Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
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Home Movies (1980)
The 1980 oddity Home Movies is a different kind of student film in that it represents a collaboration between film professor Brian De Palma and his students at Sarah Lawrence College. The hotshot auteur behind Sisters and Carrie afforded some lucky college kids (including future Tales From the Crypt producer Gilbert Adler) a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn by doing by handling many of the creative and technical aspects of what can very generously be deemed a major motion picture and more accurately be considered a failed experiment.
Kirk Douglas stars as a virile, larger than life stud of a maverick movie director/professor known only as “The Maestro” for whom film is life and life is film and there’s no point separating the two. He’s a cross between an unusually enthusiastic, inspirational teacher and a genially unhinged cult leader whose religion is cinema.
The Maestro takes an interest in the sad sack existence of Dennis Byrd (Keith Gordon, who would go on to become a film and television director of note), a film student so milquetoast and passive that the older man dismisses him as a mere extra in his own life. The Maestro wants his would be protege’s life and career to be hits but the neurotic wannabe filmmaker’s attention is split between his studies and his dysfunctional family life.
The baby faced young man’s doctor father (Vincent Gardenia) is cheating on his mother while his oddball brother Dennis (Gerrit Graham) subjects his girlfriend Kristina (Nancy Allen) to a series of sadistic tests to prove herself worthy of marriage.
Home Movies contains a bewildering and unfortunate amount of gay panic gags, slut shaming and a level of blackface not seen since Al Jolson’s heyday through a regrettable subplot involving our hero putting on dark make-up at night to try to catch his dad having sex. What it lacks, however, is even a single laugh. The central presence of Allen in the female lead, meanwhile, affords De Palma yet another opportunity to cast his wife as a sex worker who is abused and terrorized by horrible men but with a bestiality twist that gives a whole new meaning to the title of De Palma’s 1972 comedy Get to Know Your Rabbit.
A documentary about the making of Home Movies would undoubtedly be more entertaining than the film itself but that’s setting the bar awfully low. This isn’t just bad for a De Palma movie; it’s dire for a movie made by college kids who don’t know any better as well.
Normally I write about movies about movies here but today I am going to ask you for help in keeping the rickety ship that is my career afloat until I reach sunnier shores.
Man, I REALLY destroyed that metaphor. I'm sorry.
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Black Bear (2020) FM
Lawrence Michael Levine’s moody 2020 drama Black Bear is grown-up mumblecore, with a bigger budget and a lusher, more cinematic visual aesthetic but a similar set of thematic obsessions. Like pretty much all examples of the scrappy, often annoying breed, Black Bear is about neurotic young artists who find it difficult, if not impossible, to separate their messy personal and professional lives.
Black Bear is split into two parts. In “The Bear in the Road”, the first half, enigmatic, mysterious actress turned director Allison (Aubrey Plaza) shows up at a lake house airbnb in the Adirondack Mountains and causes a rift between proprietors Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and his pregnant wife Blair (Sarah Gadon) with her flirtatious attitude towards the male half of the quarreling couple.
In "The Bear by the Boat House”, the section that follows, Gabe is now a director filming a film within a film with the same title as Black Bear and some of the same dialogue and action. Only this time Blair and Allison and actresses in the film-within-a-film and Gabe wants Allison to think that he’s cheating on her with Blair.
The darkly comic psychodrama that ensues suggests a less goofy and more dread-filled Baghead by way of Persona. Like the seminal mumblecore horror comedy Baghead, Black Bear functions best as an unusually pure vehicle for the idiosyncratic charms and incandescent presence of its leading lady.
Plaza’s stormy sensuality and sardonic humor carry Black Bear. She’s a dazzlingly contemporary spitfire with the retro glamour of a silent screen siren who is riveting as someone on both sides of infidelity. Plaza’s magnetic performance grounds Black Bear’s sinister game-playing and funhouse mirror take on the seedy psychological horrors of love-making and movie-making and the dangers of combining the two.