Three Films Make A Post: Late night bites.

Ten Minutes to Midnight (2020): Erik Bloomquist’s movie is an interesting bit of mainstream feminist indie horror with Caroline Williams as an aging late night radio DJ to be surprise replaced with a younger model spending her last night on the job – possibly – turning into a vampire. I say possibly, because the film really plays out like a seventy minute or so dream sequence in which Williams’s character loses it, falls into shitty memories, and tries to react to the horrors inflicted on women in the public who dare to get older. For about forty minutes or so, I found this combination of consciously weird performances by everyone not Williams, somewhat disgusted social criticism and dream-like imagery rather interesting; the final half hour turned into a bit of a chore to watch because dream imagery and budget surrealism will take most films only so far, and where an escalation, a deepening or a resolution were needed, the film really only reiterated.

Milford Graves Full Mantis (2018): This documentary by Jake Meginsky and Neil Young (not that Neil Young, alas, even though that would be fantastic) is an exemplary documentary about the great free jazz percussionist Milford Graves, using long monologues of its subject about his philosophy, ideas about music and the world, and music and the heart, as well as the universe, the body and music, shots of Graves’s fantastic garden and other documentary material to make the intellectual and musical world of the man palpable, understanding and explaining him through his ideas (some of which sound highly eccentric, but also make total sense for Graves), his body and his musical practice rather than the historical approach most music documentaries use. Which seems perfectly appropriate to the man’s body of work, and free music as a whole.

Thus the documentary achieves something very rare: deepening the understanding of music that isn’t always easy to understand and letting the viewer leave with the feeling of having a much better grip on what man and music are about without editorializing for a second.

Mirage (1990): Visually and as a mood piece, Bill Crain’s desert-set slasher is a true hidden gem, turning the wide open spaces of the desert into a cold, claustrophobic nightmare land with the best of them, using the shape of the black truck of the killer haunting it and stalking the characters to greatest effect.

On the script level, the film does take a bit too long to get going, attempting somewhat deeper characterisation than typical of the genre, but suffering from an inability to make the characters actually interesting as well as from a mostly indifferent cast that, apart from final girl Jennifer McAllister, barely seem to make it through their lines.

Of course, one doesn’t really go into a slasher for interesting characters, and the mood here’s so strong, I found myself not caring.