{"id":17306,"date":"2021-10-26T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-26T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=17306"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:13:54","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:13:54","slug":"vodepths-what-to-see-and-avoid-on-demand-this-week-28","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/vodepths-what-to-see-and-avoid-on-demand-this-week-28\/","title":{"rendered":"VODepths: What to See (and Avoid) On Demand This Week"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week\u2019s low-profile VOD releases tackle racial tensions in Australia, Georgia and New York City, while a film crew faces down gangsters and a social media influencer hunts for Bigfoot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Subject<\/em><\/strong> (VOD and select theaters October 22):<\/strong> Director Lanie Zipoy and screenwriter Chisa Hutchinson have a lot on their minds with their debut feature, and they can\u2019t quite deliver all of it cohesively. Still, the movie is impressively ambitious, with some powerful moments and a surprisingly strong lead performance from Jason Biggs. He plays Phil Waterhouse, a white filmmaker who\u2019s made his career on documentaries about underprivileged young Black men. Even as he\u2019s working on a new HBO series and basking in awards and acclaim, he\u2019s troubled by the death of his most recent film\u2019s subject, which Phil himself caught on camera. At best, The Subject<\/em> is a complex examination of both documentary ethics and white male privilege, via a protagonist who is equally narcissistic and sympathetic. But the movie is structurally disjointed, with early scenes and subplots that amount to nothing, and a final act that jettisons all other supporting characters in favor of a lengthy, overwrought showdown between Phil and his late subject\u2019s mother (Aunjanue Ellis). Grade: B-<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Crickets Dance<\/em><\/strong> (VOD October 26):<\/strong> The legacy of slavery inspires a modern-day love story in this misguided mix of historical drama and Hallmark-style romance. Small-town Georgia lawyer Angie Lawrence (Kristen Renton) inherits a massive antebellum mansion, where she discovers a diary written in the 1860s by a previous inhabitant. The movie switches between time periods as Angie reads about the life of kind-hearted Southern lady Emmaline McGrath (KateLynn E. Newberry) and her daughter Annabeth. There\u2019s an air of condescension to the movie\u2019s treatment of race relations, especially as reading about the love that Emmaline and Annabeth have for their slaves seems to enhance Angie\u2019s attraction to her hunky Black co-worker Andrew (Maurice Johnson). Andrew\u2019s last name also not-so-coincidentally happens to be McGrath, and part of their courtship involves him assuring Angie that she isn\u2019t racist. Somewhere in here is an innocuous message about tolerance and harmony, but it\u2019s buried under the tone-deaf dialogue, sloppy historical detail and flat performances. Grade: C-<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bigfoot Famous<\/em><\/strong> (VOD November 2):<\/strong> A social media influencer whose influence is waning decides she needs a \u201ccollab\u201d with Bigfoot to regain her following. Writer-directors Sam Milman and Peter Vass start out with some spot-on takedowns of viral videos, but Bigfoot Famous<\/em> quickly loses its way, just as influencer Coley (Steph Barkley) gets lost in the woods. The improvisational comedy leads to haphazard plotting, including various developments that feel entirely arbitrary, especially whenever the story strays from the wilderness. The lighthearted jokes abruptly give way to darkness, and the filmmakers can\u2019t pull off the tonal shifts. Barkley and Milman (as Coley\u2019s long-suffering sidekick) provide amusing caricatures of self-involved influencers, and some of the absurdist humor is funny. Milman and Vass could have pushed that absurdism further, or they could have stuck with something more grounded, but the awkward mix eventually squanders all of the movie\u2019s early comedic potential. Grade: C+<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Nightshooters <\/em><\/strong>(VOD November 2):<\/strong> Marc Price\u2019s lively action comedy opens with a pitch-perfect recreation of a low-budget zombie movie titled Dawn of the Deadly<\/em>, for which a small crew is shooting a few pick-up shots in an abandoned building. Unfortunately for them, a group of mobsters is using the same building for a bit of torture and murder, and when the film crew\u2019s cameras inadvertently capture that criminal activity, the hapless filmmakers are marked for death. What\u2019s fun about Nightshooters <\/em>is that the filmmakers actually aren\u2019t as hapless as they seem, and Price cleverly applies their cinematic skills to fighting for their lives: The stunt performer is a martial-arts expert, the special effects supervisor can rig explosives, the sound designer improvises spy equipment, and the lead actor is really good at playing dead. Combining Die Hard<\/em>, Home Alone<\/em> and One Cut of the Dead<\/em>, it\u2019s an affectionate and entertaining tribute to scrappy independent filmmakers that also includes lots of kicking, punching and explosions. Grade: B+<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Flood<\/em> (VOD and DVD November 2):<\/strong> There are a lot of somber onscreen dedications to indigenous people in this Australian period piece from writer-director Victoria Wharfe McIntyre, but the movie\u2019s message is as muddled and confusing as its pacing. Set in the 1940s, The Flood<\/em> is full of impressionistic flashbacks, dream sequences, and repetitions, eventually evolving into a rape-revenge thriller about a First Nations woman going after the cruel men who forcibly separated her family. It takes a lot of clunky set-up to get there, though, and McIntyre alternates between lyrical reflections and brutal violence, including multiple replays of a gang-rape scene. Star Alexis Lane looks fearsome as she goes on a rampage, but then the movie shifts gears again, attempting to become a parable of forgiveness. The result is a contradictory jumble of themes, ideas and characters that undermines any valuable points that McIntyre is trying to make about colonialism and racial hatred. Grade: C<\/strong> \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our mini-reviews of \u2018The Subject,\u2019 \u2018Nightshooters,\u2019 \u2018Bigfoot Famous,\u2019 and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":539,"featured_media":17308,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340,1426],"tags":[1436,1427],"class_list":["post-17306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-vodepths","tag-reviews","tag-vodepths"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/539"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22148,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17306\/revisions\/22148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}