The paradox of Daryl and Neil
Paradox: Promise of the Real (2018) Available Friday
‘MADE by Daryl Hannah and starring Neil Young’ should be enough to get anyone’s attention. And then you get to the promo materials which describe this film as “a fantasy, a loud poem and a free-spirited tale of music and love”, and you know it is no ordinary Hollywood fare.
Set sometime in a dystopian future-past, a band of outlaws hides out high in the Mountains near some desolate city. The “Man in the Black Hat” (Neil Young), the “Particle Kid” (Micah Nelson), “Jail Time” (Lukas Nelson) and a band of cowboys and outlaws pass their days searching for treasure and living a piratical life.
It may all be some deep allegory I couldn’t pick up on, but the visual beauty of this story is well married to Young’s hauntingly beautiful music. Hannah wrote and directed Paradox. Interesting this is not her first directorial rodeo: Her 1993 short The Last Supper won a Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.
In Search of Fellini (2018) Available Tuesday
WHETHER you love this film will correlate directly to your appreciation of its winsome lead, Lucy (Ksenia Solo).
Lucy is a small town girl from Midwest America who, having spent her life living in a protective bubble shaped by her mother Claire (Maria Bello), decides to make for Italy to meet Federico Fellini, the maestro himself.
She is enchanted by his films, as anyone would be, after watching them all during a Fellini film festival, and having been raised on dreams and whimsy, she cannot resist the allure of his magic.
In so many ways, she’s the perfect Fellini female lead, a true believer in the sort of magic that runs like a current through his oeuvre. But though the references to his work flow thick and fast he’s more of a background device here than a part of the central conflict.
It’s a sometimes sentimental but generally interesting coming of age story which is in the end worthy of the name of the great filmmaker.
Jane the Virgin, Season 4 Available Saturday
THIS series, which began life in 2014, is an extremely loose adaptation of a Venezuelan telenovela in which a poor teenager has the ultimate crisis pregnancy: she’s accidentally impregnated via artificial insemination, then falls for the wealthy biological father.
For the American version, Jane (Gina Rodriguez) is 23, living in Miami, and still a virgin, torn between her devout Catholic grandmother and her rebellious mother, who had her at 16.
It’s trashy but well scripted, sometimes compulsive viewing, sending up the Telenova format while also lovingly homaging it and somehow managing to never quite veer into camp.
The heartfelt central performance from Rodriguez lights up the screen and this series also boasts a rich ensemble cast. The New Yorker recently said that this show shouldn’t be a guilty pleasure, and, frankly, we couldn’t agree more.
The Witch (2016) Available Friday
IT’S RARE enough that a horror movie causes such a big ripple as The Witch did when it came out two years ago. Its success was down not just to the ambivalence at the heart of the film but to writer/director Robert Eggers’s success in combining the ageold concepts of witchcraft, black magic and possession and containing them in a family psychodrama.
The film begins in the New England wilderness circa 1630. Upon threat of banishment by the church, an English farmer leaves his colonial plantation, relocating his wife and five children to a remote plot of land on the edge of an ominous forest — within which lurks an unknown evil.
Strange and unsettling things begin to happen almost immediately — animals turn malevolent, crops fail and children appear possessed.
The muted cinematography and sparse dialogue add to the creepy feel. The question of who is to blame hangs in the air until the final scenes and the chilling ambivalence of the film lingers in the memory.