by Rob DiCristino
A pair of movies for your movie holes.
Freaky Tales (Dirs. Anna Bowden and Ryan Fleck)
Writer/director team Anna Bowden and Ryan Fleck return from the MCU trenches with
Freaky Tales, a self-proclaimed “multi-track mixtape” — Aren’t all mixtapes multi-track? Eh, let’s not get sidelined so early — threading together four stories set in Fleck’s hometown of Oakland, California circa 1987. United by a supernatural energy that has some connection to Psytropics, a “mindfulness seminar” founded by Oakland NBA legend “Sleepy” Floyd (Jay Ellis), each chapter blends graphic novel storytelling with grindhouse sensibilities for a charming romp that will remind you — to a distracting and often suspicious degree — of similar movies you already love. It’s a little bit
Creepshow, a little bit
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a little bit
Sin City, a little bit
Trick ‘r Treat, a little bit
The Warriors, and yes, a little bit
Pulp Fiction, too. So while it’s heartening to see Bowden and Fleck emerge from under the weight of
Captain Marvel, it’s hard not to wonder if the former indie dynamos aren’t trying just a bit too hard to prove they’ve still got their cinematic street cred.
Those streets are on full display, at least, as
Freaky Tales goes to great lengths to celebrate the weird and wonderful eccentricities of Oakland, a city that certainly deserves a bit of celebration after recently losing its third major sports franchise in five years. Chapter One follows Lucid and Tina (Jack Champion and Ji-young Yoo), a pair of teenage punks defending their local venue — a meticulous recreation of Oakland’s storied 924 Gilman Street — from a roving band of Nazi skinheads. Chapter Two follows Entice and Barbie (Normani and Dominique Thorne), a female hip-hop duo who are set to go toe-to-toe with rapper Too $hort (who narrates the film and is played on screen by DeMario Symba Driver) for a shot at big-time fame. Next up is Clint (Pedro Pascal), a debt collector for a crooked cop known only as The Guy (Ben Mendelsohn), whose plans to walk the straight and narrow are interrupted by a ghost from his past. The last chapter finds Floyd on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the thieves who broke into his home and murdered his girlfriend.
Freaky Tales is an entertaining blend of genre elements, and that’ll probably be good enough for the VOD audience most likely to use it as a time-waster some Friday night in the near future. It’s clear that the
Captain Marvel directors are overjoyed to be making something so personal again, and their sincerity goes a long way toward making what is ultimately an overstuffed, unoriginal pastiche a bit more endurable. But while the film stays true to its “multi-track mixtape” premise with an array of pop culture references and Oakland-specific lore, it’s all thrown at us with an aggressiveness that starts to feel resentful after a while, especially the scene in which our Big Celebrity Cameo spends five minutes scolding another character for his lack of movie knowledge. It seems a bit odd that Bowden and Fleck should take such a hostile posture on the sanctity of Real Art when they’re the ones who just made
Captain fucking
Marvel, but
Freaky Tales is a big enough step in a positive direction that we’re compelled — if not convinced— to forgive their pretension.
Freaky Tales hits U.S. theaters on Friday, April 4th.
The Friend (Dirs. David Siegel and Scott McGehee)
“What will happen to the dog?” is a question that, frankly, I don’t often consider. I’m not a dog person. Dogs don’t bring me any special joy or feelings of companionship. They don’t fill me with wonder or glee. I find them messy and smelly, and I’m totally confounded by people who share their beds with them. This will make me sound like a monster, but I don’t even get particularly upset when dogs die in movies. I don’t wish them harm, mind you, and I’ve enjoyed their company on occasion, but they’re just not for me. They’re not for Iris (Naomi Watts) either, but when her best friend and colleague (Bill Murray as acclaimed novelist Walter) commits suicide, she has to consider what will happen to Apollo, his 150 lb Great Dane. It seems Walter requested that Apollo be left to Iris — not his daughter (Sarah Pidgeon) or any of his ex-wives, for whatever reason — who must now make room for him in her rent-controlled New York apartment. So begins
The Friend, a trite and maudlin adaptation of what I can only assume is the trite and maudlin 2018 novel by Sigrid Nunez.
And this isn’t just the indifference to dogs talking. On top of sporting a title so bad that it almost loops back around to being audacious,
The Friend is the worst kind of stale treacle, an alleged “meditation on writing, living in New York, and grief” that hopes you’ll be so enchanted by Apollo’s droopy eyes — which, to be clear, are adorable; I’m not completely soulless — that you won’t notice its failure to actually say anything of substance about any of those topics. What begins as a woman-about-town story quickly shifts to a relationship story before taking a pit stop into magical realism until getting bored enough with that to go all-in on a “white woman lounges in a shoreside villa getting drunk on lazy platitudes about life delivered in abysmal voice-over narration” story as the credits roll. Iris and Apollo go from frenemies to soulmates, of course, and she eventually recognizes the bond created by their shared grief, but that journey must take place in the space between the frames because I’ll be damned if there are any character arcs to be found on screen.
And, look.
The Friend has every right to exist. We used to get three of these things in theaters every month, after all, and I’m happy for the dog lovers out there who just want to let their freak flag fly. Go ahead! Laugh! Cry! Get hair all over your clothes! Put more mainstream weepies like these in theaters against some Glen Powell action programmers and we won’t have to endure
Snow White,
Captain America: Brave New World, and all the other top-heavy box office catastrophes that have Deadline foretelling the death of cinema as we know it. Let actors act! Naomi Watts is a legend who never seems to get her due, so I’m glad enough to see her working that I don’t mind that it’s mostly against a co-star who — despite delivering one of the best animal performances I’ve ever seen — doesn’t give her much to work with in return. And hell, it’s always safer to have eyes on Bill Murray than not, so let him futz around this thing for two scenes and put him on the poster. It’s just a little hollow, a little presumptuous, and a little manipulative, is all. You dog people deserve better.
The Friend hits U.S. theaters on Friday, April 4th.
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