Friday new releases: 16 February 2024

May December, Bob Marley One Love, Madame Web and Red Mole: A Romance are in cinemas, Suncoast is on Disney+

A few weeks ago, I encour­aged read­ers to check out Todd Haynes’ most recent film, Dark Waters, and now I’m going to encour­age you to go and see his new one – May December.

Natalie Portman plays an act­ress on a research trip for her new film. She’s vis­it­ing the woman who she will be por­tray­ing (Julianne Moore) as well as friends and fam­ily. The kind of totally nor­mal thing that act­ors do to pre­pare for a role.

Except …

In this case, the way that Portman goes about her work, it feels kind of exploit­at­ive, pred­at­ory. Which in a way is appro­pri­ate because the char­ac­ter she is going to play gained her notori­ety for exactly the same thing. She was once jailed for the crime of stat­utory rape, hav­ing a sexu­al rela­tion­ship with a 13-year-old col­league at the pet store where she worked. (The char­ac­ter is inspired by Mary Kay Letourneau, who as an ele­ment­ary school teach­er abused, had chil­dren to and then mar­ried Vili Fualaau.)

The film could be about the pro­cess an act­or goes through and how that pro­cess appears to nor­mal people, or it’s a por­trait of a rela­tion­ship whose com­plex­ity is almost impossible to divine, or – as Haynes’ sug­ges­ted to me when I inter­viewed him for RNZ – it’s about who gets to tell our stor­ies and define our narratives.

Oh well, it’s his film, he should prob­ably know.

Anyway, it is end­lessly fas­cin­at­ing, superbly dir­ec­ted and per­formed (Charles Melton as victim/husband Joe is a rev­el­a­tion), and I expect you will want to talk to someone about it at length afterwards.

There’s some­thing a little bit off about Bob Marley: One Love, a new biop­ic of the reg­gae super­star dir­ec­ted by King Richard’s Reinaldo Marcus Green and it took me a while to put my fin­ger on it.

Kingsley Ben-Adir plays Bob (also called Nestor or Skipper depend­ing on the circles he is mov­ing in) and even though it’s a good per­form­ance from a top act­or, I nev­er got the sense that who he was por­tray­ing was actu­ally Bob Marley.

He doesn’t phys­ic­ally resemble the man and, even though stage man­ner­isms are care­fully recre­ated, he doesn’t feel like the guy who shows up in the archive shots dur­ing the credits.

A little bit of famili­ar­ity can get in the way of these things, which is why it’s good that Rita Marley is a much less well-known fig­ure. It allows Lashana Lynch to steal the film, frankly.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

In fact, the most pleas­ur­able aspect of the exper­i­ence is, in fact, The Wailers – the fic­tion­al­ised ver­sions who lively up the screen whenev­er they appear, and also the real ones on the soundtrack, which has been mixed to sound abso­lutely mar­vel­lous on a decent set of cinema speakers.

The most joy­ful scene of the week is the flash­back where the teen­age Wailin’ Wailers audi­tion for legendary pro­du­cer Coxone Dodd (Jeff Crossley) and you get, in one very funny shot, a sense of the lun­at­ic geni­us that is Lee Scratch Perry (Everaldo Creary).

Madame Web is anoth­er super­hero film that –like The Marvels – is focused on female char­ac­ters and is led by women creatives.

Which means that it is likely to be shot down by cer­tain sec­tions of the dis­course without receiv­ing the bene­fit of any doubt. Which would be a shame because – even though there is much to quibble about – it has its heart in the right place.

Dakota Johnson plays a para­med­ic named Cassie Webb (Cassie is short for Cassandra, which is already a bot on the nose if you know your clas­sics). An orphan since birth, she has developed a tough and cyn­ic­al exter­i­or that con­ceals a heart of gold.

After a work­place acci­dent in which her heart stops for a few minutes, she devel­ops the abil­ity to see into the future which leads to her provid­ing pro­tec­tion to three teen­age girls who a supervil­lain in a spider cos­tume (Tahat Rahim) is try­ing to kill.

Somehow, all of these char­ac­ters are linked, thanks to a rare Peruvian spider and a mys­ter­i­ous tribe with spider-like abil­it­ies derived from its venom. And, because of Sony’s need for cor­por­ate syn­er­gies, they are all linked to a wider Spider-Man uni­verse that also includes Tom Hardy’s Venom films. Sometimes it’s clunky, some­times it’s sweet, but the need to include it gets in the way of what the film really wants to be about, which is moth­ers (absence of) and daughters.

Incidentally, there is some heavy-handed Pepsi product place­ment in the film which reminds me that Sony are the only major stu­dio that places ads on the YouTube offi­cial pro­mo­tion­al mater­i­al. How cheap can a multi-billion dol­lar com­pany be?

Returning from last year’s Film Festival, the loc­al doc­u­ment­ary Red Mole: A Romance is an intriguing pic­ture of the New Zealand counter-culture of the 1970s but it ends up being less about the cul­ture than it is the fam­ily who were at the heart of the theatre com­pany. That’s why it’s “a romance”, I guess, but it does feel like a missed oppor­tun­ity to place Red Mole in the con­text of their cul­tur­al whakapapa. Where did they come from and what artist­ic leg­acy did they leave?

Red Mole were an avant-garde theatre com­pany, formed at Auckland University in the late 60s but who reached New Zealand prom­in­ence with cab­aret shows in Wellington in the 70s, cul­min­at­ing in a sold out sea­son at the State Opera House.

Feeling that they had prob­ably peaked in little old Aotearoa, they headed to New York where they eked out a liv­ing with their quirky per­form­ance art.

It feels churl­ish to say this from the dis­tance we have now, but their New Zealand notori­ety prob­ably had more to do with the fact that the women got their boobs out than the strength of their the­at­ric­al­ity. New Zealand has always respon­ded to naugh­ti­ness and nov­elty and Red Mole did both.

I used to think that com­pan­ies like Red Mole – and films like this one – showed that there was more to New Zealand than the rugby, racing and beer ste­reo­type but the reg­u­lar appear­ance of cer­tain sur­names sug­gests that there wasn’t a deep well of unre­cog­nised art appre­ci­ation in this coun­try, there was just a dozen or so multi-generational fam­il­ies hold­ing back the tide of philistinism.

I won’t name them here but if you have any interest in New Zealand’s cul­tur­al his­tory you can prob­ably guess who they are.

In 1990, 26-year-old Terri Schiavo had a heart attack and nearly died. She was resus­cit­ated, but had suffered massive brain dam­age that left her in what the dotes call a per­sist­ent veget­at­ive state need­ing a feed­ing tube to keep her alive. In 1998, her hus­band – in accord­ance with what he under­stood to have been her wishes – asked for the tube to be removed.

Her par­ents dis­agreed and so began a long and pain­ful court battle, one of the early skir­mishes in the now end­less and bit­ter cul­ture war we exper­i­ence daily.

By 2000, Schiavo had been moved by her hus­band (and leg­al guard­i­an) to a Florida hos­pice where right-to-life protest­ors gathered every day as the vari­ous leg­al cases were being argued.

This is the real-life back­ground to Laura Chinn’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film, Suncoast which is now avail­able to stream on Disney+.

Around the same time that Terri Schiavo was receiv­ing hos­pice care, Chinn’s broth­er was dying of meta­stas­ised brain can­cer and her fam­ily was pre­par­ing for him to spend his final days at the very same facility.

In the film, Nico Parker plays teen­age Doris, lonely and frus­trated at all the atten­tion her veget­at­ive older broth­er is get­ting – not least from her as the primary care­giver while her solo moth­er (Laura Linney) is at work wait­ing tables.

At the hos­pice, she makes friends with Woody Harrelson’s Christian protest­or and, when her mum decides to stay full-time in her brother’s room (so he won’t be alone when he passes), she takes the oppor­tun­ity to try and impress her class­mates by let­ting them throw parties at her mod­est little house.

This one is worth per­sever­ing with, even though for a long time just about every­one in it is kind of awful, because the emo­tion­al pay­off is even­tu­ally well-earned.

And, even though they are mostly just back­ground and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters, the film also makes abso­lutely clear that hos­pice people are the very best of us which is a sen­ti­ment that I can only con­firm and applaud.

Further listening

I’ll be appear­ing in my reg­u­lar slot on RNZ Nights with Emile Donovan at 9.30 tonight. I’ll be review­ing Suncoast, the newly restored Monty Python’s Flying Circus Blu-ray box­set and (in the part of the seg­ment that focuses on free stuff), the two Venom films that are cur­rently avail­able on TVNZ+ in Aotearoa.

I hope you can tune in (101FM or online), it’s a fun seg­ment to do.