Good Time is a remarkable bad time experience done very well. The first high-profile film from indie filmmaking siblings The Safdie Brothers, Good Time is a caper thriller that harkens back to the rotten core of '70s NYC dramas. A dirty city and its working-class residents are the core of this relentless film.
Former British Twilight heartthrob Robert Pattinson is unrecognizable as Connie, a scruffy petty criminal from Queens, who is trying to pull off a bank heist with Nick, his mentally challenged brother.
One bad turn leads to another and Nick lands in jail. It's up to desperate Connie to scrape together the bail money to spring him. This leads him into one misadventure after another.
And bad, quickie hair dye jobs are the least of his worries.
Good Time plays like a dour, mean version of Martin Scorsese's After Hours. Falling into one failed impromptu plot after another, Connie hopscotches through the night of outer boroughs New York City. There's no glamour and Manhattan glitz in this world of hospital corridors, project high rises, White Castle burgers, empty carnival fun houses, and cold city streets.
The tension is perfectly ratcheted up as we careen along with Connie, making up the path as he stumbles along. The early '80s John Carpenter-esque synth score, by Oneohtrix Point Never provides ample dread-filled ambiance.
This image of underbelly New York is hard to shake. A remarkable "feel bad" journey.
"You people think that not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?"
I titled this piece 'Endangered Species' because of the rarity of real, or should I say "real" (it's the movies after all) political thrillers that reflect society at large today.
The '70s seemed to be full of them: The Conversation, All the President's Men, The Parallax View, just to name a few. Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor can be added to the list. Released dead center of the '70s, after the end of Nixon /Watergate and Vietnam, Condor has the same paranoid, don't trust the government, conspiracy vibe as some of the best of this decade.
Robert Redford stars as Joe Turner, a low-level CIA researcher in NYC (code name: Condor) who comes back to his office after lunch to find that all his co-workers have been shot dead. He immediately escapes the office and is on the lam from mysterious assassins trying to kill him as well.
While on the run, Redford encounters Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway) in a shop and forces her to provide him a hiding place in her apartment. During his short stay, they instantly fall in love. It's a bit of a silly plot point but with Redford and Dunaway in their beautiful primes, maybe it's believable?
An assassin (the always fantastic Max Von Sydow) is out on a CIA "clean-up" contract to kill Turner and protect info on a covert/rogue CIA operation to take over big oil in the Middle East. I won't go into the details here about the nefarious plot twists to silence the rogue plan but suffice to say it's all very believable 42 years later that the same thing could happen today.
I might semi-spoil the ending but suffice to say "going to the New York Times to leak the overarching CIA plot" may not be the happy ending that Turner is hoping for. It was the '70s and some of these new Hollywood films loved a freeze-framed, downer ending.
In 1975 when "news" meant newspapers, magazines, and three network TV channels and cynicism and distrusting the media was a bit less robust. But debunking lies and "fake news" conspiracies is racing back into the public eye in America, and with good reason.
Just in time for me to say this movie deserves a great reboot to modernize the storyline but still keep the paranoid tension and distrust that is the movie's core, there is a remakefilming this spring in Toronto for a ten-episode TV series.
Looking at the news, real and fake, I'm sure the writers have all the inspiration they need.
"Lots of guys want to swing with a call girl like Bree. One guy just wants to kill her."
Klute is a 1971 thriller directed by Alan J. Pakulaand was the first film in what was to be known as his "Paranoid Trilogy" of '70s films, which include The Parallax View and All the President's Men. I hope to cover these other two films in the trilogy soon. They all seem very prescient in this current, scary political landscape.
Although Klute is your basic missing persons/cop thriller with a sexy hooker angle, the vibe of the film is stunning in it's portrayal of a steadily declining NYC in the early '70s and the emotional detachment of Jane Fonda's Bree Daniels, the call girl who really wants to become a great actress.
Donald Sutherland, in his sonorous-voiced best, is the titular character of John Klute, a Pennsylvania detective looking for his missing friend, a high powered executive in Manhattan and frequent client of call girls. Sutherland also has an emotional detachment, an "all-business" vibe when investigating the case. He rents a room in Fonda's building, wire taps her phone, and shadows her movements, from auditions to clients. As Klute and Bree begin to fall for each other, Fonda's character admits she's feeling paranoid about being watched and followed, which she is, by both Klute and the eventual killer of Klute's missing friend and several prostitutes.
Microfilm, as a band, are such fans of the film that we wrote a track titled 'Inhibitions' inspired by Bree as a character and Klute as a film. It was one of our earliest songs and had a killer, lengthy moody remix done of it by Scottish artist Soundhog. It's one of my favorite remixes of our work.
Although released three years before the outing of Watergate, the film focuses on instances of secret tape recordings, buggings, and surveillance in a very dated and almost quaint way. Reel to reel audio tapes and peeking through windows are high drama in the world of Klute, but still the beginning of tech surveillance that would improve and grow in leaps and bounds every decade. Made today, the surveillance subplots would be more high tech and commonplace. Maybe this invasion of privacy would seem routine and if not expected, then not shocking. Would Bree's life be lived through her smartphone and business be done through a web app? Would her pad be furnished by IKEA?
From a tossed-off quip by Bree/Fonda in the film, she thinks her current, very spacious, loft-like apartment in Manhattan is a "kip" (a bed or room in a shared rooming house) and that she used to have a place on Park Avenue. As a part-time hooker? Simpler times.
Her place has a wonderful shabby chic vibe that Anthropologie would kill for; it's one of those lost, melancholy New York moments throughout the film where living in a pre-cleaned up Manhattan as a..."freelancer" was still possible.
Although possessing an overly plotted police thriller script, Klute has many loose moments of connection between Klute and Bree, walking Manhattan streets shopping for food or lounging in their apartments. And Fonda's monologues to her offscreen psychiatrist are brilliant, improv-heavy moments of acting that won her the Oscar for this role.
There are moments of lush beauty too, like Bree walking through the empty garment factory of Mr. Goldfarb, one of her clients. Striding through dusty air under a glow of overhead lighting Fonda moves in a slinky gown and boa, with the beautiful score by Michael Small of strings and hammered percussion surrounding her. It's wistful, slightly sinister, moody, and decaying, much like the world in Klute's NYC.
