SpaceCamp (Harry Winer, 1986)

This is the infamous space-shuttle-accident film released mere months after the Challenger disaster condemning it to box-office hell. Surprisingly, you can do far worse on a lazy Saturday afternoon than watch this solid-plus entertainment. Once you get over the premise of kids surviving an accidental launch into space, it generates some legit nail-biting tension. An 11-year-old Joaquin Phoenix is on board under the name Leaf Phoenix, many light years away from his 2019 Oscar. Kate Capshaw (a doppelganger for JoBeth Williams) plays an astronaut frustrated over never having gone on a space mission. The irony of an accident affording her the opportunity will not be lost on anyone with even surface knowledge of women at NASA. Most Americans cognizant in the 1980s will recognize the rest of the cast: Lea Thompson, Kelly Preston, Larry B. Scott, Tate Donovan, Tom Skerritt. There's also a robot named Jinx who brings problems. Forgettable but I was stunned by how much I dug it.

Afterward, the Mr. jokingly asked if it was one of the ten best films of 1986. But you know what? If we limit ourselves strictly to Hollywood product, it just might be, so pathetic was the decade for Hollywood cinema. It's quantum leaps better than the #1 box-office champ that year, Top Gun. For the good stuff, Manhunter. That's Life. Something Wild. Aliens. I have issues with Blue Velvet and The Fly (don't ask, Lynch/Cronenberg dorks). Haven't seen Platoon in a minute. And then, um, er, uh...SpaceCamp??

Grade: B+

New York Film Festival 60 Screenings 2

Stars at Noon (Claire Denis) 

Fresh from directing quite possibly her worst film ever, Avec amour et acharnement (Both Sides of the Blade) (2022), Claire Denis bounces back somewhat with Stars at Noon, an adaptation of Denis Johnson's 1986 novel The Stars at Noon. Margaret Qualley stars as an American woman of no apparent past or even future. She may or may not be a journalist and while it seems as if she wants to escape a hellish, present-day Nicaragua, we have no clue where she's headed. She meets Daniel (Joe Alwyn), a British businessman who needs to escape more urgently than she does, and begins a feverish romance marked by extremes of passion and indifference.

The l'amour fou stuff is great, jerrybuilt for art-cinema ambiguities. But Denis tells us little about present-day Nicaragua which begs the question as to why she updated Johnson's novel in the first place. And it's not as if Denis isn't poised to examine the country's current climate. Indeed, she chose to base production in Panama because she felt it would be immoral to film in Nicaragua after Daniel Ortega's hideously repressive re-election. But beyond a few acknowledgements of COVID, her film gives no sense of life under Ortega today. And when several Nicaraguan men are gunned down while helping the principals escape on a raft, the extreme indifference with which the scene is treated makes one long for a story that centers these men rather than the two pretty stars schvitzing all over their country.

Grade: B+

The Ten Best Albums of the 1990s!

1. DJ Shadow: Endtroducing..... (Mo Wax/FFRR, 1996)

2. Shanté: The Bitch is Back (Livin' Large, 1992)

3. Sleater-Kinney: Call the Doctor (Chainsaw, 1996)

4. M People: Elegant Slumming (Epic/DeConstruction, 1994)

5. The History of Our World Part One: Breakbeat & Jungle Ultramix By DJ DB (Profile, 1994)

6. My Bloody Valentine: Loveless (Sire, 1991)

7. Asia Classics I: The South Indian Film Music of Vijaya Anand - Dance Raja Dance (Luaka Bop/Warner Bros., 1992)

8. Whale: We Care (Hut/Virgin, 1995)

9. The Music in My Head (Stern's, 1998)

10. Iris Dement: My Life (Warner Bros., 1994)

New York Film Festival 60 Screenings 1

Coma (Bertrand Bonello)

Bonello's latest is somewhat of a disappointment coming after so much successive excellence (Saint Laurent, Zombi Child, Nocturama, etc). Filmed in Bonello's home in January 2021, Coma is an 81-minute collage meant to evoke the disorienting suck of staying at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are animated sequences, a soap opera played out via pixilated dolls (one of whom is voiced by Gaspard Ulliel, who played Saint Laurent for Bonello and who died at 37 in a skiing accident this January), videos of a YouTube influencer named Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), a Zoom call between several teen girls debating the coolest serial killer, a Simon-like memorization game meant to while away the hours/remind us that we have no free will, a forest where the living and the dead mingle, text messages, FaceTimes, more. Phrases uttered by one entity will get repeated by another. One of the dolls starts spouting Trumpisms. Bonello dedicates this stream-of-consciousness sprawl to his then-18-year-old daughter Anna, represented by the similarly aged Louise Labèque (of Zombi Child fame), as an acknowledgment of the difficulties of remaining at home at such a formative age. It's all a bit trite, especially the last sequence in which Bonello implores Anna to stay strong over images of ecological disaster. But, horizontally, it triumphs. You can ignore the vertical platitudes and bask in the perverse structure. Still, here's hoping his next project, a free adaptation of Henry James' 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, synthesizes his best tendencies.

Grade: A-minus 

10 Rillington Place (Richard Fleischer, 1971)

For its form/content dislocations, 10 Rillington Place reminds me of I Spit on Your Gave (Meir Zarchi, 1978). Both films treat exploitative subject matter with a stateliness more common in art cinema. A lesser director might cheapen the already tawdry true story of Timothy Evans (John Hurt, powerful), a British man wrongly accused and hanged for killing his wife Beryl (Judy Geeson, heartbreaking) and infant daughter Geraldine (Miss Riley [!]), and John Christie (Richard Attenborough, an absolutely fantastic, creepily close-miked performance), the serial killer responsible for those (and other) murders. But Fleischer takes it as an opportunity to deliberate on the working class milieu, making it clear that Evans' precarious economic situation forces him into a false confession and seals his doom. Much of the film is taken up with Beryl's decision to have an abortion since they cannot afford another child. Unlike so many serial killer films, 10 Rillington Place points to worlds outside the immediate thrill of blood and gore. 

Grade: A-minus