This Week in Tickets: 30 January 2023 - 5 February 2023 (Winter Weather Edition)

January ends with some Oscar catch-up, a reminder that climate change hasn't completely defanged New England winter, and more good stuff.

Things kicked off with a rare-ish Monday night at the movies to see Glass Onion a second time, since I don't have Netflix and we probably won't get a disc until Netflix/Lionsgate/Criterion do some "Knives Out Trilogy" thing in a few years. I liked it more the second time around, and was reminded while writing up last week's Next Week that I made some comment about Johnson maybe being my favorite contemporary filmmaker. Couldn't get to any of the other shows, but I'm thinking I might do a run of the Johnson stuff on my shelves between Film Rolls "seasons".

Speaking of which, Mookie got to Once a Thief a couple nights later, although it didn't really belong on the "unseen" shelves. It was just tough to get a bunch of John Woo stuff and set it aside.

The next couple nights were long ones - All Quiet on the Western Front at the Coolidge on Wednesday, seeing it on the big screen while I can, since it apparently isn't part of the AMC Oscar fest and who knows if we'll have a Regal by the time they're doing theirs? Thursday night was Pathaan, a big ol' Indian spy movie that is apparently the fourth, rather than the first, part of the "YRF Spy Universe". The rest are available on Prime, (one even in 4K!), so I might also do a run of those in the next couple weeks.

It got really cold that night - it was actually stupidly cold as I walked to Magoun to catch the train to Pathaan, but warmed up by the time I got to the Brattle for Jethica on Saturday. How cold? Well, the pipes froze, despite everyone's best efforts, but that's happened before and it was no big deal, eventually, but this time pipes in the wall behind my shower broke in two places. I discovered this just before heading to bed after Bruce landed on Romancing in Thin Air, a Johnnie To film that keys on a character freezing to death.

So, I spent a lot of Sunday watching the landlord try and get it fixed, but still had time to head out to the first "Silents, Please!" of 2022, Within Our Gates (with bonus feature The Other Woman's Story). I might have headed for another movie afterwards, but, not going to lie, was feeling kind of scuzzy from not being able to take a shower, so I headed back home.

Which gets us to the present, down to not being able to have a shower until tomorrow morning. Stil watching movies, though, so follow me on Letterboxd for first drafts of everything but the Film Rolls stuff.

Glass Onion

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 January 2023 in Landmark Kendall Square #1 (Filmmaker Focus: Rian Johnson, DCP)

There's an argument that the real test of a mystery story is the second viewing, when the audience is looking out for every hidden clue or bit of performance that might be misdirecting but genuine. I don't necessarily hold to that - it's nice when a mystery works that way, but I don't think it's more important than the "ya got me!" the first time through - but I do think that this is where Glass Onion really shines: It's a pretty terrific "second time through" mystery, while Knives Out was the better rug-pull.

On the first go-round, it takes far too long for the first body to drop, but the broadness of the comic bits works pretty well the second time around: When you recognize which ones aren't actually hiding anything, you can just enjoy the goofing around, rather than strain for significance that a moment just may not have, while the moments that do matter pop.

And once there's a murder to solve in the second half, things start clicking into place and moving full throttle, both the first and second times. Unlike the first Knives Out, very little of the killer cast winds up feeling like pure red herrings to keep the suspect count high, and the tight time frame keeps lulls from happening. The commentary winds up sharper and probably benefits some from the space since its original release: It was exceptionally well-timed to dunk on Elon Musk, but with him moving from the foreground to a consistently-too-loud bit of background noise, that means all the other jabs at folks like him can skewer their targets. Even the last act's broadest jokes are plenty sharp, even if I'm not sure that the big finale really works: <SPOILERS!> As great as Janelle Moná, Edward Norton, Daniel Craig, and the rest of the cast are here, I think Johnson plays things a little too much like broad comic spectacle as opposed to the expression of pure rage, and how someone will do something really transgressive to avenge whom they've lost. <!SRELIOPS%gt;

Ultimately, it's a little more shaggy than it maybe should be, but even better than I initially thought. Benoit Blanc's second outing is a worthy successor to the first, and I'm excited for more.

Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front '22)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2023 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (special engagement, DCP)

I'm sure there are other genres where the same thing can be said, but if it's possible for a movie to be too well-made, the war film is maybe where it can be the most obvious. This one, for instance, has so many moments when the striking cinematography, makeup, and other pieces of technical excellence or clever storytelling register as accomplishments more than enhancing the emotion of the moment. Filmmaker Edward Berger will build a striking image of German soldier Paul Bäumer worn down, dragged through a mire, and I'll notice the meticulousness of it: That is some incredible caking of mud on the soldier's face; it will look fantastic as a still or presented in 4K with HDR.

It's not really as overwhelming as all that for long stretches, though, and the film is impressive in how conscious it is of how war destroys its soldiers as human beings. This comes out most during the fighting, when filmmakers might be tempted to use doubles or worry about staging more than performance. That's when we see that Paul has become good at this, though, a berserker with just enough self-awareness to recognize that he's a monster even in the moment. Felix Kammerer really nails that aspect of the character, letting a demon loose and afraid of it as much as he's afraid of dying the rest of the time, and these moments are spread out just enough to highlight how the soldiers are young men occasionally making memories that could be nostalgic later. It's more than a bit diluted by cuts to the brass, although maybe that's needed to drive home that this damage isn't something that just happened to these young men, but something done, especially in the final, futile chapter.

Is it too consciously impressive? Maybe, but even some of the showier parts are able to overcome how nifty them being unusual decisions is. I love Volker Bertelmann's score, for instance, a bass rumble that hovers between anachronistic atonality and an orchestra stripped down to its bass. And, nothing wrong with showing off a bit, because that sort of thing is at least interesting to look at and consider. Besides, it's a Netflix movie, so maybe you need that to get people locked in rather than giving it half their attention while folding laundry, even if it's a bit much in a theater.

Short Stuff: The 2021 Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Shorts

Still playing a couple shows at the Coolidge this week and one more time at the ICA on Sunday, so this isn't a totally irrelevant post after the ceremony!

Anyway, we've got a really solid group this year, so let's get right to it:

"On My Mind"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

If Martin Strange-Hansen's "On My Mind" has any issues, it's that he seemingly feels some need to inject more tension and conflict than is really necessary. The story has barmaid Louise (Camilla Bendix) happy to serve a drink and fire up the karaoke machine when Henrik (Rasmus Hammerich) comes in after closing time, with owner Preben (Ole Boisen) choosing to be fussy about such things. The audience, of course, has already had a glimpse of why Henrik needs something to settle himself down, but they're likely going to go along with Louise and empathize with the man anyway. It's not that Preben is hard to believe - many have encountered folks who easily default to not really being able to see more than an inch beyond their own nose - but he winds up feeling transparently like a means to keep the short running in place more than anything else.

It's a great little piece around that, though; Hammerich and Bendix do really excellent work sketching out who these people are without Strange-Hansen having to feed the audience more information than they really need, and this has at its heart one of film's great karaoke scenes, even if it's unconventional: Even if the activity seems tremendously unappealing (as it does to me), the filmmakers still get across just how important escaping into that sort of performance can be, expressing oneself in part by changing context.

(Though I am kind of amused at how the karaoke machine lists "You Were Always on My Mind" as an Elvis Preseley song, since he's well behind Willie Nelson and the Pet Shop Boys in terms of who I associate the song with. Probably in fourth after Hammerich now!)

"Please Hold"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

This played one of the virtual Fantasia Fests? Huh, I feel like I would have seen it, in that case, but I don't remember it. Odd, because I like it a lot. It's targeted absurdity that recognizes that its audience is not exactly living in a subtle world, so there is no particular need for satire to be subtle. Every point it makes about the American prison-industrial complex feels bang-on, ripped from a story disturbingly hidden on page B18 Law & Order-style. Co-writer/director KD Davila knows his target and homes in on them.

It works, both as a short film and as a story, in large part because lead Erick Lopez makes unjustly-targeted Mateo such an amiable, likable protagonist; he's an easy guy to spend twenty minutes with and is able to rail against his twisted situation in such a way that the audience doesn't find him off-putting, and Davila recognizes how so much of this happens because so many good people want to believe the system is built to be fair and just needs a bit more earnest effort when it isn't. Amid all the very obvious exaggerations of real-world injustices, this unstated idea at the center quietly seeps into everything.

I'm not sure when this was made, but if it's a pandemic-shot production, it's one of the ones that made especially good adaptations. Where so many shorts shot in 2020 or 2021 make the use of screens and empty streets into something that needs to be explained and worked around, this feels like something built around those requirements but not about why they exist in the real world., and as a result has a sense of authenticity even though it doesn't actually redress things outside of its main set that much.

"Sukienka" ("The Dress")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

Tadeusz Lysiak's "The Dress" isn't actually about a dress, but it's a clear and clever way to distill the limbo Julka (Anna Dzieduszycka) often finds herself in - someone of her short stature and proportions can often find casual clothing in the children's section, but something sexy needs to be custom-ordered or tailor-made, making her feel less like a woman and not really sure what to do when one of the truckers (Szymon Piotr Warszawski) who stops at the motel where she lives and works as a maid actually shows some interest.

Dzieduszycka delivers a genuinely impressive show of frustration that has been going on so long that she's just come to treat it as her life's baseline, the thing that makes it hard for her to get along with even the people like co-worker Renata (Dorota Pomykala) who are at the point of taking her height in stride, mixing it up with general working-class frustration. There's an untidy, transitory feel to even the more permanent parts of the setting, underscoring the limbo where Julka keeps herself, maybe right down to how everybody she meets tends to give her a different nickname.

That the search for a dress is not a quest but just a thing that that hovers over this upcoming date makes the short a little shaggier, but that seems fair and honest. Julka has given up on quick fixes or one thing turning her life around, but that doesn't mean solving that sort of problem won't help.

"The Long Goodbye"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

How speculative is "The Long Goodbye" meant to be? Aneil Karia's short feels like the kind of thing that could either be based on a real-life incident or a warning about how things like this aren't far off, and that's perhaps part of the point - dire warnings and horrific events overlap in time, which maybe plays into the ways that this film gets even more peculiar as it keeps going past when most would fade to black.

That's the second big tonal shift; after what looks like a household of Middle-Eastern descent apparently preparing for a wedding suddenly finds themselves pulled out by black-clad men with guns, who may be government or may not be. The wedding prep had been a little tense in the way such things are - a lot to do in a little time, and the TVs in the background broadcasting ominous stories - but this is something else altogether, although it's a pretty nifty job of showing how people just trying to live a life with the constant hum of such things in the background can suddenly find it interrupting into real terror.

And then… Well, the short gets weird. One of the most prominent characters is played by Riz Ahmed (credited as "co-creator"), who stands afterward and does a spoken-word/rap piece, and it's an odd bit, making what had previously been subtext text, not exactly logical given what had previously happened. It's nicely-done, if a thoroughly theatrical thing to cap a short that had previously been naturalistically performed and grounded. It'll throw some, but then, it's not exactly a short looking to make its point subtly.

"Ala Kachuu - Take and Run"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

"Ala Kachuu - Take and Run" is built on hammering things home as well, but then, that's sort of the point: Sezim (Alina Turdumamatova) is a bright young woman who dreams of going to University but has to practically run away to do it, only to find herself kidnapped into marriage, and it's not even an arranged one - she was just convenient. Husband Dayrbek (Nurbek Esengazy Uulu) seems decent, as such men go, but Sezim has no intention of becoming one of the women her mother's age who eventually accepts this as the way things are.

Writer/director Maria Brendle does excellent work keeping her eye on a certain line, where the film isn't just showing the cruelty and sexism of the culture in this part of Kyrgyzstan or how Sezim suffers, but isn't lecturing about how, as much as the men who kidnap force themselves upon their "wives", it is the women who eventually accept it that allow this system to be perpetuated. Granted, the audience is going to want Sezim to spell it out - she and friend Aksana (Madina Talipbekova) and kid sister Aygul (Aybike Erkinbekova) are clearly perceptive enough to understand it, but that kind of direct confrontation might keep the viewer from letting how people become complicit to bury their own shame and anger really fester - and, besides, a certain moment works best if someone figures it out herself.

It's also a striking film to watch generally; Brendle and her crew find the beauty in a land that is poor, isolated, and backward in many ways, and do a good job building high-speed escape attempts around someone who is clearly just driving for the first time or two. There's a great moment early on where Sezim and her mother are making bread together, which is apparently a major part or the wedding rituals, and the way that Sezim is just no good at it compared to her - but has still familiar enough to work in a shop later - is a great, quick way to establish her character. Alina Turdumamatova does a nice job of making Sezim feel like an ordinary girl who knows she deserves more rather than someone exceptional enough to break the system.


As I finish writing this, the awards have already been handed out (off-screen, apparently), because I saw them late and have had a busy-ish week. If I'd had a vote, it would have been for "Please Hold", although that was going to be a long shot. I'm not surprised "The Long Goodbye" won - a name as familiar as Riz Ahmed in a short gives it a heck of a boost - and certainly can't gripe about it.

Short Stuff: The 2021 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts

One of the odder effects of Disney moving all of their Pixar releases to their streaming service during the pandemic is that no short films have accompanied them into theaters, meaning that the "Best Animated Short Film" category lacks an obvious front-runner. Indeed, the category and theatrical presentation of it looks rather different than it has in previous years, with longer entries, a larger fraction of which are unambiguously geared toward adults. Where the theatrical package usually has to include some "highly commended" runners-up in order to reach a length where moviegoers feel the price of a ticket is worth it, this group passes the 90 minute mark without any help.

"Robin Robin"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

Of course, there are still some familiar entries, though "Robin Robin", an Aardman-produced British half-hour Christmas special, now comes via Netflix rather than the BBC. It is, however, the sort of thing that should seem instantly comfortable - cute animals, earnest but dry humor, and a noteworthy voice or two sprinkled into the cast. It's a simple, fun story - when a robin's egg falls out of its nest and hatches after being found by a family of mice, the new sibling struggles to prove she belongs.

As with many of the best movies of this type, there's a dry sort of anarchy to what filmmakers Dan Ojari & Michael Please are up to as Robin (voice of Bronte Carmichael) cannot help but demonstrate that the whole "quiet as a mouse" thing does not come naturally to her at all, blithely leaving a mess behind her at every opportunity. She spends much of the film paired with a Magpie voiced by Richard E. Grant, all matter-of-fact about his obsession with shiny things, while Adeel Akhtar delivers not quite saintly patience as the mouse family's Dad and Gillian Anderson gets to be enjoyably sinister as a hungry stray cat. There are fun little songs and impressively staged chases. The animation is so impressive that it's hard to tell which sort of Aardman film it is - impeccable stop-motion with some digital assistance, or CGI with models built to resemble and move like plasticine. It is, from the jobs listed in the credits, the former, but is occasionally smooth in the way this medium often isn't to make one second-guess.

It's a charming little thing, thoroughly traditional right down to an earnest ending that lays out how Robin can be both bird and mouse and that this is only complicated if one makes it so. It's a fine before-bedtime story.

"Boxballet"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

Anton Dyakov's "Boxballet" is the sort of animated short that in many ways seems to be built to see how far one can stretch its character designs and still have its characters recognizably part of the same human species. Its ballerina is sleek and thin, with her body seeming to twirl without it affecting her head at all; the boxer is lumpy and damaged, with an oxbow of a broken nose. They don't belong in the same space, obviously, except that each is a little too honest for their chosen metier. A chance encounter has him more open to something beautiful in his life and her maybe less self-destructive in her pursuit of perfection.

Dyakov tells this as visual anecdotes and without enough words to make subtitling necessary, and at times that seems not quite enough - there's not a whole lot of room for back-and-forth, and the ballerina gets lost in a sea of identically-designed figures in a way that the boxer really can't. It's a tricky thing to make them both represent something and become individuals, especially when there's an expressive deadpan slapstick to his matches while she can't quite escape choreography. They can't quite become actual characters together.

It probably also doesn't help that the coda doesn't quite hit the same way was it would have when the film was made a year or two ago - the fall of the Soviet Union and the promise of a new Russia where one doesn't have to fit the role others have chosen always had soem caveats, but requires a bit more grappling in March 2022.

"Affairs of the Art"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

I'm a bit curious how Joanna Quinn's "Affairs of the Art" plays when seen next to "Dreams and Desires: Family Ties", her previous short film from 2006 with which it apparently shares characters. Quinn dives right in without doing much to introduce the brash and enthusiastic Beryl, who has grown obsessed with creating art while also chronicling her sister Beverly's odd journey from creepy little anarchist kid to Beverly Hills taxidermy maven, but then, it's not like these are characters that need to be explained and set up: That Beryl just sort of barges in and spits a lot of weirdness out without context, filling in bits as they occur to her, is kind of who she is, and being methodical in her portrayal might not sit right.

It's the sort of film Mills and writer Les Mills make, too, where the morphing characters and the seemingly-raw pencils hint at a raw stream of consciousness that keeps Beryl from really talking about how, as you get older, the drive to create and appreciate art can take hold. It's rather meta in that way - an attempt to create clear expression out of chaos, where you're never quite sure what is sheer randomness and what has intent, especially when the randomness often is a part of what one is trying to communicate.

"Bestia" ("Beast")

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

If nothing else, Hugo Covarrubias's "Bestia" has one of the more clever uses of its medium as a framing device, in that one of the first thing one notices about the design of its stop-motion main character is a crack in her oversized head, a zoom into which leads to the main flashback and whose later appearance serves as a climax. It's a neat trick, showing that how, especially in animation, how one tells a story is intimately related to the story itself.

That story, I suspect, has greater resonance in its native Chile, where one will connect what she is doing to the specific atrocities committed by the government in the 1970s, rather than just the idea of an autocracy building an atmosphere of distrust among its own people. The character designs are impressive - she's a frumpy little lump with the tiny face on her big head pinched into a permanent disapproving scowl, her hair an unmoving helmet, an obviously nasty piece of work who seems to elicit disdain more than fear. The thing is, she's accompanied by a big German Shepherd who is obviously intimidating and powerful but whose body language suggests a desire to please even when sitting obediently still. She's got affection for this dog but there are scenes where he's placed in a room with prisoners where you can't help but wonder what she's having it do. It's a quiet but cutting look at how evil twists things - he should be a nice but protective companion, she should be a brusque but concerned neighbor, and the government should be supporting its citizens rather than engaging in paranoid surveillance, but…

It's a simple but effective little tale. This sort of animation isn't the only way Covarrubias could tell it, but he's mingled the medium and the message very well.

"The Windshield Wiper"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)

Alberto Mielgo's "The Windshield Wiper" is ambitious and abstract, posing the broad question of "What Is Love" in its opening seconds and then intermingling a number of vignettes, all looking as if filmed as live action and then rotoscoped with digital tools, before returning to the man posing it.

It is, truth be told, sort of pretentious, and not necessarily in a good way where you can see the filmmakers aspiring toward something grand even if they never reach it. The very framing of a man in a café, smoking and asking a question sort of banal in its intended depth, is as likely to create a mood where one rolls one's eyes rather than finding oneself intrigued, and some of the scenarios - particularly the two tattooed young people in a supermarket who are an obvious match never looking up from their phones' hookup apps even when they are matched with each other - are easy targets. The painted-over style can sometimes be its own worst enemy, tying the film to realism but covering up the smaller human gestures Mielgo seems to be trying to elicit.

They make for great stills to be put on a poster or next to an article, though, and often impress as bold colors splashed across a screen. At best, they can emphasize how the viewer is an outsider looking in even if what they are watching looks familiar, perhaps most especially as a homeless man rages at the television screens in a shop's front window. That moment may have the least to do with the film's stated theme, but it's immediate and popped into sharp relief by the style in a way that the other moments strive for but seldom reach.

It's interesting that the people assembling this package found themselves going back and forth between words and pantomime, and how even the most whimsical shorts have something of an edge once one gets past the one obviously made for kids. I wouldn't bet against "Robin Robin" getting the statue - Aardman is awful good at what they do, and what they do is what many people see animation as being best suited - but I certainly wouldn't complain about "Bestia" getting it either, for being such a pointedly chilling story that makes the most of how animators can use every piece of the image to build toward what they want to say.

International Oscar Submissions: Exile '20 and Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time

An hour or so left to rent Exile from The Coolidge, although I wouldn't be surprised if, like a lot of the Goethe-Institut films, it comes back for a second weekend. That's doubly the case since there were some issues with playback on Friday, although you'll at least have plenty of time to watch it after if the window on my screen was typical. So, potentially plenty of time to pair it with Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, which make a nice bloc as Oscar submissions from central/eastern Europe (Kosovo and Hungary) that have their emigre protagonists up against mostly-unspoken prejudices and end at what can seem like odd places.

I liked them both a lot, though, even if I might have liked Exile a little less if technical issues hadn't broken my viewing up over two nights. Both are movies without a whole lot in the way of trajectory-altering events, but I suspect that one can feel the 30-minute difference in their lengths a bit if it wasn't broken up. It's fun contemplation, with just enough weird stuff going on to grab your attention.

Anyway - it's a good pair, and today I learned that they speak Albanian in Kosovo and that Hungarian puts the family name before the given name, which isn't something I recall any other European languages doing.

Exil (Exile '20)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29-30 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Goethe-Institut/Coolidge Corner Theatre virtual screening room, internet)

It takes Exile quite a while to get around to a question that viewers may be asking from the start, and though the answer is not trivial, the audience has likely been worn down enough by that point to consider it somewhat secondary. That trick is more impressive than it sounds; a film that plays out on as individual a scale as this one can often lose track of the larger point as it focuses on one character, but writer/director Visar Morina mostly avoids that.

Xhafer Kryeziu (Misel Maticevic) is a Kosovar chemical engineer who has lived in Germany long enough to seem more or less completely assimilated; he's got a good job that supports wife Nora (Sandra Hüller) as she works on her PhD and looks after their three children. But there are things that never let him forget that he's an outsider to some, such as how colleagues like Urs (Rainer Bock) always seem to slow-walk his requests and find ways to undermine him... or the rat he finds tied to his front gate when arriving home one afternoon.

Xhafer isn't always easy to like; he's carrying on an affair with an Albanian-speaking cleaning lady (Flonja Kodheli) but bristles at helping to translate things she must write for immigration authorities into German, for instance, and there's something seemingly off about him even in seemingly ordinary situations. Morina and star Misel Maticevic walk a fine line there, careful to let the audience clearly see the uglier side of his personality while not losing sympathy. Maticevic captures how Xhafer often (but not always) handles things badly rather than maliciously, and when the end approaches and he's both feeling more pressure and having more dredged up, it's never anything that hits just one side of the character. There's this continuing, human loop of "yeah, but..." where he's concerned, urging the audience to both understand and hold him accountable.

The same goes with the people around him; as much as Morina more or less acknowledges within the film that Urs is a very familiar sort of antagonist for this sort of story, one has to kind admire how much Rainer Bock seems to make a study of that sort of unctuousness, what sort of miserable creature he is without being a cartoon villain. Between him, Xhafer, and Uwe Preuss as Xhafer's boss Koch, I spent a fair amount of time marveling at how familiarly dysfunctional this organization was in ways that may or may not have much to do with the sort of prejudice Xhafer is keyed to notice. Sandra Hüller is also given license to be prickly and annoyed as Nora, both to show that this isn't anything new with Xhafer and that she's got her own issues to push against. One wonders, at times, whether frustration is about to overwhelm the rest of their bond.

There's not a whole lot of story there, and Morina pointedly denies the audience much resolution, but all of that plays into showing how oppressive living with that sort of prejudice is. Occasionally it's visual, like how Xhafer never quite seems to fit in his brightly-colored suburban neighborhood, or how the camera will seemingly detach from the action and go looking for something, but mostly it's the placing things in slightly higher relief. It's not just the fact of it, but the seeming impossibility of communicating it to those who don't face it and are invested in thinking of themselves as better than that; the closest thing to obvious bigotry is Koch trying to praise the team's differences and having it come off as a tremendously backhanded compliment. There's a steady background hum here that merges with the foreground, so that the fact that Xhafer, Urs, and Nora are all flawed people makes it harder - how do you know where the line is between something one can maybe do better oneself and something you can't fix about the world?

It feels exhausting in ways that movies with more plot-intensive structures more focused on specific goals often don't, and it may be a larger, more intensive dose than some may want. It seems worth disclosing that tech issues forced me to watch it in two hour-long chunks, so I don't know what the intended effect of taking the film in for two hours straight is. Then again, I'm fortunate enough to not know what it's like to live with this for one's entire life, though I suspect that the film has at least given me a somewhat better idea of it.

Also at eFilmCritic

Felkészülés meghatározatlan ideig tartó együttlétre (Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre virtual screening room, internet)

The hook for Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time hints at something more broadly paranoid or sinister, and while that would have been an interesting way to go, writer/director Lili Horvát doesn't necessarily see the need to exaggerate what's going on here. It's not the noir-ish thriller it initially looks like, but is in some ways more engaging for it.

Márta Vizy (Natasa Stork) was born in Hungary but has spent most of her adult life in the United States, becoming a top neurosurgeon over the past eighteen or twenty years. A month ago, he clicked with János Drexler at a conference like she had never connected with anyone before, not even realizing he was also from Buda-Pest at first. They made a date to meet on the Pest side of the Liberty bridge a month later, but when Márta arrives, he's not there; she seeks him out, but János (Viktor Bodó) says they've never met. Literally stunned, Márta decides not to return to New Jersey, but instead takes a job at her old teaching hospital and finds an apartment - both of them well below her status - to try and figure out what's going on.

It's hard to blame Márta for being suspicious when someone doesn't remember her - she's striking on top of being at the top of her field to the point where everyone asks her why she would come back - and what makes the film work is that she's also smart enough and familiar enough with how brains work to interrogate this idea. Conversations with a therapist (Péter Tóth) that might otherwise be a framing device or meant to move things along do something else: They get both Márta and the audience thinking in a certain way rather than offering answers. Horvát never offers any sort of conspiracy or hints that János is some sort of supervillain, so instead we've got to figure out what's going on without easy genre solutions.

It's an intriguingly interconnected mess. One thing that's striking, early on, is how Márta defaults to English before Hungarian and is taken for a foreigner, and though this part of her identity is never addressed directly, one wonders how much it is motivating her actions. Did she read more into János's words because she never truly felt at home in America and wanted an excuse to come back? Does she choose a crappy apartment because it has an obstructed view of her favorite spot rather than a far nicer one despite being able to afford the latter? The way her old professors and friends question her desire to return has some logic to it, especially when one takes the more rampant sexism of the place into account. Preparations often seems like it's a movie about a woman being gaslit because men are intimidated by her being so formidable, but I wonder to what extent the latter is a screen for the first, a way to tell that story without it being over-sentimental, and to what extent they're the two opposing influences Márta must wrestle with.

Either way, it's a real pleasure to watch Natasa Stork work the contrast; she and Horvát never seem to use Márta's confidence as a cover for her uncertainty, or as things that easily fit into different categories of her life. Her certainty in her own capability lets her charge headlong into areas where she is otherwise confused in some spots and tempers that impulse in others, and it's tremendously fun to watch her be so self-possessed in her probing in spots where other characters often seem helpless. She's got nice chemistry with Viktor Bodó in the moments when the story lets Márta and János get close, and Bodó himself has the sort of charisma that can override the way János can often seem like the sort of puffed-up fellow who's not really in Márta's league on more than just her say-so, when the need arises. It's useful (and fun) to have Benett Vilmányi there as a contrast - Horvát is well-aware that his med student eventually pursuing Márta is a flip on convention, and they make sure that there's a little bit of him knowing it and maybe thinking she should be grateful under his mostly-earnest admiration.

Preparations doesn't quite make it all the way through without stopping to hash things out, but the filmmakers are good enough at doing so in a way that still lets the audience play with it on their own and plays up that these are smart people who like to figure things out. It exists in an intriguing place between a mystery and a conventional romance, and makes it work without abandoning either.

Also at eFilmCritic

Curveball

This has a second weekend in The Coolidge's Virtual Screening Room through Sunday, and it's pretty good! I think I've said that the Goethe-Institut's presentations at the Coolidge have long been one of the theater's hidden gems - back before the virus, they were like $5 but you had to be there at 11am on a Sunday - and the larger window they've had has been pretty nice, even with the cost up to $12 (still pretty reasonable).

It's a real shame that it's pretty much the entire chance we get to see some of these movies, since they're not exactly arcane or difficult to get into. Curveball, for instance, has large chunks in English, tells a story that is fairly relevant to American lives, and is genuinely funny in ways that don't exactly require getting into a different cultural headspace. It could be an outsider critique of the USA, but isn't, really. But I've got no idea how well it will get on people's radar. They may or may not get U.S. distribution, and that distributor may not be able to get a slot on the various services. Heck, near as I can tell, the film that director Johannes Naber and star Sebastian Blomberg did five years earlier, Age of Cannibals, never got a particularly US-friendly release, and it really looks like something I'd enjoy seeing.

As an aside, part of how it's US-friendly is that it has a number of moments when it cuts to what people in power were doing publicly at the time - once even making it clear that this is a thing the characters were watching - and one of them was Colin Powell, whom my employers had breathlessly engaged to speak to us in as part of a monthly "town hall" conference call, and for as much as it seemed worthy of a little suspicion then - it was the sort of "I came from humble beginnings and made it this high, so obviously the system works in general" pep talk that you should probably expect from large corporations - it looks a bit worse when you're reminded what he was a part of, and how little consequences the people most responsible faced.

Curveball

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 December 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Goethe-Instiut German Film/Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)

There must be an entry in Ebert's Little Movie Glossary about the way movies like Curveball start, with a little bit outside the main film's setting that isn't entirely dispensable but certainly shows what's about to happen at a larger scale in microcosm. Here, it's German chemical weapons inspector Wolf (Sebastian Blomberg) letting his American colleague Leslie (Virginia Kull) believe that he was married rather than a widower because he thought she was looking for an affair as they searched for WMDs in 1997 Iraq. Even without hindsight, we'd know that something like this was about to be writ large; fortunately, the movie knows how to hit those notes even if they won't be a surprise.

It picks up two years later, when Dr. Wolf is working in a BND lab outside Munich; as the department's foremost expert on anthrax production, he's tasked by his superior officer Schatz (Thorsten Merten) to aid agent Retzlaff (Michael Wittenborn) in debriefing refugee Rafid Alwan (Dar Salim), a 34-year-old chemical engineer who claims to have witnessed tests personally. Alwan is canny enough to keep details close to the vest until he has an apartment and promises of protection, but the BND is eager to find out what he knows - they are a small player in the global intelligence community, and might be able to trade this information to the Americans for Stasi files they have been guarding since the end of the Cold War. It's the sort of information that becomes extremely valuable after the 9/11 attacks in the U.S., because even if it's not reliable, it certainly fits the narrative that some in the Bush Administration want to sell.

For as cynical as the story being told is, there's something oddly gentle about the way director Johannes Naber and his co-writer Oliver Keidel go about telling it. Wolf and most of the people in his immediate orbit aren't really that ambitious - he's got a job he wants to do well, Rafid just wants to be safe in a new home, and everyone has a very human reluctance to admit when they've made a mistake, not really thinking about how those feelings can be weaponized. Even the people who wind up falling into the category of villain are human despite their amorality, personable enough that one might grasp for reasons they can be redeemed and not the bureaucratic idiots that become the targets of easy satire.

There's still a lot of dark humor to be mined from the situation, which starts out as a kind of goofily absurdist look at the BND: For all I know, the real-life Retzlaff does smoke an actual pipe, and their offices circa 1999 really did look fifteen or twenty years out of date, but it's kind of delightfully anti-James Bond in the way it goes the other extreme in how it embraces just how relatively irrelevant this one-time great power can sometimes seem, a second-class shop whose internal politics are petty still seeing itself as competing with the superpowers. As the film reaches 2001 and beyond, it becomes cheerfully ridiculous, with a car chase so silly it would make one laugh out loud even without the genuinely funny, important twist to it. The sheer enormity of the jigsaw puzzle Wolf is solving after being dismissed feels like self-parody without winking at the audience too much.

It's a line the film often has to be careful of with Dr. Wolf, but Sebastian Blomberg is on top of it, doing a very impressive job of making him believably one of the top men in his field but also just right when taken away from his area of expertise, impressive because the script calls for him to be aware of how he's in over his head some places but blindsided in others, and it never feels off. He's got a nice chemistry with Virginia Kull that lingers after Leslie turns out to be different from how he (and through him the audience) initially sees her, and she does nice work in not making those scenes feel like flipping a switch. Dar Salim is nifty as Rafid as well - fairly transparent to the audience, but just credible enough that folks who are invested in his story might believe him, and genuinely funny when he gets into ridiculous situations later on.

It's seemingly light for a movie about decisions that caused so much death and destruction, right down to the tagline incorporated into the opening titles ("A True Story, Unfortunately"). But there's a sort of terrible honesty in how both seemingly and actual reasonable people make these mistakes that can be seized upon by bad actors, and for all that Naber encourages us to laugh at the absurdity of it, the end result is never allowed to drift too far from the viewer's mind.

Also at eFilmCritic

Two Docs from the Virtual Coolidge: Coded Bias & Assassins

There are…. four hours left to watch Coded Bias via the Coolidge, or at least pay for it and maybe have another 48 (I'm not sure whether the Coolidge's site will let you do that), with Assassins probably around for at least another week. Maybe the former will be easy to find in other places soon enough, but I do kind of wonder if Netflix or Prime might push movies that have it in for algorithms themselves down to less prominent placement. It's the sort of movie that I suspect could have benefitted by being one of just a few movies at a boutique theater, or getting a nice spot on the PBS schedule when there weren't a thousand channels and services, but the movie doesn't really need to get made then. That's kind of why I wonder if the future of documentaries isn't things like these easily digestible movies, but deep eight-hour dives that let the viewer get some depth, and maybe gain a little traction in the discourse via its sheer mass. Right now, I kind of worry that it's only going to show up on the radar of people who already know something about its subject matter, although it at least gives them someplace to point others.

Anyway, it's a pretty decent double-feature, as Assassins gets into internet stuff and online reputation fairly quickly and both have a bit of focus on marginalized people being taken advantage of. They're also easily digested lengths and value being clear even when a certain amount of things being unknowable is part of the story. You can watch them both in under three and a half hours and maybe have some interesting cross-pollination.

Also: Coded Bias isn't exactly a Boston movie, but it's enough of one that a lot of establishing shots and locations had some meaning to me and I kind of found myself wondering if I'd met primary subject Joy Buolamwini at some point. We don't exactly run in the same circles but I wouldn't be surprised if she and I got our comics in the same shop and she seemed kind of familiar. Granted, it's just as possible that my white-guy brain is just as unpracticed at telling Black women apart as the algorithms people in my demographic build, proving her point, but that's a meta-level of information I'll gladly take from the film.

Coded Bias

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 December 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)

There's been a complaint in recent years, likely justified in many cases, of documentary television series whose multi-episode bloat could probably be condensed into a conventional documentary feature, but I sometimes wonder if the big miniseries is the natural next evolutionary step. Consider Coded Bias as an example: It is a good documentary; it raises an interesting issue, makes its points in clear fashion, and will almost certainly be watched primarily by those who already have some interest in the material, learning little beyond a few specific names. It is absolutely a useful thing to get in front of people, but may be even more useful as a deep, multi-episode dive than as an overview.

Director Shalini Kantayya focuses on a number of experts and activists, with Joy Buolamwini at the center. As a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, Buolamwini discovered with dismay that the facial recognition software behind her computer's camera often would not pick up her face until she put on a white mask, and that it wasn't just a trick of lighting: Most of this software was designed and tested by men of European descent with comparatively little thought given to its use by other groups. What started out as a fun project turns into a serious piece of advocacy, inspired in part by author Cathy O'Neil and picked up by Silkie Carlo, a more street-level activist in London.

There are actually multiple facets to the issue that Kantayya explores, from how machine-learning algorithms meant to be objective instead tend to reflect the biases of the data it is trained with, to whether even a well-trained system can be used ethically, to what new questions having computers being able to sort through millions of real-time images raises, each with an example or two that goes with it and enough of a toehold into adjacent issues to hold film together as a whole rather than split it into separate units. It can seem like a lot to compact down to 90 minutes, but Kantayya and the on-screen participants are good at boiling the issues down to easily-grasped ideas that don't start to feel over-simplified with repetition. This is an issue that can be simply stated but not easily solved.

If Kantayya had wanted to make something less compact, she could have; there are plenty of examples here and more coming up every day. It's also helpful that, from the start, her experts aren't presented as detached academics who merely study the problem, but instead have the sort of personal involvement that make Buolamwini, O'Neil, and Carlo active participants in the narratives. Though Kantayya shows how far back the roots of it go, this is too modern an issue for them not to still be actively confronting it and refining their knowledge still, and that makes them more engaging than many "talking heads".

(It is worth noting that almost all of the on-screen experts are women, both because that is so often not the norm in documentaries and because algorithms picking up sexist behaviors figures into the film. I'm mildly curious whether this has just resulted in much of the important work being done by women or if Kantayya is deliberately pushing back on what is considered "default" as she recognizes how this affects the algorithms.)

In terms of filmmaking, she tends to stay modest and grounded even as the film is shot on four continents and necessarily requires some animated visualization at times, tending to pull those scenes closer to the subjects' human interactions rather than going for slick, meme-worthy presentations. If there's a fault in her presentation, it's how willing she sometimes is to completely abstract the idea of the algorithm as something unknowable as opposed to something that can be untangled, or the villain itself rather than being a tool used by people who either over-prioritize efficiency or are happy to hide their own biases behind its supposed objectivity. She'll take half the story from the general to the specific but not the other.

It's nevertheless a good way to learn about an important subject, although as with so many documentaries, I am reasonably sure I wouldn't have watched it if I wasn't already interested but I don't know if it will make its way to people who could probably do with paying more attention to the topic. And, indeed, I wonder about its future prospects in a world where independent and documentary features primarily reside on the streaming services whose algorithms are probably most found wanting on a day-to-day basis.

Also on eFilmCritic

Assassins (2020)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 December 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)

The 2017 murder of Kim Jong-Nam may not be the crime of the century (it's early and the world is only going to get stranger), but it is almost certainly the crime of the decade, one whose effects are felt on a global scale but whose most visible public faces are as modest as you get, tied up in the internet and a world where borders can go from barely noticed to crucial in an instant. It's a story Ryan White tells very well in Assassins, well worth one's notice.

Kim Jong-Nam, the older half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, was killed in the Kuala Lumpur International airport on 13 February 2017, dying less than an hour after being exposed to the VX nerve poison. That his life should end that was wasn't entirely unexpected - Kim Jong-Il's eldest son was living in exile in Macau for almost ten years after being embarrassingly caught visiting Tokyo Disneyland and opining that maybe a People's Republic shouldn't have hereditary rulers, and that's the sort of person those opposed to a dictator can rally around - but the killers were: Siti Aisyah (of Indonesia) and Đoàn Thị Hương (from Vietnam) were two young women who claimed to have no idea that they were involved in anything more nefarious than filming prank videos for YouTube.

Despite making a documentary that is necessarily going to require its filmmakers to be somewhat hands-off - an American filmmaker is not going to get to interview North Korean government officials on this subject, and even if Malaysia wasn't one of the handful of countries that has normal relations with North Korea, its media and justice system are the type that don't welcome scrutiny - White is impressively able to cover multiple angles, embedding himself within the women's separate defense teams, forging an alliance with a relatively-independent local journalist that allows him to take a somewhat local view, and talking with Westerners who have studied North Korea without the film having to rely entirely on their questionable expertise. There are no unbiased sources for any story, but White and his team do a good job of finding people who can be informative even as the audience consciously corrects for their perspectives.

More than that, he does nice work in finding ways to approach the story from the multiple angles necessary, splitting time between how young women like Siti and Đoàn wind up in this situation and the background that makes Kim a target to the machinations of the trial, where lawyers must approach their co-defendants cautiously and forces well above the justice system can have an influence. White does impressive work laying out how Đoàn and Siti have different but parallel stories that lead to the same place, leaving the Kim family just vague enough to get the audience interested - if they weren't already - without making the why behind the murder the whole story. White fiddles with the timeline just enough that the audience isn't absorbing the backstory and the trial simultaneously, but never feels too far away from either.

Perhaps most importantly, he's able to integrate the thing that often cripples this sort of documentary - the vast amount of material one may just never know, or which remains out of reach of the filmmakers - into the film better than most. Đoàn and Siti are pawns in a conspiracy that has little to do with them, and the fact that they cannot personally affect the outcome much or ever particularly define themselves. White gets only a little bit of access and it's hard to know what to make of them, and in some ways they wind up thrown together with Kim Jong-Nam in that, for all their experiences are far out of the ordinary, a viewer can at least feel like they can relate to those people, while the shadowy masterminds, chemists, and world leaders are almost unknowable despite the power they wield. There's little resolution there, but how can there be? They barely seem like real people.

That can be a fatal flaw in a documentary, but it winds up a strength here. This story is larger than life even as it lands on people who are in many ways ordinary, and this may be the only way to keep both scales in view.

Also on eFilmCritic

Nightstream 2020.00: Pelican Blood

Well, technically, Day -04 of Nightstream, but let's not get too cute about this. The point is, one of the Nightstream movies was also a part of the Coolidge/Goethe-Institut series of German films, so I was able to get a head start on the festival and also find myself curious about how well it plays to each audience; they tend to draw from different groups of cinema fans. Obviously they intersect (see: me), but even taking that into account, this feels like a different movie if you approach it from one direction rather than the other, and one I definitely found less satisfying because of the way my preferences align, but which a more horror-friendly audience might really dig.

Anyway, it's always nice to have seen a film or three in a festival before the thing starts; these virtual substitutes don't have a lot of conflicts built in, but any flexibility helps at all. This is probably one I would have tried to include in the ten selections that my BUFF badge nets me, and since I'm not going to overload my weekend by paying for more (unless something catches my interest while the fest is going), I'm very happy to have a little extra space.

Pelikanblut (Pelican Blood)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 October 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Goethe-Instiut German Film/Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)

If you live in the Boston area (and maybe others), Pelican Blood is available for streaming via two separate routes: The Nightstream streaming film festival, a cooperative effort between five genre-oriented fests canceled by the coronavirus pandemic, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre's partnership with Goethe-Institut to present noteworthy German-language films, which is generally material perceived as classier than that. I'm curious as to which group finds it more satisfying; it is by turns exceptionally earnest and deeply weird, and does a better job of moving between the two than being both at once.

Wiebke Landau (Nina Hoss) is a gifted equestrian, helping to train mounted police while raising foster daughter Nikolina (Adelia-Constance Giovanni Ocleppo). Things are going well - she's helping a policewoman bond with a reluctant animal; something seems to be passing between her and officer Benedikt (Murathan Muslu), who is getting close to silver-fox territory; and she's been approved to adopt another girl from a Bulgarian orphanage, Germany being reluctant to place girls with working single mothers. And while 5-year-old Raya (Katerina Lipovska) is adorable, she immediately starts not just testing the limits of Weibke's authority, but showing signs that the trauma of her early life has left an even greater mark upon her.

Nina Hoss and writer/director Katrin Gebbe are able to rapidly sketch out Wiebke as compassionate but not one for a lot of nonsense, the person you would want reassuring both skittish horses and children who might have abandonment issues, and a look around the house that she seems to be capably renovating as she and her girls discover a need fits in with how she's not particularly worried about finding a husband or the other things that society often declares as prerequisites to being a mother or business owner. As Raya reveals herself as being more than Wiebke had bargained for, Hoss has to show how Wiebke sees this as a threat to everything she is - her capability, her decency, and even her womanhood - without a whole lot of talk, because this is a person who explains things she knows well rather than asks for help, so it's all got to play out across her face.

That makes it in large part Hoss's show, and she's reliably excellent, but Gebbe and the rest of the cast do a very nice job of showing how her focus on Raya is causing the rest of her life to suffer, and what's especially smart is that the implication is not that Wiebke will bring everything around her crashing down but that the rest will cut her loose lest what's consuming her also swallows them. Murathan Muslu is there to play the love interest, but he plays Benedikt as clear-eyed and well-aware of just how much of his own stuff he has to worry about, while young Adelia-Constance Giovanni Ocleppo does a very nice job of showing Nikolina as having good instincts for someone her age without making her seem precocious or wise.

Gebbe takes the audience through some strange and unnerving territory on the way to where it's ultimately going - she makes damn sure that the audience can't dismiss Raya as just an extreme brat or doubt that Wiebke is going way beyond sensible or even unorthodox means of dealing with it - and it's fascinatingly transgressive without ever really treating that as a badge of honor. Even the detours into the more supernatural-adjacent material is interesting, circling back to the folktale that give the film its name and showing how a kid's inability to explain her own mind and an adult's desperation can meet. The last sequence or two seem to find her losing the plot, unfortunately - it's one thing to keep going after the film says, look, here's the lesson you've got to learn, because Wiebke may be just that stubborn, another to completely undercut everything the film has been building to, no matter how impressively staged that sequence might have been.

The thing is, that's the sequence that probably gets the movie booked at the genre festivals and seen at all outside German-speaking and foreign-film audiences, and there's certainly an audience that will appreciate the film coming from that direction. There's probably a clever way to make a film like Pelican Blood where the two halves being in conflict with each other creates interesting ambiguity, but this winds up closer to one diminishing the other.

Also at eFilmCritic

Mein Ende. Dein Anfang. (aka Relativity)

I've been doing a ton of crosswords over the past couple months or so and yet I did not notice the wordplay going on and I feel a bit ashamed even if it was in German.

I probably should have connected viewing this to Amulet a little more explicitly; give or take 20 hours, they were seen back-to-back and are both women making their feature debuts with stories that use multiple timelines. What's kind of interesting is how they take the opposite approach; Romola Garai is so intent on making a thriller that she holds back to the point where it's hard to be interested in the situation while she's revealing it, while Minoguchi is happily willing to let the audience see the shape of the whole thing right away, even if it means there's not that much suspense even when people are pointing guns at each other. It's not often that such pairings present themselves in quite that sort of contrast.

LIke a lot of the Geothe-Institut films that have played The Coolidge's virtual screening room since the shutdown started, this was originally booked for three days but did well enough to come back for a second weekend, and while my initial thoughts on Sunday were a kind of weak recommendation, it's grown on me over the week, and worth checking out (and incidentally kicking some cash the theater's way) over the next couple of days.

Mein Ende. Dein Anfang. (Relativity)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre virtual screening room, internet)

One of the first scenes in Relativity has doctoral candidate Aron (Julius Feldmeier) defending his thesis on how time's arrow is bidirectional, the future and the past part of larger patterns that can be extrapolated in either direction, which is somewhat fatalistic if you take it as meaning that the universe is a mechanism that has no room for free will. In a way, it serves more as instructions for watching the movie - though I'm not sure whether it means to treat Relativity as a puzzle to be solved or to not do that. It may just mean to look at the events as a sort of four-dimensional pattern, with only certain facets visible at once.

Aron is part of an exceptionally cute couple - his girlfriend Nora (Saskia Rosendahl) is not just similarly attractive but their areas of confidence and senses of humor line up nicely. His parents are warm and like her a lot; her mother is somewhat more prickly, not able to understand how Nora gave up the ice-skating she had spent so much effort on and now works in a supermarket. A mix-up with Aron's debit card has them in a bank just as it's being robbed, and when they try to call the police, chances of a long and happy life together go out the window. Elsewhere in the city, security guard Natan (Edin Hasanovic) has just received the news that his daughter Ava has an aggressive form of leukemia, the sort that requires an experimental treatment only available with private insurance, only to lose his job over a trivial matter soon after.

Attentive viewers will see how everything snaps together fairly quickly, and arguably too easily: Despite what I just said above about the film should probably not be approached as a puzzle box, writer/director Mariko Minoguchi isn't exactly laying everything out early and she's still structuring the movie around the audience realizing that this flashback involving Nora hooks into that bit with Natan. She pointedly has Aron advance the idea that déja vu is remembering the future early on but it's not something that anybody seems to personally experience. Having spent time moving up and down the chronology at will, bringing the movie to a climax is somewhat awkward, and she ends on a note that can sit wrong, that this is all just fate and intent is never as important as happenstance.

If that is the case, at least Minoguchi does interesting things illustrating it, especially early on, suggesting Irreversible as she starts to work backwards but makes sure that she doesn't limit herself to that early on, while consciously making sure that some bits of how the timelines connect remain a bit murky. It doesn't matter what Natan is doing during Nora's scenes and vice versa; their stories being intertwined is a much looser thing. She also uses that flexibility to show how one can get lost in time when grieving, deliberately stringing scenes together so that a jump backward could initially look like the next thing going forward, even as Nora hears Aron's voice. Looping back around seldom reveals new information - what the audience saw before was true, not just a limited perspective - but instead serves as a reminder, making it easier to piece things together without having to jump back.

Minoguchi is also impressive in how she builds out her characters' worlds without overwhelming or distracting the audience but also making it clear that, even if these moments are going to be turning points in their lives, there are large chunks of their experience which are not directly connected. Nora, Aron, and Natan are all carrying significant baggage, but loose ends are plenty acceptable here, and even the spots where Minoguchi opts to tie things up closely are more interesting coincidences than portentous, right down to using the film's original German title as its final line.

The cast is strong as well, with perhaps the most impressive thing being how well Saskia Rosendahl and Julius Feldmeier establish their pairing as more than just the adorable young lovers seen in the first couple of scenes - Minoguchi gives them the chance to show how they shore each other up and challenge each other, and it's an intriguing contrast for when Rosendahl has to play scenes along or against Edin Hasanovic's Natan; she's got the room to not entirely be one half of a whole. Hasanovic finds a good line to walk as Natan, making him the same guy in both his best and worst moments, not just someone whom circumstances pushed into being someone else.

They're good enough to make Relativity better than it seemed when I first realized that it wasn't going to do that much new with its story and conventionally-unconventional narrative tricks (much more so than the previous night's movie which did some of the same things but not as well). There's a fair amount of pleasure to be found in seeing Minoguchi and Rosendahl get most of the details right, especially once one decides to treat the film as one would a painting, turning your gaze to this part and that and enjoying those pieces even though you can easily step back and see the whole thing, rather than a puzzle where each part only makes sense when you slide the other bits into position.

Denise Ho: Becoming the Song

Looks like this is one week and out in the Coolidge's virtual room, so if you're reading this on 22/23 July 2020, watch it now, if you feel like it might be your thing. Like I say in the review, I don't know how much new material I actually learned from it - I didn't know much about Denise Ho, but I'd known some of the basics of the Hong Kong protests - but it does a nice job of sorting it out and putting it in place, which is valuable.

One thing I found kind of amusing is that the film more or less skips over the fact that, like her mentor and idol Anita Mui, Denise Ho has been an actor as well as a pop star, something not exactly unusual in Hong Kong, and after following some links through her IMDB entry and my own reviews, I saw that I'd liked her in Life Without Principle. I suspect that, like the rest of her entertainment career, she wound up shut out from even Hong Kong productions via companies' self-censorship. I absolutely see why you don't include that part of her career in an 85-minute movie, but I was amused, because I was just having an online conversation about how the line between "pop star" and "movie star" is much more porous in Asia than it is in the English-speaking world.

I probably give this a bit of extra credit because not only do I love Hong Kong and regret how, if I ever get to go back, it won't be the same, but apparently she spent her teen years in Montreal, where I should be right now. This is just a frustrating part of the 21st Century all around.

Denise Ho: Becoming the Song

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, Kino Marquee via Roku)

Those looking for an easy entry into just what's going on in Hong Kong right now could do a lot worse than starting with Denise Ho: Becoming the Song, in large part because filmmaker Sue Williams presents it as something inextricably intertwined with her subject, not just necessary background or something on which an ignorant audience must be educated.

Williams starts with news stories about Denise Ho Wan-Si (also known as "HOCC" to her fans) being banned in mainland China due to her support of the "umbrella movement" and the later protests against a broad extradition law in Hong Kong before both showing how she arrived in that position and how she works as both an activist and entertainer. It is, in large part, told from Ho's point of view - not only is she an active participant in the film, giving Williams a great deal of access, but very few of the other people interviewed talk much about her life, with even her brother mostly talking about their musical collaborations. Most of the other people interviewed discuss the greater forces around her.

It is a story that spans the globe while also being grounded in this area that is but a dot on a world map, and in that way makes her representative of Hong Kong itself. Williams uses that to push back into the 1980s, when Anita Mui Yim-Fong was becoming the region's biggest star by fusing Western-style pop and Cantonese lyrics into "canto-pop" right around the same time that Great Britain and China were codifying their plans to return Hong Kong. Ho's parents, teachers, were among the many that obtained foreign passports and emigrated (to Montreal), though she would return in search of a music career and mentorship from Mui. As her "disciple", Ho would spend a great deal of time after in Mui's early death following in her footsteps before carving out a persona more explicitly her own and building a Mandarin-language career in the mainland until her outspokenness destroyed that and self-censorship by Hong Kong and international businesses did the rest. It's a fine line between presenting Ho's experience as a typical parallel for what's going on in Hong Kong as a whole while still acknowledging that she's a rock star and her version of it is larger than life.

That said, a large part of what makes the film enjoyable is how pleasant a personality Ho is on-screen. Both her work protesting and managing a music career - whether in terms of creating or managing the nuts and bolts of a tour without a record-label support system - display a humility that doesn't seem performative or unnatural. She never pretends to be confused about why someone would make a movie about her and has clearly put some thought into everything she says and does, without seeming calculated. It's often a fine line to walk between being artistic and pragmatic, and it makes the film go down easy. Most of the other people interviewed, from fellow entertainer Anthony Wong Yiu-Ming to former government officials and academics, have a similar sense, very affable and passionate but firm rather than fiery.

Williams puts it together well, tending to show something for long enough for the audience to get the idea and then clarifying and filling in details rather than building up to a revelation or explaining something that was vague enough to leave the audience confused, making the information dumps entertaining but serious, accommodating those who are just learning about all of this while acknowledging that most watching probably have some sort of existing interest in the subject. She chooses good performance footage to get the emotion across to viewers who only speak English. What the subtitling crew does can seem a little cutesy - text made to look handwritten that appears in different areas of the screen - but it's readable and keeps one's eyes from settling at the bottom of the screen.

I don't expect Becoming the Song will be the sort of documentary that has a huge impact on many viewers; it's the sort of thing where one has to have some sort of prior interest to find it in the first place and it's built more to fill in gaps rather than shift perspectives. It's well put-together and goes down easy, with just enough meat to it that most watching it will come away knowing a little bit more, a bit better able to research further and understand what's going on as the situation keeps evolving.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Two favorite actors: Sometimes Always Never and The Audition

Right now, the virtual screening room at The Coolidge has a couple of features that could pretty easily get lost among some more high-profile offerings, though they each feature cast members I'm always glad to see turn up, though Nina Hoss is more likely to be at the center of a good film than Bill Nighy, who as I mention in the review of Sometimes Always Never is a good match for a certain sort of scene-stealing character, though that sort of character doesn't necessarily work quite so well stretched out to appearing in nearly every scene.

It's a double-feature that works better than I necessarily expected, too - both have contentious relationships between parents and children, bits of jealousy, scenes highlighting craftsmanship. Not exactly an obvious pairing, but the sort that feels good afterward because the ideas from both cross-pollinate rather nicely.

Sometimes Always Never

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 June 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)

I love Bill Nighy even when he's in an awful movie, in large part because his screen persona is one seemingly built to steal scenes. It leads him to the sort of part that a good actor can give nuance in those brief moments, but there sometimes seems to be a limit to how far those parts can be stretched when placed at a movie's center. Sometimes Always Never is the result of stretching that sort of appeal just far enough to not break; it could do more and hit harder, but it seldom makes a genuinely wrong step.

Nighy plays Alan Mellor, a tailor who, as the film opens, is making a road trip with son Peter (Sam Riley) to see if a body that has recently been recovered is Peter's long-missing brother Michael. It is not, but any relief Alan finds from this is short-lived, and when his evening walk lands him on Peter's doorstep, he winds up staying the night, and many more after, sharing a bunkbed with grandson Jack (Louis Healy) and obsessively playing Scrabble online, coming to believe that his regular opponent is Michael and hoping to arrange a meeting.

Nighy being who he is on-screen - lean, stylish, and on a much better coolness curve than many of his contemporaries - is baked into the part in a way that's often interesting: One looks at him and his retro-cool roadster and impeccable attire, while Peter is never nearly so fancy, and combines it with Peter's talk of how he often had to settle for off-brands growing up ("Scrobble" with cardboard tiles), and it seems to say something about their relationship and Alan's priorities, especially when tied in with stories of the Prodigal Son, or how another couple that has lost their son (Tim McInnerny & Jenny Agutter) also has something about presenting a face at odds with what's behind the scenes in their backstory. It's somewhat standard material about families or people that present a good front maybe having something else behind it, but it's interesting to pick at, especially once the filmmakers get to peel back Alan's wit and carefully nurtured self-composure and show how this is eating at him.

The trouble is that the filmmakers often seem to be doing the same thing. Director Carl Hunter and his crew often seem to be doing the same sort of thing as Alan, covering their film in a stylish veneer that has a tendency to draw attention to the surface rather than bringing out what's underneath. The film is slathered in bold primary colors, meticulous compositions, and widescreen shots where one can't exactly miss the distortions introduced by the lenses Hunter and cinematographer Richard Stoddard choose. It's striking and usually deployed to clear purpose - emphasizing the weak connection between father and son as they talk in the car by cutting between shots of them at the opposite ends of the mostly-empty screen, heightening the sense of unreality as they venture outside their home territory looking for answers, that sort of thing - but it often comes across as trying to tell the story with production design and cinematography rather than letting those things amplify what's happening.

Much of the time, the cast just doesn't have enough to do. Nighy is enjoyably cool and sells the torment behind that equanimity well when given the chance, although it's often kept too much in reserve. Sam Riley is a fine balance as the son more likely to wear the heart on his sleeve, with Alice Lowe and Louis Hely rounding the group out nicely. The trouble is that there's always a sense that they could be doing more than they are, whether it's actually following Alan down his Scrabble-related rabbit hole or focusing on how all of this has affected Peter's relationship with his son. Most of the more-comedic diversions seem wedged in and out of place.

It is, seemingly inevitably, something of a match for the stylish grandfather at the center through much of it, nice to look at and able to be amusing or affecting for a bit, but maybe not working quite so well when the scenes he steals have to all fit together. The film doesn't fall apart, but it does wind up stretched quite thin at points.

Also on EFilmCritic

Das Vorspiel (The Audition)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 June 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)

The makers of The Audition don't exactly hide what's really going on at any point, but it is nevertheless fascinating because it is not, by and large, the teacher/student story that it initially appears to be. That is there but it's just one facet of what's going on, and the one which often seems least important, giving the filmmakers a lot of room to explore the other things which tend to be going on around this type of story

The teacher is Anna Bronsky (Nina Hoss), who sees potential in a student who has applied to the conservatory where she's an instructor despite the others on the selection committee looking for someone more immediately polished. Perhaps she sees something in Alexander (Ilja Monti) and his awkwardness that reminds her of her own social anxiety; she has not played publicly or even rehearsed with others in years, despite her colleague and one-time lover Christian (Jens Albinus) trying to recruit her into a quintet. Husband Philippe (Simon Abkarian) is the one who sees her at her most uncertain, and probably the only one who clearly sees how Anna's efforts to get pre-teen son Jonas (Serafin Mishiev) to follow in her footsteps as a violinist despite his being much more interested in hockey and the like is putting a strain on their relationship.

From early on, it's clear that Anna, rather than Alexander, will be the focus of the film, and filmmaker Ina Weisse gives star Nina Hoss the sort of character who must be great fun for an actor to dig into. There are some big, chewy bits that seem built to announce that Hoss is playing someone who has some anxiety issues, but they come early and can be read as her on an unusually tricky day, instead giving the viewer the chance to see how those bits are hidden under all the moments when she is decisive and indeed sometimes brilliant. Hoss plays Anna as someone who has been aware of her issues and dealing with them for some time, and the combination of things sometimes getting away from her despite her clear agency makes Anna fascinating to watch, with both her missteps and her better moments easily relatable, even as the film invests in how particular her situation can be.

It's how Weisse and co-writer focus on those details that often makes The Audition demand one's attention more than other films might. The very first scene has a group of musicians critiquing Alexander's performance in specific ways, and while mastery of a musical instrument can often be a part of what moves things forward in a movie like this, Weisse and company put a lot of effort into making sure that the audience can tell what the difference between good and very good is, or will wince at Alexander making an error quickly enough that Anna's subsequent shift in attitude does not seem random. One feels how difficult sustained playing is even if the viewer has never played an instrument with any sort of skill whatsoever, or reads how the other members of the quintet seem to have music flowing through them while Anna pushes it out. It's specialized material that she makes accessible in impressive fashion, without appearing to also give the audience remedial lessons.

Weisse does a lot of other things that work as compact but telling storytelling as well - the way Anna always has her violin with her at all times even when she's not actually playing shows how central it is to her identity, and as the film goes on, more of Philippe's scenes take place in his workshop, a retreat one can feel even if it's not completely signaled. There's some very nice work done with the young actors, as well - Ilja Monti hits a very specific spot in terms of just how dedicated Alexander is and how his confidence and fear evolve over the course of the film, while Serafin Mishiev makes Jonas a kid who seems to be genuinely cracking under his mother's expectations and dedication to her new student.

There are times when Weisse et al go a bit further than is really good for the movie, opening a couple cans of worms in the homestretch that there isn't enough time to deal with, along with a moment or two odd enough to make one wonder where that particular detail came from. This doesn't leave the movie feeling unfinished or unbelievable, instead underscoring that these people are both complicated and, sometimes, dangerously straightforward. It's more than the familiar material it starts with, and interesting for that.

Also on EFilmCritic

These Weeks in (Virtual) Tickets: 18 May 2020 - 31 May 2020

Putting a ticket to a ballgame that wasn't played in because I'd like to see the page broken up a little and to remind me later that all of this doing nothing wasn't entirely a choice. I might very well have been weak given the option.





I got a late start actually watching movies a couple weeks ago because I wanted to spend evenings writing up the really good movies I'd seen the week before, and I try not to write and watch at the same time. Heck, I may still have been writing when I decided to grab The Great Wall off the shelf. It's still one of the most bizarre productions I can remember seeing, like nobody between Universal and Legendary and the Chinese co-producers and the cast was on the same page. The next night I pulled Night Train to Munich off the "unseen recent arrivals" shelf, figuring that maybe I'd to a Charters & Caldicott binge, only to discover that I had seen it before, although I certainly appreciated bits of it more this time around, even if I do find a long stretch rough.

The rest of the weekend wound up being 3-D stuff, with Saturday's show being one that I thought I might have seen - Tsui Hark's The Taking of Tiger Mountain. Not only had I not seen it, but I grumbled about not having the chance to see it during its tiny North American release, and while five years later I'm probably a little more leery about this sort of Chinese "main melody" movie, I really would have liked to see Tsui Hark doing these big action-adventure things on the big screen. Then on Saturday afternoon, L.A. 3-D SPACE had another Online 3-D Movie Festival, with a much more solid line-up of movies than the one from three weeks earlier. Afterward, I followed up with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, mostly for a little bit more 3D although as I was starting it clicked that the spelunking documentary short was my favorite part of the earlier program.

A couple days later, I started dipping back into the local theaters' offerings with Lucky Grandma, a nifty little bag-of-money movie that feels different with an elderly woman at its center rather than the usual hapless young men. Then on Thursday, I finally got around to watching Up from the Streets on its last day streaming via the Coolidge, and wished I'd enjoyed it a little more.

Friday… Well, Friday was a crazy day in America and after refreshing Twitter and news feeds all day, and that wasn't great, so I capped it off with Mad Max: Fury Road, which really never fails to hit the spot, and then I pretty much spent the weekend on crossword puzzles and more scrolling social media to see what insanity was happening.

Gonna try not to do that this week, with some things planned and some things likely to show up on my Letterboxd page on a whim.

The Great Wall

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

As I mentioned above, and in my original review, this thing feels like nobody outside of Zhang Yimou really had a handle on what sort of movie they were making, with much of the cast either trying to be too serious or mailing it in because it was a silly thing, while Zhang just has a blast, using that Hollywood special effects money as best he can, never really to elevate or add extra weight to a script that hits all the marks but never really finds good moments in between them. Nobody on set seems to have the heart to tell Matt Damon that his ability to do an accent ranges from Somerville to Southie and his British is weird.

But it's still a lot of fun, in part because it is so utterly absurd, with the Chinese half of the cast taking it completely in stride while the westerners are freaking out, although William's impossible skill with a bow puts him in the same movie. The visual effects that were a little rough in 2016-2017 haven't necessarily aged better than others from that era, but there's just enough creativity and artistry to how they're used that what they're getting across still looks great.

One thing that's kind of funny about rewatching it for me is that the score is one that has been on my tablet and cloud music selections for the past three years, to the point where seeing action with familiar motifs is kind of strange. It's also fairly clear watching it that some bits of action were clearly built for 3D, to the point where I may order a disc of that sort from Hong Kong should it drop below $15 or so.

Full review from 2017

Night Train to Munich

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Night Train to Munich is not quite so good as The Lady Vanishes, but on third viewing, it has some awfully impressive pieces. I really love the first half of this movie, with miniatures and matte paintings that give the adventure a sense of scale that it might not otherwise have had. One also can't help but be impressed by the filmmakers' visceral revulsion at the Nazis, which seems to go well past the party line. The final action bit is genuinely nifty as well, drawn out and built out of the heroes being much better shots than the villains though it may be. They cut it together exceptionally.

Unfortunately, there's a lull in the second half that swaps a little too much tension for comedy, too confidently playing the spy game like a game. That very much includes Charters & Caldicott - the reason why this movie will forever be compared to Hitchcock's; they were fun oddball bits of an ensemble in their first appearance but too active here, perhaps the first in a long line of characters who were so well-liked at first that they were subsequently given bigger parts than they deserved.

What I thought way back in 2004

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)

What I said back in 2011 still holds; this is a documentary that earns both its extra length over the typical science-museum fare and its third dimension for how it really brings out the shape of the cave and its walls. It's a film full of honest wonder that doesn't need further embellishment, and sometimes it almost seems to throw director Wener Herzog - there's not that much to look at from an odd perspective, really, and trying to be more philosophical can get into a strangely abstract position.

Still, just look at it. It's not quite the only tour you can have of one of the world's most ancient cultural artifacts (I saw an amazing reproduction at the Montreal Science Museum once), but it's certainly the most accessible and most impactful

What I thought way back in 2011

Up from the Streets: New Orleans: The City of Music

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)

It sometimes feels a bit like missing the point to review a documentary like one is grading an English paper, but somewhere about two-thirds the way through Up From the Streets, I noticed that a half-dozen people had referred to "Mardi Gras Indians" as an influence on various musicians but aside from the occasional cut-away, the filmmakers never get into what that group's deal is. It's even stranger when you consider that this 105-minute movie has at least 18 chapter titles, so maybe there would have been a spot for that. I get it - it's a thing that comes across as tacky and appropriating i contrast to the rest of the movie - but it's also an indication that writer/director Michael Murphy could have done much better in drawing up his plans for how to cover so much history in so little time.

Instead, those 18 chapters are each only able to give a quick look at some particular aspect or figure from New Orleans's musical history, and it creates this odd sensation of a high-level overview that you still have to be somewhat familiar with the material to appreciate. It's pleasant enough to watch - it's still New Orleans and it's still great music, even if there aren't showstopping numbers to highlight how great this is.
'
There's probably a terrific Ken Burns-style miniseries to be made from this material (if Burns's Jazz isn't NOLA-specific enough), but at 105 minutes, very little gets enough spotlight to fire the imagination, or even make one fall in love.

Mad Max: Fury Road

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

I've purchased this movie on disc twice (one 3D, one 4K) but may not have actually watched it at home yet because it's had enough repertory screenings and re-releases to scratch the itch on a big screen; in a number of ways. Still, none of that's happening right now and the events of the day put me in the mood.

It's a little odd to see something that you'd seen exclusively in theaters alone at home; Fury Road being a crowd-pleaser and something that builds up ambient emotion has become so much a part of how I've experienced it (along with the soundtrack as part of a rotation as mentioned with The Great Wall) that having it all to myself seems a little strange. It's still flat-out great, but seeing it like this makes one focus a little more on how it's precise and planned, rather than just getting caught up in it. One does still get caught up - it's that good - and marvel at just how well it stick together.

The 4K disc looks incredible, as much for the HDR colors as the actual resolution (it's an upconvert from a 2K source/intermediate). As much as I found the "black & chrome" version fun and a nifty way to re-experience the movie, it will probably never be my preferred version; the color is so beautiful in this movie that I can't really treat it like an afterthought. I do kind of wish that the 3D and flat versions would use alternate shots/renders in some cases, though; for as gorgeous as this disc looks, there are some bits that mostly seem built for 3D. They don't all quite look odd flattened - some show off extreme foreground/background well, like the flares - but a few don't quite the format and are distracting.

What I wrote in 2015