The Manor: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Or Maybe Not

 

Barbara Hershey turns up in The Manor somewhat as feisty and subversive as her youthful persona in Boxcar Bertha nearly a century ago - a seventy year old reluctantly confined by her family to the nursing home in question, following a mild stroke. Increasingly convinced that there's something sinister going on way beyond just over-medicating the residents to shut them up and keep them docile and compliant, the instinctive rebel in Judith is on the case. Or is she? 

 And that's where this chilling forensic elder care home scrutiny, dubbed here as 'death row' takes a sudden, unpredictable turn into a different sort of horror spree - touching on life under capitalism. And that masterful storyteller, writer/director Axelle Carolyn who originally hails from Brussels, would appear to infuse this gothically shrouded narrative with a lot more than European cinematic sensibility. Say, the increasingly dark descent of US society into economic and psychological decline and desperation.

 

As for Judith's rebel instincts in a confrontation with her fascist leaning, progressively freaky surroundings - though Barbara Hershey in this instance is ultimately no Jack Nicholson, there seems to be a refreshing trend in movies lately, of elderly female action heroes. Last year, for instance, Dianne Wiest stood up as a defiant victim of retirement home physical and emotional abuse along with financial exploitation, in 'I Care A Lot' - while Cicely Tyson, who just passed away earlier this year, risks her life as spunky whistleblower in her nineties, exposing a criminal enterprise holding the elderly hostage tied up in a basement for their monthly social security checks, in Tyler Perry's A Fall From Grace. 

 

And getting back to The Manor, though some reactions may range from bewilderment to disappointment regarding Judith's ultimate behavior - and without giving too much away - let's just say that under capitalism, it's inevitably a given that enriching oneself is to the expendable, comparable detriment of others in US society. And which may be said to lend significant, ironically realistic if brutal existential weight, to this otherwise fantasy horror tale.

 

Prairie Miller

 

Karen: The Karens Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks

 

Karen- Who Is She, What Is She Up To, And Why. So what compelled African American filmmaker Coke Daniels to make this movie on the Karen racist phenomenon - starring Orange Is The New Black's Taryn Manning as the Karen in question, and civil rights George Floyd family attorney Ben Crump turning up on screen too. 

Though a Karen movie is long overdue, it's by no means a recent ugly phenomenon - and really as old as this country itself. Whether precipitating the countless slave and Jim Crow lynchings or some of the most glaring reported cases of Emmett Till and the Tulsa Massacre with connections to the particular phenomenon of white female racism, it's about time to say the least. And though critics out there are not at all happy with this particular Atlanta Karen created by Daniels, their motivations may be either bossy backseat driver tendencies to have not made a movie their way - or methinks the Karens doth protest too much. 

Or perhaps it's considered a violation of the unspoken demand when it comes to placating liberal guilt at the movies, that an emotional rather than political catharsis is required for a stamp of approval on any film about what is always the controversial topic of racism. So were they dismayed at not encountering to their liking a documentary or a weepie instead. Though admittedly, that fast forward happy ending seemed in too much of a rush to cut narrative corners. 

In any case, props to Daniels, in reviving the subversive, irreverent blaxploitation genre - while continuing the emerging Black Renaissance in film to make movies their way, in its challenge to that entrenched cultural apartheid in Hollywood and beyond. Not to mention the reference in the movie to the covert blue brotherhood of cops because yes, the police force in this country originated in plantation slave patrols to hunt down runaway slaves.

Said Daniels in my conversation with the filmmaker: "My film is for other communities to just feel, you know, the pain and anguish of what black people go through in this country on a regular basis. And this is just putting a band aid on a bullet wound. But I would just hope that showing my film in this light will maybe put the mirror to some of the Karen types of behavior in people's faces, to say hey - this is ugly what we do..." 

Oh, and by the way, regarding one critic mocking the inclusion of 'a wailing trumpeter for some reason' - hey, a little research never hurt any review. That 'wailing trumpeter for some reason' happens to be renowned Grammy Award winning jazz musician Keyon Harrold Sr., a victim along with his young son of Soho Karen in NYC, and who likewise similarly performed in a protest gathering following that horrendous incident. 

Prairie Miller

Mama Weed: Shopping As The New Female Weapon Of Choice Scene Of The Crime Scenario

Mama Weed: Shopping As The New Female Insurrection Scene Of The Crime On Screen

 Huppert's 'arresting' charisma rules in this daring Economic Crisis Cinema gem. Flaunting a subversive female-centric literally undercover fashion statement superhero shopping spree, as the new weapon of choice scene of the crime scenario on screen.

Originally titled The Godmother and adapted from the Hannelore Cayre novel of the same name, Mama Weed excels irreverently as a daring Isabelle Huppert astonishes and delights with a take no prisoners takeover in this feminist comic noir with a raw rebel heart. Huppert as Patience Portefeux is anything but, a financially struggling older woman - a mother, widow and low wage worker as an Arabic wiretapping translator for an undercover narco squad at a Paris precinct. And with her knowledge of the language owing to her origins as the daughter of an Algerian immigrant father who married her French mother - now likewise widowed and confined to a nursing home.

Running out of economic options with dual looming evictions from her apartment, as well as her mother's nursing home that she can't afford, Patience by chance encounters a highly unusual opportunity that materializes for this female breaking bad girl in progress, when she translates for the undercover squad a pending big bust of imported hash - and whose driver is the son of the devoted immigrant attendant caring for her mother at the nursing home. Dabbling in an identity theft fashion statement, literally undercover concoction of traditional Arab female attire, Patience emerges as her own self-styled free lance double agent, marketing the marijuana in question - while simultaneously staging a rebellion against an economic system indifferent to low wage working class distress, to say the least.

An Economic Crisis Cinema gem, along with targeting an oppressive legal system criminalizing drugs, Mama Weed manages a flawless mix of satire and serious political issues. While illuminating at its center Huppert who with 'arresting' charisma, miraculously manages a compelling combo of frail and fierce, both on and off screen. Not to mention a mind over muscle feminist approach to superhero solutions, hatching scene of the crime scenarios with shopping as the preferred weapon of choice in places most female frequented - supermarkets and department stores.

Prairie Miller

Cruella: Twisted Tale For A Cynical Time

Mean is queen it would appear these days, as feminism finds itself, following hopeful and inspiring origins in the late last century, at the crossroads of right wing and cancel culture combo assaults, and endangered species irrelevance. Enter Cruella, and its movie screen as distorted mirror twisted tale for a cynical period. 

Splitting screen time are the outrageously sassy two Emma's. With Emma Stone doing split personality double duty as bottom feeder lower depths orphaned thief Estella and dark side Cruella - while obsessively bent on ruthlessly crashing her way into the designer fashion world. Though ultimately locking horns with even more ruthless Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson), who presides over the reigning London fashion house. The baroness eventually allows her entry into the business as an apprentice. Though with a suspicious eye poised to run any necessary interference on  Estella clawing her way into upstaging her.

A mix of male and female writers helmed by Craig Gillespie and that includes script by committee screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada) and Kelly Marcel (Fifty Shades Of Grey), Cruella would seem to reflect their own personal ambitions.  That is, as women like the female protagonists in Cruella, in fierce competition pitting themselves against both men and other women - in a race to the top of that professional food chain. While the actual males in this oddly sexless movie, range from eunuchs to clowns.

So with all erotic desire unconventionally absent and passion preserved solely for ambition and professional back biting, the typical Hollywood approach to human struggle on screen prevails. As always, personal and never mass movement inspired - even in this economic crisis moment, both in the movie and the real world.

Along with a warped notion of feminism that has evolved ideologically from Cruella's late 20th century setting to the present time, that women must be meaner than men in order to make it in the world. One look no further than female public figures Margaret Thatcher, 'We came, we saw, he died' giggling Hillary, Bolivia coup dictator Jeanine Anez, and rabid right wing Congresswomen Marjorie Tayler Greene along with QAnon linked Lauren Boebert today. 

In other words, move over Meryl Streep - Emma Thompson would have made the much more deliciously malevolent Thatcher.

Prairie Miller

Nomadland - More Kerouac Than Grapes Of Wrath

 Hollywood Exploits Homeless Crisis As Cross Country Great Adventure

A pandemic wet dream escapist antidote in ever worst sense of the word, Nomadland and its current breathless avalanche of critic accolades could not be further from its sobering reality. Director Chloe Zhao seems to be exploiting free spirit fantasy - somehow traveling the Trump train in that regard making US socio-economic misery great again. 

Nomadland finds Frances McDormand impersonating a homeless elderly woman who embarks on a lone journey in her van across the barren western landscape, following the death of her husband and the shutting down of that mining region - the zip code vanishing as well. At first Fern's plight plays out as disturbing and heartbreaking, a reality progressively observed as this country sinks into an economic crisis counting joblessness, hunger and homelessness everywhere.

But as Nomadland progresses, Zhao's focus digresses into increasingly unrelated side trips - namely homelessness not only as choice, but rambler euphoria. Far less a massive hard times state of hopelessness than an adventure across state lines. And a fleshing out of Fern's increasingly unlikable personality as misanthropic, a rejection of family and deep relationships with an aversion to other than fleeting human contact on the road.

Meanwhile, no need apparently to responsibly include the alarming statistics on homeless female assaults, murders and rapes. And by defining homelessness here as mental or emotional in origin, the travesty continues, not only in maligning the homeless - who may very well have psychological issues though predominantly as a result of being homeless - but in sidestepping the economic causes and solutions to their predicaments.

 And to sum up, with Nomadland essentially featuring characters hugging and kissing their poverty like a great hyper-romaticized US adventure - including intermittent cheerful gigs at Amazon warehouse pit stops along the way to earn some spare change. Wonder if Amazon allowed filming there if criticism of their worker exploitation was totally off the table.

Oh wait, Zhao's reward for buttering up the critics with this middle class pandemic virtual escape romp - she has been pegged to helm Hollywood's latest Marvel superhero spree, The Eternals.

Prairie Miller
Host and Executive Producer, Arts Express
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The Last Vermeer: Combo Classic Trickster, Cunning Subversive

 

 

** "In the colonies of yesteryear, we were the Nazis. We raped, we murdered, we took slaves - we even threw babies on to fires. And the statues of the men who led that, stand proudly in our public spaces." 

Guy Pearce is one of the most accomplished - and unheralded actors around, noted for his roles in Memento, LA Confidential and Brimstone. And now the Australian actor both astonishes and bewilders in The Last Vermeer,  inhabiting the psyche of the real life, ostentaciously evasive WWII Dutch artist and art forger Han van Meegeren. Who sold the classic painting in question to the Nazi occupiers - in exchange for art they looted from the national museums. Or did he. 

Simultaneously convicted, cursed and celebrated in his lifetime for trading classic artwork to the Nazis - while at the same time adored in Dutch popular culture by trading a forged Vermeer to them in exchange for authentic museum art they pillaged from the national museums,  the notorious figure symbolizes beyond his situation in this dramatic feature, the questionable US and European powers who today claim, or rather self-proclaim global moral authority. And continued demonizing and assault in that regard, against Third World countries they've targeted with genocide and exploitation, for centuries.

And which brings up key political questions masterfully encircling and fueling the narrative revisiting this relatively unknown figure elsewhere. Essentially, what is truth really, when it comes to victims and villains, who gets to define them whether courtrooms or the historical verdict - and all the gray areas in between.

The Last Vermeer may be the first candid, uncompromising dramatic interrogation probing what passes for truth or fabrication in the inevitably confounding aspects of human history. And swept along by the astonishing, deliriously elusive and mystifying Oscar-worthy performance of Guy Pearce - fueling a splendidly perverse, alternately shrewd and discerning vivacity to the notion of unreliable narrator, indeed. And, those eyebrows...

Prairie Miller

Wuhan Wuhan: Concern Not Cash For Care Triumphs Over The Pandemic

 

It goes without saying that documentary filmmakers with conviction step in as truth tellers where the media fear - or conspire - to tread. Such could not be more true, and timely, as a pressing and corrective screen statement than Yung Chang's Wuhan Wuhan. The Canadian director journeyed to Wuhan, the site of the first massive outbreak of the covid pandemic, to collaborate on this feature with Gong Cheng, a graduate of the People's Liberation Army Academy of Art, joining together their diverse international perspectives for this extraordinary venture.

Strikingly crafted as cinema verite, allowing the film's subjects to speak for themselves, Wuhan Wuhan proceeds into the city's pandemic stricken corridors to pursue a story with no predetermined ending - and more about crisis in progress than conclusion. Which deftly lends an element as well of dramatic suspense towards the unknown - which in hindsight has been victorious - a rare accomplishment in documentaries.

But of likewise astonishing note, is China's collective cultural contrast when it comes to health care. The sick simply walk into a hospital to receive treatment - no interrogations about acceptable insurance or paying for exorbitant procedures - which in this country leads many too fearful to seek critical help for the virus or any number of conditions, and instead hoping to get better at home but dying there instead. And with one patient casually announcing something never heard here in medical settings "I know the government cares about us."

Yet another surprising observation, is the sighting of psychologists, essential components of the medical teams making the rounds of the covid wards. And one inquiring of the patients - does anyone need therapy, maybe for anxiety or insomnia. Or just being sad. "You don't have to ask me. Everyone here needs therapy, including me."

 

Prairie Miller