queer youth who are both homeless and people of color.

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Read the full review at The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/pier-kids-review-1224324

June 2019: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for June 2019. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

June 2

• Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters (2017)

June 3

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Season 6, Episode 13, "June 2, 2019"

• Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (2018)

• Godzilla: The Planet Eater (2018)

June 4

• The Twilight Zone, Season 4, Episode 14, "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" (1963)

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 3, Episode 2, "Wrath" (2001)

June 5

• Black Mirror, Season 5, Episode 1, "Striking Vipers" (2019)

• Black Mirror, Season 5, Episode 2, "Smithereens" (2019)

• Black Mirror, Season 5, Episode 3, "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" (2019)

• Queer as Folk, Season 1, Episode 1, "Thursday" (1999)

• Queer as Folk, Season 1, Episode 2, "Stuart Alan Jones" (1999)

• Queer as Folk, Season 1, Episode 3, "A Night Out" (1999)

• Queer as Folk, Season 1, Episode 4, "D.I.S.C.O." (1999)

May 2019: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for May 2019. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

May 1

• XY Chelsea (2019)

May 3

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 20, Episode 22, "Diss" (2019)

May 4

• Wig (2019)

May 5

• Domino (2019)

• Game of Thrones, Season 8, Episode 4, "The Last of the Starks" (2019)

Child's Play (2019)

Say what you will about the seven films in the Child's Play series. Their frequent unevenness aside, they're clearly homespun and filled with love. Creator Don Mancini and his loyal band of performers — including the inimitable Brad Dourif (as knife-wielding plaything Chucky) and the incomparable Jennifer Tilly (as both fleshly and plasticine love interest) — have concocted a troubadour's mythos out of a very simple premise: Dying serial killer demonically possesses doll. Bloodletting ensues.

The series began as horror, turned to comedy with this reviewer's personal favorite entry — 1998's visually evocative, shamelessly ribald Bride of Chucky — then segued back to straight-faced scares with two solid DTV entries, Curse of Chucky (2013) and Cult of Chucky (2017), that slimmed down the scale while expanding the lore. A Mancini-produced television show is also on the horizon. Think of all the special guest stars Chucky could kill! (Meryl, here's your Big Little Lies follow-up.) But now comes this controversial remake/reboot, minus Mancini, and hailing from the MGM-owned Orion Pictures, which hold the rights to the first (and only the first) Child's Play feature.

Mancini has made his displeasure with this redo known. And the biggest knock against it is that the idiosyncratic qualities (up, down and in-between) of the other films in the series have been sanded and smoothed. Stem to stern, this 88-minute slasher runs like the clockwork bit of machinery it is, and that baseline competence effectively leeches it of personality.

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On Child's Play redux for The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/childs-play-review-1219382

Advocate (2019)

When we first see Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel in Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaïche's compelling documentary Advocate (which world-premiered at Sundance and recently played the Canadian International nonfiction festival Hot Docs), she's in motion, striding through the hallways of a Jerusalem court. The frame is bisected, live-action footage on the left, rotoscoped animated imagery on the right. This stylistic tic, which recurs now and again, is Jones and Bellaïche's way of protecting the identities of Tsemel's clients, almost all of whom are Palestinians accused of extremist crimes.

This has been Tsemel's life for decades, working on behalf of people viewed by many in her orbit as inferiors and fanatics. Advocate, though, isn't interested in litigating the apparently limitless divisions between Israel and Palestine so much as it is in portraying Tsemel's tireless routine, in the process demonstrating how one person lives morally and ethically within a morass.

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And from Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, by initial way of Sundance, here I am in The Hollywood Reporter on Advocate, about the Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/advocate-1202460

Watson (2019)

We almost all have an experience that shaped us, and the course of our lives, in irrevocable ways. In the case of the Canadian-born eco-activist Paul Watson, that occurrence was especially harrowing and impactful. As a child, he was playing near the water. His friends tied him to a semi-sunken piece of wood a little ways from shore. They left him there. Soon the tide began to rise and the young Watson was certain he was going to drown. He was eventually rescued, but not before the fear of his own death was effectively eradicated.

Watson tells this story early in the documentary (directed by Lesley Chilcott) that's named after him. He has the steely look of a religious convert whose belief system is entirely devoid of concern for his own well-being. It's at once admirable and off-putting, since there also seems to be some crucial part of his humanity missing. But this intrepid quality is also what has allowed him to be such an effective fighter for the sea creatures and the briny habitats he has spent decades trying to protect.

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Rounding out some straggler fest coverage. Here's me at The Hollywood Reporter on the eco-documentary Watson, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/watson-1205450

Wig (2019)

Those looking for a celebratory tribute to the recently revivified outdoor drag festival Wigstock might be surprised by Chris Moukarbel's HBO-bound documentary, Wig, which premiered at the most recent Tribeca Film Festival. Based on the footage gathered here, the party — which took place on September 1st, 2018 at South Street Seaport in New York City — looks like it was a blast. Yet the film itself is a far from festive affair, more of an anesthetized chronicle of Wigstock's apparent irrelevance in the current cultural and political moment.

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My review of the documentary Wig from the Tribeca Film Festival, for The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/wig-review-1202425

Scheme Birds (2019)

Ellen Fiske and Ellinor Hallin open their documentary feature Scheme Birds, which just took a top prize at the Tribeca Film Festival, with a moment out of time. Scottish teenager Gemma is doing what many girls her age might — scrolling through the photos and Facebook feed on her phone, pausing to look over images and references to one young man in particular. It's not clear who he is or, indeed, when and where we are. What is apparent, if subtly, is that Gemma is humbled in a way that is very new to her, though as we soon find out, dejection and discouragement are default to her existence.

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On the Tribeca Film Festival prize-winner Scheme Birds for The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/scheme-birds-review-1208934

Bolden (2019)

Co-writer and director Dan Pritzker's long-in-the-works biopic Bolden is an ostentatious production with an enigma at its center. An opening title card admits to there being little information about its subject, African American cornetist Buddy Bolden. It then goes on in a second text crawl to claim him as the prime inventor, during the early 20th century, of the New Orleans style of music that became Jazz.

That's some primo mythmongering, though Bolden was a crucial figure in the genre's development whose work was lost to time for a variety of reasons. These include such tragic-artist perennials as drug addiction and mental illness, to say nothing of the challenges of living as a black person in the Jim Crow south. And it's to Pritzker's credit that he doesn't sugarcoat those horrors. If anything, his mistake is in treating them almost exclusively as psychosomatic window dressing.

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On the not-uninteresting musical biopic Bolden, for The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/bolden-review-1208125

April 2019: Viewing-Reading-Listening

(Log of motion pictures viewed, books read, music listened to for April 2019. Underlined titles I've seen, read, or heard before.)

Viewed

April 1

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Season 6, Episode 6, "March 31, 2019"

• Queer Eye, Season 3, Episode 6, "Elrod & Sons" (2019)

April 3

• Completed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — 100% Walkthrough, 145 videos (that was something…)

April 4

• Queer Eye, Season 3, Episode 7, "Sloth to Slay" (2019)

• Queer Eye, Season 3, Episode 8, "Baby on Board" (2019)

• Dragged Across Concrete (2018)

XY Chelsea (2019)

"I love coming-of-age stories," says Chelsea Manning near the start of the documentary XY Chelsea, a Tribeca Film Festival world premiere soon to debut on Showtime. There are notes of wistfulness and defensiveness in how this former soldier/whistleblower — who uploaded caches of classified documents and video to Julian Assange's WikiLeaks website in 2010, and came out as a trans woman after she was arrested for her actions — utters those words, since she herself is stuck in something of a soul-sucking rut.

Director Tim Travers Hawkins adopts many of the same dissociative techniques utilized by executive producer Laura Poitras in her Edward Snowden profile Citizenfour (2014). The widescreen imagery is either smeary (moral complexity in literal motion) or oppressively sterile. The soundtrack is mostly comprised of omnipresent hums and drones, very Nine Inch Nails in ambient mode. But unlike Citizenfour, the film starts at the end of Manning's story — or, really, what should be a new beginning for her — with the commutation, in the waning days of the Obama administration, of her thirty-five year prison sentence after seven years served.

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From the Tribeca Film Festival, my review of the Chelsea Manning profile doc XY Chelsea for The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/odd-couple-review-1968-movie-1206106

UglyDolls (2019)

It's been a long road to the big screen for the plush monstrosities known as Uglydoll. Though they were first created in 2001 by David Horvath and his soon-to-be-wife Sun-min Kim, it wasn't until a decade later, after the adorably hideous toys had grown in popularity, that the film rights were snapped up and ultimately split between American (STX Entertainment) and Chinese (Alibaba Pictures; Huaxia Film) interests.

Robert Rodriguez, who knows his way around spy kids, sharkboys, and lavagirls, was signed to direct. Stuff happened, as it always does, and Rodriguez left the project (he remains a credited producer). Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and Smurfs: The Lost Village auteur Kelly Asbury replaced him. Finally, nearly eight years on from the signing of all the brand extension contracts, here is the primarily pop-star-voiced animated musical UglyDolls, an imbecilic eyesore that could lay claim to being one of the worst movies ever made if it was worth such hyperbole.

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For our sins. At The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/uglydolls-review-1205451

Circus of Books (2019)

"These are called cock rings," says Karen Mason as she unloads a recent shipment of pornographic supplies. The sight of this evidently sweet, gray-haired and bespectacled older woman nonchalantly handling such intimate apparel (not to mention VHS videocassettes with titles like The Sum of All Feet) rises below vulgarity, as Mel Brooks might say. Gut-busting as the moment is, however, it's no joke. This has been Karen's life for many years, as one of two managers — alongside her endearingly nerdy husband, Barry — of the West Hollywood-based adult store Circus of Books.

What led such an unlikely pair into this line of work? That's what Rachel Mason, one of Karen and Barry's three children, explores in this very funny, very moving documentary. The filmmaker does right by front-loading most of the snicker-worthy scenes. She knows that even the most open-minded among us need to get past a certain level of shock and incredulity to see Karen and Barry as the beautiful, and beautifully complicated, people they are.

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From the Tribeca Film Festival, my review of Circle of Books, Rachel Mason's documentary about her parents Karen and Barry, who ran a lucrative gay adult store for decades. At The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/circus-books-review-1205448

Flawless (2018)

Each girl has a wish beyond getting a date and procuring a dress. Mika wants her breasts augmented, Keshet aspires to have her prominently angular nose reduced and Eden longs to align her body physically with her gender identity. Enter Keren (Assi Levy), an enchanting older woman who Mika and Keshet have been speaking to online. She's willing to make all the girls' dreams come true…for the price of a kidney. Wait, what?

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From the Tribeca Film Festival, my review of the Israeli teen comedy/black-market organ thriller Flawless for The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/flawless-review-1202442

The Short History of the Long Road (2019)

Writer-director Ani Simon-Kennedy takes a page from the Kelly Reichardt and Debra Granik playbook with her Tribeca Film Festival world premiere The Short History of the Long Road. Like Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy or Granik's Leave No Trace, this low-key drama focuses on a regional American woman trying to sustain herself through rough economic and emotional times. It's derivative of both films, but, for a little while at least, not disagreeably so.

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Next up from the Tribeca Film Festival, the indie drama The Short History of the Long Road, starring Disney Channel star/pop singer Sabrina Carpenter and Grand Theft Auto V motion-capture performer Steven Ogg. At The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/short-history-long-road-review-1202450

Dragged Across Concrete (2018)

Pretty racist! An autumnal ode to white supremacy, in which sad Caucasians Gibson and Vaughn are photographed in golden hues, most everyone else in lighting schemes that range from ninth-circle-of-hell to Kubrick-sterile. Telling that Zahler co-pens his own "soul" soundtrack, as well as makes the two evidently Jewish characters a jeweler and a banker, respectively. Also—literal whiteface! (You fucking troll.) A movie of every -ist, -ism and -ic you can imagine. Like Robert Bresson directing un film de Michael Winner. Not a compliment.

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First published April 28th, 2019, Letterboxd

https://letterboxd.com/keithuhlich/film/dragged-across-concrete/

A Regular Woman (2019)

No great movie, even if dealing with bleak subject matter, is depressing. It's an ineffable quality — a grim story (Robert Bresson's L'Argent, Claire Denis's Bastards and Steven Spielberg's Munich come immediately to this writer's mind) that leaves a viewer oddly elated. For all its scrupulousness of performance, aesthetic and intent, director Sherry Hormann and screenwriter Florian Oeller's Tribeca Film Festival world premiere, A Regular Woman, is not such a movie.

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Read the full review at The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/a-regular-woman-review-1202454

At the Heart of Gold (2019)

Premiering in May on HBO after its Tribeca Film Festival bow this week, Erin Lee Carr's documentary about the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal aims, much like the cable network's controversial Michael Jackson exposé, Finding Neverland, to give victims a resounding voice. At 88 minutes, At the Heart of Gold is less than half the length of the four-hour Finding Neverland, and there are times when it would be preferable to sit more exhaustively with the testimony of the women who were molested over decades by sociopathic team physician Dr. Larry Nassar.

The difference here is that, in comparison to Jackson's alleged, if highly convincing two victims, Nassar's targets number inarguably in the hundreds. Many of them spoke in public over a days-long sentencing hearing in early 2018 after Nassar was finally brought to justice. Carr presents these on-the-record victim impact statements as she does the many talking head interviews with current and former female gymnasts who found themselves in Nassar's pedophilic sights — like a ringing, uniformly righteous howl. At the same time, each of the women Nassar preyed upon are clearly at different stages of acceptance, which often undercuts the aura of universal empowerment that the film is trying to cultivate.

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Next review out of the Tribeca Film Festival is of At the Heart of Gold, a doc about the USA Gymnastics/Larry Nassar scandal. At The Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/at-heart-gold-review-1202408