THE TEACHERS' LOUNGE (B+) - Writer-direct Ilker Catak spins a fascinating story about small-stakes accusations and misunderstandings that consume a new teacher and the middle school staff and students around her. It's a small but compelling film that's tough to look away from.
Much of that comes from the star, Leonie Benesch, who plays the cool, caring Carla Nowak, an immigrant to Germany battling some cultural prejudices involving her and her students of color. The film begins with the administration's interrogation of Carla's seventh-grade class after a Turkish boy is seen carrying an unusual amount of money. Carla shows sympathy to her students and to the boy when his parents are called in for a tense conference with administrators.
It turns out another bright student, Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch), grabs the teacher's sympathies, especially after Carla, through surreptitious video surveillance from her laptop, apparently catches Oskar's mother, a staffer, of stealing in the teachers' lounge (she's not the only one nicking things). The mother is sent home on admin leave, and Oskar becomes a sort of folk hero among students. (The supporting cast of students is another asset, especially the rebellious student-newspaper staffers.) Carla's group conference with parents brims with tension.
Catak, writing the script with Johannes Duncker, has a compelling message to convey about "outsiders" and the passive-aggressive ways that closed social systems manipulate the truth and create sparring factions. At only a few ticks past 90 minutes, the film unspools its story methodically, showing a subtle transformation in Carla as she learns to navigate her new environment. (In a telling scene, she insist that a fellow Polish teacher speak German in the teachers' lounge.) The ending is heartfelt, with a whimsical final shot that suggests the dangers and rewards of bucking the system.
BONUS TRACK: Life Is Short
Screenings don't get more timely than "Mountains," a minor-key mini-drama about an immigrant couple getting by in Miami's Little Haiti community. If only this debut film had a little more chicken meat on its bones. Xavier and Esperance are a sweet couple, but the monotony of their days eking out a living in a gentrifying neighborhood is too often as dull as plain white rice.
You can tell their neighborhood is gentrifying not only by the "We buy houses" door-hangers but also by the presence of an improv theater. Xavier (Atibon Nazaire) works on home-demolition sites, and Esperance (Sheila Anozier) earns money as a crossing guard when she's not at home cooking and sewing. Surrounded by increasing affluence, Xavier spots a nice house that's bigger than their rundown one-bathroom place, seeing an opportunity to move up on the social ladder. Their son, Junior (Chris Renois) a college-dropout is a typical Americanized young man who has little patience for his parents' boring traditional lifestyle.
We find out halfway through that Junior is honing a standup act at the improv theater. Director Monica Sorelle gives us little to glom onto narratively in the first half -- how many times can we watch Xavier clear debris (to make way for McMansions) or dutifully eat his lunch out of Tupperware. Nazaire has a Mike Tyson roughness and gruffness to him, but there is no real dimension to this stereotypically noble blue-collar man. Junior's standup set, about five minutes, shakes the film out of its stupor. But I just didn't have it in me to return to the worksite and find out if Xavier and Esperance get the chance to rise in the wake of the gentrifiers. Sorelle has crafted a sweet, quiet slice of life that floats in Haitian culture, but she needed more of a hook to hang a feature on.
Title: MOUNTAINS
Running Time: 96 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 50 MIN
Portion Watched: 52%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 9 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Went home and started in on this review.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 3-1 (maybe I'll catch the ending some day)
What is it with annoying mother-daughter movies this year? We stuck it out for the execrable "Tuesday" a few months ago. But we were not as patient with "Janet Planet," a tedious tale of maternal melancholy told through the perspective of the nerdy tween daughter, an obvious avatar of first-time filmmaker Annie Baker.
We waited a half hour for a plot to develop, and it just never materialized. When tween Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) went to a bread-and-puppet show with her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), and the hippie-dippy performance droned on for a minute or two, it was time to bail out. Before then, Baker was meticulously trying to craft a relationship between friendless Lacy and her depressed mother who is in a dead-end relationship with a monosyllabic cipher named Wayne. Janet likes to lie in bed with her daughter to help Lacy fall asleep, and it presents an opportunity for Janet to inappropriately whine about her unhappiness to an unhappy, though highly clever, girl.
Lacy dominates the first half hour, and there just is not enough narrative to sustain the film. Her best shot at having a friend comes when Wayne's daughter joins one of their outings, but it's obvious that Wayne will get the boot soon, and so too will go the daughter. We are forced to watch Lacy entertain herself with nerdy pursuits. For some reason we have to watch her practice the keyboards three separate times -- in extended sequences that grow more and more annoying. We also have to tolerate Lacy being annoying to Wayne when he is suffering from a migraine, and it's not clear whether he's supposed to be seen as a jerk for not wanting Lacy to keep pelting him with questions when it's obvious that she should know better.
Baker takes a molasses-like approach to her scenes, in no hurry to bring this in at much less than two hours. If I'm going to watch a mother and daughter mope around, it would be advisable to start developing the plot in the first 20 minutes or so. Otherwise, it's just your old '90s diary performed as rural hippie theater.
Title: JANET PLANET
Running Time: 113 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 30 MIN
Portion Watched: 27%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 9 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Talked politics with my movie pal who bailed with me.
MAXXXINE (B) - God bless movie star Mia Goth and writer-director Ti West for their commitment to their trilogy of retro horror films, a delightful mix of spoof and homage. Here, they take their story -- which began with "X," set in the 1970s -- into the day-glo '80s around the seedy San Fernando Valley's porn industry as Goth's lead character Maxine yearns to cross over into the respectability of Hollywood.
Goth is riveting again as the cut-throat striver who will do anything to be a movie star, even as the friends around her start falling victim to a serial killer stalking L.A. In "X," she survived a slaughter on a porn shoot at a Texas ranch, with a dual role as the murderous old lady in the farmhouse, whom Goth then portrayed in the heady prequel "Pearl," set during the 1918 flu pandemic. Now set in 1985, the story finds Goth running from her past -- not just that '70s bloodbath but also her strict Christian upbringing, which is brought into stark relief through a single opening flashback scene to her childhood.
West crafts the story around his meal ticket, and he has an uncanny ability to not only send up the thrillers of the '80s era, but also to steep this film in the texture and tropes of the movies of that Cinemax era. (The needle drops of hits by ZZ Top and Kim Carnes don't hurt.) He also has a facility with writing dialogue that also walks the line between authenticity and parody.
Goth (who also stole a few scenes in "Emma" a few years ago) carries this on her shoulders, with a placid facial expression that brings to mind the mask-like visage of Isabelle Huppert. While portraying characters (Maxine, as well as Pearl) who were desperate to be stars, Goth emerges from this sequel as a classic movie idol. She gets solid support from veterans Giancarlo Esposito (as her sly business manager); Elizabeth Debicki as the mother-hen horror-movie director; and Kevin Bacon as a creepy Cajun private eye, chewing up scenery as if he just got kicked off the set of "The Big Easy" for overacting.
I could watch West and Goth follow this saga for a few more decades. It's a lot of dumb, juicy fun.
BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) (B+) - It was an interesting experiment, revisiting this onetime indie phenomenon on its 25th anniversary screening, along with a full house full of 20- and 30-somethings at a midnight show. I was wondering how it would hold up and curious about how it would play to a generation steeped in the internet and social media.
I first watched this on video some months after it was released in summer 1999. It was notable at the time for a brilliant PR campaign that tried to dupe us -- in the early days of the internet -- into thinking that this found-footage film was real (going so far as to hide the three stars from the spotlight during the rollout at film festivals). That all now seems quaint looking back from our jaded media-saturated land of artificial intelligence.
I heard several millennials grumble their disappointment as the lights came up and the final credits rolled, and the woman in front of me spent much of the final climactic 20 minutes of the movie scrolling through her cell phone. I was able to appreciate a slow burn of a thriller with fresh eyes and an open mind. When I first saw it, the steadily building terror had me jangled, even though I knew that it wasn't a real documentary.
This time, I was surprised to see how methodically -- and often blandly -- the suspense builds. And I was impressed by the three actors -- alpha female Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard (the only one to go on to have a decent acting career, including in "Humpday" and "Fully Realized Humans") -- who mostly improvised the dialogue and who wielded the handheld cameras, a key visual effect throughout the film.
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez conceived the movie and directed it and even edited it. The banality of three young adults getting lost in the woods, spooked by some strange but not necessarily scary sounds, dominates the running time until really the final 10 minutes when everything bursts into full-on horror. That includes the now-iconic scene of Donahue, snot running out of her nose, doing a video-selfie, her character apologizing on camera to the group's parents for her role in stranding the trio, and the final image before the cut to black.
It is difficult to reconcile the experience of 1999 with that of 2024, but you can still say that "Blair Witch" is a successful horror film, that can jangle your nerves even after multiple viewings.
BONUS TRACKS
"Maxxxine's" soundtrack blasts through era hits from New Order and Judas Priest, plus Animotion's synth earworm "Obsession":
And near the climax we are treated to Carol Burnett, of all people, belting out "There's No Business Like Show Business." (One character during the film reminds Maxine of the cutthroat nature of the industry: "It's not called show friends; it's called show business."
