Hey, it's a (semi) new release during the pandemic! It's one of two currently playing at the Virtual Coolidge Corner Theatre, and the easiest to watch on my TV - I'd kind of meant to get the Vimeo app downloaded to my Roku anyway. Also, $5, with a chunk of that going to the Coolidge.
Am I looking forward to some of their other selections more? A bit. As I mention in the review which I can't seem to post to EFC right now, I did feel like the last leg takes a bit of a turn from solid science into something a little squishier, which is not my thing. It had always been there, but it goes from seeming like individual personality to the film's focus.
Perhaps this will be addressed some in the Q&As scheduled for later tonight (26 March 2020) - though the first has already started, there are others at 9pm and midnight, Eastern Daylight Time. All in all, it a good way to see some impressive nature cinematography, learn a little bit, and kick something the Coolidge's way while stuck at home.
Fantastic Fungi
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, Vimeo)
Fantastic Fungi is put together so well that it may take some sort of interruption while watching it to notice that it has seemingly gone from "nifty science documentary" to "cult recruitment video" without causing whiplash. It's impressive editing, actually, when a film can make you sit up and wonder just how you got somewhere seemingly so far from where you started, and then look at it in whole and say, actually, that's not so big a trip after all.
It starts out as a sort of primer on mycology, mushrooms, and fungi in general, pointing out that fungi are both the oldest and youngest, and largest/smallest species on Earth, and have multiple roles to play in holding various types of ecology together, from breaking dead plants and animals down into their component pieces to forming underground networks that allow trees and other plant life in an area to share resources. Some of this will be familiar from high school biology classes; other bits may not be, and there's a bit on how, more than is the case in many fields, mycology is often advanced by civilian scientists.
You can get that out of a book, but the film directed by Louie Schwartzberg and written by Mark Monroe makes great use of its medium with terrific visuals and animation, with both digital imagery and time-lapse photography used exceptionally well for this fairly small-scale documentary, at points apparently augmenting each other without the digital work taking anything from the impressive photography of these peculiar life-forms. What's especially notable is how clearly and impressively some of these sequences work as explainers; a repeated motif makes the soil transparent while the air above is a brownish fog, demonstrating how the underground mycelial networks extend and connect tree roots, for example, an image that is cool but not overwhelming.
Brie Larson narrates the movie in character as the world's fungi, but the less-well-known people who populate it are generally a genial bunch, eager to pass on knowledge and well-aware of what an unusual field they are in. Most of the screen time goes to Paul Stamets, a largely self-taught mycologist who spent years as a logger getting an up-close look at how fungi operate in the forest, and it's not a bad decision; he's both down-to-earth and authoritative, looking well at home no matter where the movie finds him. Though he is far from the only expert on display, he's the one who appears as the film moves through various subjects, uniting them.
That includes what are often referred to as "magic mushrooms", whose hallucinogenic and medicinal properties become the primary focus of the films last half hour or so, and it's there that the film often seems to become a bit unmoored: Stamets and the others interviewed during this portion of the film take on the zeal of believers rather than the enthusiasm of scientists (whether professional or amateur), the claims become wilder, and the evidence more anecdotal. The imagery shifts from illustrating science to psychedelic imagery, reflecting the subtle but important shift from "how this works" to "what this does". All of this material may be true, but it feels less solid, though Schwartzberg and his team have done a good job of laying the sort of foundation that lets them stretch a little.
The information in that last act is potentially valuable and enlightening, though its enthusiasm for how perfectly useful fungi can be for people is sometimes a bit in conflict with how other parts of the film are careful not to ascribe intent to nature. The film gets there well enough that its issues may be simply the result of encountering an overly-developed skepticism; it's a sleek, informative, well-presented introduction to the topic otherwise.
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Thursday, February 27, 2020
The Woman Who Loves Giraffes
Gone from Boston, I'm afraid, as this was a last-chance special, where I show up at Kendall Square on the last day, it's in theater 9, and just well-enough attended that I ponder the question of whether they should have kept it around another few days or whether this many people showed up because they knew it would only be around seven days. But it's only a month or so away from being available on disc and presumably the streaming service of one's choice.
Afterward, I wondered about recommending it to my nieces and friends with young girls that like science. Part of why I want to recommend it is that it's not entirely sanitized - there are some dead and dismembered giraffes, but director Alison Reid is aware of how this is awful but also useful to a scientist, and how sometimes you have to wrestle with that. The full review mentions a bit where Anne Dagg is conversing with another scientist whose arm is up a pregnant giraffe's uterus to give it a sonogram, but I kind of think that's a great test - if a kid is fascinated by the icky thing, they're who this movie was made for.
Still, it's tough for me to wholeheartedly recommend things for young girls when a big part of the story is "so, this great role model just got completely crapped on for most of her life because she was a woman". I've got no idea how you get kids to extract the positive from something like that. I think Reid does a pretty great job of focusing on how Dagg became admired despite that, but it's obviously major privilege that I don't have to worry about it much myself.
One last fun thing, going over Reid's IMDB entry - she's got a twenty-odd-year career as a stuntperson and stunt co-ordinator, so it's a pretty cool shift to wind up making this documentary. Broad interests, apparently!
The Woman Who Loves Giraffes
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
The Woman Who Loves Giraffes is the sort of movie that would have me smiling hugely from end to end if it weren't for friggin people, denying Anne Innis Dagg tenure because she's a woman, curtailing her field studies, and driving the reticulated giraffe toward extinction. It's still a genuine delight for much of its time on screen, one that happily translates fondness for its subjects into something the audience will share, but it's still got plentiful moments when one wants humanity to do better.
The woman of the title is Anne Innis Dagg, who was amazed by her first sight of a giraffe when taken to Chicago's Broadfield Zoo at the age of three and never lost that interest through school, eventually going to South Africa to study the animals in the wild in 1956. This was a bigger deal than it may sound; not only was scientific study of wild animals in situ a new field (she actually arrived in Africa years before Goodall and Fossey), but most of the places where she set up shop would dismiss her out of hand upon hearing she was a woman - rancher Alexander Matthew initially assumed "A. Innis" was a man before allowing her to use his Fleur-de-Lys plantation as her base of operations. He would eventually grow to respect her dedication, and the observations she made over those months would form the basis of a book that, decades later, was still the pre-eminent reference in the field.
And yet, this groundbreaking work would not get her tenure at the universities where she taught in the 1960s, and she would spend much of the 1970s fighting to have this sexism recognized as discrimination in front of various Canadian courts and academic organizations. Reid dedicates a significant amount of time in the film's second half to this, and handles it in conscientious fashion: This is a major part of Dagg's story, and it would be easy to spend more time on it, since it involves human conflict and things the audience can directly relate to, but Reid is careful not to let it overwhelm the more upbeat facets of the film. There's vindication as she is rediscovered and honored by those she has inspired, and pangs as one wonders just what she could have done had her career not been sidelined, but Reid opts to make what Dagg achieved the focus of her film, rather than how men stymied her.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Afterward, I wondered about recommending it to my nieces and friends with young girls that like science. Part of why I want to recommend it is that it's not entirely sanitized - there are some dead and dismembered giraffes, but director Alison Reid is aware of how this is awful but also useful to a scientist, and how sometimes you have to wrestle with that. The full review mentions a bit where Anne Dagg is conversing with another scientist whose arm is up a pregnant giraffe's uterus to give it a sonogram, but I kind of think that's a great test - if a kid is fascinated by the icky thing, they're who this movie was made for.
Still, it's tough for me to wholeheartedly recommend things for young girls when a big part of the story is "so, this great role model just got completely crapped on for most of her life because she was a woman". I've got no idea how you get kids to extract the positive from something like that. I think Reid does a pretty great job of focusing on how Dagg became admired despite that, but it's obviously major privilege that I don't have to worry about it much myself.
One last fun thing, going over Reid's IMDB entry - she's got a twenty-odd-year career as a stuntperson and stunt co-ordinator, so it's a pretty cool shift to wind up making this documentary. Broad interests, apparently!
The Woman Who Loves Giraffes
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
The Woman Who Loves Giraffes is the sort of movie that would have me smiling hugely from end to end if it weren't for friggin people, denying Anne Innis Dagg tenure because she's a woman, curtailing her field studies, and driving the reticulated giraffe toward extinction. It's still a genuine delight for much of its time on screen, one that happily translates fondness for its subjects into something the audience will share, but it's still got plentiful moments when one wants humanity to do better.
The woman of the title is Anne Innis Dagg, who was amazed by her first sight of a giraffe when taken to Chicago's Broadfield Zoo at the age of three and never lost that interest through school, eventually going to South Africa to study the animals in the wild in 1956. This was a bigger deal than it may sound; not only was scientific study of wild animals in situ a new field (she actually arrived in Africa years before Goodall and Fossey), but most of the places where she set up shop would dismiss her out of hand upon hearing she was a woman - rancher Alexander Matthew initially assumed "A. Innis" was a man before allowing her to use his Fleur-de-Lys plantation as her base of operations. He would eventually grow to respect her dedication, and the observations she made over those months would form the basis of a book that, decades later, was still the pre-eminent reference in the field.
And yet, this groundbreaking work would not get her tenure at the universities where she taught in the 1960s, and she would spend much of the 1970s fighting to have this sexism recognized as discrimination in front of various Canadian courts and academic organizations. Reid dedicates a significant amount of time in the film's second half to this, and handles it in conscientious fashion: This is a major part of Dagg's story, and it would be easy to spend more time on it, since it involves human conflict and things the audience can directly relate to, but Reid is careful not to let it overwhelm the more upbeat facets of the film. There's vindication as she is rediscovered and honored by those she has inspired, and pangs as one wonders just what she could have done had her career not been sidelined, but Reid opts to make what Dagg achieved the focus of her film, rather than how men stymied her.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Thursday, January 09, 2020
Shortlisted Oscar Docs: Honeyland, Aquarela, The Great Hack, and Apollo 11
For the second year in a row, the Oscar-shortlisted documentary features sneaked their way into AMC Boston Common for five bucks a show, which means you can do this without much pinch, even saving Stubs A-List spots for other things later in the week:
Not a bad day to spend a rainy day, and while I was initially considering tapping out after three, it doesn't take a whole lot of convincing to get me to stick around for Apollo 11 on the big screen when it's right there.
Taken all together, these movies are a fascinating examination of documentary filmmaking as storytelling. Honeyland and Apollo 11 are examples of it at its most pure - almost all captured footage, no narration, just watching a story play out in real time - but it's the way the other two work that's kind of fascinating. As I mention in the review, Aquarela looks abstract, but when you step back it's showing you a cycle of how climate change is affecting the world, one thing leading to another. The Great Hack, meanwhile, is chained down by its focus on narrative; by focusing on the personal stories of the people involved, the filmmakers miss the chance to examine the hack itself more closely, and can't finish strong when their stories start petering out.
I wish I'd been able to claw out more time to catch some of the other ten films that I haven't seen elsewhere, although I suspect most are pretty easy to find on the various streaming services, though several are probably hidden in various walled gardens (you need Netflix to see The Great Hack or Amazon Prime for One Child Nation). With the insanely short period between nominations being announced and awards being given this year, there won't necessarily be a lot of time to see the nominees, and this is a nice head start.
Honeyland
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
Honeyland is a terrific little documentary that works as both great fly-on-the-wall filmmaking and an easily digested parable about sustainable farming. It almost makes one marvel at the filmmakers' good fortune, because it seems like they started with an idea for a good short and had an even better feature appear, and they shaped it to near-perfection.
The short would have been just following Hatidze Muratova, a fifty-something woman who lives in a Macedonian village that seems to be just her and her bedridden mother. She's a beekeeper who uses traditional methods, and does well enough to get by, getting ten to twenty euros per kilo for her artisanal honey in nearby Skopje. The solitude is broken when the nomadic Sam family arrives next door, with dozens of cattle and six noisy children, but she seems to enjoy the company, and when father Hussein decides to start keeping bees himself, she's helpful. Soon, he has committed himself to selling a lot of honey, and it starts to affect Hatidze's work as well.
If the Sams family had never shown up, Honeyland might have been a different but still fascinating movie, one about a dying way of life and how family commitments can tie a person to a place beyond what seems otherwise reasonable. One can see the outline of that movie here, in the opening shots of Hatidze walking across an otherwise empty landscape to check on a hidden hive, the candle-lit scenes of her bickering with mother Nazife in a very small house, and how a camera having to find her in a city scene doesn't seem to dent Hatidze's self-confidence. Directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov show Hatidze going about her business in such a way that they don't often need her voice to explain beekeeping to the audience. Her village is presented in a specific, meaningful way - old enough to be made of stone and showing some wear, but nevertheless tidy, in a way. The air is clear, the bees have space enough to work. It is not a lecture about some pastoral ideal, but it presents Hatidze's life in such a way as to get one thinking along those lines, despite the solitude.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Aquarela
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
Aquarela serves as your semi-regular reminder that water is metal as heck and will mess you up if you think you can take it for granted. It occasionally seems to have been built as a sort of subversive parody of white noise/relaxation videos, resembling them at first glance but offering up raw power, a caution about what we may unleash.
Director Viktor Kossakovskiy breaks the film into four clear acts: In the first, we see a team examining the ice on a frozen river near St. Petersberg that has started to thaw with spring, locating and retrieving a car that has fallen through. Eventually the camera moves to what I believe to be Greenland, a sailing ship in the foreground giving scale to the glaciers as pieces cleave off and fall into the sea. The camera follows that ship to sea, where a pod of dolphins soon gives way to choppy waters with massive swells. Eventually the camera sinks under the water and emerges in a flooded city.
Kosakovskiy gives the audience characters at the start, but mostly pushes people to the side thereafter to focus more on the raw power at work, and at first glance this reads as man's meagerness in the face of nature. Look closer, though, and Kossakovskiy establishes how the film is talking about climate change with one darkly funny but potentially tragic exchange ("Why are you driving here?" / "Usually, the ice melts three weeks later!"), and then tracks it. The first segment not only features cars, but general combustion, as a building burns in the background despite the apparent indifference of those on the ice, which is followed by glaciers melting, an unpredictable sea, and finally coastal cities becoming uninhabitable. For an extra bit of apocalyptic emphasis, the audience gets to see survivors huddling in caves before the film ends on a more conventionally beautiful bit of nature photography. Humanity may destroy itself by not recognizing how much raw power nature has bottled up, but the world itself will keep turning.
Full review on EFilmCritic
The Great Hack
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
The Great Hack is one of the more glaring recent cases of "important topic that deserves a better documentary", a not-quite-so-long-as-it-seems slog that gives the audience very few details of how the process described by the title works but a great deal of sitting through testimony and talking with the same few people many times over to establish the same information. Maybe, as a Netflix production/acquisition, it's designed to be watched with a finger on the fast-forward button, but that doesn't seem like a great idea when the home-screen button is just millimeters away.
The hack in question is how Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based data-mining company whose clients have increasingly included political campaigns (favoring right-of-center candidates), used data scraped from Facebook to model the entire United States electorate in the 2016 election, allowing the Trump campaign to precisely target "persuadable" voters with large amounts of personalized advertising. Hearing this, an associate professor of digital media in New York, David Carroll, files suit in a British court to find out what personal information of his are on the company's servers. Meanwhile, a more official investigation is launched when former CA employee Christopher Wylie comes across as a whistleblower and points the investigating Parliamentary committee toward Brittany Kaiser, a former Obama campaign intern who would become a key employee at the company and knows where all the bodies are buried.
For as much as issues of digital privacy and personal information can often seem like they have become background noise because it's so pervasive and hard to practically restrict, The Great Hack is probably at its most interesting when filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim track down and illustrate the details, whether that's the simple but effective visualization of data generated with each online interaction or laying out how an innocuous-seeming personality test provided the company with useful data. Case studies like how the company leveraged youth apathy during an earlier election in Trinidad and Tobago are insightful and horrifying, and while some of the reporting on how this works could probably come across as dry and mathematical, it's useful, even if harder to obtain.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Apollo 11
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
I kind of said everything I needed to about this one back when it first played theaters back in March - it's a pretty terrific assembly of footage from the Apollo mission that puts the audience right into that time and place, both for how it attends little everyday details and presents them as high-quality film rather than the blurry TV on which most people experienced it at the time. It's never not going to be thrilling.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Not a bad day to spend a rainy day, and while I was initially considering tapping out after three, it doesn't take a whole lot of convincing to get me to stick around for Apollo 11 on the big screen when it's right there.
Taken all together, these movies are a fascinating examination of documentary filmmaking as storytelling. Honeyland and Apollo 11 are examples of it at its most pure - almost all captured footage, no narration, just watching a story play out in real time - but it's the way the other two work that's kind of fascinating. As I mention in the review, Aquarela looks abstract, but when you step back it's showing you a cycle of how climate change is affecting the world, one thing leading to another. The Great Hack, meanwhile, is chained down by its focus on narrative; by focusing on the personal stories of the people involved, the filmmakers miss the chance to examine the hack itself more closely, and can't finish strong when their stories start petering out.
I wish I'd been able to claw out more time to catch some of the other ten films that I haven't seen elsewhere, although I suspect most are pretty easy to find on the various streaming services, though several are probably hidden in various walled gardens (you need Netflix to see The Great Hack or Amazon Prime for One Child Nation). With the insanely short period between nominations being announced and awards being given this year, there won't necessarily be a lot of time to see the nominees, and this is a nice head start.
Honeyland
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
Honeyland is a terrific little documentary that works as both great fly-on-the-wall filmmaking and an easily digested parable about sustainable farming. It almost makes one marvel at the filmmakers' good fortune, because it seems like they started with an idea for a good short and had an even better feature appear, and they shaped it to near-perfection.
The short would have been just following Hatidze Muratova, a fifty-something woman who lives in a Macedonian village that seems to be just her and her bedridden mother. She's a beekeeper who uses traditional methods, and does well enough to get by, getting ten to twenty euros per kilo for her artisanal honey in nearby Skopje. The solitude is broken when the nomadic Sam family arrives next door, with dozens of cattle and six noisy children, but she seems to enjoy the company, and when father Hussein decides to start keeping bees himself, she's helpful. Soon, he has committed himself to selling a lot of honey, and it starts to affect Hatidze's work as well.
If the Sams family had never shown up, Honeyland might have been a different but still fascinating movie, one about a dying way of life and how family commitments can tie a person to a place beyond what seems otherwise reasonable. One can see the outline of that movie here, in the opening shots of Hatidze walking across an otherwise empty landscape to check on a hidden hive, the candle-lit scenes of her bickering with mother Nazife in a very small house, and how a camera having to find her in a city scene doesn't seem to dent Hatidze's self-confidence. Directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov show Hatidze going about her business in such a way that they don't often need her voice to explain beekeeping to the audience. Her village is presented in a specific, meaningful way - old enough to be made of stone and showing some wear, but nevertheless tidy, in a way. The air is clear, the bees have space enough to work. It is not a lecture about some pastoral ideal, but it presents Hatidze's life in such a way as to get one thinking along those lines, despite the solitude.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Aquarela
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
Aquarela serves as your semi-regular reminder that water is metal as heck and will mess you up if you think you can take it for granted. It occasionally seems to have been built as a sort of subversive parody of white noise/relaxation videos, resembling them at first glance but offering up raw power, a caution about what we may unleash.
Director Viktor Kossakovskiy breaks the film into four clear acts: In the first, we see a team examining the ice on a frozen river near St. Petersberg that has started to thaw with spring, locating and retrieving a car that has fallen through. Eventually the camera moves to what I believe to be Greenland, a sailing ship in the foreground giving scale to the glaciers as pieces cleave off and fall into the sea. The camera follows that ship to sea, where a pod of dolphins soon gives way to choppy waters with massive swells. Eventually the camera sinks under the water and emerges in a flooded city.
Kosakovskiy gives the audience characters at the start, but mostly pushes people to the side thereafter to focus more on the raw power at work, and at first glance this reads as man's meagerness in the face of nature. Look closer, though, and Kossakovskiy establishes how the film is talking about climate change with one darkly funny but potentially tragic exchange ("Why are you driving here?" / "Usually, the ice melts three weeks later!"), and then tracks it. The first segment not only features cars, but general combustion, as a building burns in the background despite the apparent indifference of those on the ice, which is followed by glaciers melting, an unpredictable sea, and finally coastal cities becoming uninhabitable. For an extra bit of apocalyptic emphasis, the audience gets to see survivors huddling in caves before the film ends on a more conventionally beautiful bit of nature photography. Humanity may destroy itself by not recognizing how much raw power nature has bottled up, but the world itself will keep turning.
Full review on EFilmCritic
The Great Hack
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
The Great Hack is one of the more glaring recent cases of "important topic that deserves a better documentary", a not-quite-so-long-as-it-seems slog that gives the audience very few details of how the process described by the title works but a great deal of sitting through testimony and talking with the same few people many times over to establish the same information. Maybe, as a Netflix production/acquisition, it's designed to be watched with a finger on the fast-forward button, but that doesn't seem like a great idea when the home-screen button is just millimeters away.
The hack in question is how Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based data-mining company whose clients have increasingly included political campaigns (favoring right-of-center candidates), used data scraped from Facebook to model the entire United States electorate in the 2016 election, allowing the Trump campaign to precisely target "persuadable" voters with large amounts of personalized advertising. Hearing this, an associate professor of digital media in New York, David Carroll, files suit in a British court to find out what personal information of his are on the company's servers. Meanwhile, a more official investigation is launched when former CA employee Christopher Wylie comes across as a whistleblower and points the investigating Parliamentary committee toward Brittany Kaiser, a former Obama campaign intern who would become a key employee at the company and knows where all the bodies are buried.
For as much as issues of digital privacy and personal information can often seem like they have become background noise because it's so pervasive and hard to practically restrict, The Great Hack is probably at its most interesting when filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim track down and illustrate the details, whether that's the simple but effective visualization of data generated with each online interaction or laying out how an innocuous-seeming personality test provided the company with useful data. Case studies like how the company leveraged youth apathy during an earlier election in Trinidad and Tobago are insightful and horrifying, and while some of the reporting on how this works could probably come across as dry and mathematical, it's useful, even if harder to obtain.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Apollo 11
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
I kind of said everything I needed to about this one back when it first played theaters back in March - it's a pretty terrific assembly of footage from the Apollo mission that puts the audience right into that time and place, both for how it attends little everyday details and presents them as high-quality film rather than the blurry TV on which most people experienced it at the time. It's never not going to be thrilling.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Sunday, December 08, 2019
The Aeronauts
First things first - The Aeronauts isn't perfect, but it's kind of my thing in a way that a certain movie last week wasn't, and with the Coolidge only having so many 70mm showtimes, with a few being preempted to show something else in the big room, I'd recommend trying to catch it there (or at your local place with 70mm projection) this week if possible. It's a throwback to the kind of movies that are often the most fun at the Somerville's 70mm festival - the type meant to impress you on the big screen first and foremost - and pretty family-friendly to boot (I'm not sure, how exactly, it got a PG-13 despite being chaste, non-violent, and having fairly mild language used).
It won't be in theaters long, since Amazon at some point looked at it (and their general strategy of playing nice with theater chains' demands for a three-month window) and decided they'd be better off with a small release and quick move to Prime. I can't necessarily blame them; a lot of people probably look at a trailer with the Amazon or Netflix logo and think "no need to bother, I'll stream it soon enough", and while shipping DCP drives to theaters isn't as costly as shipping reels of 35mm film, it's not nothing, either. So while I lament this big-screen movie not getting the sort of exposure it deserves, I get it. Amazon/Netflix/Hulu/etc. productions are undeniable gambles for exhibitors.
Something else I read on social media got me interested, though, that we're all having conversations of The Irishman and Marriage Story because they were able to hit the country at mostly the same time. In truth, I think it's kind of the next evolution of the platform release - they play bigger cities for a month, and then drop on the service - but it got me thinking: What's the ideal roll-out strategy in this age, to both make it easy for everyone to see something without being left behind and not necessarily hurt cinemas? So I made this:
It covers the Boston area, and it's kind of a weird graph. You can really drop everything to the left of the zero line because it's a preview of Uncut Gems messing things up, for starters, and the first weekend of December is a weird outlier in many cases because studios just don't do anything here; in most cases you would probably see zero be the high point. That spike at two weeks represents Frozen II being a monster with A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood boosting it further. That bump around eight weeks is driven by Korean movie Parasite, of all things, with Jojo Rabbit at seven and The Joker (which got a few extra times this week on Imax) at nine, and I wonder to what extent their being indies and maybe offering theaters better terms than major studio productions has them hanging around.
That zero at six weeks is telling, though - you can pretty much expect a movie to run its course in a month and a half. We can lament the loss of multi-month runs, but they're not coming back. Still, it seems like six weeks is about when things are just gone from theaters and there shouldn't be any harm in putting them on streaming services then, especially if the goal is cultural relevance. Of course, that would effectively shorten the window more, as people decide that it's really easy to wait. No big deal for the likes of Amazon and Netflix, who probably see the theatrical screenings as just advertising and prestige-building, but rough for other studios and exhibitors.
I wonder, though, if it might make sense to realign some things as other studios become more like the streamers, though, with Disney+ already here, Peacock and HBO Max coming next year (although, don't get me started on them being named after the TV side rather than the film side), and Hulu and CBS All Access probably effectively becoming Fox+ and Paramount+. I could very easily see the windows change so that corporate-cousin streaming happens at six weeks and other streaming/home video happens much further down the road than the current three months (six? twelve?). Probably not great for theaters unless studios start taking a smaller percentage of ticket sales, or make peace with theaters dropping ticket prices so they can get more people in to buy popcorn and soda.
The trouble there is that's really a model only the huge studios can afford, and probably locks us into not having new studios arise unless they can get their hands on some sort of library. Which feels a lot like "there is no good answer" to actually getting these movies seen on the big screen and how they'll be handled in the future.
The Aeronauts
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2019 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, 70mm)
The Aeronauts is not going to be quite so impressive when you see it on a small screen (which most will, given Amazon will have it streaming two weeks after its North American theatrical release), and there are bits that don't totally fit together, but this is such a treat visually that I'll cut out some slack. On top of that, it's the exact sort of thing I'm always looking to find for my nieces, full of discovery and adventure but not violence.
It's framed by an ascent in a hot-air balloon in 1862, which will incidentally attempt to break the altitude record of the time - which is how it has been sold to the assembled crowd - but whose true purpose is for scientist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) to record air pressure, temperature, and the like at various altitudes. The pilot is Amelia Rennes (Felicity Jones), and they both consider the path that led them there as they fly to the clouds: For him, it's fighting the scientific establishment's belief that Glaisher's dreams of predicting the weather is folly; for her, it involves the memory of her aeronaut husband Pierre (Vincent Perez) plunging to earth while she was in the basket during their last ascent.
Neither of those flashback threads is terribly interesting, even if we hadn't already seen that they were in the balloon five minutes into the movie, and they seem to be interspersed throughout from sheer structural necessity, because otherwise the audience would just be the flight in real time, and an hour of meticulous note-taking will probably not be to all tastes. I'd be curious to see if there's a more chronological cut of the film that does a better job of using all of these things to build to the final flight, or missing scenes that make the lead-up less choppy, because there is a fair amount that seems to be missing, from how they got financing to how there's just one scene in the massive hangar where they build the balloon to the fact that there's a missing space between Amelia saying she can't go up in a balloon again to her embracing the showmanship of her first scene.
Full review at EFilmCritic
It won't be in theaters long, since Amazon at some point looked at it (and their general strategy of playing nice with theater chains' demands for a three-month window) and decided they'd be better off with a small release and quick move to Prime. I can't necessarily blame them; a lot of people probably look at a trailer with the Amazon or Netflix logo and think "no need to bother, I'll stream it soon enough", and while shipping DCP drives to theaters isn't as costly as shipping reels of 35mm film, it's not nothing, either. So while I lament this big-screen movie not getting the sort of exposure it deserves, I get it. Amazon/Netflix/Hulu/etc. productions are undeniable gambles for exhibitors.
Something else I read on social media got me interested, though, that we're all having conversations of The Irishman and Marriage Story because they were able to hit the country at mostly the same time. In truth, I think it's kind of the next evolution of the platform release - they play bigger cities for a month, and then drop on the service - but it got me thinking: What's the ideal roll-out strategy in this age, to both make it easy for everyone to see something without being left behind and not necessarily hurt cinemas? So I made this:
It covers the Boston area, and it's kind of a weird graph. You can really drop everything to the left of the zero line because it's a preview of Uncut Gems messing things up, for starters, and the first weekend of December is a weird outlier in many cases because studios just don't do anything here; in most cases you would probably see zero be the high point. That spike at two weeks represents Frozen II being a monster with A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood boosting it further. That bump around eight weeks is driven by Korean movie Parasite, of all things, with Jojo Rabbit at seven and The Joker (which got a few extra times this week on Imax) at nine, and I wonder to what extent their being indies and maybe offering theaters better terms than major studio productions has them hanging around.
That zero at six weeks is telling, though - you can pretty much expect a movie to run its course in a month and a half. We can lament the loss of multi-month runs, but they're not coming back. Still, it seems like six weeks is about when things are just gone from theaters and there shouldn't be any harm in putting them on streaming services then, especially if the goal is cultural relevance. Of course, that would effectively shorten the window more, as people decide that it's really easy to wait. No big deal for the likes of Amazon and Netflix, who probably see the theatrical screenings as just advertising and prestige-building, but rough for other studios and exhibitors.
I wonder, though, if it might make sense to realign some things as other studios become more like the streamers, though, with Disney+ already here, Peacock and HBO Max coming next year (although, don't get me started on them being named after the TV side rather than the film side), and Hulu and CBS All Access probably effectively becoming Fox+ and Paramount+. I could very easily see the windows change so that corporate-cousin streaming happens at six weeks and other streaming/home video happens much further down the road than the current three months (six? twelve?). Probably not great for theaters unless studios start taking a smaller percentage of ticket sales, or make peace with theaters dropping ticket prices so they can get more people in to buy popcorn and soda.
The trouble there is that's really a model only the huge studios can afford, and probably locks us into not having new studios arise unless they can get their hands on some sort of library. Which feels a lot like "there is no good answer" to actually getting these movies seen on the big screen and how they'll be handled in the future.
The Aeronauts
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2019 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, 70mm)
The Aeronauts is not going to be quite so impressive when you see it on a small screen (which most will, given Amazon will have it streaming two weeks after its North American theatrical release), and there are bits that don't totally fit together, but this is such a treat visually that I'll cut out some slack. On top of that, it's the exact sort of thing I'm always looking to find for my nieces, full of discovery and adventure but not violence.
It's framed by an ascent in a hot-air balloon in 1862, which will incidentally attempt to break the altitude record of the time - which is how it has been sold to the assembled crowd - but whose true purpose is for scientist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) to record air pressure, temperature, and the like at various altitudes. The pilot is Amelia Rennes (Felicity Jones), and they both consider the path that led them there as they fly to the clouds: For him, it's fighting the scientific establishment's belief that Glaisher's dreams of predicting the weather is folly; for her, it involves the memory of her aeronaut husband Pierre (Vincent Perez) plunging to earth while she was in the basket during their last ascent.
Neither of those flashback threads is terribly interesting, even if we hadn't already seen that they were in the balloon five minutes into the movie, and they seem to be interspersed throughout from sheer structural necessity, because otherwise the audience would just be the flight in real time, and an hour of meticulous note-taking will probably not be to all tastes. I'd be curious to see if there's a more chronological cut of the film that does a better job of using all of these things to build to the final flight, or missing scenes that make the lead-up less choppy, because there is a fair amount that seems to be missing, from how they got financing to how there's just one scene in the massive hangar where they build the balloon to the fact that there's a missing space between Amelia saying she can't go up in a balloon again to her embracing the showmanship of her first scene.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
IFFBoston 2019.05: One Child Nation, The Pollinators, Cold Case Hammarskjöld, and For the BIrds
Sunday at IFFBoston wasn't quite planned as a documentary day but wound up that way once the overlapping showtimes, need to get back and forth on the subway (though I think this was the first year in a long time when the MBTA didn't have the Red Line shut down north of Harvard for the festival's weekend), and Sunday schedule which has the last shows of the day during the 8pm hour rather than after 9pm, etc., finished asserting themselves. I basically started wanting to see One Child Nation - that Amazon had already purchased it and it would run for a while in August and September seemed unlikely for what seemed like a niche film - it was easier to stick around the Brattle for The Pollinators. That had a long-enough Q&A to make Cold Case Hammarskjöld the best option after returning to Davis, and then a quick turnaround to get into For the Birds seemed more interesting to me than Gutterbug.
First guests of the day were for Pollinators, including editor/producer Michael Reuter, producer Sally Roy, and director Peter Nelson, with the Q&A being hosted by Barbara Moran of WBUR. Nelson is at least kind of local, as were many of the subjects, so there were a lot of people in the audience that knew either him or beekeeping (or both), which can stretch this sort of thing out but, fortunately, didn't let it devolve into minutiae. One of the interesting things that came up in the Q&A was how it can be easy to misrepresent the nature and extent of someone's expertise. David Hackenberg, for instance, absolutely looks the part of an old farmer who has certain practical knowledge but which can be either misguided or the common sense everyone needs to hear, but he's apparently also a skilled researcher who is often at the center of discovering what is actually going on when the bee community is facing a crisis. You can see the respect for him in the film, but not the totality of his influence
Last movie of the day was For the Birds, with the fest's Joe Arino (l) hosting a Q&A with director Richard Miron and producer Jeffrey Starr. I have apparently reached the age when someone like Miron looks about twelve to me, but it seems like he didn't quite stumble into a good movie but certainly was able to recognize one when it presented itself, as he was volunteering at the farm animal sanctuary featured in the film when all of this started. It was kind of a touchy matter getting the buy-in of everyone involved, and there was some stuff around the edges which was kind of surprising (sanctuary employee Sheila Hyslop returned home to the UK and died soon after her part of the film was over; the stress of this experience being part of the former though likely not the latter).
I did find myself scratching my head a bit when then talked about the story the film tells, because the story of Kathy getting free of her compulsions doesn't really happen on-screen, but seemingly between the last full chapter and the epilogue. The film mostly shows her static intransigence, with the growth and change they talked about less shown than alluded to. Which is fine; though we're often taught that stories are about change, stubbornness is real too, and sometimes what a person gets from a movie is more important than what its makers feel they've put out there.
One Child Nation (aka Born in China)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston, DCP)
China's "One Child Per Family" policy was launched in 1979, made an official part of their constitution in 1987, and officially ended in 2015, and the rest of the world often took it for granted, looking at the country's ten-figure population and figuring that yes, this is draconian, but something needed to change. As filmmaker Wang Nanfu points out, this message took hold with even more force in China itself, except that ignoring the implications of it there was an active (but seemingly necessary) choice. This film's close-up view leaves some questions unasked and unanswered, but also makes it impossible to simply view it as an abstraction.
Wang grew up in China, in Diangxi Province's Wang village, and her family was unusual in that she had a younger brother. Her family wasn't breaking the law in this - there was a process by which one could petition for the right to have a second child - but growing up at the height of the country's propaganda push for the policy, it was a black mark on her family. She would later go to college in the United States and marry there, returning home to visit after the birth of her first child, and finding the idea of the government involving itself so closely in her family newly chilling, she starts asking questions.
The thing about China's one child per family policy that has fascinated me in recent years is how it leads to a society not just without siblings, but without aunts, uncles, and cousins, and I always wondered to what extent if eliminating extended family as a support system outside the state was the goal. This is not a particular focus for this film's makers; the actual why of it is not particularly important, and only a little more time is spent on why the practice was ended. Nor should it be, considering the more immediate and personal interests that the filmmakers have. That focus guides the film, sometimes constraining it, but also constantly emphasizing the human reaction as opposed to just the theoretical. Wang and co-director Lynn Zhang Jialing seldom take a broad view, but focus closely on individual stories, often to the point of discomfort.
Full review on EFilmCritic
The Pollinators
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston, DCP)
Mention bees and farming to most people, and certain images leap to mind, along with the specific ways that human beings have messed up the natural order of things. These ideas are not necessarily wrong, but they are incomplete, sometimes in surprising ways. The Pollinators comes from deep enough inside this industry that one must sometimes account for a skewed perspective, but it presents a picture of modern agriculture from a point of view few think about, and does so in a way that is properly alarming but not necessarily alarmist.
Director Peter Nelson, a beekeeper himself, spends most of the film with others doing the same work, starting with old hand David Hackenberg of Hackenberg Apiaries. His company's business is not primarily honey or mead or wax candles, but the bees themselves: Though it is common knowledge that bees are vital for pollination, there simply aren't enough wild bees to go around; colony collapse disorder is not the issue that it was from 2005 to 2008, but between pesticide use and the way American industrial agriculture often tends to vast fields of one type of crop, native pollinators are stretched thin and in some cases threatened. The solution is folks like Hackenberg putting hives on pallets, and pallets onto trucks, and going where they're needed. It's possible because pollination seasons for different crops are staggered, but supply isn't far from demand and California's almond crop requires almost every bee-for-hire in America
One wonders, watching this, just how many systems like mobile apiaries their food supply relies on, and just what sort of state they're in. That these businesses are already stretched thin enough that things like a breed of mite which attacks queen bees or the adoption of new pesticides can create a genuine crisis gives the film a bit of urgency and something like a story, but in a lot of ways it serves to illustrate the way that this business seems genuinely odd to outsiders, with these living, autonomous things treated as equipment. It's an odd feeling to go from close-up photography of bees seemingly behaving like they're in the wild to a clearing full of dead ones because a neighboring farmer sprayed their crops without warning. Queens are replaced and rotated like engine parts.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Cold Case Hammarskjöld
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2019 in Somerville Theatre #5 (IFFBoston, DCP)
In Cold Case Hammarskjöld, satirical documentarian Mads Brügger does a convincing imitation of a dog who has finally caught the tail he's been chasing and realizes he's got no idea of what comes next. It doesn't quite become a repudiation of Brügger's life's work, and that of the thriving industry that uses comedy to help people process what is often an insane world, but it runs hard into the limits of that approach. I half-suspect that the film still has the form it does both because reshaping it would have felt less honest and because hitting those limits wound up fascinating him.
The film offers a refresher on Dag Hammarskjöld - or primer, if your education was like mine and gave him just a cursory mention - that he was elected Secretary General of the United Nations in 1953, and more activist in the role than many anticipated, until he did in a plane crash on the way to attempt mediation in the Congo in 1961. Many suspected foul play than and for decades later, but nothing was proven. Swedish private detective and aid worker Göran Björkdahl has what he believes is new evidence, and teams with Brügger to document the investigation. They are particularly focused on Jan Van Risseghem, a Belgian pilot and alleged soldier of fortune who cuts the figure of a James Bond villain in the one photograph they have, and may have been the one to shoot the plane down.
That image is so striking that Brügger appropriates the trademark white suit and the like to narrate the film, renting hotel rooms and having a pair of African women serve as secretaries transcribing it. Why two? As he himself mentions, it's an idea he had early on, maybe something that could be worked into the film as a commentary about details not lining up, or him disposing of lackeys as he grows more drawn into the character and obsessed. After all, as he admits, this investigation isn't going to go anywhere, but it may serve as a good jumping-off point for a movie about seeing conspiracies in every corner or how our knowledge of even recent history is incomplete or white dilettantes in Africa. And there is still a lot of that plan visible: Those interstitials in the hotel rooms are still in the movie and as off-kilter as one would hope, and there's a sort of archness to the scenes of Brügger and Björkdahl conducting their initial investigation. The earnest Björkdahl recedes a bit in order to play up Brügger not treating it as a joke but knowing that he's making something of a meta-movie.
Full review on EFilmCritic
For the Birds
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2019 in Somerville Theatre #4 (IFFBoston, DCP)
Sometimes the filmmakers won't let a documentary be over until it's all the way over, and that's the case with For the Birds, whose epilogue isn't exactly long but is very much something else after the main thread is tied up. It goes on and can't help but feel like it's drifting too far from the movie you came to see. Of course, the main body of the film can be drawn out and uncomfortable itself, but it's not like you'd want a story of hoarding and self-destructive behavior to go down easy.
It starts innocently enough, with VHS footage of upstate New York resident Kathy Murphy befriending a duck she names Innes Peep. Fast forward a few years to 2020, though, and there are dozens of ducks, turkeys, and chickens in and around the small house she shares with husband Gary, and it's obviously a bad situation. The place is impossible to keep clean, many of the birds are growing sickly, Kathy almost never goes out, and though it may not be the main reason their daughter is estranged, it's not helping. A call to the local Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary brings employee Sheila Hyslop to visit, and she convinces Kathy to let her bring some of the birds away with her, though Kathy is not necessarily aware that they won't be coming back (even if one of her beloved turkeys wasn't so sick it didn't survive very long).
Hoarding is not necessarily an activity one associates with living things, so it's interesting to see Hyslop both casually identify Kathy's behavior as such and also be alarmed by the extent of it. What's a bit surprising is that there is never much indication as to whether any of the birds return some of Kathy's affection or seem out of sorts when rescued and placed in a new environment. It could cause a bit of a disconnect, as the movie on the one hand points out that the animal abuse is what makes this a bit worse than garden-variety hoarding but leaves that abuse a bit abstract, but never quite does. Instead, it highlights just how carelessly one-sided this situation is, and gives a fair window into the neediness that seems to be driving her. There are comments dropped that sometimes offer the beginnings of an explanation, but filmmaker Richard Miron is more interested in looking at the facts of her situation rather than trying to figure it out.
Full review on EFilmCritic
First guests of the day were for Pollinators, including editor/producer Michael Reuter, producer Sally Roy, and director Peter Nelson, with the Q&A being hosted by Barbara Moran of WBUR. Nelson is at least kind of local, as were many of the subjects, so there were a lot of people in the audience that knew either him or beekeeping (or both), which can stretch this sort of thing out but, fortunately, didn't let it devolve into minutiae. One of the interesting things that came up in the Q&A was how it can be easy to misrepresent the nature and extent of someone's expertise. David Hackenberg, for instance, absolutely looks the part of an old farmer who has certain practical knowledge but which can be either misguided or the common sense everyone needs to hear, but he's apparently also a skilled researcher who is often at the center of discovering what is actually going on when the bee community is facing a crisis. You can see the respect for him in the film, but not the totality of his influence
Last movie of the day was For the Birds, with the fest's Joe Arino (l) hosting a Q&A with director Richard Miron and producer Jeffrey Starr. I have apparently reached the age when someone like Miron looks about twelve to me, but it seems like he didn't quite stumble into a good movie but certainly was able to recognize one when it presented itself, as he was volunteering at the farm animal sanctuary featured in the film when all of this started. It was kind of a touchy matter getting the buy-in of everyone involved, and there was some stuff around the edges which was kind of surprising (sanctuary employee Sheila Hyslop returned home to the UK and died soon after her part of the film was over; the stress of this experience being part of the former though likely not the latter).
I did find myself scratching my head a bit when then talked about the story the film tells, because the story of Kathy getting free of her compulsions doesn't really happen on-screen, but seemingly between the last full chapter and the epilogue. The film mostly shows her static intransigence, with the growth and change they talked about less shown than alluded to. Which is fine; though we're often taught that stories are about change, stubbornness is real too, and sometimes what a person gets from a movie is more important than what its makers feel they've put out there.
One Child Nation (aka Born in China)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston, DCP)
China's "One Child Per Family" policy was launched in 1979, made an official part of their constitution in 1987, and officially ended in 2015, and the rest of the world often took it for granted, looking at the country's ten-figure population and figuring that yes, this is draconian, but something needed to change. As filmmaker Wang Nanfu points out, this message took hold with even more force in China itself, except that ignoring the implications of it there was an active (but seemingly necessary) choice. This film's close-up view leaves some questions unasked and unanswered, but also makes it impossible to simply view it as an abstraction.
Wang grew up in China, in Diangxi Province's Wang village, and her family was unusual in that she had a younger brother. Her family wasn't breaking the law in this - there was a process by which one could petition for the right to have a second child - but growing up at the height of the country's propaganda push for the policy, it was a black mark on her family. She would later go to college in the United States and marry there, returning home to visit after the birth of her first child, and finding the idea of the government involving itself so closely in her family newly chilling, she starts asking questions.
The thing about China's one child per family policy that has fascinated me in recent years is how it leads to a society not just without siblings, but without aunts, uncles, and cousins, and I always wondered to what extent if eliminating extended family as a support system outside the state was the goal. This is not a particular focus for this film's makers; the actual why of it is not particularly important, and only a little more time is spent on why the practice was ended. Nor should it be, considering the more immediate and personal interests that the filmmakers have. That focus guides the film, sometimes constraining it, but also constantly emphasizing the human reaction as opposed to just the theoretical. Wang and co-director Lynn Zhang Jialing seldom take a broad view, but focus closely on individual stories, often to the point of discomfort.
Full review on EFilmCritic
The Pollinators
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2019 in the Brattle Theatre (IFFBoston, DCP)
Mention bees and farming to most people, and certain images leap to mind, along with the specific ways that human beings have messed up the natural order of things. These ideas are not necessarily wrong, but they are incomplete, sometimes in surprising ways. The Pollinators comes from deep enough inside this industry that one must sometimes account for a skewed perspective, but it presents a picture of modern agriculture from a point of view few think about, and does so in a way that is properly alarming but not necessarily alarmist.
Director Peter Nelson, a beekeeper himself, spends most of the film with others doing the same work, starting with old hand David Hackenberg of Hackenberg Apiaries. His company's business is not primarily honey or mead or wax candles, but the bees themselves: Though it is common knowledge that bees are vital for pollination, there simply aren't enough wild bees to go around; colony collapse disorder is not the issue that it was from 2005 to 2008, but between pesticide use and the way American industrial agriculture often tends to vast fields of one type of crop, native pollinators are stretched thin and in some cases threatened. The solution is folks like Hackenberg putting hives on pallets, and pallets onto trucks, and going where they're needed. It's possible because pollination seasons for different crops are staggered, but supply isn't far from demand and California's almond crop requires almost every bee-for-hire in America
One wonders, watching this, just how many systems like mobile apiaries their food supply relies on, and just what sort of state they're in. That these businesses are already stretched thin enough that things like a breed of mite which attacks queen bees or the adoption of new pesticides can create a genuine crisis gives the film a bit of urgency and something like a story, but in a lot of ways it serves to illustrate the way that this business seems genuinely odd to outsiders, with these living, autonomous things treated as equipment. It's an odd feeling to go from close-up photography of bees seemingly behaving like they're in the wild to a clearing full of dead ones because a neighboring farmer sprayed their crops without warning. Queens are replaced and rotated like engine parts.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Cold Case Hammarskjöld
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2019 in Somerville Theatre #5 (IFFBoston, DCP)
In Cold Case Hammarskjöld, satirical documentarian Mads Brügger does a convincing imitation of a dog who has finally caught the tail he's been chasing and realizes he's got no idea of what comes next. It doesn't quite become a repudiation of Brügger's life's work, and that of the thriving industry that uses comedy to help people process what is often an insane world, but it runs hard into the limits of that approach. I half-suspect that the film still has the form it does both because reshaping it would have felt less honest and because hitting those limits wound up fascinating him.
The film offers a refresher on Dag Hammarskjöld - or primer, if your education was like mine and gave him just a cursory mention - that he was elected Secretary General of the United Nations in 1953, and more activist in the role than many anticipated, until he did in a plane crash on the way to attempt mediation in the Congo in 1961. Many suspected foul play than and for decades later, but nothing was proven. Swedish private detective and aid worker Göran Björkdahl has what he believes is new evidence, and teams with Brügger to document the investigation. They are particularly focused on Jan Van Risseghem, a Belgian pilot and alleged soldier of fortune who cuts the figure of a James Bond villain in the one photograph they have, and may have been the one to shoot the plane down.
That image is so striking that Brügger appropriates the trademark white suit and the like to narrate the film, renting hotel rooms and having a pair of African women serve as secretaries transcribing it. Why two? As he himself mentions, it's an idea he had early on, maybe something that could be worked into the film as a commentary about details not lining up, or him disposing of lackeys as he grows more drawn into the character and obsessed. After all, as he admits, this investigation isn't going to go anywhere, but it may serve as a good jumping-off point for a movie about seeing conspiracies in every corner or how our knowledge of even recent history is incomplete or white dilettantes in Africa. And there is still a lot of that plan visible: Those interstitials in the hotel rooms are still in the movie and as off-kilter as one would hope, and there's a sort of archness to the scenes of Brügger and Björkdahl conducting their initial investigation. The earnest Björkdahl recedes a bit in order to play up Brügger not treating it as a joke but knowing that he's making something of a meta-movie.
Full review on EFilmCritic
For the Birds
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2019 in Somerville Theatre #4 (IFFBoston, DCP)
Sometimes the filmmakers won't let a documentary be over until it's all the way over, and that's the case with For the Birds, whose epilogue isn't exactly long but is very much something else after the main thread is tied up. It goes on and can't help but feel like it's drifting too far from the movie you came to see. Of course, the main body of the film can be drawn out and uncomfortable itself, but it's not like you'd want a story of hoarding and self-destructive behavior to go down easy.
It starts innocently enough, with VHS footage of upstate New York resident Kathy Murphy befriending a duck she names Innes Peep. Fast forward a few years to 2020, though, and there are dozens of ducks, turkeys, and chickens in and around the small house she shares with husband Gary, and it's obviously a bad situation. The place is impossible to keep clean, many of the birds are growing sickly, Kathy almost never goes out, and though it may not be the main reason their daughter is estranged, it's not helping. A call to the local Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary brings employee Sheila Hyslop to visit, and she convinces Kathy to let her bring some of the birds away with her, though Kathy is not necessarily aware that they won't be coming back (even if one of her beloved turkeys wasn't so sick it didn't survive very long).
Hoarding is not necessarily an activity one associates with living things, so it's interesting to see Hyslop both casually identify Kathy's behavior as such and also be alarmed by the extent of it. What's a bit surprising is that there is never much indication as to whether any of the birds return some of Kathy's affection or seem out of sorts when rescued and placed in a new environment. It could cause a bit of a disconnect, as the movie on the one hand points out that the animal abuse is what makes this a bit worse than garden-variety hoarding but leaves that abuse a bit abstract, but never quite does. Instead, it highlights just how carelessly one-sided this situation is, and gives a fair window into the neediness that seems to be driving her. There are comments dropped that sometimes offer the beginnings of an explanation, but filmmaker Richard Miron is more interested in looking at the facts of her situation rather than trying to figure it out.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Apollo 11
Man, I would have liked to see this in Imax, but its limited North American run in the format came while I was overseas on vacation, and the giant screens there were split between Alita and Captain Marvel where I was. No big deal, I saw awesome sights there as well, and the Somerville's upgraded screen #3 is pretty nice.
It's worth noting that it's still kicking around there, if maybe not on that exact screen, while their sister cinema in Arlington is still showing They Shall Not Grow Old once or twice a day, not bad legs for a couple documentaries that might be seen as niche and reasons to doubt their distribution (Warner initially only planned "event" screenings for TSNGO until those proved too popular, while Apollo's Neon often would seemingly prefer a cult hit to the sort that makes money in most cases). A certain amount of that is probably being driven by historically-minded or nostalgic elders who know the material won't make them uncomfortable buying discounted tickets, but I suspect and hope that the way these films are made is part of it as well.
These movies are experiences, not so much because they are visual spectaculars, but because they are immersive. Peter Jackson and Todd Douglas Miller built these movies to spend as little time as possible repeating facts versus putting the audience directly into the action, choosing and upgrading the footage that did that the best. Both had initial releases that were designed to dominate the senses in ways television mostly can't, be it 3D or Imax (and though it may seem like heresy, I'd be fascinated to see what a 3D-ified Apollo 11 was like). Documentaries are often built to resemble television news programs, even when destined for the big screen, but this one is built to lose something when seen at home.
I also like Apollo 11 as a reminder that film looks really good. The 50-year-old footage probably doesn't need much polish, and I think some in the audience might have been a bit surprised at that. Part of that is how we've mostly seen these events as NTSC footage, and it plays in with I've noticed that whenever an older movie got a high-def release or shows on film, people were kind of shocked at how good it looks after years of being conditioned to associate movies above a certain age with broadcast or VHS copies and thinking that was their natural state. It's less prevalent now that 1080p has become the standard, but I suspect that many don't realize that in many cases older movies might benefit more from a 4K HDR release than recent ones (for example, can you imagine the eyes that a 4K Powell & Pressburger set would melt?).
I hope this gets a 4K release itself, although I hope even more that the Aquarium will be able to get hold of a genuine celluloid Imax print and show that for a few weeks.
Apollo 11
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 March 2019 in Somerville Theatre #3 (first-run, DCP)
While recommending Apollo 11 to friends and family on social media, there was an interjection that there is probably less "rediscovered" footage in the film than the marketing would have one believe, that most of what people are treating as new here has been in other documentaries, both about the first mission to the moon and NASA more generally. Likely true, but also kind of adjacent to what I was actually saying about how people should try and catch it as part of its limited (but longer-than-expected) run: It's terrifically put together and undeniably amazing to look at.
There have been other NASA documentaries, of course, but many of them have been done for television, and mostly before high definition was the order of the day, and even when they were done for theatrical presentation (and seen that way), they would often use the television footage, either because that was what was available, because the filmmakers wanted to strike an emotional chord with baby boomers and how they remembered these events, or even to emphasize how analog and low-tech what NASA had to work with was relative to the present. Those are all valid reasons to present such a film that way, but eventually that grainy video becomes too much a part of how one pictures the event, as opposed to just an artifact of the medium.
For Apollo 11, filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller instead finds the best sources he can, including some relatively rare 65mm footage, has the picture and sound cleaned up, and generally saves the NTSC video for when there's no other footage of an iconic moment, and seen on the big screen, it's something of a revelation: Visual detail pops in ways that much of the audience has never seen it before, and a barrier that those who hadn't lived through the events (by now, most of the film's potential audience) seems to be lifted. Heck, much of the actual time on the surface on the moon is presented as the clearest, highest-resolution stills he could find, to make sure that the sharp edges and incredible clarity of vacuum make more of an impression than the limits of what could be broadcast live back then. The footage itself is often functional, unmistakably shot by engineers and technicians to be useful before concerns of artistry, but as such it gives the audience a sense of scope and scale. What's important is always front and center, but there's room for the curious eye to wander, and when a shot does seem odd or awkward, that tells a story too, of tight quarters where the film camera can't quite get as close as one might like.
Full review on EFilmCritic
It's worth noting that it's still kicking around there, if maybe not on that exact screen, while their sister cinema in Arlington is still showing They Shall Not Grow Old once or twice a day, not bad legs for a couple documentaries that might be seen as niche and reasons to doubt their distribution (Warner initially only planned "event" screenings for TSNGO until those proved too popular, while Apollo's Neon often would seemingly prefer a cult hit to the sort that makes money in most cases). A certain amount of that is probably being driven by historically-minded or nostalgic elders who know the material won't make them uncomfortable buying discounted tickets, but I suspect and hope that the way these films are made is part of it as well.
These movies are experiences, not so much because they are visual spectaculars, but because they are immersive. Peter Jackson and Todd Douglas Miller built these movies to spend as little time as possible repeating facts versus putting the audience directly into the action, choosing and upgrading the footage that did that the best. Both had initial releases that were designed to dominate the senses in ways television mostly can't, be it 3D or Imax (and though it may seem like heresy, I'd be fascinated to see what a 3D-ified Apollo 11 was like). Documentaries are often built to resemble television news programs, even when destined for the big screen, but this one is built to lose something when seen at home.
I also like Apollo 11 as a reminder that film looks really good. The 50-year-old footage probably doesn't need much polish, and I think some in the audience might have been a bit surprised at that. Part of that is how we've mostly seen these events as NTSC footage, and it plays in with I've noticed that whenever an older movie got a high-def release or shows on film, people were kind of shocked at how good it looks after years of being conditioned to associate movies above a certain age with broadcast or VHS copies and thinking that was their natural state. It's less prevalent now that 1080p has become the standard, but I suspect that many don't realize that in many cases older movies might benefit more from a 4K HDR release than recent ones (for example, can you imagine the eyes that a 4K Powell & Pressburger set would melt?).
I hope this gets a 4K release itself, although I hope even more that the Aquarium will be able to get hold of a genuine celluloid Imax print and show that for a few weeks.
Apollo 11
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 March 2019 in Somerville Theatre #3 (first-run, DCP)
While recommending Apollo 11 to friends and family on social media, there was an interjection that there is probably less "rediscovered" footage in the film than the marketing would have one believe, that most of what people are treating as new here has been in other documentaries, both about the first mission to the moon and NASA more generally. Likely true, but also kind of adjacent to what I was actually saying about how people should try and catch it as part of its limited (but longer-than-expected) run: It's terrifically put together and undeniably amazing to look at.
There have been other NASA documentaries, of course, but many of them have been done for television, and mostly before high definition was the order of the day, and even when they were done for theatrical presentation (and seen that way), they would often use the television footage, either because that was what was available, because the filmmakers wanted to strike an emotional chord with baby boomers and how they remembered these events, or even to emphasize how analog and low-tech what NASA had to work with was relative to the present. Those are all valid reasons to present such a film that way, but eventually that grainy video becomes too much a part of how one pictures the event, as opposed to just an artifact of the medium.
For Apollo 11, filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller instead finds the best sources he can, including some relatively rare 65mm footage, has the picture and sound cleaned up, and generally saves the NTSC video for when there's no other footage of an iconic moment, and seen on the big screen, it's something of a revelation: Visual detail pops in ways that much of the audience has never seen it before, and a barrier that those who hadn't lived through the events (by now, most of the film's potential audience) seems to be lifted. Heck, much of the actual time on the surface on the moon is presented as the clearest, highest-resolution stills he could find, to make sure that the sharp edges and incredible clarity of vacuum make more of an impression than the limits of what could be broadcast live back then. The footage itself is often functional, unmistakably shot by engineers and technicians to be useful before concerns of artistry, but as such it gives the audience a sense of scope and scale. What's important is always front and center, but there's room for the curious eye to wander, and when a shot does seem odd or awkward, that tells a story too, of tight quarters where the film camera can't quite get as close as one might like.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Sunday, July 08, 2018
This That Week In Tickets: 16 April 2018 - 22 April 2018
I think this was a kind of busy work week, although not necessarily in the way such weeks usually work out.
It was a week of Agile project-planning stuff at work, which often means a lot of time stuck in meetings and unwanted after-work activities, but somehow I got left out of all of that and just got to work, which often got me on a roll so that I wound up working late those days. There's a valuable lesson there.
Still managed to find an evening to catch Beirut, which is pretty decent, although I do kind of wish Brad Anderson had somehow managed to wind up a little north of where he is, continually producing stuff that's right on the border of theatrical and VOD material.
With a quiet weekend release-wise, I opted to hit The Museum of Science, because it had been a while and some of the stuff on tap looked kind of neat. You can't go wrong with indoor lightening and dinosaur bones, but I've got to admit, having been to other cities' natural history museums in recent years and seeing that the MOS evolved from something similar, I wouldn't mind if we had something that sort of overwhelming in our city along with the earnestly educational, kid-friendly place we have. Of course, while there, I checked out what was in the two movie screens: a condensed version of The Martian in the 4D room and "Dream Big" in the Omnimax dome.
And then it was IFFBoston week, although most of those movies were only on my Letterboxd page before reaching the blog.
The Martian (condensed)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2018 in the Museum of Science 4D Theater (4D, digital 3D with motion)
The Martian is not a short movie in its original form, and there's apparently an extended version on home video because, well, Ridley Scott is a tinkerer by nature. I doubt that he was directly involved in this edition, which drops two full hours from the original running time to get down to about fifteen minutes, but adds in some rumble, sprays of mist, and something that pokes you in the small of the back. It's a small, somewhat cozy room, not the sort of thing that threatens to overwhelm the kids or immerse you in the same way that the OMNIMAX screen does.
It's kind of fun to see it this way, but I can't imagine what it's like for the kids in the room who haven't seen the whole feature. You get the story, and some of the jokes, but it's so compressed that it's hard to feel tension, or that one event was connected to another. It's one thing following the last, occasionally reminding us that this movie has a crazy good cast, and that's what this show is: Remembering what a neat movie The Martian is, but not quite re-experiencing it again.
"Dream Big"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2018 in the Museum of Science Mugar Omni Theater (first-run, OMNIMAX)
"Dream Big" is kind of a perfect science-museum movie, whether for its utter sincerity in its love of engineering, for the somewhat heavy-handed corporate (and organizational) sponsorship, or the fact that, when you put that behind you, it shows some pretty darn amazing things right up close, using the sheer size of the dome-shaped screen to overwhelm the visitor. You'll learn something about bridges, buildings, and solar vehicles, and likely be fascinated, even if they may otherwise seem like dry subjects and if narrator Jeff Bridges sometimes seems to be trying too hard.
To be fair, he seems to be trying too hard to me, a 44-year-old guy who has always been interested in this material, and it's important to remember that this movie isn't really for me, no matter how much I love larger-than-life presentations and technical minutiae. It's for the kids who visit the museum, who maybe haven't thought of this stuff, or maybe haven't thought that it relates to them. That's likely part of why the filmmakers choose engineers to follow with different accents, and why the majority of them are women. A similar Imax film shown during my elementary-school trips to the science-museum might not have been so diverse, balanced, or international.
I see this is coming out on video this month, and I'm sure schools will purchase it for when you sometimes need to fill a period in science class, but I don't know how effective it is without a huge screen putting you in places that desperately need bridges. It's a neat part of a museum of science visit, and that's all it needs to be.
It was a week of Agile project-planning stuff at work, which often means a lot of time stuck in meetings and unwanted after-work activities, but somehow I got left out of all of that and just got to work, which often got me on a roll so that I wound up working late those days. There's a valuable lesson there.
Still managed to find an evening to catch Beirut, which is pretty decent, although I do kind of wish Brad Anderson had somehow managed to wind up a little north of where he is, continually producing stuff that's right on the border of theatrical and VOD material.
With a quiet weekend release-wise, I opted to hit The Museum of Science, because it had been a while and some of the stuff on tap looked kind of neat. You can't go wrong with indoor lightening and dinosaur bones, but I've got to admit, having been to other cities' natural history museums in recent years and seeing that the MOS evolved from something similar, I wouldn't mind if we had something that sort of overwhelming in our city along with the earnestly educational, kid-friendly place we have. Of course, while there, I checked out what was in the two movie screens: a condensed version of The Martian in the 4D room and "Dream Big" in the Omnimax dome.
And then it was IFFBoston week, although most of those movies were only on my Letterboxd page before reaching the blog.
The Martian (condensed)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2018 in the Museum of Science 4D Theater (4D, digital 3D with motion)
The Martian is not a short movie in its original form, and there's apparently an extended version on home video because, well, Ridley Scott is a tinkerer by nature. I doubt that he was directly involved in this edition, which drops two full hours from the original running time to get down to about fifteen minutes, but adds in some rumble, sprays of mist, and something that pokes you in the small of the back. It's a small, somewhat cozy room, not the sort of thing that threatens to overwhelm the kids or immerse you in the same way that the OMNIMAX screen does.
It's kind of fun to see it this way, but I can't imagine what it's like for the kids in the room who haven't seen the whole feature. You get the story, and some of the jokes, but it's so compressed that it's hard to feel tension, or that one event was connected to another. It's one thing following the last, occasionally reminding us that this movie has a crazy good cast, and that's what this show is: Remembering what a neat movie The Martian is, but not quite re-experiencing it again.
"Dream Big"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2018 in the Museum of Science Mugar Omni Theater (first-run, OMNIMAX)
"Dream Big" is kind of a perfect science-museum movie, whether for its utter sincerity in its love of engineering, for the somewhat heavy-handed corporate (and organizational) sponsorship, or the fact that, when you put that behind you, it shows some pretty darn amazing things right up close, using the sheer size of the dome-shaped screen to overwhelm the visitor. You'll learn something about bridges, buildings, and solar vehicles, and likely be fascinated, even if they may otherwise seem like dry subjects and if narrator Jeff Bridges sometimes seems to be trying too hard.
To be fair, he seems to be trying too hard to me, a 44-year-old guy who has always been interested in this material, and it's important to remember that this movie isn't really for me, no matter how much I love larger-than-life presentations and technical minutiae. It's for the kids who visit the museum, who maybe haven't thought of this stuff, or maybe haven't thought that it relates to them. That's likely part of why the filmmakers choose engineers to follow with different accents, and why the majority of them are women. A similar Imax film shown during my elementary-school trips to the science-museum might not have been so diverse, balanced, or international.
I see this is coming out on video this month, and I'm sure schools will purchase it for when you sometimes need to fill a period in science class, but I don't know how effective it is without a huge screen putting you in places that desperately need bridges. It's a neat part of a museum of science visit, and that's all it needs to be.
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Independent Film Festival Boston 2018.04: Tre Maison Dasan, The New Fire, Never Goin' Back, and Don't Leave Home
Ah, Saturday at IFFBoston, the longest day. It used to be you could squeeze five movies out of the festival this day - they would know who the truly hardcore were by who raised their hand for 18 movies at the last show and who had managed 19, but not this year
First up: Tre Maison Dasan, who did not line up in title order:
Left to right, that is Maison, director Denali Tiller, Dasan, Dasan's scene-stealing cousin Alivia, Tre (who goes by T.J. now), and Dasan's mother Jacqueline.
They are all pretty great, happy to talk about how weird it was to have Tiller shooting this movie and self-aware enough to realize that they all used the word weird. They were up-front about how you can't make this sort of movie without having an effect on what you're shooting, but that's okay; nobody feels bad about helping at-risk kids out a little. Of course, you could tell that there was some negotiating going on from the number of scenes where T.J. has a bag from McDonald's as the filmmakers knew what would get him in a good enough mood to open up.
The best part was just seeing that T.J. and Jacqueline were doing okay. T.J. went through a lot over the course of the time he was being filmed and wasn't starting out in the best place, so seeing him upbeat was great. Jacqueline was released from jail early on, and was pushing the Kickstarter for a children's book she had written to help other kids in her son's position.
Then, to the Brattle!
I think that's WBUR's Bruce Gellerman, The New Fire director David Schumacher, Caroline Cochrane of Oklo, and pro-nuclear activist Armond Cohen. Yeah, that's right. I am amazed that I got that out of notes scribbled on the back of a CVS receipt that has been transferred from pocket to pocket for a month.
I wonder if enough good science docs get made in a year to make for a festival during some off month at the Brattle or Somerville (October, perhaps); they get a good turnout at IFFBoston but seldom seem to be great movies. It kind of pains me to say that, because they're some of the ones I look forward to the most, and I should really be more in the tank for the nuclear power movie than I wound up being. If nothing else, they make for some of the more unusual Q&As, because there is always a few people in the audience whose expertise is way beyond what the movie actually gets into, and they are going to try and hijack the discussion in specific, detailed ways.
After that, it was back to Somerville for Never Goin' Back, and as much as I enjoyed it, I kind of sighed when I saw the A24 logo in front. They do good stuff, but an indication that a movie has already got distribution with no Q&A afterward is a missed opportunity to see something that might not play in a theater otherwise. Then again, I might have just gone for Support the Girls instead, and that's also got distribution. So who knows?
Finally, I went downstairs for Never Leave Home, a decision that was 60% "this film starts and ends before everything else playing after 9pm", and I still found myself drifting in and out, missing enough that I couldn't even pretend to write something about it. Filmmaker Michael Tully did videoconference in for a post-show Q&A (apparently some other film festival got him in person even though IFFBoston has played all his films and he says he loves us), talking about how he liked bouncing around genres, with Irish folklore horror one he wanted to do. Like a lot of people who play in that genre, he raved about his location scouts, saying they were planning to go to a lot of different places for different scenes, but instead found what they needed in one place… Which of course was haunted.
Tre Maison Dasan
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2018 in the Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Tre Maison Dasan will often be described as a documentary about growing up with at least one parent incarcerated, but it's not quite that: It's about being a kid whose mother or father is in jail, and that's something different. These three boys have too little control over their situations to overcome much, so the audience is placed in a position of mainly watching and trying to understand without much judgment. It's a tricky sort of documentary - the filmmakers can't really want the drama that creates a traditional storyline - but one that often proves engrossing and illuminating.
The title names the three kids in the general area of Providence, Rhode Island, from youngest to oldest: Tre Janson is thirteen and already starting to find trouble; he and his father compare ankle monitors when Tre visits him in prison, and that father often seems like the most stable one in the family, considering how erratic Tre's mother Kerri can be. Maison Teixeira is eleven and on the autistic spectrum, living with his grandmother so he can both be close to close to his father and attend a special-needs school while his mother is out in California. Six-year-old Dasan Lopes is probably the most fortunate - not only has he been taken in by extended family, with a cousin who is like a sister to him, but his mother Stephanie is just about to be released as the film starts, and is determined to make things work..
These three are an interesting group of kids and you can see why producer/director Denali TIller chose them; they've got big personalities and distinct situations. One of the more interesting choices she makes is that none of the parents are in jail for smoking weed or something else that would make this a film about all the ways in which the American justice system is prone to excessive incarceration. That's a worthy topic, but there's something fascinating by the situations shown here, as all three parents try to take ownership of their past misdeeds. Watching them do so does sometimes implicitly raise the question of what the system should do, but it's the way they handle it that's most powerful, from how Maison's father seems to be trying to keep his son from to thinking too highly of him to how Dasan seems unable to process that his loving mother could have done something so awful
Full review on EFC
The New Fire
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
This documentary about the future of nuclear power - one which, it argues, should not be "disappearing as soon as possible" - feels like it's either being made much too early or as a high-level pitch for investors. It has a very optimistic attitude, which is welcome enough, but relatively less in the way of numbers. Not a bad introduction, but maybe it's too simple for the choir that it will inevitably be preaching to.
It makes its initial argument in impressively clear fashion: That while renewable energy sources like wind and solar power have been making great strides in both volume and price per kilowatt-hour, they are far from being able to cover the "baseload" - a predictable, constant supply of electricity not dependant on weather or other variable factors - that the United States and the rest of the world rely upon and which is generally supplied by burning hydrocarbons such as coal and natural gas. Director David Schumacher is fairly quick in terms of outlining why continuing along with that is not a great idea (if you're part of the audience for this film, you are probably at least somewhat familiar with how humanity is driving climate change), but relatively thorough in talking about the size of the hole that needs to be filled.
The film is also fairly competent in talking about the upgraded forms of fission power that could displace coal, oil, and the like, coming at them via start-ups aiming to implement them in the near future: Transatomic, founded by Leslie Dewan & Mark Massie, aims to create safer large reactors cooled by molten salt rather than water; husband-and-wife team Caroline Cochrane & Jacob DeWitte are behind Oklo, which envisions small sealed reactors powering "microgrids". Both groups find themselves bumping up against regulatory agencies that, beyond being properly cautious, are designed to be navigated by large, established players.
Full review on EFC
Never Goin' Back
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2018 in the Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
An enjoyably crude comedy about two people whose simple-if-ill-advised plan for a weekend at the beach is detailed by a bunch of disasters both of their own and others' making, Never Goin' Back is a bit of a standout right now because they don't necessarily make a lot of these movies about teenage girls. And while it's noteworthy for being unusual now, it will probably age well because it's genuinely funny throughout.
The girls are Jessie (Camila Morrone) and Angela (Maia Mitchell), high-school dropouts sharing an apartment in Fort Worth with Jessie's older brother Dustin (Joel Allen) and his friend Brandon (Kyle Mooney). Jessie's seventeenth birthday is next week, and Angela's just announced they'll take a trip to Galveston to celebrate. The thing is, she's paid with their rent money, which is not necessarily a problem, since they've got double shifts at the diner all week. That doesn't necessarily take into account Dustin's plan to make some money selling drugs with his new buddy Tony (Kendal Smith), which could easily go south because, even when this group isn't high, none of them are really that bright.
Dumb folks are usually the sidekicks or supporting characters in a movie because it is not easy to move a story forward in a satisfying way based upon a bunch of decisions that don't exactly make sense. Writer/director Augustine Frizzell gives Jessie & Angela goals that at least seem reasonable on a certain level, even if they're almost certainly doomed, and there's a certain mild delusion that the audience can sympathize with - that even if what they're doing is unlikely to work, what they want, whether it be a couple days off or just a toilet Jessie isn't afraid to sit on, is not unreasonable, and you can kind of get behind the world being fair.
Full review on EFC
Don't Leave Home
Seen 28 April 2018 in the Somerville Theatre #2 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
The last show of a long day, and I'm not going to lie: Even at the time, I didn't feel like I retained enough to put an entry into Letterboxd, and that was a month and a half ago. I was wiped out, so I can't give this one a truly fair assessment.
Still, if it pops up in a good slot at Fantasia or makes it to a local theater, I'll certainly consider giving it another shot. It kind of hit me as a sort of generic Irish-folklore horror story with a nifty concept - various pieces of art consuming people, repeated as one work inspires another - and a terrifically creepy set of locations, from the inside of a manor that seems uncomfortably large as the home of a clergyman (even if he is also an artist who presumably comes from money) to a gazebo setting that absolutely feels like it could swallow a person up. Writer/director Michael Tully and his crew make piece feel otherworldly even when they're not materially different than the area around them.
To the extent that horror operates on feel, this movie generally hits its target. To the extent that a movie needs to rely on one event leading to another, it seemed a lot fuzzier. The great horror movies find ways to make that work, with the irrationality overwhelming the characters and the audience (or the heroine finding a way to overcome her fear and cut her way through to a goal); this one had me stuck in between, and not in a good way.
First up: Tre Maison Dasan, who did not line up in title order:
Left to right, that is Maison, director Denali Tiller, Dasan, Dasan's scene-stealing cousin Alivia, Tre (who goes by T.J. now), and Dasan's mother Jacqueline.
They are all pretty great, happy to talk about how weird it was to have Tiller shooting this movie and self-aware enough to realize that they all used the word weird. They were up-front about how you can't make this sort of movie without having an effect on what you're shooting, but that's okay; nobody feels bad about helping at-risk kids out a little. Of course, you could tell that there was some negotiating going on from the number of scenes where T.J. has a bag from McDonald's as the filmmakers knew what would get him in a good enough mood to open up.
The best part was just seeing that T.J. and Jacqueline were doing okay. T.J. went through a lot over the course of the time he was being filmed and wasn't starting out in the best place, so seeing him upbeat was great. Jacqueline was released from jail early on, and was pushing the Kickstarter for a children's book she had written to help other kids in her son's position.
Then, to the Brattle!
I think that's WBUR's Bruce Gellerman, The New Fire director David Schumacher, Caroline Cochrane of Oklo, and pro-nuclear activist Armond Cohen. Yeah, that's right. I am amazed that I got that out of notes scribbled on the back of a CVS receipt that has been transferred from pocket to pocket for a month.
I wonder if enough good science docs get made in a year to make for a festival during some off month at the Brattle or Somerville (October, perhaps); they get a good turnout at IFFBoston but seldom seem to be great movies. It kind of pains me to say that, because they're some of the ones I look forward to the most, and I should really be more in the tank for the nuclear power movie than I wound up being. If nothing else, they make for some of the more unusual Q&As, because there is always a few people in the audience whose expertise is way beyond what the movie actually gets into, and they are going to try and hijack the discussion in specific, detailed ways.
After that, it was back to Somerville for Never Goin' Back, and as much as I enjoyed it, I kind of sighed when I saw the A24 logo in front. They do good stuff, but an indication that a movie has already got distribution with no Q&A afterward is a missed opportunity to see something that might not play in a theater otherwise. Then again, I might have just gone for Support the Girls instead, and that's also got distribution. So who knows?
Finally, I went downstairs for Never Leave Home, a decision that was 60% "this film starts and ends before everything else playing after 9pm", and I still found myself drifting in and out, missing enough that I couldn't even pretend to write something about it. Filmmaker Michael Tully did videoconference in for a post-show Q&A (apparently some other film festival got him in person even though IFFBoston has played all his films and he says he loves us), talking about how he liked bouncing around genres, with Irish folklore horror one he wanted to do. Like a lot of people who play in that genre, he raved about his location scouts, saying they were planning to go to a lot of different places for different scenes, but instead found what they needed in one place… Which of course was haunted.
Tre Maison Dasan
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2018 in the Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Tre Maison Dasan will often be described as a documentary about growing up with at least one parent incarcerated, but it's not quite that: It's about being a kid whose mother or father is in jail, and that's something different. These three boys have too little control over their situations to overcome much, so the audience is placed in a position of mainly watching and trying to understand without much judgment. It's a tricky sort of documentary - the filmmakers can't really want the drama that creates a traditional storyline - but one that often proves engrossing and illuminating.
The title names the three kids in the general area of Providence, Rhode Island, from youngest to oldest: Tre Janson is thirteen and already starting to find trouble; he and his father compare ankle monitors when Tre visits him in prison, and that father often seems like the most stable one in the family, considering how erratic Tre's mother Kerri can be. Maison Teixeira is eleven and on the autistic spectrum, living with his grandmother so he can both be close to close to his father and attend a special-needs school while his mother is out in California. Six-year-old Dasan Lopes is probably the most fortunate - not only has he been taken in by extended family, with a cousin who is like a sister to him, but his mother Stephanie is just about to be released as the film starts, and is determined to make things work..
These three are an interesting group of kids and you can see why producer/director Denali TIller chose them; they've got big personalities and distinct situations. One of the more interesting choices she makes is that none of the parents are in jail for smoking weed or something else that would make this a film about all the ways in which the American justice system is prone to excessive incarceration. That's a worthy topic, but there's something fascinating by the situations shown here, as all three parents try to take ownership of their past misdeeds. Watching them do so does sometimes implicitly raise the question of what the system should do, but it's the way they handle it that's most powerful, from how Maison's father seems to be trying to keep his son from to thinking too highly of him to how Dasan seems unable to process that his loving mother could have done something so awful
Full review on EFC
The New Fire
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
This documentary about the future of nuclear power - one which, it argues, should not be "disappearing as soon as possible" - feels like it's either being made much too early or as a high-level pitch for investors. It has a very optimistic attitude, which is welcome enough, but relatively less in the way of numbers. Not a bad introduction, but maybe it's too simple for the choir that it will inevitably be preaching to.
It makes its initial argument in impressively clear fashion: That while renewable energy sources like wind and solar power have been making great strides in both volume and price per kilowatt-hour, they are far from being able to cover the "baseload" - a predictable, constant supply of electricity not dependant on weather or other variable factors - that the United States and the rest of the world rely upon and which is generally supplied by burning hydrocarbons such as coal and natural gas. Director David Schumacher is fairly quick in terms of outlining why continuing along with that is not a great idea (if you're part of the audience for this film, you are probably at least somewhat familiar with how humanity is driving climate change), but relatively thorough in talking about the size of the hole that needs to be filled.
The film is also fairly competent in talking about the upgraded forms of fission power that could displace coal, oil, and the like, coming at them via start-ups aiming to implement them in the near future: Transatomic, founded by Leslie Dewan & Mark Massie, aims to create safer large reactors cooled by molten salt rather than water; husband-and-wife team Caroline Cochrane & Jacob DeWitte are behind Oklo, which envisions small sealed reactors powering "microgrids". Both groups find themselves bumping up against regulatory agencies that, beyond being properly cautious, are designed to be navigated by large, established players.
Full review on EFC
Never Goin' Back
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2018 in the Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
An enjoyably crude comedy about two people whose simple-if-ill-advised plan for a weekend at the beach is detailed by a bunch of disasters both of their own and others' making, Never Goin' Back is a bit of a standout right now because they don't necessarily make a lot of these movies about teenage girls. And while it's noteworthy for being unusual now, it will probably age well because it's genuinely funny throughout.
The girls are Jessie (Camila Morrone) and Angela (Maia Mitchell), high-school dropouts sharing an apartment in Fort Worth with Jessie's older brother Dustin (Joel Allen) and his friend Brandon (Kyle Mooney). Jessie's seventeenth birthday is next week, and Angela's just announced they'll take a trip to Galveston to celebrate. The thing is, she's paid with their rent money, which is not necessarily a problem, since they've got double shifts at the diner all week. That doesn't necessarily take into account Dustin's plan to make some money selling drugs with his new buddy Tony (Kendal Smith), which could easily go south because, even when this group isn't high, none of them are really that bright.
Dumb folks are usually the sidekicks or supporting characters in a movie because it is not easy to move a story forward in a satisfying way based upon a bunch of decisions that don't exactly make sense. Writer/director Augustine Frizzell gives Jessie & Angela goals that at least seem reasonable on a certain level, even if they're almost certainly doomed, and there's a certain mild delusion that the audience can sympathize with - that even if what they're doing is unlikely to work, what they want, whether it be a couple days off or just a toilet Jessie isn't afraid to sit on, is not unreasonable, and you can kind of get behind the world being fair.
Full review on EFC
Don't Leave Home
Seen 28 April 2018 in the Somerville Theatre #2 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
The last show of a long day, and I'm not going to lie: Even at the time, I didn't feel like I retained enough to put an entry into Letterboxd, and that was a month and a half ago. I was wiped out, so I can't give this one a truly fair assessment.
Still, if it pops up in a good slot at Fantasia or makes it to a local theater, I'll certainly consider giving it another shot. It kind of hit me as a sort of generic Irish-folklore horror story with a nifty concept - various pieces of art consuming people, repeated as one work inspires another - and a terrifically creepy set of locations, from the inside of a manor that seems uncomfortably large as the home of a clergyman (even if he is also an artist who presumably comes from money) to a gazebo setting that absolutely feels like it could swallow a person up. Writer/director Michael Tully and his crew make piece feel otherworldly even when they're not materially different than the area around them.
To the extent that horror operates on feel, this movie generally hits its target. To the extent that a movie needs to rely on one event leading to another, it seemed a lot fuzzier. The great horror movies find ways to make that work, with the irrationality overwhelming the characters and the audience (or the heroine finding a way to overcome her fear and cut her way through to a goal); this one had me stuck in between, and not in a good way.
Saturday, March 17, 2018
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
It's mildly disappointing that things didn't line up so that one could have done a double feature of Bombshell and Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool at the Kendall; the Boston runs of the two are separated by a month and that might have been a bit more "femme fatales not getting their due" than most people want to see in an evening. On the other hand, it might be a tough one to resist when putting together the next Brattle calendar.
It's already down to just a couple shows a day at the Kendall, but it will be a Science on Screen selection at the Coolidge on 27 March, so there's still an opportunity or two to catch it coming up.
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 March 2018 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run, DCP)
One would think that there would have been a great movie about Hedy Lamarr's story by now, but it hasn't happened yet, and this documentary isn't quite it. There are almost too many ways to approach it, perhaps, and the greatest chapters are either apocryphal or end in disappointment; the beautiful genius movie star never gets the Hollywood ending. This film does its best to extract useful lessons from that, even if in doing so it has a hard time deciding what to keep and what to leave out.
For those not familiar with Hedwig Eva Kiesler, given the screen name of "Hedy Lamarr" when she was signed to an MGM contract after fleeing Austria during World War II, she lived a heck of a life: Born in cosmopolitan Vienna in 1914, she went into acting as a teenager, becoming equally parts famous and infamous for Extase, a sexually provocative film made when she was 17, before marrying a munitions manufacturer who sold to the Nazis. Legend is she fled by disguising herself as the maid, making her way to London and then America, where she was celebrated as one of the most beautiful and glamorous movie stars in the world with a gossip-page-worthy personal life. Her greatest accomplishment, though, was arguably one few knew much about until later in her life and after her death: Responding to a call for new ideas, she and avant-garde composer George Antheil collaborated on "frequency hopping", a method for switching the frequencies used to control a torpedo remotely that would avoid jamming. The Navy said it would not be possible to implement - and why don't you put your pretty face to better use selling war bonds - but it would later serve as the foundation for most forms of secure wireless communication.
There's a long time between WWII and Wi-Fi, and it's during this period that filmmaker Alexandra Dean occasionally stumbles. That it's in many ways not a satisfying story is at least partially the point - a world that had little use for her mind and independence turned on her as she aged - but the clear admiration that Dean and her collaborators have for her sometimes seems to keep them from really digging into the parts that don't cast her in a good light. There's an adopted son who chose to live with another family and grandchildren who talk of her being distant, and it doesn't quite mesh with the talk of her as a devoted single parent to her biological children. It's all over the place, and not just because the latter half of Lamarr's life was messy.
Full review on EFC
It's already down to just a couple shows a day at the Kendall, but it will be a Science on Screen selection at the Coolidge on 27 March, so there's still an opportunity or two to catch it coming up.
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 March 2018 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run, DCP)
One would think that there would have been a great movie about Hedy Lamarr's story by now, but it hasn't happened yet, and this documentary isn't quite it. There are almost too many ways to approach it, perhaps, and the greatest chapters are either apocryphal or end in disappointment; the beautiful genius movie star never gets the Hollywood ending. This film does its best to extract useful lessons from that, even if in doing so it has a hard time deciding what to keep and what to leave out.
For those not familiar with Hedwig Eva Kiesler, given the screen name of "Hedy Lamarr" when she was signed to an MGM contract after fleeing Austria during World War II, she lived a heck of a life: Born in cosmopolitan Vienna in 1914, she went into acting as a teenager, becoming equally parts famous and infamous for Extase, a sexually provocative film made when she was 17, before marrying a munitions manufacturer who sold to the Nazis. Legend is she fled by disguising herself as the maid, making her way to London and then America, where she was celebrated as one of the most beautiful and glamorous movie stars in the world with a gossip-page-worthy personal life. Her greatest accomplishment, though, was arguably one few knew much about until later in her life and after her death: Responding to a call for new ideas, she and avant-garde composer George Antheil collaborated on "frequency hopping", a method for switching the frequencies used to control a torpedo remotely that would avoid jamming. The Navy said it would not be possible to implement - and why don't you put your pretty face to better use selling war bonds - but it would later serve as the foundation for most forms of secure wireless communication.
There's a long time between WWII and Wi-Fi, and it's during this period that filmmaker Alexandra Dean occasionally stumbles. That it's in many ways not a satisfying story is at least partially the point - a world that had little use for her mind and independence turned on her as she aged - but the clear admiration that Dean and her collaborators have for her sometimes seems to keep them from really digging into the parts that don't cast her in a good light. There's an adopted son who chose to live with another family and grandchildren who talk of her being distant, and it doesn't quite mesh with the talk of her as a devoted single parent to her biological children. It's all over the place, and not just because the latter half of Lamarr's life was messy.
Full review on EFC
Monday, December 21, 2015
That Week In Tickets: 6 December 2015 - 12 December 2015
Idea for next year - a movie-ticket Yahtzee game with other folks who have MoviePass or who just otherwise see a bunch of movies in a week. This week's tickets, for instance, would get me 25 points for a full house
I knew something like this was in play from Sunday, when I got out of Tamasha - a Bollywood movie I liked a bit more than I was expecting despite always being up for something with Deepika Padukone - and into Krampus at a different theater and saw they were both screen #1s. Since I knew the Science on Screen presentations at the Coolidge were usually in the main auditorium, it was looking to be a good week for someone who enjoys word numeric coincidences!
(For what it's worth, Krampus is a lot of fun, whether you're in the Christmas spirit or not.)
And The Blob delivered the one as well as the usual entertaining and illuminating pre-show lecture. This one started with the Great Boston Molasses Disaster, which is a piece of Boston history that is both absurd and horrifying - people died, but it is hard not to laugh when you picture a wave of molasses suring up the streets of Boston's North End. This led to a discussion of how the viscosity of molasses makes swimming through it with standard symmetrical strokes almost impossible for something human-sized - length is the important variable here - so to escape you're best off trying to imitate microbes, whose dimensions make water even harder to swim through than molasses would be for humans, so they use asymmetrical motions with cilia and tails. Things you learn at this series.
A couple days off after that, and then on Thursday I went to the night-before show of The Danish Girl, which wasn't bad but was not exceptional in the way something built to be an awards contender has to be. Also, in a year where we've already seen Tangerine, it's not so big a deal. (It was in theater #5, so chances of five of a kind pretty much ended there.)
Friday night, I dropped into the Harvard Film Archive for one of the more rare screenings in their Orson Welles series, Too Much Johnson, which is less a film itself than an assembly of the footage Welles spot when bringing the play of the same name to the stage with the idea of these films bits of slapstick action being inserted at the appropriate time. The play never made it to Broadway and thus Welles never finished cutting the material, but it's kind of interesting to examine as the unfinished (and long-thought-lost) project that it is.
Saturday would prove long but not take me fat from home, as both things I went to see were in the Somerville Theatre. The afternoon was spent downstairs in the Micro-Cinema, where All Things Horror had what I think was their first event since the Boston Horror Show back in January with their annual presentation of Etheria Film Night. I wounds up liking the feature more than the short films, but even there, the only one I disliked was the one I had seen and hatred earlier, so I was steeled for it.
Then after a quick stop home for some food, I was back there for In the Heart of the Sea, which has to be put down as a fairly significant disappointment - it's got a very nice cast and Ron Howard at the helm, a guy who is a pretty fair storyteller even when faced with a challenging shoot, but it always seeks to remind the audience that these events inspired something better and never finds an angle that gives the film a theme beyond how the ocean is dangerous.
With that also on a screen #5, I scored a full house. Now, if only I we're actually competing with someone...
Up next - a vacation where I accomplished little beyond watching movies!
The Blob (1958)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2015 in College Corner Theatre #1 (Science on Screen, DCP)
There's a Criterion Collection edition of The Blob, which might lead one to believe that this particular 1950s monster movie is a cut above its contemporaries - or maybe two, since being just one step up gets it to "not embarrassing" as opposed to actually good. That's not really the case; instead, this is a movie that represents its time and genre fairly well, and on top of that gains a little extra attention for putting some of the action in a theater full of its teenaged target audience watching horror movies. And, of course, for starring Steve McQueen before he was Steve McQueen.
That's more literally true in this case than many others, with the future star credited as "Steven McQueen". More importantly, though, the rugged masculinity that would later become his hallmark is still very much a work in progress; this movie's hero Steve Andrews may be introduced as a guy who drag races and goes through girlfriends fast enough that he can't be expected to remember the details of the one he's currently necking with, but McQueen plays him with an almost complete absence of swagger. Andrews may suddenly get the urge to run after a meteorite or insist he saw something horrible happen to the town doctor, but he's oddly hesitant much of the time, seemingly not certain or bright enough to insist or charismatic enough to convince. In a way, it's perhaps a more realistic portrayal of 1950s youth than the standard, in that he has ideas of taking charge of the situation but doesn't quite have the belief in himself to do so yet; he's still fairly deferential, despite the insistence by one of the local cops that all teenagers are back-talking hooligans. Maybe it makes his development into a leader by the end a little more honest and hard-won after seeing him jump because girlfriend Jane Martin (Aneta Corseaut) is a step or two ahead of him at one point (sneaking back out to prove they really saw something may be his idea, but she's the one who commits to it more whole-heartedly).
The odd performance of its star aside, The Blob winds up being campy in a somewhat less mockable way than many other fifties B-movies. Its featureless monster may seem very silly in motion, no matter what sort of tricks the filmmakers pull to make it seem threatening, but there are a few surprisingly gruesome moments that let it feel like a real danger nevertheless, and a combination of simplicity and cleverness to getting it on screen that demands at least a little admiration. Make no mistake, the movie is frequently very dumb - the Blob bounces from place to place too easily, and there's a constant sense that nothing has to be nearly as flat as it is - and that's what ultimately frustrates in retrospect. It's always one moment of inspiration away from having its faults forgiven, but never able to get it.
Too Much Johnson
N/A (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2015 at the Harvard Film Archive (Orson Welles Part II, 35mm)
Has there ever been a video game built around silent comedy, at least recently? There's the old Atari 2600 Keystone Kapers game, and the Three Stooges game of the mid-1980s also comes to mind, but it seems like there would be something really fun about a game where your character was slightly klutzy, and correcting for the slight winnings of the controls was an important skill rather than a reason for frustration, and situations careened out of control in funny, non-lethal ways.
I ask because watching Too Much Johnson - or more accurately, the slapstick footage Orson Welles shot to use in a stage version of the William Gillette play of that name - can bring the sensation of a game to mind: The player (Welles, in this case) tries a bunch of different things, not always getting anywhere for reasons that may seem oblique, but sometimes it works, the level clears, and he tries to get his avatar (Joseph Cotton) through something similar but different. It can be kind of a chore to watch, especially with little storytelling context but you recognize the skill involved. That's also the nature of what is still halfway an assembly cut - the first of three to five silent-comedy sequences is mostly complete, but at least three-quarters of the footage that we see here would have been discarded, static shots cut into edited footage that tells a story rather than just showing the same thing over and over again.
There is still some pleasure in watching it, as the gags are mostly well-conceived and the folks involved are good at what they're doing. It would actually be kind of fascinating to have a bunch of filmmakers act as Welles's editor here, or make this an assignment for a film class. There's plenty of smiles and laughs in the material, and it's great to have it rediscovered, even if you can't really treat it like an actual movie.
(Although, seriously, there's a heck of a game to be made out of its wild rooftop chases with what seem like dangerously unstable ladders along with an appreciation for how dating some of this comedy was!)
I knew something like this was in play from Sunday, when I got out of Tamasha - a Bollywood movie I liked a bit more than I was expecting despite always being up for something with Deepika Padukone - and into Krampus at a different theater and saw they were both screen #1s. Since I knew the Science on Screen presentations at the Coolidge were usually in the main auditorium, it was looking to be a good week for someone who enjoys word numeric coincidences!
(For what it's worth, Krampus is a lot of fun, whether you're in the Christmas spirit or not.)
And The Blob delivered the one as well as the usual entertaining and illuminating pre-show lecture. This one started with the Great Boston Molasses Disaster, which is a piece of Boston history that is both absurd and horrifying - people died, but it is hard not to laugh when you picture a wave of molasses suring up the streets of Boston's North End. This led to a discussion of how the viscosity of molasses makes swimming through it with standard symmetrical strokes almost impossible for something human-sized - length is the important variable here - so to escape you're best off trying to imitate microbes, whose dimensions make water even harder to swim through than molasses would be for humans, so they use asymmetrical motions with cilia and tails. Things you learn at this series.
A couple days off after that, and then on Thursday I went to the night-before show of The Danish Girl, which wasn't bad but was not exceptional in the way something built to be an awards contender has to be. Also, in a year where we've already seen Tangerine, it's not so big a deal. (It was in theater #5, so chances of five of a kind pretty much ended there.)
Friday night, I dropped into the Harvard Film Archive for one of the more rare screenings in their Orson Welles series, Too Much Johnson, which is less a film itself than an assembly of the footage Welles spot when bringing the play of the same name to the stage with the idea of these films bits of slapstick action being inserted at the appropriate time. The play never made it to Broadway and thus Welles never finished cutting the material, but it's kind of interesting to examine as the unfinished (and long-thought-lost) project that it is.
Saturday would prove long but not take me fat from home, as both things I went to see were in the Somerville Theatre. The afternoon was spent downstairs in the Micro-Cinema, where All Things Horror had what I think was their first event since the Boston Horror Show back in January with their annual presentation of Etheria Film Night. I wounds up liking the feature more than the short films, but even there, the only one I disliked was the one I had seen and hatred earlier, so I was steeled for it.
Then after a quick stop home for some food, I was back there for In the Heart of the Sea, which has to be put down as a fairly significant disappointment - it's got a very nice cast and Ron Howard at the helm, a guy who is a pretty fair storyteller even when faced with a challenging shoot, but it always seeks to remind the audience that these events inspired something better and never finds an angle that gives the film a theme beyond how the ocean is dangerous.
With that also on a screen #5, I scored a full house. Now, if only I we're actually competing with someone...
Up next - a vacation where I accomplished little beyond watching movies!
The Blob (1958)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2015 in College Corner Theatre #1 (Science on Screen, DCP)
There's a Criterion Collection edition of The Blob, which might lead one to believe that this particular 1950s monster movie is a cut above its contemporaries - or maybe two, since being just one step up gets it to "not embarrassing" as opposed to actually good. That's not really the case; instead, this is a movie that represents its time and genre fairly well, and on top of that gains a little extra attention for putting some of the action in a theater full of its teenaged target audience watching horror movies. And, of course, for starring Steve McQueen before he was Steve McQueen.
That's more literally true in this case than many others, with the future star credited as "Steven McQueen". More importantly, though, the rugged masculinity that would later become his hallmark is still very much a work in progress; this movie's hero Steve Andrews may be introduced as a guy who drag races and goes through girlfriends fast enough that he can't be expected to remember the details of the one he's currently necking with, but McQueen plays him with an almost complete absence of swagger. Andrews may suddenly get the urge to run after a meteorite or insist he saw something horrible happen to the town doctor, but he's oddly hesitant much of the time, seemingly not certain or bright enough to insist or charismatic enough to convince. In a way, it's perhaps a more realistic portrayal of 1950s youth than the standard, in that he has ideas of taking charge of the situation but doesn't quite have the belief in himself to do so yet; he's still fairly deferential, despite the insistence by one of the local cops that all teenagers are back-talking hooligans. Maybe it makes his development into a leader by the end a little more honest and hard-won after seeing him jump because girlfriend Jane Martin (Aneta Corseaut) is a step or two ahead of him at one point (sneaking back out to prove they really saw something may be his idea, but she's the one who commits to it more whole-heartedly).
The odd performance of its star aside, The Blob winds up being campy in a somewhat less mockable way than many other fifties B-movies. Its featureless monster may seem very silly in motion, no matter what sort of tricks the filmmakers pull to make it seem threatening, but there are a few surprisingly gruesome moments that let it feel like a real danger nevertheless, and a combination of simplicity and cleverness to getting it on screen that demands at least a little admiration. Make no mistake, the movie is frequently very dumb - the Blob bounces from place to place too easily, and there's a constant sense that nothing has to be nearly as flat as it is - and that's what ultimately frustrates in retrospect. It's always one moment of inspiration away from having its faults forgiven, but never able to get it.
Too Much Johnson
N/A (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2015 at the Harvard Film Archive (Orson Welles Part II, 35mm)
Has there ever been a video game built around silent comedy, at least recently? There's the old Atari 2600 Keystone Kapers game, and the Three Stooges game of the mid-1980s also comes to mind, but it seems like there would be something really fun about a game where your character was slightly klutzy, and correcting for the slight winnings of the controls was an important skill rather than a reason for frustration, and situations careened out of control in funny, non-lethal ways.
I ask because watching Too Much Johnson - or more accurately, the slapstick footage Orson Welles shot to use in a stage version of the William Gillette play of that name - can bring the sensation of a game to mind: The player (Welles, in this case) tries a bunch of different things, not always getting anywhere for reasons that may seem oblique, but sometimes it works, the level clears, and he tries to get his avatar (Joseph Cotton) through something similar but different. It can be kind of a chore to watch, especially with little storytelling context but you recognize the skill involved. That's also the nature of what is still halfway an assembly cut - the first of three to five silent-comedy sequences is mostly complete, but at least three-quarters of the footage that we see here would have been discarded, static shots cut into edited footage that tells a story rather than just showing the same thing over and over again.
There is still some pleasure in watching it, as the gags are mostly well-conceived and the folks involved are good at what they're doing. It would actually be kind of fascinating to have a bunch of filmmakers act as Welles's editor here, or make this an assignment for a film class. There's plenty of smiles and laughs in the material, and it's great to have it rediscovered, even if you can't really treat it like an actual movie.
(Although, seriously, there's a heck of a game to be made out of its wild rooftop chases with what seem like dangerously unstable ladders along with an appreciation for how dating some of this comedy was!)
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
The Fantasia Daily 2015.14 (27 July 2015): The Blue Hour, The Visit, Ryuzo and the Seven Henchmen, and The Interior
Busy start Monday, with a run directly from work to the just-starting The Blue Hour and then right back into the same theater for The Visit. I then walked a few blocks for a burger with pulled pork at m:brgr, and it's weird, but distances in Montreal seem much shorter this year, which is really odd. I don't think I'm walking particularly faster, but that's a place I remember taking a little effort to reach and instead I felt like I was getting there earlier. I'm reasonably sure that I've stayed fairly close to where I am now and not been able to get to the festival in ten minutes before as well.
(Anyway, good burger, but that place is pricey without really separating itself from, say, Le Gourmet Burger.)
After that, I hung out in line with some folks I know from Boston who would be going home the next day and agreed to help me recover from a stupid thing I did/that happened, where I couldn't find which box had the stamps before leaving for Montreal, and since that trip was on a Sunday, I couldn't stop in a post office. The trouble with that is that I hadn't mailed my rent for August yet, and I'll be here until the eighth. I was afraid I'd have to pay international rates and not know when it would arrive, but they said they'd drop it in the mail when they got back. Whew.
Ryuzo and the Seven Henchmen was good, and then I wandered back and forth like a dummy, going to the Yuk Yuk club for "Tales from Beyond the Pale: Live", seeing everyone already had tickets, going back to the ticket office, being told it was sold out, and then opting for The Interior. Note that it was raining and I'd left my umbrella at the apartment at the start of the day, though not the downpour it was at some points.
Say hi to the cast and crew of The Interior, many of whom I don't have full names for because I didn't take a snapshot of the credits and the IMDB entry for this tiny independent film which just had its world premiere is, as one might expect, incomplete. My notes say (l-r) Director of Photography Othello Ubalde; Ryan, a non-professional actor who played the small part of Roland; Patrick McFadden, who played the main character James; Jake Beczala, who played the nameless man in the red jacket; producer Peter Kuplowsky (I think), and writer/director Kevin Juras.
As you might expect, some of these folks were just really pleased to be there; others waxed rhapsodic about the beauty and poetry of the location or talked about what didn't influence the movie. The Dreaded Improv Question actually yielded a good variation on the usual answer, that when you're making such a tightly-budgeted (both in terms of money and time) independent movie, you really can't afford to waste time going off-script... But on the other hand, when the location gives you snow, you work with it and be glad you were shooting in sequence. They said this was doubly true of the Toronto-set scenes, where they had roughly three days to shoot about 25 minutes in a number of locations. It may seem like the cast is being loose and riffing, but the reality is that the script was good and the cast well-chosen.
Today's plan: Catch Me Daddy, Robbery, dinner, Cop Car, and Fatal Frame. The Visit is recommended, and note that those first two are playing in Hall rather than de Seve now.
Onthakan (The Blue Hour)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
When making a film meant to be eerie and still, greatness is almost the baseline requirement for the cinematography. Fortunately, Thailand seems to be unusually well-stocked with both great shooters and things for them to point a camera at, so The Blue Hour is off to a good start, and builds into something unnerving as well.
It begins by showing Tam (Atthaphan Poonsawas), a middle-class teenager, making his way to a disused public pool for a rendezvous with Phum (Oabnithi Wiwattanawarang),a slightly older, more confident guy he met online. It's an ideal meeting place for these sorts of assignations - free as opposed to a hotel, away from parents, empty because of rumors of past drownings and subsequent hauntings. But while Phum seems unlikely to add to Tam's collection of mostly-discreet bruises, he may be dangerous in other ways.
Not that Tam is entirely a sweet kid who is bullied for being gay. That's the bulk of the character, sure, but it's rare for anybody to be that entirely passive, and it's not long before his complaints about being unfairly blamed for everything have caveats that, yeah, he did steal that Buddha statuette. Atthaphan Poonsawas handles adding that sort of nuance to Tam nicely; the core of the character is still an easy guy to empathize with, but he's also very much a teenager that is going to find trouble and may in fact be looking for it, if not quite to the level he eventually finds.
Full review on EFC.
"Témoinage de l'indicible" ("Tales of the Unspeakble")
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Director Simon Pernollet tells a nifty tale of his childhood in Tepoztlan, Mexico here, with the family all living in a spooky house that was surrounded by nahual. Those would be sorcerers and shapeshifters (generally up to no good) of Mexican and Central American myth. As Pernollet tells the story, nearly every member of his family had some sort of encounter with them, though they escaped unscathed.
He tells the story in an interesting way, moving his camera around an empty house and grounds that may not be the one in the stories, but gives the right impression, while Pernollet describes events in narration. The fully-made beds and otherwise intact house imply that it was abandoned in place when the family got too freaked out, adding to a sense of unease that rumbling bass helps to create. The filmmaker winds up playing with fear nicely, as there's no big horror-movie sting to the story, but the environment and atmosphere is built to the point where one can comprehend fright itself doing all the work.
Nifty little campfire tale, well presented.
The Visit (2015, doc)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, DCP)
The Visit is apparently meant to be the second in a thematic trilogy of documentaries by Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen, and I'm curious what grand-scaled idea will round them out. I hope it's something a little more like Into Eternity, where the consideration of long-term storage of nuclear waste felt practical as well as too big to truly understand, as this film's topic of first contact with alien life, while fascinating, winds up both too specific and too vague.
After a bit of discussion about how, for the past 100 years, humanity has been sending a great deal of radio into space, which will inevitably attract the attention of any intelligent life out there. Madsen posits a single alien spacecraft arriving on Earth and landing, and then interviews a fair number of people on how that situation would likely play out. Many are connected with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, headquartered in Vienna, but there are scientists from a number of countries, an expert in space law, and military and political spokespeople from the UK added to the discussion.
As with Into Eternity, Madsen and his interviewees often speak in the second person, addressing the alien visitors rather than the actual audience, and it's not always as natural as it was in the former movie. That's in part because a good deal of the documentary is about how actual communication with extraterrestrials may be impossible, and in part because the subjects only occasionally seem to be let in on the premise, which isn't necessarily compatible with the sort of simulation and explanation they are doing. Madsen also seems to find himself trapped between the general and the specific, like he wants to present the framework of how the world would respond to this sort of encounter but ultimately realizes that it is impossible; there are too many contradictory paths that can play out.
Full review on EFC.
Ryûzô to 7 nin no kobun tachi (Ryuzo and the Seven Henchmen)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Takeshi Kitano's name is well-enough known in American boutique-house circles for certain things - mournful cop movies, violent yakuza fare, self-referential and deconstructive comedies - that Ryuzo and the Seven Henchmen almost throws one for a loop. It's a small, silly comedy that in some ways plays as a mixture of those things by puncturing yakuza film stereotypes and pushing them into the past, but it's also very mainstream, positioned less as artistic satire than a goofy old people movie.
And it actually does that fairly well. Kitano gives himselves a lot of characters to deal with, but he and his elderly cast (including himself as a detective who maybe harbors a certain fondness for these old-school retirees) happily dive into the indignities of aging and trying to be both intimidating and honorable as life removes that option. Everybody in the cast gets something funny to do, and it builds nicely, starting with an embarrassed son asking his title character "Ryuzo the Demon" to please where long-sleeved shirts so that his tattoo doesn't embarrass the family and ending with a fight and chase that is equal parts absurd and effective, just clever enough to suggest that a finale that traditionally means defeat might be these characters getting to finish their lives as the noble outlaws as which they see themselves, rather than shameful issues their kids don't know what to do with.
Full review on EFC.
The Interior
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
The Interior seemingly starts as an off-kilter comedy and stays that way for roughly the first third, when the title comes up, the scene shifts, and the main character re-appears with a beard and a backpack as if to say that now the movie begins after the backstory. It is, really, a clever way to split the film up, even if it's going to be a bit of time before the film gets where it's going.
That place is a middle-of-the-woods horror movie, although with the twist being that Patrick McFadden's James is apparently craving isolation in this phase of his life, and it's the possibility of human contact that has him jumpy, and not necessarily because it's dangerous. There's obviously something going on in his head that may or may not explain why he's so motivated, and which may explain the inexplicable things going on around him, and writer/director Trevor Juras deserves credit for how tightly this all fits together. The first scene starts a chain of events that leads directly to the last, even if that chain will take James to the other side of Canada and occasionally seem like just wandering in the woods.
I dig it. This is a small movie that would seem to hit my fear of being lost in the woods but actually inverts it, and gives the audience a surprisingly broad number of moods on the way to an inevitable, but still thrilling, conclusion.
Full review on EFC.
(Anyway, good burger, but that place is pricey without really separating itself from, say, Le Gourmet Burger.)
After that, I hung out in line with some folks I know from Boston who would be going home the next day and agreed to help me recover from a stupid thing I did/that happened, where I couldn't find which box had the stamps before leaving for Montreal, and since that trip was on a Sunday, I couldn't stop in a post office. The trouble with that is that I hadn't mailed my rent for August yet, and I'll be here until the eighth. I was afraid I'd have to pay international rates and not know when it would arrive, but they said they'd drop it in the mail when they got back. Whew.
Ryuzo and the Seven Henchmen was good, and then I wandered back and forth like a dummy, going to the Yuk Yuk club for "Tales from Beyond the Pale: Live", seeing everyone already had tickets, going back to the ticket office, being told it was sold out, and then opting for The Interior. Note that it was raining and I'd left my umbrella at the apartment at the start of the day, though not the downpour it was at some points.
Say hi to the cast and crew of The Interior, many of whom I don't have full names for because I didn't take a snapshot of the credits and the IMDB entry for this tiny independent film which just had its world premiere is, as one might expect, incomplete. My notes say (l-r) Director of Photography Othello Ubalde; Ryan, a non-professional actor who played the small part of Roland; Patrick McFadden, who played the main character James; Jake Beczala, who played the nameless man in the red jacket; producer Peter Kuplowsky (I think), and writer/director Kevin Juras.
As you might expect, some of these folks were just really pleased to be there; others waxed rhapsodic about the beauty and poetry of the location or talked about what didn't influence the movie. The Dreaded Improv Question actually yielded a good variation on the usual answer, that when you're making such a tightly-budgeted (both in terms of money and time) independent movie, you really can't afford to waste time going off-script... But on the other hand, when the location gives you snow, you work with it and be glad you were shooting in sequence. They said this was doubly true of the Toronto-set scenes, where they had roughly three days to shoot about 25 minutes in a number of locations. It may seem like the cast is being loose and riffing, but the reality is that the script was good and the cast well-chosen.
Today's plan: Catch Me Daddy, Robbery, dinner, Cop Car, and Fatal Frame. The Visit is recommended, and note that those first two are playing in Hall rather than de Seve now.
Onthakan (The Blue Hour)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
When making a film meant to be eerie and still, greatness is almost the baseline requirement for the cinematography. Fortunately, Thailand seems to be unusually well-stocked with both great shooters and things for them to point a camera at, so The Blue Hour is off to a good start, and builds into something unnerving as well.
It begins by showing Tam (Atthaphan Poonsawas), a middle-class teenager, making his way to a disused public pool for a rendezvous with Phum (Oabnithi Wiwattanawarang),a slightly older, more confident guy he met online. It's an ideal meeting place for these sorts of assignations - free as opposed to a hotel, away from parents, empty because of rumors of past drownings and subsequent hauntings. But while Phum seems unlikely to add to Tam's collection of mostly-discreet bruises, he may be dangerous in other ways.
Not that Tam is entirely a sweet kid who is bullied for being gay. That's the bulk of the character, sure, but it's rare for anybody to be that entirely passive, and it's not long before his complaints about being unfairly blamed for everything have caveats that, yeah, he did steal that Buddha statuette. Atthaphan Poonsawas handles adding that sort of nuance to Tam nicely; the core of the character is still an easy guy to empathize with, but he's also very much a teenager that is going to find trouble and may in fact be looking for it, if not quite to the level he eventually finds.
Full review on EFC.
"Témoinage de l'indicible" ("Tales of the Unspeakble")
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Director Simon Pernollet tells a nifty tale of his childhood in Tepoztlan, Mexico here, with the family all living in a spooky house that was surrounded by nahual. Those would be sorcerers and shapeshifters (generally up to no good) of Mexican and Central American myth. As Pernollet tells the story, nearly every member of his family had some sort of encounter with them, though they escaped unscathed.
He tells the story in an interesting way, moving his camera around an empty house and grounds that may not be the one in the stories, but gives the right impression, while Pernollet describes events in narration. The fully-made beds and otherwise intact house imply that it was abandoned in place when the family got too freaked out, adding to a sense of unease that rumbling bass helps to create. The filmmaker winds up playing with fear nicely, as there's no big horror-movie sting to the story, but the environment and atmosphere is built to the point where one can comprehend fright itself doing all the work.
Nifty little campfire tale, well presented.
The Visit (2015, doc)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, DCP)
The Visit is apparently meant to be the second in a thematic trilogy of documentaries by Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen, and I'm curious what grand-scaled idea will round them out. I hope it's something a little more like Into Eternity, where the consideration of long-term storage of nuclear waste felt practical as well as too big to truly understand, as this film's topic of first contact with alien life, while fascinating, winds up both too specific and too vague.
After a bit of discussion about how, for the past 100 years, humanity has been sending a great deal of radio into space, which will inevitably attract the attention of any intelligent life out there. Madsen posits a single alien spacecraft arriving on Earth and landing, and then interviews a fair number of people on how that situation would likely play out. Many are connected with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, headquartered in Vienna, but there are scientists from a number of countries, an expert in space law, and military and political spokespeople from the UK added to the discussion.
As with Into Eternity, Madsen and his interviewees often speak in the second person, addressing the alien visitors rather than the actual audience, and it's not always as natural as it was in the former movie. That's in part because a good deal of the documentary is about how actual communication with extraterrestrials may be impossible, and in part because the subjects only occasionally seem to be let in on the premise, which isn't necessarily compatible with the sort of simulation and explanation they are doing. Madsen also seems to find himself trapped between the general and the specific, like he wants to present the framework of how the world would respond to this sort of encounter but ultimately realizes that it is impossible; there are too many contradictory paths that can play out.
Full review on EFC.
Ryûzô to 7 nin no kobun tachi (Ryuzo and the Seven Henchmen)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Takeshi Kitano's name is well-enough known in American boutique-house circles for certain things - mournful cop movies, violent yakuza fare, self-referential and deconstructive comedies - that Ryuzo and the Seven Henchmen almost throws one for a loop. It's a small, silly comedy that in some ways plays as a mixture of those things by puncturing yakuza film stereotypes and pushing them into the past, but it's also very mainstream, positioned less as artistic satire than a goofy old people movie.
And it actually does that fairly well. Kitano gives himselves a lot of characters to deal with, but he and his elderly cast (including himself as a detective who maybe harbors a certain fondness for these old-school retirees) happily dive into the indignities of aging and trying to be both intimidating and honorable as life removes that option. Everybody in the cast gets something funny to do, and it builds nicely, starting with an embarrassed son asking his title character "Ryuzo the Demon" to please where long-sleeved shirts so that his tattoo doesn't embarrass the family and ending with a fight and chase that is equal parts absurd and effective, just clever enough to suggest that a finale that traditionally means defeat might be these characters getting to finish their lives as the noble outlaws as which they see themselves, rather than shameful issues their kids don't know what to do with.
Full review on EFC.
The Interior
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
The Interior seemingly starts as an off-kilter comedy and stays that way for roughly the first third, when the title comes up, the scene shifts, and the main character re-appears with a beard and a backpack as if to say that now the movie begins after the backstory. It is, really, a clever way to split the film up, even if it's going to be a bit of time before the film gets where it's going.
That place is a middle-of-the-woods horror movie, although with the twist being that Patrick McFadden's James is apparently craving isolation in this phase of his life, and it's the possibility of human contact that has him jumpy, and not necessarily because it's dangerous. There's obviously something going on in his head that may or may not explain why he's so motivated, and which may explain the inexplicable things going on around him, and writer/director Trevor Juras deserves credit for how tightly this all fits together. The first scene starts a chain of events that leads directly to the last, even if that chain will take James to the other side of Canada and occasionally seem like just wandering in the woods.
I dig it. This is a small movie that would seem to hit my fear of being lost in the woods but actually inverts it, and gives the audience a surprisingly broad number of moods on the way to an inevitable, but still thrilling, conclusion.
Full review on EFC.
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