Possibly Soon at the Cinema or possibly on Apple TV - From New Zealand - David Hare recommends DEAD MAN'S WIRE (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2025)

Al Pacino

Three actors on a telephone hammering out life and death: Al Pacino, Bill Skarsgard and Dacre Montgomery from Gus Van Sant's new picture, Dead Man's Wire, based on the real-life kidnap and holdup of a loan shark’s son by Tony Kiritsis in Indianapolis 1977. Lumet's justly famous 1975 movie Dog Day Afternoon seems to also forecast the same mode d'emploie by the real-life Indiana kidnapper two years' later which is the basis for Gus' movie. 

Bill Skarsgard

Without wishing to stretch too far into the winds of metacinematic narrative with history, the reprisal of Pacino in this superb new movie makes it impossible to miss a now totally alienated America in the thrall of late era Death-cult Capitalist greed and mindless International land-grab wars. Gus really gets the era and tone just as firmly as he gets the past with all his humanity at his disposal to make us care about these people. A lot. 

It's a real joy to see Gus out again in a picture that's entirely cut to his cloth with all the illustrious tics of his own style and mise-en-scene in play. Sequences of highly agitated long take shouting-out drama within four walls and a telephone start to give way to moments of apparent serenity before the next storm in Austin Kolodney's terrific screenplay. Just as "Kiritsis"/Skarsgard seems to catch each small concession in his baroquely insane negotiations with the FBI and Police to reach apparent short term agreements, Gus pumps a key music track each time into the audio to create an orgasm-like hold-still meditation on all-these too-brief moments of satisfaction. The score is a vibrant '70's hip compendium knockout curated by Danny Elfman. 

 

Dacre Montgomery

The picture had not yet had a general release in this territory since its debut at Venice last year until this January. May the gods of success attend to this terrific movie penned so movingly and richly by a real movie hero of mine so long absent since his last great work.

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison enjoys HONEY DON'T! (Ethan Coen, USA, 2025)

Margaret Qualley

I rate Honey Don't! Pretty much the most enjoyable movie since - well - Drive Away Dolls, the first part of Ethan Coen's proposed trilogy with Margaret Qualley in her P.I. Honey O'Donahue character. The new instalment offers all the things that make these enjoyable - raunchy sex, ultra-violence, bad taste, smart film craft and substantial borrowings from some of the best crime films that pre-date it - The Big Sleep, The Naked City, Chinatown - Hitchcock represented by lots of Psycho,  along with Torn Curtain & Topaz. Throw in Jessica Jones and add the parched Bakersfield L.A. settings they absorbed from Fat City.  

David Z. Obadiah’s attention-getting titles have the camera rolling through that scorched desert suburb and locking onto local business names painted on walls, proving to be the film’s credits. The most conspicuous streetscape feature is  coach stop benches.  These get to be significant. Lera Abova, the Russian lady from Luc Besson’s Anna, shows up on her moped at a remote highway car smash, where the wreck has rolled into an isolated ravine. The suspended body of the girl driver is still bleeding.  Abova prizes the “Four Way Temple” ring off a dead hand before going off to float naked in an abandoned mine pond.

 

Some time later Margaret Qualley drives her classic turquoise Chevy SS up to what has now become plainclothes cop Charlie Day’s crime scene and there’s this exchange about what either one is doing at a traffic accident.  Day keeps on coming on for Qualley, tall in her loose fitting outfit and heels, despite her telling him “I like girls.” She gets better information out of records storage-cage  officer Aubrey Plaza.

 

Turns out the dead girl had hired Qualley before they had a chance to meet. Her working an already closed case is the most Chandler element. The piece is closer to Mickey Spillane. Think of Honey Don’t! as the Kiss Me Deadly of our time. 

 

Chris Evans

Investigations keep on indicating charismatic Reverend  Chris Evans, who pounces on the chance to come on as something other than Captain America with a beard. As with Drive Away Dolls’ Congressman Mat Damon, also promoted with family values bill boards, Rev. Evans is a sleazy populist leader. His shadowy Russian connections, add to  the character’s contemporary resonance.

 

The service he gives to a congregation of marginals in their best clothes, about God’s demands and noodle, is a super-charged highlight. The Preacher also has other interests including Motel Parking Lot dope deals and threesomes with bondage gear girls in the Sacristy. These get to involve vengeful henchman Jacnier, who we were just getting to like. Qualley/O'Donahue finds a choir smock and fetishist leather and chains under the bed in her late client’s family home. 

 

There’s maybe related complications in the chaotic domestic situation of the investigator’s sister Kristen Connolly and punk niece, diner waitress Talia Ryder, who shows up roughed up by a trailer-trash boy friend. The scene where Qualley sorts him out (smashing his sawn-off proves harder than it looks) is another of the film’s surprise highlights.

 

With her secretary Gabby Beans giving Qualley a hard time when her boss picks up the ‘phone calls that are her job, it’s all a bit much for her and she finds release with Plaza in material more explicit than we’ve seen either do before. The downwards take of the pair of them, naked, smoking in bed, is done in a single run of the camera. Critics who seem to miss everything else in the film pick up on the shot of dildos (also pivotal in Drive Away Dolls) soaking in the sink next morning. Think the ripped papers flushed in Pyscho’s toilet bowl for a similar disruption of movie taboos that hadn’t occurred to us before.

 

Along with the shock value material and the nostalgia content, Honey Don’t! keeps on fielding walk-ons that could have classed up earlier Coen Brothers efforts - Patrick Swayze’s brother as the piano bar man who makes his line about smiling register by a menacing leer, Michael Gmur’s brief, unmotivated monologue about the bus he’s driving or homeless man Kale Browne who proves to be more than he seems. In any other film they would stand out. 

 

Aubrey Plaza, Margaret Qualley

It takes a while to establish that there’s something going on here than we never got in Drive Away Dolls but wait. One of the film’s core purposes is to set Qualley’s star status but it’s more remarkable to see Aubrey Plaza, conspicuous for a decade, abruptly finding her character. Think Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat.

We’ve now got IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes (both U.S. but incorporating some foreign language sources) and an alarming thing is that reviewers all seem to be queuing up to say the same thing  - like the bogus consensus of that Sight & Sound poll. They all home in on the dildos. However the Mickey Spillane thing totally passes them by. They can’t all be too young for that. One element that puts writers off is apparently unmotivated content. In a scheme where information is planted with such precision (the retrieved ring, a Rolodex that doesn’t have Plaza’s address, green lipstick on the tea cup) it seems hard to believe that we are not going to get more clues. I’m still wondering about who offed the car smash client but my guess is that all is to be revealed in Go Beavers, the proposed third film. No word yet on how that one is going. Personally, I've had such a kick out of the first pair I can’t wait.

The Current Cinema - CAUGHT STEALING, (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2025)

Hank (Austin Butler) being subtle, Caught Stealing

Darren Aronofsky has a reputation for attacking his subjects full on... I dont think he does subtlety much at all. For Caught Stealing he wanted "to go back to the basics, and let's make great entertainment" at least that's what he told Karl Quinn for a piece in the SMH yesterday. Paywalled so no link...

Nikita Kukushkin, Benito Martínez Ocasio, Yuri Kolokolnikov,
... bad guys in Caught Stealing

To set up the story, you have to be up for the sight of two bald Russian (or maybe Ukrainian, it's complicated) mobsters, (one nicknamed Microbe who sports either an abstract facial tattoo or eczema over the right side of his face) kicking the living bejesus out of our hero, alcoholic barman and ex-baseball big leaguer Hank (Austin Butler), to pretty much start proceedings off. That does happen after a warmup sex scene. After that, if violent sudden death is your bag then Caught Stealing  is entertainment. The early kicking is so severe, and seen so on screen, that Hank ends up in hospital minus a kidney. Later, to pry information out of him, one of the Russians/Ukrainians uses a pair of pliers to start removing the stitches that patched up the missing kidney. 

Liev Schreiber, Austin Butler, Vincent D'Onofrio

The entertainment includes a corrupt black female cop and two Jewish gangsters who (Spoiler Alert) dont mind killing people on the Sabbath but whose religion prevents them from driving a car on that day, hence they have to press Hank into service for that job, notwithstanding that Hank has had an aversion to driving ever since he killed his father (?) while driving drunk to spring training. The father's lack of a seatbelt sets up a later scene with another violent car death. 

It is a Darren Aronofsky movie and it is thus, as usual, 'excessive'. I'm not sure I'd adjudge it as entertainment or a 'fun film'. Karl Quinn speculated on possible sequels given that Hank is the hero of a series of three novels so far by author/scriptwriter Charlie Huston.  I'd be surprised.... but then again Donald Westlake's Parker, first iterated by Lee Marvin in Point Blank and similarly back then accused of excessive violence, was eventually also played by Michel Constantin, Anna Karina, Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, Peter Coyote, Mel Gibson, Jason Statham and Marc Wahlberg over forty years or so.  

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison reports falling about watching DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS (Ethan Coen, USA, 2023)

Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Drive-Away Dolls

I’ve been wondering about Drive-Away Dolls, the movie from the Coen brother who didn’t want to make a black and white Macbeth with Denzel Washington. I noticed a reference to it quite a while back (its credits say 2023) but pretty much the only promotion I’ve seen for its local run is a teaser on the front of a trailer for another movie. That all worked up my curiosity.

What I got was the kind of ferocious bad taste movie you’d expect if someone hired Oliver Stone to re-make The Rocky Horror Picture Show. After an uneasy start, I found myself falling about.

This one is kind of a family affair, one Coen brother writing with his editor wife and directing Andie McDowell’s daughter and Jonah Hill’s sister, to showcase a young woman from Newcastle, New South Wales, called Geraldine Viswanathan who makes a memorably straight faced contribution to all the anarchic stuff. Think Aubrey Plaza without the attitude. She is the required contrast to hard charging Margaret Qualley, teetering on the edge of her stardom. Qualley would have fit right in as a Howard Hawks woman.

It starts off uneasily with Pedro Pascal meeting a grotesque fate in an alley. Attention shifts to girl buddies Qualley and Viswanathan finding themselves at a loose end. Qualley has broken up with her police officer lover Beanie Feldstein, complete with an argument about who gets their wall dildo, while Viswanathan, fresh from her job with Ralph Nader, isn’t all that interested in the Sapphic club scene and plans on joining a birding expedition in Tallahassee, reading her Henry James novels along the way. 

Matt Damon

The ideal mode of transport would be a Driveaway where they take a car to its owner in another city. Turns out that grouchy Bill Camp’s office has a vehicle waiting to be shifted just there – exercise in comic probability. Nobody checks the boot, which turns out to have two suspicious items where the spare tire should be. Eyes widen when that’s unlocked.

Things liven up for Margaret when they stay at the motel where a lesbian soccer team are relaxing with the captain blowing a change partners whistle at half time. Turning down a threesome, Geraldine finds herself spending the night sitting in the office.

Geraldine Viswanathan

Meanwhile comic goons Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson discover that their car has been mistakenly dispatched because how likely is it that two sets of customers would want to go to Tallahassee? This sends those rightful owners off in pursuit, which gets one beaten up by Feldstein because he’s old school and doesn’t want to hit a woman and his mate is blindsided when the address the soccer girls he’s charming gives them turns out to be a rough black music barn.

The girls meanwhile are coasting on a suspect credit card and the luxury El Conquistador hotel’s policy of inclusivity - steamy shower scene. Of course paths converge.

Not the least of the delights is the film’s maliciously misapplied film form. Scene transitions come up as the Henry James pages fluttering, contrasting to a psychedelic montage of fluoro coloured pizza fillings. Miley Cyrus gets a psychedelic number and there’s a glimpse of Senator Matt Damon’s mis-spent college days.

Beanie Feldstein

Drive-Away Dolls keeps on playing off audience expectation. It’s an exploitatively sexy film (“at least take off your shirt”) where the only full frontal is a sunbathing bit player. It comes with my all time favourite McGuffin (include monologue about the possibility of an E-Bay sales promotion). They telegraph the introduction of ego-free star Matt Damon with a hoarding of him as the local family values politician. Boy is he going to get it! When the girls confront him, they announce themselves as Democrats.

The pace never slacks with the lesbian frame of reference twisting the familiar situations into something grotesquely fresh. Everyone comes out of it well though it’s not a big budget offering.

I’m sorry they didn’t get about to making this in the nineties the way they planned, when it could conveniently have slid in with the drive-In fare that it burlesques. I would have re-visited it at intervals quite a few times by now. That I would have enjoyed. It’s the highlight of my current viewing.

The Current Cinema - Ripley Underdone - THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY (Giuseppe Capotondi, Italy, 2019)

I came to write something about The Burnt Orange Heresy  somewhat slowly. 

It was our Friday night movie at the Randwick Ritz, one of two new movies in the theatre that week, almost an afterthought after the management seemingly had to plump in favour of a retro led reintroduction to cinemagoing.    Probably smart too because on its opening weekend The Burnt Orange Heresy  was in the Ritz's Cinema 6 (the smallest) and had barely a dozen punters at the prime 6.30 pm session. Elizabeth Debicki on the front cover of the previous week’s SMH Spectrum had seemingly not raised interest.

I noted  from the credits that the film was based on a book by the admired American crime writer Charles Willeford, a favourite author of twenty or more novels including three others that have been made into movies – Cockfighter, Miami Blues and The Woman Chaser.  Nobody had made anything of that in the lead-up and it was a Willeford I hadn't read.

Then I got to John McDonald in the Fin Review, and now available on John's personal website. As an art critic John indicated he was ‘approaching the movie with a sceptical eye’. The subject, an art critic and historian, bellicose, smart, ambitious and ultimately prepared to go all the way to murder for the purpose of furthering his career. Like all critics I hear you say. 

So, another film adaptation where a European transplants crime from the grime of the US to the elegance of Europe. Think Bande a part  and Shoot the Pianist  and that other story by Donald Westlake that Godard stole to make Made in USA.  (Westlake pursued Godard for reparations until his dying day.) The Burnt Orange Heresy  is another one that leaves   the novel’s Florida setting way behind and does some massive transformations. 

Now it is set in Milan and Berenice Hollis, the girl from Duluth Minnesota who attracts the critic’s attention, is now the skinny and much more sophisticated Debicki and not the large-arsed and uncultured woman described by Willeford. (The size of Berenice’s bum is remarked upon by Willeford several times.)

Both the film and the book have a serious problem. Both tell us that the mysterious and reclusive painter who provokes murderous behaviour is a master whose work has not been seen for decades. If indeed it ever has. He is an artist with a reputation that seems entirely unjustified.

He does however provide Willeford in his novel the chance to show off his ‘knowledge’ of art history, cinema, literature, cultural studies and more.  Little asides on art movements and much smirking. Like….”The artist’s bookcase …held about thirty books. Most of them were paperbacks, five policiers from the Série Noire, three Simenons and two by Chester Himes, Pascal’s Pensées, From Caligari to Hitler, Godard on Godard, an autographed copy of Samuel Beckett’s Proust  and several paperback novels by French authors I had never heard of.” Get the idea. But you have to wonder how many of Willeford’s readers have the slightest idea what he, or some researcher, is talking, indeed pontificating, about.

The biggest transposition is in James Figueiras, the criminal critic on a mission to make his own reputation and accumulate wealth. In Giuseppe Capotondi’s version he’s an even more robust Mr Cool, the smart-arse self-promoter who offs his girlfriend and at the end has just a chance of reckoning descending on him.  Inevitably Capotondi makes you think of Highsmith’s American in Europe Tom Ripley and her novel “Ripley Underground”, another story about art forgery, murder and mayhem but so much less pretentious, so much less bombastic. 

If The Burnt Orange Heresy  has had any effect on me it has  prompted me to go back and look at Roger Spottiswood’s adaptation Ripley Underground, starring the least interesting of the movie Ripleys, Barry Pepper.