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The latest film releases include Honey Don’t!, Splitsville, Lurker, and Suspended Time. Weighing in are Alonso Duralde and Dave White, film critics and co-hosts of the movie podcast Linoleum Knife.
Honey Don’t!
A private eye (Margaret Qualley) in Bakersfield investigates a series of murders tied to a mysterious local church.
White: “The case itself, the mystery of it, is of lesser importance than … the vibe. It's been a couple weeks since I saw it, and the element of the mystery has faded from my thoughts. But what has stayed around is that sun-baked Bakersfield of it all, the tonal silliness, and the film's emphasis on Qualley as a very cool cat in very hot clothes and an even hotter ‘70s convertible. And it picks and chooses very classic noir and detective tropes to pump up and camp up. And she takes over and delivers exactly the chill sexiness that the script is asking for. The supporting cast is really funny too. … I found it really entertaining in a very low-key way. And I think that's what it's aiming to be: a very welcome end-of-August excuse to go hang out in the air conditioning.”
Splitsville
When his wife asks for a divorce, a man turns to his friends for support, but gets involved in their open marriage.
Duralde: “This movie has an escalating absurdity about it, and a really fun take on masculine fragility and the big talk that people will have about … being cool about things, and then what really happens when they have to face it head-on. This has some of the biggest laughs of the summer.”
White: “So often it's the case, especially in comedy, that unconventional sexuality finds its resolution in a very traditional spot after it peers into the abyss of more libertine ways of living. So you would think that for this marriage go-round comedy, that it might wind up in a much more conservative place than it does, but it's not even really interested in doing that. It bounces so much off its own walls and spends its running time bobbing and weaving with its characters that you don't know where they're going to end up or in what shape. … It owes a lot to the screwball comedies of the ‘30s, and it is especially influenced by Preston Sturges and how his comedies often involved a large ensemble of side characters that animate the proceedings.”
Lurker
From writer/director Alex Russell, a retail worker joins the inner circle of a soon-to-be-famous pop artist.
Duralde: “This is a movie where you see people behaving badly and working … in dishonest ways into other people's lives, and a knot forms in your chest. And as the film goes on, that knot just tightens and tightens. And Russell very masterfully plays out the suspense, the thriller aspects, and just the emotional terror that these characters inflict on each other.”
White: “It's all told in a very economical visual language, putting Gen Z's habits under a microscope, all from an insider position. It carries with it this tone of nonchalance that is actually a smoke screen for very, very studied effort. It is chilling and mean like a horror movie in many ways. Alex Russell has delivered a very impressive debut here. He knows how to dig into the psychology of young people, and he does it ruthlessly.”
Suspended Time
During the COVID shutdown, two married couples quarantine together in a French countryside house.
White: “It is about two middle-aged brothers spending the French COVID lockdown in their childhood home with their respective girlfriends. And the tensions that arise from their differing perspectives on literally everything related to that confinement. … [Director Olivier Assayas] shot the film in the childhood home he grew up in outside of Paris, where he spent the French COVID lockdown with his brother and both of their partners. So very much a thing that really happened here. Underneath the squabbling between the brothers and commentary on the privilege of living during a global pandemic in a very comfortable and peaceful place where no one is really in any danger, there's another story. One that Assayas began in one of his other earlier films called Summer Hours.
And it's the story of the house that they're in and the objects, the books, the art, the furniture, and the memories that those possessions carry in them, and how they influence you when you're back there. So in Summer Hours, the tone was very mournful and concerned that family legacy might dissipate with the death of their elderly mother. And in this film, you come to understand that those concerns have not subsided or been entirely resolved. And they are compounded by the ways that siblings can revert to childish behavior when they enter their childhood home. So it becomes very moving on that level, in much more subtle ways.”
Duralde: “Here you get these conversations that were happening during the lockdown that I think we're still grappling with. He talks to a filmmaker about the future of filmmaking and film-going, and whether or not those are going to be tenable things in a post-lockdown world. And we're still figuring that out. I mean, you talk to people in the industry here in Southern California, the productions are not back up to the levels they were beforehand, and movie theater chains are certainly still struggling to get people to come in. And so it's not like this was a blip in time, and then we just forget about it and walk away. We're still in that moment. And so I think movies like this remind us that these conversations started in a certain place, and that we still have to grapple our way through them.” |
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