Where In The Hell, Laramie Dennis’s (a younger friend of mine) debut film, is streaming on Amazon. A road trip, essentially, in which one of the two protagonists is looking for her girlfriend, who seems to have slipped away from their Northern California motel in the night, and the other – a young Asian man – is trying to make it to Canada for an audition. All of this while traveling through the extraordinary scenery of remote California locations during the pandemic. Dialogue and cinematography and general feel are A+.
To watch if you:
- Appreciate a side of subtlety with your poignant humor
- Love good art direction and a trip through places both ordinary and unfamiliar
- Prefer optimistic endings that don’t package up your feelings like a grab-and-go sandwich
- Love watching new actors deliver extraordinary performances, especially when they haven’t had plastic surgery as far as you can tell (not to take anything away from Joohun Lee but Cam Killion is a star)
- Like it when narrative of any sort stays with you for a while
- Are happy when good movies win awards
- Want to close your streaming window in a state of belief
Andre Is An Idiot, arriving on Netflix June 17th, is about a man who turns down his best friend’s plans that they get colorectal cancer screening together, and subsequently dies of the selfsame disease. Yes, really. And it’s not sad. Really. A documentary about a wildly creative, irrepressible, and probably difficult man who died as he lived, we follow him, his friends, family and therapist through his last years. It’s not sad but it is funny; a portrayal of human growth and change when it’s too late but still matters. My brother, Peter Carnochan, is the therapist.
To watch if you:
- Enjoy watching someone truly live their own life
- Believe that being willing to admit your mistakes and keep trying to do your best is one of the best traits in a human being
- Are willing to enter someone’s reality all the way
- Feel science and logic cannot and should not explain everything we experience
- Are glad that wisdom is available
- Are happy when good movies win awards (in this case, the U.S. Documentary Audience Award and the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival)
- Want to close your streaming window in a state of belief
And with that, here’s to art, as always. Have a wonderful, wonderful weekend!