New Year’s Absolution, 2024

Directed by Nick Leisure.
Starring Michael Copon, Joel Brady, Josh Gilmer, Rafael Siegel, Shala White, Victoria Brandart, Siddalee Diaz and Lamondo Hill II.

SYNOPSIS:

Four longtime friends reunite for their traditional New Year’s Eve party. But things start to go awry with the arrival of a mysterious resolution: Kill Someone.

The amateur production values of New Year’s Absolution leak off the screen from the opening frame, as a cheap-looking title card appears over stock drone footage, followed by the actors’ names in a bold yellow font, dancing on and off the screen with only the flashiest of iMovie transitions. It’s effective, in letting you know exactly what kind of ride you’re in for.

We get the first sense of this film’s ‘humour’ as we meet Stuart and Travis, a couple played by Rafael Siegel and Lamondo Hill II. As Travis drives toward the home of Damon (Joel Brady), who’s hosting this year’s annual New Years’ Eve party, director Nick Leisure attempts to shock us with a rude joke, as Stuart bends down towards Travis’ crotch, a visual that would almost work if Travis didn’t have a small dog sitting on his lap. Turns out Stuart was just reaching down to pick up his phone. Hilarious.

Stuart and Damon are both members of ‘the five of ’99’, a friend group who met in 1999, of which only four remain (watch for the shocking revelation to this mystery). Damon is more concerned with arranging the coasters, and bickering with his wife Clare (Shala White) over the canapés, than making sure his friends have a good time. Don’t worry, Damon, we’re not having any fun either.

As everyone starts trickling in, the lack of chemistry between the cast members becomes increasingly apparent. ‘Lifelong friends’ Stuart and Damon interact like coworkers at an after-hours event, while ‘best friends’ Travis and Clare stand around rehearsing dialogue. This involves a lot of bitching about the others, especially the next arrivals Jacob (Josh Gilmer), an off-duty cop, and his wife Misty (Victoria Brandart). They are both vain and image-obsessed, showing off their bodies while the others snigger behind their backs about how fat they used to be.

The last to arrive are narcissistic surgeon Roy (Michael Copon), and his new girlfriend Kira (Siddalee Diaz), a shallow parody of Gen Z shallowness, whose entire character is constructed around her social media presence, and who physically cannot stand being separated from her phone. That’s the caliber of subtle social satire you can expect here.

What with the vanity, body shaming, and some casual racism and homophobia, it becomes clear that these are not nice people. There’s an obscenity to their wealth; Stuart blew 50k on a vintage car that can’t drive in the rain, and Damon forked out for a pool that he’s never swam in. Yet Leisure fails to make any kind of satirical point about the superficiality on display, because his approach to filmmaking lacks any depth of its own.

Damon’s hesitancy to get into his own pool is a key point, as his friends jokingly threaten to throw him in, and Stuart later threatens to drown him if he harms his dog Cookie, whom Damon fears will crap on his precious floors. It’s not much, but it’s nice to get some foreshadowing in a plot that’s mostly lacking in structure or craft.

Said plot eventually coughs and sputters to life when Jacob picks his new year’s resolution out of a ceremonial hat, and reads – kill someone. You might expect the group to laugh this off, but Jacob flips out, and deeper, sinister connotations are revealed. Jacob, who has been doing coke with Roy all night, then draws a loaded firearm in his drug-fueled haze, which he accidentally fires, injuring a member of the party.

This leads to some impromptu bathtub surgery from the coked-up doctor, that further highlights the film’s disconnection from reality. None of the characters react in a normal way to this development, continuing the party as if there isn’t a dude with a gunshot wound in the tub.This could’ve been an interesting satirical point about the hollowness of the upper class, except so little has been established about these characters and their relationships, that it just comes across as lazy writing.

However, it’s after this point that the film finally begins to find some (admittedly ironic) entertainment value, as the plot descends into a chain reaction of over-the-top carnage, with each character blaming another for the night’s misfortunes, and perpetuating them in grisly fashion. It’s in this last half hour that Nick Leisure’s vision of a bloody dark comedy begins to come through, and the kills are as exaggerated as they are unexpected, sparing no amount of fake blood. That said, it’s too little too late, as we’ve already wasted an hour watching these unbearable characters exchange dialogue that’s in turn laughable and dull.

New Year’s Absolution is a tonally confused, poorly put-together piece of work that is unclear in its goals, and fails to achieve them. Director Nick Leisure seems to be going for a broad black comedy, but the only laughs I found were from the piss-poor acting, ridiculous deaths, dumb editing gimmicks, and the autogenerated subtitles while rewatching the surgery scene – “It’s bleeding!” “Boobs tend to do that.”

It’s supposedly a horror/thriller, but it’s not scary or thrilling, because there’s no singular antagonistic force, and the deaths are too random, while the characters are so flat and unlikable that we neither feel nor fear for them. Though it’s possible Leisure is going for some kind of ‘eat the rich’ social satire, his approach is too bland for this to come through, and we don’t get any grounded perspective outside of these awful characters.

One question remains, however – who wrote the resolution? Don’t know. Don’t care.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★  / Movie: ★ 

Dan Carville

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

Caught between rural roots and urban opportunities, familial duty, friendship and forbidden carnal desire, young San Kyi (Nandar Myat Aung) struggles to find her place in Fruit Gathering, a sensitive Myanmar-Czechia-France co-production that just won Karlovy Vary’s top prize.

That’s an impressive achievement for Burmese writer-director Aung Phyoe, making his feature debut after several shorts. His flair for blending realist drama with more poetic, painterly imagery makes for a dreamy, hypnotic viewing experience, eased along by a confident, open-hearted performance from Nandar Myat Aung in the lead role. Fruit Gathering will be ripe for picking at further festivals, especially ones specializing in Asian and/or LGBTQ+ fare, possibly followed by niche distribution.

Self-transplanted with her mother (Tin Tin Ei) and grandmother from the countryside to industry-rich Yangon, San Kyi has so far managed to resist the pressure from her mom to get married or pursue a career in something upmarket like tech. Instead, eager for a job that doesn’t demand too much thinking, San Kyi works in a massive clothing factory, sewing seams all day in a ferociously noisy, scrap-strewn environment where the supervisor gets snotty if she takes a bathroom break without seeking permission first.

Incidentally, while the factory hardly looks inviting, the conditions don’t seem to be too bad compared to those seen in older documentaries about East and South Asian sweatshops. They’re comparable to what’s on display in, say, Chinese director Wang Bing’s doc Youth but without the company-owned residential housing. At least the workers are allowed to submit petitions circulated by labor organizers requesting better pay and more safety measures, although tellingly San Kyi refuses to sign lest she might get fired for it. A union leader (Wutt Yee Kyaw) pours scorn on her for not showing more solidarity with her colleagues.

Later, after she’s injured herself by a sewing accident, San Kyi will rethink her position on workers’ rights, but industrial relations in the textile industry are not the film’s main focus. It’s all background color, as much a part of the vivid landscape as the interludes where we see San Kyi back home visiting the mango farms and spirit-dance ceremonies of her agrarian childhood.  

At least it’s at this factory that San Kyi meets Theint Theint Oo (Nandar Myint Lwin), a young co-worker around the same age as San Kyi with a radiant smile and street sense to burn. The two young women start out just hanging together during their lunch breaks but soon grow inseparable. The script suggests early on that Theint Theint may be the kind of pal who always forgets to bring enough cash for dinner. A darker interpretation might posit that she sees San Kyi as little more than a mark, but the truth probably falls somewhere in a grayer area.

Either way, by the time San Kyi is buying nearly identical blouses for the two of them to wear on strolls around town, it’s pretty clear that she’s smitten with Theint Theint. The latter is ambiguously flirtatious and keen to have languid girls’ night sleepovers in the same bed, but also open about the fact that she’s got a man in the background, who is conveniently always away working in another country. Afraid of losing her new limerent object of desire, San Kyi entertains the thought of going abroad with Theint Theint to work as housekeepers or factory workers in somewhere affluent like Singapore or Malaysia.

Clearly, things are heading for a smash up when San Kyi lends Theint Theint a substantial amount of money. Somehow the tension is heightened by the fact that Theint Theint gets closer to San Kyi’s family, even accepting a job offer that comes through the local guy whom San Kyi’s mom was trying to set San Kyi up with as a potential husband. It all serves to underscore how narrowly female relationships are usually defined in highly traditional, painfully patriarchal Myanmar society. The intense feeling between these two young women could never be openly romantic, although no one bats an eye when they walk hand and hand through the streets, much the way Queen Victoria is said to have refused to sign legislation banning lesbianism because she wouldn’t acknowledge such a thing even existed.

Aung Phyoe suggests the messy, uncontrollable nature of desire via some slightly heavy-handed imagery of flooded apartments and generally juicy, watery, somewhat soluble imagery. But the story surprisingly shifts tack halfway through and becomes less interested in the two women’s relationship and more in San Kyi’s personal development, especially after some hard knocks change how she sees the world.

Every so often, the camera will linger on a tiny detail like a vase that has some emotional significance, or the light coming in a window. There’s a tiny hint that these cinematic still life pictures are being seen through San Kyi’s eyes, like scenes in a book told through limited third-person point of view. Indeed, there’s a faintly literary quality to the filmmaking, as if inspired by romance and high-brow fiction, but Aung Phyoe’s touch is feathery soft, as gentle as the soft thud of a mango falling from a tree.

The new comedy film The Invite centers on an unhappy married couple who host another couple — they live upstairs — for an uncomfortable, and revelatory, evening of dinner and charcuterie. The film’s screenwriters, Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, are actors who are also longtime writing and producing partners.

Jones and McCormack met decades ago, when McCormack’s sister (actor Mary McCormack) set them up on a date. It didn’t work out as a romantic pairing. Instead, it was the start of a long-running creative partnership.

“We’re really like brother and sister who dated briefly, which is not weird,” McCormack jokes. “I think we both knew right from the very beginning that we were connected and that we had to be in each other’s lives. And it took us a minute to sit down to write, but finally we did, and I’m so glad we did.”

Jones says she and McCormack share a voice: “The two of us have the same clip, the same rhythm, and we’re so different in so many ways, but we just kind of like fit like puzzle pieces conversationally very quickly, which is a wonderful thing to have with a writing partner.”

Inspired by the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs, The Invite takes place over the course of one night in a chicly appointed apartment in San Francisco. Two couples gather for dinner, and as the evening unfolds, the stories they’ve been telling themselves about their relationships and about themselves fall apart.

McCormack describes the film as a sex comedy that’s not really about sex. “It’s about wanting to be seen and heard and valued,” he says. “You live with someone for so long and it’s really hard.”

Jones says it’s no accident that their work tends to focus on relationships and middle age: “Selfishly, it’s great that we can channel the thing we’re most interested in, which is relationships, living with other people, being parents, losing parents, being alive, getting older, being middle-aged, looking straight down the barrel of the back half of life. All these things we got to bring to this script.”