Asphalt City

The stressful, despairing but compelling paramedic drama Asphalt City is bound to be compared to 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead, Martin Scorsese’s hyperactive take on New York City EMTs. But the more relevant likeness, I think, is to the cop drama Colors. In that film, Sean Penn played a hot-blooded young cop partnered with tired veteran Robert Duvall; here, Penn takes over as the tired veteran, while Tye Sheridan rides shotgun as Penn’s rookie partner. There’s a lot mentally wrong with Penn’s character, Gene “Rut” Rutkovsky, but considering it’s Penn, Rut is surprisingly even-tempered, almost gentle. That’s meant to throw us off the scent of Rut’s less admirable qualities, or perhaps the film is proposing him as an essentially decent man who succumbs to pessimism and, about two-thirds into the movie, makes an inhumane decision that he sees as merciful.

The perhaps too-symbolically-named Ollie Cross (Sheridan) is considered by some of his more hostile colleagues as a tourist in the paramedic life; he’s studying to get into med school. Ollie just wants to help people. But the craziness of the job and how much desensitization it requires, especially in a chaotic urban milieu, get inside him and start pushing him towards being a rough customer like Rut or like Lafontaine (Michael Pitt in a juicy performance), a callous EMT who drives with Ollie a few times. People’s lives are in the hands of guys whose idea of a prank is to leave a bloody dead dog in someone’s locker. But that’s kind of a nihilistic rewrite of the doctors in M*A*S*H, who cracked jokes while elbow-deep in someone’s bowels. 

In either case, you don’t want an easy weeper coming to slap the paddles on your chest; you want cold technicians who know the boilerplate reassurances (“Stay with us, buddy, you’re gonna make it”) but can flip their emotional switch and perform the tasks at hand. Surgeons don’t often have a warm bedside manner, but EMTs are expected to at least make a patient feel rescued and headed for safety; the paramedics I’ve personally seen in action have been gracious and positive. But city responders may be a different species; they see the worst at their worst, and even the best are often not their best at their worst. EMTs often arrive to screaming and blood everywhere. The director, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, working from a script by Ryan King and Ben Mac Brown, spatters the screen in grit and gore; the dominant color is red, often flashing in our faces. Sauvaire does a detailed job of creating the inferno these men live and work in. As in Taxi Driver, it’s not the job but the city that torments the characters.

Asphalt City was once called Black Flies, after the Shannon Burke novel it’s based on, and that’s a finer and more poetic title but also possibly misleading (it sounds like a horror movie about demons — which this sort of is). Black flies are treated as harbingers of death, humming thickly and maddeningly around clotting blood and cooling flesh. Penn and Sheridan deliver anguished turns as men who must co-exist with the flies, and who seem to hear them buzzing inside their skulls constantly. (How insane is their job? Their supervisor is played by Mike Tyson.) I believed in the men, not always in the women they’re involved with. Katherine Waterston has a terrific angry scene as Rut’s ex-wife; Raquel Nave doesn’t bring much to the role of Ollie’s booty call (he hesitates to call her a girlfriend). I didn’t spot any female paramedics — it’s hilarious that Madame Web of all films shows this movie up in that area. 

I wouldn’t call the film sexist, though. (As I’ve said in other contexts, the movie isn’t feminist, but it’s not remotely masculinist either.) The women sadly know they don’t fit well into these particular men’s lives. And some of the female patients come through with vivid impressions. Kali Reis, a boxer who starred in the most recent season of True Detective, pierces our hearts as a pregnant addict whose encounter with Rut leaves them both wounded. Authentic faces like Luisita Salgado and Glorimar Crespo, as loud street people, flood the screen with profanity, cracked humanity, lacerated pride. The meaning of city life as seen in this movie boils down to making other people suffer as much as you’ve suffered, and how do you deal with being surrounded by people like that if you’re sworn to help and heal? Asphalt City isn’t perfect — all the scenes between Ollie and his lover are only there to make a point about his devolution, and we’re not terribly invested in the couple. But it has something; it has its own ornery integrity, and wants to stare death and despair full in the face, as its protagonists do every night. 

Love Lies Bleeding

The writer-director Rose Glass, who introduced herself five years ago with the well-regarded horror film Saint Maud, has a knack for setting up a suggestive yet oppressive mood. She was built, really, for film noir, and her latest, Love Lies Bleeding, has steamy moments and genuinely horrifying violence. In both films, though, she can’t quite stick the landing and some of the more hallucinatory passages risk bad laughter. That’s the trouble with movies as serious as Glass’s are — she doesn’t release our laughter with any comic relief, so it has to be released somehow, and it happens when our protagonist’s fantasies are made absurdly literal. Any more detail would be spoiling part of the big finish. 

I enjoyed Love Lies Bleeding more than Saint Maud, but I’m not eager to watch either of them again. Our heroine, Louise or “Lou” (Kristen Stewart), staggers under the weight of the world. A gym manager, Lou likes women but seems to have attracted only bad news like Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), who is hyperactive and needy in a way that screams drugs, or just desperate loneliness. Soon enough, Lou meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a hopeful bodybuilder, and falls in love with her. Jackie seems nice but a little flighty; her instability spikes when she gets hooked on steroids Lou gives her. Jackie happens to have landed work at a shooting range owned by Lou’s dad (Ed Harris), a bad motorscooter who uses the range as a front for gunrunning and has left many bodies at the bottom of a ravine. 

That’s not all. Lou’s beloved sister Beth (Jena Malone) is stuck in an abusive relationship with J.J. (Dave Franco), who puts Beth in the hospital one day. Venting her anger, Lou says she wants J.J. dead, and Jackie hears and goes to visit J.J. in a spiral of roid rage. During all this, the feds are sniffing around; they’d like to nail Lou’s dad for all the bodies in the ravine, plus a new one found down there. For a while, I was with the movie as a sort of artful mirage of passion, in which Lou’s desires are answered by Jackie the leonine figure of mystery. Where did she come from? What does she want? It’s all kind of abstract. As if that weren’t enough stress, Lou is trying to quit smoking during all this. Good luck with that.

It’s capably acted — this deserves to be Katy O’Brian’s breakout role, allowing her to explore pleasure and pain and fear and madness, and Stewart has some fine, truthful moments. Her Lou grounds the sometimes strange film in lucidity and gives us someone to relate to. When these two make each other smile, they create a pocket of warmth we don’t want to lose, even though this is a noir and we know a storm is on the horizon. There’s a troublesome, though most likely unintentional, subtext wherein the mixed-race Jackie enters the pale Lou’s life and behaves savagely. Again, noirs are not nice. But it’s tricky to create characters we’re meant to care about, and cast actors who can make us care, and then shove them into the meat grinder of noir, where by definition everything turns to pulp.

Pulp, of course, can be fun. But Rose Glass has now made a horror movie and a noir, both genres that can offer a terrific time, and dipped them in a thick, forbidding mood. Jackie’s two major trippy sequences seem to signify more than is there; they pop in for a surreal twinkle, then are gone and unremarked on. Yet this kind of emotionally fuzzy psychodrama, which feels palpably physical but relentlessly interiorized, can poke us in raw places that other movies can’t get at. Someday Glass will find a story that consorts well with her dread-ridden tone, and she will make a classic that even I, who feels emotionally adrift in her films to date, will have to acknowledge. I’m also willing to note that the problem could be more mine than hers; something in my store of emotions and responses gets put off by what she’s doing or what she’s trying. That doesn’t make it bad. It certainly doesn’t make it boring.

Oscar Night 2024

I long ago stopped expecting Oscar-history moments on Oscar night, even after we’ve seen a few recent negative moments. But Ryan Gosling forever enshrined his coolness with his performance of “I’m Just Ken,” the most purely enjoyable thing I’ve seen on Oscar night in years. Gosling also appeared, with The Fall Guy costar Emily Blunt, to pay tribute to stuntpeople. You know how actors got nervous about being replaced with AI? Stunt folks got to feel that pain first. I know there continues to be phenomenal stuntwork, but the problem is CGI has advanced to the point where we don’t believe what we’re seeing. It could be Tom Cruise risking his ass or it could be Cruise’s face deepfaked onto a CGI figure.

Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel addressed the AI topic as well, using it to lead into a shot at the latest Transformers movie, as though Transformers wouldn’t have been feted if it had made more money. Kimmel, who largely conducted himself as slickly as usual, got a bad review of his Oscar hosting on Truth Social by none other than Donald Trump, who apparently had nothing better to do. I mean, I didn’t either, but then I’m not facing 91 state and federal charges. Anyway, Kimmel is a practiced old hand at this stuff by now, and we didn’t have to sit through the usual big comedic stunt. The evening felt streamlined, other than the return of that obnoxious bit where they haul five past winners of an acting award onstage, where they each hype one of the current nominees in that category. I miss seeing those Big Acting Oscar-night clips.

Then they botched the In Memoriam segment by filming the big screen showing some of 2023’s dear departed from too far away, instead of just letting that graphic fill our screens at home. They always manage to devalue the dead non-star, below-the-line talent they occasionally deign to acknowledge, this time by making them share a screen chopped up into thirds. The annual TCM Remembers homages have put the Oscars’ frail displays to shame for a while now; maybe the Academy should just get TCM to handle In Memoriam.

The courier of nostalgia on this most nostalgic of nights was Michael Keaton, which is not something I’d have guessed thirty years ago. Keaton’s bit with Schwarzenegger and DeVito — let’s not pretend these comically “extemporaneous” gags aren’t rehearsed inside out — was terrific, and he got to have a Beetlejuice reunion onstage with Catherine O’Hara. (They’re both also appearing in the sequel, coming your way in September.) Keaton seems at ease with what people want from him, and frequently goes and does his own thing anyway. Give him an Oscar. With my luck, his next nomination will be opposite Paul Giamatti. I was darn sad to see Giamatti remain seated, but I can’t begrudge Cillian Murphy’s night in the lights. There were people and films I’d rather have seen win, but at least none of what did win is insultingly bad (or even regular bad).

I didn’t love Oppenheimer — it’s a hard film to “love” — but it was destined to clean up, and largely deserved to, picking up seven trophies including the big one. Poor Things has got to be the weirdest film to win four Oscars since The Shape of Water. Like The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon was up for multiple awards and captured zilch. Maestro didn’t get the love either, and The Holdovers had to settle for one win — and its loss in the original screenplay category was ironic since a plagiarism claim against it had just been made public. The Zone of Interest won the right Oscars, I think. Weirdly, the three movies that got shut out (Past Lives was the third) were the only Best Picture nominees I hadn’t seen before Oscar night. I don’t really want to see Maestro.

It occurs to me that the night’s two big winners, Oppenheimer and Poor Things, are both mature geek movies — sciency and odd and unafraid to be off-putting in the pursuit of their vision. Somehow, Nolan makes a three-hour movie unfolding mostly in cramped rooms feel big, major, echoing with import. And Poor Things, which crossed the $100 million mark worldwide not long ago — which is not at all weird, heavens no — does what it does so fearlessly and with such a volatile visual sense that it has come to seem, out of all the nominees, the best example of pure cinema. That a movie this stubbornly strange could win four of the field’s highest honors while also being a legitimate hit is reason for optimism. Let’s hope it’s not unfounded.

Drive-Away Dolls

It’s probably too simplistic, and probably wrong, but on the evidence of Ethan Coen’s solo debut feature Drive-Away Dolls, he’s the goofy one in the Coen partnership and his brother Joel (who directed The Tragedy of Macbeth a few years back) is the serious one. (Typically perversely, the truth is probably the other way around.) Drive-Away Dolls, which Ethan also co-wrote with his wife Tricia Cooke, is blessedly short (77 minutes less seven minutes of end credits) and full of sex, violence, and jokes. The jokes sometimes land and sometimes don’t, but overall it’s a pleasant enough trifle. Not everything the Coens are involved in, separately or together, has to be a cinematic game-changer.

The dolls (the original title was Drive-Away Dykes) are buddies Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan). They get a car from a drive-away service and head to Tallahassee, not knowing there’s something in the trunk. Violent men hired by a powerful figure are after this something, for reasons I should let the movie tell you. Jamie, a lascivious sort, and Marian, who brings a Henry James novel with her, are generally the kind of diametrically opposed friends you only meet in B-movies. But Coen never pretends this is anything but a B-movie. Full of psychedelic scene transitions that recall the knockout daydreams in The Big Lebowski, it’s informed by any number of exploitation flicks of the ‘70s, though I feel sure none of those had references to The Europeans. 

The movie is all over the place — its tone is the ‘70s, but it’s set in 1999 for some reason, and sports some anachronisms like someone saying women can marry each other in Massachusetts (they couldn’t until 2004). A small dog is treated somewhat cavalierly (though not cruelly, thankfully), its only purpose being an excuse to get Jamie’s ex (Beanie Feldstein, funny as usual) on her trail. The terrific character actor Bill Camp scores every time as the drive-away manager Curlie, who’s sort of the comedic flip side of the elderly gas-station attendant who almost loses the coin toss in No Country for Old Men. As often happens in Coen movies, the desperate criminals are ruinously stupid, and their quarry is only innocent in comparison. Stars Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon drop in briefly, adding to the tapestry.

It may also be simplistic to imagine that Coen came up with the knockabout male crime stuff while Tricia Cooke (who identifies as queer; she and Coen have an open marriage) handled the lesbian stuff. Certainly the scenes inside various lesbian bars (an endangered species these days) were informed by someone who’s been there. Apparently “basement parties” are or were a thing; Jamie and Marian find themselves at one such shindig hosted by a women’s soccer team, and are invited to another. The South in 1999, presumably, was a lava pool of activity for like-minded young women to pursue glory or humiliation. In this universe, men mostly exist to be laughable or menacing (Colman Domingo holds up the “menacing” portion as imposingly as he did in @Zola). This is the kind of movie where Beanie Feldstein comes to the rescue, gun blazing.

Weirdly, of the two solo Coen efforts, I prefer Ethan’s sex-positive, consolateur-laden goof to Joel’s starkly artsy Shakespeare. (The two films couldn’t be less alike.) For one thing, it’s more fun, and fun is as rare nowadays as lesbian bars. The loosey-goosey Qualley and the stoically suffering Viswanathan are an engaging match; if their Jamie and Marian headlined a TV series I’d be there for it. If you don’t relish their company, you’re only with them for slightly north of an hour, and there are other strange divertissements throughout, such as Miley Cyrus’ bit as a character named Tiffany Plastercaster, or a heavy who emphasizes people skills as a path to persuasion (with dialogue you can imagine hearing, slightly tweaked, in Miller’s Crossing), or the funniest front-page headline since Arrested Development’s heyday. It’s silly and soft and bound for the cult-movie section, where it will find the following it lacks right now.