Volume 132: Late Night With the Devil / Yuni / About Dry Grasses
The Voice of Energy Vol. 132
Hidey-ho, friendly subscribers. How is the day treating you? I'm currently hanging with family in Renton and having a lovely, relaxing time. But not so relaxing that I forgot to put this together for you.
Thanks to any of you who might have been on hand for my appearances at the Tomorrow Theater last weekend. I had a lovely time and my intros for both films seemed to go over well. Would love to do more things like that in the future, so if you are in need of a speaker / lecturer, hit me up.
Weird thing that happened to me this week, some moron tried to use my name and credentials to get free tickets to see Phish in Las Vegas. His pitch to the band's PR flak was pretty in depth, ignoring the detail that his real name showed up in the email and the publicist knows me personally and flagged it immediately. I almost admire the chutzpah but...
Have a trio of reviews for you to consider. Thanks in advance for reading them. See you on the other side.
Late Night With The Devil (2023, dir. Colin and Cameron Cairnes)
David Dastmalchian’s spindly frame and tastefully askew features have long booked him for character actor status. In spite of his well-regarded work on stage, he’s been relegated to small and often disquieting supporting roles like his turn as the titular Boston Strangler in a 2023 film or his turns in The Dark Knight and Dune. Australian filmmaking brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes surely knew Dastmalchian’s resume when they cast the 48-year-old actor as the lead in their latest feature Late Night With The Devil, likely hoping that his appearance on-screen would put viewers on edge from the start of this fun if wobbly supernatural horror flick.
And they surely knew that Dastmalchian had the chops to take on the role of Jack Delroy, the charismatic host of a late night talk show struggling to beat Johnny Carson in the ratings as he mourns the untimely passing of his wife. He proves to be the ideal fit, perfectly evoking the calm patter of Dick Cavett and Mike Douglas while letting the sweaty desire for fame and a growing sense of terror poke through his otherwise steady visage.
As spelled out through an overly dramatic intro, the film purports to bring us a long hidden Halloween sweeps week episode of Delroy’s ’70s talk show Night Owls where the host aims for ratings success by bringing on a flashy medium (Fayssal Bazzi) and a magician turned debunker (Ian Bliss). But the star of this particular show is a young girl named Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), the lone survivor of a Satanist cult who, with the help of a “psi-researcher” (Laura Gordon), is a channel for demons. Naturally her arrival brings about all manner of glitches and unsettling moments, including an on-air demonstration of her strange power.
There’s no denying the strength of this film, but it also feels as though the brothers Cairnes pulled their punches. The bulk of Devil has the look and feel of a ’70s network gabfest (I especially loved the montage of “clips” from Night Owl’s past), but they shoehorn in supposedly uncovered behind-the-scenes footage of backstage conversations that aim to deepen the emotional stakes and heighten the terror, but ultimately become an annoying interruption from the juicy goodness of the TV show proper.
On the other hand, those black-and-white sequences do allow for more opportunities to see Dastmalchian in action. As he has been in all of his small and large on-screen roles, he’s an absolutely charismatic presence. Here, he taps into the same neuroses that Garry Shandling so wonderfully skewered in The Larry Sanders Show — that never satisfied cauldron of need that roils in the heart of so many comedians and TV personalities. In the mind of Delroy and his sleazy producer, if putting his own sanity and safety, not to mention that of the other guests and studio audience at risk, means ratings gold, it’s a worthy sacrifice.
Late Night With the Devil opens in theaters today and arrives on Shudder on April 19.
Yuni (2021, dir. Kamila Andini)
Yuni (Arawinda Kirana) is, in nearly every way, your typical modern teenager. She gets good grades as much as she gets in trouble at school. In her free time, she eats junk food and goofs around with her friends when she’s not worrying over her smartphone. She experiments with masturbation and crushes on the cool literature teacher.
The key difference is that Yuni lives in a small village in Indonesia where Muslim clerics have begun demanding virginity tests of the female students and where multiple adult males, carrying packets of cash, arrive at her home asking for her hand in marriage. Even with the potential of college offered to her by a kind administrator, Yuni’s options feel slim and stifling.
Director Kamila Andini understands the characters that she and co-screenwriter Prima Rusdi conceived for Yuni on a bone-deep level. In our increasingly misogynistic world, we insist that our young women grow up too fast and be at the mercy of men, no matter what their ambitions are. And for a character like Yuni, because her only understanding of the world at large is through what she sees through the lens of the Internet, she feels the pressure to utilize her sensuality before she even has a clear understanding of its power.
Yuni is an occasionally rough sit with sometimes unsteady tonal shifts and a couple of moments where either I was given a first draft screener or certain scenes were edited out by gunshy editors. But the truth of the story wins out over any bumpy passages. Kirana gives a fully grounded performance, maintaining the perfect balance on the hormonal teen tightrope that spans overconfidence and anxiety. She is especially winning in her loose, comfortable hangs with her friends, snacking on street food or cuddling as they gossip and fret. And through the lens of cinematographer Teoh Gay Hian, this cinematic world is rendered in a rich purples, reds, and blues — the perfect approximation of Yuni’s emotional palette as she sashays and stumbles along the rocky path toward adulthood.
Yuni is available to stream or purchase on various VOD platforms starting today.
About Dry Grasses (2023, dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), a gruff but charming art teacher, is nearing the end of his four year compulsory service in Eastern Anatolia, helping young students learn perspective and portraiture. He can't wait to get away. "All I know is that this place is dragging me down," he tells the lovely leftist English instructor Nuray (Merve Dizdar) whom he is courting over dinner one night. With any hope, he'll soon earn a transfer to Istanbul. He will surely end up taking his troubles with him, as his new friend reminds him, but he'll be far away from the oppressive rules of the administration and the drama of living in a small village.
His best laid plans however are upended — as is his own perspective — when he is accused of inappropriate behavior with a prized student (Ece Bağci). Rumors swirl, tensions emerge, and Samet starts lashing out at the people who have, by all accounts, helped bolster him during his time at the school. He tells his charges that their artistic efforts are pointless as they're only likely to wind up planting potatoes and sugar beets like their families have for generations.
Ceylan has long been fascinated with the inner workings of these small towns, seeing so much of himself in characters like Samet or Mahmut, one of the protagonists of the beautifully poignant 2002 film Uzak, or Aydim, the retired actor at the heart of 2014's Winter Sleep. Though with About Dry Grasses he was working, in part, from the journals of co-screenwriter Akin Aksu written during his own three-year stint as a public school teacher, he empathizes with the plight of a dreamer pushing at the so-called restrictions of these cloistered communities.
But he also deeply understands the dangers of holding on to the bitterness that lays at the root of Samet's worldview. Though he does see something in Nuray, he only really starts pursuing her when she takes a shine to his housemate and fellow teacher Kenan (Musab Ekici). Watching the façade of camaraderie and connection quickly fall away from Samet is shattering, particularly in those moments when he takes out his anger on the kids.
As with so many of Ceylan's work over the past two decades, Dry Grasses is a stoic work. With a running time of just over three hours, he lets scenes linger with camera movements and editing work that are in no rush to move away from the central action. We sink deeper and deeper into each moment, picking up on the details of the small apartments and houses and offices of these dynamic characters. Ceylan started off his artistic career as a photographer and it shows in every image he constructs here. The chilliness of the atmosphere zings through every moment. It culminates in a meta moment that sets both the film, Samet, and the viewer on an entirely new trajectory. It's worth the wait.
About Dry Grasses is in theaters now.
That's all I got for you this week. Considering adding a paid tier to this that will offer up some pieces on older films and other cinematic-centered writing. Would that be something any of you would pony up for? Reply and let me know. Otherwise I'll be back next Friday with more. Ceasefire now. Free Palestine.
Artwork for this edition is by Sam Vernon whose work is on display at Kunsthaus Hamburg through May 12.
This newsletter was written on the unceded land where once stood the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River creating communities and summer encampments to harvest and use the plentiful natural resources of the area.