A Different Man, New Wave, Fall Movie Preview

Comings and Goings at the Cinema, Sept. 19

Big news! Thanks to this newsletter and readers like you, I have press credentials for the New York Film Festival! For the next few weeks, I’ll be spending way too much time in the Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. Dispatches from the front will be coming soon, and next week I’ll publish a practical NYFF survival guide for those attending the festival at the end of this month. If there’s anything you’ve wanted to know about the festival, drop a comment or email me.

And if you’re attending the festival this year, either as a member of the public or the press, let me know and we can meet up if our schedules align!

There will be a little bit less cooking going on while I spend all my free time in press screenings, but right after the festival ends I’m hosting a truffle-centric dinner party that I’m super excited about. I’m collaborating with a friend who is an actual professional (she’s an R&D Chef at RH Guesthouse), so I’m looking forward to learning a lot from her. Hoping there will be some fun things to write about for that dinner 😃

To get you into the weekend, here’s a review of a good new movie starring the stan-worthy Sebastian Stan, plus a lil’ preview of some movies to look forward to in the coming months.

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A Different Man

Opens September 20 in limited release.

Courtesy of A24.

Sebastian Stan, famously known for his Marvel role as The Winter Soldier, is literally unrecognizable at the start of A Different Man. He plays Edward, an aspiring actor with a severe facial deformity (think The Elephant Man). Children gawk at him on the subway and strangers pity his appearance. But then Edward is offered an experimental treatment to remove the tumors from his face. While some movies would make that the entire story, here it’s only the first act. Writer-director Aaron Schimberg is more interested in what happens after the treatment is successful. The film starts off as a character study but ventures into a surprisingly comedic exploration of identity and fulfillment. 

After a couple gruesome scenes where the tumors slough off of his face, Edward is transformed into a handsome fellow who looks quite a bit like Sebastian Stan. With a symmetrical face and a strong jawline, he rebuilds his life, embarking on a new career as a realtor and hooking up with beautiful women on a whim. He chooses a new name that completes the effacement of his former self: now, everyone calls him “Guy.” But eventually  his old life catches up with him. Things are thrown into chaos with the appearance of Oswald (Adam Pearson, Under the Skin), a British gentleman with the same neurofibromatosis that once afflicted Edward. Outwardly, the two would have looked nearly identical, but unlike the grim Edward, this other man is different: charming, funny, a ladies’ man. He has all the success that Edward never had. It turns out that you can change your face, but you can’t change your soul¹.

With layers of prosthetics covering his face, Stan conveys Edward’s weariness through physical movements, but it’s not too surprising that his performance improves with the weights lifted off his head. As the vapid, vacant Guy, Stan maintains a sullen deadpan reminiscent of Buster Keaton. Conversely, Pearson, who is not wearing any prosthetic makeup, elicits your support without needing your sympathy. It’s one of the best comedic performances of the year. Rounding out this three-hander is Renate Reinsve, who charmed us all in The Worst Person in the World. She continues to charm us here as well, until her playwright character takes on a more parasitic edge when she writes a thinly-veiled drama about Edward. (If there’s a moral to this movie, it’s to never get involved with a writer.)

A Different Man is stealthily a very good New York movie, with little grace notes that reflect the surrealism that comes with living here. At one point we see a Mr. Softee truck speed past an ambulance, an evocative image for those who know². Schimberg pays close attention to the experience of living in such a big city, where we’re never truly alone, always in close quarters with others. There’s that constant sense that you’re being perceived, no matter what you look like. But fair play: aren’t you sometimes the voyeur, noticing and judging? It dovetails with Edward’s initial desire to be an actor, which he follows through with later on in the movie: if people are gonna stare at him, at the very least he could have that happen on his own terms.

★★★★☆

Location Spotting

Birdy’s as seen in the movie.

Photo source

Nearly all of A Different Man is shot on location, and there’s a few recognizable spots. Edward lives in a decaying apartment somewhere on the Upper West Side, so there’s a lot of walking around Central Park. In one scene, we see him drinking a whiskey neat at Birdy’s in Bushwick. Later scenes take place in the East Village, including a party at Holiday Cocktail Lounge, notably seen in Past Lives. (Both films were produced by Christine Vachon’s Killer Films; perhaps the two productions shared a location scout.)

The final scene of this movie is in a very strikingly designed restaurant in downtown Manhattan that serves some sort of Japanese fusion, but I couldn’t figure out what it is. If you’ve seen it and you know where it is, leave a comment!

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New Wave

Opens October 4 for a one-week theatrical run at DCTV Firehouse. Also making the festival rounds nationwide, check their Instagram page for info.

Full disclosure: I’m friends with someone involved with this movie, so consider this less of a review than free promo.

The Vietnamese New Wave describes a style of eurodisco where Vietnamese performers — most of them living in Orange County — covered the dance hits of the 1980s. In a time where Asians existed on the fringes of pop culture, these young refugees created their own scene, thanks to a parallel media made by and for the Viet diaspora. This emotional documentary starts off as buoyant hagiography, with well edited montages and nostalgic interviews. But like any Vietnamese refugee narrative, deep pain and grief is at the heart of this story. Elizabeth Ai’s film gets personal, tracking how the ascendance of stars like Lynda Trang Đài parallels the director’s contentious relationship with her mother.

My mom lived in Orange County during the height of the Vietnamese New Wave, and she went to all the parties and saw all the stars who are profiled in the doc. She opened Lynda Trang Đài's first bank account while working at Cathay Bank. The singer brought thousands of dollars in wadded up bills.

If you want to get acquainted with the Vietnamese New Wave, check out this one-hour mix on NTS Radio from Demonslayer (aka Dan Nguyen).

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Fall Movie Preview

Movie season is almost here! There are so many promising titles out this fall. Some will be good, some will be bad, a few may even be great. Here’s a few that I have on my watchlist, organized by release date.

• September 27

  • Megalopolis isn’t even out yet and it’s already infamous; Francis Ford Coppola’s go-for-broke passion project is certainly going to be a box office bomb, but aren’t you curious about what the fuss is all about?

  • The Wild Robot is a DreamWorks animated film that’s been getting some really positive buzz from its festival screenings. It looks cute!

• October 11

  • We Live In Time seems like a solid British weepie, with Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh promising a good, sad time.

  • Piece By Piece is an intriguing documentary about Pharrell Williams. It’s completely animated and told by LEGO characters. Not making this up.

  • The Apprentice is the second movie out this fall that stars Sebastian Stan. Unlike A Different Man, he plays someone who is legitimately repulsive: Donald Trump. The best thing about this movie is that Dan Snyder (the controversial former owner of the Washington Commanders) thought this would be a flattering portrayal of his favorite President and got conned out of his money.

• October 18:

  • Anora is Sean Baker’s latest film, and the Palme d’Or winner is primed to be a major Oscar contender. I’ve loved every movie of his that I’ve seen (Red Rocket, The Florida Project, Tangerine) and the buzz on this one is very good.

• October 25:

  • Nickel Boys is a lyrical adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel directed by RaMell Ross, who made the lyrical documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening.

• November 1:

  • Blitz is the newest movie from Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Widows), set in London during World War II. Seems promising, but one big red flag: it’s the Closing Night film for the New York Film Festival. In the past few years, the movie in that slot has not been good. Taste is subjective, but these films did not find commercial or awards success: Ferrari, The Inspection, French Exit, Motherless Brooklyn. (The exception to this was Parallel Mothers, but Pedro Almodóvar is impervious to curses.) However, the Closing Night slot might be more a matter of scheduling: Blitz is (appropriately) having its world premiere on the first day of the London Film Festival. It’s just one day before this film plays in New York. Maybe the curse will be broken.

• November 13:

  • Emilia Pérez is a crime drama musical that stars Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez and directed by French stalwart Jacques Audiard. It involves drug cartels and gender-affirming surgery. Need I say more?

• December 20/25:

  • Babygirl continues the trend of older woman/younger man romances, this time with Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in the roles. It’s directed by Halina Reijn, who previously made the zeitgeisty Bodies Bodies Bodies.

  • Mufasa is a sequel to the awful Lion King remake (which Disney keeps saying is “live action,” which, come on). But it’s directed by Barry Jenkins so… maybe it’ll be good? At the very least it’ll fund his next three movies.

  • The Fire Inside was written by Jenkins and directed by longtime cinematographer Rachel Morrison. It’s about a boxer who trains for the Olympics, and early reviews from festivals as a solid crowd-pleaser. Probably an ideal movie for the family to watch over the Christmas holiday.

  • Better Man comes from Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey. It’s a Robbie Williams biopic in which the “Angels” crooner is played by a CGI monkey and I am not making this up. The last Christmas-opening, CGI animal-starring movie musical was Cats, so there’s nowhere to go but up.

• Sometime in 2024

  • The Brutalist will be the prestige cinephile event of the season. It’s a 3.5 hour epic about a Hungarian Jewish architect in postwar America, and reviews have been absolutely raving. I’ve got a ticket to see this at NYFF where it’ll be projected on 70mm, and I’m certainly excited. Even though I hated director Brady Corbet’s previous movie, Vox Lux, except for its shocking opening scene that depicts a school shooting. I liked that part, which is weird to write.

1. The basic premise of this film is quite similar to Seconds, an unsettling 1960s cult classic that presages both of these new pictures. If you haven’t seen it, critic Scott Tobias just wrote a great primer which hopefully will convince you to add it to your watchlist: “The desire for transformation—to look better and younger, to change your environment and your lifestyle, to start over—is restricted by our own existential prison, an inability to transcend who we are fundamentally.”

2. I saw this movie a few months ago through New Directors/New Films, and this is one of the shots that has stuck with me