New releases: Cold Storage and Secret Mall Apartment

My recov­ery con­tin­ues to go well and I was able to make it to the cinema twice last week – once for this column and once for my rostered appear­ance on RNZ’s Culture 101 next Sunday. In the mean­time, more titles move from the ‘new releases’ column to the ‘must catch them when they turn up online’ column (or, in the case of Reminders of Him, the ‘maybe its ok that they just passed me by’ column).

Cold Storage is one of those films we used to see in cinemas reg­u­larly in the 80s and 90s – a nice and tidy bit of genre engin­eer­ing fea­tur­ing a vet­er­an act­or and some new faces bat­tling spe­cial effects in order to save the world. This ver­sion is writ­ten by A‑List screen­writer David Koepp (Indiana Jones, Jurassic World and last year, two Soderberghs – Presence and Black Bag) and it’s largely his craft that keeps things to a tight and sat­is­fy­ing 90+ minutes. The big moments are cour­tesy of British TV dir­ect­or Jonny Campbell.

When the first manned space sta­tion Skylab crashed back down to Earth in 1979, it was sup­posed to burn up on reentry, incin­er­at­ing its con­tents at the same time. However, for the pur­poses of Cold Storage, at least one of the sci­ence exper­i­ments on board made it the sur­face intact – a vir­u­lent and fast mov­ing green fungus with the abil­ity to take con­trol of its host’s brain­stem and viol­ently repro­duce itself through­out the imme­di­ate environment.

Back in 2007, mil­it­ary bio­ter­ror expert Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and his off-sider Trini Romano (Lesley Manville, a long way from Mike Leigh) man­age to con­tain an out­break in Western Australia and bury the offend­ing test tube sev­er­al hun­dred feet under­ground in a refri­ger­ated Kansas mil­it­ary bunker.

In the present day the install­a­tion has been sold off to a self stor­age com­pany and glob­al warm­ing has com­prom­ised the cool­ing sys­tem. Our little green friend is on the loose and if it makes it into the water sup­ply we might as well turn off the lights then and there. The two night secur­ity guards – Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery – take a break from flirt­ing long enough to real­ise the danger and call the author­it­ies who in turn bring old Mr. Neeson out of retire­ment for one last nuc­le­ar powered job.

Campbell and Keery have great chem­istry and Keery is one of those act­ors I often call a tal­en­ted new­comer until I real­ise that he’s been one of the biggest stars on TV for the last six years. When I say he reminds me of Brendan Fraser at his Mummy peak, that’s high praise indeed. Another high point is the unex­pec­ted pres­ence of legend Vanessa Redgrave (89) who man­ages to wield a fire­arm con­vin­cingly in her brief cameo.

I wish the effects in Cold Storage had been more phys­ic­al and less digit­al but that’s a mod­er­ate cri­ti­cism at the end of the day when everything else works so well.

Premiering on DocPlay last week was an inter­est­ing story about a group of New England artists who, in the early 200s, dis­cov­er a vacant space in the roof of their brand spank­ing new loc­al mall and real­ise that it’s big enough for them to live in. In Secret Mall Apartment, the group dis­cov­er that by simply brazen­ing things out, they can avoid the atten­tion of secur­ity and man­age­ment and move fur­niture and their PlayStation into the space. They even build a cinder block wall and install a door with a lock – you would­n’t want the space you are illeg­ally occupy­ing to be itself illeg­ally occu­pied, would you?

At first the film is about all the cloak and dag­ger of how they pulled the scam off but it soon diverges into a story about the per­ils of gentri­fic­a­tion and also the por­trait of an artist – the group lead­er Michael Townsend – who finds the line between art and life impossible to draw. One of the many iron­ies is that the film about the rebel­lion against con­sumer­ism in fact became one of the few reas­ons why Rhode Islanders would actu­ally vis­it the Providence Place Mall in recent years. Down on its uppers, the mall mul­ti­plex played this doc­u­ment­ary for over a year.

Further reading

My pro­file of the pro­du­cer and dir­ect­or Mark DeFriest has been pos­ted at NZ On Screen. This was an epic piece of work, push­ing the bound­ar­ies of per­mit­ted length, and tak­ing almost nine months from com­mis­sion­ing to publishing.

With over 800 hours of tele­vi­sion cred­its across a nearly four-decade career, California-born pro­du­cer and dir­ect­or Mark DeFriest freely cred­its his time in New Zealand as the appren­tice­ship that gave him his career. Arriving at Lower Hutt’s Avalon Studios in 1977 to helm twice-weekly drama Close to Home, he became the young­est dir­ect­or in New Zealand tele­vi­sion at the age of only 26.

I loved talk­ing to Mark (over Zoom from his home in Western Australia), so much so that we did two inter­view ses­sions and the tran­script came out to over 27,000 words. There are so many stor­ies that we had to leave out. My favour­ite might be the day this Yankee expat faced up to Kiwi crick­et legend Lance Cairns dur­ing the lunch break on an epis­ode of Jocko in 1982. If you are famil­i­ar with your NZ crick­et his­tory you’ll know that Cairns was at his finest that sum­mer and Mark man­aged to last three deliv­er­ies without lay­ing a bat on any of them. 

Further listening

I talked about both of the above films in my reg­u­lar slot on RNZ Nights last Friday, talk­ing to reliev­ing host Susana Lei’ataua. You can hear the whole thing here.