Indie Focus: Fresh takes on genre storytelling with 'Arrival,' 'The Monster' and 'The Love Witch'

By Mark OlsenStaff Writer

Nov. 13, 2016 12:05 AM PT

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to your weekly field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

The AFI Fest is still in full swing. Josh Rottenberg wrote a great overview of the festival, where director of programming Lane Kneedler told him, “It’s interesting to come to AFI Fest and see these artists deal with the chaotic nature of the world in such different ways.” There’s still to come screenings of “Moana,” “Jackie,” “La La Land,” a tribute to Annette Bening with the new “20th Century Women” and the closing night premiere of “Patriots Day.”

I spoke to David O. Russell about the AFI Fest 20th anniversary screening of his comedy “Flirting With Disaster.” He talked about how the film was “deconstructing the idea of dysfunction” when he said “It was having fun with it, and in a strange way, saying there’s not some ideal thing that you’re going to find, that’s a journey without a destination.”

There are also a lot of great Times screening events coming up, including Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle,” John Madden’s “Miss Sloane,” Maren Ade’s “Toni Erdmann” and Michaël Dudok de Wit’s “The Red Turtle.” We’ve got a lot more awards season screenings and Q&A events coming soon. For more information, check in with events.latimes.com

‘Arrival’

Director Denis Villeneuve has recently been examining genre and movie heroism in films such as “Enemy,” “Prisoners,” “Sicario” and the new “Arrival.” In his new film, written by Eric Heisserer from a short story by sci-fi author Ted Chiang, Amy Adams plays a linguist who is enlisted by the military to help in figuring out how to communicate with the alien beings who have just arrived on Earth in ominous spacecraft. The idea of reaching out and finding new ways to understand and be understood has perhaps taken on a new meaning in recent days.

In his review for The Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “One of the most satisfying things about Denis Villeneuve’s elegant, involving ‘Arrival’ is that it is simultaneously old and new, revisiting many of these alien-invasion conventions but with unexpected intelligence, visual style and heart.”

In the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday wrote about the film in the context of other recent sci-fi films, noting, “With its intriguing premise and handsome production values, ‘Arrival’ continues an encouraging trend in science-fiction filmmaking, embodied by the likes of ‘Gravity’ and ‘The Martian’: films that imbue the genre’s inherent flights of fancy with sophistication and meaningful subtext.

Rebecca Keegan spoke to Adams about the movie. As Adams said of her character, “She’s not heroic in the traditional sense. I love that she gets to rely on her intellect and instinct as opposed to brawn and bravery.”

Steve Zeitchik spoke to Villeneuve back in September and more recently wrote about the marketing challenge of cerebral sci-fi like “Arrival.” He noted, “At the heart of the ‘Arrival’ marketing puzzle is whether a sci-fi audience that embraces explosions can respond to quiet charms — and, on the other hand, whether an audience attuned to humanistic cinema will come out for a movie in which aliens are present.”

And Chris Ryan at The Ringer wrote a thorough overview of Villeneuve’s career.

‘The Monster’

Even at this time of year, a movie life cannot be all prestige pictures and heady dramas. But even wanting some lowdown genre kicks doesn’t mean you have to dumb down for what you’re watching. In the horror movie “The Monster” starring Zoe Kazan, Ella Ballentine and Scott Speedman, a fraught mother-daughter relationship is thrown into deeper peril.

As The Times’ Justin Chang wrote in his review, “And then there are the horror movies of Bryan Bertino, in which the characters are often at each other’s throats from the get-go; when the terrors finally do arrive, they feel like a queasy yet logical amplification of what we’ve already seen. … Not least of the surprises here is that even when ‘The Monster’ is trying to scare you witless, its every scene insistently reaffirms its characters’ humanity.

At the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “Monstrous motherhood has never gone out of fashion, including in movies — recent examples include ‘The Babadook’ and ‘Goodnight Mommy’ — that are more obvious fodder for art houses than for multiplexes. ‘The Monster’ is cleverly pitched somewhere in between, with the kind of generous splatters that evoke the good old nasty days of grindhouse horror and enough sleek, self-conscious moves for festival play dates.”

‘The Love Witch’

We wrote about Anna Biller’s “The Love Witch” here over the summer and this fresh and exciting film is now getting a theatrical release. Shot on 35 mm and with 35 mm prints screening in some venues (including the run at L.A.’s venerable Nuart Theatre). The film, about a witch named Elaine who moves to a small town and the havoc that follows, is beautiful to look at, with astonishing production and costume design, but also a playfully provocative take on male-female dynamics.

I spoke to Biller and her star, Samantha Robinson, about making a film where the look of it and the ideas behind are so closely fused.

“I’m making a movie about a witch, it’s about witchcraft, and it’s going to have to put a spell on the audience,” Biller said. “And cinema is already a magical spell, it’s already about voyeurism. So the men are being mesmerized by Elaine in the movie and I want the audience to be mesmerized by the film.”

Filmmaker Anna Biller and lead actress Samantha Robinson from the film "The Love Witch" are photographed in Los Angeles on November 3, 2016.

In his review for The Times, Michael Rechtshaffen wrote, “Using early ’70s-era sexploitation flicks as her aesthetic template, filmmaker Anna Biller transforms female objectification into empowerment with her slyly campy sophomore effort, ‘The Love Witch.’”

At MTV, Amy Nicholson called it “a feminist film about a character who thinks feminism is bad news. It’s delightful. Biller and Robinson tap into that stilted soap-opera speech, a way of talking in which everyone sounds like they’re lying — often because they are.”

At Film Comment, Violet Lucca added, “Presided over by the angry spirit of Helen Gurley Brown, Anna Biller’s ‘The Love Witch’ is a sprawling, beguiling world unto itself. Biller’s sharp film stands in stark contrast to the complacency and crushing safeness of the vast majority of independent films made in the U.S., and is far more than the lighthearted genre pastiche or retrophile curiosity it may seem to be at first glance.”

Email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions, and follow me on Twitter @IndieFocus.