The quiet girl
Steveandkerry Riddell
John Harvey
Tonight’s film is Red Rocket, the story of Mikey Saber -- charismatic con man and washed-up porn star – who plots his return to the big time from a small-town Texas hometown that hates him.
The film is the latest from director Sean Baker, it’s his fifth feature and came to prominence when he shot the highly acclaimed Tangerine (from 2015 and shot on three Iphone 5s cameras). The film followed a transgender sex worker who discovers her boyfriend and pimp has been cheating on her.
His next film was The Florida Project which we showed on a Monday Night back in 2018, that was a drama about a 6-year-old girl living in a motel with her mother in Greater Orlando as they try to make ends meet (and stay out of trouble).
His films follow people mostly on the margins, who are stuck, shackled by circumstance, trying to get out, searching for escape, success, another life, another go-round. It’s the antithesis of the American Dream.
His films also feature undocumented immigrants and sex workers, Red Rocket features mostly non-actors. Baker claims to have been directly inspired by exploitation films although his influences include Ken Loach, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Mike Leigh, Steven Spielberg (whose film Sugarland Express he credited for the way he shot the outdoor scenes in RR), John Cassavetes, and Hal Ashby, among others.
Red Rocket was released in the US last December. It received praise for its direction and cast and received a variety of awards and nominations. The National Board of Review listed it among the top ten films of the year. Simon Rex , who plays Mikey Saber, won Best Actor awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the Independent Spirit Awards.
Like all his films Red Rocket was shot on a modest budget of $1.1m (and earned twice that at the box office). Baker also edited it as he does all his own films. The film has a very warm grainy look the result of shooting it on 16mm film. There was a total crew of 10, had no rehearsal time and featured mostly non-actors.
The exception is Simon Rex as Mikey. Not too well known over here, he’s an American actor, rapper, comedian, and former model. He started his career as a MTV VJ, Rex later became an actor starring in three films of the Scary Movie franchise. He later developed a rap persona, Dirt Nasty, and co-founded the hip-hop group Three Loco. In 1994, under the alias "Sebastian", he appeared in pornographic films which he says he took the job to pay for rent and food for his girlfriend's two-year-old son.
Reviews have been very good. Empire Magazine gave it 5 stars (as they did the last two Monday night films) and the review is typical of many others, Mikey is not a good guy, “On paper, Mikey is repellent; on screen, compelling. Simon Rex makes him staggeringly charismatic.”
The film received 4 stars from Peter Bradshaw: "Sean Baker has given us an adult American pastoral, essentially a comedy, and another study of tough lives at the margin, close in spirit to his lo-fi breakthrough Tangerine."
Film critic Tim Robey added “I don't think Simon Rex is in any way to blame for me hating [Mikey]. I think it's a tremendous performance”.
Finally, from LITTLE WHITE LIES: A dirty delight. Weird, smart, fantastic, and very, very wrong.
POST FILM
Some reactions to the film have stirred a debate about sexual morality in film especially with Mikey’s relationship to another character.
"if the filmmakers aren't exactly endorsing their protagonist's middle-aged, borderline pedo-pimp obsession with Strawberry, they're not being as rigorous about mediating it as they should." RogerEbert.com
Rex actively underplays Mikey’s self-interest and cruelty, so that -- in a way -- the audience becomes an equal target of his manipulation.
Gawker: "It was both refreshing and exhilarating to watch an anti-hero go that low, during a time where it seems like audiences feel obligated to reject bad fictional behaviour that isn’t explicitly punished."
Steveandkerry Riddell
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