This week I am recommending three new releases, a coming-of-age film from the 1990s, a psychedelic animated short film, an experimental Palestinian short documentary, and a mumblecore classic.
Before I write about the three new releases I’m featuring this week I want to reiterate that I firmly believe the road towards equality is paved in women filmmakers getting to make average and/or terrible films and keep getting opportunities to make more films, just like men so often in this business do. Although, obviously, it would be more ideal if actually talented women filmmakers were offered projects worthy of them. I preface this week’s guide this way because I’m writing about three films that are decidedly not great, although each has enough charm for me to still recommend them.
I was really excited when I saw that Jocelyn Moorhouse had a new film out because I am a big fan of How To Make an American Quilt and really enjoyed The Dressmaker. Unfortunately, The Fabulous Four is anything but. It strands a talented ensemble (Susan Sarandon, Bette Midler, Megan Mullally, and Sheryl Lee Ralph) in a script way below their talent levels. It somehow saps all the charm out of Bruce Greenwood. It tries to be relevant (I think???) by shoehorning in some really asinine TikTok aesthetics. It somehow squanders a Michael Bolton cameo!!
The film follows four women who have been friends since college as they reunite for a week in Key West. Two of the women (Sarandon, Midler) have beef dating back decades that has soured their friendship. In order to convince her to go on the trip, the other two friends (Mullally and Ralph) trick her into thinking she’s won one of Hemingway’s polydactyl cats and must claim it in person. I must confess, this ploy would work on me too. However, given what a big plot point the Hemingway cats are, I unhappily report that they are barely featured at all once the women land in Key West (although there are lots of shots of feral chickens.)
In her review Nell Minow pointed out the obvious inequality older actresses face when it comes to film projects:
If you're a distinguished older male actor in Hollywood, you're typically cast as Batman’s sidekick or a WWII veteran who escapes from assisted living (Michael Caine), God or a grieving father (Morgan Freeman), a brilliant psychotherapist or Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), an action hero (Tom Cruise), Sigmund Freud and a Roman emperor (Sir Anthony Hopkins), or a daring drug mule (Clint Eastwood). But distinguished older actresses get cast in simple-minded comedies about old friends having silly adventures that make the lightest-weight beach read seem like Remembrance of Things Past. The Fabulous Four follows in the unfortunate tradition of the Book Club movies, Summer Camp, and 80 for Brady, with an EGOT-full of brilliant talents mired in antics that the Golden Girls would consider too ridiculous.
So yeah, this movie is not great. But there is a scene where Sarandon, having ingested way more weed gummies than she realized, imagines an anthropomorphized cat has taken over her job as a surgeon, and friends, I did laugh. You can find tickets and showtimes here.
I actually kind of liked Dakota Gorman’s paranoid suburban-set thriller The Girl In The Pool, starring one-time teen idol Freddie Prinze Jr., although I do think your milage will vary depending on how much you enjoy these kind of cheapie thrillers (I tend to enjoy them quiet a lot!).
Here’s a bit from my review:
Gorman playfully switches perspective in one scene, pulling back from a claustrophobic ultra-close-up of Tom to a wide shot of Alex, Rose, and her boyfriend watching Tom as he pitifully stumbles around the backyard. It's a refreshing reminder that not only are we watching a movie, but also Tom the character is so deep in his own world, that it's like he's in his own movie as well. It's a pity, then, that Gorman's direction isn't always this razor sharp as there is a current of mordant humor throughout Williams' script that could easily have made this whole affair a pitch-black comedy.
You can rent the film now on VOD.
The last of his week’s new releases is Ellie Kanner’s Spread, a Tubi original. You read that correctly. I actually had not heard of this movie until my smart TV suggested it (which is, in fact, creepy). I was a big fan of Elizabeth Gillies on the CW reboot of Dynasty, and she’s pretty much operating on the same wavelength here, but instead of a billionaire heiress businesswoman, she's a upper middle class girl (you know that because she's smart, but went to Berkeley and not an Ivy, yet her parents have been helping her pay her cell phone bill) named Ruby with failure to launch syndrome. After losing a job at a start up magazine for saying a corporate merger with Uber would be stupid because they’re one of the biggest human rights violators in the world (I did like how the big boss says “thank you for your honesty” before canning her. While I’ve never been fired, I’ve definitely been in similar situations where my honesty was not exactly welcomed in a corporate situation), Ruby finds herself temping at a porno rag called Spread (whose founder is played by Harvey Keitel!!). At first repulsed (Ruby has some major sex hangups), after she’s assigned to bring the company into the 21st century by launching social media accounts and an app, she eventually finds that embracing sexuality can be empowering, actually. The whole thing has big bargain basement The Devil Wears Prada vibes, but what if we bring girlboss feminism to porn. The script might have had more bite in the mid-2000s than it does in 2024, where now it just feels incredibly outdated. But Gillies is game, her performance is charming, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy my time watching this. You can stream the film now on Tubi.
Sticking with the “embracing your sexuality” theme, I thought I’d recommend Tamara Jenkins’ delightful coming-of-age film Slums of Beverly Hills. Set in 1976, Natasha Lyonne plays Vivian Abromowitz, a fourteen-year-old girl whose father (Alan Arkin) continually moves the family from one cheap apartment complex to the next, eking out a meek existence on the outskirts of Beverly Hills. When her cousin Rita (Marisa Tomei) escapes from a rehab facility and comes to stay with them, Vivian must babysitting her adult cousin while exploring her burgeoning sexuality, navigating a crush on her neighbor Eliot (Kevin Corrigan), and managing the embarrassment she feels after she inherits her mother’s large breasts. While some of the sexual politics are very of their time (I can imagine younger audiences feeling some type of way about the age gap between Viv and Eliot), it’s refreshingly frank about topics like masturbation, menstruation, the unwanted attention teen girls get from men after once they begin to “mature,” and the weird distancing that sometimes happens between fathers and daughters who were once close. You can stream the film now on Hulu.
I saw Hungarian director Flóra Anna Buda’s animated short film 27 at Sundance earlier this year and really loved it. If you are a fan of Suzan Pitt’s work, then you’ll definitely love this too. This “surreal reverie” as Mubi calls it, follows Alice, an adult woman who still lives at home and his suffocating under the pressure from her parents and the precarity of her own lack of self-sufficiency. After a psychedelic rooftop party leads to a nasty fall on her bike, Alice’s raunchy, drunken dreams may just finally lead her towards the life she’s always longed for. You can stream the film now on Mubi.
This week’s pick from the Palestine Film Index is J. Reem Salloum’s Planet of the Arabs. I saw her feature film Slingshot Hip Hop (read more about this great doc here) on Le Cinema Club and really loved it, but they only make films available for one week at a time (I should have recommended it last week!!). Thankfully, her short film is available to watch on Vimeo. Inspired by the book Reel Bad Arabs, the film is cut like a theatrical trailer and features several decades worth of vilifying and dehumanizing portrayals of Muslims and other MENA peoples as seen in countless films and television shows, mostly produced by Hollywood. This film was released in 2005, so I can only imagine how much more horrible it would be if it were updated to include all the negative stereotypes and portrayals that have proliferated pop culture in the twenty years since it was made. It’s really chilling stuff, but I think an essential watch to understand how easily this kind of propaganda slips into entertainment, priming an entire population to hate another.
I meant to recommend Mary Bronstein’s Yeast when it became available on the Criterion Channel a few months ago, but now that it is expiring at the end of July, this is your last chance to give it a watch on there. Filmed and released during the heyday of the mumblecore movement (and featuring many of its luminaries like Sean Price Williams, Ronald Bronstein, and Josh and Benny Safdie behind and in front of the camera), Bronstein’s film plays a bit like is like if you took Frances and Sophie's relationship from Frances Ha and replaced all the cinematic whimsy with brutal honesty (I mean this complimentary for both films). Bronstein plays Rachel, who supposedly “has it together” (aka has a real job), but who also spends the bulk of the film belittling and picking fights with her best friend Gen (Greta Gerwig) and her roommate Alice (Amy Judd Lieberman). All three of the women are a mess, after all they are in their twenties and still trying to figure it all out, yet only Alice seems incapable of having any chill (or grace) when it comes to the faults of others, while at the same time refusing to (outwardly) acknowledge her own. As someone who is about the same age as everyone involved in this film, I felt viscerally transported back to my twenties (and 2008. Rachel’s ribbed tank top, the Nalgene water bottle, the copy of Yoko Ono's Grapefruit, her haircut? All too real.) I can see why people find this insufferable, but I also feel like a lot of the reviews I read find it extra insufferable because it revolves around three young women, which is in itself a mode of thinking that is best left in the mid-2000s. If you don’t have Criterion Channel, you can also watch the film on the Internet Archive.
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