Movie Reviews
‘Queer’ Review: Daniel Craig Burns a Hole in the Screen With Obsessive Desire in Luca Guadagnino’s Trippy Gay Odyssey
![‘Queer’ Review: Daniel Craig Burns a Hole in the Screen With Obsessive Desire in Luca Guadagnino’s Trippy Gay Odyssey ‘Queer’ Review: Daniel Craig Burns a Hole in the Screen With Obsessive Desire in Luca Guadagnino’s Trippy Gay Odyssey](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/queer_009_000_dmp_a_v00165-H-2024.jpg?w=1296&h=730&crop=1)
The jazzy experimental style of the Beat Generation writers has made their work notoriously tricky to adapt for the screen. Walter Salles’ On the Road, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl and David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch took stabs at it with varying degrees of success. John Krokidas’ under-appreciated Kill Your Darlings arguably came closer to capturing the rebellious energy of the literary movement by tracing a formative episode in the lives of the writers themselves. In Queer, Luca Guadagnino meets William S. Burroughs on the iconoclast’s own slippery terms and the result is mesmerizing.
Working again with Justin Kuritzkes, his screenwriter on Challengers, Guadagnino paints an evocative picture of ex-pat ennui in post-World War II Mexico City, establishing the foundations of a love story grounded in realism before shifting into fantasy as the narrative becomes a drug-addled mosaic. The film was acquired ahead of its Venice premiere by A24, which is planning a release later this year.
Queer
The Bottom Line Drifts hypnotically between realism and hallucination.
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenwriter: Justin Kuritzkes, based on the novel by William S. Burroughs
2 hours 15 minutes
Written in the early ‘50s while Burroughs was awaiting trial for the allegedly accidental homicide of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, but not published until 1985, the novel is practically a memoir, given how closely it hews to events in the author’s diaries and letters.
The book sits squarely between Junkie and Naked Lunch in chronicling the experiences with opioid addiction of Burroughs’ alter ego, William Lee. But Queer perhaps is the most revealing of the three books about the writer himself, depicting Lee’s unraveling, possessed by desire and corrosive need. The object of that obsession is Eugene Allerton, a fresh-faced American ex-military kid inspired by Adelbert Lewis Marker, who was 21 when he and Burroughs met.
It’s hard to think of a more ideal director than Guadagnino to explore queerness, sensuality and the shifting terrain of romantic intoxication, and he’s found the perfect traveling companion in Daniel Craig. In a transfixing performance that balances colorful affectation with raw hunger, the actor makes Lee a magnetic raconteur whose shield of worldly composure falls away as Eugene (Drew Starkey) eludes his grasp, leaving him a virtual ghost by the end of the film.
In Mexico City to escape charges of heroin possession in the U.S., Lee indulges his drug habit with whatever he can get, while trying to write but more often spending time strolling the streets, drinking in a charged atmosphere of brothels and cock fights and bars captured in granular panoramic splendor by DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom.
Aside from some second-unit work, the movie was shot entirely at Cinecittà, with sets constructed on the historic Rome studio backlot. (Queer marks the second major film this year to recreate Mexico on European soundstages, following Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez.)
Lee is a fixture at the Ship Ahoy bar, floating among the queer American ex-patriate community but maintaining a real friendship seemingly only with Joe, who’s unwilling to give up his taste for rough trade over anything as inconsequential as getting assaulted or robbed. Played by an unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman, Joe could almost be an Allen Ginsberg surrogate, spinning low-key hilarious accounts of his sexual adventures. When a dalliance with a cop turns sour and he finds “El Puto Gringo” scrawled on an exterior wall of his home, he shrugs, “I left it there. It pays to advertise.”
Lee pulls his share of young tricks, both Americans and Mexicans, but when lanky, bespectacled Eugene catches his eye on the street, he’s bewitched. At first, their flirtatious glances are a playful cat-and-mouse game. Lee strikes out in his initial attempts to connect, but Eugene gradually starts fraternizing with him at bars.
They go to a movie theater to see Cocteau’s Orpheus, where Guadagnino finds a gorgeous visual translation for Burroughs’ description of Lee as he imagines caressing and kissing Eugene, with “ectoplasmic fingers” and “phantom thumbs.” Also lifted directly from the novel is a moving image soon after, when Lee in his mind leans in close to the younger man, appearing “curiously spectral, as though you could see through his face.”
Though the connection does eventually extend to the physical, it’s more a question of Lee servicing Eugene and the latter surprising him by reciprocating, albeit with impersonal detachment. While Eugene is sufficiently bi-curious to express interest in the gay bars around town, there’s no indication that he’s had sex with men before, or that he enjoys it. But Lee perseveres, convincing him to accompany him to South America, covering all costs and bargaining for intimacy once or twice a week.
Burroughs purists might scoff, but it lends credibility and warmth to the trajectory of this transactional relationship that Guadagnino and Kuritzkes have sanded down some of Lee’s more abrasive edges from the novel — his patronizing attitudes toward Mexicans for one. Craig looks both seedy and elegant, louche and dashing in his linen suits and fedora. You can understand a youth being dazzled by Lee’s “routines,” flavorful anecdotes full of seductive conversational flourishes.
While Craig makes this loquacious side of the character highly entertaining, he’s also superb at showing Lee’s unaccustomed self-exposure, his aching need for human contact increasing his vulnerability as his addiction to Eugene becomes chronic. With illuminating new self-knowledge comes crippling weakness, something Craig fully conveys in a ballsy performance covering a broad psychological and emotional spectrum.
Once they depart Mexico, drug withdrawals leave Lee weak and shivering, clinging to every tenuous sign that Eugene cares for him. Playing a withholding character, Starkey deftly keeps an air of mystery around that question though he never risks being perceived as a mere user. Despite being ambivalent about the sex, his irritation is tempered by compassion for hopelessly consumed Lee. The actor quietly sizzles in the high-waisted trousers and knit shirts of the time; Eugene wears his preppy wardrobe with a natural panache about which he seems oblivious.
The purpose of the South America trip is to find a plant-derived hallucinogen called yagé, more commonly known as ayahuasca, which Lee believes can trigger powers of telepathic divination. This takes them into the Ecuadorian jungle to meet wildly eccentric, stringy-haired American botanist Dr. Cotter, who lives in a hut with her younger male companion (Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso) and a sloth. (Another of Guadagnino’s directing contemporaries, David Lowery, appears earlier as one of Lee’s bar acquaintances.)
The botanist is played to the hilt by Lesley Manville (also unrecognizable), feral and ferocious, packing a pistol lest anyone try to make off with her precious research material. Lee assures her in his disarming way that they just want to sample the brew, which she warns them is a mirror, not a portal to another place.
Psychedelic tripping scenes in movies often tend to be embarrassing. But Guadagnino knows what he’s doing, folding together body horror elements reminiscent of his Suspiria remake — if you want to see two men literally vomit up their hearts, you’re in the right place — with an almost balletic union between Lee and Eugene that’s as spiritual as it is carnal.
Cotter encourages them to stick around and see where more of the drug could take them, but they decline. As they leave, she tells Eugene: “The door is already open. You can’t close it.” Those cryptic words hang in the air of a haunting epilogue with Lee back in Mexico City two years later, in which the images of Eugene in his head become enmeshed with Burroughs’ own traumatic history with Vollmer.
This is Guadagnino’s fourth collaboration with gifted Thai cinematographer Mukdeeprom; it’s heady and beautiful, finding dreamy visual poetry even in tawdriness and squalor. The air seems pervaded by palpable strains of both sensuality and desolation. The period production and costume design (respectively Stefano Baisi and Jonathan Anderson) clearly have been meticulously curated but have a lived-in feel that gives the movie as much grit as elegance.
After their pounding beats energized Challengers, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross shift gears with a score drenched in melancholy feeling, shaping the mood along with invigorating blasts of non-period tracks by New Order, Nirvana, Sinéad O’Connor and Prince, among others. Those bold choices are typical of Guadagnino’s sure hand throughout this strange, beguiling film, fueled by tenderness, loneliness, lust and swooning unrequited love.
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Movie Reviews
Piece by Piece movie review & film summary (2024) | Roger Ebert
![Piece by Piece movie review & film summary (2024) | Roger Ebert Piece by Piece movie review & film summary (2024) | Roger Ebert](https://www.rogerebert.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Piece-by-Piece_Still_01.jpg)
A hybrid musical-docu-biopic Lego movie like “Piece by Piece” is a rich concept. The bright jubilation of “Happy,” the chart-topping hit for producer/musician Pharrell Williams, would presumably make his life story and the form of animation a perfect fit. Williams’ playful, genre-bending music that mixes post-soul cool with skater sensibilities is probably more than a live-action narrative could contain. In the hands of director Morgan Neville, however, the story of Williams’ life lacks specificity and substance.
Neville leans on the kind of visual storytelling common to documentary film, his bread and butter, throughout “Piece by Piece.” The opening, for instance, borrows the aesthetic language of behind-the-scenes documentaries by having a camera following behind a Lego Pharrell (voicing himself) as he walks into his home. The singer asks his wife Helen to quiet the kids because he’s about to be interviewed. Pharrell and the camera go to a separate room, where two chairs are set up: one for him and another for a Lego version of Neville. The filmmaker then prompts the star to tell his life story—inspiring Pharrell to imagine himself as a baby sea creature swimming through the ocean toward the Roman god of the sea Neptune. That dreamed origin story pushes us to the shores of Virginia Beach, Pharrell’s hometown, where he lives in the Atlantis projects with his mother and father.
From then on, the film takes a rise-and-fall-and-rise format. At his grammar school, Pharrell connects with Pusha T, Missy Elliot, Timbaland, and his eventual Neptunes collaborators Chad Hugo and Shay Haley. The band impresses superstar music producer Teddy Riley, inspiring Williams and Hugo to maximize their creative potential. It leads to collaborations with Gwen Stefani, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake and more. The plethora of hits, of course, lends the film its jukebox appeal. But visually, Neville, uninspiringly just recreates the music videos for “Hollaback Girl” and “Drop It Like It’s Hot” as Legos. The success Pharrell experiences becomes the primary conflict as he stretches himself too thin as a hitmaker and as the head of fashion and product lines.
It’s all pretty ho-hum. Biopics, especially with the subject’s involvement, are always sanitized. Despite the film’s love of oft-bleeped expletives, “Piece by Piece” is far too clean. Pharrell’s two main character flaws in this film add up to: I’m too trusting and yet I’m afraid of commitment. The former gets him in trouble with A&R men sanding down his musical complexity. The latter occurs in his music, jumping from genre to genre, and in his personal life, with his girlfriend and eventual wife. These aren’t uninteresting obstacles. But they can’t be the sum-total of a person’s complexity. Rather Neville emphasizes Pharrell’s faith in God, his devotion to his friends—such as helping a down-on-his-luck Pusha T score a hit—and his seemingly boundless creativity as the main talking points.
Those aims leave many other narrative questions unanswered. Neville and Pharrell make it a point that the Neptunes were locked in a music deal with Teddy Riley, but it’s never explained how the group were able to break out of that deal once they found representation. Pharrell’s parents appear as comic relief, but not much else is revealed about them. Pharrell’s songwriting process is also likened to his putting together Lego pieces until they shine a la the lightbulb above a great idea. Nothing else, however, is said of his actual methodology or ethos.
Most of all, the film rarely finds inventive ways to talk about Pharrell’s inner life. Sequences where the artist’s synesthesia are represented onscreen are the exception, roaring as vibrant, blooming hues of hypnotic color. There are other whimsical moments, such as a statue of Neptune coming alive or Pharrell imagining himself being left out at sea by nefarious A&R men, but this film is never as playful as it’d like you to believe.
Rather the overstretched and underthought “Piece by Piece” is always struggling to check the boxes of its genre requirements: the musical sequences lack originality, the Lego animation doesn’t go beyond the expected sheen, the biopic elements are too controled and the humor is intermittent. It’s also unclear who exactly this movie is for? With its heavy expletives it’s certainly not for kids. And with it being animated, you wonder how many adults will gravitate toward a movie trying to straddle the line between winking and clean. There are simply too many chunks missing from “Piece by Piece” for it to be as memorable as its subject.
This review was filed from the premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. The film opens on October 11, 2024.
Movie Reviews
The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar’s English feature debut
![The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar’s English feature debut The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar’s English feature debut](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/og_image_scmp_review/public/d8/images/canvas/2024/09/03/4dea867b-c8a4-4820-b7ce-20c3a7728dda_d87efef2.jpg?itok=Rm-BvkoI&v=1725329694)
4/5 stars
After a career stretching back 50 years, Pedro Almodóvar finally makes his feature debut in English with The Room Next Door.
Spain’s premier director has clearly been building up to this feat; last year, he delivered his second short film in English, the gay-themed Western Strange Way of Life. This take on Sigrid Nunez’s book What Are You Going Through, premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, goes a step further.
Almodóvar devotees can rest assured that his unique approach to filmmaking has not been diluted by switching from Spanish.
This New York story sees Julianne Moore play Ingrid, an author who has just published a successful book wrestling with death, something she greatly fears.
When she runs into an old acquaintance at a book signing, she is informed that their mutual friend Martha (Tilda Swinton) is ill with cervical cancer. Ingrid has not seen Martha for years, but takes the opportunity to visit her in hospital, and restores the bond between them as she becomes a regular visitor.
Movie Reviews
The Thicket (2024) – Movie Review
![The Thicket (2024) – Movie Review The Thicket (2024) – Movie Review](https://cdn.flickeringmyth.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/the-thicket-peter-dinklage.jpg)
The Thicket, 2024.
Directed by Elliott Lester.
Starring Peter Dinklage, Juliette Lewis, Levon Hawke, Leslie Grace, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Esme Creed-Miles, Andrew Schulz, Macon Blair, Arliss Howard, James Hetfield, Ryan Robbins, Ned Dennehy, David Midthunder, Sophia Fabris, Guy Sprung, Derek Gilroy, Chris Enright, and Teach Grant.
SYNOPSIS:
West Texas. A boy who, after his sister is kidnapped by a violent killer known only as Cut Throat Bill, enlists a fierce bounty hunter named Reginald Jones who becomes the leader of the group of outcasts searching for the stolen girl.
Directly across from one another, Cut Throat Bill (Juliette Lewis) tells Peter Dinklage’s Reginald Jones he is the shortest man she has ever seen, to which he responds that she is the ugliest man he has ever seen. There are unmistakable parallels between these two hardened killers, one a gravedigger and gunslinger for higher, the other a career criminal with a hefty bounty on her. Even before Director Elliott Lester’s The Thicket starts getting into the similar expository traumatic backstory for each of them, anyone with working eyes can tell that these two people have gotten a raw deal from society (especially in the Wild West) based on their appearances alone. He is a dwarf; she is butch, scarred, gruff, and about as unladylike as a woman can get.
Above all else, everyone here is searching for a home or place of belonging, whether they realize it or not. Throughout the film, a found family is developed and juxtaposed alongside the hierarchy of a band of criminals. That’s not to say Reginald Jones starts as noble or with a heart of gold. It’s far from the contrary, as he, alongside his muscular friend (which is not to say that he can’t hold his own with a gun or in a knife fight) Eustace (Gbenga Akinnagbe) are bounty hunters and will essentially take any dirty job for money.
Their services are hired by sensitive and harmless religiously Christian Jack (Levon Hawke), who wants his sister Lula (Esme Creed-Miles) rescued from the clutches of Cut Throat Bill and her violent posse of miscreants. Following the tragic loss of their parents to smallpox, the siblings were attacked en route to a new family home, which Jack eventually uses the deed for to sweeten the deal. It is also unclear what Cut Throat Bill wants Lula for, but allowing the young woman to be assaulted and raped by her men is not an option. In that regard, there is some temporary relief for Lula’s safety, at least until we learn that she is being taken somewhere dubbed The Big Thicket.
There is enough drama to mine characterization from, but Chris Kelley’s screenplay (based on the book by Joe R. Lansdale) doesn’t know when to stop adding characters in its effort to drive home that found family aspect. The result is a lot of characters that are hard to care about, even if one of them happens to be an unofficially deputized bounty hunter chasing after Reginald Jones, played by none other than Metallica lead singer James Hetfield. Then, there is a forced prostitute (Leslie Grace) Jack decides he needs to save, meaning that there is a romantic subplot mixed into this narrative about rescuing his sister that one would think would play out more urgently.
Everything else tossed into this story comes as an unfortunate detour from Peter Dinklage and Juliette Lewis turning in solid, pained, and empathetic misfit turns as characters from similar backgrounds, ending up on different areas of the morality spectrum. It’s another fascinating role for Peter Dinklage, who admirably refuses to let his career be placed into a conventional box. He isn’t merely a helpless dwarf incapable of fighting against his tormentors; he is skilled with weapons and fends them off. There is also a tough exterior to the character and a willingness to mold Jack into a more traditional man, which is somewhat necessary to rescue Lula successfully.
The primary issue is that the storytelling isn’t particularly riveting, and the characters aren’t explored deeply enough. Unsurprisingly, all of this will culminate in violence at The Big Thicket, which disappointingly doesn’t come across as a unique, terrifying location or one that is taken advantage of for innovative action and set pieces. Admittedly, those environments are beautifully harsh, and the period piece details are convincing.
Overstuffed plot lines and characters just let down the core dynamic, presumably having had more time to breathe and come alive in book form. As an adaptation, The Thicket probably could have used more condensing and a tighter focus on fresh elements.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
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