I'd kind of opted against expanding the Letterboxd entry for Foe, what with it being a let-down rather than something to give whatever meager boost an "official" review gives it, but it wound up being such an oddly apt pairing with Fingernails that I decided to maybe give it another paragraph or two.
Both, after all, are films nominaly set in the future but featuring no cell phones or other evidence of the internet, which amuses me when I remember Stephen Soderbergh whining a few months back about how he hated making modern movies these days because having the internet in one's pocket makes it too hard to keep people from knowing things, which is sort of silly because, well, have you seen people in general lately? Or tried to quickly find something now that Google values ad revenue over usefulness and the internet is filling up with GPT-generated garbage? But, also, you can apparently just skip all this, because if sci-fi films feel free ignoring it, surely contemporary ones can too.
(I wonder, a little, if Soderbergh also laments how nobody smokes any more because of how useful that was in staging scenes.)
Of course, the science-fiction-ness of these two movies caused some bumps for me, as I am simply unable to watch this sort of thing without wondering what a given bit of world-building implies beyond the movie's tight focus, and get frustrated when a little thought reveals how contradictory various pieces are or how clearly it's being set up to prove the filmmaker's point. Both Foe and Fingernails have some interesting bits but the details don't work, and while some are able to just embrace the heightened reality in the spirit that's intended, I tend to figure that life is dealing with a whole bunch of aggregated details, and if you're just going to fudge those away, what can the story really tell you about the human nature it intends to explore?
That's at least partly, if not mostly, a me problem, but I do suspect that it causes these movies to land softer than they might, even if it doesn't set off alarms for everyone.
Anyway, welcome to IFFBoston 2023½! It's going to be a short-ish report, because out of the 12 movies shown, I got to four. I missed the first night because, on my way, I saw that it was sold out, and turned around to see Killers of the Flower Moon at the Somerville before Jonathan Richman took over the main room for the weekend. I dawdled too long after work to get to the first show of the second night, but made it for the second. It's not a huge deal; I've been seeing a fair amount of trailers for Eileen at both Kendall Square and Boston Common, although that's not necessarily any sort of guarantee these days (remember all those trailers for The Kill Room over the past couple months?). Fallen Leaves, meanwhile, was the latest from a filmmaker I've never really followed and described as a sort of thematic follow-up to his other work, so, eh.
More on the other three in coming days.
Foe
* * (out of four)
Seen 18 October 2023 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
I grow weary of art-house science fiction where the details aren't coherent but that's supposed to be okay because they ask big philosophical questions about being human, as if being human wasn't navigating a complicated world and the various details being thrown at a person. It's especially frustrating when the film has a weak twist near the end so that the audience doesn't have much time to contemplate its big ideas, or wind up finding themselves more focused on something else.
That's Foe, whose name suggests a thriller though the movie only occasionally cares to highlight any tension in its premise, and whose moments of world-building are kind of a waste of an effects budget for how little they matter. It is, far too often, boring even when it's not trying to avoid tipping its hand, and terribly unsexy besides: It's full of nude scenes where you can't help but notice how careful the camera placement is, and no real difference in energy between passionate and perfunctory sex.
It follows Hen (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal), a couple married seven years, living on the farm the latter inherited but not working it - there simply isn't enough water for anything but the hardiest of GMO crops - and growing consensus appears to be that humanity's future is in space. Outermore Corporation is building an orbital habitat, and is in a tight enough partnership with the government that they will be able to draft Junior. But that's some time in the future; in the meantime, their representative Terrance (Aaron Pierre) will be conducting interviews and otherwise observing Junior so that an "artificial human" replica can be created to make sure Hen's life can continue as normal.
This all makes no sense, of course - for all the talk of there being no water, Hen takes a lot of showers and there's no apparent efforts at conservation, space stations are far more fragile a human habitat than even a hostile Earth, and none of the rationale for creating these artificial humans rings true, especially since Hen and Junior apparently have no choice in it. It's a long litany of "why are you even doing this?" But arguably the biggest sin is that all of this doesn't say anything particularly interesting about Hen and Junior, or their relationship. Their backgrounds are blank enough that it's hard to see what Terrance is upending, and if Iain Reid's book had any interesting ideas about the ethics of creating the sort of clone Terrance describes, director and co-screenwriter Garth Davis doesn't find that of much interest for more than a moment or two. The revelation that allows everything to snap into place happens far too late to play out in anything but the most superficial, obvious way.
The movie's got Saoirse Ronan, so at least that role is in good hands, although I wonder if her being a known quality leads a viewer to centering her too much. Paul Mescal's Junior has the potential to be as interesting a character, but he's established early enough as "just kind of a jerk" that the angst about being potentially replaced can be played very well but not hit home. Aaron Pierreis just kind of around, equal parts sinister and curious.
It might be interesting to give the movie a second go to see what knowing everything reveals. At least, it would if this was a better movie worth another two hours of time. But it's not.
Fingernails
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 October 2023 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus 2023, DCP)
On the one hand, I think you've got to have some pretty weird ideas about both love and biology for the premise of Fingernails not to feel like it's stretching its premise past the point where it's useful. On the other, Jessie Buckley is so dang delightful that I immediately went to look up what else she has been in. Get her in some romantic comedies that are as witty and quirky as this movie is at its best and ditch the faux-profundity that doesn't work.
She plays an elementary school teacher, Anna, who was laid off when her school shut down on short notice, and, though she winds up telling boyfriend Ryan (Jeremy Allen White) otherwise, she winds up taking a job at The Love Center, which not only administers the scientific tests that can determine whether two people are truly in love by running a test on their extracted fingernails, but offers classes to help couples deepen their bond before taking a test. She's instructed to shadow/work with Amir (Riz Ahmed), who has been creating new exercises based on romantic movie plots as scientific research, and it's not long before she starts to feel a spark. She and Ryan had a positive test early in their relationship, and not much has changed, but one can't help but wonder if maybe knowing that they are in love has allowed Ryan to start taking her for granted.
The movie works fantastically when it's a romantic comedy filled with sci-fi absurdity; director Christos Nikou and co-writers Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner are especially good at finding goofy workplace humor bits that maybe would only show up at a place like The Love Institute, right down to Luke Wilson being a perfect little bit of casting as the boss - sentimental, optimistic, but also kind of sad. Just about every weird exercise at the Love Center meant to strengthen a couple's bond is enjoyably goofy, and making Ryan kind of a drip but not really a bad boyfriend allows for some deadpan moments at home.
There's really terrific chemistry between Buckley and Riz Ahmed, in large part because their characters don't quite seem like the perfect match, often caught a little unawares at something the other does but kind of delighted by it. Buckley practically glows at times, as she's meant to, with a wide smile and a way of curiously looking around but also focusing on the other person in a scene, but also seeming aware of when things aren't quite right. Ahmed's Amir is dryer, not quite as dry, smooth, and witty as he thinks, a smart fellow who gets a touch less composed the more time he spends with Anna. Jeremy Allen White hits the right tone as Ryan in terms of making him a man of his weird time and place but still kind of weird and not good enough; the way he takes Anna for granted because they're Certified In Love that feels more disappointing than mean, as it could.
The big trouble is that the film's built in such a way that its makers apparently expect the audience to take the weird premise of the Machine seriously, even when making big assumptions that require a little exploration. There are bits of it that seem like rich veins of satire - the idea that people will put themselves through literal torture to find love, that knowing something is true can make you lazy about it, or that people are essentially studying for the test - but the filmmakers seldom go for that. Instead, the counterintuitive test results get taken at face value, never leading to the idea that there's something in these relationships we need to take a closer look to see or hints that there's something off about the system.
The heck of it is, if they were keener on thinking their pseudo-science and world-building through rather than just taking it as what you need to tell this story, there's good material here: When the audience is wondering how the Machine can tell two people are in love with one another - as opposed to just individually in love - by looking at separate fingernails, talk about quantum entanglement. Really leverage that a lab test only gives you the data for one point in time more than the movie does. Or be really daring, and take the mentions that most results are negative but that an often indifferent couple like Anna & Ryan are positive to talk about what kind of love this thing is measuring and if maybe a powerful infatuation or a strong friendship may be more valuable, even if one doesn't call it "love".
indep
There's some of that, but as with Foe, it comes too late to really be explored in depth compared to the time spent playing things out by the arbitrary rules that had been established. It leaves enough of the movie adrift to make one start wondering what they're even trying to say here, and why it's never as thought-provoking as the early going had been entertaining.
Showing posts with label IFFBoston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IFFBoston. Show all posts
Monday, October 23, 2023
Monday, June 28, 2021
IFFBoston 2021.08: Marvelous and the Black Hole
The good news about taking forever to do write-ups: Sometimes you see a movie about kids, get a chance to see your nieces who are roughly the same age, and it kind of erases any doubts one might have about how well the filmmakers get tweens. Not that I had many watching this movie - it rings pretty true - but kids are tricky, especially with adults who have seen so many movies about them wanting to put self-referential words in the mouths of people who might be smart enough for it but don't necessarily think along those lines yet.
A little time rolling it over made me inclined to boost it a quarter-star up to the full three. It's kind of lightweight in a few ways, but it's not overextended and probably plays very well to kids the same age as its characters. Even during an in-person film festival, you don't really get a sense of how a young audience reacts to a movie like this, and it's something I'd be curious to see.
Marvelous and the Black Hole
* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
I wonder if a movie like Marvelous and the Black Hole goes a little further now than it did five or ten years ago, with all manner of streaming services out there looking for material in bulk and not needing to be particularly concerned about balancing demographics in a limited number of slots (to be a bit euphemistic). Now, it's got a chance to be seen outside the festival circuit, and even if it's the sort of movie which, ten years later, is described as either good experience or an accomplishment that can't be taken away from someone, it's at least got a bit of a chance to find the person for whom it will hit just right.
Someone like Sammy Ko (Miya Cech), perhaps, a tween who is not doing very well at all with either the loss of her mother or the speed with which things are progressing between father Angus (Leonardo Nam) and his perfectly nice girlfriend Marianne (Paulina Lule). Acting out and verging on self-harm, she's forced to take a class at the community center, but ditches that as well, only to stumble on Margot Sullah (Rhea Perlman), a children's magician who could use an assistant for an hour, something which sparks Sammy's interest a bit more that she thought it would.
The film needs Margo to give Sammy something to do away from her family so that she eventually can see them a bit differently, but writer/director Kate Tsang makes a good choice in never straying too far from the Kos; not only is it just about impossible for a kid Sammy's age to actually be apart from her family for any particular length of time, but Sammy, older sister Patrician (Kannon), and Angus are an entertainingly imperfect group: As much as Sammy is the lead and someone that the audience can sympathize with, she's also kind of exhausting, and the way she and her sister reflexively cover for and snipe at each other certainly rings true, as does Leonardo Nam as the awkward, easy-to-like dad who is self-aware in ways that are funny but also show that he knows just how far in he is over his head. They're well-enough realized that the film can afford a sequence of the three out for an afternoon at the arcade that feels a bit like an unrelated detour before being revealed as Angus trying to make something go down easier and have it blow up because neither he nor Sammy can make the other move forward at their pace.
So where's Margot fit in? There are times when she kind of doesn't but it's not a particular problem because Rhea Perlman makes her eccentricity charming - there are aspects to Margot that would have read as "initially mean old spinster" just a couple decades back but which are shaded more sympathetically today - even if it takes a while to see how her somewhat broader performance plays into the character. Eventually, though, her parallels with Sammy become a bit more clear and sobering, and her purpose as a teacher becomes an intriguing inversion of magician and trickster tropes - she is teaching Sammy to deceive, yes, but also storytelling and how to recreate herself so that she can move forward even while that still hurts.
It's not always something Tsang and company are quite able to hit the right note on - kids Sammy's age are tricky in that even though they are emotionally complex, subtlety is not a big part of how they express themselves or necessarily the best way to deal with them, while Margot winds up in an odd spot that's neither quite central nor on the edges. Still, the often very funny details make up for a lot, especially when it involves the Kos' Chinese-American heritage, whether it be a way Sammy cuts down a cliche Angus spouts or how her initial interest in an old magic books section on "Oriental Magic" turns to annoyed disdain when it's just weird old racism. That does make it a little more clever when Sammy's imaginings of the stories her mother told her play out like the Shanghai-shot Chinese movies of the same era.
Those ways it all fits make the film come together a bit better than may initially seem to be the case, and I suspect that some folks will see themselves quite clearly in it. That won't be everyone, and the rest may just see a rough-but-earnest first feature, but given the age of the characters, that's not exactly a negative.
Also at eFilmCritic
A little time rolling it over made me inclined to boost it a quarter-star up to the full three. It's kind of lightweight in a few ways, but it's not overextended and probably plays very well to kids the same age as its characters. Even during an in-person film festival, you don't really get a sense of how a young audience reacts to a movie like this, and it's something I'd be curious to see.
Marvelous and the Black Hole
* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
I wonder if a movie like Marvelous and the Black Hole goes a little further now than it did five or ten years ago, with all manner of streaming services out there looking for material in bulk and not needing to be particularly concerned about balancing demographics in a limited number of slots (to be a bit euphemistic). Now, it's got a chance to be seen outside the festival circuit, and even if it's the sort of movie which, ten years later, is described as either good experience or an accomplishment that can't be taken away from someone, it's at least got a bit of a chance to find the person for whom it will hit just right.
Someone like Sammy Ko (Miya Cech), perhaps, a tween who is not doing very well at all with either the loss of her mother or the speed with which things are progressing between father Angus (Leonardo Nam) and his perfectly nice girlfriend Marianne (Paulina Lule). Acting out and verging on self-harm, she's forced to take a class at the community center, but ditches that as well, only to stumble on Margot Sullah (Rhea Perlman), a children's magician who could use an assistant for an hour, something which sparks Sammy's interest a bit more that she thought it would.
The film needs Margo to give Sammy something to do away from her family so that she eventually can see them a bit differently, but writer/director Kate Tsang makes a good choice in never straying too far from the Kos; not only is it just about impossible for a kid Sammy's age to actually be apart from her family for any particular length of time, but Sammy, older sister Patrician (Kannon), and Angus are an entertainingly imperfect group: As much as Sammy is the lead and someone that the audience can sympathize with, she's also kind of exhausting, and the way she and her sister reflexively cover for and snipe at each other certainly rings true, as does Leonardo Nam as the awkward, easy-to-like dad who is self-aware in ways that are funny but also show that he knows just how far in he is over his head. They're well-enough realized that the film can afford a sequence of the three out for an afternoon at the arcade that feels a bit like an unrelated detour before being revealed as Angus trying to make something go down easier and have it blow up because neither he nor Sammy can make the other move forward at their pace.
So where's Margot fit in? There are times when she kind of doesn't but it's not a particular problem because Rhea Perlman makes her eccentricity charming - there are aspects to Margot that would have read as "initially mean old spinster" just a couple decades back but which are shaded more sympathetically today - even if it takes a while to see how her somewhat broader performance plays into the character. Eventually, though, her parallels with Sammy become a bit more clear and sobering, and her purpose as a teacher becomes an intriguing inversion of magician and trickster tropes - she is teaching Sammy to deceive, yes, but also storytelling and how to recreate herself so that she can move forward even while that still hurts.
It's not always something Tsang and company are quite able to hit the right note on - kids Sammy's age are tricky in that even though they are emotionally complex, subtlety is not a big part of how they express themselves or necessarily the best way to deal with them, while Margot winds up in an odd spot that's neither quite central nor on the edges. Still, the often very funny details make up for a lot, especially when it involves the Kos' Chinese-American heritage, whether it be a way Sammy cuts down a cliche Angus spouts or how her initial interest in an old magic books section on "Oriental Magic" turns to annoyed disdain when it's just weird old racism. That does make it a little more clever when Sammy's imaginings of the stories her mother told her play out like the Shanghai-shot Chinese movies of the same era.
Those ways it all fits make the film come together a bit better than may initially seem to be the case, and I suspect that some folks will see themselves quite clearly in it. That won't be everyone, and the rest may just see a rough-but-earnest first feature, but given the age of the characters, that's not exactly a negative.
Also at eFilmCritic
Saturday, June 05, 2021
IFFBoston 2021.07: Strawberry Mansion
I was going to have a blank spot on IFFBoston's Wednesday slot because the only scheduled premiere was The Sparks Brothers, and I figured I'd catch it during a theatrical run, but they opted to move this one up a couple days (and make it available through the rest of the fest rather than just for 48 hours), so it worked out. Under normal circumstances, Sparks would probably be a Tuesday-at-the-Coolidge selection, and this wasn't quite how I've often wished the fest had encores at Somerville or the Brattle that night, but it's close enough.
The movie itself feels like the 9:30pm show at the Brattle co-presented by BUFF, reminding me of that festival's Dave Made a Maze in a lot of the best ways: Both have a home-made aesthetic, touch on how people sometimes wrestle with their creative impulses, and manage to keep going despite a thin-seeming premise. I feel like I've seen more for Audley and Birney, but it looks like I maybe fell asleep during Sylvio if anything. Might be worth circling back, given how much I enjoyed their brand of absurdity here.
Strawberry Mansion
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
If Strawberry Mansion is not specifically what the average movie with deadpan surrealism and kitchen-table production design is going for, it is nevertheless one of the best recent examples of such things. It's lo-fi sci-fi that takes its silliness seriously, having fun with its clever story but seldom feeling like the filmmakers are amusing themselves at the expense of the audience.
It's the mid-2030s, and dreams are routinely recorded so that they can be taxed. James Preble (Kentucker Audley) is one of the people who audits those dreams, and his latest assignment is Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller), an elderly artist who lives in a remote red house, and it turns out she's the sort of eccentric who never completed the mandatory upgrade to Airstick, leaving Preble with two thousand VHS tapes to go through. It could be worse; Bella's dreams are generally pleasant and whimsical, and her self-image in them (Grace Glowicki) is young and cute. It's initially a welcome distraction from Preble's feelings that something is off about his own dreams, but soon he's finding peculiar overlaps.
Filmmakers Kentucker Audler and Albert Birney drop their viewers into their weird future right away, starting off in Preble's dreams which more than hint about some of where the story will go. Many filmmakers playing with dreams will attempt to start with a fake-out, but Audley & Birney are not actually interested in fooling their audience or sending them down blind alleys. There will be a point when things get strange and they maybe lose track of the world they've created - the finale owes a bit to Inception's multiple time-scales and stretches them right to the breaking point, showing that for however much Nolan's precision may be a bit cold, it can be useful - but it doesn't become a puzzle first and foremost, even if the audience is given the chance to figure out what certain symbols and memories may mean.
Instead, it's a fascinating love story. A romance between Preble and Bella is not entirely impossible, although the age difference would certainly be a major obstacle, but a viewer may wonder if Preble can imagine love as something else. There's just enough in common between Penny Fuller's performance and that of Grace Glowicki that one can see how Preble connects them, and Audley does good work in making Preble a legitimately starchy civil servant who can nevertheless come to appreciate Bella's creative and eccentric bent rather than just someone who has been repressing a true self. What's more fascinating is the way the filmmakers show Preble falling in love with a combination of Bellas - who she is now, who she remembers being, her own fantasies, and his own - and lets them run together rather than carefully pulling them apart. Much of the "Bella" in the film's latter half is in Preble's dreams (though it's easy to fall into the trap of only treating it as a psychic or spiritual connection), and chasing that can be destructive, but even with our dreams laid bare for others to see, we can't not do that. It's how our brains work.
Much of this happens in dreams, although it's not like Preble's real world is any less surreal. As mentioned, it's a world constructed out of chunky analog tech, and in some ways it can't help but be kind of ostentatiously cheap-looking, but the filmmakers are determined not to wink at the audience; characters sell things as weird and inconvenient in the way that real life is. The real world is an effortless sort of hodgepodge of low-tech and grotesque, and while the dreams are flights of fancy, they're seldom more elaborate than real life; Preble's interior life just isn't as rich as it could be until he meets Bella, and Bella's feel like her crowded house, indicating few regrets.
Birney and Audley come close to overstaying their welcome as the film moves through its final stretch, but this is the sort of movie that usually reaches that point once it gets past short length. It's a nifty fantasy whose obvious satire works because of how warmly unconventional the underlying relationship is.
Also at eFilmCritic
The movie itself feels like the 9:30pm show at the Brattle co-presented by BUFF, reminding me of that festival's Dave Made a Maze in a lot of the best ways: Both have a home-made aesthetic, touch on how people sometimes wrestle with their creative impulses, and manage to keep going despite a thin-seeming premise. I feel like I've seen more for Audley and Birney, but it looks like I maybe fell asleep during Sylvio if anything. Might be worth circling back, given how much I enjoyed their brand of absurdity here.
Strawberry Mansion
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
If Strawberry Mansion is not specifically what the average movie with deadpan surrealism and kitchen-table production design is going for, it is nevertheless one of the best recent examples of such things. It's lo-fi sci-fi that takes its silliness seriously, having fun with its clever story but seldom feeling like the filmmakers are amusing themselves at the expense of the audience.
It's the mid-2030s, and dreams are routinely recorded so that they can be taxed. James Preble (Kentucker Audley) is one of the people who audits those dreams, and his latest assignment is Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller), an elderly artist who lives in a remote red house, and it turns out she's the sort of eccentric who never completed the mandatory upgrade to Airstick, leaving Preble with two thousand VHS tapes to go through. It could be worse; Bella's dreams are generally pleasant and whimsical, and her self-image in them (Grace Glowicki) is young and cute. It's initially a welcome distraction from Preble's feelings that something is off about his own dreams, but soon he's finding peculiar overlaps.
Filmmakers Kentucker Audler and Albert Birney drop their viewers into their weird future right away, starting off in Preble's dreams which more than hint about some of where the story will go. Many filmmakers playing with dreams will attempt to start with a fake-out, but Audley & Birney are not actually interested in fooling their audience or sending them down blind alleys. There will be a point when things get strange and they maybe lose track of the world they've created - the finale owes a bit to Inception's multiple time-scales and stretches them right to the breaking point, showing that for however much Nolan's precision may be a bit cold, it can be useful - but it doesn't become a puzzle first and foremost, even if the audience is given the chance to figure out what certain symbols and memories may mean.
Instead, it's a fascinating love story. A romance between Preble and Bella is not entirely impossible, although the age difference would certainly be a major obstacle, but a viewer may wonder if Preble can imagine love as something else. There's just enough in common between Penny Fuller's performance and that of Grace Glowicki that one can see how Preble connects them, and Audley does good work in making Preble a legitimately starchy civil servant who can nevertheless come to appreciate Bella's creative and eccentric bent rather than just someone who has been repressing a true self. What's more fascinating is the way the filmmakers show Preble falling in love with a combination of Bellas - who she is now, who she remembers being, her own fantasies, and his own - and lets them run together rather than carefully pulling them apart. Much of the "Bella" in the film's latter half is in Preble's dreams (though it's easy to fall into the trap of only treating it as a psychic or spiritual connection), and chasing that can be destructive, but even with our dreams laid bare for others to see, we can't not do that. It's how our brains work.
Much of this happens in dreams, although it's not like Preble's real world is any less surreal. As mentioned, it's a world constructed out of chunky analog tech, and in some ways it can't help but be kind of ostentatiously cheap-looking, but the filmmakers are determined not to wink at the audience; characters sell things as weird and inconvenient in the way that real life is. The real world is an effortless sort of hodgepodge of low-tech and grotesque, and while the dreams are flights of fancy, they're seldom more elaborate than real life; Preble's interior life just isn't as rich as it could be until he meets Bella, and Bella's feel like her crowded house, indicating few regrets.
Birney and Audley come close to overstaying their welcome as the film moves through its final stretch, but this is the sort of movie that usually reaches that point once it gets past short length. It's a nifty fantasy whose obvious satire works because of how warmly unconventional the underlying relationship is.
Also at eFilmCritic
Thursday, May 13, 2021
IFFBoston 2021.06: The Oxy Kingpins
As much as I kind of knew that the guy who I hear opening every all-employee "Town Hall" call at work was going to show up in this movie, it's still awfully dispiriting when your employer's parent company appears prominently in a movie about how there was a pretty darn seamless pipeline between major pharmaceutical distributors, street drug dealers, and addicts that created a crisis that has killed many, with only the latter two groups actually facing consequences for their action. I didn't really choose to work for them affirmatively - I joined a small-ish start up looking to save lives by preventing chemotherapy drug interactions and overdoses, and then somehow a few years and two acquisitions later, that startup is a division of a business unit of a Fortune 10 company. I don't hate the vacation policy, but being even vaguely associated with this is depressing.
Anyway, it's a weird feeling to get to the end of a documentary still being in favor with corporations being hit with fines that are as proportionately ruinous as any individual would face but also hoping that when they make cuts to offset them, they'll ignore the good people in the chemotherapy drug reporting department.
End disclaimer, begin review, watch the movie.
The Oxy Kingpins
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
Though many people are touched directly enough by what is often called "the opioid crisis" or "the opioid epidemic" for it not to be abstract, some are lucky enough for it to not be directly affected and others, quite naturally, are concerned enough about the immediate ill effects that they don't tend to think about the other end of the supply chain. The Oxy Kingpins does a fair job of remedying that; it may not have a proper ending, but the filmmakers do yeoman's work explaining how so many pills got into the wrong hands, and maybe what can be done about it.
The film starts provocatively, as a young man without either face or voice disguised says that he enjoyed being a drug dealer, and how oxycontin changed the game: A powerful painkiller that might as well be heroin, easy to transport, and insanely addictive, the only problem was getting enough, and while some people were selling unused pills from a prescription or stealing from pharmacies, parts of Florida were creating a cottage industry of "pain management clinics", basically doctors writing bogus scrips which could be filled at any drug store. He's not just sharing this information with the filmmakers, but with attorney Mike Papantonio, whose firm handles massive trials and is putting together a series of class-action lawsuits against the major drug distributors for how their push to over-prescribe has created addicts and their lax enforcement has allowed criminal networks to thrive.
In many ways, The Oxy Kingpins is most notable for what it's not: Directors Nick August-Perna and Brendan Fitzgerald spend almost no time on poverty porn or watching addicts suffer, with the main figure chosen to represent that side of the story has more or less come out the other end, rebuilding her life and not looking back, although it's clear that the spinal surgery that led to her painkiller habit still affects her today. At times, the filmmakers seem to be deliberately putting those stories to the side - even Papantonio emphasizes that he is not representing individuals, but the governments that have had to increase their budgets due to the suppliers' criminal negligence - because while those stories hit the audience hard on a gut level, that emotional response can be a distraction from what they're trying to get across.
And it's kind of necessary, because while what Alex-the-former-dealer and his more-anonymous colleagues talk about is exciting, Papantino's side of the story is kind of dry. Both are charismatic enough in their way, but Alex's stories are things you can get caught up in even as you blanch at the sheer amorality of it, even if you obviously much rather have someone like Mike Papantino on your side in a courtroom where the judge will brook no nonsense and grandstanding. It's a useful contrast, especially when you look at the two types of operations that this situation fundamentally entwines: The obvious relatively low-level criminals that traditional law enforcement is built to deal with, and the folks who are so rich and able to hire clever people as to be outside their reach.
Whichever part of the chain that they're dealing with, the filmmakers are adept at getting their information out clearly, not getting too bogged down in specific procedural details but giving the viewer the sort of specific facts and scenes that can stick in their heads. A big part of making a movie like this work is telling the sort of story that someone else might retell later, so that even if it doesn't give the movie a bigger audience, the facts get out there. This film lays the situation out clearly in a way that goes down pretty easy, and that is more or less the goal.
The one caveat is that it ends on a screen saying the trial in Nevada is set for April 2021, and while that does make one wonder why the filmmakers couldn't have waited for an actual ending. Of course, the goal here is to explain, not necessarily tell a story, and that ending could have forced a change in focus on what is considered important. Without it, The Oxy Kingpins does the job its makers set out to do - no more, but certainly no less.
Also at eFilmCritic
Anyway, it's a weird feeling to get to the end of a documentary still being in favor with corporations being hit with fines that are as proportionately ruinous as any individual would face but also hoping that when they make cuts to offset them, they'll ignore the good people in the chemotherapy drug reporting department.
End disclaimer, begin review, watch the movie.
The Oxy Kingpins
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
Though many people are touched directly enough by what is often called "the opioid crisis" or "the opioid epidemic" for it not to be abstract, some are lucky enough for it to not be directly affected and others, quite naturally, are concerned enough about the immediate ill effects that they don't tend to think about the other end of the supply chain. The Oxy Kingpins does a fair job of remedying that; it may not have a proper ending, but the filmmakers do yeoman's work explaining how so many pills got into the wrong hands, and maybe what can be done about it.
The film starts provocatively, as a young man without either face or voice disguised says that he enjoyed being a drug dealer, and how oxycontin changed the game: A powerful painkiller that might as well be heroin, easy to transport, and insanely addictive, the only problem was getting enough, and while some people were selling unused pills from a prescription or stealing from pharmacies, parts of Florida were creating a cottage industry of "pain management clinics", basically doctors writing bogus scrips which could be filled at any drug store. He's not just sharing this information with the filmmakers, but with attorney Mike Papantonio, whose firm handles massive trials and is putting together a series of class-action lawsuits against the major drug distributors for how their push to over-prescribe has created addicts and their lax enforcement has allowed criminal networks to thrive.
In many ways, The Oxy Kingpins is most notable for what it's not: Directors Nick August-Perna and Brendan Fitzgerald spend almost no time on poverty porn or watching addicts suffer, with the main figure chosen to represent that side of the story has more or less come out the other end, rebuilding her life and not looking back, although it's clear that the spinal surgery that led to her painkiller habit still affects her today. At times, the filmmakers seem to be deliberately putting those stories to the side - even Papantonio emphasizes that he is not representing individuals, but the governments that have had to increase their budgets due to the suppliers' criminal negligence - because while those stories hit the audience hard on a gut level, that emotional response can be a distraction from what they're trying to get across.
And it's kind of necessary, because while what Alex-the-former-dealer and his more-anonymous colleagues talk about is exciting, Papantino's side of the story is kind of dry. Both are charismatic enough in their way, but Alex's stories are things you can get caught up in even as you blanch at the sheer amorality of it, even if you obviously much rather have someone like Mike Papantino on your side in a courtroom where the judge will brook no nonsense and grandstanding. It's a useful contrast, especially when you look at the two types of operations that this situation fundamentally entwines: The obvious relatively low-level criminals that traditional law enforcement is built to deal with, and the folks who are so rich and able to hire clever people as to be outside their reach.
Whichever part of the chain that they're dealing with, the filmmakers are adept at getting their information out clearly, not getting too bogged down in specific procedural details but giving the viewer the sort of specific facts and scenes that can stick in their heads. A big part of making a movie like this work is telling the sort of story that someone else might retell later, so that even if it doesn't give the movie a bigger audience, the facts get out there. This film lays the situation out clearly in a way that goes down pretty easy, and that is more or less the goal.
The one caveat is that it ends on a screen saying the trial in Nevada is set for April 2021, and while that does make one wonder why the filmmakers couldn't have waited for an actual ending. Of course, the goal here is to explain, not necessarily tell a story, and that ending could have forced a change in focus on what is considered important. Without it, The Oxy Kingpins does the job its makers set out to do - no more, but certainly no less.
Also at eFilmCritic
Wednesday, May 12, 2021
IFFBoston 2021.05: The Dry
I think America was roughly fifteen minutes into the pandemic before people started talking about not wanting to see masks, isolation, distancing, etc. reflected in entertainment, either as a way to pin a date down or as a metaphor, and it's been kind of odd to watch it play out on television as the likes of 911 and Law & Order try to feel current but also watchable afterward, and it doesn't always work. Australia has by and large dodged that bullet - not as completely as New Zealand, but orders of magnitude better than it's done in the USA pre-vaccination - but I wonder whether the heat waves would be seen the same way.
At any rate, this movie is all sort of my thing and should start hitting theaters next Friday, which means we'll have three consecutive weekends of movies where wildfires or the threat thereof, are a major part of the danger - The Water Man last weekend, Those Who Wish Me Dead next, and then this the week after. It's a weird coincidence, especially considering how the pandemic has shuffled release dates over the past year and into the future, but a thoroughly relevant one as both California and Australia have had some horrific fire seasons recently, and for all we know they won't be slowing down any time soon. Given where the movie industry is, one wonders if it's just going to be a more omnipresent thing that works its way into more of our entertainment.
(Fills in Amazon link that none of you are going to click, sees Jane Harper has written a second Aaron Falk novel, and hopes like heck that Eric Bana is up for another go.)
The Dry
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
Early on in The Dry, there's a subtitle specifying that it's been 324 days since the last rain in the town of Kiewarra, and I wonder whether that was the inspiration for the story or just something the filmmakers couldn't avoid, given how bad the drought and heat waves have been in Australia in recent years. Either way, it's a way to add some color to a somewhat dour mystery.
Our sleuth is Aaron Falk (Eric Bana), a member of Australia's Federal Police Force who has recently broken a major financial case. He probably had no real intention of ever returning to the farming community where he lived as a boy - even if it is nice to see old friend Gretchen (Genevieve O'Reilly) again - and it would be completely inappropriate from him to investigate the murder-suicide old friend Luke Hadler was apparently involved in. But for as much as Luke's mother Barb (Julia Blake) thinks that maybe he can find something in the farm's books that would exonerate her son, his father Gerry (Bruce Spence) has gnawing doubts, as he's fairly sure that Luke didn't tell the whole truth when his girlfriend Ellie (BeBe Bettencourt) drowned twenty years ago. Most in town are more liable to look at Aaron where that incident is concerned, but local deputy Greg Raco (Keir O'Donnell) wasn't there then and doesn't particularly mind Aaron giving everything a second look.
Director and co-writer Robert Connolly have a neat little nested-mystery setup here, built in such a way that there's a good story to be had even if the most obvious connection between them - and thus the default explanation for both incidents - is true. It's compelling enough that even as Raco points out a crucial bit of evidence that would seem to cast doubt on Luke as the killer and enough characters are introduced in the present to make the viewer look closer, the impulse is still there to look at it more as an ensemble drama about how one maybe doesn't know anyone, or how secrets everyone knows can fester in a small town. It's a clever structure, full of red herrings which nevertheless seem essential even when revealed as such; it gives both the problem-solving and emotional halves of the brain something to do without making the other unimportant or over-complicated.
The drought also makes the difference between the two timelines striking, even if I'm not completely certain that Luke's body is found in the dried-up river where Ellie drowned (the implication is delicious, though). Kiewarra circa 1991 is filled with greens and blues, right up until Ellie's death, when the light shifts and everything gets darker. The present is all bleached sand and dried out, leafless trees; even the opening where the Hadler farmhouse briefly seems like it's in the middle of a haven of green is a fake-out before a grisly crime scene. There's a different feel to the relative emptiness of the town in the two periods, an undercurrent of how various factors from climate change to corrupt development are hurting towns like this.
Pieces are kept mysterious enough that Falk can easily seem a cipher, but Eric Bana does good work in giving him a sort of insider-outsider nervousness that reads a lot of ways - a kind of abrasive confidence in his early scenes with Raco that also says he knows he shouldn't be there, the non-specific guilt that can sometimes be pinpointed, and the right bit of happiness to push all that halfway aside when Gretchen greets him warmly. Genevieve O'Reilly plays the opposite sides of those scenes nicely, and puts a little bit more of a twist into the scenes when it looks like she might be a suspect. The crew of young actors playing their younger selves maybe doesn't entirely look like them, but Joe Klocek certainly catches the sort of earnest vibe that could believably be beaten down into what we see out of Bana, and Sam Corlett establishes enough about Luke that one can extrapolate some but not entirely to the present. BeBe Bettencourt is the standout in that group, though, carrying the whole load for Ellie and making her feel important enough that her death would blow this hole in the community. The rest of the cast is terrifically solid in parts that all need to be immediately understood but could potentially hold secrets, and Keir O'Donnell is sneaky-impressive as the cop who is not on Falk's level but also quite respectable. There's a fun scene when he reacts to the phrase "shooting rabbits" where the audience can feel him catching up, and the shift can make a viewer lick their lips.
There's a nifty climax as well, a tense confrontation that nevertheless feels like something new and doesn't shift the feel of what has been a nice, slow simmer for a couple of hours. Connolly and company deliver a mystery that's more than just a puzzle and a drama that benefits from the crime story's focus.
Also at eFilmCritic
At any rate, this movie is all sort of my thing and should start hitting theaters next Friday, which means we'll have three consecutive weekends of movies where wildfires or the threat thereof, are a major part of the danger - The Water Man last weekend, Those Who Wish Me Dead next, and then this the week after. It's a weird coincidence, especially considering how the pandemic has shuffled release dates over the past year and into the future, but a thoroughly relevant one as both California and Australia have had some horrific fire seasons recently, and for all we know they won't be slowing down any time soon. Given where the movie industry is, one wonders if it's just going to be a more omnipresent thing that works its way into more of our entertainment.
(Fills in Amazon link that none of you are going to click, sees Jane Harper has written a second Aaron Falk novel, and hopes like heck that Eric Bana is up for another go.)
The Dry
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
Early on in The Dry, there's a subtitle specifying that it's been 324 days since the last rain in the town of Kiewarra, and I wonder whether that was the inspiration for the story or just something the filmmakers couldn't avoid, given how bad the drought and heat waves have been in Australia in recent years. Either way, it's a way to add some color to a somewhat dour mystery.
Our sleuth is Aaron Falk (Eric Bana), a member of Australia's Federal Police Force who has recently broken a major financial case. He probably had no real intention of ever returning to the farming community where he lived as a boy - even if it is nice to see old friend Gretchen (Genevieve O'Reilly) again - and it would be completely inappropriate from him to investigate the murder-suicide old friend Luke Hadler was apparently involved in. But for as much as Luke's mother Barb (Julia Blake) thinks that maybe he can find something in the farm's books that would exonerate her son, his father Gerry (Bruce Spence) has gnawing doubts, as he's fairly sure that Luke didn't tell the whole truth when his girlfriend Ellie (BeBe Bettencourt) drowned twenty years ago. Most in town are more liable to look at Aaron where that incident is concerned, but local deputy Greg Raco (Keir O'Donnell) wasn't there then and doesn't particularly mind Aaron giving everything a second look.
Director and co-writer Robert Connolly have a neat little nested-mystery setup here, built in such a way that there's a good story to be had even if the most obvious connection between them - and thus the default explanation for both incidents - is true. It's compelling enough that even as Raco points out a crucial bit of evidence that would seem to cast doubt on Luke as the killer and enough characters are introduced in the present to make the viewer look closer, the impulse is still there to look at it more as an ensemble drama about how one maybe doesn't know anyone, or how secrets everyone knows can fester in a small town. It's a clever structure, full of red herrings which nevertheless seem essential even when revealed as such; it gives both the problem-solving and emotional halves of the brain something to do without making the other unimportant or over-complicated.
The drought also makes the difference between the two timelines striking, even if I'm not completely certain that Luke's body is found in the dried-up river where Ellie drowned (the implication is delicious, though). Kiewarra circa 1991 is filled with greens and blues, right up until Ellie's death, when the light shifts and everything gets darker. The present is all bleached sand and dried out, leafless trees; even the opening where the Hadler farmhouse briefly seems like it's in the middle of a haven of green is a fake-out before a grisly crime scene. There's a different feel to the relative emptiness of the town in the two periods, an undercurrent of how various factors from climate change to corrupt development are hurting towns like this.
Pieces are kept mysterious enough that Falk can easily seem a cipher, but Eric Bana does good work in giving him a sort of insider-outsider nervousness that reads a lot of ways - a kind of abrasive confidence in his early scenes with Raco that also says he knows he shouldn't be there, the non-specific guilt that can sometimes be pinpointed, and the right bit of happiness to push all that halfway aside when Gretchen greets him warmly. Genevieve O'Reilly plays the opposite sides of those scenes nicely, and puts a little bit more of a twist into the scenes when it looks like she might be a suspect. The crew of young actors playing their younger selves maybe doesn't entirely look like them, but Joe Klocek certainly catches the sort of earnest vibe that could believably be beaten down into what we see out of Bana, and Sam Corlett establishes enough about Luke that one can extrapolate some but not entirely to the present. BeBe Bettencourt is the standout in that group, though, carrying the whole load for Ellie and making her feel important enough that her death would blow this hole in the community. The rest of the cast is terrifically solid in parts that all need to be immediately understood but could potentially hold secrets, and Keir O'Donnell is sneaky-impressive as the cop who is not on Falk's level but also quite respectable. There's a fun scene when he reacts to the phrase "shooting rabbits" where the audience can feel him catching up, and the shift can make a viewer lick their lips.
There's a nifty climax as well, a tense confrontation that nevertheless feels like something new and doesn't shift the feel of what has been a nice, slow simmer for a couple of hours. Connolly and company deliver a mystery that's more than just a puzzle and a drama that benefits from the crime story's focus.
Also at eFilmCritic
Tuesday, May 11, 2021
IFFBoston 2021.04: I Was a Simple Man and Who We Are
Let's mostly go with release date rather than watch date , with this getting split up because I was doing all the Sunday crosswords and making pizza, so I got to I Was a Simple Man relatively late in the evening, too late to be up for a second movie (although I'd happily be up until almost 2am the next night).
Not a whole lot to say here. Both were pretty good. And it's a day late, but I think I heard construction as I walked past the Somerville Theatre on the way back from the camera shop on Saturday, so I'm guessing there will be an at least somewhat upgraded concession stand when they re-open.
I Was a Simple Man
* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
Point a camera in any random direction in Hawaii, and odds are that you're going to get a great-looking movie, and though that is not entirely the direction Christopher Makoto Yogi takes with I Was a Simple Man, it is a major part of what makes the film work. Not so much the scenery, but the star, who often seems to embody his character to the point where everything more than taking him in is (entirely welcome) elaboration on a theme.
Steve Iwamoto was likely cast for the vibe he gives off; his short list of screen credits paired with his age make one wonder if maybe he's taken up a new hobby in his retirement. He plays Masao Matsuyoshi, who may have been a troublemaker once but who is dying now, an unspecified cancer advancing quickly. It's a part that requires a certain amount of quiet presence early and quiet but pained absence later, as both the pain medication and his natural tendency to look back are going to make him less responsive to whichever family member is looking after him.
There will be several - son Mark (Nelson Lee), who is spiritual; daughter Kati (Chanel Akiko HIrai), who is practical; and grandson Gavin (Kanoa Goo), who is still mostly interested in skateboarding. Unseen by any of them is Grace (Constance Wu), his wife, who died on the day Hawaii became a state. Seeing her ghost sends his mind back in time, to when they were first courting - to his parents' disappointment, as she was Chinese - to when he found himself unable to reconnect with his children without her.
That is, perhaps, the greatest tragedy of the film - that Masao effectively died with her, and though the timing of it seems meaningful, Yogi doesn't necessarily dive into the parallel, which is a bit of a shame, because there's something gripping about the central idea of how, despite having apparently never moved from the house where he and Grace lived during their short time together, he died in a different country than the one he considered home. Indeed, by choosing to live there, he arguably gave up his first homeland, as his parents would return to Japan without him. This mostly feels like convenient sign-posting, and it's the empty spaces that matter - assume the "present" is roughly Y2K, and there are 40 years left almost completely empty after Grace's death, and another 20 before without much else. Tim Chiou does a nice job of matching Iwamoto during those flashbacks - beyond resemblance, they both seem to play the same way against Constance Wu - and if Kyle Kosaki and Boonyanudh Jiyarom don't quite seem the same, it still kind of works - Masao grew with Grace, and froze without her.
It thus falls to the cast playing Masao's adult children and grandchildren to sell the effects of his inability to be a proper father, whether a son only heard on the phone from the mainland or the folks puttering around as Iwamoto is part of the scenery. It's nice work from all three, too: Nelson Lee does a nice job in showing how Mark finds himself strained as he tries to act on a connection his beliefs say should be natural, while Chanel Akiko Hirai plays the caretaker who best remembers who her father was before the tragedy (with a nice flashback featuring Alexa Bodden showing how she has strived for that connection even when he pushed her away). For Kanoa Goo's Gavin, Masao is almost an abstraction, a way for him to learn a bit more about life outside Honolulu and how life has a decay and end, which he has not yet had to face.
Yogi and cinematographer Eunsoo Cho wrap it up in a fine looking package, embracing digital brightness and sharpness to enhance the tragedy of Masao's weathered face and slumped posture. They find shadows among the bright colors and make darkness especially oppressive even before the world turns red after the eclipse prefigured in one of Grace's paintings. As the film goes on, Yogi has Masao's memories become more dreamlike, with his dog seemingly able to run into a past where, in memory, Grace tells him the future. His life, as it ends, goes from being a string of events to one thing which is linked to other lives in a way which would mystify the outside world.
The end comes, and everyone must make peace with that, even if they don't entirely forgive. Yogi could perhaps have done more with this, but he gets an awful long way on beautiful country, a lived-in face, and a uniformly impressive supporting cast.
Also at eFilmCritic
Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
There's a segment early on in Who We Are when Jeffery Robinson tries to have a conversation with a man standing in front of a Confederate statue with a matching flag, and it goes about as well as it can: There's no profanity or violence, but also no visible movement. It's not exactly the film in miniature, but it does make one worry about how much two hours of even the most earnest, well- crafted talk on the subject can be.
It's a talk Robinson has likely given a lot, and the film is built around a lecture on America's history of anti-Black racism given at New York City's Town Hall theater in 2018. That presentation is somewhere between skeleton and meat, as he visits notable sites from just down the street to Selma and Tulsa, both visiting his own history, talking to those keeping the memories of these incidents alive, and occasionally talking to survivors.
This is often grim material that sometimes actively seeks to overwhelm; no matter how much one has learned before now, there's probably some particular incident or document that Robinson mentions that a viewer may not have heard of. Robinson acknowledges that it's a lot, and that even he wasn't fully aware of the full extent of it until relatively recently. There are enough items he could list, even limiting the focus strictly to anti-Black racism as the film does, that it's impressive how well Robinson and directors Emily & Sarah Kunstler pick out pieces that do not always directly follow from the previous segment but form a sort of lattice, the laws and norms which enable intersecting in ever finer ways. The group can't talk about everything, but the parts they do show make one wonder just how anything gets through at times.
That Robinson can be such a charismatic host when having to confront all this both in his own life and as the Deputy Legal Director at the National ACLU is, honestly, beyond my understanding, but I'm grateful for it. He shows a natural ability to connect with an audience that also works well in a one-on-one setting, which I imagine must help in his day job, whether gathering what one needs to build a case or present it. It is, I imagine, a tricky face to present - optimistic would feel dishonest, but the film would be unwatchable if he didn't see a way past the oft-referenced tipping point, even if he does often shift into justified anger.
The Kunstler sisters do a fair job of pulling material together (both direct and produce, while Emily also edits), although it's not necessarily the sort of dynamically-presented documentary that can pull in people who normally only watch narrative features. There's more than a few mid-interview cuts to Robinson nodding along that made one wonder what else they could do to mix a sequence up a little, and bits where Robinson will seemingly come to a place in order to be overcome by emotion, which doesn't feel less than genuine but which also doesn't have the impact of a truly spontaneous reaction. The important thing that they do is balance the field trips with the lecture well, giving a viewer time to let the emotional appeals sink in while Robinson approaches the intellect and vice versa.
This is the point where you wonder if folks like that pro-Confederate protester near the beginning will ever even see it - or, if they do, not have it just completely bounce off them because that worldview becomes a fundamental part of their identity, but I suspect that's not really the hope of the film or the lecture in draws from. The point is to make those who might be persuaded more certain, angry enough to act rather than just disagree. How effective that will be is anybody's guess, but it's well-enough put together to have a shot.
Also at eFilmCritic
Not a whole lot to say here. Both were pretty good. And it's a day late, but I think I heard construction as I walked past the Somerville Theatre on the way back from the camera shop on Saturday, so I'm guessing there will be an at least somewhat upgraded concession stand when they re-open.
I Was a Simple Man
* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
Point a camera in any random direction in Hawaii, and odds are that you're going to get a great-looking movie, and though that is not entirely the direction Christopher Makoto Yogi takes with I Was a Simple Man, it is a major part of what makes the film work. Not so much the scenery, but the star, who often seems to embody his character to the point where everything more than taking him in is (entirely welcome) elaboration on a theme.
Steve Iwamoto was likely cast for the vibe he gives off; his short list of screen credits paired with his age make one wonder if maybe he's taken up a new hobby in his retirement. He plays Masao Matsuyoshi, who may have been a troublemaker once but who is dying now, an unspecified cancer advancing quickly. It's a part that requires a certain amount of quiet presence early and quiet but pained absence later, as both the pain medication and his natural tendency to look back are going to make him less responsive to whichever family member is looking after him.
There will be several - son Mark (Nelson Lee), who is spiritual; daughter Kati (Chanel Akiko HIrai), who is practical; and grandson Gavin (Kanoa Goo), who is still mostly interested in skateboarding. Unseen by any of them is Grace (Constance Wu), his wife, who died on the day Hawaii became a state. Seeing her ghost sends his mind back in time, to when they were first courting - to his parents' disappointment, as she was Chinese - to when he found himself unable to reconnect with his children without her.
That is, perhaps, the greatest tragedy of the film - that Masao effectively died with her, and though the timing of it seems meaningful, Yogi doesn't necessarily dive into the parallel, which is a bit of a shame, because there's something gripping about the central idea of how, despite having apparently never moved from the house where he and Grace lived during their short time together, he died in a different country than the one he considered home. Indeed, by choosing to live there, he arguably gave up his first homeland, as his parents would return to Japan without him. This mostly feels like convenient sign-posting, and it's the empty spaces that matter - assume the "present" is roughly Y2K, and there are 40 years left almost completely empty after Grace's death, and another 20 before without much else. Tim Chiou does a nice job of matching Iwamoto during those flashbacks - beyond resemblance, they both seem to play the same way against Constance Wu - and if Kyle Kosaki and Boonyanudh Jiyarom don't quite seem the same, it still kind of works - Masao grew with Grace, and froze without her.
It thus falls to the cast playing Masao's adult children and grandchildren to sell the effects of his inability to be a proper father, whether a son only heard on the phone from the mainland or the folks puttering around as Iwamoto is part of the scenery. It's nice work from all three, too: Nelson Lee does a nice job in showing how Mark finds himself strained as he tries to act on a connection his beliefs say should be natural, while Chanel Akiko Hirai plays the caretaker who best remembers who her father was before the tragedy (with a nice flashback featuring Alexa Bodden showing how she has strived for that connection even when he pushed her away). For Kanoa Goo's Gavin, Masao is almost an abstraction, a way for him to learn a bit more about life outside Honolulu and how life has a decay and end, which he has not yet had to face.
Yogi and cinematographer Eunsoo Cho wrap it up in a fine looking package, embracing digital brightness and sharpness to enhance the tragedy of Masao's weathered face and slumped posture. They find shadows among the bright colors and make darkness especially oppressive even before the world turns red after the eclipse prefigured in one of Grace's paintings. As the film goes on, Yogi has Masao's memories become more dreamlike, with his dog seemingly able to run into a past where, in memory, Grace tells him the future. His life, as it ends, goes from being a string of events to one thing which is linked to other lives in a way which would mystify the outside world.
The end comes, and everyone must make peace with that, even if they don't entirely forgive. Yogi could perhaps have done more with this, but he gets an awful long way on beautiful country, a lived-in face, and a uniformly impressive supporting cast.
Also at eFilmCritic
Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
There's a segment early on in Who We Are when Jeffery Robinson tries to have a conversation with a man standing in front of a Confederate statue with a matching flag, and it goes about as well as it can: There's no profanity or violence, but also no visible movement. It's not exactly the film in miniature, but it does make one worry about how much two hours of even the most earnest, well- crafted talk on the subject can be.
It's a talk Robinson has likely given a lot, and the film is built around a lecture on America's history of anti-Black racism given at New York City's Town Hall theater in 2018. That presentation is somewhere between skeleton and meat, as he visits notable sites from just down the street to Selma and Tulsa, both visiting his own history, talking to those keeping the memories of these incidents alive, and occasionally talking to survivors.
This is often grim material that sometimes actively seeks to overwhelm; no matter how much one has learned before now, there's probably some particular incident or document that Robinson mentions that a viewer may not have heard of. Robinson acknowledges that it's a lot, and that even he wasn't fully aware of the full extent of it until relatively recently. There are enough items he could list, even limiting the focus strictly to anti-Black racism as the film does, that it's impressive how well Robinson and directors Emily & Sarah Kunstler pick out pieces that do not always directly follow from the previous segment but form a sort of lattice, the laws and norms which enable intersecting in ever finer ways. The group can't talk about everything, but the parts they do show make one wonder just how anything gets through at times.
That Robinson can be such a charismatic host when having to confront all this both in his own life and as the Deputy Legal Director at the National ACLU is, honestly, beyond my understanding, but I'm grateful for it. He shows a natural ability to connect with an audience that also works well in a one-on-one setting, which I imagine must help in his day job, whether gathering what one needs to build a case or present it. It is, I imagine, a tricky face to present - optimistic would feel dishonest, but the film would be unwatchable if he didn't see a way past the oft-referenced tipping point, even if he does often shift into justified anger.
The Kunstler sisters do a fair job of pulling material together (both direct and produce, while Emily also edits), although it's not necessarily the sort of dynamically-presented documentary that can pull in people who normally only watch narrative features. There's more than a few mid-interview cuts to Robinson nodding along that made one wonder what else they could do to mix a sequence up a little, and bits where Robinson will seemingly come to a place in order to be overcome by emotion, which doesn't feel less than genuine but which also doesn't have the impact of a truly spontaneous reaction. The important thing that they do is balance the field trips with the lecture well, giving a viewer time to let the emotional appeals sink in while Robinson approaches the intellect and vice versa.
This is the point where you wonder if folks like that pro-Confederate protester near the beginning will ever even see it - or, if they do, not have it just completely bounce off them because that worldview becomes a fundamental part of their identity, but I suspect that's not really the hope of the film or the lecture in draws from. The point is to make those who might be persuaded more certain, angry enough to act rather than just disagree. How effective that will be is anybody's guess, but it's well-enough put together to have a shot.
Also at eFilmCritic
Monday, May 10, 2021
IFFBoston 2021.03: Holler and We're All Going to the World's Fair
Neither of these movies are really bad at all, although I must admit that my thoughts after each were:
* Dang, Jessica Barden is not an actual teenager? She sure seems just that young.
* Was We're All Going to the World's Fair shot around Yarmouth, ME? Some of the exteriors looked really familiar, but also like the sort of streets you see in any sort of mid-sized town.
Anyway, I feel like both could have been sharper, though I did how Holler was satisfied to make Ruth regular-person smart rather than a genius (unless it was made by a bunch of people who think her doing some basic arithmetic is super-impressive, which has happened). She's not Will Hunting, but bright enough that this would actually make a decent pairing with the previous day's A Reckoning in Boston, stories about how there are probably a lot of smart people out there who just don't get the opportunity. Some of the most intriguing bits are about how everyone, even Ruth, kind of accepts that she's not cut out for anything but what she's got.
As to World's Fair, well, the EFC review is verging on spoiler territory already, so…
SPOILERS!
I think what made this fall flat for me was that it was really hard to tell for most of the movie whether this is "spooky internet thing having real-world consequences" or "teenagers play-acting online opening themselves up to adult predator", and it never developed tension between the two possibilities. I tend to gravitate toward the non-supernatural version anyway - the whole deal where people thinking outspoken young girls are witches is scarier than young girls being witches - and I think that there's a really good movie to be made about how these unformed teenagers are creating elaborate alter-egos online and earlier generations either don't get it or want to insert themselves into it. But you've got to leave room to play with that, rather than getting to the end and saying "oh, that's what this movie was really about".
It's a shame, because the very end, when they lean into it, with JLB smirking as he makes up a story about how he helped "Casey" a year later, is one of the most believable and genuinely unnerving things in the movie, and it would have been great if were able to get something even close to that level of intensity during the previous 80 minutes.
!SRELIOPS
Holler
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
I wouldn't necessarily have guessed that Holler is filmmaker Nicole Riegel's second go at the material, but it makes sense in retrospect - the story at the center is straightforward, but with a lot more room to explore the world around it, even if she doesn't make things that much more intricate and complicated than you might find in a ten-minute short. It kind of lives right on the line where one might want her to explore certain things further but are also glad they aren't forced, winding up a familiar tale but still fairly satisfying.
It opens with Ruth (Jessica Barden) dashing down the street and hopping into a truck with brother Blaze (Gus Halper); with their mother Rhonda (Pamela Adlon) in jail because she can't afford rehab and jobs scarce in this small Ohio town, selling scrap to salvage-yard owner Hark (Austin Amelio) is the best way they can make ends meet. It means her attendance at school is lousy, which is a shame, because she's smart enough to get into college, although to make the kind of money where the family could afford that, they're going to have to get a little deeper into Hark's organization, where they raid abandoned factories at night for the copper wire, an order of magnitude more illegal, dangerous, and lucrative than what they've been doing.
The action in Holler probably stretch out over more than a couple weeks or so, but maybe not by that much, and one of its great strengths is that this fairly manageable slice of time means that the filmmakers don't ever feel the need to start from scratch or have anyone undergo a massive change. It lets one get a general idea what it's like to live in this sort of decaying town, and let the cast be generally authentic rather than getting tripped up on too many specifics. Jessica Barden is in nearly every scene and the audience gets to know her Ruth fairly well even without some defining trauma to hang on her, smart and angry enough to push back but just trusting enough under the cynical posturing for betrayals to hurt (and to occasionally believe what people say about her). She and Gus Halper are well enough in sync to come across as siblings without having to do too much to underline it - the script has them in each other's business and they don't oversell - with Halper playing Blaze as maybe not quite as positioned for bigger things as Ruth but not self-martyring about it. Becky Ann Baker doesn't need a lot of explanation as the friend of their mother's who takes an interest, and Austin Amelio finds a level of capable scuzziness that makes Hark dangerous but not obviously villainous.
The downside of it being so slice-of-life is that there are times when it feels like Riegel could dig a lot deeper but the path she's chosen doesn't allow it. There's this big, obvious metaphor in how it seems like the only way to make a buck in this town is to tear everything that American industry left behind up and sell the Chinese; maybe it deserves a movie of its own, but given that the film eventually leans toward "Ruth has what it takes to get out", maybe it deserves a little more. The whole deal with Ruth applying to college is also the part of the story that seems unique enough to maybe be worth digging into her thought process a little - she does everything up to sending her application in, which Blaze does in secret, and she's apparently buying into how college won't teach her anything staying won't until she's not. There's potentially great material in how so many folks in the lower economic classes see higher education as something that, paradoxically, is both corrupting and something they're not worthy of. Heck, at one point it walks right up to her having to convince a teacher that she deserves this and then just skips that scene. The finale similarly has the feel of everything that needs to happen occurring and in the right order, but never actually making this feel inevitable or something only Ruth would think of.
For all those flaws, it's pretty darn good for a first feature. The 16mm cinematography by Dustin Lane looks great, really capturing the windy and gray winter when it takes place, especially when a fair amount of the action takes place at night. The story may be simple, but the pacing is good; time rolls forward at a measured clip but the film never bogs down, and Riegel is good at inserting pieces of other connected lives in a way that gives a fuller picture of what this family is up against without ever pulling away from Ruth. The detail is solid enough that the film can make up in immersion for what it maybe lacks in complexity.
Holler is a well-made movie, although it does make me wonder if it would be better if there were more like it. Only a handful of movies seem to be set in this portion of America each year, compared to the cities and the comfortable suburbs, and if there were more, maybe they would have to dig a little deeper than this one does.
Also at eFilmCritic
We're All Going to the World's Fair
* * (out of four)
Seen 8 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
There's a great movie to be made about the ground that this one covers, but I'm pretty sure that We're All Going to the World's Fair isn't it. It may be closer than I thought - for as much as I've dabbled in the sort of social-media storytelling that filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is playing with, I've never been that engrossed. It's a younger person's game, after all. Still, I found myself remembering the feeling of watching The Collingswood Story back in 2005 - a prototype for the later "screen life" movies that hadn't quite figured out how to make it work yet - and wondering what the next movie that plays with this hook would do.
It starts out in internet urban legend territory, with teenager Casey (Anna Cobb) taking the "World's Fair Challenge" - saying "I want to go to the World's Fair" three times, offering up a bit of blood, and playing a video with a lot of strobing lights. Others who have taken it have disconnected from reality in some ways - feeling no pain, skin taking on a plasticine consistency, and the like - and Casey promises updates to her followers. One of them, JLB (Michael J Rogers) is older and seems not so much worried about kids playing with the supernatural, but plunging themselves so deeply into viral role-play scenarios that they can't get out.
That's a topic that merits a lot more examination in popular culture than it's getting, and not just in genre cinema - though for all JLB talks about teens, they're not the ones being taken in by QAnon. Even if the movie winds up in "they think it's a game but it's real" territory, that's still a neat hook, but the trouble here is, Schoenbrun doesn't do a whole lot to establish the idea. The "World's Fair" lore presented in the movie isn't built up to the level where it's interesting on its own, especially since the film spends so much of its time with Casey and JLB that there's not much context for what Casey's getting herself into if it's real. Schoenbrun never gives the audience enough that a sudden twist could have an effect, and Casey is an isolated-enough character whose biggest trait is that she likes horror stuff, so the slow burn itself doesn't have that much effect.
That's probably realistic, but there are times when realism isn't necessarily an asset. Anna Cobb and Michael J Rogers are both thoroughly believable in their respective roles, but the characters are enigmas out of necessity - Schoenbrun sometimes seems to be saving any juicy details for a twist that sort of fizzles when it comes - and neither their body language nor the various details add up into much. They seem fairly average, and this sort of horror movie or thriller needs something a bit more out of the ordinary. Everything gets played so straight that the big scene where the audience is supposed to gasp at something impossible in thoroughly grounded footage never actually feels uncanny.
Schoenfeld seems primed to offer something unique at the start, as the film opens with an extended shot from the POV of Casey's webcam, a nifty inversion of those screen life movies that maybe emphasizes things moving from on-line to the real world in a way that the live feeds don't. She seldom does much to follow up on the hints she drops, which is unfortunate, because they individually feel like they could lead to something. The finale gets at something about how teens and adults approach this sort of content on the internet - and each other - that works as a satisfying conclusion but is also frustrating, because she's got something to say here but has spent so much of the film playing coy and half-heartedly feinting toward a more conventional horror movie that it's frustrating that she doesn't just dive right into this stuff earlier.
At least, that's how it hit my middle-aged eyes; it's entirely possible that a teenager more immersed in this stuff is going to see it more clearly. Even if they do, I still wonder whether there's enough meat on the movie's bones to actually pull a viewer in and actually make them scared of anything going on.
Also at eFilmCritic
* Dang, Jessica Barden is not an actual teenager? She sure seems just that young.
* Was We're All Going to the World's Fair shot around Yarmouth, ME? Some of the exteriors looked really familiar, but also like the sort of streets you see in any sort of mid-sized town.
Anyway, I feel like both could have been sharper, though I did how Holler was satisfied to make Ruth regular-person smart rather than a genius (unless it was made by a bunch of people who think her doing some basic arithmetic is super-impressive, which has happened). She's not Will Hunting, but bright enough that this would actually make a decent pairing with the previous day's A Reckoning in Boston, stories about how there are probably a lot of smart people out there who just don't get the opportunity. Some of the most intriguing bits are about how everyone, even Ruth, kind of accepts that she's not cut out for anything but what she's got.
As to World's Fair, well, the EFC review is verging on spoiler territory already, so…
SPOILERS!
I think what made this fall flat for me was that it was really hard to tell for most of the movie whether this is "spooky internet thing having real-world consequences" or "teenagers play-acting online opening themselves up to adult predator", and it never developed tension between the two possibilities. I tend to gravitate toward the non-supernatural version anyway - the whole deal where people thinking outspoken young girls are witches is scarier than young girls being witches - and I think that there's a really good movie to be made about how these unformed teenagers are creating elaborate alter-egos online and earlier generations either don't get it or want to insert themselves into it. But you've got to leave room to play with that, rather than getting to the end and saying "oh, that's what this movie was really about".
It's a shame, because the very end, when they lean into it, with JLB smirking as he makes up a story about how he helped "Casey" a year later, is one of the most believable and genuinely unnerving things in the movie, and it would have been great if were able to get something even close to that level of intensity during the previous 80 minutes.
!SRELIOPS
Holler
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
I wouldn't necessarily have guessed that Holler is filmmaker Nicole Riegel's second go at the material, but it makes sense in retrospect - the story at the center is straightforward, but with a lot more room to explore the world around it, even if she doesn't make things that much more intricate and complicated than you might find in a ten-minute short. It kind of lives right on the line where one might want her to explore certain things further but are also glad they aren't forced, winding up a familiar tale but still fairly satisfying.
It opens with Ruth (Jessica Barden) dashing down the street and hopping into a truck with brother Blaze (Gus Halper); with their mother Rhonda (Pamela Adlon) in jail because she can't afford rehab and jobs scarce in this small Ohio town, selling scrap to salvage-yard owner Hark (Austin Amelio) is the best way they can make ends meet. It means her attendance at school is lousy, which is a shame, because she's smart enough to get into college, although to make the kind of money where the family could afford that, they're going to have to get a little deeper into Hark's organization, where they raid abandoned factories at night for the copper wire, an order of magnitude more illegal, dangerous, and lucrative than what they've been doing.
The action in Holler probably stretch out over more than a couple weeks or so, but maybe not by that much, and one of its great strengths is that this fairly manageable slice of time means that the filmmakers don't ever feel the need to start from scratch or have anyone undergo a massive change. It lets one get a general idea what it's like to live in this sort of decaying town, and let the cast be generally authentic rather than getting tripped up on too many specifics. Jessica Barden is in nearly every scene and the audience gets to know her Ruth fairly well even without some defining trauma to hang on her, smart and angry enough to push back but just trusting enough under the cynical posturing for betrayals to hurt (and to occasionally believe what people say about her). She and Gus Halper are well enough in sync to come across as siblings without having to do too much to underline it - the script has them in each other's business and they don't oversell - with Halper playing Blaze as maybe not quite as positioned for bigger things as Ruth but not self-martyring about it. Becky Ann Baker doesn't need a lot of explanation as the friend of their mother's who takes an interest, and Austin Amelio finds a level of capable scuzziness that makes Hark dangerous but not obviously villainous.
The downside of it being so slice-of-life is that there are times when it feels like Riegel could dig a lot deeper but the path she's chosen doesn't allow it. There's this big, obvious metaphor in how it seems like the only way to make a buck in this town is to tear everything that American industry left behind up and sell the Chinese; maybe it deserves a movie of its own, but given that the film eventually leans toward "Ruth has what it takes to get out", maybe it deserves a little more. The whole deal with Ruth applying to college is also the part of the story that seems unique enough to maybe be worth digging into her thought process a little - she does everything up to sending her application in, which Blaze does in secret, and she's apparently buying into how college won't teach her anything staying won't until she's not. There's potentially great material in how so many folks in the lower economic classes see higher education as something that, paradoxically, is both corrupting and something they're not worthy of. Heck, at one point it walks right up to her having to convince a teacher that she deserves this and then just skips that scene. The finale similarly has the feel of everything that needs to happen occurring and in the right order, but never actually making this feel inevitable or something only Ruth would think of.
For all those flaws, it's pretty darn good for a first feature. The 16mm cinematography by Dustin Lane looks great, really capturing the windy and gray winter when it takes place, especially when a fair amount of the action takes place at night. The story may be simple, but the pacing is good; time rolls forward at a measured clip but the film never bogs down, and Riegel is good at inserting pieces of other connected lives in a way that gives a fuller picture of what this family is up against without ever pulling away from Ruth. The detail is solid enough that the film can make up in immersion for what it maybe lacks in complexity.
Holler is a well-made movie, although it does make me wonder if it would be better if there were more like it. Only a handful of movies seem to be set in this portion of America each year, compared to the cities and the comfortable suburbs, and if there were more, maybe they would have to dig a little deeper than this one does.
Also at eFilmCritic
We're All Going to the World's Fair
* * (out of four)
Seen 8 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
There's a great movie to be made about the ground that this one covers, but I'm pretty sure that We're All Going to the World's Fair isn't it. It may be closer than I thought - for as much as I've dabbled in the sort of social-media storytelling that filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is playing with, I've never been that engrossed. It's a younger person's game, after all. Still, I found myself remembering the feeling of watching The Collingswood Story back in 2005 - a prototype for the later "screen life" movies that hadn't quite figured out how to make it work yet - and wondering what the next movie that plays with this hook would do.
It starts out in internet urban legend territory, with teenager Casey (Anna Cobb) taking the "World's Fair Challenge" - saying "I want to go to the World's Fair" three times, offering up a bit of blood, and playing a video with a lot of strobing lights. Others who have taken it have disconnected from reality in some ways - feeling no pain, skin taking on a plasticine consistency, and the like - and Casey promises updates to her followers. One of them, JLB (Michael J Rogers) is older and seems not so much worried about kids playing with the supernatural, but plunging themselves so deeply into viral role-play scenarios that they can't get out.
That's a topic that merits a lot more examination in popular culture than it's getting, and not just in genre cinema - though for all JLB talks about teens, they're not the ones being taken in by QAnon. Even if the movie winds up in "they think it's a game but it's real" territory, that's still a neat hook, but the trouble here is, Schoenbrun doesn't do a whole lot to establish the idea. The "World's Fair" lore presented in the movie isn't built up to the level where it's interesting on its own, especially since the film spends so much of its time with Casey and JLB that there's not much context for what Casey's getting herself into if it's real. Schoenbrun never gives the audience enough that a sudden twist could have an effect, and Casey is an isolated-enough character whose biggest trait is that she likes horror stuff, so the slow burn itself doesn't have that much effect.
That's probably realistic, but there are times when realism isn't necessarily an asset. Anna Cobb and Michael J Rogers are both thoroughly believable in their respective roles, but the characters are enigmas out of necessity - Schoenbrun sometimes seems to be saving any juicy details for a twist that sort of fizzles when it comes - and neither their body language nor the various details add up into much. They seem fairly average, and this sort of horror movie or thriller needs something a bit more out of the ordinary. Everything gets played so straight that the big scene where the audience is supposed to gasp at something impossible in thoroughly grounded footage never actually feels uncanny.
Schoenfeld seems primed to offer something unique at the start, as the film opens with an extended shot from the POV of Casey's webcam, a nifty inversion of those screen life movies that maybe emphasizes things moving from on-line to the real world in a way that the live feeds don't. She seldom does much to follow up on the hints she drops, which is unfortunate, because they individually feel like they could lead to something. The finale gets at something about how teens and adults approach this sort of content on the internet - and each other - that works as a satisfying conclusion but is also frustrating, because she's got something to say here but has spent so much of the film playing coy and half-heartedly feinting toward a more conventional horror movie that it's frustrating that she doesn't just dive right into this stuff earlier.
At least, that's how it hit my middle-aged eyes; it's entirely possible that a teenager more immersed in this stuff is going to see it more clearly. Even if they do, I still wonder whether there's enough meat on the movie's bones to actually pull a viewer in and actually make them scared of anything going on.
Also at eFilmCritic
Saturday, May 08, 2021
IFFBoston 2021.01: Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Thursday was opening night of Independent Film Festival Boston 2021, and since we couldn't be there in person, here's a little bit of IFFBoston Opening Night goodness:
We all miss this, and I hope to see a full set by Jon Bernhardt before the opening night of IFFBoston 2022.
Anyway, to continue the musical theme, Summer of Soul is a pretty darn fun movie, and while I don't know that there's a lot of time to see it even if you're reading it right as I post - it came online for 48 hours at 7pm Thursday and I don't know whether that's 48 hours to start or finish - it will be on Hulu come 2 July, and I wouldn't be shocked if Searchlight gave it a day-and-date or week-early release. Hopefully that means Disney+ Star outside the USA and a soundtrack album.
Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
Summer of Soul isn't quite a concert film, but it's hard to blame director Ahmir-Khalib "Questlove" Thompson for never wanting to stop the music: The raw material is a treasure trove of great performances not seen in fifty years, and more often than not, they say just as much on their own as anybody talking about them later might. The trick, which Questlove, editor Joshua L. Pearson, and the rest of the crew pull off nicely, is to insert just enough present-day reminiscences to give a little bit of context without slowing the party down.
The party in question was the Harlem Cultural Festival, six concerts that took place in Mount Morris Park during the summer of 1969. The country in general and black community in particular was a powder keg, and the city of New York wanted something to defuse the nervous energy in Harlem. Enter producer and emcee Tony Lawrence, who aside from being a charismatic host on stage also had the knack for convincing agents and labels that they should send their stars because they were also negotiating with someone else, leading to a lineup that had everyone from Stevie Wonder to Mahalia Jackson to Nina Simone. The Black Panther Party would provide security, 300,000 people would attend, and it would all be filmed - but nobody at the time was interested in the rights to "Black Woodstock".
I don't doubt that Questlove could have gone through the film, found two hours worth of great performance, and let it be, making for a solid film - and if the producers can get a soundtrack album out, it will likely be a great one to listen to. That's close to what he does, rather than make the shows a climax in a film mostly focused on the challenges of putting on an event such as this, but they're interrupted with voiceover just enough to underscore the point that this is a movie about the event, rather than just a recording of it. He and his team will generally let a song play in its entirety, but the whole event is compacted to seem like a single event, although the various themes of the different concerts (which, from the occasional glimpses of the advertising, seem to be presented in roughly chronological fashion) allow the film to have rough chapters - pop, blues, gospel, Spanish Harlem, more direct African influences.
It is by nature an overview, but a useful one; it is easy for those of us who are outsiders to the Black community, and I suspect even for those who are part of it but mostly familiar with their favorite contemporary music, to see all of this as one thing evolving, but Questlove picks performances and occasional bits of interview material to show how this is sometimes the case - Mavis Staples talks about how she didn't realize that her father was playing blues riffs until they were touring - but also how even what was popular in one summer covered a lot of ground. Audiences may be surprised by some of this,especially the gospel section, where what is often presented as dignified and maybe a bit watered-down has more than a bit of the revival tent and spiritual possession to it, but it strikes a balance by showing that even in this one summer, fifty years ago, Black culture had already started to grow in many different directions from the same roots, doubling back and intermingling with other traditions.
You can see that just looking at what's on stage - and just in terms of being a fun movie to look at, the colorful backdrops hold up pretty well for being of the period and the original footage looks great, whether restored or preserved - and Questlove proves the have the knack for both choosing interesting interview subjects and getting them to chat until something interesting and conversational to come out. Early on, it's fun to watch Billy Davis Jr. and Marilyn McCoo start out delighted to see this footage even if they cringe at their old outfits but move on to talking about how they were perceived as a white-sounding band and thus were more proud to be asked to play in Harlem. Later, he'll talk to Jesse Jackson about the overlap between music, religion, and the civil rights movement, discuss the change in language from "Negro" to "Black" that was going on at the time, , and give audiences an opening to think about how Black Americans are not really of Africa but are often keen to explore those roots.
It is not, by any means, a deep dive into any of those subjects, but it's less shallow than it may seem - by grounding the film in music, Questlove is able to use a lot of musical techniques, where a quote or a reference can serve as powerful shorthand and a contrast between music and lyrics can hint at a middle ground without minimizing the extremes. It makes Summer of Soul a movie that manages to cover a lot of ground even within a small window of time and space.
Also at eFilmCritic
We all miss this, and I hope to see a full set by Jon Bernhardt before the opening night of IFFBoston 2022.
Anyway, to continue the musical theme, Summer of Soul is a pretty darn fun movie, and while I don't know that there's a lot of time to see it even if you're reading it right as I post - it came online for 48 hours at 7pm Thursday and I don't know whether that's 48 hours to start or finish - it will be on Hulu come 2 July, and I wouldn't be shocked if Searchlight gave it a day-and-date or week-early release. Hopefully that means Disney+ Star outside the USA and a soundtrack album.
Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)
Summer of Soul isn't quite a concert film, but it's hard to blame director Ahmir-Khalib "Questlove" Thompson for never wanting to stop the music: The raw material is a treasure trove of great performances not seen in fifty years, and more often than not, they say just as much on their own as anybody talking about them later might. The trick, which Questlove, editor Joshua L. Pearson, and the rest of the crew pull off nicely, is to insert just enough present-day reminiscences to give a little bit of context without slowing the party down.
The party in question was the Harlem Cultural Festival, six concerts that took place in Mount Morris Park during the summer of 1969. The country in general and black community in particular was a powder keg, and the city of New York wanted something to defuse the nervous energy in Harlem. Enter producer and emcee Tony Lawrence, who aside from being a charismatic host on stage also had the knack for convincing agents and labels that they should send their stars because they were also negotiating with someone else, leading to a lineup that had everyone from Stevie Wonder to Mahalia Jackson to Nina Simone. The Black Panther Party would provide security, 300,000 people would attend, and it would all be filmed - but nobody at the time was interested in the rights to "Black Woodstock".
I don't doubt that Questlove could have gone through the film, found two hours worth of great performance, and let it be, making for a solid film - and if the producers can get a soundtrack album out, it will likely be a great one to listen to. That's close to what he does, rather than make the shows a climax in a film mostly focused on the challenges of putting on an event such as this, but they're interrupted with voiceover just enough to underscore the point that this is a movie about the event, rather than just a recording of it. He and his team will generally let a song play in its entirety, but the whole event is compacted to seem like a single event, although the various themes of the different concerts (which, from the occasional glimpses of the advertising, seem to be presented in roughly chronological fashion) allow the film to have rough chapters - pop, blues, gospel, Spanish Harlem, more direct African influences.
It is by nature an overview, but a useful one; it is easy for those of us who are outsiders to the Black community, and I suspect even for those who are part of it but mostly familiar with their favorite contemporary music, to see all of this as one thing evolving, but Questlove picks performances and occasional bits of interview material to show how this is sometimes the case - Mavis Staples talks about how she didn't realize that her father was playing blues riffs until they were touring - but also how even what was popular in one summer covered a lot of ground. Audiences may be surprised by some of this,especially the gospel section, where what is often presented as dignified and maybe a bit watered-down has more than a bit of the revival tent and spiritual possession to it, but it strikes a balance by showing that even in this one summer, fifty years ago, Black culture had already started to grow in many different directions from the same roots, doubling back and intermingling with other traditions.
You can see that just looking at what's on stage - and just in terms of being a fun movie to look at, the colorful backdrops hold up pretty well for being of the period and the original footage looks great, whether restored or preserved - and Questlove proves the have the knack for both choosing interesting interview subjects and getting them to chat until something interesting and conversational to come out. Early on, it's fun to watch Billy Davis Jr. and Marilyn McCoo start out delighted to see this footage even if they cringe at their old outfits but move on to talking about how they were perceived as a white-sounding band and thus were more proud to be asked to play in Harlem. Later, he'll talk to Jesse Jackson about the overlap between music, religion, and the civil rights movement, discuss the change in language from "Negro" to "Black" that was going on at the time, , and give audiences an opening to think about how Black Americans are not really of Africa but are often keen to explore those roots.
It is not, by any means, a deep dive into any of those subjects, but it's less shallow than it may seem - by grounding the film in music, Questlove is able to use a lot of musical techniques, where a quote or a reference can serve as powerful shorthand and a contrast between music and lyrics can hint at a middle ground without minimizing the extremes. It makes Summer of Soul a movie that manages to cover a lot of ground even within a small window of time and space.
Also at eFilmCritic
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Pahokee
Normally I'd do an "IFFBoston 2019.370"-ish title, but it's a bit too much of a bummer to see the festival in limbo right now even as it's good to see one of last year's titles getting a release. This wasn't particularly high on my priorities last year, but I'm glad to buy a virtual ticket and help support the Somerville via their virtual cinema.
I actually rented it Saturday night but didn't actually get around to watching it until Monday, having kind of planned it as part of a double feature with The Roads Not Taken only to find it was 112 minutes rather than the 90-ish I'd anticipated, and I pretty much knew that I wasn't going to make it to the end that night. I've got to start doing this earlier in the evening!
Pahokee
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Somerville Theatre Virtual Screening Room, Vimeo)
There's a lot of high-school football in the middle of Pahokee, enough to make one wonder if that was sort of the plan or if it just sort of evolved that way because that's what this sort of small town is like. It doesn't truly feel like a plan, but this isn't the sort of documentary you necessarily make with a plan. You take what you get and put it together as well as this.
It follows four seniors in Pahokee High School, with Pahokee being a rural town in Florida's Palm Beach County. Curvy and confident Na'Kerria is focused on the "Miss PHS" contest tied to the upcoming Homecoming ceremonies, starting to campaign as soon as she's technically allowed. Jocabed frets over college essays while working in her parents' taco stand, while B.J. is aiming for a football scholarship while also making sure the schools he applies to have good sports medicine programs. Junior's focus is a bit more immediate; he's in the drum corps, but also focused on his year-old baby girl.
Plug "Pahokee" into a search engine (or even look for the film on IMDB), and you will soon see that the town is at or near the bottom of certain lists, and it would not be surprising for directors Patrick Bresnan & Ivete Lucas were to point that out at some point, especially early on, but they opt not to. They don't hide this, but instead play up how this place feels normal for someone who grew up there, and how those kids aren't necessarily missing any part of growing up in America, just getting the most bare-bones version of it. There's a comment about not having the budget for the much decoration early and a confessional bit about "getting out of this town" toward the end, but in between, the audience just has to absorb how many large families they're seeing in small houses, or how there's not many cuts to anything but the fields. It's a small world.
So, when all the football starts, it's initially easy to just look at it and say that this is more of that one thing than one signed up for as a viewer, but as they play in the homecoming "Muck Bowl" game against a local rival and the playoffs, the viewer gets an idea of just how concentrated the town's identity is concentrated in the team and where they sometimes stand as the opposing teams get whiter, the fields get nicer, and the physical toll on the players, notably B.J., makes one a bit more worried. The aftermath is one of the film's most striking sections, as so much plays out in audio recordings that indicate just how much things are out of the locals' hands, and while the scenes of the fields undergoing controlled burns that play out behind it aren't necessarily indications of bad things themselves, it is nifty filmmaking, getting across the feeling of the world sometimes just won't let people have something.
The focus on that does mean that Jocabed kind of disappears for that stretch - the others are on the team, in the band, or on the cheer squad - but she feels less missing than one might expect since the other threads don't cross much during those pieces, and she'll get more time later when football moves to the past. It's a small town, and everybody's experience is similar, but Bresnan and Lucas (the latter of whom edited the film) make each teen's story their own. They're a likable group, and the filmmakers do a very nice job of capturing where they are at that moment in time, with one foot in childhood even as they're starting to make decisions that are going to affect the rest of their lives.
It makes for a somewhat odd movie, never finding the moment of high drama or sudden change that people tend to remember from this genre of documentary, and never particularly angling for the audience's pity. That's its value - it sees these kids as kids rather than victims or potential saviors, letting the audience become fond of them while still offering a clear view of their lives.
Also on EFilmCritic
I actually rented it Saturday night but didn't actually get around to watching it until Monday, having kind of planned it as part of a double feature with The Roads Not Taken only to find it was 112 minutes rather than the 90-ish I'd anticipated, and I pretty much knew that I wasn't going to make it to the end that night. I've got to start doing this earlier in the evening!
Pahokee
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Somerville Theatre Virtual Screening Room, Vimeo)
There's a lot of high-school football in the middle of Pahokee, enough to make one wonder if that was sort of the plan or if it just sort of evolved that way because that's what this sort of small town is like. It doesn't truly feel like a plan, but this isn't the sort of documentary you necessarily make with a plan. You take what you get and put it together as well as this.
It follows four seniors in Pahokee High School, with Pahokee being a rural town in Florida's Palm Beach County. Curvy and confident Na'Kerria is focused on the "Miss PHS" contest tied to the upcoming Homecoming ceremonies, starting to campaign as soon as she's technically allowed. Jocabed frets over college essays while working in her parents' taco stand, while B.J. is aiming for a football scholarship while also making sure the schools he applies to have good sports medicine programs. Junior's focus is a bit more immediate; he's in the drum corps, but also focused on his year-old baby girl.
Plug "Pahokee" into a search engine (or even look for the film on IMDB), and you will soon see that the town is at or near the bottom of certain lists, and it would not be surprising for directors Patrick Bresnan & Ivete Lucas were to point that out at some point, especially early on, but they opt not to. They don't hide this, but instead play up how this place feels normal for someone who grew up there, and how those kids aren't necessarily missing any part of growing up in America, just getting the most bare-bones version of it. There's a comment about not having the budget for the much decoration early and a confessional bit about "getting out of this town" toward the end, but in between, the audience just has to absorb how many large families they're seeing in small houses, or how there's not many cuts to anything but the fields. It's a small world.
So, when all the football starts, it's initially easy to just look at it and say that this is more of that one thing than one signed up for as a viewer, but as they play in the homecoming "Muck Bowl" game against a local rival and the playoffs, the viewer gets an idea of just how concentrated the town's identity is concentrated in the team and where they sometimes stand as the opposing teams get whiter, the fields get nicer, and the physical toll on the players, notably B.J., makes one a bit more worried. The aftermath is one of the film's most striking sections, as so much plays out in audio recordings that indicate just how much things are out of the locals' hands, and while the scenes of the fields undergoing controlled burns that play out behind it aren't necessarily indications of bad things themselves, it is nifty filmmaking, getting across the feeling of the world sometimes just won't let people have something.
The focus on that does mean that Jocabed kind of disappears for that stretch - the others are on the team, in the band, or on the cheer squad - but she feels less missing than one might expect since the other threads don't cross much during those pieces, and she'll get more time later when football moves to the past. It's a small town, and everybody's experience is similar, but Bresnan and Lucas (the latter of whom edited the film) make each teen's story their own. They're a likable group, and the filmmakers do a very nice job of capturing where they are at that moment in time, with one foot in childhood even as they're starting to make decisions that are going to affect the rest of their lives.
It makes for a somewhat odd movie, never finding the moment of high drama or sudden change that people tend to remember from this genre of documentary, and never particularly angling for the audience's pity. That's its value - it sees these kids as kids rather than victims or potential saviors, letting the audience become fond of them while still offering a clear view of their lives.
Also on EFilmCritic
Monday, January 20, 2020
This Those Weeks in Tickets: 15 April 2019 - 5 May 2019
Just posted the pages for BUFF, so obviously the ones which include IFFBoston 2019 are next.
This three-week period actually started off with heading out to another series, the Belmont World Film Festival, for Asako I & II on Monday, 25 April. It's a neat little movie in a neat little series (at a venue I kind of dig), although in some ways the thing I remember most is the guest talking about how it was weird, leading me to think that my idea of Japanese films being weird must be awful skewed, because this was barely odd. Or, alternately, she needed to see the anniversary screenings of Audition at the Brattle that weekend.
I didn't; instead, my next bit of Japanese film was finally making it through Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on Saturday, as the Harvard Film Archive had a subtitled 35mm print for one of their family matinees. Good, obviously, and I just hadn't seen it at the right time before. A much better choice than the thoroughly ill-considered new version of Hellboy than I saw later that evening.
The next evening, I would head to the Kendall for a split double feature of Little Woods and Wild Nights with Emily, liking them both, although the latter is the one that probably sticks in my head more, just because it is so unrelentingly odd and peculiar even as it is kind of ruthless in getting what it was going for across.
That was a good warm-up for IFFBoston, where did a (mostly) full schedule:
Posts for those were all over the place as I tried to finish writing BUFF up first but bumped things to the front of the line as they got released. And, yes, I did kind of wind up taking a day off, mostly because I got held up on the MBTA and sometime around Charles, I knew that I would not make it to the Coolidge in time for The Sound of Silence and decided to get off, watch Avengers: Endgame in 3D, and figure that the stuff that plays the Tuesday night shows at the Coolidge usually wind up getting regular releases anyway. Sadly, this turned out not to be the case for either movie playing there that night, but I'd at least get to see The Art of Self-Defense at Fantasia.
It's enough to make you want to do something else for a few days, but there's new stuff every week, and I hit Always Miss You and Savage on the weekend, even if they weren't exactly the two Chinese films I'd been hoping would open in Boston that weekend. Neither were particularly great, but there's at least something interesting in Savage that could have been really good but for the inevitable censorship.
I wasn't going to see them on back-to-back days, but getting out to Danvers to see Bolden is a tricky four-legged process if you use public transportation, so I had to divert on Saturday before finally making it on Sunday. On the one hand, not exactly a good enough movie to be worth that sort of day-eating effort; on the other, I'd been waiting almost nine years to see the dang thing after having it teased at the Apollo Theater in 2010, so I wasn't going to miss it on the one chance I had to see it on the big screen.
As you can see, it's especially important to follow my Letterboxd page during festivals, because they will just take forever to write up.
Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2019 in the Harvard Film Archive (Weekend Matinee, subtitled 35mm)
Does it count as a rewatch if I've put the disc in the player two or three times and then nodded off before it was done? I swear, I've chosen the worst times to try and watch this movie before jumping all over the HFA's subtitled 35mm matinee.
Obviously, I should have seen this sooner; it's a downright terrific movie which establishes its science-fiction bona fides from the opening frames and is grounded in Miyazaki's particular environmental take on the genre throughout. Miyazaki draws no line between world-building and adventure, and sketches out a larger world casually, without ever losing his focus on the title character and her village.
It's obviously an early work - the animation is a little rough at points, the villains are sometimes a little too casually sketched, and there were more than a few comments from the audience about how much of Nausicaä's bottom we were seeing. It's almost never less than intriguing, though, and I likely would have been astounded if it had played Portland, ME/been a thing my parents would have brought me to when I was 11. It still seems like an insane practically out-of-nowhere achievement, and I'm mildly curious to know whether a shot early in the movie of Nausicaä walking to the forest from her glider inspired an iconic image from Akira, vice versa, or if they were pulling from the same source.
Avengers: Endgame
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2019 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)
Funny how the better part of a year gives me an odd perspective on this particular movie - maybe no longer so keenly caught up in the hype to praise it as effusively as I did back in May, but also keenly aware of how Disney's Star Wars guys didn't quite stick the landing to their grand saga the way the Marvel team did. It is, as I figured after a second screening, one of the most satisfying movies of the year even if it's not the best.
I think it obviously being a piece of corporate IP hides a bit of what it does well: It's a smart story about wrestling with failure, on a super-hero-sized grand scale, and a fitting final evolution for what Robert Downey Jr. has been doing as Tony Stark for a decade. The plotting is shaggy when it can afford to be and clever when it needs to be, and for all that the grand finale is a bunch of CGI craziness, it's built and scaled to a sort of perfection, getting the audience caught up in the fight for it to actually feel desperate enough before reinforcements show up that you forget that's a possibility, even though it's been the point of much of the movie, and almost getting there again so that the audience can go "oh, right, Carol" when she shows up. The audience whooped and applauded for that, and it's tough to blame them.
I'm sure that Disney and the other studios are all trying to plan something as big and loyalty-generating as Marvel's Infinity Cycle (or whatever we wind up calling this stretch of Marvel movies when they're knee-deep into something else five years from now), but it may be a one-time thing. At least it ended as well as it could.
What I wrote back in May 2019
This three-week period actually started off with heading out to another series, the Belmont World Film Festival, for Asako I & II on Monday, 25 April. It's a neat little movie in a neat little series (at a venue I kind of dig), although in some ways the thing I remember most is the guest talking about how it was weird, leading me to think that my idea of Japanese films being weird must be awful skewed, because this was barely odd. Or, alternately, she needed to see the anniversary screenings of Audition at the Brattle that weekend.
I didn't; instead, my next bit of Japanese film was finally making it through Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on Saturday, as the Harvard Film Archive had a subtitled 35mm print for one of their family matinees. Good, obviously, and I just hadn't seen it at the right time before. A much better choice than the thoroughly ill-considered new version of Hellboy than I saw later that evening.
The next evening, I would head to the Kendall for a split double feature of Little Woods and Wild Nights with Emily, liking them both, although the latter is the one that probably sticks in my head more, just because it is so unrelentingly odd and peculiar even as it is kind of ruthless in getting what it was going for across.
That was a good warm-up for IFFBoston, where did a (mostly) full schedule:
- 24 April 2019: Luce
- 25 April 2019: Them That Follow and The Death of Dick Long
- 26 April 2019: Pizza: A Love Story and Not for Resale
- 27 April 2019: We Are Not Princesses, Ms. Purple, When Lambs Become Lions, and In Fabric
- 28 April 2019: One Child Nation, The Pollinators, Cold Case Hammarskjöld, and For the Birds
- 29 April 2019: Shorts Exeter and The Rusalka
- 1 May 2019: The Farewell
Posts for those were all over the place as I tried to finish writing BUFF up first but bumped things to the front of the line as they got released. And, yes, I did kind of wind up taking a day off, mostly because I got held up on the MBTA and sometime around Charles, I knew that I would not make it to the Coolidge in time for The Sound of Silence and decided to get off, watch Avengers: Endgame in 3D, and figure that the stuff that plays the Tuesday night shows at the Coolidge usually wind up getting regular releases anyway. Sadly, this turned out not to be the case for either movie playing there that night, but I'd at least get to see The Art of Self-Defense at Fantasia.
It's enough to make you want to do something else for a few days, but there's new stuff every week, and I hit Always Miss You and Savage on the weekend, even if they weren't exactly the two Chinese films I'd been hoping would open in Boston that weekend. Neither were particularly great, but there's at least something interesting in Savage that could have been really good but for the inevitable censorship.
I wasn't going to see them on back-to-back days, but getting out to Danvers to see Bolden is a tricky four-legged process if you use public transportation, so I had to divert on Saturday before finally making it on Sunday. On the one hand, not exactly a good enough movie to be worth that sort of day-eating effort; on the other, I'd been waiting almost nine years to see the dang thing after having it teased at the Apollo Theater in 2010, so I wasn't going to miss it on the one chance I had to see it on the big screen.
As you can see, it's especially important to follow my Letterboxd page during festivals, because they will just take forever to write up.
Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2019 in the Harvard Film Archive (Weekend Matinee, subtitled 35mm)
Does it count as a rewatch if I've put the disc in the player two or three times and then nodded off before it was done? I swear, I've chosen the worst times to try and watch this movie before jumping all over the HFA's subtitled 35mm matinee.
Obviously, I should have seen this sooner; it's a downright terrific movie which establishes its science-fiction bona fides from the opening frames and is grounded in Miyazaki's particular environmental take on the genre throughout. Miyazaki draws no line between world-building and adventure, and sketches out a larger world casually, without ever losing his focus on the title character and her village.
It's obviously an early work - the animation is a little rough at points, the villains are sometimes a little too casually sketched, and there were more than a few comments from the audience about how much of Nausicaä's bottom we were seeing. It's almost never less than intriguing, though, and I likely would have been astounded if it had played Portland, ME/been a thing my parents would have brought me to when I was 11. It still seems like an insane practically out-of-nowhere achievement, and I'm mildly curious to know whether a shot early in the movie of Nausicaä walking to the forest from her glider inspired an iconic image from Akira, vice versa, or if they were pulling from the same source.
Avengers: Endgame
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2019 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)
Funny how the better part of a year gives me an odd perspective on this particular movie - maybe no longer so keenly caught up in the hype to praise it as effusively as I did back in May, but also keenly aware of how Disney's Star Wars guys didn't quite stick the landing to their grand saga the way the Marvel team did. It is, as I figured after a second screening, one of the most satisfying movies of the year even if it's not the best.
I think it obviously being a piece of corporate IP hides a bit of what it does well: It's a smart story about wrestling with failure, on a super-hero-sized grand scale, and a fitting final evolution for what Robert Downey Jr. has been doing as Tony Stark for a decade. The plotting is shaggy when it can afford to be and clever when it needs to be, and for all that the grand finale is a bunch of CGI craziness, it's built and scaled to a sort of perfection, getting the audience caught up in the fight for it to actually feel desperate enough before reinforcements show up that you forget that's a possibility, even though it's been the point of much of the movie, and almost getting there again so that the audience can go "oh, right, Carol" when she shows up. The audience whooped and applauded for that, and it's tough to blame them.
I'm sure that Disney and the other studios are all trying to plan something as big and loyalty-generating as Marvel's Infinity Cycle (or whatever we wind up calling this stretch of Marvel movies when they're knee-deep into something else five years from now), but it may be a one-time thing. At least it ended as well as it could.
What I wrote back in May 2019
Monday, November 18, 2019
IFFBoston 2019.194: The Kingmaker
One of the things that's a bit of a bummer about the Fall Focus compared to the spring festival is the relative paucity of guests; it's scheduled as if they might need a fair amount of time between shows, but there's seldom anyone on the stage filling that time. Who knows, with four different movies a day, they may need the time to delete on DCP, ingest the next, and make sure the keys work before letting the audience in; I don't know the capacity of the Brattle's projection system.
… so it's fun even when folks like director Lauren Greenfield are teleconferencing in from another festival in California. She's an IFFBoston regular, even having the closing night film a few years ago with The Queen of Versailles, so it's not exactly surprising that they could work something out.
The film speaks for itself in many ways, although it's interesting to hear her talk about how it evolved. Documentaries can have a long turnaround time for a lot of reasons, and this one evolved from initially being inspired by Coulalait, with perhaps more talk to the members of the staff that tries to make do with insufficient resources (human and otherwise), to following Bongbong Marcos's run at the Vice Presidency. It's likely not as complete a shift as it could be - she likely wasn't going to make a film about how things are great completely counter to how Coulalait has degraded - but it supplied a couple great threads to tie together.
One thing that struck me about the films was that, in today's world, with so many viewing options tailored to their potential audience's tastes and beliefs available and raw information readily available via the same internet connection, documentary filmmakers often can't just present facts and events, and even doing so from a particular perspective may not be enough. I don't necessarily know that Greenfield was at any point consciously making a movie that made people question just how they consume information, but it certainly made me think, a bit, about how I wasn't more aware that the Marcos family had walked back into power in multiple levels of the Philippine government and were connected to the latest mess there. Hopefully, it gets me thinking more about how that story I've heard about probably didn't wrap up neatly when it left my eyeline and is probably lurking somewhere behind the thing that seems vaguely connected.
The Kingmaker
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 November 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston Fall Focus, DCP)
Americans often hear bits and pieces of news from other countries, when something particularly noteworthy happens or when it's connected to something closer to home. The ouster of Ferdinand Marcos was a big deal, in part because it included astonishing details like his First Lady Imelda's impossibly large collection of shoes, and the current president's glee at murdering drug dealers is alarming enough to get notice, especially since he has a fan in Donald Trump. Both of those things are part of a bigger narrative, and Lauren Greenfield does an impressive job of getting at it in The Kingmaker.
It starts with Imelda Marcos, still fairly striking in her eighties, able to joke about how she's so identified with her collection of shoes that friends teasingly send her artwork or decorations with high heels on them, showing off her philanthropy, leading the filmmakers into the crypt where, as filming began in 2014, her late husband's body was kept because the current administration would absolutely not allow him to be interred in the heroes' cemetery. She's happy to talk about her life from how she started out as a girl from the country who came to Manila for a beauty pageant and soon caught politicians' eyes, but especially her son, Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr., who is currently serving in the senate and is eyeing a run for Vice President.
Naturally, Greenfield doesn't entirely take her word on this, but she's willing to let Imelda talk, and smart enough to realize that someone who has been in politics for most of her life and is trying to build a dynasty is likely not going to be tripped up by a gotcha question or two. Instead, she lets Imelda present the face she wants while also finding others who will present another side in an earnest, even-keeled way, from one of the candidates running against Bongbong to Andy Bautista, who went from the Presidential Commission on Good Government to overseeing the election and has, as one may expect, strong opinions about the Marcos legacy. Eventually, she spends some time on the saga of the isle of Coulalait (a large part of the original inspiration for this project), populated with African animals as a vanity project and gift to Imelda at the height of Marcos's power - at the expense of the indiginous people living there - but since neglected to the detriment of both human and beast.
Full review on EFilmCritic
… so it's fun even when folks like director Lauren Greenfield are teleconferencing in from another festival in California. She's an IFFBoston regular, even having the closing night film a few years ago with The Queen of Versailles, so it's not exactly surprising that they could work something out.
The film speaks for itself in many ways, although it's interesting to hear her talk about how it evolved. Documentaries can have a long turnaround time for a lot of reasons, and this one evolved from initially being inspired by Coulalait, with perhaps more talk to the members of the staff that tries to make do with insufficient resources (human and otherwise), to following Bongbong Marcos's run at the Vice Presidency. It's likely not as complete a shift as it could be - she likely wasn't going to make a film about how things are great completely counter to how Coulalait has degraded - but it supplied a couple great threads to tie together.
One thing that struck me about the films was that, in today's world, with so many viewing options tailored to their potential audience's tastes and beliefs available and raw information readily available via the same internet connection, documentary filmmakers often can't just present facts and events, and even doing so from a particular perspective may not be enough. I don't necessarily know that Greenfield was at any point consciously making a movie that made people question just how they consume information, but it certainly made me think, a bit, about how I wasn't more aware that the Marcos family had walked back into power in multiple levels of the Philippine government and were connected to the latest mess there. Hopefully, it gets me thinking more about how that story I've heard about probably didn't wrap up neatly when it left my eyeline and is probably lurking somewhere behind the thing that seems vaguely connected.
The Kingmaker
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 November 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston Fall Focus, DCP)
Americans often hear bits and pieces of news from other countries, when something particularly noteworthy happens or when it's connected to something closer to home. The ouster of Ferdinand Marcos was a big deal, in part because it included astonishing details like his First Lady Imelda's impossibly large collection of shoes, and the current president's glee at murdering drug dealers is alarming enough to get notice, especially since he has a fan in Donald Trump. Both of those things are part of a bigger narrative, and Lauren Greenfield does an impressive job of getting at it in The Kingmaker.
It starts with Imelda Marcos, still fairly striking in her eighties, able to joke about how she's so identified with her collection of shoes that friends teasingly send her artwork or decorations with high heels on them, showing off her philanthropy, leading the filmmakers into the crypt where, as filming began in 2014, her late husband's body was kept because the current administration would absolutely not allow him to be interred in the heroes' cemetery. She's happy to talk about her life from how she started out as a girl from the country who came to Manila for a beauty pageant and soon caught politicians' eyes, but especially her son, Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr., who is currently serving in the senate and is eyeing a run for Vice President.
Naturally, Greenfield doesn't entirely take her word on this, but she's willing to let Imelda talk, and smart enough to realize that someone who has been in politics for most of her life and is trying to build a dynasty is likely not going to be tripped up by a gotcha question or two. Instead, she lets Imelda present the face she wants while also finding others who will present another side in an earnest, even-keeled way, from one of the candidates running against Bongbong to Andy Bautista, who went from the Presidential Commission on Good Government to overseeing the election and has, as one may expect, strong opinions about the Marcos legacy. Eventually, she spends some time on the saga of the isle of Coulalait (a large part of the original inspiration for this project), populated with African animals as a vanity project and gift to Imelda at the height of Marcos's power - at the expense of the indiginous people living there - but since neglected to the detriment of both human and beast.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Saturday, November 09, 2019
IFFBoston 2019.193: The Wild Goose Lake & The Truth
The Fall Focus seemed a bit more like a preview series this year, with most of the films having releases coming up pretty soon - some would begin their rollouts the very next weekend - but the ones I wound up seeing were those whose theatrical release is either somewhat far off or in question. That's part prioritization and part not really having a lot to do in Harvard Square between movies, or having things to do that would take a little longer - for example, between these two, I headed out to the Best Buy in the Cambridgeside Galleria to use a $5 reward certificate that was expiring that day, getting myself a 4K copy of The Great Wall for cheap enough that I won't feel I've spent too much on two copies if it shows up on the list of 3D Blu-rays that are on sale in Hong Kong next month, then heading back into Davis for The Lighthouse (which I'm torn between trying again and really not wanting to), and then back to the Brattle for the nightcap.
The Wild Goose Lake, I gather, is coming out in China in early December with a North American release planned for spring, and I kind of wonder whether this might be a case where it should just get two releases - one day-and-date for the expats and folks like me who just don't wait and one for the arthouse crowd. It's got the same sort of vibe as Ash Is Purest White and Long Day's Journey Into Night, to name a couple of movies that had a more traditional foreign-film release pattern and didn't have a whole lot of Asian folks in the audience when I saw them. Are these just films that were never going to be of mainstream interest even to folks who speak the language, built for export, or is it just a case of the two audiences being siloed and unaware or what is playing for the others? Someday, someone should try this strategy.
The Truth will probably get some local play, as there are dedicated fans of the director and the cast and together they might just add up to opening at the Kendall rather than three days at the Brattle. As I mention in the review, I wonder to what extent filmmakers whose appeal often lies outside their home territories are doing this for commercial reasons or if it's just being cinephiles who love movies from around the world and want to do something in that mode. Either way, I'm looking forward to Werner Herzog's Japanese film.
Nan Fang Che Zhan De Ju Hui (The Wild Goose Lake)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 November 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston Fall Focus, DCP)
I may regularly gripe about how crime does not (and can not) pay in Chinese movies, but there are restrictions on what stories you can tell everywhere, and Diao Yi'nan is one of a number of filmmakers who are finding a way to tell a good story within those bounds. Sometimes you can build a nifty yarn out of who will ultimately benefit from the criminals' inevitable capture and how making justice pay can appeal to the criminal in us all.
The film opens on career criminal Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) waiting in the rain for wife Yang Shujun (Regina Wan Qian), only to be greeted by Liu Ai'ai (Kwei Lun-Mei) instead. Two days ago, he was in the middle of a scuffle as territory for the motorcycle-theft racket was handed out, and while his old friend Huahua (Qi Dao) tried to mediate, rival Cat's Eye (Huang Jue) saw a chance to get revenge, and in the aftermath, not only are the local police hunting Zenong down, but a 300,000 yuan reward (roughly $40,000) makes him a tempting target for everyone in an area where that sort of money can be life-changing.
Diao opens the film with a clever little dance as Zenong and Ai'ai creep around what little cover offered near a train station, telling the audience that they need to avoid prying eyes without getting into why yet. The introduction of Ai'ai is especially delicious, hiding her face behind a fogged-up bubble umbrella while still hinting at a femme fatal as she walks, a downward pan to her handbag hinting at secrets. It's a canny use of the tools of the genre that primes the audience and lets Zenong ease the audience into a flashback without it seeming hokey even as we're soon greeted by him hanging back in a crowded room, a doomed moment of cool confidence.
Full review on EFilmCritic
La vérité '19 (The Truth)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 November 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston Fall Focus, DCP)
I don't really think that Hirokazu Kore-eda has made a French-language movie because his particular arthouse niche was getting kind of tight, but it's darkly amusing to imagine international film financiers imagining that the combination of his understated Japanese family dramas and French films where Catherine Deneuve makes a movie about being Catherine Deneuve might get screens and audiences that neither alone might find. Heck, there's a third element in play that might draw a different audience! Fortunately, even when the film feels like it is assembled out of different pieces, the craftsmanship that puts them together is as fine as one might hope, creating a work that should satisfy audiences no matter what drew them to it.
It revolves around Fabienne Dangeville (Deneuve) and her family; the famous actress has just published her memoirs in advance of starting work on a new movie where she plays the 73-year-old daughter of a twentysomething woman whose job in outer space keeps her unaging. The actress playing the role (Manon Clavel), naturally, is the daughter of an old friend and rival who was sometimes more of a mother to Fabienne's daughter than she was. Lumir (Juliette Binoche), now a screenwriter in America, has arrived with husband Hank (Ethan Hawke) and daughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier) to be part of the book launch, noting many inaccuracies while Luc (Alain Libolt), the assistant who has been by her side for decades, quits upon noting that he is not mentioned at all, putting Lumir in charge of wrangling her mother.
Films like this, set within the world of cinema, art, and fame, can often be insular, built on experiences and metaphors that are meaningful for the closest and most dedicated audience but which often have others trying to figure out some sort of meta-narrative or left behind by not recognizing a meaningful reference. The Truth it does kind of feel hollow for a while, with every bit of Fabienne being insufferable coming across as an anecdote that those in the know will recognize rather than something that actually adds up to a person, although that is in a way her character: Fabienne is a performer before all else, and while many things can give a person tunnel-vision, dedication to this particular art can erase the self, leaving Deneuve playing an often amusing, though nearly as often horrible, woman with limited conception of how she affects others.
Full review on EFilmCritic
The Wild Goose Lake, I gather, is coming out in China in early December with a North American release planned for spring, and I kind of wonder whether this might be a case where it should just get two releases - one day-and-date for the expats and folks like me who just don't wait and one for the arthouse crowd. It's got the same sort of vibe as Ash Is Purest White and Long Day's Journey Into Night, to name a couple of movies that had a more traditional foreign-film release pattern and didn't have a whole lot of Asian folks in the audience when I saw them. Are these just films that were never going to be of mainstream interest even to folks who speak the language, built for export, or is it just a case of the two audiences being siloed and unaware or what is playing for the others? Someday, someone should try this strategy.
The Truth will probably get some local play, as there are dedicated fans of the director and the cast and together they might just add up to opening at the Kendall rather than three days at the Brattle. As I mention in the review, I wonder to what extent filmmakers whose appeal often lies outside their home territories are doing this for commercial reasons or if it's just being cinephiles who love movies from around the world and want to do something in that mode. Either way, I'm looking forward to Werner Herzog's Japanese film.
Nan Fang Che Zhan De Ju Hui (The Wild Goose Lake)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 November 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston Fall Focus, DCP)
I may regularly gripe about how crime does not (and can not) pay in Chinese movies, but there are restrictions on what stories you can tell everywhere, and Diao Yi'nan is one of a number of filmmakers who are finding a way to tell a good story within those bounds. Sometimes you can build a nifty yarn out of who will ultimately benefit from the criminals' inevitable capture and how making justice pay can appeal to the criminal in us all.
The film opens on career criminal Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) waiting in the rain for wife Yang Shujun (Regina Wan Qian), only to be greeted by Liu Ai'ai (Kwei Lun-Mei) instead. Two days ago, he was in the middle of a scuffle as territory for the motorcycle-theft racket was handed out, and while his old friend Huahua (Qi Dao) tried to mediate, rival Cat's Eye (Huang Jue) saw a chance to get revenge, and in the aftermath, not only are the local police hunting Zenong down, but a 300,000 yuan reward (roughly $40,000) makes him a tempting target for everyone in an area where that sort of money can be life-changing.
Diao opens the film with a clever little dance as Zenong and Ai'ai creep around what little cover offered near a train station, telling the audience that they need to avoid prying eyes without getting into why yet. The introduction of Ai'ai is especially delicious, hiding her face behind a fogged-up bubble umbrella while still hinting at a femme fatal as she walks, a downward pan to her handbag hinting at secrets. It's a canny use of the tools of the genre that primes the audience and lets Zenong ease the audience into a flashback without it seeming hokey even as we're soon greeted by him hanging back in a crowded room, a doomed moment of cool confidence.
Full review on EFilmCritic
La vérité '19 (The Truth)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 November 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston Fall Focus, DCP)
I don't really think that Hirokazu Kore-eda has made a French-language movie because his particular arthouse niche was getting kind of tight, but it's darkly amusing to imagine international film financiers imagining that the combination of his understated Japanese family dramas and French films where Catherine Deneuve makes a movie about being Catherine Deneuve might get screens and audiences that neither alone might find. Heck, there's a third element in play that might draw a different audience! Fortunately, even when the film feels like it is assembled out of different pieces, the craftsmanship that puts them together is as fine as one might hope, creating a work that should satisfy audiences no matter what drew them to it.
It revolves around Fabienne Dangeville (Deneuve) and her family; the famous actress has just published her memoirs in advance of starting work on a new movie where she plays the 73-year-old daughter of a twentysomething woman whose job in outer space keeps her unaging. The actress playing the role (Manon Clavel), naturally, is the daughter of an old friend and rival who was sometimes more of a mother to Fabienne's daughter than she was. Lumir (Juliette Binoche), now a screenwriter in America, has arrived with husband Hank (Ethan Hawke) and daughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier) to be part of the book launch, noting many inaccuracies while Luc (Alain Libolt), the assistant who has been by her side for decades, quits upon noting that he is not mentioned at all, putting Lumir in charge of wrangling her mother.
Films like this, set within the world of cinema, art, and fame, can often be insular, built on experiences and metaphors that are meaningful for the closest and most dedicated audience but which often have others trying to figure out some sort of meta-narrative or left behind by not recognizing a meaningful reference. The Truth it does kind of feel hollow for a while, with every bit of Fabienne being insufferable coming across as an anecdote that those in the know will recognize rather than something that actually adds up to a person, although that is in a way her character: Fabienne is a performer before all else, and while many things can give a person tunnel-vision, dedication to this particular art can erase the self, leaving Deneuve playing an often amusing, though nearly as often horrible, woman with limited conception of how she affects others.
Full review on EFilmCritic
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