Indecent Behaviors
My thoughts on The Good Mother, Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose and We Kill for Love
The Good Mother is a drama that tackles any number of weighty and serious topics—a mother grieving the death of her adult son, alcoholism, the scourge of fentanyl and the gradual death of journalism to name but a few—but handles them in such incompetent ways that most viewers will find them struggling to keep from simply laughing at it all. Sporting an occasionally dubious Albany accent, Hillary Swank stars as Marissa Bennings, a hard-drinking journalist at a local newspaper increasingly being taken over by click hounds who, as the story opens, learns that her estranged younger son, former star athlete turned drug addict Michael (Madison Harrison) has been killed—the theory, according to her older son, cop Toby (Jack Raynor), is that he was killed by friend/dealer Ducky (Hopper Penn) over a drug deal involving fentanyl-laced heroin that went sideways. At the funeral, she encounters Michael’s pregnant girlfriend, Paige (Olivia Cooke), and while she still blames her for the path that Michael took (she takes a swing at her at the gravesite), the incipient grandchild does help to foster a tentative reconciliation. With nothing else to do, the two begin to poke around the circumstances surrounding Michael’s death and discover that things don’t quite add up. While Toby counsels them to leave the investigating to him, they make a series of discoveries that force them to consider some unthinkable possibilities.
Well, unthinkable for them, at least. Unfortunately, the screenplay by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte-Peyrafitte (who also directed) and Madison Harrison is so devoid of any real sense of suspense or intrigue that I cannot imagine very many half-conscious viewers who will not be able to figure out the supposedly shocking third-act twist by about the 15-minute mark and even that is only because it takes about that long for it to reveal itself as a mystery in the first place. In order stretch things out that long, the script requires the characters to overlook obvious signs and act like idiots in order to get from one point to the next. (At one key point, Paige does something so irretrievably stupid that it would have stopped the movie dead if it hadn’t already pretty much ground to a halt by that point.) Meanwhile, we are given no real insight into Marissa and her particular emotional state—the film tells us that she has a drinking problem, for example, but then never really bothers to deal with it in any meaningful way, so that the moment of triumph when she finally orders just a glass of water at the local bar is a big fizzle. I think the concept was to go for a terse, close-to-the-bone approach but the script has no idea of how to approach such a thing and the whole thing feels like a very rough first draft instead of a fully fleshed-out narrative. Swank and Cooke are both excellent actors but not even they can do much with the ultra-thin material that they are working with here—watching them trying to make something out of it is like watching a couple of musical prodigies being forced to play scales for 90-odd minutes. Flopping as both a thriller and as a character study, The Good Mother is a waste of time and talent that essentially feels like a product from the Lifetime film factory, albeit played at the wrong speed and with a script not quite up to their usual quality standards.
In 1931, the Irving family—James, Margaret and teen daughter Viorrey—reported that their farm on the Isle of Man appeared to be the home to a talking mongoose who introduced himself as Gef and regularly conversed with them and did small things for them like catching rabbits and mice, most of the time just out of sight. Before long, word began to spread about Gef, neighbors claimed that they saw and heard him as well and swarms of reporters and paranormal investigators began arriving in the hopes of getting a glimpse of the creature or proving its non-existence. One of those investigations forms the basis of the new British import Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose, starring Simon Pegg in the role of real-life parapsychologist Fodor. After learning about the mysterious case of the mongoose from a colleague (Christopher Lloyd), he and his able assistant Anne (Minnie Driver) arrive at the Isle of Man in order to get to the bottom of the mystery—he figures that it is a fake, especially when he learns that Viorrey (Jessica Balmer) happens to be an accomplished ventriloquist, but is curious as to the reasons why people would come up with and buy into such an implausible and easily disproven tale. Once he arrives and begins investigating, his usual scientific approach proves to be useless—especially once he begins to hear Gef (voiced by Neil Gaiman) without finding anything in the way of tangible proof—and his frustration begins to mount as he tries to get a conclusive answer.
This all sounds sort of interesting, I suppose, but the problem with the film is that as it progresses, viewers may find themselves feeling as frustrated with it as Fodor is with his situation. With a story as decidedly odd as this, it would seem wise to either play everything completely straight or to lean completely into the weirdness, perhaps playing it as an absurdist riff on the likes of Stuart Little. Instead, writer-director Adam Sigal tries to negotiate a middle road between the two that just doesn’t fit—the more comedic elements never find the right rhythm that would have made them work (it feels at times like people trying to perform a Monty Python routine without any familiarity regarding their work) and the serious stuff, especially when the film strains to be a meditation on how notions like truth and reality are indeed in the eye of the beholder, never seems to have a clear idea of what it is trying to say. As Fodor, Pegg is okay but there are times when he seems equally befuddled as to how to approach the material while Driver is pretty much wasted in what is essentially a nothing role. In the end, Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose is a film that fails to live up to its undeniably intriguing title but if you do find yourself watching it, be sure to stay through the end credits for one of the most bewildering post-credit cookies that I can recall seeing.
Once a staple of video stores and late-night cable television, the direct-to-video erotic thriller—the kind of cheapo semi-sleazy schlock in which sexy dames and hunky guys engaged in steamy and silly narratives, often cribbed from such mainstream hits as Dressed to Kill, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, featuring interchangeable names, plenty of saxophone on the soundtracks and just enough nudity to give viewers an eyeful without requiring them to go beyond the beaded curtain at the back of the store—has pretty much disappeared from our collective cultural memory. Unwilling to sit back and let the collected works of Shannon Whirry fade from view, filmmaker Anthony Penta has put together We Kill for Love, a nearly three-hour long exploration of the entire history of this dubious cinematic sub-genre that is exhaustive and exhausting in equal measure. Utilizing mountains of “research,” interviews with a number of participants from both sides of the camera and lots of choice clips, Penta tracks the history of this particular form of storytelling from its roots in the film noir classics of the 40s such as Double Indemnity and a large portion of Michael Douglas’s filmography to its heyday in the 90s, where such films found favor with viewers who wanted to rent movies that promised uncomplicated narratives that were filled with sex, violence, lust, greed and deceit without quite crossing over into outright pornography, to its collapse in the 2000s, when a combination of market saturation, dwindling budgets, the rise of Internet pornography and the downfall of the video rental market led to their demise.
As someone who has always had a fascination for the odder and more offbeat aspects of cinema history and as someone old enough to remember actually seeing some on the films under the microscope here when they first came out (enough to be disappointed that Night Rhythms, an insanely ludicrous and hilariously cheesy 1992 effort which was shot by future Christopher Nolan collaborator Wally Pfister) never comes up at all), the idea of a film providing a look at this all-but-forgotten area of filmmaking has an undeniable appeal. Indeed, the segments in which the actual actors and filmmakers from that era offer up a nuts-and-bolts look at how titles such as Night Eyes and Body Chemistry 3 were produced are alternately amusing and fascinating. However, while his attempt to cover seemingly every possible aspect related to the subject at hand is certainly admirable, the film takes viewers on such a deep dive that it becomes the very definition of too much of a good thing. Unlike Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, the always-mesmerizing documentary on the history of folk horror cinema that managed to keep up interest throughout its 195-minute length by constantly finding new avenues of interest to tell its story, Penta’s film get a bit repetitive after a while to the point where even the hardiest scholars of semi-smut may find themselves struggling to get to the end. (That said, there are still some weird absences to be had, primarily the lack of even a single mention of John McNaughton’s Wild Things, a film which proved to be both the ultimate trashy erotic thriller and a wickedly smart and funny spoof of such things.) There is also a weird framing device meant to link the sections together featuring an Archivist (Michael Reed) making pseudo-profound scholarly observations amid stack of VHS tapes of movies starring Tanya Roberts that is too clever by half and fails to add much in the way of insight to the observations made by the genuine participants, critics and commentators who are also on display. Ultimately, We Kill for Love is an ambitious but ungainly work that could have benefitted greatly from some judicious editing to help make its points. That said, those who remember watching these films back in the day may enjoy checking it out as an exercise in sweaty nostalgia—however, those that do decide to dig in would be advised to make sure that the remote is handy, and not just for the pause button.