FILMS

film roundup

Kimi Ths Souvenir. Photo courtesy A24

Kimi (Dir. Steven Soderbergh). Starring: Zoë Kravitz, Erika Christensen, Rita Wilson. You could do worse for a Covid-era genre piece than Steven Soderbergh’s latest, an HBOMax exclusive that has style to spare and a story, penned by David Koepp, that feels like a mid’90s-thriller throwback. Zoë Kravitz stars as agoraphobic techie Angela Childs, who monitors the voice commands given by random consumers to their Kimis (this movie’s version of Amazon Echo). One night she hears what sounds like a murder and must overcome her fear of leaving her apartment during a pandemic, as well as several other obstacles, to report it. The initial stretch in Angela’s apartment is rather dull, despite Soderbergh’s attempts to jazz things up aurally and visually (he does make great use of noisecancelling headphone audio dropouts to put us more fully in his protagonist’s headspace). When Angela finally leaves home, the film becomes more engrossing, mainly because it leans hard into her paranoid perspective. It’s nearly enough to make you forgive the trio of Euro-trash villains who seem like they’ve been transplanted from a low-rent DTV thriller of another era. [R] HHH Nitram (Dir. Justin Kurzel). Starring: Caleb Landry Jones, Judy Davis, Anthony LaPaglia, Essie Davis. Caleb Landry Jones was rightfully awarded at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance in this disturbing character study, a dramatic re-enactment of the events leading up to the 1996 Port Arthur shooting massacre in Tasmania. Jones plays the burgeoning mass killer, nicknamed Nitram, whose spree is never shown onscreen. The film instead aims to demystify the tabloid elements of his life, particularly his affair with a Grey Gardens-like socialite (Essie Davis), which left him flush with cash upon the woman’s unexpected death. Director Justin Kurzel’s style isn’t exactly nitty-gritty verité. The sound design is frequently abrasive and the saturated coloring of scenes just a hair’s breadth removed from garish. It’s all dangerously, often thrillingly close to giallo. Jones’s untamed peculiarity is matched scene for scene by costar Judy Davis as Nitram’s mother, a steely woman who has made denial her defensive default mode. Davis’s world-weary opacity has rarely been utilized this effectively. [N/R] HHHH Petite Maman (Dir. Céline Sciamma). Starring: Joséphine Sanz, Gabrielle Sanz, Nina Meurisse. This gentle-to-a-fault fantasy from

KEITH UHLICH

French writer-director Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) stars sisters Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz as Nelly and Marion, two youngsters who strike up a friendship after crossing paths in the woods. Nelly is staying with her parents (Nina Meurisse and Stéphane Varupenne) at the family cabin, which they’re cleaning out after the death of her grandmother. Marion resides with her own mother in another cabin (one strangely similar to Nelly’s) where she is awaiting a hopefully life-saving operation. There’s a magical-mystical connection between the two girls that is revealed by midpoint, and which is a bit too Shyamalan-lite for this viewer’s taste. The low-key nature of the film works against it at moments and for it at others, though the Sanz siblings do appreciably bear the weight of the themes Sciamma is exploring, in particular the quite literal timelessness of generational kinship. [N/R] HHH The Souvenir: Part II (Dir. Joanna Hogg). Starring: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tilda Swinton, Richard Ayoade. Writer-director Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical followup to her 2019 feature The Souvenir is obvious where the former was opaque. That’s not necessarily a detriment, and it could even be seen as intentional since film student Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is herself artistically exploring the very real fallout of her relationship with older drug addict Anthony (Tom Burke, co-star of the first movie, who cameos here). The layers of aesthetic and thematic artifice are meant to be raw, ragged—a heady jumble of the poetic and the prosaic. What’s best here, though, are the moments that feel directly ripped from life, like a scene in which Julie accidentally breaks a piece of pottery created by her mother (Tilda Swinton). Despite the pair’s mild-mannered apologetics, the world seems to shift off its axis. Sequences of this sort have a lot more power than the increasingly meta ones on Julie’s various movie sets, though Richard Ayoade is tremendous fun as a flamboyant director modeled on Absolute Beginners helmer Julien Temple. [R] HHH n

interview

A.D. AMOROSI

For the Zombies, the time of the season is now

WWHEN THE ZOMBIES AND its longtime vocalist Colin Blunstone play Phoenixville’s Colonial Theatre on April 20 and Atlantic City’s Music Box at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa on April 23, the celebration will hold many thrills.

Along with celebrating the overlooked majesty of 1968’s swirling Odessey and Oracle and soulful, back catalog smash hits such as “She’s Not There” and “Time of the Season,” Blunstone and Zombies’ co-founder Rod Argent insist on making smart new music, with As Far as I Can See (2004), Breathe Out, Breathe In (2011) and Still Got That Hunger (2015) as equally strong as the band’s classics. Yet another new Zombies album and an additional tour are planned for the end of 2022. “You need to be a special person to go and play only old material, night in, night out for years,” Blunstone says. “That isn’t us, and neither Rod nor I would last very long doing just that.” The last time I spoke with Zombies’ Blunstone and Argent, playing off each other like DeNiro and Pacino in Heat, the two said of fresh tracks such as the jazz bluesy “Moving On” and the baroquely inspired “Chasing the Path,” like kids with a new toy. “Colin’s voice is so natural and rich that my wild Hammond organ and loads of weird chord sequences just follow in line, naturally,” said Argent. “I think going forward from our first reunion in 2001, our influences have stayed the same, as we never used them in a contrived way,” said Argent. “We were just there to make songs work. I suppose you’re prey to the climate of the times.” He does say that when the band did Oracle, there were “subconscious issues” of influence, specifically the complexity of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. “I always loved developing melodic bass lines,” Argent says. “So did Brian Wilson, and that excited me.” Repeatedly during this, my first Zombies interview, one member begins a thought, the other finishes. With that, Argent and Blunstone seem like an old married couple. Were they a pair who decided to rekindle the old flame with new tricks once they reunited or a band who never truly got the chance to burn and sizzle in the first place? Either way, everything was a blur. “Very early on,” said Blunstone, the Zombies in its initial ’60s heyday all went by in a whirlwind. “For that first year, we were probably finding our feet as musicians. Plus, we were young, you know.”

Cue the Swinging ’60s music and Carnaby Street scenes of mod London.

Move forward a decade to the top of the 1970s. Another whirlwind occurred, one that Blunstone and I discussed recently: the 50th anniversary of his grand, folksy, quiet storming R&B-ish solo albums One Year (1971) and Ennismore (1972), the former of which was due to celebrate its silver anniversary with orchestral solo shows in Los Angeles and New York City under the pandemic struck. Again.

Ask Blunstone about his initial solo yearnings after the Zombies broke up (the first time) in 1968 over management issues. At first, Colin didn’t want to be a solo act and instead worked a 9-to-5 job as a clerk in an insurance office. “When The Zombies broke up, we had to immediately get day jobs because we had no money,” says Blunstone with a snicker. “It’s not as if we chose to have office jobs over making music. We just didn’t have any choice.” When “Time of the Season” finally hit in America (after its reign in Britain), it came when the band had already broken up. When labels were suddenly looking for The Zombies to quote their other hit, they weren’t there. Still, labels were looking for the hushed soulful voice behind the newfound smash, and Blunstone returned, signed with the Deram label, and released three singles in a row in 1969 under a pseudonym, Neil MacArthur.

“This was all just experimental, mind you,” laughs Blunstone of the thought of going it alone. “I didn’t know if going into the music business a second time would work either. And the name change? It was all so arbitrary. It was going to be ‘James MacArthur’ until we found out that there was an American actor by that name in a show called Hawaii 5-0. So I became Neil MacArthur. Not as a big career move, but rather as a guess.”

When MacArthur/Blunstone actually wound up with a solo hit redoing the Zombies’ “She’s Not There,” some of Colin’s old bandmates, Rod Argent and Chris White, had started a produc-

ARGENT AND BLUNSTONE SEEM LIKE AN OLD MARRIED COUPLE. WERE THEY A PAIR WHO DECIDED TO REKINDLE THE

OLD FLAME WITH NEW TRICKS ONCE THEY REUNITED OR A BAND WHO NEVER TRULY GOT THE CHANCE TO BURN AND SIZZLE IN THE FIRST PLACE? EITHER WAY, EVERYTHING WAS A BLUR.

Rod Argent. Rod Argent in the ’60s.