Green Room

Cafe Society
1

This only started getting a wider release Thursday night, so I don’t know that a lot of people have seen it yet. It comes from Jeremy Saulnier, whose previous film, Blue Ruin can be seen on Netflix streaming.

It’s a siege film in the vein of Assault on Precinct 13. A small punk band is trapped in a backwoods venue owned by a group of skinheads after one of the members witnesses the aftermath of a crime. What follows is an insane 90 minutes of guerilla skirmishing as the skinheads try to find some way to keep the crime under wraps and the band comes to term with just how precarious their situation is.

If you’ve seen Blue Ruin, you have an idea of how visceral Saulnier’s films can be. But whereas his previous film had a few moments where you could catch your breath, there is none of that here. The first fifteen or twenty minutes tighten the noose around the protagonists’ necks, and the majority of the film after that is just letting them dangle. The nearest corollary is probably the ultimate shootout in The Wild Bunch, only stretched out to an hour.

It’s the most intense film I’ve seen in theatres in recent memory. I caught a midnight showing last night. The theatre had around twenty-five people, mostly college-aged and a little drunk, so you’d expect them to be a kind of raucous. Everybody was on the edge of their seats and stone-cold quiet – minus the first clash between the Nazis and punks when there was a single audible gasp. I think people left the theatre kind of shell- shocked.

So had anybody else seen this? Thoughts?

2

I’ve read a bit about it. The characters being in a punk band piqued my interest, because it is an interesting premise, but yes, everything I have heard is that it is very intense, so I am keeping my distance.

3

Patrick Stewart was recently on the Nerdist podcast talking about this. He said his wife couldn’t make it through the screening despite giving it a good effort, and his manager kept his head down much of the time. He said that he will read many scripts that come in just on the screen, but he printed this one out because it looked interesting. He was by himself at his remote country home at night when he read it. He said that by page 30 he put it down, went around locking all the doors and windows, turned on the security system and poured a giant glass of scotch before reading the rest of it.

4

Patrick Stewart does an excellent job of playing against type as the patriarch of a pack of rabid skinheads. The impression you get of him in the media as a jovial, intelligent older man is still in the film, too. He’s actually more foreboding in his update of Macbeth than here, I think, and the film gets a lot of road from Stewart having a comforting grandfatherly presence.

5

Saw it Sunday afternoon, with my teenage nephew. Pretty damn unflinchingly violent, for sure, and the nephew was leaning forward at times, really looking intense.

Alamo Drafthouse showed a pretty funny “criss-cross applesauce” short before the movie. Didn’t make sense until they got to that one scene.