I saw this movie THE ROYAL HOTEL that came out on video last week, and I really liked it, so I watched the previous one by director Kitty Green, and that was even better. Let me tell you about them in this Kitty Green/Julia Garner Stressful Job Double Feature, presented in order of release.
THE ASSISTANT (2019) chronicles one day on the job for Jane (Julia Garner, WE ARE WHAT WE ARE), a junior assistant at a production company in New York City. It has a really engrossing fly-on-the-wall feel because it’s all presented very naturalistically, avoiding cinematic shortcuts, letting you piece together what’s happening instead of directly telling you. A more Hollywood version might have her narrating at the beginning about what a big deal her boss is, with a montage of camera flashes on a red carpet, fake magazine covers, she talks about dreaming of a dream job like this and wryly jokes about “What could possibly go wrong?” or whatever.
THE ASSISTANT doesn’t believe in that shit. It knows not to describe its world to us, but to just create it and drop us into it. I didn’t even know that her job was movie-related at first, it never tells us the name of the company, never lets us see the hot shit producer everyone walks on eggshells around or tells us his name. It kinda feels like we’re shadowing Jane for a day and we know better than to ask about that stuff. (read the rest of this shit…)
THE NIGHTINGALE, now in limited theatrical release, is Australian director Jennifer Kent’s followup to 
LION is one of those movies I never heard anybody talk about, but the Weinstein Company somehow got it a best picture nomination. That’s okay – it’s a well made movie and a powerful story, the kind of thing you go to this time of year and you cry and you’re uplifted and in this case I feel no shame about it. It’s based on the memoir of Saroo Brierley, who when he was a dirt poor peasant kid in India got very lost and never found his way back for 25 years.
