Indie Focus: Eternal issues in ‘A Ghost Story,’ ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ and ‘Scum’

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

Los Angeles’ LGBTQ festival Outfest is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year. The Times’ Tre’vell Anderson wrote about this year’s festivities, running through the 16th, and the overlapping functions it serves as a showcase for filmmakers, a focal point for the community and an incubator for new talent.

Filmmaker Andrew Ahn won the festival’s top prize last year with his film “Spa Night,” and he gives much credit to the festival for helping boost his career. Though he sees progress and hope in this year’s winner of the best-picture Oscar, as Ahn put it, “The solution comes with having a diverse range of representations. That doesn’t mean just ‘Moonlight.’ It means many ‘Moonlights.’ ”

We have two screening events this week, and both are extremely exciting. On Tuesday, we’ll screen the drama “To The Bone” with a Q&A featuring writer-director Marti Noxon and star Lily Collins. Then on Thursday, we’ll have the comedy “Landline,” with director Gillian Robespierre, co-writer and producer Elisabeth Holm and actresses Jenny Slate, Abby Quinn and Edie Falco. For updates on future events, go to events.latimes.com.

‘A Ghost Story’

By turns moody and metaphysical, David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story” is a measured, melancholy look at love and loss. Rooney Mara plays a woman struggling to get over the death of her husband, as Casey Affleck plays the husband, who returns as a ghost to the house they shared.

In his review for The Times, Justin Chang said the film “isn’t a horror story exactly, unless you count the horror of permanent solitude. Opening in domestic contentment, moving through personal anguish and ending with a cosmic lament, it’s a simple, wrenching story of love and loss that pries open a window onto eternity.”

I spoke to Mara, Affleck and Lowery about Mara’s epic pie-eating scene, Affleck’s acting from under a sheet and how they were all prepared to scrap the project if it didn’t turn out as they hoped.

“I didn’t know if the ghost would work,” Lowery said. “I thought it just might be too silly of a concept to function the way I hoped it would. I always hoped that shape and symbol and character and presence would be maybe a little bit amusing from time to time but ultimately a very emotional presence in the film.”

I also recently spoke to actor and musician Will Oldham about his pivotal scene in the film, for a story I’ll be publishing soon.

And The Times’ Steve Zeitchik visited the temporary “A Ghost Store” in New York City that the movie’s adventurous distributor, A24, is using to promote it. “My hope is that, while regarding the images in here, minds can wander in a way that is complementary to what I’m trying to do with the movie,” Lowery said of the unusual space.

At the New York Times, A.O. Scott said, “ ‘A Ghost Story’ is suspenseful, dourly funny and at times piercingly emotional,” before going on to add, “time — the ways it can accelerate through years, freeze in moments and defy measurement altogether — is Mr. Lowery’s chief preoccupation here, his major theme and his raw material.”

Writing for the Tribune News Service, Katie Walsh added, “Lowery reverses the perspective of the grief process to fascinating ends. We are aligned with his point of view as a ghost, and palpably feel his own sense of loss, of his life, of his wife slipping away from him as she continues living. … It’s the cycle of life — destruction, development, creation, crumbling and so on.”

‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’

You’re probably asking yourself, “Another ‘Spider-Man’ movie?” Or maybe, “Don’t I read this newsletter to get away from the bombardment of summer franchise tent-pole filmmaking?” The answers to which are yes and not so fast. The new “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” starring Tom Holland in the lead role, is directed by Jon Watts, whose previous film “Cop Car” was a Sundance standout a few years back. The mix of youth movie and outsized action spectacle makes for an intriguing blend of sensibilities.

In his review for The Times, Kenneth Turan referred to the film as “a weak copy of the teen-centric epics of John Hughes,” before finding that “against considerable odds, ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ finds its pace and rhythm by the end. Not only did figuring out how to become an effective Spider-Man require more of a learning curve than Parker anticipates, figuring out how to make a successful superhero movie mandated one for the filmmakers as well.”

The Times’ Jen Yamato spoke to director Watts about the move to big-budget studio filmmaking, and as the filmmaker said, “On an independent film where you’re working with just a handful of people, you don’t have to explain anything … because no one cares. You can do whatever you want. There’s no one there to tell you not to do it.

“But if you’re in a larger situation, the best thing you can do is just have a vision and don’t hide it,” Watts added. “Make sure everyone understands it as completely as possible — and understands the controversial elements of it so that you’re not running into trouble later on down the line.”

Yamato also wrote specifically about how Watts was able to add a role for actor Donald Glover, after a passionate online campaign to see the actor cast as Spider-Man. She also took a look at the new film’s purposeful efforts toward diversity in the cast, which includes Zendaya, Tony Revolori, Laura Harrier, Abraham Attah for a story publishing soon.

As Watts said, “A big part of it was what I thought the cast should look like. I separated them — these are what the nerdy kids would be like, these are the cool kids — and because I was pulling from real life, it was this very diverse group. And that was my pitch from the very beginning.”

For the New York Times, Manohla Dargis said of the new film, “What makes Spider-Man different and, ideally, work as a character, giving him an off-kilter charm, is he retains the uncertainties and vulnerabilities of adolescence. For all his super-gifts and despite the weird and dangerous company he keeps, he is also a teenage boy — that’s his Kryptonite, what cuts him down to recognizable human size.”

For the AP, Lindsey Bahr took note of the new film’s forward progress, while also noting there are some strides left to be made. “My only quibble with ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ is that for all of its charming and infectious realism about race, high school life and class issues, it has a bit of a woman problem. Simply: Every significant and semi-significant female character looks like a model. ... Taken together, you start to wonder if maybe things would have been different if just one of the six screenwriters was a woman.”

‘Scum’

Alan Clarke is the kind of filmmaker that is in danger of falling through the cracks of movie memory. Frequently spoken of by other filmmakers, ranging from Paul Greengrass to Gus Van Sant, Clarke made bracing visions of a dark, violent world that bore a startling clarity and disturbing closeness to reality. Which makes the run at L.A.’s Cinefamily of a new restoration of his 1979 film “Scum,” a youth prison drama starring Ray Winstone, something worth noting.

Writing about the film for The Times, Justin Chang said, “A ferocious exposé of life in Britain’s notorious borstals, or youth detention centers, the movie tells you much that you probably already know about incarcerated young men, their vicious pecking orders and the corrupt authorities overseeing their rehabilitation. But it tells it with scalding wit and coolly riveting style, in the visual equivalent of spare, brilliant prose that occasionally bleeds (and bleeds and bleeds) into poetry.”

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