Filmsuck

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores express their admiration and affection for comedian Chris Fleming and his hilarious new HBO special CHRIS FLEMING: LIVE AT THE PALACE. Highly recommended!

You may know Fleming from his dazzling comic flights on YouTube and Instagram, but as Fleming puts it, this special is designed to expand his audience beyond "women who brought a knife to prom." Wearing a four-way-stretch purple jumpsuit made by Prince's longtime costume designer Anthony Sartino, Fleming is able to prance, race, strut, flap, tumble, and moonwalk freely around the stage characterizing the freaky eccentrics and wanna-be-freaky normies who populate our world. He's pinpointed unerringly by the theater's spotlight operator who was "on the team that got Osama." Acknowledging his own unique appearance and category-busting affect that revives the old dream of queer liberation, Fleming says there's already been "a nationwide manhunt for my pronouns" and he/she/they will answer to any of them, leaving it up to the audience: "You tell me. You're looking at it."

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores resisted seeing HAMNET, so they both marvel at the emotional impact it achieves by the poignant ending, when almost everyone in theater audiences dissolves into tears. HAMNET is a period tragedy by Chloe Zhao (NOMADLAND) that’s been playing in arthouse theaters for two months. It’s still drawing crowds, and it’s nominated for a number of Academy Awards including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay (by Zhao and the author of the source novel by Maggie O’Farrell), and Best Actress (Jessie Buckley). It deals with the relationship of husband and wife William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Hathaway (Buckley), which is tested by the death of their eleven-year-old son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). The film’s seemingly grandiose theme is the way art can transform experiences such as grief over the loss of a loved one into a sense of meaning in terms of human life in the universe. But don’t scoff. You’re probably more susceptible to this idea than you think you are. Just wait till you cry through the final sequence.

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores agree that the title character in writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s THE BRIDE!, played by Jessie Buckley (who also portrays the wry, raddled spirit of author Mary Shelley) is terrific. She has a brilliantly disheveled look of undead glamor featuring wild bleached-blonde hair, wonderfully garish orange dress, black lips, and the inky splotch that spews up from the corner of her mouth, a chemical stain left over from the process of reanimation. Dolores is forgiving of the way THE BRIDE!, especially in its addled second half, fails to live up to central character and best scenes, whereas Eileen can’t condemn Gyllenhaal hard enough for the dopey, unfocused, pretentious way she blows her opportunity to make an electrifying film.

Co-hosts disagree on THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE, a new film about the title character (played by Amanda Seyfried) who founded the Shaker religion. Eileen liked it because she has a morbid religious streak that makes her obsessively interested in movies about old-time people who see visions and start mad spiritual communities. Dolores, on the other hand, hates movies set in the 18th century “when everything was so ILL” and found THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE a dull empty frustrating would-be-hipster work that makes the artfully simple utilitarian structures of Shaker architecture look like Restoration Hardware stores. A lively debate ensues!

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores found Jim Jarmusch’s new indie film Father Mother Sister Brother a sleep-inducing slog. It’s a comedy-drama anthology film in three chapters about difficult family relationships that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and stars Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Mayim Bialik, Cate Blanchett, and Charlotte Rampling. Jarmusch calls it an “anti-action film” that avoids commercial expectations of such typically hard-hitting effects as “drama, violence, revenge, sex” in order to create a film that’s minimalist, focused, delicate, and deliberately simple, like “three flower arrangements.” So consider yourself warned!