Emergency: Following the leads of past Sundance breakouts including Damian Chazelle (Whiplash) and James Wan (Saw), director Carey Williams and writer KD Davila hit a home run by adapting their own short film into a feature. Emergency is a damn near perfect coming-of-age tale that organically mines situational comedy, multi-faceted social commentary, suspense and heartfelt odes to the power of true friendship out of a story about three black and Latino college students (Donald Elise Watkins, RJ Cyler, Sebastain Chacon) whose plans for an epic night of partying gets suddenly foiled when they return to their apartment and find an unconscious white girl (Maddie Nichols) passed out in their living room. Davila's clever writing creates a believable, unpredictable balance of silly college movie hijinks and the sobering reality that every choice these three young men make during the night could be the difference between life and death, Williams directs with the poise of a 20-year yet as he gracefully navigates the tricky tonal balance this material presents to create a piece of work that's truly dynamic and the main trio of actors do an incredible job of being goofy, vulnerable and authentic to their individual characters throughout the course of this night that will change their lives and relationships with one another forever. Emergency is an endearing gem of a movie and I hope that it'll be able to overcome Amazon's reliably dismal marketing efforts and find some degree of a meaningful audience on Prime Video in the coming months.
Grade: A-
Crimes of the Future: David Cronenberg was so excited to return to the body horror genre for the first time in 23 years that he overstuffed and undercooked the hell out of the script. There's so many loose plot threads, secret organizations and mutilated weirdos milling about in the dystopian art world hellscape Cronenberg builds in Crimes of the Future that it's difficult to draw connections as to how they're all intertwined and what exactly each entity/individual is motivated by. As deeply messy as it is, Crimes of the Future makes up for some of its unfocused storytelling sins by filling most of these unexplored narrative rabbit holes with an abundance of intrigue. Cronenberg has created a richly atmospheric world where advances in evolution are rapidly stomped out by the government, an absence of physical pain among the bulk of the population has caused people to become fascinated by, physically attracted to and even envious of the people that do feel it and people have become so obsessed with changing their appearance and desire to feel pain again that various cosmetic surgeries are being performed on every street corner. Even when what's being presented on the screen doesn't make total sense, the images and worldbuilding are never less than fascinating. With more fleshed-out writing and a couple more performances that are as mesmerizingly nutty as Kristen Stewart's supporting turn as a meek government agent who becomes downright smitten with a famous organ-removing performance artist (Viggo Mortensen), this probably would've been a really freaky, darkly comedic sci-fi horror standout.
Grade: B-
Watcher: Joining Carey Williams on the list of directors to watch from this year's edition of Sundance is Chloe Okuno. Her feature debut Watcher is an expertly made classical psychological thriller about an American woman named Julia (Maika Monroe, adding another notch to her unheralded scream queen belt) that has just moved from New York to Bucharest, Romania for her husband's (Karl Glusman) marketing job who feels she's being watched and followed by a man (Burn Gorman) who lives in the building directly across from their apartment complex. Small decisions like setting the film in a foreign country where Julia doesn't know the language and is unemployed in a place where she doesn't know anyone allows the feelings of isolation, unease and fear plenty of room to gradually build before they hit a nerve-shredding crescendo in the chilling final 15 minutes that validates both Julia's fears and Okuno's slow burn approach to thriller filmmaking. Watcher is just a hell of a way to spend 90 minutes in a movie theater and I can't wait to see what paranoia-inducing nightmare Okuno can come up with next.
Grade: B+
Fire Island: Although the slightly melancholic subtext of a group of gay friends (Joel Kim Booster, Bowen Yang, Matt Rodgers, Tomas Matos, Torian Miller) in their early 30's coming to the unfortunate realization that the carefree days of their youth and the traditions that are associated with them are about to come to an end loom over the party like an ominous gray cloud on a summer afternoon, Fire Island-which shares a name with the popular New York LGBTQ tourist destination off the coast of Long Island-manages to savor as much light as possible before the storm comes in. There's plenty of time to solemnly reflect on the metaphorical death of one's youth, but until that moment arrives, spending your last hoorah in a vibrant romantic comedy wonderland where you can go from hating a stranger that you drunkenly bumped into at a beach bar to ending up on the receiving end of a creatively sappy "stop your true love before they get on a plane/train/boat and leave your life forever" moment is a pretty idyllic way to cap off a wild child era. "Laugh now, cry later" didn't become an expression for no reason and from the sea of raucous beachside party sequences to the casual orgies to the triumphant placement of Donna Summer's "Last Dance" in the final moments, Fire Island embraces that mantra to the fullest.
Grade: B
No comments:
Post a Comment