Movie Review Showing Up

Showing Up (2023) 

Directed by Kelly Reichardt 

Written by Jon Raymond, Kelly Reichardt

Starring Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, John Magaro, Maryann Plunkett, Andre Benjamin, Judd Hirsch 

Release Date April 7th, 2023 

Published December 14th, 2023 

The Great Catch Up of 2023 continues with Kelly Reichardt's festival favorite, Showing Up. Teamed with her muse, Michelle Williams, Reichardt crafts a portrait of loneliness, disconnection, and art that feels a little like Reichardt's take on Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielmann, a languid, observant, sometimes bleak comedy about a disconnected woman longing to be seen and cared for while also nursing a mostly combative relationship with most other human beings. For Williams' Lizzy, other people are mostly a functional element of life that she must navigate while trying not to be bothered. 

Lizzy is an artist who crafts remarkable, fragile statues out of clay and fire and paint. Her work is abstract but painstaking. When she isn't making art in her garage, Lizzy also works as a secretary at an artist commune or art school, depending on how dismissive you want to be regarding art and artists. Lizzy got the job because her mother is in charge of the college and hired Lizzy as her top assistant. Lizzy does a good job while spending most of her time creating new ideas for her art. 

This would normally where I would launch into a thumbnail sketch of the plot, spoiler free, of course. However, Showing Up is not a movie that lends itself to such an easy boiling down. Kelly Reichardt's film is very much a slice of a relatively mundane life. Lizzy has few friends and a troubled family but she spends most of her time alone making art and feeding her cat. The biggest incident of any average day for Lizzy is badgering her fellow artist and landlord, Jo (Hong Chau) to repair her hot water heater which hasn't worked in weeks. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Past Lives

Past Lives (2023) 

Directed by Celine Song 

Written by Celine Song 

Starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro 

Release Date June 30th, 2023 

Published July 3rd, 2023 

The opening scene of Past Lives catches you immediately off-guard. Our main characters are in a bar together but we are not with them. We are watching them from across the bar as we listen to characters we will never meet, talking about our main characters. These strangers speculate about who our main characters are, whose the husband, who is the lover or ex-lover, are they family members? What is their dynamic? It's the kind of conversation many of use nosy people have had about strangers in public for years. It might break with formal film construction to begin the movie from a perspective other than that of your main character but this breaking of formality is rather brilliant once you come to understand the story being told in Past Lives. 

Past Lives is the kind of movies that spark your imagination in unique ways. It leads you to conversations about it and its many, many ideas about life, love, relationships, friendships, and the dynamics of the heart and mind. It invites you to consider the role you play in the lives of others and how any meaningful interaction you've had with another person has changed you in some way, for good or for ill. It's about how the impressions you make on others matter in ways we most often overlook. It's about a gentle, thoughtful exploration of these ideas via three wonderfully complicated and warm characters. 

24 years ago in South Korea, Nora (Greta Lee) became friends with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). They may have had more than friendly feelings for each other, but they were too young for that kind of thing. They did go on what their mother's called a 'date' but, again, too young for them to actually know what that means. In school they competed and encouraged each other. When Hae Sung finally beat Nora on a test, she cried and he offered her comfort, in the sort of rudimentary way a teenage boy might offer comfort. Their friendship is rather lovely until Nora bluntly informs her class that her family is moving to America, and she fails to prepare her best friend for this bombshell. 

He's clearly hurt by this and the two part ways almost silently, their last word being a simple and blunt 'Bye.' It takes a decade, but they do eventually reconnect. While chatting with her mother, Nora decides to search for her childhood friend on Facebook. She finds that he's been searching for her as well. This leads to a brief flirtation via Skype, hey it was a decade ago, okay? The relationship gets emotional and involved and discussions are had about seeing each other but life gets in the way. He can't travel to America because of his work, and she can't visit Korea because she's earned a chance to travel to a prestigious writer's commune. She suggests they take a break and he agrees. 

Read my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Overlord

Overlord (2018) 

Directed by Julius Avery

Written by Billy Ray, Mark L. Smith

Starring Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, John Magaro, Bokeem Woodbine 

Release Date November 18th, 2018 

Published November 17th, 2018

Overlord stars Jovan Adepo as Boyce, an infantry soldier, completely out of his depth when he’s dropped behind enemy lines in France during World War 2. Boyce, along with a group of 20 or so other soldiers have the task of destroying a German stronghold where a radio tower stands. The soldiers must destroy this communication tower, inside an old French church before the troops hit the beach at Normandy, the famed D-Day raid, and keep the Nazis from being able to radio for help. 

The plan requires men jumping from a plane over heavily guarded German territory and while the infantrymen are fooling themselves as best they can, they know that of the 20 or so on the plane, only a handful will survive the drop and be able to try and complete the mission. Boyce has an antagonistic relationship with many in his squad but the movie is smart not to linger over this with exposition, we will get around to that. 

The plane gets shot at and is about to crash when Boyce gets tossed out by his Sgt. On the ground, after nearly drowning in a lake, Boyce meets up with the few men who survived the drop. These include the commanding Corporal Ford (Wyatt Russell), the bullying Tibbet (John Magaro), an AP cameraman and soldier named Chase (Ian De Caestecker) and one other soldier who is not long for the movie. 

You will recognize the dead meat guy pretty quickly as he is the first and only one of the soldiers to spend time talking about what he plans to do when he gets home. He may as well have a wife with a baby on the way and a sign that says shoot me. The character is kind of a parody of the classic trope about the innocent lamb being led to the slaughter of war, but Overlord is not meant to be a parody.The film's modest sense of humor appears tacked on.  

Here we make the turn away from the plot and into a discussion of the movie as a conception. Overlord appeared to be, from the trailer, a wild-eyed zombie soldier movie that would be a rollicking ride. It is not quite that, not exactly. Instead, Overlord is a surprisingly straightforward World War 2 thriller that takes on elements of science fiction via historical speculation about the Germans experimenting on Jewish people, captured soldiers and their own dead soldiers. 

There is history to back up the idea that the Germans were committing horrific atrocities in the name of science. In fact, you might not want to dig too deeply into how some of the medicines of the day today came to be via what monstrous German scientists did to a lot of innocent people. I won’t cite a specific example here so as not to get bogged down in conspiracy theories, I mention this only to provide an insight into where the makers of Overlord are coming from. 

The intention here is to make an entertaining thriller with elements of science fiction and horror in the midst of the genuine, human drama of war. This is not a movie to be taken seriously but Overlord is a movie that surprisingly earns a little bit of self-seriousness that I know I wasn’t expecting from what I assumed would be a World War 2 zombie movie. There are elements of that zombie idea, but the story actually appears more at home in the world of speculative science fiction than the braindead horror genre. 

Speaking of horror, the best element of Overlord is the body horror element. The special effects at play in Overlord, especially the makeup effects, are superb in how they turn stomachs. One particular soldier's gruesome death is preceded by a transformation from man to God knows what kind of monster, featuring some truly gut wrenching visuals. Director Julius Avery may be a newcomer to big budget horror but he has a tremendous vision for terror, a mastery of creepy imagery that should bode well for his career. 

Overlord is tense and fun, a tad slow at times, and rather conventional given the zombie premise, but I do recommend the movie. Overlord is a terrific piece of war-time suspense and speculative science fiction. German scientists did horrible things to people in the name of war and Overlord is the rare movie to push the boundaries and look closer, even from the pop sci-fi perspective, at the horrors of Nazi scientist war crimes. 

Think of Overlord like a thought experiment that goes to the most broad and even ludicrous lengths regarding speculation over  what Nazi scientists were willing to do to those they deemed inferior to them. There is real life evidence to suggest that German scientists may have experimented on dead bodies and reanimation of corpses. That’s not me saying that Overlord has a basis in fact, it doesn’t, but I don’t see the harm in taking the idea of what Nazis may have done to people to an extreme conclusion. 

The World War 2 backdrop gives Overlord an unpredictable and chaotic bit of suspense that really works and keeps us in the audience aware of the constant  danger, not just from monstrous reanimated corpses, but from the Nazis who make a great villain. 

Overlord is in theaters nationwide now and is worth a look. Even if you wait for DVD and Blu Ray, if you’re a fan of horror movies, you will enjoy Overlord.