drama

She’s Lost Control (2015)

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twohalfstar

It’s difficult to tell exactly how much of my disinterest in She’s Lost Control has to do with my personal tastes, which lean towards excess over understatement, but there really isn’t much in this film for me to recommend. I didn’t exactly expect a bright, ecstatic affair from a drama about a sex worker ostensibly named after a Joy Division song, but She’s Lost Control still surprised me in just how lowkey & somber it could be from scene to scene. I didn’t particularly loathe the film at any point during its melancholy proceedings, but I didn’t engage with it much either.

As a sexual surrogate, the protagonist Ronah toes the line between therapy & sex work. She doesn’t have johns; she has patients. Early on in the film, when she proclaims “You pay me for my time but you can’t control how I feel” (in a speech she apparently delivers often), she’s already establishing that her clients are men towards which she has an incredibly vulnerable potential for emotional attachment. These are broken men with deep-seeded intimacy issues (such as a difficulty being undressed in front of a partner or a mental block when it comes to physical contact) that Ronah attempts to coax out of their well-guarded shells. Her vulnerability in these scenarios reaches a breaking point late in the film that feels simultaneously inevitable & brutally cruel.

There’s a lot of potential in these fragile, intimate moments, but first-time director Anja Marquardt does very little to tie their meanings into something more than “These things happen.” I’m sure that this was a deliberate choice & it’s one backed up by a similarly somber visual aesthetic, but I still found very few memorable moments in the final product, despite the great potential. Other folks more tuned-in to the gloomy, low-key indie drama as a genre might find something much more fulfilling here, but for me She’s Lost Control was essentially a gray wash of uncomfortable intimacy that signified little more than how cruel people can sometimes be when you make yourself vulnerable before them.

-Brandon Ledet

Straight Outta Compton (2015)

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fourhalfstar

I was at first a little overwhelmed by the idea of a N.W.A biopic stretching out for a 147min runtime, but as I was watching Straight Outta Compton in the theater its length gradually began to make total sense. It’s an incredibly thorough biopic, digging not only into the cultural & political climate surrounding the group’s origins, but also the aftermath of their falling out & disbanding. Even at 2.5 hours, not everything was covered & large swaths of historical accuracy were tossed aside in favor of a tight narrative & an indulgence in a killer 90’s aural & temporal vibe. Straight Outta Compton is not a particularly great example of a historical document, but damn if it didn’t achieve an incredible Cinematic Aesthetic in every scene, somehow managing to squeeze out a great biopic with exactly zero deviations from the format (unlike more experimental films like Love & Mercy). The cinematography, provided by longtime Aronofsky collaborator Matthew Libatique, confidently supported the film’s surface pleasures (including an onslaught of still-great songs & pandering nostalgia) to the point where any & all faults were essentially irrelevant. When a sample wraps up the music video portion of the end credits by proclaiming “Damn, that shit was dope!” (the very same sample that concludes the song the film’s named after) it was difficult to disagree.

Because stories ultimately belong to those still around to tell them, the film’s narrative is undoubtedly bent towards the stories of Ice Cube & Dr. Dre, who are both credited as producers here. In a lot of ways they use the film as a sort of redemption piece, reshaping their personal history to include a reconciliation with departed group member Eazy-E, who lost his life to HIV-related health complications at a young age. The real-life tale as long as I’ve known it has been that the group never truly resolved their very public feuds (a deeply ugly mess of shoddy contracts, legal disputes, and diss tracks) while Eazy was still alive. The movie version cleans that mess up in an unbelievably tidy way perhaps more fit for the likes of a made-for-TV TLC biopic, but that tendency towards a clear A-B narrative feels entirely intentional. There’s a scene late in the film where Cube confronts Eazy for calling out his acting debut Boyz n the Hood for being “an afterschool special” & Eazy responds “I like afterschool specials.” The simple, clean redemption story Straight Outta Compton tells doesn’t feel at all far from that sentiment.

So according to this romanticized, cleaned-up folklore, Dre was the group’s seminal producer, Cube was responsible for its best writing, and Eazy held down the majority of the raw talent, street cred, and business acumen. Folks like MC Ren, DJ Yella, and The D.O.C. are not only sidelined, but sometimes they’re even downplayed as lesser talents to make the film’s holy gangsta rap trinity shine all the brighter. Yella, for instance, shoulders most of the blame for Dre’s involvement in the Prince-influenced, sexually ambiguous funk days of the Worldclass Wreckin’ Cru & other club gigs that required him to wear sequins & play mindless party records. Ren gets the real short end of the stick here, though, verbally thrown under the bus as an inferior lyricist that couldn’t hold down the crew after Ice Cube’s departure. As a fan of the group’s entire output (and Ren’s solo records for that matter), these claims sting a little, but just as the fudging of the Eazy redemption story makes for a clearer narrative, dissing Ren in the script does actually make sense story-wise (even if it’s a shame that he only raps a total of three verses in the entire film to make more room for Cube, Dre, and Eazy).

If the film didn’t capture the entirety of the group members individual nuances, it at least got the imagery down. Actors Corey Hawkins & O’Shea Jackson, Jr. look & sound incredibly similar to the roles they’re playing (Dre & Cube, respectively), with Jackson having the distinct advantage (and possible awkwardness) of portraying his own father. New Orleans native Jason Mitchell pulls the hat trick of not only looking & sounding like Eazy-E, but also outshining his fellow cast members as a damn good actor, bringing to life what turns out to be one of the group’s more interesting & complicated characters. R. Marcos Taylor & speaking of Love & Mercy, Paul Giamatti (playing infamous record industry tyrants Suge Knight & Jerry Heller) aren’t nearly as visually accurate in their roles as the film’s villains, but they do provide an all-too-believable menace to their scenes that allow them to get by more as archetypes than carbon copies. The only actor who looks jarringly out of place here is a brief appearance by an absurdly inaccurate Snoop Dogg, but that’s more than made up by the likeness of the rest of the cast, an appearance from a Tupac lookalike so accurate he could’ve been a hologram, and clips of the “Straight Outta Compton” music video shown at the end credits to remind you just how detailed the film’s attention to visual preciseness was.

Visual & historical accuracy aside, director F. Gary Gray should get a lot of credit here for creating a wildly entertaining biopic with exactly zero deviations from the genre’s format. This is a movie that somehow makes room to capture our current cultural 90s fetishization, ludicrously timely reflections on race-based police brutality that are sadly just as potent now as they were in the days of Rodney King, and an extended gag that calls back to the infamous “Bye, Felicia” line in Gray’s debut film (and original collaboration with Ice Cube) Friday. Instead of calling into question N.W.A’s more unsavory attributes, namely their misogyny & homophobia, Gray just lets them play themselves out. Misogyny is on display in hedonistic, music video style pool & hotel parties where women are treated like party favors (sometimes literally tossed around like objects) & homophobic rants are allowed to be voiced in Ice Cube’s infamous diss tracks & Eazy’s reaction to his HIV diagnosis. Straight Outta Compton makes no moral judgements about its subjects, but rather just more or less portrays them as they were.

There’s some glorification inherent to the biopic format here & a lot of ground was breezily glossed over (including contributions from names like Vanilla Ice, Bone Thugs, Above the Law, and J.J. Fad), but it’s unwise to nitpick too many of Gray’s decisions here, since the final product is so enjoyable & packed-to-the-gills as is. It’s not only successful as an aurally & visually beautiful slice of N.W.A fan service, but it’s also a great primer for younger folks who mostly know Ice Cube as an actor & Dre as Eminem’s buddy who peddles expensive headphones. Even as a longtime fan, I learned a thing or two along the way (most excitingly that Eazy-E once dined with President George H. W. Bush). Gray competently captures the social & political climates that gave birth to his infamous subject as well as the context of their dissolution’s aftermath (even if he intentionally fuzzes up the details in-between), but the story he tells in Straight Outta Compton is mostly remarkable in how fun & rewatchable it is without at all straying from its biopic format. He used an already well-established narrative structure as a bottle to capture the lighting that was what the made the group so special & their songs so endlessly listenable to this day. That’s no small feat & the final product ended up being one of my favorite trips to the theater all year.

-Brandon Ledet

Clouds of Sils Maria (2015)

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three star

Nothing can sink a film faster or more thoroughly than the viewer’s misplaced expectations. I know it’s not fair to judge a film based on what you expect it to deliver as opposed to what’s actually on the screen, but sometimes I can’t help myself. Clouds of Sils Maria is a good movie. It’s visually stunning, hosts a handful of excellent performances from greatly talented actresses, and doesn’t have any particular scenes that fall flat without impact. Still, I can’t help but feel like the movie let me down in some way that I can’t quite put my finger on. It was good, but I was expecting it to be great, an unfair expectation or not.

As far as the film’s performances go, most of Clouds‘ emotional weight rests on the shoulders of Juliete Binoche & Kristen Stewart, who play an aging actress of stage & screen who’s struggling with an ever-evolving industry & her young, no-bullshit assistant, respectively. Having never seen Stewart in a single Twilight movie (okay maybe I drunkenly heckled the first one), I’ve only ever had positive experiences with her work, so her success in Clouds of Sils Maria comes as no surprise to me. Juliet Binoche’s immense talent is another no-brainer, but it’s her unlikely chemistry with Stewart that makes the screen sing. Whether the two are tensely conducting business across a series of electronic devices, tensely rehearsing lines for Binoche’s latest role, or tensely enjoying an alcoholic beverage, there’s a great push & pull to their relationship that unfortunately proves to be a well-played non-starter. Chloë Grace Moretz also cashes in on some long detected, but rarely seen acting chops here in a role as a Lindsay Lohan/Miley Cyrus archetype, but there’s no mistake that this is Binoche’s & Stewart’s show.

The other significant element in play is the movie’s play within a play structure, which of course comes with an avalanche of meta context. As Stewart’s & Binoche’s characters discuss acting as a craft, it’s difficult to separate their words from the real-life actors speaking them. As they rehearse lines from a script about an older executive seducing a younger version of herself, it’s difficult to separate the-play-within-the-movie’s sexual power dynamics from their characters’ relationship as intimate coworkers. As they discuss the current state of tabloid culture & celebrity gossip it’s difficult not to think of the dialogue as the actresses venting on camera. Clouds of Sils Maria has a lot of fun playing with audience perception, blurring the lines between fiction & reality in an admittedly catty, but intricately layered fashion.

There’s also a lot of simplistic, but effective visual majesty derived from the location of the film’s title. The clouds of Sils Maria’s mountaintops are flowing, river-like washes that add a drowning sadness to the separation, death, and axiety that plague the opening of the film. At one point the clouds & mountain roads overwhelm Stewart’s character in a psychedelic cacophony that suggests a drastic change coming in the film’s structure (à la Bergman’s Persona) is imminent, but alas very little changes & the film silently rolls along, just like the clouds that decorate it. There’s so much commendable about Clouds of Sils Maria that it pains me to admit that I wasn’t fully satisfied with the entirety of what was delivered. I left the film with a mind full of pleasant sentiments & images, but still feeling empty-handed, as if I had tried to grasp a passing cloud, only to watch it dissipate between my fingers. It’s a difficult reaction to describe, but I also doubt I’m the only one who felt it.

-Brandon Ledet

Girlhood (2015)

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fourstar

Despite what you might expect from a film about roving packs of French girl gangs, Girlhood is far from an on-the-nose melodrama with explicit messages about the powder keg of poverty & puberty. Instead, it’s a brutally melancholy slow burner about an especially shitty youth with dwindling options for escape. It’s far more open-ended & hazy than I was anticipating, opting more for a gradual unravelling than a grand statement. It’s that aversion to closure & moralizing that makes the film special when it easily could’ve gone through the motions of rote Lifetime Movie schmaltz.

That’s not to say that Girlhood is all grays, haze, and sadness. It certainly does have it’s . . . bright, shining moments. Specifically, the scene where the central gang is dancing to Rihanna’s “Diamonds” alone in a fancy hotel room while sporting shoplifted dresses is a transcendent dream of a respite that briefly shakes the dull pastel voids of the movie’s housing projects in favor of an intense music video chic. In that moment it’s not at all difficult to see why the protagonist Marieme would choose gang life over her only other viable options: vocational school or a life of housekeeping. Besides the “Diamonds” scene & several other moments of otherworldly dance parties, Girlhood also shines in its opening sequence, in which two female football teams clash to the sounds of minimal synth in an oddly beautiful, but violent display that sets the tone for what’s to come. As the football match lets out, the girls roam in a cloud of raucous chatter.

These dreamlike escapes are always fleeting, though. The group gradually splinters & the scene shifts from an unbridled, decidedly feminine joy to a quietly fearful trip through a very literal, very dangerous-feeling male gaze. A lot of what lurks in Girlhood‘s pensive silence is an unspoken oppression & the threat of violence from the few men in Marieme’s life, particularly her older brother. Torn between fending for herself & protecting her younger siblings, Marieme finds herself in the vulnerable position of not qualifying for high school and decides, rather quickly, to trade in her makeshift football gang for a much more purposeful gang of loveable reprobates. It’s through the empowerment of her new crew that she builds the confidence to occupy traditionally male spaces: night time public streets, fistfights, sexual exploration, etc. The meek quiet of that opening football sequence is quickly supplanted by the rush of Marieme getting whatever she wants through brute force & the solidarity of her newfound sisterhood. The problem is that Marieme is too smart to play the girl gang game forever. As much fun as she has with the scene’s selfies & shoplifting, pocket knives & smart phones, she begins to plan for the future, which is about as dangerously unsure & open-ended in the film as it is in real life.

Much of the Girlhood‘s back half deliberately raises more questions than it dares to answer as its protagonist tries to figure out exactly who she is & what she wants. Due to an unfortunate (but perhaps intentional, marketing-wise) similarities in titles, Girlhood has of course suffered a lot of comparisons to Richard Linklater’s technically impressive, but (in this reviewer’s eyes) messy at best in practice Boyhood. Given Boyhood‘s never-ending need to wrap everything up tightly in a neat little package, the two films couldn’t be further apart in their approaches to capturing the essence of youth on film. Girlhood has no interest in telling a complete story, but rather indulges in soaking in the cold, grey pastels of a life drifting through housing projects and the inevitable doom of the pull between personal & familial obligations that poverty & shrinking options for escape can often inflict upon far too many young people. Girlhood’s disinterest in closure is a commendable impulse with thoroughly satisfying results, even if those results don’t include straight answers or an A to B narrative. It’s less of a complete story than it is a solemn mood piece, a melancholy tone poem with occasional dance breaks and much-needed gasps for air.

-Brandon Ledet

The Smokers (2000)

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halfstar

This was the dumbest film that I’ve watched so far this year, and the only interesting thing about it is a couple of fun facts about the “masterminds” behind the film’s production. After graduating from Tulane University, Nick Loeb became one of the co-founders of the International Production Company (IPC), and the first film the company produced was The Smokers. He also played the role of Jeremy in the film. Jeremy was supposed to come off as the film’s nice guy, but Loeb’s acting was subpar at best and the character ended up just being pathetic. Thankfully, he went on to become a well-known businessman and put his acting career on the backburner. Loeb has been in the news on and off in the past few months because of the embryo controversy between him and his ex-fiancé, Sofia Vergara. It seems like he’s probably still butthurt about being associated with The Smokers. Also, just to make things a little more interesting, Quincy Jones was the film’s executive producer, and the film’s director, Christina Peters (aka Kat Slater) is also a director in the adult film industry. Dream team!

What I expected to be an edgy film about a group of rebellious teenage girls turned out to be the one of the worst representations of feminism that I’ve ever seen, feeding into the misconception that empowered women are psychotic man haters. The leader of the pack, Karen (Busy Philipps), is angry at the entire male species and attempts to start a revolution with a few bullets and handgun. She also enjoys sporting terrible Juggalette inspired makeup from time to time. Her two pals, Jefferson (Dominique Swain) and Lisa (Keri Lynn Pratt), had some bad experiences with boys, and while they don’t have as much of a violent attitude as Karen, they sort of follow her lead. But not really. They don’t know what they want to do, just like this film. It has absolutely no direction and it’s about an hour too long.

-Britnee Lombas

Southpaw (2015)

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twohalfstar
The advertisements for Southpaw have been driving me mad every time I go to the movies lately. No matter how I timed my entrance at the theater it seemed I was always just doomed to hear Eminem echo “I am PHENOMENAL PHENOMENAL PHENOMENAL” in an embarrassing fashion & I’d find myself cringing again. Much of the film’s trailer had me interested in Jake Gyllenhaal’s follow-up to his nightmarish turn in Nightcrawler, but Eminem was regrettably featured so prominently in Southpaw‘s trailer that I was expecting to take at least a half-star off my rating every time one his songs played on the soundtrack. Although Eminem’s voice is only heard twice during the film (once during a clueless in tone training montage & once during the end credits) his prominence in the trailer does point to a lack of self-awareness that prevents Southpaw from being anything too fresh or special.

It would be one thing if Eminem were something Gyellehaal’s punch drunk protagonist Billy Hope blasted in headphones to get pumped up before his boxing bouts. A down on his luck, white brute foster home survivor with a drinking problem certainly sounds like the kind of dude who might be a huge fan of the Detroit rapper, who knows a thing or two about being a down on his luck white brute with a troubled upbringing. Instead, though, Eminem’s contribution to the film amounts to little more than a business deal soundtrack tie-in, complete with an official music video. It feels like an ancient practice, dead for at least a decade, that’s much better suited for already-cynical corporate cash grabs like Juicy J’s contribution to the Ninja Turtles soundtrack or Waka Flocka Flame’s (laughably awful) collaboration with Good Charlotte meant to promote the latest Adam Sandler stinker Pixels. Instead of helping detail the character of its protagonist, Eminem’s involvement instead details the character of the film itself.

Southpaw is a mediocre film. It’s passable as a redemption story melodrama, but rarely memorable as a unique work. Even die-hard fans of boxing films in general are likely to find it difficult to distinguish its individual charms from much more distinctive examples of the genre. The story it tells is pretty easy to call from beginning to end within the first fifteen minutes or so, complete with a couple tearjerker character deaths solely meant to give Billy Hope’s inevitable final triumph some sense of meaning or purpose. Without a unique narrative or any visual touches to distinguish Southpaw (outside maybe a couple interesting 1st person POV shots in the ring), all that’s left then is the quality of the acting, which varies from Impressive, But Not Nightcrawler Impressive (Gyllenhall) to Decent (Forest Whitaker) to I’m Wearing A Hat! (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson). It’s not a terrible viewing experience (besides maybe the sequence where it tries to use an Eminem song for misguided cool points), but Gyllenhaal’s performance is the sole element in play that approaches anything near PHENOMENAL PHENOMENAL PHENOMENAL and that’s far from enough to save the whole ordeal from mediocrity. I hope the actor continues this recent trend of playing scary that started with films like Nightcrawler & Enemy, but I’d like to also like to see that talent put to much more interesting use with far fewer Enimem songs stinking up the joint.

-Brandon Ledet

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015)

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onestar

It’s been interesting to see lately how teen movies are shifting away from the raunchy, American Pie type of sex comedies that have been prevalent since the late 90s towards a more serious, “grown-up” sensibility that hasn’t been very popular since the 80s era of films like Say Anything . . . & The Breakfast Club (or anything by John Hughes, really). Newer films like Dope, White Bird in a Blizzard, and an endless list of John Green adaptations have all reached for a more emotionally resonant, less detached brand of teen media, all with varying degrees of success. The recent Sundance-favorite Me & Earl & the Dying Girl is painfully aware of this trend and attempts to both play along with & subvert serious teen movie earnestness. It fails on both counts. By pretending to be above the emotional vulnerability of John Green adaptations while dabbling in the very same overreaching narcissism & sentimentality, Me & Earl & The Dying Girl creates an all new kind of inflammatory teen movie monster, one with both unique & clichéd reasons to be derided.

If Me & Earl & The Dying Girl is trying to interact with its earnest teen cinema pedigree in any deliberate way, it’s at the very least echoing elements of the John Green cancer-romance drama The Fault in Our Stars. As opposed to the John Green aesthetic where Everything Means Everything & teens struggle with the overwhelming significance of everyday existence, Me & Earl & The Dying Girl  shrugs off the emotional weight of a teen dying of leukemia and proposes that nothing means anything at all. It’s not endearing. The film’s protagonist, the titular Me, drifts through life without any concern for anything outside himself. An all-star navel gazer, Me (often referred to as “Greg” for some reason) finds zero significance in any of life’s little ups or downs and tries to keep it all very casual, unless of course the subject at hand is himself, in which case it’s of the upmost importance. This could be an interesting character trait if the movie surrounding him didn’t have the exact same fascination with Me, despite the wide range of infinitely more fascinating characters surrounding him.

The level of self-absorption in Me & Earl & The Dying Girl (alternately titled Me, Me, Me & Me) is so out of control that the central conflict is not whether or not The Dying Girl survives leukemia, but whether or not Me gets to go to college. The least interesting character in this film gets the first, middle, and last word, steamrolling any possible character development outside himself with his overbearingly bland omnipresence. There’s a scene late in the film where Me discovers that his Dying Girl friend has an artistic side she neglected to express to him directly. According to Me’s (& the movie’s) logic this is because Dying Girl was intentionally keeping her artistry private. The truth is, of course, that Me never shut up about himself for two consecutive minutes, so Dying Girl never had a chance to get a word in edgewise. Along with Me’s depressed stoner dad, Dying Girl’s white wine enthusiast mother, the titties & Criterion Collection obsessed Earl of the title, and a selfless former bad boy history teacher, Dying Girl is just one of many fascinating characters that are shamefully allowed to fade into the background while Me blathers on about Me, Me, Me & Me. The best scene in the film (& one of Dying Girl’s most prized memories) is a glorious, but all too brief stretch where Me finally shuts up because he is high & eating a popsicle.

This Is The Part Where I Explain That The Movie Is Not Only Narratively Bankrupt, But Also Stylistically Horrendous. Me, Me, Me & Me is broken up by annoying chapter titles similar to the first sentence of this paragraph and that’s far from the only instance of its stylistic overreaching. The film mostly borrows from familiar visual sources like Wes Anderson & Michel Gondry, often deviating into stop motion animation & Be Kind Rewind-style “Sweded” versions of Criterion Collection films. One of the worst mistakes Me, Me, Me, & Me makes is constantly reminding you of better media you could be filling your time with: The 400 Blows, The Red Shoes, Modest Mouse, etc. The movie does find its own visual language & metaphorical exploration in objects like scissors, pillows, and hand-drawn, Criterion-themed DVD covers, but their significance amounts to little more than inside jokes. Most of what the film accomplishes visually has been done before, better & many times over.

Like when I saw b I of course got the nagging feeling that no matter how much enjoyment I could pull from this movie, there was going to be a very specific target audience who connected to it even more. The difference is that Dope was at the very least entertaining to an outsider, while this film will only be entertaining to Me and all the Me’s in the audience, whoever they are. All I can say at this point is that I didn’t particularly care whether or not Me got into college, which seemed to be the main point of the film, so I guess it was a failure overall & I very much look forward to never spending any more time or energy on Me in the future. Hats off to the other characters & members of the audience who have more patience for Me’s incessant pondering on the nature of Me. I just didn’t have it in me.

-Brandon Ledet

My Mistress (2015)

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three star
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One of the most unexpected genre revivals I’ve noticed recently is the return of the 90s style erotic thriller. From major releases like 50 Shades of Grey to trashier fare like The Boy Next Door, there seems to be a veritable resurgence of erotic thriller media. This might be a little disheartening to defenders of good taste & decency, but for cinematic trash dwellers like myself, it’s a godsend. Bring on the expensive-looking echoes of crap that used to play at 2am on Showtime & Cinemax, I say. Bring it on, ya garbage peddlers.

It’s with that attitude that I welcome, without a safe word even, the arrival of My Mistress to Netflix’s Recently Added stockpile. An Australian film that grapples with questions about grief, maternal love, and the therapeutic powers of BDSM play, My Mistress doesn’t quite match the campy heights of fare like The Boy Next Door, but it also doesn’t try to. Although its story about a dominatrix who becomes involved with her teenage neighbor sounds adventurous, the film mostly plays it safe. It’s at heart a pleasant, but low key melodrama about two people who’ve been badly hurt & find solace in each other’s company. This kind of melancholy ambition doesn’t do much for the film’s erotic thriller appeal, admittedly. If it were to be a true addition to the genre one of the two love birds would have to flip out and start threatening to murder the other, but that’s just not the kind of story told here.

That’s not to say that there aren’t trashy elements at play. My Mistress may be hinged on the devastating grief suffered by two lonely souls, but it knows exactly how tawdry the erotic elements of its BDSM subject are. While the movie never gets overly kinky outside a couple whippings, there’s enough leather bullet bras & doggy costumes to give the whole thing a campy undertone. Watching a teen boy try to seduce a grown woman by smoking cigarettes and playing tough with lines like “I’m bad. Really bad. Evil sometimes,” is the kind of playfulness the movie tries to get away with while still dealing full-on with the more tragic plot developments. There’s also some uncomfortable, Oedipal vibes in the contrast between the two central mother-son relationships that the film is smart not to push too hard, but it still adds an extra layer of tawdriness to the affair.

My Mistress is not likely to be a movie that’s going to change anyone’s life. At best, it might help you fill up an afternoon. Its worst fault might be that it somewhat plays into the typical BDSM Folks Just Need to Meet Someone Sweet to Lower Their Defenses triteness you usually encounter in these kinds of films, but that only adds to its trashy charms in some ways. It’s a pleasant movie that finds a way to have it both ways, playing with titillating 90s Skinemax erotica and exploring the sad nuance of romance & grief. I liked the balance it struck, even if it didn’t push its worst impulses into deliciously over-the-top JLo territory.

-Brandon Ledet

The Sisterhood of Night (2015)

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witch twohalfstar The ads for The Sisterhood of Night got me all riled up for nothing. The movie’s trailer promised that there would be some in-the-woods witchcraft silliness (that would be somewhat buried under some over the top courtroom drama, but still) mostly like a millennial The Craft in nature. Or at least that’s what I hoped for when I saw the trailer. My persistent thirst for witchy media may have blinded me from seeing what was truly being advertised: an afterschool special/Lifetime Original Movie type tyrade against the dangers of online bullying. The Sisterhood of Night did feature brief flashes of witchy vibes & media frenzy nonsense, but it was mostly a simple tale about how teen girls should be nicer to each other online. It’s a nice sentiment, but not exactly a profound or captivating one.

Self-described as having “an atmosphere of furious accusation and hysterical rumor”, The Sisterhood of Night warns of the dangers of telling a lie to gain more attention online, especially when it’s at the expense of your peers’ reputations. When a few teenage girls decide to go offline (delete their blogs & Facebook accounts, basically) and start forming a more personal, intimate community in the woods, their return to nature is approached by outsiders with rampant suspicion. A jealous girl who was not invited throws some wild accusations at their secret goings on in order to get some sweet blog clicks and the whole thing spirals out of control in a way that teaches everyone involved lessons about empathy, trust, privacy, and how absolutely fucking tough it is to be a teenage girl. Again, the intent of the movie is admirable, but there just isn’t a whole lot going on that will leave any impression at all, positive or negative, on most viewers.

I was wrong to assume so much about The Sisterhood of Night’s plot before I had seen the actual film. The one time someone actually delivers what I wanted and shouts, “I’m a witch & The Sisterhood is a cult!” it was a sarcastic exchange. I’m not sure how much this false assumption colored my response to the film, but I doubt I would have watched it at all otherwise. There’s some interesting ideas at play here about why a modern teen would decide to “go offline” and the ways both adults & kids alike can be really shitty to teens for no reason other than they want a private space to be themselves. The execution never felt that more adept than a decent made-for-TV movie, though, so the message feels a little flat, no matter how admirable. After finding an unexpected wealth of enjoyment in both Unfriended & The DUFF, The Sisterhood of Night is the third anti-online bullying film I’ve seen released in 2015 and the least memorable of its kind. If only they had worked those ideas into a story about actual witches, I might have changed my tune.

-Brandon Ledet

Small Sacrifices (1989)

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three star

In 80s cinema, Farrah Fawcett was best known for her performances as revenge-hungry victims in films such as The Burning Bed and Extremities. However, in the made-for-TV biopic, Small Sacrifices, Fawcett transforms from a victim to a straight-up killer by taking on the role of the infamous Diane Downs. In the early 80s, Downs made headlines after being accused of shooting her 3 children in the backseat of her car. A few years after the incident in 1988, true crime writer Anne Rule published Small Sacrifices, which (obviously) the movie was heavily based on. The film has definitely made its share of appearances on the Lifetime channel throughout the years, so it’s easy for it to blend in with all the other made-for-TV dramas. The only thing that really sets it apart from the rest is Fawcett’s phenomenal performance. She’s really good a playing a bad mom. As horrible as that may sound, I mean it in the best way possible.

With her fluffy blonde hair, cute Southern accent, and all-American smile, Fawcett perfected the innocent image of Downs. How could this sweet single mother of 3 kill her children? Well, she was disturbingly obsessed with a married man (and fellow postal worker) Lew Lewiston, and during one of their rendezvous, he mentioned to her that he was not interested in having children. Interestingly, Ryan O’Neal played the role of Lew, and at the time, he and Fawcett were in an iconic relationship. Lew ended his relationship with Downs to go back to his wife, but Downs wasn’t having it. She completely lost her mind and took her children on a late night car ride, and while Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” was blaring in the background, she shot them all. Of course, she created an elaborate story about being attacked by a stranger that was hanging out on the deserted road, but she really sucked at keeping her story straight. Little by little, she transformed from being a grieving mother to a terrifying psychopath. I can’t even imagine how difficult it was to portray someone so mentally unstable, but Fawcett nailed it. She was so good that I had a difficult time separating her from her character, and that’s not something I come across very often.

Lifetime junkies, true crime lovers, and everyone in between, Small Sacrifices is an absolute must-see. The movie is about 3 hours long, so be prepared to spend a good bit of time with this one.

-Britnee Lombas