I could make the standard joke about weaning one's self off Fantasia slowly, maybe by only seeing one Chinese film on a day when you could see two, but truth be told, I had three days of not seeing movies including not seeing this one before coming home, and then it was the only thing I saw Sunday.
What's kind of interesting is that this got writer/director "Da Peng" Dong Chengpeng on my Letterboxd for directors I'd seen multiple movies from this much as I'd remembered that he directed Jian Bing Man and City of Rock and that was one of the reasons I was interested in Post Truth four months ago, but, for some reason, that pretty darn good movie didn't leap to mind when making plans for this one.
I chose to see it on Sunday because, between my return flight being Saturday, returning to work Monday, and the film only having matinee shows, that was the only window to see it. What's kind of surprising to me is that Post Truth also was only booked for matinees, although I don't remember if it was quite so well-attended as One and Only was. I gather co-star Yang Yibo is a big rock star in China, which might be the main reason why there was a decent, young-looking crowd at Boston Common, although the decision to limit shows like this is odd, considering. Maybe they've got data that says Jian Bing Man and City of Rock did much better in matinees. Odd coincidence, otherwise.
At any rate, I liked this quite a bit, but I'm amused that this is the fourth movie of Da Peng's I've seen and the fourth time I've been kind of wary of it beforehand before rather liking it. Maybe he's just a filmmaker I like.
Re lie (One and Only)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 August 2023 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)
I don't watch a whole lot of these dance-focused movies, but I've always gathered that if you can just tread water or do a little better until the big dance-off comes, the audience will probably go home happy. This movie has a strong enough core in writer/director "Da Peng" Dong Chengpeng and costars Bio Huang and Wang Yibo that the stuff that goes on when they're not dancing is going to be pretty competent, and that will do until it's time to dance.
The film opens with a street dance competition in Zhejiang, where the E-Mark team coached by Ding Lei (Bo Huang) is initially fretting because their star dancer Kevin (Casper Chu) is running late, and when he does show, he throws a fit when one of his teammates misses a move. Ding suggests this would not be an issue if Kevin practiced with the team, while Kevin instead suggests they fire various team members and bring in foreign ringers. Elsewhere in the city, Chen Shuo (Wang Yibo), who once auditioned for the team but didn't make it, is working three jobs between a car-wax shop, dancing gigs for Brother Xie (Xia Shenyang), and the restaurant run by his mother (Liu Mintao). Bing hits upon the idea of hiring Shuo as a sort of stand-in for practice, and he quickly bonds with the rest of the team, triggering Kevin's jealousy as the next competition nears.
All of this stuff is pretty much on-template; the film is full of stock characters, from the egomaniac who breaks with the team to the coach's ex who still kind of likes him to the amiable teammates to the cute young reporter, but the cast all know what these folks need, everyone is sincere including the comic relief. That' a bit of a surprise, since the other three films from Da Peng and co-writer Su Biao which have crossed the Pacific to play American theaters were fairly broad comedies, and this film is played more or less straight. When it's time for jokes, they're pretty good, and everyone involved seems to get that earnest support is going to play better than manufactured conflict that the audience can spot as phony a mile away. There's the occasional great bit, while the awkwardly-plotted twisting in the last act plays like the filmmakers were torn between two paths and tried to keep bits of both because it gives Bo Huang a nice moment to play for boos.
Interestingly, Bo often plays Ding like the sort of zany loser that Da Peng usually plays in the films he writes and directs, a fast-talking striver bouncing back from self-inflicted wounds, but he seems to get how the youthful ambition thwarted by a broken leg clashes with the paternal instincts that make Ding a good coach, and his most memorable scenes show a man keenly aware of the conflict. Wang Yibo's Shuo is often the opposite - a dutiful son who needs building up to have the sort of forceful stage presence Kevin does - but he handles the build-up well. Song Zuer plays well off him as the reporter who bonds with Shuo over them both kind of being interns, and Liu Mintao hits most of the "sad backstory but doesn't let it interfere with supporting her son" points quite well. Casper Chu and the other folks who are primarily dancers are used well.
So that keeps things moving in well-lubricated fashion until it's time for the big showdown between Kevin's team and Shuo's, and there's some terrific dancing in the finale. Da Peng probably could have more dance scenes on the way there - some of those scenes are shot and cut in such a way that they don't look as much like amazing sequences as one-off feats, and don't showcase the rest of the team's moves well enough that Shuo breaking them out would have an impact without announcers narrating what's going on - but the climax is terrific, including a literal exclamation point that could easily draw laughs but somehow doesn't. I gather Wang Yibo is a big pop star in China, so it's probably not surprising he can dance a bit, especially when you think back to how he stole a couple action scenes in Hidden Blade earlier this year. He doesn't really have to be a whole lot more than likable for most of the movie, but he sure shows up when it counts, on and off the dance floor. Da Peng and his crew don't lock the camera down or stop cutting in the climax - they keep the energy up and check in on the side-stories of all Shuo's friends and family - but they both know that this is both a talent showcase and a way to show who Shuo and Kevin are and what they've become over the movie.
And when that hits, yes, you forget a bit that the previous hour and a half was kind of by the numbers, albeit from a cast and crew that execute the template with care rather than indifference. They're looking to make a movie that plays well to a crowd, and hit the target squarely.
Showing posts with label dance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dance. Show all posts
Monday, August 14, 2023
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Rey & Rose: Chaos Walking & Raya and the Last Dragon
No idea why getting this written has taken so long - some combination of just not feeling writing at the moment, daylight savings throwing me off just enough to over-caffeinate, and going down crossword rabbit holes, I guess. Fortunately, it's not like the stuff in theaters is turning over much right now, and with the recent announcement that Disney has pushed a bunch of movies back again, that's not changing any time soon.
Which makes the fact that these two movies were released the same day even more peculiar! Is the first full week of March when schools outside of New England have spring break, compared to President's and Patriot's Day weeks? Did the studios in question both decide not to mess around with more places reopening that week? It's genuinely peculiar, and the local AMCs with two premium screens have been doing odd timeshares, tweaking it week to week, trying to guess how it's going to go with Raya available for purchase on Disney+ and Chaos not being very good. I almost wondered if Disney and Lionsgate coordinated in so that someone could low-key do double feature built around the actresses from the latest Star Wars trilogy without either undercutting the other.
At any rate, since I've found myself much more comfortable in the Imax room than the Dolby one during All Of This - maybe it's partly the way that the smaller number of larger seats looks on the AMC Stubs app, but the Dolby Room just feels small - so I bought my tickets in such a way as to see them both in the larger room, reserving the same seat for both shows. The order was good, since it meant the day started with the Cruella trailer - the one that makes me wonder why the movie wasn't nixed at every single stage of the process, from someone at Disney noting which characters to which they have rights to after the last pixel of visual effects was rendered - and built to Raya, which had me grinning in delight at every inventive moment. Heck, I may have cheered a little when Raya did the vovinam thing where a fighter jumps, gets legs around the opponent, and flips them over by twisting in midair, which has kind of been dropping my jaw since seeing Veronica Ngo do it in The Rebel.
My nieces may not like Raya as much as they do Frozen, which is unambiguously about sisters as opposed to two girls who could be best friends if they weren't so angry at something, but it sure feels like the sort of thing they could enjoy. I certainly dig it and hope that it comes out in 3D somewhere in the world, especially since I'll likely have access to the 4K version on Disney+ once it gets out of the pay tier.
Chaos Walking
* * (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2021 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax-branded digital)
I don't know that Lionsgate has been chasing "the next Hunger Games" that much harder than other studios; but since so much of a hypothetical LG+ service would be built on those series of young-adult adaptations, each obvious Part One that is never going to get a sequel looks like an even bigger misfire. So it is with Chaos Rising, which has enough interesting ideas and talent involved that one could see it evolving into something compelling but is not nearly good enough as a movie for one to want more.
Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland) is the youngest man in the Prentisstown colony on New World, which makes him the youngest person there; all the women were killed in an attack he's not old enough to remember. He appears to be something of an outcast because he has a hard time controlling his "Noise", a projection of the thoughts in his head that afflicts all males on the planet (both human and the native species). A scout vessel from the ship carrying the second wave of colonists doesn't expect this, and the crash leaves only one survivor, Viola (Daisy Ridley). One would think that the colonists from Mayor Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen) to Preacher Aaron (David Oyelowo) would be thrilled at the prospect of their community dwindling and dying until only Todd is left, but they regard Viola with suspicion and hostility, leading her to flee. Todd's fathers (Demián Bichir & Kurt Sutter) say that there may be a radio that can reach Viola's ship at Farbranch - and it's news to Todd that Prentisstown isn't the only settlement.
Putting all that in a row, it's not hard to see why various producers spent a decade trying to make the movie after Patrick Ness's novel The Knife of Never Letting Go was published and then another couple trying to fix it up when what they shot in 2017 wasn't working: It's got adventure on a new planet on one side and a powerful idea that strikes right at the heart of what teenagers, especially young women, are discovering about the dangers of the world around them and how their parents have sugar-coated it. It winds up being too much for a mainstream two-hour movie meant to start a trilogy in a couple of ways: It's okay that there's not much time to explore how New World has a history and geography that stretches well beyond the horizon of Prentisstown; that can be saved for later films, although the planet's native life is too close by for that logic. Having only passing reference to the world Viola does the film no favors, especially when you combine it with how the filmmakers always skitter away from the most potentially obvious and hard-hitting idea around The Noise, that men are constantly projecting their desires while women must work around it and hold their reactions close. The story is inextricably tied up with men playing the oppressed even as the aggressors, but the people making the movie seemingly can't bring themselves to just say that, and as a result the film is all about Todd and how he feels about Viola but seldom casts its eyes in the other direction. Viola often just has a thing she has to do.
Even once you get past the filmmakers not seeming to have the courage to dive into their big ideas - and it's worth noting that saying "the filmmakers" should not necessarily be an indictment of credited director Doug Liman and screenwriters Ness and Christopher Ford because a movie like this has passed through a lot of uncredited hands working at the behest of producers and executives trying to create the version that will be the easiest sale - it's a bland film. New World seldom has a chance to establish itself as anything other than a random dead-ringer-for-Canadian-woods planet the team would visit on Stargate SG-1, and the CGI fauna just heightens that impression rather than making it feel more alien. The production designers have clearly spent some time imagining how the planet was colonized and how the advanced technology that got humans there exists in the middle of agrarian communities with little infrastructure to manufacture more, but the script does quite connect that to Todd and the others.
The film is also frustratingly scripted at a nuts-and-bolts level, though sometimes in a way that makes one wonder whether a lot of the nuances of The Noise would have been given some explanation in the books but were cut as boring exposition here. It's noteworthy that nobody aside from Todd seems to have the level of trouble controlling their Noise as he does, and his dials back when Liman et al need a scene with few distractions, to the point where even fairly passive viewers are going to think that the filmmakers are cheating a bit. When it's revealed that there are things he doesn't know about Prentisstown, it's not unreasonable to ask both how and why - not only is the whole point of the movie that this all-male community can't help but put what they're thinking out there, but what's the point of the secret and the chase that ensues? What's the Mayor's line of thinking? It would be okay for it to be kind of irrational - people hide things for dumb reasons all the time, and the dumbest secrets can be the most closely-guarded - but the pointlessness of it all should be part of the story, not an inconvenient issue with the plot.
In some ways, the film is extremely lucky to have Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, though the film loses a fair amount by aging Todd and Viola to their late teens or early twenties rather than their early teens (as they were in the book) - Todd especially seems a little more off the further he is from feeling like an adolescent. Holland's not bad at all - truth be told, not many actors could sell the line "Spacegirl!" or all the variations on "ugh, stop thinking that!" as often as he does within two hours - and Ridley does good work giving Viola some personality despite not appearing to have as much on the page or all the assistance the male cast members get. As little as she gets, the rest of the cast gets less, despite being a very solid group.
Between the delays, people aging out, the pandemic, and the film just not being very good, the odds of this doing well enough for The Ask and the Answer to be adapted any time soon or with this group must be very low indeed. That's probably a good thing; between the pieces that probably make this a better book than movie and the specific decisions that didn't work, it seems like a fool's errand. The filmmakers and cast do hit on something that works often enough to make one wonder if they might do better with a second shot, but then again, there are enough of these series out there that the producers might as well start from scratch.
Also at eFilmCritic
"Us Again"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2021 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax-branded digital)
I was kind of surprised not to see a choreographer's name featured prominently in the credits for "Us Again"; the short has everybody dancing throughout basically every scene, and you'd think this would be a great high-profile gig and that Disney would want to splash such a name around. But, then, the movie isn't exactly about the dancing so much as it's a cheery way to make a story that could have just been talking about something entirely visual.
And it's great at that; though only seven minutes long including credits, it does so much - establishes how the not-quite-real world works, does nifty character animation for its senior citizen characters, and hits on two or three different ideas, from how decreased mobility can just be crushing for someone defined in large part by their physicality to how (literally) chasing one's youth can be tempting but futile. It's all tied together naturally but not so tight that a viewer feels they have to examine every frame or motion. It's terrifically easy to get caught up in what's going on, and while this isn't the sort of short where you don't realize filmmaker Zach Parrish is telling a story until he's done - the intent is always clear - it feels loose and unfettered as it makes its way to its end.
Which is more or less what one wants an animated short of this type to do. A lot of Disney's showcase shorts (for lack of a better term for the ones attached to features) do this, and fairly well, but this one seems just a notch better than usual.
Raya and the Last Dragon
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2021 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax-branded digital)
As Disney cranks out two or three live-action remakes of their animated per year, they will inevitably catch up to the point where they started this practice, and I wonder if that ever crossed the minds of those making Raya and the Last Dragon. It is, maybe not coincidentally, the sort of grand and fantastic adventure that only animation can manage right now - and genuinely terrific at being that - but where one can maybe see a slightly older-skewing version that surrounds actors with more photorealistic CGI coming in ten years. It won't be necessary or a likely upgrade, even if it is inevitable.
One would be surprised if the filmmakers weren't aware of the possibility, considering the wink with which Raya's opening narration notes that the lone swordswoman crossing a desolate land on a quest is a possible too-familiar setting. After a flashback to seven years earlier to see how the world as she knew it ended - we get back to the business of Raya (voice of Kelly Marie Tran) trying to find the last dragon in Kumandra, since the dragons were the ones who stopped the Druun when they first appeared hundreds of years ago, though at great cost. She does awaken Sisu (voice of Awkwafina), only to discover that said dragon is far less powerful and more down-to-earth than expected, and though she gains powers when exposed to fragments of the shattered Dragon Stone. Each is hidden within one of Kumandra's five city-states, all dangerous in this post-apocalyptic world, even without Raya's nemesis Namaari (voice of Gemma Chan) looking to settle a score.
Raya may talk about this as being standard adventure-story material, but it's not the sort that's typically been the fodder for kids' adventure movies, though it's nothing new to kids who have grown up on Adventure Time and the like. It's impressive how well the large creative team lays out a fair amount of lore across multiple eras without it taking up too much story time, especially since the film doesn't switch things up for songs the way that many of Disney's movies do. It's at times a little odd that the language often feels more Twenty-first Century than fantasy-world, but it keeps things moving smoothly.
It also means that the filmmakers are free to pack the movie with eye-popping visuals and impressive action, taking not just visual cues from Southeast Asia but also the action; when Raya, Namaari, and others have to fight, martial-arts enthusiasts will see bits of muay thai, silat, and vovinam, not exactly athletic in an animated feature but certainly giving the animators a chance to have people moving in fun and sometimes new ways. They also get a chance to do nifty things with the fantastic elements, from the whimsy of Raya's giant pillbug Tuk Tuk (who sometimes feels like both a sci-fi mutant and a cheerfully larger-than-life bit of fantasy) to the almost completely abstract Druun. It's especially fun to see what they do with Sisu's design when she gains the ability to shapeshift; both dragon and human forms have a messy look that matches Awkwafina's vocal performance well, but the latter fits while sort of looking off-model, not looking wrong but also not entirely blending in.
The fact that the Druun are inhuman forces of nature lets the filmmakers mostly dispense with conventional villains in a way that a lot of family-friendly movies try to do but can't quite manage. Raya and Namaari are fierce rivals in a way that can be more harsh than typical in part because the film doesn't have to back down and explain why someone isn't really bad, and it's impressive how the animators and voice actors Kelly Marie Tran & Gemma Chan echo each other in how both are confident and capable until they have to deal with each other, which brings a lot of tension to both voice and body language. The pairings of Raya with both Sisu and Namaari are good enough that it's clear that the fairly sizable supporting cast doesn't have nearly the same amount of attention lavished on them; and it's a lot of sidekicks when the movie needs more equals.
It's only a slight unbalance compared to the string of sheer fun and creative adventure that the bulk of the film represents. It's a big, grand, clever adventure with the sort of constant invention that animation does better than anything else right now. Maybe there will be another iteration (though it's kind of strange to start speculating on that already, even if that may be where Disney seems to be heading), but in the meantime, it's one of the most exciting and adventurous things that their feature division has done in a while.
Also at eFilmCritic
Which makes the fact that these two movies were released the same day even more peculiar! Is the first full week of March when schools outside of New England have spring break, compared to President's and Patriot's Day weeks? Did the studios in question both decide not to mess around with more places reopening that week? It's genuinely peculiar, and the local AMCs with two premium screens have been doing odd timeshares, tweaking it week to week, trying to guess how it's going to go with Raya available for purchase on Disney+ and Chaos not being very good. I almost wondered if Disney and Lionsgate coordinated in so that someone could low-key do double feature built around the actresses from the latest Star Wars trilogy without either undercutting the other.
At any rate, since I've found myself much more comfortable in the Imax room than the Dolby one during All Of This - maybe it's partly the way that the smaller number of larger seats looks on the AMC Stubs app, but the Dolby Room just feels small - so I bought my tickets in such a way as to see them both in the larger room, reserving the same seat for both shows. The order was good, since it meant the day started with the Cruella trailer - the one that makes me wonder why the movie wasn't nixed at every single stage of the process, from someone at Disney noting which characters to which they have rights to after the last pixel of visual effects was rendered - and built to Raya, which had me grinning in delight at every inventive moment. Heck, I may have cheered a little when Raya did the vovinam thing where a fighter jumps, gets legs around the opponent, and flips them over by twisting in midair, which has kind of been dropping my jaw since seeing Veronica Ngo do it in The Rebel.
My nieces may not like Raya as much as they do Frozen, which is unambiguously about sisters as opposed to two girls who could be best friends if they weren't so angry at something, but it sure feels like the sort of thing they could enjoy. I certainly dig it and hope that it comes out in 3D somewhere in the world, especially since I'll likely have access to the 4K version on Disney+ once it gets out of the pay tier.
Chaos Walking
* * (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2021 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax-branded digital)
I don't know that Lionsgate has been chasing "the next Hunger Games" that much harder than other studios; but since so much of a hypothetical LG+ service would be built on those series of young-adult adaptations, each obvious Part One that is never going to get a sequel looks like an even bigger misfire. So it is with Chaos Rising, which has enough interesting ideas and talent involved that one could see it evolving into something compelling but is not nearly good enough as a movie for one to want more.
Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland) is the youngest man in the Prentisstown colony on New World, which makes him the youngest person there; all the women were killed in an attack he's not old enough to remember. He appears to be something of an outcast because he has a hard time controlling his "Noise", a projection of the thoughts in his head that afflicts all males on the planet (both human and the native species). A scout vessel from the ship carrying the second wave of colonists doesn't expect this, and the crash leaves only one survivor, Viola (Daisy Ridley). One would think that the colonists from Mayor Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen) to Preacher Aaron (David Oyelowo) would be thrilled at the prospect of their community dwindling and dying until only Todd is left, but they regard Viola with suspicion and hostility, leading her to flee. Todd's fathers (Demián Bichir & Kurt Sutter) say that there may be a radio that can reach Viola's ship at Farbranch - and it's news to Todd that Prentisstown isn't the only settlement.
Putting all that in a row, it's not hard to see why various producers spent a decade trying to make the movie after Patrick Ness's novel The Knife of Never Letting Go was published and then another couple trying to fix it up when what they shot in 2017 wasn't working: It's got adventure on a new planet on one side and a powerful idea that strikes right at the heart of what teenagers, especially young women, are discovering about the dangers of the world around them and how their parents have sugar-coated it. It winds up being too much for a mainstream two-hour movie meant to start a trilogy in a couple of ways: It's okay that there's not much time to explore how New World has a history and geography that stretches well beyond the horizon of Prentisstown; that can be saved for later films, although the planet's native life is too close by for that logic. Having only passing reference to the world Viola does the film no favors, especially when you combine it with how the filmmakers always skitter away from the most potentially obvious and hard-hitting idea around The Noise, that men are constantly projecting their desires while women must work around it and hold their reactions close. The story is inextricably tied up with men playing the oppressed even as the aggressors, but the people making the movie seemingly can't bring themselves to just say that, and as a result the film is all about Todd and how he feels about Viola but seldom casts its eyes in the other direction. Viola often just has a thing she has to do.
Even once you get past the filmmakers not seeming to have the courage to dive into their big ideas - and it's worth noting that saying "the filmmakers" should not necessarily be an indictment of credited director Doug Liman and screenwriters Ness and Christopher Ford because a movie like this has passed through a lot of uncredited hands working at the behest of producers and executives trying to create the version that will be the easiest sale - it's a bland film. New World seldom has a chance to establish itself as anything other than a random dead-ringer-for-Canadian-woods planet the team would visit on Stargate SG-1, and the CGI fauna just heightens that impression rather than making it feel more alien. The production designers have clearly spent some time imagining how the planet was colonized and how the advanced technology that got humans there exists in the middle of agrarian communities with little infrastructure to manufacture more, but the script does quite connect that to Todd and the others.
The film is also frustratingly scripted at a nuts-and-bolts level, though sometimes in a way that makes one wonder whether a lot of the nuances of The Noise would have been given some explanation in the books but were cut as boring exposition here. It's noteworthy that nobody aside from Todd seems to have the level of trouble controlling their Noise as he does, and his dials back when Liman et al need a scene with few distractions, to the point where even fairly passive viewers are going to think that the filmmakers are cheating a bit. When it's revealed that there are things he doesn't know about Prentisstown, it's not unreasonable to ask both how and why - not only is the whole point of the movie that this all-male community can't help but put what they're thinking out there, but what's the point of the secret and the chase that ensues? What's the Mayor's line of thinking? It would be okay for it to be kind of irrational - people hide things for dumb reasons all the time, and the dumbest secrets can be the most closely-guarded - but the pointlessness of it all should be part of the story, not an inconvenient issue with the plot.
In some ways, the film is extremely lucky to have Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, though the film loses a fair amount by aging Todd and Viola to their late teens or early twenties rather than their early teens (as they were in the book) - Todd especially seems a little more off the further he is from feeling like an adolescent. Holland's not bad at all - truth be told, not many actors could sell the line "Spacegirl!" or all the variations on "ugh, stop thinking that!" as often as he does within two hours - and Ridley does good work giving Viola some personality despite not appearing to have as much on the page or all the assistance the male cast members get. As little as she gets, the rest of the cast gets less, despite being a very solid group.
Between the delays, people aging out, the pandemic, and the film just not being very good, the odds of this doing well enough for The Ask and the Answer to be adapted any time soon or with this group must be very low indeed. That's probably a good thing; between the pieces that probably make this a better book than movie and the specific decisions that didn't work, it seems like a fool's errand. The filmmakers and cast do hit on something that works often enough to make one wonder if they might do better with a second shot, but then again, there are enough of these series out there that the producers might as well start from scratch.
Also at eFilmCritic
"Us Again"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2021 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax-branded digital)
I was kind of surprised not to see a choreographer's name featured prominently in the credits for "Us Again"; the short has everybody dancing throughout basically every scene, and you'd think this would be a great high-profile gig and that Disney would want to splash such a name around. But, then, the movie isn't exactly about the dancing so much as it's a cheery way to make a story that could have just been talking about something entirely visual.
And it's great at that; though only seven minutes long including credits, it does so much - establishes how the not-quite-real world works, does nifty character animation for its senior citizen characters, and hits on two or three different ideas, from how decreased mobility can just be crushing for someone defined in large part by their physicality to how (literally) chasing one's youth can be tempting but futile. It's all tied together naturally but not so tight that a viewer feels they have to examine every frame or motion. It's terrifically easy to get caught up in what's going on, and while this isn't the sort of short where you don't realize filmmaker Zach Parrish is telling a story until he's done - the intent is always clear - it feels loose and unfettered as it makes its way to its end.
Which is more or less what one wants an animated short of this type to do. A lot of Disney's showcase shorts (for lack of a better term for the ones attached to features) do this, and fairly well, but this one seems just a notch better than usual.
Raya and the Last Dragon
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2021 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax-branded digital)
As Disney cranks out two or three live-action remakes of their animated per year, they will inevitably catch up to the point where they started this practice, and I wonder if that ever crossed the minds of those making Raya and the Last Dragon. It is, maybe not coincidentally, the sort of grand and fantastic adventure that only animation can manage right now - and genuinely terrific at being that - but where one can maybe see a slightly older-skewing version that surrounds actors with more photorealistic CGI coming in ten years. It won't be necessary or a likely upgrade, even if it is inevitable.
One would be surprised if the filmmakers weren't aware of the possibility, considering the wink with which Raya's opening narration notes that the lone swordswoman crossing a desolate land on a quest is a possible too-familiar setting. After a flashback to seven years earlier to see how the world as she knew it ended - we get back to the business of Raya (voice of Kelly Marie Tran) trying to find the last dragon in Kumandra, since the dragons were the ones who stopped the Druun when they first appeared hundreds of years ago, though at great cost. She does awaken Sisu (voice of Awkwafina), only to discover that said dragon is far less powerful and more down-to-earth than expected, and though she gains powers when exposed to fragments of the shattered Dragon Stone. Each is hidden within one of Kumandra's five city-states, all dangerous in this post-apocalyptic world, even without Raya's nemesis Namaari (voice of Gemma Chan) looking to settle a score.
Raya may talk about this as being standard adventure-story material, but it's not the sort that's typically been the fodder for kids' adventure movies, though it's nothing new to kids who have grown up on Adventure Time and the like. It's impressive how well the large creative team lays out a fair amount of lore across multiple eras without it taking up too much story time, especially since the film doesn't switch things up for songs the way that many of Disney's movies do. It's at times a little odd that the language often feels more Twenty-first Century than fantasy-world, but it keeps things moving smoothly.
It also means that the filmmakers are free to pack the movie with eye-popping visuals and impressive action, taking not just visual cues from Southeast Asia but also the action; when Raya, Namaari, and others have to fight, martial-arts enthusiasts will see bits of muay thai, silat, and vovinam, not exactly athletic in an animated feature but certainly giving the animators a chance to have people moving in fun and sometimes new ways. They also get a chance to do nifty things with the fantastic elements, from the whimsy of Raya's giant pillbug Tuk Tuk (who sometimes feels like both a sci-fi mutant and a cheerfully larger-than-life bit of fantasy) to the almost completely abstract Druun. It's especially fun to see what they do with Sisu's design when she gains the ability to shapeshift; both dragon and human forms have a messy look that matches Awkwafina's vocal performance well, but the latter fits while sort of looking off-model, not looking wrong but also not entirely blending in.
The fact that the Druun are inhuman forces of nature lets the filmmakers mostly dispense with conventional villains in a way that a lot of family-friendly movies try to do but can't quite manage. Raya and Namaari are fierce rivals in a way that can be more harsh than typical in part because the film doesn't have to back down and explain why someone isn't really bad, and it's impressive how the animators and voice actors Kelly Marie Tran & Gemma Chan echo each other in how both are confident and capable until they have to deal with each other, which brings a lot of tension to both voice and body language. The pairings of Raya with both Sisu and Namaari are good enough that it's clear that the fairly sizable supporting cast doesn't have nearly the same amount of attention lavished on them; and it's a lot of sidekicks when the movie needs more equals.
It's only a slight unbalance compared to the string of sheer fun and creative adventure that the bulk of the film represents. It's a big, grand, clever adventure with the sort of constant invention that animation does better than anything else right now. Maybe there will be another iteration (though it's kind of strange to start speculating on that already, even if that may be where Disney seems to be heading), but in the meantime, it's one of the most exciting and adventurous things that their feature division has done in a while.
Also at eFilmCritic
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
3-D Rarities Volume II, including El corazón y la espada
Another bit of "let's not even let new stuff make it onto the shelf as the pre-order gets delivered a bit late, but it's no big deal. You are probably not buying this particular Blu-ray unless you already have a ton of stuff on the shelf that you can enjoy.
A part of me is a little curious about the format and contents of this disc, although I wonder if it's just a matter of what the 3-D Film Archive can do with its distributors. They and 3-D SPACE crowdfunded a restoration of El corazón y la espada last year, but I suspect that this Mexican adventure film might be a little too niche for either Kino or Flicker Alley, although a "rarities" disc with it and a couple other bits of content that didn't particularly make a lot of sense as special features on other discs might be better branding. Meanwhile, it seems like the didn't quite accumulate enough content for a second rarities disc without a feature (my review of Volume 1 from back in 2017 notes that a second disc was planned for 2018 at the time, but it came out in 2020 and there's only a few short films on it, all strung together, with 3D photo collections that are presented as slideshows with narration rather than as galleries as was the case on The Bubble, one of them part of the big compendium of shorts and one on its own. It's not the most straightforward way to do it.
The fun thing about the photos was how much the Kodak "Stereo-Realist" camera used to take most of them looks like the RETO camera I got from a different crowdfunding campaign which I've been playing with for the past few months:
Though I haven't been back to Hunt's to pick up the two or three rolls of film I shot in New Zealand, so I can't speak for those, I'm intensely jealous of the results shown. Part of it is just that the process - the Kodak camera these people (including silent film star Harold Lloyd) used was generally built for slide film and developed to slides, while I'm using regular film and having the lab scan it, then screwing around with software to put them together despite the RETO camera taking vertical photos while every viewing device I've got (aside from maybe making a wigglegram meant to be viewed on phones) is horizontal, meaning I lose resolution. They're also using Kodachrome film, which helps a lot.
The slide shows are kind of neat, but the narration is odd, and I imagine it would drive me nuts on the second or third time through, like when you're going through a museum and there's no way to turn the audio guide off. Also, Mr. Lloyd's granddaughter seemed a tiny bit uncomfortable talking about his fondness for photographing naked ladies (though I seem to remember there were many more pictures like that in the collection of 3D photos included with the box set New Line released.
It's still a very fun set for those of us that dig the format. I may wind up turning the sound off for some parts or wish there were a bit more of a direct path to the best bits the next time I put it on, but I still enjoyed seeing these oddities.
"A Day in the Country" (aka "Stereo Laffs")
* * (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
Speaking of narration that fills every second and leads as much to cringe as actual laughs, let's talk about - or, at least, quickly and regretfully acknowledge - Joe Besser talking all over "A Day in the Country". I don't know whether it was shot silently with the idea of adding narration, the soundtrack was degraded in the ten years it took for the thing to get released after being shot, or if filmmaker Jack Rieger just looked at the footage and decided it needed a little something more because it was just a bunch of shots without a strong story (and both editing and reshooting would be tricky). However it got to this point, the result is not great.
It does come across as something of a weird beast, though, because the subject matter as well as the staging feels a lot like a 1910s/1920s silent short, although still somewhat off - it's like Rieger is trying to capture the sort of goofy comic pastoral Lloyd or Keaton might have made but isn't quite getting the impersonation right, and the camera angles used to enhance the 3D effect as well as the things thrown at the camera break the illusion. That they often hit the camera and send the picture to black feels a bit like a growing pain that other 3D filmmakers learned from - the flinch as something zips past works better than the head-on collision.
For an half-experimental short film at a time when this just wasn't something filmmakers and theaters were working with on a regular basis, a lot of the work is impressive, and there are some funny gags in it. Find a way to do it without the voiceover, and maybe it's more than an interesting curiosity, both at the time and years later.
"The Black Swan" '52
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
The previews for various opera, ballet, and stage presentations in movie theaters seldom show 3D shows any more, and that feels like a real missed opportunity. Dance is a natural for the medium with how it uses three-dimensional space, and two of the more interesting 3D movies to come out during the current wave, Pina and Cunningham, were dance documentaries. It's no surprise, then, that "The Black Swan" is probably the most impressive thing on the disc, feeling very much like the spiritual ancestor to Cunningham, taken off a stage that needs to be built for an audience and into a somewhat more complex environment that that a camera can move around in it. It's still not realistic, but it's not quite stagebound.
The music and dancing are quite good to my decidedly inexpert eyes, although at 13 minutes it feels like something of a long short. I suspect that, to a certain extent, the way stereoscopic advisor Raymond Spottiswoode frames the shoot contributes to that - though the effect of a window seemingly floating in front of the screen is undoubtedly nifty and apparently erases flat bits at the edges, it tends to encourage one to lean forward and strain even when one doesn't need to. That is something common with a lot of 3D formats, which don't quite work as well as they should until one learns to relax while focusing.
"Games in Depth"
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
The liner notes indicate that this was apparently created for Expo 1967 before being replaced with something else, which seems like a good call - it's a random-seeming montage of various play-related scenes melded with an often atonal soundtrack, but it never becomes hypnotic in the way this sort of installation can. There are nifty moments - shots of a high-school football game briefly give an idea of how 3D can be used in a sportscast - but by the time this was shot, its 3D effects weren't spectacular, and the imagery and music doesn't seem like something that will make people stop, put on glasses, and watch an entire loop as they walk through the American pavilion.
Prologue to La marca del Hombre Lobo
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
It's listed as a "prologue" but feels more like a pitch reel; I'd need to see the actual movie (either the original Spanish La marca del Hombre Lobo or the American Frankenstein's Bloody Terror) to have some idea of how it actually works at its intended function. You can at least get a sense of how this thing would have looked, enough that I'd be interested if the film itself were part of "3-D Rarities Volume III".
Preview for The 3-D Movie
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
Okay, I guess. The film, which never got made, would apparently have been a bunch of 3-D footage from various other films stitched together as a sort of documentary, and this is definitely a trailer for that. It's got that slow, early-1980s trailer feel where it goes on a bit too long,nothing ever seems the right length, and the voiceover sounds like it's over-promising but in actuality is just saying what you can see in front of you.
El corazón y la espada (Sword of Granada)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
El corazón y la espada (aka Sword of Granada) is the first 3-D film to be produced in Mexico and there's no missing that the third dimension was near the fore of everybody's mind as they made it; the new restoration by the 3-D Film Archive highlights every way in which someone making such a movie can push into and out of the screen. There's no other single piece of it showing the same sort of ambition, but despite that, it's a surprisingly entertaining film. This film knows what it is and has all of its parts pulling in the same direction.
As it opens, Pedro (Cesar Romero) and Ponce (Tito Junco) are sneaking across a Moor-occupied castle's courtyard, aiming to kill the Khalifa within (Fernando Casanova) and bring forth a revolution. They, it turns out, are not the only ones with that idea - they run into swordswoman Lolita (Katy Jurado) in the chambers of a captured priest (Miguel Ángel Ferriz). Aside from the Khalifa, the castle is rumored to contain a rose that confers eternal life and an alchemist who knows how to transmute base elements into gold - but though Pedro has a map to the various secret passages that litter the castle, every path seems to lead through the chambers of Princesa Esme (Rebeca Iturbide).
Secret passages are the sort of adventure-story trope that lies precariously balanced between being tremendously fun and being a tacky cliché - it's kind of like quicksand or swinging on ropes and vines that way - and this film is so full of hidden doors and tunnels and secret spaces behind walls that it's almost impossible for it not to be overkill. And while there are certainly times when the amount of sneaking around stone passageways that seem a bit too well-illuminated seems like it would be overkill, that never quite happens. The filmmakers build fake-stone sets that look like the platonic ideal of hidden staircases, and they turn out to be fun things to shoot and project in stereo - it creates a box for the characters to occupy behind the screen, staircases lead up and back, and tight spaces are suggested by foreground pieces that are clearly not in the same plane. It's never busy enough that it wouldn't work in 2-D, and the crisp black-and-white photography looks very nice even as it highlights that this is obviously a film set.
It creates an atmosphere of larger-than-life, admittedly simplified legends, and though there are plenty of moments when the filmmakers are more than a bit heavy-handed in creating a sanitized fifteenth century suitable to an audience of all ages in the 1950s, they're pretty good at setting things up so that's the path of least resistance rather than something that's ever jarring. They mostly do a good job in having enough action going on that the pace never particularly flags even when the raiders are captured and Esme is figuring out where she stands. The sword-fighting will likely not make anybody's list of the most technically-proficient and well-choreographed screen duels - there's a lot of swinging wildly at two guards at a time - but it's energetic and makes good use of the three-dimensional stage (even if the attempt to have blades push out of the screen shows you really shouldn't shoot that sort of thing head-on).
The cast is willing to throw themselves into this with enthusiasm as well, and it's a fairly impressive group. Star Cesar Romero was imported from America and seems right at home as the confident aristocrat, blustery but charming and comfortably occupying the center of the movie without anyone else appearing slighted. Co-star Katy Jurado would also crossover to some Hollywood success and has probably played a lot of roles like Lolita - firey and not afraid to make the likes of Don Pedro come to her - but she can make that familiarity funny without making it a joke. The writers seem to do the least amount possible to make their inevitable pairing-off happen, but the two of them know how to turn on the charm to the point where they sell it. They've got a brace of good character actors behind them, with everyone knowing their job - Miguel Ángel Ferriz's priest is the wise advisor, Victor Alcocer's Khalifa is cruel but not quite scary, Rebeca Iturbide's princess is ignorant but basically good - and making sure they entertain rather than just fill slots.
It doesn't exactly make for a classic - it's not entirely unjust that this movie fell into obscurity and was restored for a "3-D Rarities" disc rather than something with a broader audience. It's still a trim, entertaining swashbuckler even in two dimensions, worth stumbling upon even for those who can't view it as intended.
Also on EFilmCritic
A part of me is a little curious about the format and contents of this disc, although I wonder if it's just a matter of what the 3-D Film Archive can do with its distributors. They and 3-D SPACE crowdfunded a restoration of El corazón y la espada last year, but I suspect that this Mexican adventure film might be a little too niche for either Kino or Flicker Alley, although a "rarities" disc with it and a couple other bits of content that didn't particularly make a lot of sense as special features on other discs might be better branding. Meanwhile, it seems like the didn't quite accumulate enough content for a second rarities disc without a feature (my review of Volume 1 from back in 2017 notes that a second disc was planned for 2018 at the time, but it came out in 2020 and there's only a few short films on it, all strung together, with 3D photo collections that are presented as slideshows with narration rather than as galleries as was the case on The Bubble, one of them part of the big compendium of shorts and one on its own. It's not the most straightforward way to do it.
The fun thing about the photos was how much the Kodak "Stereo-Realist" camera used to take most of them looks like the RETO camera I got from a different crowdfunding campaign which I've been playing with for the past few months:
Though I haven't been back to Hunt's to pick up the two or three rolls of film I shot in New Zealand, so I can't speak for those, I'm intensely jealous of the results shown. Part of it is just that the process - the Kodak camera these people (including silent film star Harold Lloyd) used was generally built for slide film and developed to slides, while I'm using regular film and having the lab scan it, then screwing around with software to put them together despite the RETO camera taking vertical photos while every viewing device I've got (aside from maybe making a wigglegram meant to be viewed on phones) is horizontal, meaning I lose resolution. They're also using Kodachrome film, which helps a lot.
The slide shows are kind of neat, but the narration is odd, and I imagine it would drive me nuts on the second or third time through, like when you're going through a museum and there's no way to turn the audio guide off. Also, Mr. Lloyd's granddaughter seemed a tiny bit uncomfortable talking about his fondness for photographing naked ladies (though I seem to remember there were many more pictures like that in the collection of 3D photos included with the box set New Line released.
It's still a very fun set for those of us that dig the format. I may wind up turning the sound off for some parts or wish there were a bit more of a direct path to the best bits the next time I put it on, but I still enjoyed seeing these oddities.
"A Day in the Country" (aka "Stereo Laffs")
* * (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
Speaking of narration that fills every second and leads as much to cringe as actual laughs, let's talk about - or, at least, quickly and regretfully acknowledge - Joe Besser talking all over "A Day in the Country". I don't know whether it was shot silently with the idea of adding narration, the soundtrack was degraded in the ten years it took for the thing to get released after being shot, or if filmmaker Jack Rieger just looked at the footage and decided it needed a little something more because it was just a bunch of shots without a strong story (and both editing and reshooting would be tricky). However it got to this point, the result is not great.
It does come across as something of a weird beast, though, because the subject matter as well as the staging feels a lot like a 1910s/1920s silent short, although still somewhat off - it's like Rieger is trying to capture the sort of goofy comic pastoral Lloyd or Keaton might have made but isn't quite getting the impersonation right, and the camera angles used to enhance the 3D effect as well as the things thrown at the camera break the illusion. That they often hit the camera and send the picture to black feels a bit like a growing pain that other 3D filmmakers learned from - the flinch as something zips past works better than the head-on collision.
For an half-experimental short film at a time when this just wasn't something filmmakers and theaters were working with on a regular basis, a lot of the work is impressive, and there are some funny gags in it. Find a way to do it without the voiceover, and maybe it's more than an interesting curiosity, both at the time and years later.
"The Black Swan" '52
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
The previews for various opera, ballet, and stage presentations in movie theaters seldom show 3D shows any more, and that feels like a real missed opportunity. Dance is a natural for the medium with how it uses three-dimensional space, and two of the more interesting 3D movies to come out during the current wave, Pina and Cunningham, were dance documentaries. It's no surprise, then, that "The Black Swan" is probably the most impressive thing on the disc, feeling very much like the spiritual ancestor to Cunningham, taken off a stage that needs to be built for an audience and into a somewhat more complex environment that that a camera can move around in it. It's still not realistic, but it's not quite stagebound.
The music and dancing are quite good to my decidedly inexpert eyes, although at 13 minutes it feels like something of a long short. I suspect that, to a certain extent, the way stereoscopic advisor Raymond Spottiswoode frames the shoot contributes to that - though the effect of a window seemingly floating in front of the screen is undoubtedly nifty and apparently erases flat bits at the edges, it tends to encourage one to lean forward and strain even when one doesn't need to. That is something common with a lot of 3D formats, which don't quite work as well as they should until one learns to relax while focusing.
"Games in Depth"
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
The liner notes indicate that this was apparently created for Expo 1967 before being replaced with something else, which seems like a good call - it's a random-seeming montage of various play-related scenes melded with an often atonal soundtrack, but it never becomes hypnotic in the way this sort of installation can. There are nifty moments - shots of a high-school football game briefly give an idea of how 3D can be used in a sportscast - but by the time this was shot, its 3D effects weren't spectacular, and the imagery and music doesn't seem like something that will make people stop, put on glasses, and watch an entire loop as they walk through the American pavilion.
Prologue to La marca del Hombre Lobo
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
It's listed as a "prologue" but feels more like a pitch reel; I'd need to see the actual movie (either the original Spanish La marca del Hombre Lobo or the American Frankenstein's Bloody Terror) to have some idea of how it actually works at its intended function. You can at least get a sense of how this thing would have looked, enough that I'd be interested if the film itself were part of "3-D Rarities Volume III".
Preview for The 3-D Movie
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
Okay, I guess. The film, which never got made, would apparently have been a bunch of 3-D footage from various other films stitched together as a sort of documentary, and this is definitely a trailer for that. It's got that slow, early-1980s trailer feel where it goes on a bit too long,nothing ever seems the right length, and the voiceover sounds like it's over-promising but in actuality is just saying what you can see in front of you.
El corazón y la espada (Sword of Granada)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
El corazón y la espada (aka Sword of Granada) is the first 3-D film to be produced in Mexico and there's no missing that the third dimension was near the fore of everybody's mind as they made it; the new restoration by the 3-D Film Archive highlights every way in which someone making such a movie can push into and out of the screen. There's no other single piece of it showing the same sort of ambition, but despite that, it's a surprisingly entertaining film. This film knows what it is and has all of its parts pulling in the same direction.
As it opens, Pedro (Cesar Romero) and Ponce (Tito Junco) are sneaking across a Moor-occupied castle's courtyard, aiming to kill the Khalifa within (Fernando Casanova) and bring forth a revolution. They, it turns out, are not the only ones with that idea - they run into swordswoman Lolita (Katy Jurado) in the chambers of a captured priest (Miguel Ángel Ferriz). Aside from the Khalifa, the castle is rumored to contain a rose that confers eternal life and an alchemist who knows how to transmute base elements into gold - but though Pedro has a map to the various secret passages that litter the castle, every path seems to lead through the chambers of Princesa Esme (Rebeca Iturbide).
Secret passages are the sort of adventure-story trope that lies precariously balanced between being tremendously fun and being a tacky cliché - it's kind of like quicksand or swinging on ropes and vines that way - and this film is so full of hidden doors and tunnels and secret spaces behind walls that it's almost impossible for it not to be overkill. And while there are certainly times when the amount of sneaking around stone passageways that seem a bit too well-illuminated seems like it would be overkill, that never quite happens. The filmmakers build fake-stone sets that look like the platonic ideal of hidden staircases, and they turn out to be fun things to shoot and project in stereo - it creates a box for the characters to occupy behind the screen, staircases lead up and back, and tight spaces are suggested by foreground pieces that are clearly not in the same plane. It's never busy enough that it wouldn't work in 2-D, and the crisp black-and-white photography looks very nice even as it highlights that this is obviously a film set.
It creates an atmosphere of larger-than-life, admittedly simplified legends, and though there are plenty of moments when the filmmakers are more than a bit heavy-handed in creating a sanitized fifteenth century suitable to an audience of all ages in the 1950s, they're pretty good at setting things up so that's the path of least resistance rather than something that's ever jarring. They mostly do a good job in having enough action going on that the pace never particularly flags even when the raiders are captured and Esme is figuring out where she stands. The sword-fighting will likely not make anybody's list of the most technically-proficient and well-choreographed screen duels - there's a lot of swinging wildly at two guards at a time - but it's energetic and makes good use of the three-dimensional stage (even if the attempt to have blades push out of the screen shows you really shouldn't shoot that sort of thing head-on).
The cast is willing to throw themselves into this with enthusiasm as well, and it's a fairly impressive group. Star Cesar Romero was imported from America and seems right at home as the confident aristocrat, blustery but charming and comfortably occupying the center of the movie without anyone else appearing slighted. Co-star Katy Jurado would also crossover to some Hollywood success and has probably played a lot of roles like Lolita - firey and not afraid to make the likes of Don Pedro come to her - but she can make that familiarity funny without making it a joke. The writers seem to do the least amount possible to make their inevitable pairing-off happen, but the two of them know how to turn on the charm to the point where they sell it. They've got a brace of good character actors behind them, with everyone knowing their job - Miguel Ángel Ferriz's priest is the wise advisor, Victor Alcocer's Khalifa is cruel but not quite scary, Rebeca Iturbide's princess is ignorant but basically good - and making sure they entertain rather than just fill slots.
It doesn't exactly make for a classic - it's not entirely unjust that this movie fell into obscurity and was restored for a "3-D Rarities" disc rather than something with a broader audience. It's still a trim, entertaining swashbuckler even in two dimensions, worth stumbling upon even for those who can't view it as intended.
Also on EFilmCritic
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
This Week in Tickets: 6 January 2020 - 12 January 2020
You know what seems like it would be a pretty good idea, sometime? Choosing a day, not setting an alarm, and just getting to work when I get there, working until 7pm if that's what what gets me on a good schedule. Might get me back to Davis at a time when I'm not hanging around waiting for a showtime in the cold.
Kind of a busy week, even down to taking a little more off the shelf than I put up. It got started with Adoring which is exactly the cute comedy about the intersecting lives of people with adorable pets in a pretty nice Beijing neighborhood. Or at least, I think it's Beijing; I'm not yet at the point where I can tell Beijing from Shanghai from the other large mainland cities. It's pretty disposable, like those Garry Marshall holiday movies, but I was kind of in the mood for cute doggies and kitties and piggies.
I was in the mood for some people getting punched in the face the next night, which my copy of Undercover Punch and Gun technically delivered, but it's a lackluster-enough movie that you can see why it's apparently been sitting on a server for a couple years. Good fighters in Philip Ng, Van Ness Wu, and Andy On, a cameo-filled cast, and an occasionally weird sensibility, but somehow it never becomes fun in the way it should.
A few days of weird work schedules later and I was at the Brattle on Friday for the first night of "(Some of the) Best of 2019", which began with the really quite good Atlantics. Not only did I see the Netflix movie without paying for Netflix, I didn't even have to shell out cash for a ticket because of my theater membership. Hardly a genuine bit of rebellion, but I enjoy it.
The next day had some errands including doing laundry at a different, closer, less-fancy-but-about-the-same-price place than usual, and man, no-one was there, there was a soft couch, and no TVs were blaring Spanish Lifetime or the like. Just blissful quiet. After that, I found a way to avoid the Red Line Shuttle to get to Boston Common to check out a couple of war movies: 1917 on the fancy new Dolby Cinema screen and Liberation on the screen physically closest to Chinatown. The first was better for not being flagrant propaganda, but the generally have complementary issues.
Sunday was a long one, but it was an absurdly nice day to walk around. Things started off at the Kendall, where the 3D screenings of Cunningham were down to one matinee a day, and I'm kind of curious about the kid toward the back and what his story was. Was a parent or a sister really into dance and it was decided that there was no need for a sitter what with the movie (probably) rated PG? He wasn't really disruptive, but you could absolutely tell that a 3D portrait of a titan of modern dance was not really his thing.
After that, there was plenty of time to get back to Harvard Square, use a coupon on the wrong sort of USB cable to replace the frayed on on my phone before something went badly awry, and visit Charlie's Kitchen for the first time, despite the fact that one would think that I would have eaten at a place billing itself as "The Double Cheeseburger King" at some point in the last twenty years. I had not, and it was a good, o mussing-around bacon cheeseburger. After that, on to a double feature at the Brattle, where I was happy to finally see Fast Color after it didn't have a regular theatrical run in Boston and its other special screenings didn't work with my schedule. It's good, I continue to love Gugu Mbatha-Raw and David Strathairn, and I'm looking forward to the series.
And then I hung around for Captain Marvel, and didn't realize that I'd never posted my review of it on the blog - but did on my Letterboxd page - because I was kind of busy elsewhere during that time.
Captain Marvel
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre([Some of] The Best of 2019, DCP)
I think the Brattle had some issues with projection, because the picture looked kind of dim compared to when I saw it in Imax over in Hong Kong. Kind of a shame.
Second time around, it gives off the same feel - absolutely Yet Another Marvel Origin Story, but an example of it being done very well indeed, and, seen eight months after Avengers: Endgame, it doesn't play as if it's just setup.
Kind of a busy week, even down to taking a little more off the shelf than I put up. It got started with Adoring which is exactly the cute comedy about the intersecting lives of people with adorable pets in a pretty nice Beijing neighborhood. Or at least, I think it's Beijing; I'm not yet at the point where I can tell Beijing from Shanghai from the other large mainland cities. It's pretty disposable, like those Garry Marshall holiday movies, but I was kind of in the mood for cute doggies and kitties and piggies.
I was in the mood for some people getting punched in the face the next night, which my copy of Undercover Punch and Gun technically delivered, but it's a lackluster-enough movie that you can see why it's apparently been sitting on a server for a couple years. Good fighters in Philip Ng, Van Ness Wu, and Andy On, a cameo-filled cast, and an occasionally weird sensibility, but somehow it never becomes fun in the way it should.
A few days of weird work schedules later and I was at the Brattle on Friday for the first night of "(Some of the) Best of 2019", which began with the really quite good Atlantics. Not only did I see the Netflix movie without paying for Netflix, I didn't even have to shell out cash for a ticket because of my theater membership. Hardly a genuine bit of rebellion, but I enjoy it.
The next day had some errands including doing laundry at a different, closer, less-fancy-but-about-the-same-price place than usual, and man, no-one was there, there was a soft couch, and no TVs were blaring Spanish Lifetime or the like. Just blissful quiet. After that, I found a way to avoid the Red Line Shuttle to get to Boston Common to check out a couple of war movies: 1917 on the fancy new Dolby Cinema screen and Liberation on the screen physically closest to Chinatown. The first was better for not being flagrant propaganda, but the generally have complementary issues.
Sunday was a long one, but it was an absurdly nice day to walk around. Things started off at the Kendall, where the 3D screenings of Cunningham were down to one matinee a day, and I'm kind of curious about the kid toward the back and what his story was. Was a parent or a sister really into dance and it was decided that there was no need for a sitter what with the movie (probably) rated PG? He wasn't really disruptive, but you could absolutely tell that a 3D portrait of a titan of modern dance was not really his thing.
After that, there was plenty of time to get back to Harvard Square, use a coupon on the wrong sort of USB cable to replace the frayed on on my phone before something went badly awry, and visit Charlie's Kitchen for the first time, despite the fact that one would think that I would have eaten at a place billing itself as "The Double Cheeseburger King" at some point in the last twenty years. I had not, and it was a good, o mussing-around bacon cheeseburger. After that, on to a double feature at the Brattle, where I was happy to finally see Fast Color after it didn't have a regular theatrical run in Boston and its other special screenings didn't work with my schedule. It's good, I continue to love Gugu Mbatha-Raw and David Strathairn, and I'm looking forward to the series.
And then I hung around for Captain Marvel, and didn't realize that I'd never posted my review of it on the blog - but did on my Letterboxd page - because I was kind of busy elsewhere during that time.
Captain Marvel
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre([Some of] The Best of 2019, DCP)
I think the Brattle had some issues with projection, because the picture looked kind of dim compared to when I saw it in Imax over in Hong Kong. Kind of a shame.
Second time around, it gives off the same feel - absolutely Yet Another Marvel Origin Story, but an example of it being done very well indeed, and, seen eight months after Avengers: Endgame, it doesn't play as if it's just setup.
Cunningham
That's two movies about modern dance and choreography, a subject I know remarkably little about but was drawn to because I do really like 3D movies and want to encourage theaters to play unconventional movies in 3D and continue to release them on 3D Blu-ray, even if those of us with compatible players and displays are dwindling in North America and, as far as I can tell, internationally. Stuff that used to show up in the UK and South Korea and Hong Kong in that format just doesn't any more (note to self: grab 3D Star Wars movies from the UK while you can). It's a shame that studios and exhibitors have, by and large, abandoned 3D outside of a way to add a surcharge to some tickets, because between this, the continued good work of the 3-D Film Archive, Long Day's Journey into Night, Alita: Battle Angel, and Gemini Man (and even the nifty conversion for Star Wars IX), there's been some really nifty use of the format over the past year, and it's by and large going to vanish once these films leave theaters
.
Hopefully this will come out on a 3D disc - and if it does, the folks who made Found Footage 3D should ask Magnolia what's up with them not getting one.
Chuningham
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)
I wonder what sort of a minority I am in coming to see Cunningham for the 3D photography as much as the dance, and how many people who came for the dance were hoping for something a little more in-depth. It's the sort of documentary about an artist and his career that relies heavily on demonstration, and as such seems like a good introduction with an intriguing hook, albeit one whose gimmick will only be briefly available.
Filmmaker Alla Kovgan covers Merce Cunningham's career from 1942 to 1972, when he created some of his most famous pieces as a choreographer and dancer, often in collaboration with composer John Cage and designer Robert Rauschenberg. Rather than simply presenting period footage of varying quality, they often recreate the performances, sometimes on a stage and sometimes on location. More context is given with archival interviews, not necessarily contemporaneous with the black-and-white photos and footage shown. It's a clear demarcation - the vital material is in vivid, colorful motion, while the rest is supplementary, filling in the gaps.
Letting the dance and Cunningham's own words speak for themselves is a nifty choice, although I suspect that it doesn't present a whole lot of new information or special insight for those who already know something about dance in general and Cunningham in particular. What Kovgan chooses to include as writer/director/editor makes for an intriguing lesson plan, providing just enough information for even us laymen to start to examine the dance ourselves. From the very start, she's redirecting how viewers think of dance by including comments from Cunningham about divorcing the movements from storytelling and music, focusing on the technical more than the biographical. There is some of that, certainly, but as asides and jumping-off points. For better or worse, Kovgan builds the film around Cunningham's position that his dance is almost entirely about movement.
Full review on eFilmCritic
.
Hopefully this will come out on a 3D disc - and if it does, the folks who made Found Footage 3D should ask Magnolia what's up with them not getting one.
Chuningham
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)
I wonder what sort of a minority I am in coming to see Cunningham for the 3D photography as much as the dance, and how many people who came for the dance were hoping for something a little more in-depth. It's the sort of documentary about an artist and his career that relies heavily on demonstration, and as such seems like a good introduction with an intriguing hook, albeit one whose gimmick will only be briefly available.
Filmmaker Alla Kovgan covers Merce Cunningham's career from 1942 to 1972, when he created some of his most famous pieces as a choreographer and dancer, often in collaboration with composer John Cage and designer Robert Rauschenberg. Rather than simply presenting period footage of varying quality, they often recreate the performances, sometimes on a stage and sometimes on location. More context is given with archival interviews, not necessarily contemporaneous with the black-and-white photos and footage shown. It's a clear demarcation - the vital material is in vivid, colorful motion, while the rest is supplementary, filling in the gaps.
Letting the dance and Cunningham's own words speak for themselves is a nifty choice, although I suspect that it doesn't present a whole lot of new information or special insight for those who already know something about dance in general and Cunningham in particular. What Kovgan chooses to include as writer/director/editor makes for an intriguing lesson plan, providing just enough information for even us laymen to start to examine the dance ourselves. From the very start, she's redirecting how viewers think of dance by including comments from Cunningham about divorcing the movements from storytelling and music, focusing on the technical more than the biographical. There is some of that, certainly, but as asides and jumping-off points. For better or worse, Kovgan builds the film around Cunningham's position that his dance is almost entirely about movement.
Full review on eFilmCritic
Sunday, April 07, 2019
This Last Week in Tickets: 25 March 2019 -31 March 2019
Never fails - festivals and vacations force me into catch-up mode and then "screw it, I'll just pick up from last week".
I was just coming off BUFF, so while I had some plans to do something Monday night, most everything was at weird times so I just hit the grocery store and went home. Still, stuff needed to be seen, so I stuck around work for a little while so that there was no stopping at home (or elsewhere) on the way to Ash Is Purest White on Tuesday, and then pointedly didn't stay late for Climax on Wednesday. Not huge crowds either night, and with Ash, it's kind of interesting to me that this film being released in the sort of traditional foreign-film pattern didn't get quite the same audience as the Chinese films getting day-and-date releases.
After that… it was opening day of the baseball season, but the Sox opened on the West Coast, which meant a lot of staying up late and then kind of staying at work late because I was dragging from that… It's a vicious cycle, especially with only one of those games a win and really worth staying up late for.
Sunday wound up being doppelganger day, entirely by coincidence, although isn't it just a little more satisfying when movies about doubles come in twos? It should be that way, right? Anyway, first up was Us, which I'm obviously behind the rest of the world on, to the point of trying to dodge spoilers on social media where you can't exactly mute every tweet with "us" in it.
After that, I would wind up here:
Jeff Rapsis has been doing occasional shows accompanying silents at the Aeronaut Brewery for a while, which is somewhere between tempting and not - Jeff's great and silent films are fun, but bars are horrible places full of noise, too many people, and beer, which smells bad, tastes worse, and makes people loud and stupid. Still, Mystery of the Eiffel Tower is not something you see all the time, arguably for good reason (it's kind of bloated for a silent). It's at least a neat-looking and unusual environment to see a movie, although I've got to wonder about the lady next to me who was looking at her phone through the first half of the movie. On the one hand, I kind of get that I'm in a bar and can't necessarily expect the same sort of focus, but, geez, it's a silent movie! If you're not looking at the screen, why did you pay $10 to sit in that part of the bar?
That one isn't on the Letterboxd page, because it's not in their database, but otherwise I try to update that page as rough drafts for this one.
Us
* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2019 in Somerville Theatre #3 (first-run, DCP)
Even more than with most horror movies, there's a lot going on just out of view in Us that would probably cause things to fall apart if they were actually explained - it almost feels like there should be another movie in the series and the feeling that this was a surprise sequel akin to Split and Unbreakable, and that movie would not make much sense. One only really notices because Jordan Peele has ambition enough for the audience to really want it to hold together as something brilliant.
It may not be that, but it is pretty darn good. Peele knows how to build this sort of movie, making it funny enough to keep the audience off their guards but not making it a joke, and how to play into the idea that there's something fundamentally wrong with the world while keeping a tight focus on the heroes. It's shot extremely well - Peele and cinematographer are good at getting the picture to sink into the screen and using the red of the doppelgangers' outfits to suggest something bloodier than what is being shown on-screen - and has an escalating tension that will likely be just as impressive on a second go-round.
Plus, it's got Lupita Nyong'o in the best of the film's many double roles, an exceptional combination of steadying and on-edge as Adelaide and smoldering rage as Red. Winston Duke threatens to steal every scene he's in as the earnestly dorky dad, but completely changes his body language to feel hulking and dangerous as Abraham. The whole cast is kind of great, making every bit that might not otherwise quite work impressively tense.
Le mystère de la tour Eiffel (The Mystery of the Eiffel Tower)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2019 at the Aeronaut Brewery (Silent Film Club, projected DVD)
The intertitles on this (on a DVD of a French film made from a Flemish print subtitled in English) suggest that it was originally meant to be broken into two or more parts, whether as a serial or a feature with an intermission, and that seems like it would be a better way to experience it. 129 minutes is a whole lot of silent film, and this one spends a lot of time going back and forth, recapping prior action, kind of ignoring what happened a fifteen minutes ago. It feels like binge-watching a series that was absolutely not designed for that.
It also sometimes feels like two movies mashed together, in one of which a man who plays one half of a set of "Siamese Twins" in a local circus steals the identity of his unrelated "brother" to inherit a twenty-billion franc fortune (no idea how that translates to modern dollars), but as a result gets caught up in a mystery involving the "Ku-Klux-Eiffel", a mysterious European crime syndicate that broadcasts directives to its people from the Eiffel Tower. It's outright bonkers, bigger and pulpier than life and sometimes kind of weirdly abstract, like the French filmmakers involved don't know specifically why the KKK are monsters rather than just people in weird robes, or what exactly these villains are going for other than vanilla villainy.
It's got a heck of a climax, though, as everybody pursues each other up the Eiffel Tower, and while it's kind of chaotic, it's also genuinely exciting. Some of the shots in this film certainly seem to clearly be shot in a manner akin to Safety Last!, carefully choosing angles to make it look as if it was shot further away from the ground than it looked, but some certainly seems to be insanely dangerous, enough to feel a little dizzy. Pair that with the over-the-top pulp and you've got a heck of a finale, and it just would have been nice if it were a bit more compact.
I was just coming off BUFF, so while I had some plans to do something Monday night, most everything was at weird times so I just hit the grocery store and went home. Still, stuff needed to be seen, so I stuck around work for a little while so that there was no stopping at home (or elsewhere) on the way to Ash Is Purest White on Tuesday, and then pointedly didn't stay late for Climax on Wednesday. Not huge crowds either night, and with Ash, it's kind of interesting to me that this film being released in the sort of traditional foreign-film pattern didn't get quite the same audience as the Chinese films getting day-and-date releases.
After that… it was opening day of the baseball season, but the Sox opened on the West Coast, which meant a lot of staying up late and then kind of staying at work late because I was dragging from that… It's a vicious cycle, especially with only one of those games a win and really worth staying up late for.
Sunday wound up being doppelganger day, entirely by coincidence, although isn't it just a little more satisfying when movies about doubles come in twos? It should be that way, right? Anyway, first up was Us, which I'm obviously behind the rest of the world on, to the point of trying to dodge spoilers on social media where you can't exactly mute every tweet with "us" in it.
After that, I would wind up here:
Jeff Rapsis has been doing occasional shows accompanying silents at the Aeronaut Brewery for a while, which is somewhere between tempting and not - Jeff's great and silent films are fun, but bars are horrible places full of noise, too many people, and beer, which smells bad, tastes worse, and makes people loud and stupid. Still, Mystery of the Eiffel Tower is not something you see all the time, arguably for good reason (it's kind of bloated for a silent). It's at least a neat-looking and unusual environment to see a movie, although I've got to wonder about the lady next to me who was looking at her phone through the first half of the movie. On the one hand, I kind of get that I'm in a bar and can't necessarily expect the same sort of focus, but, geez, it's a silent movie! If you're not looking at the screen, why did you pay $10 to sit in that part of the bar?
That one isn't on the Letterboxd page, because it's not in their database, but otherwise I try to update that page as rough drafts for this one.
Us
* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2019 in Somerville Theatre #3 (first-run, DCP)
Even more than with most horror movies, there's a lot going on just out of view in Us that would probably cause things to fall apart if they were actually explained - it almost feels like there should be another movie in the series and the feeling that this was a surprise sequel akin to Split and Unbreakable, and that movie would not make much sense. One only really notices because Jordan Peele has ambition enough for the audience to really want it to hold together as something brilliant.
It may not be that, but it is pretty darn good. Peele knows how to build this sort of movie, making it funny enough to keep the audience off their guards but not making it a joke, and how to play into the idea that there's something fundamentally wrong with the world while keeping a tight focus on the heroes. It's shot extremely well - Peele and cinematographer are good at getting the picture to sink into the screen and using the red of the doppelgangers' outfits to suggest something bloodier than what is being shown on-screen - and has an escalating tension that will likely be just as impressive on a second go-round.
Plus, it's got Lupita Nyong'o in the best of the film's many double roles, an exceptional combination of steadying and on-edge as Adelaide and smoldering rage as Red. Winston Duke threatens to steal every scene he's in as the earnestly dorky dad, but completely changes his body language to feel hulking and dangerous as Abraham. The whole cast is kind of great, making every bit that might not otherwise quite work impressively tense.
Le mystère de la tour Eiffel (The Mystery of the Eiffel Tower)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 March 2019 at the Aeronaut Brewery (Silent Film Club, projected DVD)
The intertitles on this (on a DVD of a French film made from a Flemish print subtitled in English) suggest that it was originally meant to be broken into two or more parts, whether as a serial or a feature with an intermission, and that seems like it would be a better way to experience it. 129 minutes is a whole lot of silent film, and this one spends a lot of time going back and forth, recapping prior action, kind of ignoring what happened a fifteen minutes ago. It feels like binge-watching a series that was absolutely not designed for that.
It also sometimes feels like two movies mashed together, in one of which a man who plays one half of a set of "Siamese Twins" in a local circus steals the identity of his unrelated "brother" to inherit a twenty-billion franc fortune (no idea how that translates to modern dollars), but as a result gets caught up in a mystery involving the "Ku-Klux-Eiffel", a mysterious European crime syndicate that broadcasts directives to its people from the Eiffel Tower. It's outright bonkers, bigger and pulpier than life and sometimes kind of weirdly abstract, like the French filmmakers involved don't know specifically why the KKK are monsters rather than just people in weird robes, or what exactly these villains are going for other than vanilla villainy.
It's got a heck of a climax, though, as everybody pursues each other up the Eiffel Tower, and while it's kind of chaotic, it's also genuinely exciting. Some of the shots in this film certainly seem to clearly be shot in a manner akin to Safety Last!, carefully choosing angles to make it look as if it was shot further away from the ground than it looked, but some certainly seems to be insanely dangerous, enough to feel a little dizzy. Pair that with the over-the-top pulp and you've got a heck of a finale, and it just would have been nice if it were a bit more compact.
Saturday, March 30, 2019
Foreign Affairs: Ash Is Purest White & Climax
If the Boston Underground Film Festival hadn't been going on last weekend, I might have been tempted to perform an experiment by seeing Ash Is Purest White in both Boston Common and the Kendall, to see if they had different sorts of audiences - one the art-house crowd and one the folks coming in from Chinatown - and which was more into the movie if one group is appreciating it while the other is enjoying it. Doesn't look like that would have revealed much, though - Ash came out in the People's Republic of China last fall, so it's probably been good and pirated by those with interest in it, so the crowd at the Common was probably not that far off the one at the Kendall.
Still, kind of great, although there was a fair chunk of the audience that didn't enjoy it as much as I did and was going in and out.
The next night was one of the last Climax was playing anywhere in the area and it was kind of an uncharacteristically good time, easy enough to just get right off the train and drop into the Somerville at 6:30pm. Only a couple of us there, and I don't know if the other fellow was having the same sort of "really fun until it kind of becomes too much in the exact way you might expect. I might have thought different with a loud crowd, but I don't know if you're going to get that crowd for a Gaspar Noé film in general release. I think the biggest crowd I've ever seen for one was Irreversible at the Harvard Film Archive on Super Bowl Sunday, and that had a bunch of walk-outs from the folks who were looking to enjoy the new edgy French movie but didn't expect quite so much. It makes you wonder, sometimes, just exactly what target he's looking to hit.
Jiang hu er nü (Ash Is Purest White)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2019 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run, DCP)
Someone in my screening of Ash Is Purest White was repeating "oh my gawwwwwd" through the end credits and beyond, and while it was probably from the exact note the filmmaker opted to end on, it's not entirely unreasonable to presume that he was just that taken with the film as a whole. It is kind of terrific, the sort of prestige import that may wind up surprising people with just how playful it can sometimes be.
It opens in 2001, with So Qiao (Zhao Tao) working in a mah-jongg hall in Datong City. She's dated manager Bin Luo (Liao Fan) for three years or so and they're doing well enough to support her father in the mining town where she grew up, and maybe the villas Bin's boss is building are a sign that Datong is ready to expand. Or maybe not; the "jianghu underworld" that Bin describes himself as part of doesn't seem to be the most organized of organized crime scenes. Even the bloody violence is often sloppy and apparently misdirected, landing the pair in prison. When Qiao is released five years later, she goes to Chaozhou to find Bin, who has already been out for some time.
The story that filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke tells is intimate; even the supporting characters who send things bouncing off in another direction don't seem particularly important, and other people in Qiao's life pop up and disappear without being given actual names. There are no children or business entanglements to force this pair's relationship down a certain path or create external pressure, and that allows Jia to make this a sort of pure examination of what this relationship means to these people. They can walk away, and if there's some transformative moment in their love's origins, the audience doesn't see it. Even the moments of great personal sacrifice are made without a whole lot of fuss - Qiao makes a decision she know will likely put her in jail because she wants to do it for Bin, and makes other decisions later because she values him, not because she has no other choice.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Climax
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2019 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run, DCP)
Gaspar Noé just can't resist pushing it too far, can he? He's just got to looking for the edge of a movie being sexy and thrilling and dangerous and horrific to the point where some failsafe in the brain kicks in and the viewer disengages, so the thing that should have been seared into the viewer's brain is set aside as bad-boy posturing. Ah, well, Climax is a heck of a thing until that happens.
Noé dumps a lot on the audience at first, introducing it to a couple dozen characters via videotaped testimonials. They're a dance troupe, about to go on a tour of France and America, and as the scene jumps to a party, they've certainly got the moves. They've also got just as much drama going on as you might expect, horny as only a group of people in their twenties with the bodies of top athletes who have spent every waking hour the past few months demonstrating their physicality and artistic ambitions to each other can be. That's before it becomes clear that someone has dosed the sangria with LSD and the drive to discover who did it (focusing on the two who haven't been drinking and/or hitting the harder stuff all night) only adds to the rest of their emotions going into overdrive.
There are two or three extended sequence that are just this group dancing as their DJ Daddy (Kiddy Smile) lays down some beats and you could pull a lot of people into this movie under false pretenses by cutting a trailer that mostly draws from that. They're energetic stretches where Noé is playful, such as when he has cinematographer Benoît Debie shoot one entirely from above, highlighting the extended limbs and whipping hair of one dancer surrounded by a scrum rather than the precise synchronization of the Busby Berkeley numbers that shot is usually associated with. The opener is a long take that not only shows everyone off but eventually is kind of intriguing for being a long shot and for the way it presents the dancers, with moments where someone will hit the ground and the viewer can't be quite sure whether that's choreography or the cast being really good at recovery and Noé just accepting that as the price of not cutting.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Still, kind of great, although there was a fair chunk of the audience that didn't enjoy it as much as I did and was going in and out.
The next night was one of the last Climax was playing anywhere in the area and it was kind of an uncharacteristically good time, easy enough to just get right off the train and drop into the Somerville at 6:30pm. Only a couple of us there, and I don't know if the other fellow was having the same sort of "really fun until it kind of becomes too much in the exact way you might expect. I might have thought different with a loud crowd, but I don't know if you're going to get that crowd for a Gaspar Noé film in general release. I think the biggest crowd I've ever seen for one was Irreversible at the Harvard Film Archive on Super Bowl Sunday, and that had a bunch of walk-outs from the folks who were looking to enjoy the new edgy French movie but didn't expect quite so much. It makes you wonder, sometimes, just exactly what target he's looking to hit.
Jiang hu er nü (Ash Is Purest White)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2019 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run, DCP)
Someone in my screening of Ash Is Purest White was repeating "oh my gawwwwwd" through the end credits and beyond, and while it was probably from the exact note the filmmaker opted to end on, it's not entirely unreasonable to presume that he was just that taken with the film as a whole. It is kind of terrific, the sort of prestige import that may wind up surprising people with just how playful it can sometimes be.
It opens in 2001, with So Qiao (Zhao Tao) working in a mah-jongg hall in Datong City. She's dated manager Bin Luo (Liao Fan) for three years or so and they're doing well enough to support her father in the mining town where she grew up, and maybe the villas Bin's boss is building are a sign that Datong is ready to expand. Or maybe not; the "jianghu underworld" that Bin describes himself as part of doesn't seem to be the most organized of organized crime scenes. Even the bloody violence is often sloppy and apparently misdirected, landing the pair in prison. When Qiao is released five years later, she goes to Chaozhou to find Bin, who has already been out for some time.
The story that filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke tells is intimate; even the supporting characters who send things bouncing off in another direction don't seem particularly important, and other people in Qiao's life pop up and disappear without being given actual names. There are no children or business entanglements to force this pair's relationship down a certain path or create external pressure, and that allows Jia to make this a sort of pure examination of what this relationship means to these people. They can walk away, and if there's some transformative moment in their love's origins, the audience doesn't see it. Even the moments of great personal sacrifice are made without a whole lot of fuss - Qiao makes a decision she know will likely put her in jail because she wants to do it for Bin, and makes other decisions later because she values him, not because she has no other choice.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Climax
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2019 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run, DCP)
Gaspar Noé just can't resist pushing it too far, can he? He's just got to looking for the edge of a movie being sexy and thrilling and dangerous and horrific to the point where some failsafe in the brain kicks in and the viewer disengages, so the thing that should have been seared into the viewer's brain is set aside as bad-boy posturing. Ah, well, Climax is a heck of a thing until that happens.
Noé dumps a lot on the audience at first, introducing it to a couple dozen characters via videotaped testimonials. They're a dance troupe, about to go on a tour of France and America, and as the scene jumps to a party, they've certainly got the moves. They've also got just as much drama going on as you might expect, horny as only a group of people in their twenties with the bodies of top athletes who have spent every waking hour the past few months demonstrating their physicality and artistic ambitions to each other can be. That's before it becomes clear that someone has dosed the sangria with LSD and the drive to discover who did it (focusing on the two who haven't been drinking and/or hitting the harder stuff all night) only adds to the rest of their emotions going into overdrive.
There are two or three extended sequence that are just this group dancing as their DJ Daddy (Kiddy Smile) lays down some beats and you could pull a lot of people into this movie under false pretenses by cutting a trailer that mostly draws from that. They're energetic stretches where Noé is playful, such as when he has cinematographer Benoît Debie shoot one entirely from above, highlighting the extended limbs and whipping hair of one dancer surrounded by a scrum rather than the precise synchronization of the Busby Berkeley numbers that shot is usually associated with. The opener is a long take that not only shows everyone off but eventually is kind of intriguing for being a long shot and for the way it presents the dancers, with moments where someone will hit the ground and the viewer can't be quite sure whether that's choreography or the cast being really good at recovery and Noé just accepting that as the price of not cutting.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
Independent Film Festival Boston 2013 Day 04: Secundaria, Night Labor, Computer Chess, Oxyana, and V/H/S/2
Only nine days behi... Oh, wait, the clock just struck midnight. Ten days behind!
Saturday was kind of a wacky day - I got my usual slow start, for a festival weekend day, and would spend some time bouncing back and forth between venues as the day went on, although there was more than enough time scheduled between "blocks" that it wasn't hard to get from one thing to another.
It was a day for busy lines, too - though it's usually easy enough to keep everyone at all five movies at the Somerville Theatre in one line during IFFBoston, they had the Much Ado About Nothing folks broken out during the afternoon, as the cult of Joss Whedon can get folks out for this sort of targeted event. The real surprise was around 9pm; while I waited for Oxyana: I sort of assumed the big crowd was for The Hunt, but apparently The Dirties brought out a big crowd; I wouldn't be surprised if they shuffled it from screen #2 to #5 to fit more people in. It was a rowdy crowd, too, for a movie that didn't really seem to leap off the page of the program for me.
Didn't have time for dinner - Boston Burger Company was packed, and I didn't want to wander much further from Davis Square (probably should have hit Tasty Burger after Computer Chess) - so I grabbed some snacks at the concession stand and Ian (the Somerville's manager) greeted me by name. That always freaks me out a bit - I don't post a lot of pictures of myself online or go introducing myself, so folks recognizing me means I've got to be pretty pretty ubiquitous. It's tough to get to the concession stand during the festival, since you'll often have everybody trying to fill a theater in a five minute period, and as I may have mentioned, with a lot of climbing over people and going back and forth in the theater, not to mention the merch cart and general loitering in the lobby. I half-jokingly suggested on Twitter that the theater ought to have a pushcart to sell some basics to folks waiting in line, but there's probably not enough sidewalk as there is.
OK, movies and guests!
There you have director Mary Jane Doherty, the composer (whose name I didn't get and can't find because the film's web and IMDB pages are shells), and producer Lyda Kuth. Ms. Doherty is a professor at BU, so there were a number of her students in the audience - meaning folks got called on by name and there were some inside jokes during the Q&A. It was a pretty friendly crowd.
SPOILERS!
The most interesting questions, naturally, revolved around the film's main subject Marya defecting to the United States at the climax - did she know what was going on? Did she assist? Did it make finishing the movie with Gabriela and Moises more difficult? No, no, and obviously. She said a couple of interesting things about the situation, though - for one, apparently defecting is almost considered an inevitable part of a ballerina's career in Cuba - every talented dancer walks away from a touring company eventually, although this was the first time a student had done so. The other was that before that happened, the movie was shaping up more as a sort of visual poem, but this is the sort of event that immediately puts everything that came before into a new context - that scene where Maryara's prize money is taken by the school goes from being about how poor Cuba is to how that sort of authoritarian system can push its talented youth away.
It turned out, I was seated in front of a Cuban ballerina. Not Maryara - she's apparently busy in Orlando as a lead dancer in that city's company - but someone who was able to leave Cuba by dint of her mother being Spanish and having dual citizenship.
!SRELIOPS
Add Cuba to the list of places I might like to visit someday, though - every movie I see shot there makes it look so lively, even where it's very poor. The Talk Cinema people do a trip to the film festival, but I think I'd rather wait until the country is more open and on its feet; I'd rather not engage in poverty tourism.
Man, is that the best picture I got of Computer Chess producer Andrew Finnigan (I think), actor Gerald Peary (better known as a local film critic and teacher), and the Brattle's Ned Hinkle? Let me check the phone...
That's better. Anyway, Gerry made a more impassioned plea than usual for folks to donate some money to IFFBoston, stating (not incorrectly) that it's kind of crazy that the festival is in its eleventh year and the folks in charge are still all volunteers, probably burning all their vacation time from their day jobs on this event (between spending a week running it and heading out to other festivals to scout potential selections).
I don't want to spend too much time on the Q&A (or this movie in general), because it kind of annoyed me, highlighting that this time it was mostly improvised (compared to Bujalski's previous films, which were actually tightly scripted but had the awkward stumbling feel of improvisation). It was the kind of discussion that served to push some of my buttons, with a lot of how they were casting people who already embodied the characters, and need a lot of nerds, so who are the nerdiest people you know - well, editors! The movie already had the sort of Big Bang Theory attitude I don't like - where the filmmakers are making the same mocking jokes about nerds as usual, but by throwing a few references in they expect to curry some favor. Combine this with a precious essay in the program and it's become pretty clear that this filmmaker's stuff is just not for me.
Oxyana director Sean Dunne, executive producer Colby Glenn, and (I think) co-producer Cass Marie Greener. No, I don't know why I get better shots from my phone than my real camera at this festival.
Anyway, they seemed like a really great group of folks, with a lot of respect for the people in their film that didn't seem insincere in the least. Like their movie, they were admirably straightforward and plain-spoken about what was going on down there, getting into why they thought towns like Oceana were mostly dealing with prescription drugs rather than meth or harder stuff (isolated enough that it's not yet worth expanding into the area) and why dealing with the problem was so problematic (a real "pray it away" attitude. As I mention in the review, I might have liked hearing some of that in the actual film, but that would have been hard to do with the people involved telling it in their own words.
So, that's Saturday at IFFBoston. Next up: A nearly-as-busy Sunday!
Secundaria
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
For someone who has never been to the ballet, I sure tend to find a lot of movies involving the combination of art and athleticism fascinating. Maybe it's the way that the intense discipline necessary to master the form naturally creates great drama as well as great beauty; maybe ballet is a tough enough sell to many Americans that what manages to make it on screen is exceptional. Either way, Secundaria is quite the strong documentary, even if some of its most interesting material isn't about the ballet itself.
Ballet is a big deal in Cuba, and vice versa, even if the island is best known for other styles. Many of the world's foremost companies have Cuban performers taking lead roles, though, with many of them trained at an internationally-renowned academy in Havana. This film follows three who entered the three-year program in 2007: Maryara, who lives in a small apartment with her mother and brother and rides a bus for an hour each way to get to the school; Gabriela, who by contrast comes from a comfortable background (her mother is a hotel accountant and her father is in the military); and Moises, a new friend of Maryara's who comes from one of Havana's poorest neighborhoods. At the start of each year, students are ranked by how they perform in a competition, and while Gabriela is one of the most heralded talents, Maryara surprises by coming in second for the whole school.
That's the story's starting point, and filmmaker Mary Jane Doherty sticks with these characters for the full three years rather than the more common path of choosing, say, a freshman, a senior, and a graduate and following them in parallel. It works out nicely; it means that the various threads don't play as disconnected while it seldom seems forced when the group interacts (although I half-suspect that the decision to make Moises one of the central characters was made later).
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Night Labor
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Documentary filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin had two features at IFFBoston last year; I saw the one about teenage Russian models in Japan rather than the one about the attempt to open a fish-processing plant in Maine. The latter would have been a natural complement to Night Labor, to the extent that I almost wonder if this film is constructed out of unused footage from the other.
The film focuses almost entirely on one man, Sherman Frank Merchant. He's the sort of fellow who looks his age and then some; there's evidence of a lot of hard living and cigarettes on his face. Now, he clams in the afternoon, eats his catch for dinner, and then works the night shift at the plant. He doesn't talk much, but he doesn't seem to have too many people to talk with.
And so, Night Labor is a documentary that is almost 100% pure observation. We watch Merchant go through what seems like a typical day, with no narration and no particular attempts to add context. Even when Merchant says something, it's not really directed to the camera as much as it's an under-his-breath muttering that brings Popeye to mind when the audience feels generous and that guy wandering the street or riding the bus who is so disgusted or enamored with something that he has to say it out loud. How much the audience enjoys the movie may be directly proportional to how much they see as interesting details and demonstrations of processes with which they weren't previously familiar versus how much seems like banal minutia.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Computer Chess
* * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in The Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
I think I'm done with Andrew Bujalski. I've seen three of his four films, and even the one I kind of liked didn't really impress me. And while I can see some merit in the ones like Computer Chess that bore me to frustration, it's not enough. This thing is just not clever enough to go without a story.
Sure, it sort of looks like it has a story: In the late 1970s/early 1980s, there's an annual convention where the developers of various chess-playing computer programs set their creations against each other round-robin style. The winner will play host and chessmaster Pat Henderson (Gerald Peary), although at the time, the idea that a computer could defeat a human being is ludicrous. Among the competitors are a team from MIT that includes Peter Bishton (Patrick Riester) and Tom Schoesser (Gordon Kindlmann); one from Cal Tech that includes Shelly (Robin Schwarts), the only girl in the tournament; independent operator Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige), who apparently hasn't booked a room; and a privately-funded team with Martin Beuscher (Wiley Wiggins). There's also a sort of swingers' group sharing the space, and... cats.
Bujalski and his cast of what are, for the most part, non-actors (Wiggins and Paige have prior credits but have been doing other things lately) create a few memorable characters, and a great many others that run together. As is often the case, there's a certain authenticity to their performances, especially since they are by and large editors, computer programmers, and others who can easily handle the retro-technical terms. Paige gets the most memorable character, with Papageorge just cynical and snide enough for his being thwarted to be entertaining but not quite enough to really get on the audience's bad side. Riester's Peter winds up drifting toward the center of the story, and he does project a likable everynerd quality.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Oxyana
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Addiction to prescription medication is hardly limited to rural America, but it thrives there. The reasons why communities like Oceana, West Viginia have such a serious problem with painkillers like Oxycontin are far from the first concern of this movie, which concerns itself almost entirely with showing the effects, becoming a tragic study in human frailty.
Director Sean Dunne builds the film almost entirely out of interviews with local residents; some are functioning addicts, some are dealers, some are relatives who have tried to get their loved ones into rehab but to no avail. There's a man suffering from cancer and the wife who is determined to go down with him. Young men who left for a little while after graduating from high school who came back to find their friends dying at an astonishing rate, and a dentist shocked at his patients' prescription requests. There's a couple of scenes with the district attorney and other officials, but not many; this isn't a story about enforcement.
They're country folks, in general, plain-spoken and not particularly prone to seeking anyone's pity. They spell out the reasons why they think drug abuse has become so endemic in towns like Oceana both as a trend and for themselves personally, and that they can communicate this clearly is somewhat unusual for movies about addiction: There's no metaphor to it, just a simple description of how each feels on and off oxy that makes it more easy than usual for the viewer to put themselves in their positions. Though the idea of "Appalachian Fatalism" is brought up, this tendency to think it's impossible to win brought on by (among other things) decades of exploitation by the coal industry never feels like the end of their arguments; there's a sad willingness to accept responsibility.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
V/H/S/2
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston After Dark, digital)
To call last year's V/H/S uneven would be generous; while it managed "pretty good" in a couple of segments, it was awful in more. Still, the good thing about commercially successful anthology films is that sequels need not be encumbered by prior entries' failings, and V/H/S/2 is a great example of this: The new segments feel tighter, more creative, and scarier than last time, with the new filmmakers inspired to top what came before and the returnees opting to step up their game.
The opening/wraparound story - "Tape 49" by Simon Barrett - is still kind of stupid; as the premise is apparently that these VHS tapes unleash monsters and/or make their viewers homicidal just by being VHS, and for all the format's shortcomings, I think you have to be a cinematographer to have that reaction. It's more fun than last time, though - the obnoxious bros from last time out have been replaced by a co-ed team of private investigators (Lawrence Michael Levine & Kelsey Abbot), and their pulpy banter is a definite step up, with the whole deal of them recording themselves watching the tapes they find actually making a reasonable amount of sense.
The first one they watch, "Clinical Trials" by Adam Wingard, has a premise borrowed from movies such as The Eye by the Pang Brothers: Guy (Wingard) is outfitted with a prosthetic eye which records everything it sees as part of its engineers' QA process, only to discover that he's now seeing things that normal people can't. Simple premise, but fun - Hannah Hughes soon pops up as a hot, sarcastic mentor figure and Wingard works plenty of good jumps and a fairly impressive escalation into the short's runtime. My biggest complaint is that it feels less like a complete short film than half a feature, stopping rather than ending just when things are starting to get good - or, alternately, getting out before Wingard has to build a boring mythology and get predictable.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Saturday was kind of a wacky day - I got my usual slow start, for a festival weekend day, and would spend some time bouncing back and forth between venues as the day went on, although there was more than enough time scheduled between "blocks" that it wasn't hard to get from one thing to another.
It was a day for busy lines, too - though it's usually easy enough to keep everyone at all five movies at the Somerville Theatre in one line during IFFBoston, they had the Much Ado About Nothing folks broken out during the afternoon, as the cult of Joss Whedon can get folks out for this sort of targeted event. The real surprise was around 9pm; while I waited for Oxyana: I sort of assumed the big crowd was for The Hunt, but apparently The Dirties brought out a big crowd; I wouldn't be surprised if they shuffled it from screen #2 to #5 to fit more people in. It was a rowdy crowd, too, for a movie that didn't really seem to leap off the page of the program for me.
Didn't have time for dinner - Boston Burger Company was packed, and I didn't want to wander much further from Davis Square (probably should have hit Tasty Burger after Computer Chess) - so I grabbed some snacks at the concession stand and Ian (the Somerville's manager) greeted me by name. That always freaks me out a bit - I don't post a lot of pictures of myself online or go introducing myself, so folks recognizing me means I've got to be pretty pretty ubiquitous. It's tough to get to the concession stand during the festival, since you'll often have everybody trying to fill a theater in a five minute period, and as I may have mentioned, with a lot of climbing over people and going back and forth in the theater, not to mention the merch cart and general loitering in the lobby. I half-jokingly suggested on Twitter that the theater ought to have a pushcart to sell some basics to folks waiting in line, but there's probably not enough sidewalk as there is.
OK, movies and guests!
There you have director Mary Jane Doherty, the composer (whose name I didn't get and can't find because the film's web and IMDB pages are shells), and producer Lyda Kuth. Ms. Doherty is a professor at BU, so there were a number of her students in the audience - meaning folks got called on by name and there were some inside jokes during the Q&A. It was a pretty friendly crowd.
SPOILERS!
The most interesting questions, naturally, revolved around the film's main subject Marya defecting to the United States at the climax - did she know what was going on? Did she assist? Did it make finishing the movie with Gabriela and Moises more difficult? No, no, and obviously. She said a couple of interesting things about the situation, though - for one, apparently defecting is almost considered an inevitable part of a ballerina's career in Cuba - every talented dancer walks away from a touring company eventually, although this was the first time a student had done so. The other was that before that happened, the movie was shaping up more as a sort of visual poem, but this is the sort of event that immediately puts everything that came before into a new context - that scene where Maryara's prize money is taken by the school goes from being about how poor Cuba is to how that sort of authoritarian system can push its talented youth away.
It turned out, I was seated in front of a Cuban ballerina. Not Maryara - she's apparently busy in Orlando as a lead dancer in that city's company - but someone who was able to leave Cuba by dint of her mother being Spanish and having dual citizenship.
!SRELIOPS
Add Cuba to the list of places I might like to visit someday, though - every movie I see shot there makes it look so lively, even where it's very poor. The Talk Cinema people do a trip to the film festival, but I think I'd rather wait until the country is more open and on its feet; I'd rather not engage in poverty tourism.
Man, is that the best picture I got of Computer Chess producer Andrew Finnigan (I think), actor Gerald Peary (better known as a local film critic and teacher), and the Brattle's Ned Hinkle? Let me check the phone...
That's better. Anyway, Gerry made a more impassioned plea than usual for folks to donate some money to IFFBoston, stating (not incorrectly) that it's kind of crazy that the festival is in its eleventh year and the folks in charge are still all volunteers, probably burning all their vacation time from their day jobs on this event (between spending a week running it and heading out to other festivals to scout potential selections).
I don't want to spend too much time on the Q&A (or this movie in general), because it kind of annoyed me, highlighting that this time it was mostly improvised (compared to Bujalski's previous films, which were actually tightly scripted but had the awkward stumbling feel of improvisation). It was the kind of discussion that served to push some of my buttons, with a lot of how they were casting people who already embodied the characters, and need a lot of nerds, so who are the nerdiest people you know - well, editors! The movie already had the sort of Big Bang Theory attitude I don't like - where the filmmakers are making the same mocking jokes about nerds as usual, but by throwing a few references in they expect to curry some favor. Combine this with a precious essay in the program and it's become pretty clear that this filmmaker's stuff is just not for me.
Oxyana director Sean Dunne, executive producer Colby Glenn, and (I think) co-producer Cass Marie Greener. No, I don't know why I get better shots from my phone than my real camera at this festival.
Anyway, they seemed like a really great group of folks, with a lot of respect for the people in their film that didn't seem insincere in the least. Like their movie, they were admirably straightforward and plain-spoken about what was going on down there, getting into why they thought towns like Oceana were mostly dealing with prescription drugs rather than meth or harder stuff (isolated enough that it's not yet worth expanding into the area) and why dealing with the problem was so problematic (a real "pray it away" attitude. As I mention in the review, I might have liked hearing some of that in the actual film, but that would have been hard to do with the people involved telling it in their own words.
So, that's Saturday at IFFBoston. Next up: A nearly-as-busy Sunday!
Secundaria
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
For someone who has never been to the ballet, I sure tend to find a lot of movies involving the combination of art and athleticism fascinating. Maybe it's the way that the intense discipline necessary to master the form naturally creates great drama as well as great beauty; maybe ballet is a tough enough sell to many Americans that what manages to make it on screen is exceptional. Either way, Secundaria is quite the strong documentary, even if some of its most interesting material isn't about the ballet itself.
Ballet is a big deal in Cuba, and vice versa, even if the island is best known for other styles. Many of the world's foremost companies have Cuban performers taking lead roles, though, with many of them trained at an internationally-renowned academy in Havana. This film follows three who entered the three-year program in 2007: Maryara, who lives in a small apartment with her mother and brother and rides a bus for an hour each way to get to the school; Gabriela, who by contrast comes from a comfortable background (her mother is a hotel accountant and her father is in the military); and Moises, a new friend of Maryara's who comes from one of Havana's poorest neighborhoods. At the start of each year, students are ranked by how they perform in a competition, and while Gabriela is one of the most heralded talents, Maryara surprises by coming in second for the whole school.
That's the story's starting point, and filmmaker Mary Jane Doherty sticks with these characters for the full three years rather than the more common path of choosing, say, a freshman, a senior, and a graduate and following them in parallel. It works out nicely; it means that the various threads don't play as disconnected while it seldom seems forced when the group interacts (although I half-suspect that the decision to make Moises one of the central characters was made later).
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Night Labor
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Documentary filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin had two features at IFFBoston last year; I saw the one about teenage Russian models in Japan rather than the one about the attempt to open a fish-processing plant in Maine. The latter would have been a natural complement to Night Labor, to the extent that I almost wonder if this film is constructed out of unused footage from the other.
The film focuses almost entirely on one man, Sherman Frank Merchant. He's the sort of fellow who looks his age and then some; there's evidence of a lot of hard living and cigarettes on his face. Now, he clams in the afternoon, eats his catch for dinner, and then works the night shift at the plant. He doesn't talk much, but he doesn't seem to have too many people to talk with.
And so, Night Labor is a documentary that is almost 100% pure observation. We watch Merchant go through what seems like a typical day, with no narration and no particular attempts to add context. Even when Merchant says something, it's not really directed to the camera as much as it's an under-his-breath muttering that brings Popeye to mind when the audience feels generous and that guy wandering the street or riding the bus who is so disgusted or enamored with something that he has to say it out loud. How much the audience enjoys the movie may be directly proportional to how much they see as interesting details and demonstrations of processes with which they weren't previously familiar versus how much seems like banal minutia.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Computer Chess
* * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in The Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
I think I'm done with Andrew Bujalski. I've seen three of his four films, and even the one I kind of liked didn't really impress me. And while I can see some merit in the ones like Computer Chess that bore me to frustration, it's not enough. This thing is just not clever enough to go without a story.
Sure, it sort of looks like it has a story: In the late 1970s/early 1980s, there's an annual convention where the developers of various chess-playing computer programs set their creations against each other round-robin style. The winner will play host and chessmaster Pat Henderson (Gerald Peary), although at the time, the idea that a computer could defeat a human being is ludicrous. Among the competitors are a team from MIT that includes Peter Bishton (Patrick Riester) and Tom Schoesser (Gordon Kindlmann); one from Cal Tech that includes Shelly (Robin Schwarts), the only girl in the tournament; independent operator Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige), who apparently hasn't booked a room; and a privately-funded team with Martin Beuscher (Wiley Wiggins). There's also a sort of swingers' group sharing the space, and... cats.
Bujalski and his cast of what are, for the most part, non-actors (Wiggins and Paige have prior credits but have been doing other things lately) create a few memorable characters, and a great many others that run together. As is often the case, there's a certain authenticity to their performances, especially since they are by and large editors, computer programmers, and others who can easily handle the retro-technical terms. Paige gets the most memorable character, with Papageorge just cynical and snide enough for his being thwarted to be entertaining but not quite enough to really get on the audience's bad side. Riester's Peter winds up drifting toward the center of the story, and he does project a likable everynerd quality.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Oxyana
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in Somerville Theatre #4 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)
Addiction to prescription medication is hardly limited to rural America, but it thrives there. The reasons why communities like Oceana, West Viginia have such a serious problem with painkillers like Oxycontin are far from the first concern of this movie, which concerns itself almost entirely with showing the effects, becoming a tragic study in human frailty.
Director Sean Dunne builds the film almost entirely out of interviews with local residents; some are functioning addicts, some are dealers, some are relatives who have tried to get their loved ones into rehab but to no avail. There's a man suffering from cancer and the wife who is determined to go down with him. Young men who left for a little while after graduating from high school who came back to find their friends dying at an astonishing rate, and a dentist shocked at his patients' prescription requests. There's a couple of scenes with the district attorney and other officials, but not many; this isn't a story about enforcement.
They're country folks, in general, plain-spoken and not particularly prone to seeking anyone's pity. They spell out the reasons why they think drug abuse has become so endemic in towns like Oceana both as a trend and for themselves personally, and that they can communicate this clearly is somewhat unusual for movies about addiction: There's no metaphor to it, just a simple description of how each feels on and off oxy that makes it more easy than usual for the viewer to put themselves in their positions. Though the idea of "Appalachian Fatalism" is brought up, this tendency to think it's impossible to win brought on by (among other things) decades of exploitation by the coal industry never feels like the end of their arguments; there's a sad willingness to accept responsibility.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
V/H/S/2
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2013 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston After Dark, digital)
To call last year's V/H/S uneven would be generous; while it managed "pretty good" in a couple of segments, it was awful in more. Still, the good thing about commercially successful anthology films is that sequels need not be encumbered by prior entries' failings, and V/H/S/2 is a great example of this: The new segments feel tighter, more creative, and scarier than last time, with the new filmmakers inspired to top what came before and the returnees opting to step up their game.
The opening/wraparound story - "Tape 49" by Simon Barrett - is still kind of stupid; as the premise is apparently that these VHS tapes unleash monsters and/or make their viewers homicidal just by being VHS, and for all the format's shortcomings, I think you have to be a cinematographer to have that reaction. It's more fun than last time, though - the obnoxious bros from last time out have been replaced by a co-ed team of private investigators (Lawrence Michael Levine & Kelsey Abbot), and their pulpy banter is a definite step up, with the whole deal of them recording themselves watching the tapes they find actually making a reasonable amount of sense.
The first one they watch, "Clinical Trials" by Adam Wingard, has a premise borrowed from movies such as The Eye by the Pang Brothers: Guy (Wingard) is outfitted with a prosthetic eye which records everything it sees as part of its engineers' QA process, only to discover that he's now seeing things that normal people can't. Simple premise, but fun - Hannah Hughes soon pops up as a hot, sarcastic mentor figure and Wingard works plenty of good jumps and a fairly impressive escalation into the short's runtime. My biggest complaint is that it feels less like a complete short film than half a feature, stopping rather than ending just when things are starting to get good - or, alternately, getting out before Wingard has to build a boring mythology and get predictable.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Ginger Rogers & singular talents: Monkey Business, The Major and the Minor, Swing Time, and The Gay Divorcee
The program notes for the Brattle's Ginger Rogers tribute, "Backwards and in High Heels", note that even that title doesn't really do her justice. After all, the quotation it comes from (pointing out that yeah, Fred Astaire was great, but Ginger Rogers did everything he did backwards and in high heels) is not actually about her. Rather, it's about women in general, how they often have to work harder for lesser recognition. It's almost political, really, as opposed to pointing out just how great she was on-screen.
After all, she's clearly more than Astaire's dance partner. I admit to not being hugely impressed when I saw her in Tight Spot a few months ago; she brought a big personality a B movie that really wasn't very good despite her presence alongside Brian Keith and Edward G. Robinson, and while I think I've seen her in some other stuff (I want to say a Jimmy Stewart western), a concentrated dose of her as 2011 came to a close led me to really appreciate her screen persona. It's actually pretty close to what I imagine her Tight Spot character must have been like when younger, sassy and capable and funny. She's also a bona fide good actress right from the start; even when she's being second-billed to Fred Astaire or Cary Grant (or set to be upstaged by a young Marilyn Monroe), she's always the best thing about these movies.
Well, unless you compare her to Astaire as a dancer, maybe. It gets back to the "backwards in high heels" thing, but it did often seem as though Fred was doing the longer sequences of quicker steps, although it's not like he was spinning as much, and I'll bet twirling in heels is an order of magnitude more difficult than throwing down a few taps. But what do I know? I've got a lot more experience watching martial arts flicks than musicals, and I'm not exactly great at figuring which stuff is really hard there, either.
It's funny, though, that I can spend the three or four months from my first day at the New York Asian Film Festival to when I'm finally done with my Fantasia reviews pumping out a whole bunch of text about a slew of sometimes very similar kung fu and horror movies and feel like I'm hitting each one fresh, but present me with two RKO musicals to write up back to back, and I almost feel like I'm writing the same thing twice. I don't know if I felt that when reviewing three versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles in rapid succession!
In a way, though, Hong Kong filmmaking is sort of the last bastion of the mindset that made movies like Swing Time, and even there, it's kind of diluted these days, as the cross-pollination with Hollywood makes those action movies a little more story-oriented. I mention this is the review of Swing Time, but while movies like it and The Gay Divorcee are nominally telling a story, that wasn't really what they were for, and to some extent you have to keep this sort of thing in mind when watching flicks from the thirties and forties: With no television, let alone home video, and travel options better than they were a generation before but not as good as they would be a generation later, the local cinema was the best way for someone in a small town (or even a city off the main rail lines) to see talented people doing the things they excelled at, and the studio supplied that.
So you'd get something like Swing Time, which is awfully close to being five or six dance numbers strung together with the absolute minimum connective tissue needed to call it a story for those who won't pay their nickel to see people dance. Warner Brothers would build musicals around their library of songs, sticking singers in the middle for much the same purpose movies would be built around Astaire dancing or Sonja Henie skating - these things were draws, because you couldn't get them anywhere else.
You see echoes of that today - plays, operas, and ballets broadcast to theaters that project them digitally, and even if Hong Kong has put stronger spines in their action movies (or diluted the displays of martial skill with special effects), Thailand is still cranking out movies that are basically "these guys can move; watch them do their thing". And it's not a bad thing that everything is more accessible these days But it's a funny thing - as film has become a more sophisticated, better storytelling medium, they've narrowed to become little but, and we seem to have lost some ability to love them as exhibitions. The closest thing we've got to that today are FX-driven blockbusters, and making them gorgeous, state of the art, and amazing with story a secondary focus has become an unforgivable sin.
Certainly, I was disappointed at Swing Time when I looked at it as a story interrupted by dance numbers, but as dance numbers loosely held together by story, well, what makes it less worthy than Pina? It's just using a different method to stitch things together.
Monkey Business (1952)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 December 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Backwards and in High Heels)
The high concept comedy has been relatively common at various points in cinematic history, and while the type that go past high concept to outright fantasy are more common now than ever, they're not new: You've always had the likes of Topper and Bell, Book and Candle. Something like Monkey Business is still an odd thing to see sixty years later, a goofy comedy less driven by (then) current societal mores than absurd innovation.
The chief innovator is Dr. Barnaby Fulton (Cary Grant), a research chemist for Oxley Chemical Company searching for a rejuvenation formula. Well, maybe it's actually the chimp who gets out of her cage, randomly mixes some chemicals, and then dumps the result in the water cooler. After drinking it, not only does Barnaby feel twenty years younger, he starts acting it as well, opting to play hooky from work. Company owner Oliver Oxley (Charles Coburn) sends secretary Lois Laurel (Marilyn Monroe) to find him - and while she's not that bright, she sure is radiant, which could potentially cause trouble with Barnaby's wife Edwina (Ginger Rogers).
Director Howard Hawks made great movies in several genres, but when he turns sights on screwball comedy, well, it can get exceptionally screwy. Monkey Business is deliriously silly, even more so than Hawks's and Grant's Bringing Up Baby, but in many ways the story (by four credited writers, with Hawks involved as well) is actually pretty tight, in that once you accept the premise that a concoction mixed by a chimp can revert otherwise stiff people to their more freewheeling youth, everything else follows pretty logically from that; it's just a matter of arranging things so that the characters stumble into gags rather than tragedy. Well, OK, some bits toward the end are a bit off, though they still draw laughs even if one is a stretch and the other would be seen as kind of politically incorrect nowadays.
Full review at EFC.
The Major and the Minor
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 December 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Backwards and in High Heels)
The next time some old person starts loudly complaining about how movies today are just strange or perverted compared to the old days, just turn around and remind grandpa that he (or his parents) probably paid money to see The Major and the Minor, a romantic comedy in which a thirty-year-old Ginger Rogers plays a character in her mid-twenties who potentially becomes a rival for a man's affection by making him think she's a twelve-year-old girl.
That's not her goal, of course - as the movie starts, Susan Applegate (Rogers) is a small-town girl who has given New York City her best shot and now just wants to go back home. Unfortunately, the money she has set aside for her train ticket back is no longer enough, but seeing a girl not much smaller than herself pay child's fare gives her an idea. Circumstances lead to her hiding out in the cabin of one Major Kirby (Ray Milland), and when the train stops because of a flooded track, Kirby and his fiancée Pamela (Rita Johnson) offer to put "Su-Su" up at the military academy where he teaches for a few days - and while the adults and many of the cadets are fooled, Pamela's sister Lucy (Diana Lynn) isn't buying it at all.
In the wrong hands, The Major and the Minor could become something really grotesque, but that's what makes it so much fun: Even though it was a little more acceptable for a young man to court a teenage girl when the movie came out in 1942, Billy Wilder makes sure the apparent age difference is enough to be creepy when looked at from most any perspective, and has a fine time stepping over the line just enough to make the audience squirm before dancing back again. The script (by Wilder and Charles Brackett, from a story by Fanny Kilbourne by way of a Edward Carpenter's play) is well-balanced between Susan being placed in uncomfortable positions and doing so to others, which keeps things from straying into really uncomfortable territory.
Full review at EFC.
Swing Time
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Backwards and in High Heels)
"Formula" is a bit of a dirty word when talking about film today, but there's a sort of awesome purity to how it was applied back in the pre-home video, pre-television "Golden Age of Cinema": RKO has a guy who can dance really well under contract, so the producers tell the writers to come up with a script that starts with him dancing, ends with him dancing, and doesn't go more than twenty minutes or so at a stretch without him dancing. The director directs, the studio ships it to their theaters, where the people who haven't seen that guy dance in a few months buy their tickets. Then they do it again. It doesn't always result in great movies, but they certainly give the audience what they were looking for.
This one opens with Lucky Garnett (Fred Astaire) doing his last dance as part of a traveling show before getting married to Margaret Watson (Betty Furness), at least until his fellow performers sabotage him. As a result, Lucky ends up in New York, having promised to earn $25,000 to show he's responsible. So, of course, he and his magician friend Pop Cardetti (Victor Moore) immediately causes a series of misunderstandings at a dance school that gets teacher Penny Carroll (Ginger Rogers) and receptionist Mabel Anderson (Helen Broderick) fired. Still, it doesn't take long before people realize that Lucky and Penny have great chemistry on and off the dance floor.
Describing Fred Astaire as just "a guy who can dance really well" obviously undersells him quite a bit, but there's little denying that Swing Time is built to showcase how well Astaire and Rogers work their feet: There are five or six dance numbers in a 103-minute movie, and at times it feels as if the powers that be sense Lucky and Carroll have gone too long without dancing and so arrange circumstances to make them start. The script relies on weak plot devices like Lucky never losing when he gambles, and is just amazingly eager to wrap things up at the end. It's a dance delivery system as much as it's a story.
Full review at EFC.
The Gay Divorcee
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Backwards and in High Heels)
I am sure that somewhere in The Gay Divorcee, there's a moment that at least made sense eighty years ago, because it all seems rather adorably silly now. Well, maybe not all - Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers can dance and even spark a bit when sitting down, and that will get you a long way.
This time around, Astaire plays Guy Holden, a famous American dancer come to Europe for some time out of the spotlight visiting his English friend Egbert "Pinky" Fitzgerald (Edward Everett Horton). Pinky is watching the store at the family law firm when Mimi Glossop (Ginger Rogers) - a lady who married young and now only hears from her husband when he wants access to her money - walks in looking for a divorce, her Aunt Hortense (Alice Brady), who has been on this merry-go-round several times, in tow. Apparently, the best way about this is for Mimi to be caught in a hotel room with a gigolo (Erik Rhodes), so Pinky sets that up at a Brighton resort. He asks Guy to come along, hoping a few days at the beach will help him get his mind off the girl he met when he first arrived in England... Not realizing that Mimi is that girl.
To call a movie like The Gay Divorcee goofy or ridiculous is actually a sort of compliment. It is, after all, a farce, based on piling mistaken identities and missed connections until they can be stacked no more and fall over. If the story ever slowed down enough for somebody to think, the thing would fall apart completely, and to a certain extent, it does - it goes from being snappy to requiring a character to be even more ridiculous than previously established to draw things out even more toward the end before heading to a rushed wrap-up. And just getting to the resort seems to take longer than it should.
Full review at EFC.
After all, she's clearly more than Astaire's dance partner. I admit to not being hugely impressed when I saw her in Tight Spot a few months ago; she brought a big personality a B movie that really wasn't very good despite her presence alongside Brian Keith and Edward G. Robinson, and while I think I've seen her in some other stuff (I want to say a Jimmy Stewart western), a concentrated dose of her as 2011 came to a close led me to really appreciate her screen persona. It's actually pretty close to what I imagine her Tight Spot character must have been like when younger, sassy and capable and funny. She's also a bona fide good actress right from the start; even when she's being second-billed to Fred Astaire or Cary Grant (or set to be upstaged by a young Marilyn Monroe), she's always the best thing about these movies.
Well, unless you compare her to Astaire as a dancer, maybe. It gets back to the "backwards in high heels" thing, but it did often seem as though Fred was doing the longer sequences of quicker steps, although it's not like he was spinning as much, and I'll bet twirling in heels is an order of magnitude more difficult than throwing down a few taps. But what do I know? I've got a lot more experience watching martial arts flicks than musicals, and I'm not exactly great at figuring which stuff is really hard there, either.
It's funny, though, that I can spend the three or four months from my first day at the New York Asian Film Festival to when I'm finally done with my Fantasia reviews pumping out a whole bunch of text about a slew of sometimes very similar kung fu and horror movies and feel like I'm hitting each one fresh, but present me with two RKO musicals to write up back to back, and I almost feel like I'm writing the same thing twice. I don't know if I felt that when reviewing three versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles in rapid succession!
In a way, though, Hong Kong filmmaking is sort of the last bastion of the mindset that made movies like Swing Time, and even there, it's kind of diluted these days, as the cross-pollination with Hollywood makes those action movies a little more story-oriented. I mention this is the review of Swing Time, but while movies like it and The Gay Divorcee are nominally telling a story, that wasn't really what they were for, and to some extent you have to keep this sort of thing in mind when watching flicks from the thirties and forties: With no television, let alone home video, and travel options better than they were a generation before but not as good as they would be a generation later, the local cinema was the best way for someone in a small town (or even a city off the main rail lines) to see talented people doing the things they excelled at, and the studio supplied that.
So you'd get something like Swing Time, which is awfully close to being five or six dance numbers strung together with the absolute minimum connective tissue needed to call it a story for those who won't pay their nickel to see people dance. Warner Brothers would build musicals around their library of songs, sticking singers in the middle for much the same purpose movies would be built around Astaire dancing or Sonja Henie skating - these things were draws, because you couldn't get them anywhere else.
You see echoes of that today - plays, operas, and ballets broadcast to theaters that project them digitally, and even if Hong Kong has put stronger spines in their action movies (or diluted the displays of martial skill with special effects), Thailand is still cranking out movies that are basically "these guys can move; watch them do their thing". And it's not a bad thing that everything is more accessible these days But it's a funny thing - as film has become a more sophisticated, better storytelling medium, they've narrowed to become little but, and we seem to have lost some ability to love them as exhibitions. The closest thing we've got to that today are FX-driven blockbusters, and making them gorgeous, state of the art, and amazing with story a secondary focus has become an unforgivable sin.
Certainly, I was disappointed at Swing Time when I looked at it as a story interrupted by dance numbers, but as dance numbers loosely held together by story, well, what makes it less worthy than Pina? It's just using a different method to stitch things together.
Monkey Business (1952)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 December 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Backwards and in High Heels)
The high concept comedy has been relatively common at various points in cinematic history, and while the type that go past high concept to outright fantasy are more common now than ever, they're not new: You've always had the likes of Topper and Bell, Book and Candle. Something like Monkey Business is still an odd thing to see sixty years later, a goofy comedy less driven by (then) current societal mores than absurd innovation.
The chief innovator is Dr. Barnaby Fulton (Cary Grant), a research chemist for Oxley Chemical Company searching for a rejuvenation formula. Well, maybe it's actually the chimp who gets out of her cage, randomly mixes some chemicals, and then dumps the result in the water cooler. After drinking it, not only does Barnaby feel twenty years younger, he starts acting it as well, opting to play hooky from work. Company owner Oliver Oxley (Charles Coburn) sends secretary Lois Laurel (Marilyn Monroe) to find him - and while she's not that bright, she sure is radiant, which could potentially cause trouble with Barnaby's wife Edwina (Ginger Rogers).
Director Howard Hawks made great movies in several genres, but when he turns sights on screwball comedy, well, it can get exceptionally screwy. Monkey Business is deliriously silly, even more so than Hawks's and Grant's Bringing Up Baby, but in many ways the story (by four credited writers, with Hawks involved as well) is actually pretty tight, in that once you accept the premise that a concoction mixed by a chimp can revert otherwise stiff people to their more freewheeling youth, everything else follows pretty logically from that; it's just a matter of arranging things so that the characters stumble into gags rather than tragedy. Well, OK, some bits toward the end are a bit off, though they still draw laughs even if one is a stretch and the other would be seen as kind of politically incorrect nowadays.
Full review at EFC.
The Major and the Minor
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 December 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Backwards and in High Heels)
The next time some old person starts loudly complaining about how movies today are just strange or perverted compared to the old days, just turn around and remind grandpa that he (or his parents) probably paid money to see The Major and the Minor, a romantic comedy in which a thirty-year-old Ginger Rogers plays a character in her mid-twenties who potentially becomes a rival for a man's affection by making him think she's a twelve-year-old girl.
That's not her goal, of course - as the movie starts, Susan Applegate (Rogers) is a small-town girl who has given New York City her best shot and now just wants to go back home. Unfortunately, the money she has set aside for her train ticket back is no longer enough, but seeing a girl not much smaller than herself pay child's fare gives her an idea. Circumstances lead to her hiding out in the cabin of one Major Kirby (Ray Milland), and when the train stops because of a flooded track, Kirby and his fiancée Pamela (Rita Johnson) offer to put "Su-Su" up at the military academy where he teaches for a few days - and while the adults and many of the cadets are fooled, Pamela's sister Lucy (Diana Lynn) isn't buying it at all.
In the wrong hands, The Major and the Minor could become something really grotesque, but that's what makes it so much fun: Even though it was a little more acceptable for a young man to court a teenage girl when the movie came out in 1942, Billy Wilder makes sure the apparent age difference is enough to be creepy when looked at from most any perspective, and has a fine time stepping over the line just enough to make the audience squirm before dancing back again. The script (by Wilder and Charles Brackett, from a story by Fanny Kilbourne by way of a Edward Carpenter's play) is well-balanced between Susan being placed in uncomfortable positions and doing so to others, which keeps things from straying into really uncomfortable territory.
Full review at EFC.
Swing Time
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Backwards and in High Heels)
"Formula" is a bit of a dirty word when talking about film today, but there's a sort of awesome purity to how it was applied back in the pre-home video, pre-television "Golden Age of Cinema": RKO has a guy who can dance really well under contract, so the producers tell the writers to come up with a script that starts with him dancing, ends with him dancing, and doesn't go more than twenty minutes or so at a stretch without him dancing. The director directs, the studio ships it to their theaters, where the people who haven't seen that guy dance in a few months buy their tickets. Then they do it again. It doesn't always result in great movies, but they certainly give the audience what they were looking for.
This one opens with Lucky Garnett (Fred Astaire) doing his last dance as part of a traveling show before getting married to Margaret Watson (Betty Furness), at least until his fellow performers sabotage him. As a result, Lucky ends up in New York, having promised to earn $25,000 to show he's responsible. So, of course, he and his magician friend Pop Cardetti (Victor Moore) immediately causes a series of misunderstandings at a dance school that gets teacher Penny Carroll (Ginger Rogers) and receptionist Mabel Anderson (Helen Broderick) fired. Still, it doesn't take long before people realize that Lucky and Penny have great chemistry on and off the dance floor.
Describing Fred Astaire as just "a guy who can dance really well" obviously undersells him quite a bit, but there's little denying that Swing Time is built to showcase how well Astaire and Rogers work their feet: There are five or six dance numbers in a 103-minute movie, and at times it feels as if the powers that be sense Lucky and Carroll have gone too long without dancing and so arrange circumstances to make them start. The script relies on weak plot devices like Lucky never losing when he gambles, and is just amazingly eager to wrap things up at the end. It's a dance delivery system as much as it's a story.
Full review at EFC.
The Gay Divorcee
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2011 in the Brattle Theatre (Backwards and in High Heels)
I am sure that somewhere in The Gay Divorcee, there's a moment that at least made sense eighty years ago, because it all seems rather adorably silly now. Well, maybe not all - Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers can dance and even spark a bit when sitting down, and that will get you a long way.
This time around, Astaire plays Guy Holden, a famous American dancer come to Europe for some time out of the spotlight visiting his English friend Egbert "Pinky" Fitzgerald (Edward Everett Horton). Pinky is watching the store at the family law firm when Mimi Glossop (Ginger Rogers) - a lady who married young and now only hears from her husband when he wants access to her money - walks in looking for a divorce, her Aunt Hortense (Alice Brady), who has been on this merry-go-round several times, in tow. Apparently, the best way about this is for Mimi to be caught in a hotel room with a gigolo (Erik Rhodes), so Pinky sets that up at a Brighton resort. He asks Guy to come along, hoping a few days at the beach will help him get his mind off the girl he met when he first arrived in England... Not realizing that Mimi is that girl.
To call a movie like The Gay Divorcee goofy or ridiculous is actually a sort of compliment. It is, after all, a farce, based on piling mistaken identities and missed connections until they can be stacked no more and fall over. If the story ever slowed down enough for somebody to think, the thing would fall apart completely, and to a certain extent, it does - it goes from being snappy to requiring a character to be even more ridiculous than previously established to draw things out even more toward the end before heading to a rushed wrap-up. And just getting to the resort seems to take longer than it should.
Full review at EFC.
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