Sprinting Towards the New Year

Hey, look! We made it to the end of this miserable garbage fire of a year and if you’re reading this that means you’re still capable of higher cognitive function! Nice!

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the slow collapse of Western civilization has really done a number on the supply chain, and once you throw in the demands on the holiday season and the multiple days off around Christmas and Boxing Day … well, nothing’s reaching me as quickly as it ought to. But I did get a flurry of stuff last week, so we can start digging into that. Let’s go with the three films that screened at the TIFF Lightbox last year. One of them won an Oscar!

It seems bizarre that Walter Salles hadn’t made a movie in over a decade – not since his wobbly 2012 adaptation of On the Road – but it gives I’m Still Here a title that resonates on multiple levels. The drama finds Salles returning home to Brazil – and to his observational, empathetic roots as a storyteller – for this spare and unblinking study of Eunice Paiva (Oscar nominee Fernanda Torres), whose husband Rubens (Selton Mello) was arrested at their Rio di Janeiro home in January of 1971, taken in for questioning and never seen again.

Working from the book by the Paivas’ son Marcelo, Salles and screenwriters Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega find a very specific angle on day-to-day life under the Brazilian military dictatorship … where a person could simply vanish without a trace, leaving their family with no trail to follow and no closure to be found. This isn’t the first film about the disappearances in Brazil, but Torres’ anguished performance as Eunice gives I’m Still Here a terrible intimacy; we experience the horror with her, hoping she won’t be swallowed up by it as well.

For whatever reason, Sony Pictures Classics has taken its time to bring I’m Still Here to disc – even after its Oscar win in March, there was no word of anything other than a streaming release.  I had assumed this might portend a Criterion release, but they don’t do a lot of SPC titles these days; maybe it was held back to capitalize on the North American release of The Secret Agent, another drama set in 1970s Brazil? (Different distributor, seems unlikely.)

At any rate, it’s a fine disc, with a pristine presentation of the feature – its 5.1 DTS-HD soundtrack offered in both the original Portuguese and a Spanish dub – and a modest selection of interviews with the cast about the shoot and their characters. (The organization is a little weird, but it makes sense once you start going through them.) Watching it on your own won’t quite replicate the solemn hush that slowly settled over its TIFF screening, but it’s as good as you can get.

Kaniehtiio Horn’s Seeds played TIFF last year as well, and though it was one of Kelly’s picks I was able to join everyone for the world premiere, and watch it work its audience over in a very different way: This is a hangout movie that turns into a revenge picture, and one where the person exacting the revenge is entirely justified in everything she does.

I’ve been a fan of Horn’s for a very long time, and it’s been a pleasure watching the larger industry discover her electric screen presence and coiled sense of humor. (You’ve likely seen her as either Letterkenny’s Tanis, or as Reservation Dogs’ Deer Lady or as Ethan Hawke’s clear-headed ex in The Lowdown – and if you’ve seen her in all three of those roles, you understand her remarkable range.) Seeds lets Horn do it all as Ziggy, an Instagram influencer living in Toronto who comes back home to her community to mind her aunt’s house – and winds up in a cat-and-mouse situation with a corporate thug (Killjoys’ Patrick Garrow) sent to steal her family’s cache of heirloom seeds.

The fun of Seeds is in its fungible approach to genre: The first half of the film is the hangout comedy I mentioned, with Ziggy driving around with her old buddy Wiz (Rez Dogs writer and actor Dallas Goldtooth, charming as always) before shit gets real; the second half is Horn’s version of the Canadian survival thriller Clearcut, complete with a cheerful, possibly hallucinated Graham Greene appearing to advise Ziggy on the best methods of obtaining payback. It’s funny, and it’s brutal, and the crowd loved it – and I am very excited to see what Horn does for an encore, especially after The Lowdown raised her profile even further this year. She's a force.

Seeds is a very tiny Canadian movie from a very tiny Canadian distributor, so it was a small miracle to see it getting a physical release on the Indican Pictures label. No special features, and it’s a burned disc rather than a pressed one, so you might encounter some fussiness depending on your player. (My Sony UBP-X700 couldn’t quite navigate the menu the first time I loaded the disc, but I got there eventually.) But like I said, it’s a small miracle there’s a disc at all, and the 1080p/24 master looks and sounds just great, capturing every step of the slow descent into darkness in Jonathon Cliff's widescreen cinematography. Grab it while you can.

And let’s do one more feature from a formidable multi-hyphenate whose work hits me just right: Timestalker! If the title of this oddball historical anti-romance is unfamiliar, perhaps you’ll know its writer-director-star, Alice Lowe, from decades of making brilliant screwball art.

Alice played the magnificently named Madeleine Wool in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace; she co-starred in and co-wrote Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers, she’s turned up in everything from Locke and The Ghoul to Black Mirror and Paddington and in 2016 she made her first feature, the emotionally messy body-horror comedy Prevenge. (I was into it.)

It took eight years but Alice finally made a second movie, Timestalker – a profound, and profoundly silly, study of one woman’s pursuit of a perfect love through centuries of frustration. We first meet her protagonist, Agnes, in 1688, where she’s a Scottish serving woman who falls for political radical Alexander (Aneurin Barnard). Despite the protestations of her friend Meg (Tanya Reynolds) that the fellow has been condemned to death, Agnes tries to disrupt his execution – and catches an axe in the face for her efforts.

But per the title, this isn’t the only time Agnes will encounter her dream man. She will live to see him again, and again, and again, in various incarnations in various places and times. And because this is a comedy she will never, ever get what she wants. There even seem to be people trying to tell her this – the aforementioned Meg, an amused spectator called Scipio (Jacob Anderson), her uncaring lover George (Nick Frost). But Agnes is a hopeless romantic and will not be denied ... however many times her head comes off.

Timestalker is a much more playful film than Prevenge, which was a jet-black story of an unassuming woman driven to murder by the voice of the fetus she’s carrying. It had plenty of the uncomfortable, hesitant comedy that Alice loves, but its essential nature was far darker than what Timestalker is going for – a satire of empowerment that uses the fantasy of romantic expectations to deliver a series of sketches that all start and end the same way, leaving us the space to wonder how the specifics of this incarnation will change things each time.

But there’s also a sadness that creeps in once we understand how futile Agnes’ existences are, and how frustrating this must be for her. Alice gets that much sooner than Agnes does, which gives Timestalker’s live-die-repeat structure a tragic bite other films might not have bothered with, or even wanted. Both the director and her character wind up laughing through bared teeth.

So here’s a weird thing: While Prevenge got a Blu-ray release in the UK, the only physical disc of Timestalker yet pressed has come through Australia’s Via Vision Entertainment, which put the film out on BD and DVD earlier this summer. My copy arrived just before Christmas, and while there are no special features beyond the theatrical trailer I’m just glad to have the film on my shelf, in a presentation considerably richer than the streaming file I watched as a refresher before we played Timestalker in last year’s Secret Movie Club.

The very specific looks that Alice and her cinematographer Ryan Eddleston (who also shot Prevenge) have designed for each of Agnes’ lives don’t risk blurring together in the same way, and details on costumes, hairstyles and environments are all sharper; it’s altogether more in line with my initial DCP viewing of the film a couple of years back. And because almost everything Via Vision releases is all-region, you can have the same experience!

Also, you should act quickly because they’re running a Boxing Day sale on pretty much the entire shop through January 1^st, but that’s Australian time which means I think it’s over at noon today? There’s a lot of good stuff there; those Peckinpah 4K boxes are glorious, for a start. Take a flyer, see what happens.

I’m Still Here is now available on Blu-ray from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment; Seeds is now available on Blu-ray from Indican Pictures, and Timestalker is available on Blu-ray from Via Vision Entertainment.

Next up: Black Phone 2, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and The Smashing Machine have also arrived! But first, paid subscribers will enjoy Friday’s What’s Worth Watching recommendations. If you’re not a subscriber to the paid tier, it’s a really easy upgrade – and cheap, too! Maybe make it your New Year’s resolution?