Cinema Survey 4

Seeking Mavis Beacon: The best documentary I’ve seen this year. When I saw India Donaldson’s Good One a couple of weeks ago, the trailer played before it, and an older guy told his wife, very loudly, “THAT WAS THE WORST TRAILER I’VE EVER SEEN!” No idea why—this was a straightforward trailer about two young women looking for the Haitian model who posed as “Mavis Beacon” for the enormously popular Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing software. For those born in the 1980s and early-1990s, this program was everywhere, along with “Mavis Beacon”’s face; naturally, she was paid a flat fee of $500 without any residuals. Her name is Renée L’Esperance, and there’s no record of her anywhere, on the internet or the makeup counter where she worked and was “discovered” by developer Les Crane and his then-fiancé Sondra Blake.

Director Jazmin Jones, with collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross, spend at least two years trying to track L’Esperance down; she doesn’t want to be found, and she definitely doesn’t want to talk to them, but they get in touch with her son, who’s as polite as he can be with these pestering filmmakers. I loved that Jones and Ross show themselves failing, falling into frustration, and continually questioning and interrogating their project and its intentions. They even include tense footage with the landlord of their production office; besides being evicted, they break stuff, break down, and make a lot of people really uncomfortable. For someone who doesn’t want to be found, they get pretty close, and the movie is all the better for how unflattering Jones and Ross appear. That’s not a diss—they’re just doing their job.

Office Space: A revival two screens down at the Charles just 20 minutes after Seeking Mavis Beacon ended. I just rewatched it at home a few months ago, but it’s hard to burn out Office Space, one of Mike Judge’s two cinematic classics (Beavis and Butthead Do America is the other one; Idiocracy blows, a classist relic of the Bush administration). Gales of laughter throughout the film; the line that I can’t stop thinking about this time is Ron Livingston bribing Orlando Jones near the end of the movie: “What am I going to do with 40 subscriptions to Vibe?”

The Substance: The best horror movie of the year. My full review will be up on Wednesday, but this is the best movie Demi Moore has been in in years, and certainly her best performance; watching her in The Substance, I kept mistaking her for Jennifer Connelly, and even Courtney Cox. A film with a unified aesthetic: widescreen wide-angle lenses, EXTREME close-ups and wide-wide-wide long shots, sound design as character, assertive and aggressive from minute one. A friend of mine saw the first showing here last week, and she said the crowd applauded at the end—the same thing happened when I saw it the next day. As always, but especially with The Substance, the first three rows are the best seats in the house.

Run Lola Run: Just didn’t match a lifetime of peripheral awareness; Tom Tykwer’s 1999 video-game inspired thriller is an artifact of its time, the other side of the coin that is The Matrix, whose popularity and influence grows every year. Tykwer has Lola run through a basic Grand Theft Auto-style mission to help her boyfriend pay off a crime boss so he won’t have to rob a grocery store. She gets three tries: she dies in the first one, her boyfriend dies in the second, and they live happily ever after (and much richer) in the third and final run-through. The premise is even more bare-bones than Reservoir Dogs, with none of the verve or life of Quentin Tarantino’s first (and least good) film; everything that was once innovative and surprising about Run Lola Run—its hyperlink structure, mixed media including handheld digital cameras,  relentlessness—is deadly dull now. Thank God it’s only 80 minutes—coming right after The Substance, Run Lola Run had no chance in 2024.

—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith