Mid movies by distinctive talents

I'm trying to not needlessly fatten up my 2026 rankings with a lot of streaming crap. When a movie gives off a whiff of being a quickie algorithm pleaser, instead of letting it flesh out the lower part of my rankings with just another in a sea interchangeable movies, I'm leaving it on the sidelines. As my post the other day about the two movies called Runner/The Runner will attest. 

But you can't entirely disregard genre movies on streaming, so you're looking for certain key elements that would make you choose one over another. Netflix's new The Whisper Man ticks a lot of these boxes.

One of these is the cast. Adam Scott? Tick. Michelle Monaghan? Personal favorite. Robert DeNiro? I'm not as instinctively opposed to what latter-day DeNiro can offer us as I might have been a few years ago. Sprinkle in an unexpected Michael Keaton and Hamish Linklater? You're speaking my language.

But the real clincher for The Whisper Man was its director, James Ashcroft. 

Ashcroft is a Kiwi who made one of the more dour and hopeless horror movies I've ever seen, Coming Home in the Dark, in 2021. I won't get into what makes it so depressing. But let's just say it's in the Funny Games category of bleakness. It involves a family put in peril on a camping trip by a pair of violent scumbags. 

Then last year he followed it up with The Rule of Jenny Pen. This was a truly weird, in the best possible way, psychological horror? I guess? in which a menace played by John Lithgow tortures, figuratively and sometimes literally, a character played by Geoffrey Rush in the retirement home where they both live. It involves a hand puppet called Jenny Pen.

Neither of these movies are personal favorites, though Pen performed quite admirably in last year's rankings, coming in at #68 out of 184. I'm a bit more mixed on Dark, though in a weird way I think it might showcase the "real" Ashcroft a bit better and give us a better idea of the sorts of non-commercial films of which he is capable.

And then he goes and makes some true interchangeable Netflix schlock that has a good cast but not a lot else. 

There are plenty of dour moments in The Whisper Man, to be sure. It might, in fact, push the envelop on this sort of movie more than some other films would, and there were a few memorable images. Overall, though, it's quite mid, and will soon be forgotten by me and everyone else who sees it.

Devoting a whole post to the notion of a director who "sells out" to make a more accessible film suggests that there is something particularly unusual about it. I won't say everyone wants to become more famous and make more money, but probably most people do. 

I think the thing that caught my attention about this film is that Ashcroft's previous two features indicated the sort of person who wouldn't do that. One was incredibly depressing. The other was incredibly weird. This one? To the extent that it's incredibly anything, it's incredibly mid. 

And it's not like Ashcroft had to take this project because he was desperate after the flop of his last film. I don't know if The Rule of Jenny Pen flopped or not, but he's releasing this one only in the very next calendar year, so obviously one project came right on the heels of the other. It wasn't "I'll take anything I can get at this point." (Technically speaking, Pen shows a 2024 release date on IMDB, but that was due to festival debuts.)

That sort of desperation does apply to another distinct talent who also made, in my estimation, a very mid film that I've seen recently. That's David Robert Mitchell, whose The End of Oak Street came only after he'd been fishing about for eight years following the box office failure of Under the Silver Lake. 

Mitchell also gave us something that really showcased his unique vision in the form of It Follows, a big hit in 2014. He used that hit to follow up Follows with a sprawling noir that ran two hours and 20 minutes, and because even then his financiers were probably suspicious of its box office potential, it took another four years to get that one released. Predictably, it flopped, and a potential wunderkind -- someone I was thinking in the same category as Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, who also had prestige horror hits around that time -- went into the wilderness for the better part of a decade.

It was more clear that The End of Oak Street was a compromise in his vision, even if it has some surprises that are the kind of thing that might have intrigued someone like Mitchell. He actually wrote it, so there's no suggestion this was a director-for-hire project. But clearly he said "I have to make something that is not a sprawling 140-minute noir," and what came of that was a dinosaur movie involving music by Michael Giacchino. 

I know some people like this more than I do, so your mileage may vary. But whatever you think about it, there's no doubt you never thought of this as the logical next movie from the guy who made It Follows and Under the Silver Lake. 

And then also this week I saw a movie by a man who had the same eight-year layoff between features as Mitchell, but he went a different path.

Boots Riley got critical acclaim, but probably not much box office either, for his 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. He was not entirely in the wilderness for the years in between, because he made a TV show called I Am a Virgo, but I have to assume he would have been able to make a follow-up feature sooner if Bother had been just a bit more successful and a bit less idiosyncratic in its vision.

So what did Riley do for his follow-up? 

He made I Love Boosters, which I saw and quite liked on Sunday, and which is, if anything, even a bit weirder than Sorry to Bother You. 

I wouldn't say I love either of Riley's films, though I highly respect both of them and they naturally excite me for anything he might make next. The question is, though, whether it'll be another eight years or longer until the next Riley feature, given the lack of money Boosters surely made. (I could be consulting actual box office figures here, but my point works even in the abstract.) 

It seems that Riley prefers his artistic vision to the ability to make movies on the regular. That's a brave decision, and if it's going to be his fate, I hope the hossanas for his previous features are enough to nourish him, artistically, while he waits for his next opportunity.

And if I see his name attached to The Whisper Man 2, well, I will be disappointed. 

MIFF: Bookended by outsider animation, and Joe Swanberg redux

If you want to know what it's like to watch a MIFF movie at 7 p.m. on the final Sunday of the festival, well I'll tell you, there weren't any tumbleweeds blowing through Melbourne Central.

The last day of any activity, be it a film festival or the circus -- yes those are the only two options -- would usually entail a matinee show, then pulling up stakes and getting the hell out of town as quickly as possible. In the case of a circus, that would be literal. 

Not MIFF. Because Melbourne Central is an extremely busy venue anyway, it seemed just as much like it might be the first day of the festival as the last. My screening of the animated film Tangles -- not to be confused with the animated film Tangled -- was essentially full. 

As I've mentioned about four times during my nearly three weeks of covering MIFF, I wasn't supposed to go to Leah Nelson's film originally. At the risk of truly beating this horse to death, I'll remind you that I was supposed to go to Mile End Kicks on Tuesday night, but changed out the showing because I ended up making that movie part of my MIFF preview, and watched it through Apple rentals before the festival even started.

Tangles had made my shortlist -- it was one of probably 50 titles I shortlisted, anyway -- but I wouldn't have normally planned to go to a MIFF showing on Sunday, mostly because of the tumbleweed factor. I thought it would be sad and lonely to attend a showing in the dying hours of the festival, when everyone else is heading for the airport, metaphorically speaking. But this isn't Sundance. The people leaving MIFF are just getting on a train and riding 20 minutes to their houses.

But it did create a very interesting bookend, which is that I started this MIFF watching an outsider animation movie at the Hoyts in Melbourne Central, and that's where I ended it as well. It seems ages ago that I saw the Chinese animated film Light Pillar on Friday the 7th, and on Sunday the 23rd, I brought the festival full circle back to where I started. 

And going to the movie allowed me to have another funny and memorable MIFF experience: a second interaction with Joe Swanberg.

Actually it was the first, considering that I didn't interact with him on Friday night, for the first festival showing of his movie The Sun Never Sets, which he appears to have introduced three different times over the weekend. Only the first was at the Forum, and the last two were both afternoon showings in Melbourne Central, 1 o'clock on Saturday and 4:15 on Sunday.

In heading up the escalators to my 7:00 p.m. showing of Tangles, I was perfectly time to catch him on a landing coming down, which would have been just after his Q&A ended, assuming he had a Q&A for this showing. 

I made eye contact with him and he returned it. "Hey" I said, like we were old friends. He returned the greeting in the same manner before we both continued on our way. 

Likely he just responded in the way he always responds when someone sees him in public and realizes they recognize him. Swanberg is probably the sort of person whose face is not recognizable enough that he's always getting stopped, but when people do recognize him, it earns his respect, because it means they watch his movies. They are not just your average dufus on the street, though just from my few experiences with him this weekend, I sense he has an affection for your average dufus too.

About three seconds after this short interaction, I became emboldened to go give him some well wishes, to tell him I'd really enjoyed his film. I followed him back to the top of the next escalator, but once he'd boarded it and started to descend, I decided there was no value to picking through the people between him and me. The last thing I wanted to do was create a stalker vibe. So I just aborted. 

Okay but enough about Joe. He had his turn on Friday.

I thought I might be really walloped by Tangles, because my mother had Alzheimer's. Oh, didn't I tell you? Tangles is a bit of a personal memoir by its filmmaker, a lesbian living in San Francisco around the turn of the millennium, who begins a period of bicoastal living as she has to make it regularly back to Maine to check in with her family after her mother starts going downhill quickly. It's told in black and white with a graphic novel's sense of boundary pushing, though I suppose I'm just saying that because it's gay and a bit cheeky about it. Wanda Sykes plays the role of her editor at an LGBT magazine (I think that's all the letters they had in 1999), and she's not the only name who lent their talents to this. Julia Louis-Dreyfus voices the mother, and other characters are voiced by Seth Rogen, Bryan Cranston, Pamela Adlon, Beanie Feldstein and Bowen Yang. Abbi Jacobson voices the character based on the director, though it could be Beanie Feldstein -- I can't tell for sure because IMDB doesn't have any of the character names. Both actresses would be about the right age, anyway.

And don't get me wrong, Tangles was great. It does what it does well. I just didn't feel the tears welling up at any point.

And maybe that's because the things that make me cry in movies are not necessarily the things that speak to my own experience the most. In that way, I think I'm sort of the idealized form of the critic, who doesn't have particular triggers that are based on his own life. I hope that means that I'm going only on the filmmaker's abilities to make a moment emotional even though it doesn't speak to me personally. It's either universal, or highly specific in a way that works without pertaining specifically to my own experience.

So yes I loved the way these characters are drawn, both figuratively and literally, and yes, it does have relevance to things I've gone through. But that makes it four stars with no tears, not 4.5 or five with sobbing. 

That's it for MIFF, but I did want to tell you that I had one final piece of business to take care of during this festival, and I took care of it on Sunday night.

As you know because I wrote about it last week, I do like having a double feature that includes one MIFF movie and one non-MIFF movie. I thought I'd missed my shot at that when I couldn't get into Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma on Tuesday before Rose of Nevada, but I realized I just needed to think outside the box. I'd be out of Tangles by 8:45 on Sunday night. If I went home then, I'd just fiddle around for an hour and go to bed. But if I stayed out, I could get to a 9:15 movie and complete the MIFF/non-MIFF double feature.

Because I'd had four beers and three margaritas over the course of the afternoon with friends -- forgot to mention that part -- I thought my stamina would be too shot to attempt this. But by the time Tangles let out, I knew I could do it, and hoofed it down to the Village Cinemas at Crown Casino for the showing of The End of Oak Street.

The best thing I can say about this movie was that at least it was brief, clocking in at only 99 minutes, which is nothing for a movie that features dinosaurs. In fact, that was one of its problems, that its pacing was so off, and that it felt like it should have been 20 minutes longer to flesh out the characters and land in a satisfying place where it felt like we'd watched a whole movie. This was like 64% of a movie and some very strange tonal choices. But hey, it got me home at just after midnight, which was just what the doctor ordered for the end of a festival that exhausts you even when you space your movies out. 

Looking forward to MIFF 2027 already!