The Quiet One (2019)
Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: The Wedding Guest, The Quiet One, New York Stories and Our Hospitality.
The Wedding Guest
Michael Winterbottom’s sultry thriller hurries with swift efficiency from Pakistan to India, traveling up and down the length of the latter country with police on alert and pictures in all the papers. The protagonist kidnaps a woman to save her from an unwanted marriage but descends into a labyrinth of duplicity, distrust and romance. The Wedding Guest is like a B film noir set under the blazing subcontinental sun but infused with art-house melancholy.
The Quiet One
Bassist Bill Wyman was the solemn-faced figure at the edge of The Rolling Stones. His aesthetic was to support the music, not standout. And unlike his bandmates, he usually kept his head. He may have loved sex and rock ’n’ roll, but drugs? Wyman stayed sober through the long party, shot 8mm and kept every photo and scrap of paper in a climate-controlled room in his castle. He narrates this documentary crafted from the holdings in his archive.
New York Stories
Three directors were given 45 minutes and one theme: New York. Maybe because he lived in California, Francis Ford Coppola’s contribution about a precocious young girl living in a grand hotel is the slightest entry. Martin Scorsese triumphs with his life of an aging art-world lion and his fraught relations with a young woman, coaching great performances from Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette. Woody Allen is hilarious on the subject of a hectoring mother.
Our Hospitality
Seen today, most silent comedians seem like moving museum exhibits. Not so Buster Keaton, a director-actor whose deadpan remains cool a century later. One of his funniest films, Our Hospitality (1923), spoofs the 19th century with sight gags (an early railroad resembles a steam plow rigged to a pair of stagecoaches) and its “once upon a time in the United States” setting. Keaton is characteristically unflappable under pressure, enduring catastrophe with barely a wary shrug.
