Who Killed Teddy Bear (Joseph Cates, 1965)

 

Joseph Cates’ Who Killed Teddy Bear is an unexpectedly haunting oddity, a rare mix of trashiness and delicacy, strangely dignified in its manipulativeness. A brief synopsis more easily evokes the trashy aspect: a nightclub worker, Norah, starts to receive vaguely threatening phone calls, a chance event bringing her to the attention of a police detective, Madden, who oscillates between rumpled charm and a seeming unnatural interest in, if not affinity for, such aberrant behaviour (eventually attributed to his wife having been murdered); the threat escalates in familiar genre fashion, right up to the killing of a co-worker mistaken for Norah after borrowing her coat. The film is documentary-like in its surveying of New York’s seamier side, providing loving pans over long rows of nudist magazines, “dirty” books, porn theatre marquees and the like; as if to illustrate its underlying duality though, there’s an extended, equally fascinated sequence following Norah through the theatre district, taking in marquees and posters for the likes of Any Wednesday and Golden Boy. As Norah, Juliet Prowse radiates crisp intelligence and engagement; the frank presentation of her character contrasts with that of the perpetrator, Lawrence (Sal Mineo), often photographed half-naked and in extreme close-up, the imagery both sensual and aberrant. The theme of damage and danger runs through Lawrence’s younger sister, her development hampered by a childhood accident, Lawrence seeking to suppress her sexual identity even as he can barely control the expression of his own; Norah’s employer (Elaine Stritch!), whose comforting of Norah suddenly evolves into an attempt at seduction; the deaf nightclub bouncer, injured early on in an unrelated confrontation: even in its more straightforward moments, in its staging of the activity on the nightclub dance floor for instance, the film often feels oddly compulsive or desperate. The ending is again broadly unsurprising in narrative terms, but feels as pathetic and forlorn as it does cathartic.

My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktev, 2024)

 

Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow exerts its mighty grip partly through the director’s calculated form of intimate near-invisibility: the film’s subjects occasionally address or question her as she holds the camera, but for the most part she’s silent and unacknowledged even at moments of extreme stress or sadness, her fortitude reflecting that of her subjects, a group of mostly female television and podcast reporters observed in the run-up to and then the initial days of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. The film is five and a half hours long, its length allowing a visceral sense of escalating fear and pessimism: an evening-long New Year’s Eve broadcast on December 31, 2021 has one guest after another expressing variations on how there’s not much to be positive about but they nevertheless hope for the best; just a few months later, virtually everyone on the show is either already or heading into exile. Loktev generates a visceral sense of sadness and frustration, sometimes masked by dark humour or escapism (I lost count of how many times the Harry Potter universe is referenced), using titles in measured but astute fashion to provide foreshadowing or context, her shifting focus (the friend who’s initially most prominent is out of the country on vacation when the invasion happens, and ends up not coming back, entailing that others take centre stage in the final stretch) reflecting the prevailing sense of utter unknowability, of living in a country where one might summarily be declared a “foreign agent,” where livelihoods and basic aspects of everyday infrastructure might suddenly be snatched away, where one of the more poignantly vulnerable participants faces a wretched choice between remaining in a country that’s imprisoned her fiancée for over a year without bringing charges, or leaving in the undefined hope that she can do more for him by maintaining her own freedom, even if it’s the precarious freedom of the exile (to be explored further in Part 2).

Together (Michael Shanks, 2025)

 

It was recently reported that a professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, preparing to teach a course on “Contemporary Moral Issues,” was instructed from above to “mitigate your course content to remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these.” Perhaps the most fear-inducing aspect of those readings: a notion of humans as having originally consisted of three sexes, male and female and a union of the two, the latter split in two for their transgressions and now yearning to be reunited, a premise which accommodates (or ”explains”) same- as well as opposite-sex attraction. Michael Shanks’ Together explicitly cites that aspect of Plato as an input into its enjoyably gonzo premise, and the film’s finale, indeed its very last shot, could be seen as representing its realization, and thus as an embodiment of a red-state’s worst nightmare (or one of them anyway). Reason alone then, to celebrate Shanks’ film, even if it weren’t otherwise any good. Happily, it’s an enjoyable contrivance, surprisingly straight-faced even at moments of maximum comic potential, especially given its two stars, Alison Brie and Dave Franco: they play a romantically challenged couple that moves from the big city to a small town, incurring injuries during a hiking accident, and thereafter experiencing an array of physical and psychological trouble (Brie and Franco make the couple’s sputtering chemistry all too believable, such that the uninformed viewer likely wouldn’t remotely suspect that they’re married in real life). One’s heart momentarily sinks when the movie attempts to place their travails in over-determined context, citing an extinguished religious cult with an idiosyncratic approach to marriage, and predictably revealing a congenial neighbour’s sinister side; overall though, the film’s central dynamic, especially when boosted by those helpfully grim real-world resonances, easily maintains one’s (possibly rather stunned) interest.