Apparently, this was originally slated to go straight to Disney+, but someone at Disney either figured "we spent some money on this and maybe it would be a good idea to build Daisy Ridley up before New Jedi Order" or, as I've read, they figured it would be a good tie-in for the Olympics, but in either case, it's not like they did much to promote it or release it wide. Which is a shame, because it's pretty darn good, although I suppose it's also the sort of thing people have been trained to wait for streaming on.
Apparently, it was set up at Paramount for a while before moving to Disney, and I'm kind of surprised that Universal didn't pick it up. It fits Disney's brand better, I suppose, but Universal and NBC are sister companies, and not only has NBC/Peacock had a stranglehold on the Olympics for decades, but all the radio news in the movie is from the National Broadcasting System. The cross-promotion seems natural!
(Aside - how excited do people get about the Olympics these days? It was a big deal when I was a kid, but now I regularly ignore it and hear little but how NBC smothers any actual sports under human-interest stories and ignores everyone but Americans.)
I'm guessing it won't hang around much longer than this coming coming week (and that seems like of lucky), but it's worth recommending. I bet my sporty tween nieces would like it.
Young Woman and the Sea
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2024 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, DCP)
Movies like this used to be Disney's bread and butter: Earnest tales of adventure and overcoming obstacles with young heroes and little material that might give parents pause. Young Woman and the Sea may be longer and more elaborate than many of its forebears, but it's got the same quality of nobody seeming embarrassed to be making family fare,and winds up surprisingly rousing and entertaining without having to give the audience a wink to show how clever they are.
It introduces young Trudy (Olive Abercrombie) and Meg Ederle (Lilly Aspell) in 1914 New York, a freighter burning in the distance as their immigrant parents (Kim Bodnia & Jeanette Hain) fear Trudy will die of the measles. She proves too stubborn for that, and she doesn't stop being stubborn when mother Gertrud insists on Meg and their younger brother Henry receiving swimming lessons but attempts to exclude her because measles survivors risk losing their hearing from the activity. The sisters take to it with a passion, and by the time they are older, Gertrud signs them up for a team coached by Lotte Epstein (Sian Clifford). Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) is initially seen as the team's strongest member, but soon Trudy (Daisy Ridley) is setting records, eventually recruited for the 1924 Olympics in Paris. Neither the sponsor (Glenn Fleshler) nor the coach (Christopher Eccleston) actually believes in women's athletics, but Trudy nevertheless sets her sights on swimming the English Channel, an oft-deadly pursuit that only a handful of men have managed in 1926.
It's odd to say, perhaps, but the way that the film handles the sexism at the heart of its story is kind of impressive; it could often be presented as so overwhelming that Trudy and Meg would have to do something that seems truly impossible to chip away at it, or seem like they're undoing sexism all by themselves. Instead, though, they show the 1920s as a sort of inflection point, where there are a lot of silly assumptions and attitudes persisting but not only can one see a space for someone like Trudy, but where her love for swimming can exist as its own thing rather than as a response to the nonsense: She swims because she loves it and is naturally competitive, as opposed to as an escape from what she deals with on land.
That's all important because it gives writer Jeff Nathanson (adapting Glenn Stout's book) and director Joachim Rønning more room to make a good sports movie. Swimming isn't necessarily the easiest activity to make exciting, since there's limits on where you can put the camera without the shot feeling contrived when someone is doing laps - I imagine that it's a bit of a filmmaking challenge to get across the emotional intensity of a bunch of people face down in the water - and so rely on live commentary and montage a lot until it becomes a distance event, when they can open the image up, center the seemingly tiny Trudy against the vast ocean, and face her with a variety of challenges, from boats coming too close to how one can get completely turned around in the dark to jellyfish. They also give the audience a fair amount of credit for connecting necessary dots, from how Trudy's works stoking the boiler where the women practice is probably building a fair amount of strength to how the line between being very good and great can be a heck of a thing for two people to find between them.
In the middle, there's Daisy Ridley, the only person in the film you'd potentially call a star, and it's been kind of interesting to see her carve out this niche of women who are wired differently since Star Wars. Trudy doesn't seem quite so peculiar as her characters from Sometimes I Think About Dying and The Marsh King's Daughter, but she probably was relative to her time, and neither she nor Rønning seems worried about making Trudy's focus something that other people will have to work around if they want to be close to her. Indeed, it often seems that the only person she is consistently playing off comfortably is Tilda Cobham-Hervey as the teen/adult Meg, who clearly understands Trudy's passions and can serve as a sort of bridge to those who don't. One can see some of where Trudy comes from in the parents played by Kim Bodnia and Jeanette Hain, but there's always a bit of distance between them - they love Trudy but can't fully enter her world. The coaches played by Sian Clifford, Christopher Eccleston, and Stephen Graham can, perhaps, but they're different sorts of extreme personalities.
It's a terrific looking picture for something with just the one major star and originally destined for a streamer (and likely not one of Disney+'s tentpole releases); you can never really know these days how much was shot in a big green room and how much is finding spots in Bulgaria that can pass of the New York City of a century ago with some clever redressing, but it's a convincing-enough world, and the aquatic scenes are equally great. It's perhaps longer than this sort of film traditionally would be, but seldom feels flabby or drawn out or flabby.
Young Woman and the Sea is kind of a modest movie, but it does what it's supposed to do and does it well. We could probably use this sort of kid-friendly adventure which doesn't rely on visual effects and fantasy being in theaters from major studios a little more often.
Showing posts with label sports. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sports. Show all posts
Friday, June 14, 2024
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
YOLO
Last of the big Chinese New Year movies, possibly the biggest to release over there, although I kind of lost track of how they were doing at the box office after a while, because, heck, I don't read stories about American box office these days, instead going with a loose "how long has it hung around?" metric. I guess it did well in China dn it's doing well in Americas, as it's on its second week of two screens in Boston.
Anyway, it's a fair movie, but a couple things sort of got me thinking about lacking a bit of context on certain things. For instance, I went into this one knowing it was a remake of 100 Yen Love, and while it's been a while, I didn't particularly remember its main character being particularly overweight as opposed to just slovenly and lazy, and I spent time grumbling to myself about the fat suit, in part because I haven't seen Jia Ling in much of anything and didn't really know that her actual build was closer to what we see at the start of the film than the end - apparently, she gained 20kg before filming and shed 50kg during, which strikes me as an insane Christian Bale stunt (or perhaps more like Tom Hanks in Cast Away) - but, anyway, it's worth noting that Jia is a famous comedian in China, famous for something I don't even know the definition of ("crosstalk" comedy), so the local audience would have seen her at the start and thought something else.
The period where she drops the weight/tones up is scored with Bill Conti's Rocky theme, and aside from the other issues with using that music here, which I'll get into in the "proper" review, I did immediately find myself wondering - did Rocky get released in Mainland China, back in the day? I can't imagine a lot of Hollywood releases were playing the People's Republic back in the 1970s and 1980s, which means that music is probably not embedded into the pop-cultural firmament the way it is in America such that it instantly conjures up particular associations. Does it simply scan as good music for a training montage to a Chinese viewer? Or, alternatively, has it been used in the Creed movies, which maybe did get released there? Anyway, I suspect that it's a joke that hits differently depending who is seeing it.
Kind of related, in the opposite way: In one of the later episodes of Monsieur Spade, which I watched a few days before this, Clive Owen's Sam Spade refers to "kung fu", and I wonder: Would Sam Spade, retired in the South of France in the early 1960s (yes, this is absolutely my thing), know the phrase "kung fu", which I don't think became particularly well-known until about ten years later, when the David Carradine show arrived. But! He also mentions "that Kato shit", which also seems anachronistic, but The Green Hornet had debuted as a radio show in the 1930s, and given that Monsieur Spade basically uses the timeframe of the most famous production of The Maltese Falcon, Sam would probably know that character. And even if those serials didn't mention "kung fu", he was a San Francisco private detective, whose work presumably took him to Chinatown on occasion. So maybe that's a Tiffany Problem thing, where a thing we figure to be very modern, whether you're talking about the name Tiffany, a white American dude knowing about "kung fu", or Rocky being known in China, goes back further, but hits weird when used in proper historical context.
It's a silly digression, I guess, but that's part of what you have to reckon with when watching movies, like YOLO, that are huge elsewhere and play as a pretty mainstream: It's coming from a different place, and you've got to have that in your head.
Re la gun tang (YOLO)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
The debut behind-the-camera feature from YOLO writer/director/star Jia Ling, Hi, Mom, was an enormous hit in China three years ago, but so far as I can tell has not had a North American release, whether on disc or streaming, despite having a fairly universal premise even if the details are relatively specific to 1990s China. Sony appeared to figure that her follow-up had somewhat wider appeal, giving it a wider release than any of the other five Lunar New Year movies that came out here. They're probably right about that; this isn't necessarily great, but it eventually works as a crowd-pleaser capable of transcending borders.
Based on Japanese film 100 Yen Love, YOLO kicks off with 32-year-old Du Leying (Jia), who has been living above her family's convenience store without doing much since college, and if it wasn't bad enough that cousin Doudou (Andy Yang Zi) was trying to recruit her for the reality show she works for where people beg for jobs, her boyfriend Shanzi (Qiao Shan) has just knocked up her best friend Lili (Li Xueqin), who would nevertheless like Leying to be maid of honor at the wedding to help them save face, and divorced sister Ledan (Zhang Xiaofei) and their parents want her to cede the apartment her grandmother left her so that her daughter Xizi can be in this school district. She walks out and finds a new place and job as a waitress at a barbecue restaurant; that place is next to a boxing gym, where one of the coaches (Lei Jiayin) seems to be interested in her for more than boosting his member-recruiting numbers. Things seem to be looking up - at least, until things start to spiral badly enough that Leying fanatically commits herself to boxing training, wanting to just get one win for once in her life.
For as bad as things sometimes seem to be for Leying, I wonder how many people will see her storm out of the family home with a suitcase and have a decent new apartment and a job that will pay for it by the end of the afternoon and wonder how bad things could really be. I don't remember 100 Yen Love particularly clearly - it has been nearly 9 years since I saw it - but that film seemed a bit more committed to its desperation, though not despair; a sense that the world was keeping Leying's analog Ichiko down as much as her own choices, and a sense that there was still further to fall. That isn't really the case for Leying for much of the film, in part because of how much Jia holds back to make a final montage hit with more power as she reveals just how much Leying is dealing with.
What JIa-the-writer/director does means Jia-the-actress has to work a bit harder, and when she can find a happy medium between the petulant side of the character that is mad at the world and the timid side that's afraid of it, she can absolutely carry the movie, and has to, because even at his best, Lei Jiayin's trainer Haokun is more eccentricities than complementary character. It is impressive that she carries a lot of the same characterization forward to the second half of the movie where she's worked herself into fighting shape, with a chip on her shoulder around the people who had mistreated her and her self-doubt manifesting itself as a feeling that all she has done will become meaningless if she fails once. It's a bit unfortunate that she doesn't get much chance explore how her remade self affects her relationship with other characters - the early scene between Leying, Lili, and Shanzi is fine cringe comedy that doesn't get much chance at an upending; she plays off her mother at the start and her father toward the end; and her non-Haokun coaches weren't much of a factor in the first half - but when she's on, she's on.
It's worth noting that the physical transformation Jia made to play Leying, as depicted during the credits, is kind of nuts: She gained 20kg (about 45 pounds) before shooting started and then lost 50kg (about 110 pounds) mid-film, presumably shooting the training montage in real-time, which seems like a crazy thing when you're just acting and don't have the additional stress of everything else that goes into making a movie, but she pulled it off. She also does a terrific job with the big match, considering that you only have to look at the opponent played by former pro Zhang Guiling to know that Leying is likely just as outmatched as the other characters have been saying, so the story the fight tells might be very different from the standard.
(A little thing that bugged me during the movie: The training montage is scored to Bill Conti's Rocky theme, and… Is it allowed to just use music from another movie for the exact purpose it was originally used for? I mean, I know, it's technically "allowed" given that MGM licensed it, but usually when a movie does this, it's done with irony or subversion or the like. It seems a bit like that for a moment here, but eventually, no, it's just using Rocky music for Rocky things, which seems like a breach of etiquette of some sort.)
YOLO does not exactly pull its punches, to go for the obvious cliché that it will happily embrace, but it does seem to be a bit less than what it could be as it tries to have a triumphant finale without bogging the audience down in just what makes it so triumphant until the last minute.
Anyway, it's a fair movie, but a couple things sort of got me thinking about lacking a bit of context on certain things. For instance, I went into this one knowing it was a remake of 100 Yen Love, and while it's been a while, I didn't particularly remember its main character being particularly overweight as opposed to just slovenly and lazy, and I spent time grumbling to myself about the fat suit, in part because I haven't seen Jia Ling in much of anything and didn't really know that her actual build was closer to what we see at the start of the film than the end - apparently, she gained 20kg before filming and shed 50kg during, which strikes me as an insane Christian Bale stunt (or perhaps more like Tom Hanks in Cast Away) - but, anyway, it's worth noting that Jia is a famous comedian in China, famous for something I don't even know the definition of ("crosstalk" comedy), so the local audience would have seen her at the start and thought something else.
The period where she drops the weight/tones up is scored with Bill Conti's Rocky theme, and aside from the other issues with using that music here, which I'll get into in the "proper" review, I did immediately find myself wondering - did Rocky get released in Mainland China, back in the day? I can't imagine a lot of Hollywood releases were playing the People's Republic back in the 1970s and 1980s, which means that music is probably not embedded into the pop-cultural firmament the way it is in America such that it instantly conjures up particular associations. Does it simply scan as good music for a training montage to a Chinese viewer? Or, alternatively, has it been used in the Creed movies, which maybe did get released there? Anyway, I suspect that it's a joke that hits differently depending who is seeing it.
Kind of related, in the opposite way: In one of the later episodes of Monsieur Spade, which I watched a few days before this, Clive Owen's Sam Spade refers to "kung fu", and I wonder: Would Sam Spade, retired in the South of France in the early 1960s (yes, this is absolutely my thing), know the phrase "kung fu", which I don't think became particularly well-known until about ten years later, when the David Carradine show arrived. But! He also mentions "that Kato shit", which also seems anachronistic, but The Green Hornet had debuted as a radio show in the 1930s, and given that Monsieur Spade basically uses the timeframe of the most famous production of The Maltese Falcon, Sam would probably know that character. And even if those serials didn't mention "kung fu", he was a San Francisco private detective, whose work presumably took him to Chinatown on occasion. So maybe that's a Tiffany Problem thing, where a thing we figure to be very modern, whether you're talking about the name Tiffany, a white American dude knowing about "kung fu", or Rocky being known in China, goes back further, but hits weird when used in proper historical context.
It's a silly digression, I guess, but that's part of what you have to reckon with when watching movies, like YOLO, that are huge elsewhere and play as a pretty mainstream: It's coming from a different place, and you've got to have that in your head.
Re la gun tang (YOLO)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
The debut behind-the-camera feature from YOLO writer/director/star Jia Ling, Hi, Mom, was an enormous hit in China three years ago, but so far as I can tell has not had a North American release, whether on disc or streaming, despite having a fairly universal premise even if the details are relatively specific to 1990s China. Sony appeared to figure that her follow-up had somewhat wider appeal, giving it a wider release than any of the other five Lunar New Year movies that came out here. They're probably right about that; this isn't necessarily great, but it eventually works as a crowd-pleaser capable of transcending borders.
Based on Japanese film 100 Yen Love, YOLO kicks off with 32-year-old Du Leying (Jia), who has been living above her family's convenience store without doing much since college, and if it wasn't bad enough that cousin Doudou (Andy Yang Zi) was trying to recruit her for the reality show she works for where people beg for jobs, her boyfriend Shanzi (Qiao Shan) has just knocked up her best friend Lili (Li Xueqin), who would nevertheless like Leying to be maid of honor at the wedding to help them save face, and divorced sister Ledan (Zhang Xiaofei) and their parents want her to cede the apartment her grandmother left her so that her daughter Xizi can be in this school district. She walks out and finds a new place and job as a waitress at a barbecue restaurant; that place is next to a boxing gym, where one of the coaches (Lei Jiayin) seems to be interested in her for more than boosting his member-recruiting numbers. Things seem to be looking up - at least, until things start to spiral badly enough that Leying fanatically commits herself to boxing training, wanting to just get one win for once in her life.
For as bad as things sometimes seem to be for Leying, I wonder how many people will see her storm out of the family home with a suitcase and have a decent new apartment and a job that will pay for it by the end of the afternoon and wonder how bad things could really be. I don't remember 100 Yen Love particularly clearly - it has been nearly 9 years since I saw it - but that film seemed a bit more committed to its desperation, though not despair; a sense that the world was keeping Leying's analog Ichiko down as much as her own choices, and a sense that there was still further to fall. That isn't really the case for Leying for much of the film, in part because of how much Jia holds back to make a final montage hit with more power as she reveals just how much Leying is dealing with.
What JIa-the-writer/director does means Jia-the-actress has to work a bit harder, and when she can find a happy medium between the petulant side of the character that is mad at the world and the timid side that's afraid of it, she can absolutely carry the movie, and has to, because even at his best, Lei Jiayin's trainer Haokun is more eccentricities than complementary character. It is impressive that she carries a lot of the same characterization forward to the second half of the movie where she's worked herself into fighting shape, with a chip on her shoulder around the people who had mistreated her and her self-doubt manifesting itself as a feeling that all she has done will become meaningless if she fails once. It's a bit unfortunate that she doesn't get much chance explore how her remade self affects her relationship with other characters - the early scene between Leying, Lili, and Shanzi is fine cringe comedy that doesn't get much chance at an upending; she plays off her mother at the start and her father toward the end; and her non-Haokun coaches weren't much of a factor in the first half - but when she's on, she's on.
It's worth noting that the physical transformation Jia made to play Leying, as depicted during the credits, is kind of nuts: She gained 20kg (about 45 pounds) before shooting started and then lost 50kg (about 110 pounds) mid-film, presumably shooting the training montage in real-time, which seems like a crazy thing when you're just acting and don't have the additional stress of everything else that goes into making a movie, but she pulled it off. She also does a terrific job with the big match, considering that you only have to look at the opponent played by former pro Zhang Guiling to know that Leying is likely just as outmatched as the other characters have been saying, so the story the fight tells might be very different from the standard.
(A little thing that bugged me during the movie: The training montage is scored to Bill Conti's Rocky theme, and… Is it allowed to just use music from another movie for the exact purpose it was originally used for? I mean, I know, it's technically "allowed" given that MGM licensed it, but usually when a movie does this, it's done with irony or subversion or the like. It seems a bit like that for a moment here, but eventually, no, it's just using Rocky music for Rocky things, which seems like a breach of etiquette of some sort.)
YOLO does not exactly pull its punches, to go for the obvious cliché that it will happily embrace, but it does seem to be a bit less than what it could be as it tries to have a triumphant finale without bogging the audience down in just what makes it so triumphant until the last minute.
Sunday, February 25, 2024
Pegasus x2
Pegasus 2 appears to be one of the two big Chinese hits for Lunar New Year, heading into its third weekend at Boston Common, after pretty decent crowds during weekend #2. I don't recall how well the first did back in 2019, when it was also a LNY release. Not quite so well, I don't think - it seems to have come and gone before I got to the theater to see it - but Boston is not Beijing, and it wouldn't be the first movie to have found enough of an audience at home (during the pandemic) to trigger a bigger sequel.
That it happens strikes me as a bit odd, as I mention below; these are capably-enough made movies, so when I'm tempted to say that as a director, Han Han makes a good racecar driver, it's not so much a question of technical competence as priorities; he's really about the how of a lot of things, including putting together a team and car behind the scenes, without making it terribly dramatic. Which is not necessarily a bad thing - I'm kind of fond of movies where people do things that they are good at - but sometimes he seems to be familiar enough with the everything that he doesn't go into detail where that could be useful, or finding ways to make this a part of the drama.
But, then again, I'm not Chinese, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some of the business situations and acceptance of certain social structures are closer to the default there than they would be here. It's obviously a success at the box office! It just seems strange to me that a lot of these movies seem smoothed out in the very places a Western filmmaker would probably heighten tension.
Fei chi ren sheng (Pegasus)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 February 2024 in Jay's Living Room (catch-up, Prime Video HD stream)
Available to stream/rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere elsewhere
I did a "watch the first before the sequel" thing here, and it clearly didn't result in me skipping Pegasus 2, but I wound up watching that as much out of curiosity about how one does a sequel or maybe makes the second go at something a little better with a little more money and practice. Pegasus isn't a bad movie, really, but it's very slight, always moving straight to the next step when it could dig in a little deeper.
Zhang Chi (Shen Teng) knew he wanted to race ever since he was a kid, and grew up to be a fantastic rally car driver, winning the Bayanbulak Rally a number of times, but in 2014, he got involved in a spectacularly ill-advised street race and lost his license to drive for five years. His suspension over, he intends to show foster son Fei (Li Qingyu) that he was, indeed, the best. Times have changed, though - Bayanbulak is now dominated by a team led by rich kid Lin Zhendong (Johnny Huang Jingyu), longtime navigator Sun Yuqiang (Yin Zheng) has been working in a theme park, and none of his old sponsors want to come near him. If he's to return to Bayanbulak, he's going to have to start completely from scratch.
While I try not to call productions that involved hundreds of people over months the result of laziness, there's a real sense that writer/director Han Han did not exactly put max effort into certain parts of this. Throughout the film, problems are raised and quickly disposed of or ignored, there's no sense of any sort of conflict or friction between characters (Zhang Chi hasn't been in jail, so why hasn't he been talking to Yuqiang? Is there supposed to be any sort of rivalry between him and Zhendong?), and to the extent that it's a comedy, the jokes aren't really much beyond "one male character has long hair". It's a movie made almost entirely out of the capable pieces that fill in the little gaps between the bits of a better movie where something important happens or a character's actions are revealing rather than those bits themselves.
Perhaps there's some intent to say something about Zhang Chi's singular focus, but Han han doesn't really give the audience much reason to consider that before the finale; but there's really no foreshadowing that, nor anything in Shen Teng's performance to suggest that there's something closer to obsession than enthusiasm here. Maybe you don't always see something like that, but if so, it's not an interesting sort of realism.
It's also a movie about rally-car racing that not only contains very little racing, but doesn't do a whole lot to demonstrate what makes the sport exciting or dramatic. The film is a bit hampered a bit by the way that this particular sort of race works: All the racers going at once but deliberately separated, so there's little chance for head-to-head action or direct comparisons of how their different approaches reflect their characters. If there were any sort of stakes or conflict between disgraced racer making a comeback and the wealthy young frontrunner, and there's really not that much, you're deliberately pushed a step back. The film is built to show you the course - which is impressively dangerous, full of switchbacks, changes of altitude, and dirt roads of variable traction - and closeups of a driver executing one piece, but not the competition.
All in all, it feels like a J.J. Abrams movie - Han Han knows all the pieces that work, and how to smoothly transition from one to another, but not really how to build an actual movie out of those pieces that earns a reaction rather than getting a sort of response from recognizing the technique and shape of the film.
Fei chi ren sheng 2 (Pegasus 2)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2024 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, DCP)
There are lots of different sorts of sequels, and Pegasus 2 has a go at several: There's the straight "do it again" type, the "coping with the fallout from the last" type, the "hero becomes mentor" type. As with the first, though, director Han Han Is less focused on drama than on how you get to and compete in a race. And as was the case the first time around, that's more or less fine, although it keeps the film from being as thrilling as it could be.
Despite the seemingly tragic finale to the first, Zhang Chi (Shen Teng) is still alive, rescued from the car that flew off the cliff and into the sea after passing the finish line, but it messed up his right hand and left leg, and pieces being missing from the recovered wreckage meant that his winning time could not be certified. Five years later, he, navigator Sun Yuqiang (Yin Zheng), and mechanic Ji Xing (Zhang Benyu) are running a driving school and garage, facing eviction when Xin Di (Jia Bing), the director of a mobility-scooter factory looking to expand into full-sized electric vehicles, approaches the group about sponsoring a rally team for the forthcoming final Bayanbulak Rally (climate change is rendering the course too dangerous). He doesn't really have the funds for it, but does have a natural driver in Li Xiaohai (Fan Chengcheng). They don't stand much chance of beating the hybrid-powered Lightlife team, run by their former manager Ye (Wei Xiang), but just placing would be the boost both businesses need.
I didn't know Han Han was a former driver before setting the first Pegasus, but looking at the two movies together, it tracks. The movies don't necessarily get lost in minutia, but they've got a sort of familiarity with the material that isn't distancing but is occasionally a bit dry. It also sometimes seems the case that he doesn't see a deeper meaning in all of this as opposed to this just being the protagonist's sport, what he does because it's fun and he loves nothing better - not all athletes see poetry in their endeavor. There's something approaching a theme in the end, about running your car/body into ruin over the course of the race or life, but it's not that deep. It's not quite just a race, but it's not that much more.
Indeed, the film is oddly slimmed down from last time, not much more than these guys doing things with cars. Chang Chi's foster son has apparently been reclaimed by his birth parents, Yuqiang's wife isn't even mentioned, and Ye becomes a villain because, I dunno, the actor was available and the movie needed a villain (kind of a shame, because there could be something interesting in examining how desire to win has blotted out his easygoing nature from the first movie, or how the others apparently have nothing but racing left, but Han doesn't give that much time). The father-son relationship between Xiaohai and Xin gets one or two scenes, and they basically work, even if they're not enough to hang the movie on. There are also fewer feints in the direction of comedy. I'm not sure whether to appreciate the focus on what they can do well or wish it was more ambitious.
The racing is pretty darn good, though. It's the same legendary course as the previous movie, but it kind of doesn't matter, given how this sort of race works and there's no particular symbolism other to the course's nature other than that being the legendary course that has captured the imagination of Chinese racers for decades, not even to consider how this is the end of an era. Han does make it a bit more obviously exciting this go-round, though - there is more direct competition between the racers, as well as confrontations between Ye and Ji Xing off the track, and a sudden hailstorm that makes Zhang Chi and Sun Yuqiang have to work more closely than they ever have before
To a certain extent, these movies are what they are, and execute well enough, and this one is a bit of an improvement. They're odd ducks as big event movies, at least as such things are often built in Hollywood with a big emotional story that can be mapped to the final event, but this one works more often than not.
That it happens strikes me as a bit odd, as I mention below; these are capably-enough made movies, so when I'm tempted to say that as a director, Han Han makes a good racecar driver, it's not so much a question of technical competence as priorities; he's really about the how of a lot of things, including putting together a team and car behind the scenes, without making it terribly dramatic. Which is not necessarily a bad thing - I'm kind of fond of movies where people do things that they are good at - but sometimes he seems to be familiar enough with the everything that he doesn't go into detail where that could be useful, or finding ways to make this a part of the drama.
But, then again, I'm not Chinese, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some of the business situations and acceptance of certain social structures are closer to the default there than they would be here. It's obviously a success at the box office! It just seems strange to me that a lot of these movies seem smoothed out in the very places a Western filmmaker would probably heighten tension.
Fei chi ren sheng (Pegasus)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 February 2024 in Jay's Living Room (catch-up, Prime Video HD stream)
Available to stream/rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere elsewhere
I did a "watch the first before the sequel" thing here, and it clearly didn't result in me skipping Pegasus 2, but I wound up watching that as much out of curiosity about how one does a sequel or maybe makes the second go at something a little better with a little more money and practice. Pegasus isn't a bad movie, really, but it's very slight, always moving straight to the next step when it could dig in a little deeper.
Zhang Chi (Shen Teng) knew he wanted to race ever since he was a kid, and grew up to be a fantastic rally car driver, winning the Bayanbulak Rally a number of times, but in 2014, he got involved in a spectacularly ill-advised street race and lost his license to drive for five years. His suspension over, he intends to show foster son Fei (Li Qingyu) that he was, indeed, the best. Times have changed, though - Bayanbulak is now dominated by a team led by rich kid Lin Zhendong (Johnny Huang Jingyu), longtime navigator Sun Yuqiang (Yin Zheng) has been working in a theme park, and none of his old sponsors want to come near him. If he's to return to Bayanbulak, he's going to have to start completely from scratch.
While I try not to call productions that involved hundreds of people over months the result of laziness, there's a real sense that writer/director Han Han did not exactly put max effort into certain parts of this. Throughout the film, problems are raised and quickly disposed of or ignored, there's no sense of any sort of conflict or friction between characters (Zhang Chi hasn't been in jail, so why hasn't he been talking to Yuqiang? Is there supposed to be any sort of rivalry between him and Zhendong?), and to the extent that it's a comedy, the jokes aren't really much beyond "one male character has long hair". It's a movie made almost entirely out of the capable pieces that fill in the little gaps between the bits of a better movie where something important happens or a character's actions are revealing rather than those bits themselves.
Perhaps there's some intent to say something about Zhang Chi's singular focus, but Han han doesn't really give the audience much reason to consider that before the finale; but there's really no foreshadowing that, nor anything in Shen Teng's performance to suggest that there's something closer to obsession than enthusiasm here. Maybe you don't always see something like that, but if so, it's not an interesting sort of realism.
It's also a movie about rally-car racing that not only contains very little racing, but doesn't do a whole lot to demonstrate what makes the sport exciting or dramatic. The film is a bit hampered a bit by the way that this particular sort of race works: All the racers going at once but deliberately separated, so there's little chance for head-to-head action or direct comparisons of how their different approaches reflect their characters. If there were any sort of stakes or conflict between disgraced racer making a comeback and the wealthy young frontrunner, and there's really not that much, you're deliberately pushed a step back. The film is built to show you the course - which is impressively dangerous, full of switchbacks, changes of altitude, and dirt roads of variable traction - and closeups of a driver executing one piece, but not the competition.
All in all, it feels like a J.J. Abrams movie - Han Han knows all the pieces that work, and how to smoothly transition from one to another, but not really how to build an actual movie out of those pieces that earns a reaction rather than getting a sort of response from recognizing the technique and shape of the film.
Fei chi ren sheng 2 (Pegasus 2)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2024 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, DCP)
There are lots of different sorts of sequels, and Pegasus 2 has a go at several: There's the straight "do it again" type, the "coping with the fallout from the last" type, the "hero becomes mentor" type. As with the first, though, director Han Han Is less focused on drama than on how you get to and compete in a race. And as was the case the first time around, that's more or less fine, although it keeps the film from being as thrilling as it could be.
Despite the seemingly tragic finale to the first, Zhang Chi (Shen Teng) is still alive, rescued from the car that flew off the cliff and into the sea after passing the finish line, but it messed up his right hand and left leg, and pieces being missing from the recovered wreckage meant that his winning time could not be certified. Five years later, he, navigator Sun Yuqiang (Yin Zheng), and mechanic Ji Xing (Zhang Benyu) are running a driving school and garage, facing eviction when Xin Di (Jia Bing), the director of a mobility-scooter factory looking to expand into full-sized electric vehicles, approaches the group about sponsoring a rally team for the forthcoming final Bayanbulak Rally (climate change is rendering the course too dangerous). He doesn't really have the funds for it, but does have a natural driver in Li Xiaohai (Fan Chengcheng). They don't stand much chance of beating the hybrid-powered Lightlife team, run by their former manager Ye (Wei Xiang), but just placing would be the boost both businesses need.
I didn't know Han Han was a former driver before setting the first Pegasus, but looking at the two movies together, it tracks. The movies don't necessarily get lost in minutia, but they've got a sort of familiarity with the material that isn't distancing but is occasionally a bit dry. It also sometimes seems the case that he doesn't see a deeper meaning in all of this as opposed to this just being the protagonist's sport, what he does because it's fun and he loves nothing better - not all athletes see poetry in their endeavor. There's something approaching a theme in the end, about running your car/body into ruin over the course of the race or life, but it's not that deep. It's not quite just a race, but it's not that much more.
Indeed, the film is oddly slimmed down from last time, not much more than these guys doing things with cars. Chang Chi's foster son has apparently been reclaimed by his birth parents, Yuqiang's wife isn't even mentioned, and Ye becomes a villain because, I dunno, the actor was available and the movie needed a villain (kind of a shame, because there could be something interesting in examining how desire to win has blotted out his easygoing nature from the first movie, or how the others apparently have nothing but racing left, but Han doesn't give that much time). The father-son relationship between Xiaohai and Xin gets one or two scenes, and they basically work, even if they're not enough to hang the movie on. There are also fewer feints in the direction of comedy. I'm not sure whether to appreciate the focus on what they can do well or wish it was more ambitious.
The racing is pretty darn good, though. It's the same legendary course as the previous movie, but it kind of doesn't matter, given how this sort of race works and there's no particular symbolism other to the course's nature other than that being the legendary course that has captured the imagination of Chinese racers for decades, not even to consider how this is the end of an era. Han does make it a bit more obviously exciting this go-round, though - there is more direct competition between the racers, as well as confrontations between Ye and Ji Xing off the track, and a sudden hailstorm that makes Zhang Chi and Sun Yuqiang have to work more closely than they ever have before
To a certain extent, these movies are what they are, and execute well enough, and this one is a bit of an improvement. They're odd ducks as big event movies, at least as such things are often built in Hollywood with a big emotional story that can be mapped to the final event, but this one works more often than not.
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
Weird Weekend Part II: Chang An, Road to Boston, and Limbo
I spent the last few days chuckling to myself at Boston Common booking Chang An, because even for Chinese movies, a nearly-three-hour animated feature about two Tang dynasty poets seemed, well, kind of niche. Then, on Saturday night, I looked to reserve a seat for the next afternoon's show and pretty much the whole upper section was sold out. Chinatown, at least, was down for this, with a fair number of kids who didn't seem to get particularly squirmy. Go figure; I would have figured this was as hard a sell as you'd find this weekend, even to the local Chinese audience, but this is just more confirmation that I am not a Chinese-American person with a family that may want to learn more about the culture and thus have no idea what will be appealing to that group.
Next up after that was Road to Boston, which did not have nearly the same crowd, which surprised me a little bit, although I'd be curious to see how it would do closer to Patriot's Day, when the marathon is foremost in people's minds, as opposed to "as far from mid-April as the calendar will let you get". But, then, I suppose last weekend was a good time for it to come out in South Korea; it didn't have a million tickets sold like Dr. Cheon, but 870,000 in two weeks seems pretty good for a Korean film.
Most of the audience behind me was Korean-American, I think, and there were a lot of us staying through the end credits, with at least one camera flash as people presumably spotted their names and friends' names in the Korean text. Nobody local, I don't think, because the parts of the film meant to be set in Boston were actually shot in Melbourne. I'd be annoyed, but I seem to recall a lot of parts of that area that could pass for mid-Twentieth-Century New England, maybe part of why I enjoyed my trip there so much a few years back. They seem to have gotten a lot of the marathon details right, at least from what I've absorbed from 50 years living in New England.
(I like to sit up front, so I was unable to see the whole theater giving a knowing nod at a scene where the coaches look at the young running dashing up to a mountaintop shrine and say "boy, look at that kid go up that hill." "Yep, really good at going up hills, that one." "I hear there's a sort of heartbreaking story as to why…")
After that, dinner break, and over to the Somerville for its last show of Limbo, and I feel kind of weirdly guilty about waiting around after being so excited to see it not just playing the area but a theater that doesn't really book a lot of Asian films. I see they've got a Canto-Pop show scheduled for the main stage in late November, so I'm half-wondering if there may be more Cantonese-speaking Chinese-Americans in Somerville than there are in Chinatown, going by how well Mainland films are often attended compared to Hong Kong ones. Not that this was an "I'm the only guy in the theater who needs subtitles" situation; it might just be that the Somerville Theatre attracts a good crowd for people who like this sort of dark crime movie. Or it was a theater rental to get its VOD/UHD release a little extra notice and nothing to do with the local audience at all.
Kind of crazy to see it as a bookend on the day with Chang An, though - just the most noir-ish, scuzzy Hong Kong film possible after starting the day with a smoothed-out, moralistic CGI feature.
Chang'an san wan li (Chang An)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2023 in AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run, DCP)
There was a recent flap where certain American politicians grumbled about what soldiers shouldn't be doing which included mocking the idea of military people writing poetry, while this film may still have been kicking around theaters on the other side of the world before arriving in North America along with the mid-autumn festival hits; it celebrates a rich history or Chinese warrior-poets going back centuries in an epic-sized animated feature at least partially meant for children. It doesn't really do a whole lot to make the idea particularly interesting, unfortunately; it's the sort of history lesson that compacts a lot of big, messy facts about a turbulent period into a polished, easily-swallowed capsule.
It opens during the reign of Emperor Daizong, with aged regional governor Gao Shi (voice of Wu Junquan) facing an uphill battle trying to hold Fort Yushang from the forces of the An Lushan rebellion. Forced to fall back, he soon finds himself visited by a military inspector, Cheng Jianjun (voice of Lu Lifeng); surprisingly, Cheng's questions do not concern Gao's recent failures in battle, but poet Li Taibai - "Li Bai" for short - who was one of few to side with the rebels. Despite a second attack being imminent, Gao settles in to describe their entire intersecting histories to Cheng, going back 40 years: That's when Gao (voiced in flashback by Tang Tianxiang), a skilled spear-fighter from a heroic but impoverished house, mets Bai (voice of Ling Zhenhe), whose material comfort can net him no official status, coming as it does from mercantile sources. They become fast friends, although their lives only occasionally intersect, as Gao is by nature a military man and Li a libertine, but both become renowned poets even as the prosperous Tang Dynasty is beset by attacks and rebellions.
One should not necessarily expect too much of a film like Chang An (whose title refers to China's capital and seat of culture at the time, a place where both poets strive to belong); if it's a historical movie, it's grade-school history, where the aim is to use exciting battle action and impressive visuals to help cement what happened in what order. Why all this is going on is handwaved away to a certain extent; Gao is a loyal subject looking to match his grandfather's service, and is witness to various noteworthy incidents and people, but not particularly connected to the causes and effects of those events, beyond noting ambition and opposition to the stability provided by the Emperor. Indeed, as the flashbacks catch up to Old Gao, the film does not have Gao and Li debate how they have found themselves on opposite side, but shows Li being lectured by the boy who runs Gao's errands; he has learned his lesson well and is passing his exams.
Perhaps more frustrating, though, is that for a film that often links Gao and Li as poets and attaches great importance to the art, it seemingly has very little to say about poetry. It seldom if ever shows Gao or Li doing the work of composing a poem, never discussing how finding the right word and meter or cutting what isn't essential heightens the impact of what often comes off, as subtitled, as simply stating what the poet has seen (though English subtitles are likely the worst way to encounter the poetry of a tonal language like Middle Chinese); the craft and work of it is almost wholly absent. Indeed, the filmmakers note but somewhat avoid facets of this which could make Gao's journey as a poet more interesting: He's portrayed as having both a stutter and dyslexia, but is apparently able to simply grow out of them, and there's a pointed section early on where Gao, Li, and some of Li's friends, notably swordswoman Pei Shi'er (voice of Li ShiMeng) talk about talent and the privilege to hone or display it, but this is something that is raised as a concert but not much explored. Like battles, poetry is apparently just something that happens, without a lot of curiosity as to how and why.
(And, yes, there is something worth noting about this conversation happening in a movie that flashes the approval of the nation's film board at the start, along with the later lines that it is regrettable that various pets have fallen out of favor and find themselves starving, as if that is just some neutral rule of the world. There's also a conversation to be had about how this is the story of two men who are never shown to marry for love and whose first and last encounters involve ditching their shirts and wrestling, although it may be about how the filmmakers got that in rather than how they don't go any farther.)
It may not have much to say about the craft of poetry, but its filmmaking craft is fairly impressive. The natural and man-made environments are both impressively rendered, and the studios do a nice job of depicting how Chang'An or a landmark like the Yellow Crane Tower can seem grand and aspirational to the likes of Gao and Lee without overdoing the gleaming precious metals or extreme detail (though people are often rendered in a way that lands between whimsical hand-drawn caricature and stiff photorealism, more often blandly than grotesquely). Whether historically accurate or not, I like the way rooms full of "poetry boards" evoke bulletin boards more than galleries or libraries; it evokes modern social media in how missives are mixed and interacting, or how a poem's popularity can spread without the author knowing, like a post going viral. The grand action is well staged, possibly by the same visual effects houses that render flights of arrows for live-action epics, and the martial arts seems to use good reference or motion capture to evoke the same sort of thrill as an old-fashioned Shaw Brothers sword-versus-spear fight.
And, for a grandly-sized movie - at 168 minutes, I can't immediately recall a longer mainstream animated feature meant to be seen in one intermission-free sitting - it moves pretty well. There's maybe one joke about sticking to the point, but this did nice work of communicating the size of Gao's life without making the audience, kids included, particularly fidgety. It does roughly what I imagine it was set out to do - introduce a general audience, mostly young and Chinese, to a number of noteworthy figures - in capable fashion, even if the length belies that it's not much more ambitious than that.
1947 Boston (Road to Boston)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2023 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)
I'm curious how many North American cities Road to Boston opened in other than Boston itself; it's the sort of rousing sports movie that comes out often enough that you don't necessarily have to import more. After all, it's the sort that is pretty clearly less about sports than pride, but it's a fine example of the genre, one which knows how to let that drive the movie but let the characters, and ultimately the competition, be what the audience connects with.
In 1936, Son Kee-chung (Ha Jung-woo) won the gold medal for the marathon at the Berlin Olympics, but because Korea was occupied by Japan at the time, it was under the name "Son Kitei", and he was forced to leave track & field by the government for covering the Japanese flag with his laurel. Ten years later, Japan has been liberated (though still a "refugee country" under a United States military government), and his old teammate Nam Sung-yong (Bae Sung-woo), now a coach, wants to bring a team to the 1948 London Olympics, but there's a catch: Korea technically has no Olympic history, so will need to qualify in some other international event, such as the 1947 Boston Marathon. It's easier said than done: Government support is conditional on the disillusioned Son coaching, and the best potential recruit, Suh Yun-bok (Im Si-wan), is dirt-poor with an ailing mother, so feels running is frivolous. And that's before getting to the issues of raising the money to send the team to America, which includes a large deposit and the need for a local guarantor (Kim Sang-ho) to prevent such events from bringing in a flood of refugees, even if this trio are insistent that they want to represent Korea rather than become Americans.
This marathon is described as Korea's first chance to prove itself on the world stage as an independent nation, and for much of the film, director Kang Je-kyu and his co-writers are as focused on the moment as the competition: The "Republic of Korea", they note, is technically a new country, which makes it cash-poor but which doesn't mean it doesn't have history, and the filmmakers are wise to point out the burden that places on these athletes and the public at large: Son has never been able to properly take pride in his accomplishment, Suh may be too constrained by his present circumstances to become what Son should have been, and everybody knows that asking a bunch of poor people for money to compete in a marathon is tacky at best. Indeed, one of the things that's fascinating about the film, and which can seem like a plotting weakness at first, is that both filmmakers and characters seem to recognize that what they're getting at is something instinctual and only rational in hindsight, so instead of having a big speech about why a community, even a poor one, needs to support this kind of project, but sort of maneuver things into a position where people know they instinctively need this and that nobody else will make it happen but them. You talk up the benefits after they're revealed.
That works, in large part, because Ha Jung-woo's Son is not the sort of national hero who seems natural fit for the position, although Ha's crusty screen presence is fit for the job: Son's always got a chip on his shoulder, and Ha hits the line between where it's helpful and a problem, embodying how being that great at one thing kind of ripples through every other piece of your personality. Im Si-wan's Yun-bok is angrier, and he does a nifty thing where one maybe doesn't initially recognize he's laying it on a bit thick because he does, in fact, like running so much that he has to work at suppressing it. It thus falls on Bae Sung-woo to be the glue of the movie as Nam; he's got an easy way of bantering with Ha to sell the idea that these two are old friends and shows the sort of enthusiasm for the sport that otherwise might need to be unearthed. Kim Sang-ho is useful comic relief in the last act so that it's not entirely isolating, fish-out-of-water material.
(There are some highly entertaining Boston accents, although this may be the rare time that the "they talk like JFK there, right?" gambit works!)
The race almost functions as an encore, after the issues leading up to it are resolved - Suh and Nam actually doing well kind of feels like a bonus - but it's a heck of an encore. Kang has had the characters talk about running and shown the degree to which a half-marathon can reduce a person to nothing but full-body pain so that the audience has some idea of what to expect but still has plenty to discover, and while he filmed little or nothing in Massachusetts, they put together something that feels like this particular marathon, taking the story they were given and wringing everything he could out of it. The race, as sports often does, winds up distilling just who Son, Suh, and Nam are to their essences, and the cast and crew know that this is what the audience wants to see just as much as how well Suh does.
I readily admit, I like this movie a little more because the idea that this thing that feels super-local actually wound up being tremendously important to people on the other side of the world tickles me, with the movie going a little further to flatter Boston besides. Mostly, though, it's just a well-made sports movie, the sort that reminds us just why we love these silly-seeming activities.
Zhi chi (Limbo)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2023 in Somerville Theatre #3 (first-run, DCP)
You've got to fudge the dates a bit to say that this is a return to form for director Soi Cheang after a detour into Monkey King fantasy - he actually made SPL 2 between his first and second Monkey King movies, and some more mainstream action flicks just before that trilogy - but the point is nonetheless compelling: After that detour into family-friendly action, he's got a hell of a lot of darkness stored up, and Limbo shows that he's got a real talent for it.
As the film opens in 2017, the Hong Kong Police Department finds themselves investigating a serial killer, or at least they think that must be the case: So far, they've only found the left hands of two women. Though up-and-comer Will Ren (Mason C. Lee Sun) is technically in charge of the investigation, he'll be leaning on veteran detective Cham Lau (Gordon Lam Ka-Tung) and his knowledge of the city and its seamier sides, as the killer seems to be preying upon those whose disappearance won't be noticed. The second victim was recently released from prison, which is when he discovers that car thief Wong To (Cya Liu Yase) is also back on the streets, sending him into a near-murderous rage. But with relatively little to work on, Wong To may be their best path through the underworld to whoever is doing this.
Cya Liu's Wong To may set some sort of record for taking abuse in this movie, and it's more horrific in its way than the serial killer elements. Those are random and monstrous, but at least unambiguously treated as such. Wong To may be a criminal, but she's a thief, and that she caused a deadly accident horrifies her. For all that Cham and Ren are hunting down a serial killer, much of the tension comes from the question of whether her need to atone can outlast Cham's desire for revenge. Liu is terrific, establishing Wong's street smarts quickly and letting Cheang do a quick turnaround as her guilt drives her, and they get that street smarts also means knowing when you are well and truly screwed. Gordon Lam, meanwhile, pivots Cham from an eccentric detective who nevertheless seems reliable to a man whose anger lets him tap into a vein of cruelty.
They are reflections of the world that they live in, a Hong Kong that looks slick when you are pulled way back but which is nothing but grimy slums in close-up, photographed in a harsh black and white, high-contrast digital sharpness that denies the audience shadows to hide the worst of the setting or letting grain soften it. Even when the camera pulls back, hovering to follow a tricky route or just providing an overhead view, it's phenomenal work, gasp-worthy imagery to make this a truly striking bit of noir.
And a nihilistic one; there's barely any motive to its crimes - the suspects played by both Fish LIew and Hiroyuki Ikeuchi are often pathetic as opposed to any sorts of masterminds - with Cham looking for revenge with impunity while the seemingly upright Ren is still looking to cover up when it looks like he might slip. Wong To doesn't so much become a heroine as revert to fight-or-flight, her noble intentions and capability as a crook who can mostly avoid violence to repeating "I don't want to die" like a mantra.
It's a cruel chase, but certainly a memorable one. The film has actually made its way to general North American release after Cheang's follow-up, Mad Fate, which is also a visually striking tour of Hong Kong's underbelly on the trail of a serial killer. This is Soi Cheang's wheelhouse and a hell of a ride.
Next up after that was Road to Boston, which did not have nearly the same crowd, which surprised me a little bit, although I'd be curious to see how it would do closer to Patriot's Day, when the marathon is foremost in people's minds, as opposed to "as far from mid-April as the calendar will let you get". But, then, I suppose last weekend was a good time for it to come out in South Korea; it didn't have a million tickets sold like Dr. Cheon, but 870,000 in two weeks seems pretty good for a Korean film.
Most of the audience behind me was Korean-American, I think, and there were a lot of us staying through the end credits, with at least one camera flash as people presumably spotted their names and friends' names in the Korean text. Nobody local, I don't think, because the parts of the film meant to be set in Boston were actually shot in Melbourne. I'd be annoyed, but I seem to recall a lot of parts of that area that could pass for mid-Twentieth-Century New England, maybe part of why I enjoyed my trip there so much a few years back. They seem to have gotten a lot of the marathon details right, at least from what I've absorbed from 50 years living in New England.
(I like to sit up front, so I was unable to see the whole theater giving a knowing nod at a scene where the coaches look at the young running dashing up to a mountaintop shrine and say "boy, look at that kid go up that hill." "Yep, really good at going up hills, that one." "I hear there's a sort of heartbreaking story as to why…")
After that, dinner break, and over to the Somerville for its last show of Limbo, and I feel kind of weirdly guilty about waiting around after being so excited to see it not just playing the area but a theater that doesn't really book a lot of Asian films. I see they've got a Canto-Pop show scheduled for the main stage in late November, so I'm half-wondering if there may be more Cantonese-speaking Chinese-Americans in Somerville than there are in Chinatown, going by how well Mainland films are often attended compared to Hong Kong ones. Not that this was an "I'm the only guy in the theater who needs subtitles" situation; it might just be that the Somerville Theatre attracts a good crowd for people who like this sort of dark crime movie. Or it was a theater rental to get its VOD/UHD release a little extra notice and nothing to do with the local audience at all.
Kind of crazy to see it as a bookend on the day with Chang An, though - just the most noir-ish, scuzzy Hong Kong film possible after starting the day with a smoothed-out, moralistic CGI feature.
Chang'an san wan li (Chang An)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2023 in AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run, DCP)
There was a recent flap where certain American politicians grumbled about what soldiers shouldn't be doing which included mocking the idea of military people writing poetry, while this film may still have been kicking around theaters on the other side of the world before arriving in North America along with the mid-autumn festival hits; it celebrates a rich history or Chinese warrior-poets going back centuries in an epic-sized animated feature at least partially meant for children. It doesn't really do a whole lot to make the idea particularly interesting, unfortunately; it's the sort of history lesson that compacts a lot of big, messy facts about a turbulent period into a polished, easily-swallowed capsule.
It opens during the reign of Emperor Daizong, with aged regional governor Gao Shi (voice of Wu Junquan) facing an uphill battle trying to hold Fort Yushang from the forces of the An Lushan rebellion. Forced to fall back, he soon finds himself visited by a military inspector, Cheng Jianjun (voice of Lu Lifeng); surprisingly, Cheng's questions do not concern Gao's recent failures in battle, but poet Li Taibai - "Li Bai" for short - who was one of few to side with the rebels. Despite a second attack being imminent, Gao settles in to describe their entire intersecting histories to Cheng, going back 40 years: That's when Gao (voiced in flashback by Tang Tianxiang), a skilled spear-fighter from a heroic but impoverished house, mets Bai (voice of Ling Zhenhe), whose material comfort can net him no official status, coming as it does from mercantile sources. They become fast friends, although their lives only occasionally intersect, as Gao is by nature a military man and Li a libertine, but both become renowned poets even as the prosperous Tang Dynasty is beset by attacks and rebellions.
One should not necessarily expect too much of a film like Chang An (whose title refers to China's capital and seat of culture at the time, a place where both poets strive to belong); if it's a historical movie, it's grade-school history, where the aim is to use exciting battle action and impressive visuals to help cement what happened in what order. Why all this is going on is handwaved away to a certain extent; Gao is a loyal subject looking to match his grandfather's service, and is witness to various noteworthy incidents and people, but not particularly connected to the causes and effects of those events, beyond noting ambition and opposition to the stability provided by the Emperor. Indeed, as the flashbacks catch up to Old Gao, the film does not have Gao and Li debate how they have found themselves on opposite side, but shows Li being lectured by the boy who runs Gao's errands; he has learned his lesson well and is passing his exams.
Perhaps more frustrating, though, is that for a film that often links Gao and Li as poets and attaches great importance to the art, it seemingly has very little to say about poetry. It seldom if ever shows Gao or Li doing the work of composing a poem, never discussing how finding the right word and meter or cutting what isn't essential heightens the impact of what often comes off, as subtitled, as simply stating what the poet has seen (though English subtitles are likely the worst way to encounter the poetry of a tonal language like Middle Chinese); the craft and work of it is almost wholly absent. Indeed, the filmmakers note but somewhat avoid facets of this which could make Gao's journey as a poet more interesting: He's portrayed as having both a stutter and dyslexia, but is apparently able to simply grow out of them, and there's a pointed section early on where Gao, Li, and some of Li's friends, notably swordswoman Pei Shi'er (voice of Li ShiMeng) talk about talent and the privilege to hone or display it, but this is something that is raised as a concert but not much explored. Like battles, poetry is apparently just something that happens, without a lot of curiosity as to how and why.
(And, yes, there is something worth noting about this conversation happening in a movie that flashes the approval of the nation's film board at the start, along with the later lines that it is regrettable that various pets have fallen out of favor and find themselves starving, as if that is just some neutral rule of the world. There's also a conversation to be had about how this is the story of two men who are never shown to marry for love and whose first and last encounters involve ditching their shirts and wrestling, although it may be about how the filmmakers got that in rather than how they don't go any farther.)
It may not have much to say about the craft of poetry, but its filmmaking craft is fairly impressive. The natural and man-made environments are both impressively rendered, and the studios do a nice job of depicting how Chang'An or a landmark like the Yellow Crane Tower can seem grand and aspirational to the likes of Gao and Lee without overdoing the gleaming precious metals or extreme detail (though people are often rendered in a way that lands between whimsical hand-drawn caricature and stiff photorealism, more often blandly than grotesquely). Whether historically accurate or not, I like the way rooms full of "poetry boards" evoke bulletin boards more than galleries or libraries; it evokes modern social media in how missives are mixed and interacting, or how a poem's popularity can spread without the author knowing, like a post going viral. The grand action is well staged, possibly by the same visual effects houses that render flights of arrows for live-action epics, and the martial arts seems to use good reference or motion capture to evoke the same sort of thrill as an old-fashioned Shaw Brothers sword-versus-spear fight.
And, for a grandly-sized movie - at 168 minutes, I can't immediately recall a longer mainstream animated feature meant to be seen in one intermission-free sitting - it moves pretty well. There's maybe one joke about sticking to the point, but this did nice work of communicating the size of Gao's life without making the audience, kids included, particularly fidgety. It does roughly what I imagine it was set out to do - introduce a general audience, mostly young and Chinese, to a number of noteworthy figures - in capable fashion, even if the length belies that it's not much more ambitious than that.
1947 Boston (Road to Boston)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2023 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)
I'm curious how many North American cities Road to Boston opened in other than Boston itself; it's the sort of rousing sports movie that comes out often enough that you don't necessarily have to import more. After all, it's the sort that is pretty clearly less about sports than pride, but it's a fine example of the genre, one which knows how to let that drive the movie but let the characters, and ultimately the competition, be what the audience connects with.
In 1936, Son Kee-chung (Ha Jung-woo) won the gold medal for the marathon at the Berlin Olympics, but because Korea was occupied by Japan at the time, it was under the name "Son Kitei", and he was forced to leave track & field by the government for covering the Japanese flag with his laurel. Ten years later, Japan has been liberated (though still a "refugee country" under a United States military government), and his old teammate Nam Sung-yong (Bae Sung-woo), now a coach, wants to bring a team to the 1948 London Olympics, but there's a catch: Korea technically has no Olympic history, so will need to qualify in some other international event, such as the 1947 Boston Marathon. It's easier said than done: Government support is conditional on the disillusioned Son coaching, and the best potential recruit, Suh Yun-bok (Im Si-wan), is dirt-poor with an ailing mother, so feels running is frivolous. And that's before getting to the issues of raising the money to send the team to America, which includes a large deposit and the need for a local guarantor (Kim Sang-ho) to prevent such events from bringing in a flood of refugees, even if this trio are insistent that they want to represent Korea rather than become Americans.
This marathon is described as Korea's first chance to prove itself on the world stage as an independent nation, and for much of the film, director Kang Je-kyu and his co-writers are as focused on the moment as the competition: The "Republic of Korea", they note, is technically a new country, which makes it cash-poor but which doesn't mean it doesn't have history, and the filmmakers are wise to point out the burden that places on these athletes and the public at large: Son has never been able to properly take pride in his accomplishment, Suh may be too constrained by his present circumstances to become what Son should have been, and everybody knows that asking a bunch of poor people for money to compete in a marathon is tacky at best. Indeed, one of the things that's fascinating about the film, and which can seem like a plotting weakness at first, is that both filmmakers and characters seem to recognize that what they're getting at is something instinctual and only rational in hindsight, so instead of having a big speech about why a community, even a poor one, needs to support this kind of project, but sort of maneuver things into a position where people know they instinctively need this and that nobody else will make it happen but them. You talk up the benefits after they're revealed.
That works, in large part, because Ha Jung-woo's Son is not the sort of national hero who seems natural fit for the position, although Ha's crusty screen presence is fit for the job: Son's always got a chip on his shoulder, and Ha hits the line between where it's helpful and a problem, embodying how being that great at one thing kind of ripples through every other piece of your personality. Im Si-wan's Yun-bok is angrier, and he does a nifty thing where one maybe doesn't initially recognize he's laying it on a bit thick because he does, in fact, like running so much that he has to work at suppressing it. It thus falls on Bae Sung-woo to be the glue of the movie as Nam; he's got an easy way of bantering with Ha to sell the idea that these two are old friends and shows the sort of enthusiasm for the sport that otherwise might need to be unearthed. Kim Sang-ho is useful comic relief in the last act so that it's not entirely isolating, fish-out-of-water material.
(There are some highly entertaining Boston accents, although this may be the rare time that the "they talk like JFK there, right?" gambit works!)
The race almost functions as an encore, after the issues leading up to it are resolved - Suh and Nam actually doing well kind of feels like a bonus - but it's a heck of an encore. Kang has had the characters talk about running and shown the degree to which a half-marathon can reduce a person to nothing but full-body pain so that the audience has some idea of what to expect but still has plenty to discover, and while he filmed little or nothing in Massachusetts, they put together something that feels like this particular marathon, taking the story they were given and wringing everything he could out of it. The race, as sports often does, winds up distilling just who Son, Suh, and Nam are to their essences, and the cast and crew know that this is what the audience wants to see just as much as how well Suh does.
I readily admit, I like this movie a little more because the idea that this thing that feels super-local actually wound up being tremendously important to people on the other side of the world tickles me, with the movie going a little further to flatter Boston besides. Mostly, though, it's just a well-made sports movie, the sort that reminds us just why we love these silly-seeming activities.
Zhi chi (Limbo)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2023 in Somerville Theatre #3 (first-run, DCP)
You've got to fudge the dates a bit to say that this is a return to form for director Soi Cheang after a detour into Monkey King fantasy - he actually made SPL 2 between his first and second Monkey King movies, and some more mainstream action flicks just before that trilogy - but the point is nonetheless compelling: After that detour into family-friendly action, he's got a hell of a lot of darkness stored up, and Limbo shows that he's got a real talent for it.
As the film opens in 2017, the Hong Kong Police Department finds themselves investigating a serial killer, or at least they think that must be the case: So far, they've only found the left hands of two women. Though up-and-comer Will Ren (Mason C. Lee Sun) is technically in charge of the investigation, he'll be leaning on veteran detective Cham Lau (Gordon Lam Ka-Tung) and his knowledge of the city and its seamier sides, as the killer seems to be preying upon those whose disappearance won't be noticed. The second victim was recently released from prison, which is when he discovers that car thief Wong To (Cya Liu Yase) is also back on the streets, sending him into a near-murderous rage. But with relatively little to work on, Wong To may be their best path through the underworld to whoever is doing this.
Cya Liu's Wong To may set some sort of record for taking abuse in this movie, and it's more horrific in its way than the serial killer elements. Those are random and monstrous, but at least unambiguously treated as such. Wong To may be a criminal, but she's a thief, and that she caused a deadly accident horrifies her. For all that Cham and Ren are hunting down a serial killer, much of the tension comes from the question of whether her need to atone can outlast Cham's desire for revenge. Liu is terrific, establishing Wong's street smarts quickly and letting Cheang do a quick turnaround as her guilt drives her, and they get that street smarts also means knowing when you are well and truly screwed. Gordon Lam, meanwhile, pivots Cham from an eccentric detective who nevertheless seems reliable to a man whose anger lets him tap into a vein of cruelty.
They are reflections of the world that they live in, a Hong Kong that looks slick when you are pulled way back but which is nothing but grimy slums in close-up, photographed in a harsh black and white, high-contrast digital sharpness that denies the audience shadows to hide the worst of the setting or letting grain soften it. Even when the camera pulls back, hovering to follow a tricky route or just providing an overhead view, it's phenomenal work, gasp-worthy imagery to make this a truly striking bit of noir.
And a nihilistic one; there's barely any motive to its crimes - the suspects played by both Fish LIew and Hiroyuki Ikeuchi are often pathetic as opposed to any sorts of masterminds - with Cham looking for revenge with impunity while the seemingly upright Ren is still looking to cover up when it looks like he might slip. Wong To doesn't so much become a heroine as revert to fight-or-flight, her noble intentions and capability as a crook who can mostly avoid violence to repeating "I don't want to die" like a mantra.
It's a cruel chase, but certainly a memorable one. The film has actually made its way to general North American release after Cheang's follow-up, Mad Fate, which is also a visually striking tour of Hong Kong's underbelly on the trail of a serial killer. This is Soi Cheang's wheelhouse and a hell of a ride.
Sunday, July 23, 2023
Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.03: The First Slam Dunk, Sympathy for the Devil, "Drumming Makes You Happy", and The Becomers
Or, "the one we should get posted on time because two of these movies hit theaters next week".
It wound up being a late start because the shows in the 1pm slot were things I had already seen, whether in their original release (The President's Last Bang) or the Fathom Events presentation a couple months ago (Shin Kamen Rider), so I spent a bit of time walking down St. Catherine taking in the decorations for Juste Pour Rire.
Very good crowd for The First Slam Dunk, which isn't exactly surprising - the manga and anime have been popular for decades and this has the buzz that it's getting a regular theatrical release next week, although I was kind of surprised just how into it the audience got, as basketball. I remember one time the festival tried to do a genre/sports double feature and the audience wasn't really into it, but this got the sort of response to the game that had me thinking "hey, there's kids watching this movie" when someone cussed as part of their reaction.
Next up after that was Sympathy for the Devil, initially expected to be a big centerpiece presentation with Nicolas Cage getting a Cheval Noir, but the actor's strike means no promotional activities so Mitch was joined by director Yuval Adler and producer Allan Ungar. The writers are also on strike, so that meant that while screenwriter Luke Paradise was there to see the world premiere, he stayed in the audience rather than doing a Q&A.
Which is a real shame for us, because from the way Adler and Ungar described it, this was kind of an interesting script-to-screen story: Adler had apparently seen the script about ten years ago, trying to make it his next movie after Bethlehem, but somebody else got there first. Getting a film made can take ages, though, so it just went through development, with Adler calling every couple years until finally, in 2021 or 2022, it became available and he pounced. It was originally set in New York during the winter, but then Nicolas Cage was cast and it not only wound up relocated to Las Vegas because Cage lives there and his wife was expecting a child soon, but it had to fit into a very narrow window because, in case you haven't noticed, Cage makes a lot of movies these days. He's also a movie star with ideas about his characters, and you kind of wind up bending to that. Adler and Ungar had a bunch of interesting stories about that; they had to find a soundstage, with everyone going through a learning curve with the scenery-projection tech that has become popular since The Mandalorian, with relatively little shot on location, and that cut short by approaching rain, which is a thing you don't think about having to worry about in Vegas. It did mean they got some shots of apocalyptic-looking lightning on the horizon, which fit it pretty well. Not being able to get Cage and Paradise on stage was a shame, because, as much as this is sort of a minor thriller, the talk of how this sort of collaboration happens and winds up coherent is fascinating.
Also, the jacket Adler is wearing there is the same one Cage wears in the movie. I could not pull it off. They mentioned that it was supplied by a clothier in a Vegas hotel, and that four $7,000 jackets gets you a pretty nice logo in the closing credits.
After that, it was across the street to De Seve for The Becomers, with writer/director Zach Clark and producer Edwin Linker. As Clark put it, it is what you get after more or less doing nothing for a year because of a global pandemic, watching a bunch of the original Star Trek, and getting invited to pitch genre movies that can be done cheap and shot in a couple of weeks. The result is genuinely weird and very pandemic-warped, cynical but not quite giving up on humanity.
Clark had some fun stories to go with it, such as how Russell Mael wound up narrating because they both wound up on the same Zoom movie-watch-along during the pandemic and were exchanging emails, and that Clark himself wound up playing the aliens in their natural form because the cast was Chicago-based and the guys fabricating the costumes were in New York, and in this sort of microbudget indie, you limit who is racking up air miles on the production dime. He also couldn't help laughing at how, yes, the weird cultist character were stupid and ridiculous, but have you seen the folks he was basing them on? Just so, so stupid.
Anyway, both The First Slam Dunk and Sympathy for the Devil are opening Friday, 28 July. If I had to guess for the Boston area, Slam Dunk will play Boston Common while Sympathy might show up at Fresh Pond, as Nic Cage movies are wont to do, although who knows with how well the big ones opened this weekend - sometimes a thing opening soft means there are extra screens available, sometimes the opposite means opportunities to run dry up.
As an aside, I probably messed up two promotional photos yesterday, sitting up front and center but not collecting a megaphone for Slam Dunk or sunglasses for Becomers, though not out of any sort of "telling the audience they are part of the entertainment sets a bad precedent" principle; they just weren't handed to me. Hopefully, I won't do the same today, where the plan is Ride On, Sand Land, Raging Grace, and New Normal
"Otamatoon: Let's Play Chirirrin"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: Axis, digital)
These little vignettes by director Novmichi Tosa and Maywa Denki are about a minute long, but cute as heck, in this case pulling a lot of personality out of two baby toys, one of whose face doesn't really move while the other has a big mouth that lets out contrasting wails to his friend's bells.
Adorable. I hope there's more before other animes this week.
The First Slam Dunk
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: Axis, DCP)
The First Slam Dunk is a genuinely terrific sports movie and manga adaptation that, like many, probably benefits some from familiarity with the source material - there are plenty of characters who probably carry a ton of weight in the high school drama parts of the manga spend the bulk of the film on the sidelines, cheering the starting five on. But the laser focus on this one game keeps the movie from getting anywhere close to bogged down, or otherwise getting to the point where you're worrying about what's "really" important.
Ryota Miyagi (voice of Shugo Nakamura) is apparently something of a secondary character in the main Slam Dunk manga, but here he is presented as the heart and soul of the Shohoku basketball team, despite his relatively short stature. Just turning 17, he's been a huge basketball fan since he was a little kid idolizing his big brother Sota, who died in an accident soon after they lost their father. Now, though, he is playing for the national championship against powerhouse high school Sannoh, and the starters will get most of the minutes: Hisashi Mitsui (voice of Jun Kasama), a versatile guard; Hanamichi Sakuragi (voice of Subaru Kimura), a former hooligan with red-dyed hair who thinks he's more a basketball genius than he is; Takenori Akagi (voice of Kenta Miyake), a goliath of a center with confidence issues; and Kaede Rukawa (voice of Shinichiro Kamio), Ryota's first friend at this new school, a three-point threat who has a tendency to hog the ball.
Not that is entirely in the game; there are plentiful flashbacks to Ryoga as a 9-year-old kid idolizing his older brother and reeling from the loss, as well as his first days in a new school and on this team. It's mostly good, foundational material, showing what the main force behind these kids' supercharged emotions and showing just how much Ryoga's desire to follow in his brother's footsteps (though he's now older than Sota will ever be) is a strain on his mother. Given that the main line of the original comics and animations primarily follow Sakuragi, it's a nifty way for filmmaker Takehiko Inoue (who also wrote and drew the original manga) to insert a feature into a story that is mostly complete without retreading much. There are moments that longtime fans of the material will probably seize upon, and things that feel like cut subplots to us newbies (like, are Ryoga and team manager Ayako crushing on each other?), but it works, overall.
It's the basketball that people are going to come out of the film racing about, though, and they should: For all that animation carries the risk of looking weightless or letting the filmmakers do an end run around human capability, the action here is heavily motion captured and rendered in a style that keeps the characters rigidly on model as opposed to enabling cartoon-style exaggeration. What the style does allow for is the filmmakers getting the virtual camera right into the middle of the action in a way that could never happen on an actual sports broadcast, sometimes slowing things down maybe 10% so normal people can follow the unfolding action that players can see instinctively, and otherwise just pulling one into the game. It's written to deliver the full roller coaster of an underdog playing a powerhouse, and the festival audience responded like it was a real game.
There are, admittedly, a couple stretches where a flashback goes on a bit long or doesn't seem particularly connected to the immediate game situation and one wants them to get back to basketball, but it's more than enough to give it some heft. And for a first-time director, Inoue handles the push and pull between these two halves very well. He and his animators also do a very impressive job of combining two animation techniques, as the game action is digital but most of the flashback material is a more hand-drawn style, but the transition between the two is unusually seamless, especially considering that the things that looked unreal in the trailer look much better when presented in context rather than quick-cut clips.
It's a heck of a thing for an animated high school basketball game to bring out the same response as attending a game live, but this one manages. It's a heck of a ride, even for those of us who barely know the comic exists.
Sympathy for the Devil
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Confession: As a New Englander, a Nicolas Cage character announcing he's from Southie made me tense up as much as anything else - I mean, folks are going to expect me to have opinions on this. Beyond that, though, the accent is the sort of thing that can just eat an actor up when he's already playing to the rafters, and thus serve as a test for just how big one enjoys Cage going.
It starts smaller, of course, with David Chamberlain (Joel Kinnaman) dropping his son off at his mother-in-law's so that he can get to the hospital where his wife is about to give birth to their second child in her third difficult pregnancy. As he attempts to park, though, a man in red (Cage) casually slides in the back seat and says to drive; when David mentions that this isn't a rideshare, the man pulls a gun and directs him to the outskirts of Vegas. It soon becomes clear that the passenger was looking for David specifically, but why? He's just a nobody, certainly not someone an East Coast hood would be interested in!
And so, the movie becomes Nicolas Cage just Nicholas Caging all over the place for a bit under 90 minutes, and you're kind of either all in for that or not. Cage never mails this sort of thing in, though, and he doesn't here, from the moment he steps out of the shadows with his hair dyed a Satanic red to match his suit to when he eventually, inevitably, sets everything on fire. By now, I suspect writers know that he'll take their script as a starting point to riff and give him more raw meat when he gets attached, and that's what one remembers: Cage takes great joy turning a good line over in his mouth, staring without blinking for far too long, putting more energy into an outburst than is on the page, and walking up to the edge of meta-commentary, both as an acknowledgment that the audience has seen a lot of these movies and hinting that he may be the actual devil who knows how this sort of thing always goes. Still, you can't claim he doesn't actually find something amid the genre trappings; there's undeniably a bit more than the mad-dog killer to his role, even if he's going to let the audience have fun until they really need to see it.
If he's in almost the full 90 minutes, Joel Kinnaman is in more, and though this can be kind of a thankless sort of role, it's worth remembering that the laugh at Cage going big often comes from when the camera cuts to Kinnaman's everyman reacting in the same stunned disbelief anyone else would. Of course, the audience going into the movie is going to have their suspicions that there's more to David than meets the eye, and part of his job is to convince us that, no, maybe there's not, but there still might be enough to him that he can turn the tables at some point in the last act, whether or not he's who his passenger thinks he is.
In the meantime, this is a small but mostly well-mounted little movie. I don't know that it really takes advantage of how Vegas can be a sort of in-between place intentionally; while Boston and New York are mentioned, there aren't any flashbacks, instead relying on Cage telling a story, and it sort of becomes limbo, but not entirely. There are moments that come across more as something the actor can have fun with than the natural response, but the filmmakers make that work as an agent-of-chaos thing, and when the time for action comes, they do a solid job of building suspense from what the audience can see rather than cutting together a lot of action and hoping the vibe is right.
Which is good, because this isn't really a story that hasn't been told before or anything. It's fairly straightforward and has a couple good parts, but even the surprises aren't really surprises. Movies like this fill out a theater on a slow week or are good for an hour and a half when you find it on a streaming service. There's a good chance you'll move onto something else soon enough, but it's better than just fine.
"Drumming Makes You Happy"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival Underground, digital)
This thing is two minutes long, so I'm not going to go too deep into it, but I hope that the one note I took during it, "Like Paul Reubens playing a buddhist monk", is what filmmaker Josh Coen and lead actor Chad Jamian were going for. It's cheery and silly and gets dangerously close to its joke being spent in a very short time, but it is certainly good for a couple of laughs.
The Becomers
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival Underground, digital)
The Becomers is an enjoyably odd piece of sci-fi that takes a familiar if not exactly common trope (alien visitors/refugees displacing human bodies) and makes it work in large part by maintaining their point of view and maybe not overthinking it. So many movies playing with this get too caught up in the morality of it, where this one seems to get to those questions at the right pace.
The first alien arrives on Earth in a cloud of pink smoke, possessing a hunter before winding in the body of Francesca (Isabel Alamin), a young woman about to give birth. They get acclimated - with a motel manager seeming a little too eager to be of assistance - before the law starts looking for Francesca. From there, they get a chance to jump to Carol (Molly Plunk), who lives in a nice suburban house, and when their lover locates them, they can take over Carol's husband Gordon (Mike Lopez). Seems like a nice, quiet place to reside after fleeing one's home planet's destruction, but they don't know what Carol, Gordon, and their friends were into.
It's an interesting decision that a lot of the humans these folks encounter are weirdos, rather than doing the thing where they observe normal humans and find our everyday lives strange, but get into an even weirder situation. One could say that they do, and most of humanity is just more twisted than we give ourselves credit for, but it lets the filmmakers ride a line where anything can happen but it's not entirely because of aliens-doing-alien-things randomness, letting writer/director Zach Clark do outrageous surprises while still playing kind of fair. It's actually kind of interesting, because on the surface there's not a whole lot of reason for the aliens to really begin to feel remorse and affection for humanity, but testing that ability manages to strengthen it.
This is a very tight little indie, so there aren't going to be a lot of big set-ups, but Clark offers a lot of weird fun regardless. Russell Mael offers narration that seems just off-kilter enough for one to shake their heads as he describes the Lovers' lives on their home planet but also feels grounded in familiar pleasures, hardships, and threats, just the right sort of us and them. There's a really mean-spirited bit early on that works as a joke (and doesn't entirely turn one away from the first lover) because Clark isn't even trying to make the effects believable, and some alien sex that is appropriately gooey and ridiculous, a nice but nasty companion to Mael's earlier narration about "missing your orifice".
The cast does a fairly nice job of taking these protean characters and making them work, with each Lover played by at least three actors each. I wonder, a bit, if maybe the first has a tendency to backslide and have to relearn in each new body, although Isabel Alamin and Molly Plunk both capture some of the same weird vibe (Plunk, especially, makes one wonder how this redhead isn't already at the stage in her career where she's not only joined the cast of Saturday Night Live but is moving on because she keeps getting all the great zany roles in spin-off movies). Plunk has good chemistry with both characters who play her character's lover, with Mike Lopez an enjoyable straight man who can get weird himself on occasion.
This one's going to be an acquired taste; I can already see people asking me why I would recommend it to them. But it's a pandemic production - I'm not sure whether half the characters wearing masks around their chins is a barbed joke or a compromise - and in all its goofy, cynical, and bizarrely hopeful oddity, it captures how that time made us a little nuts as well as anything can.
It wound up being a late start because the shows in the 1pm slot were things I had already seen, whether in their original release (The President's Last Bang) or the Fathom Events presentation a couple months ago (Shin Kamen Rider), so I spent a bit of time walking down St. Catherine taking in the decorations for Juste Pour Rire.
Very good crowd for The First Slam Dunk, which isn't exactly surprising - the manga and anime have been popular for decades and this has the buzz that it's getting a regular theatrical release next week, although I was kind of surprised just how into it the audience got, as basketball. I remember one time the festival tried to do a genre/sports double feature and the audience wasn't really into it, but this got the sort of response to the game that had me thinking "hey, there's kids watching this movie" when someone cussed as part of their reaction.
Which is a real shame for us, because from the way Adler and Ungar described it, this was kind of an interesting script-to-screen story: Adler had apparently seen the script about ten years ago, trying to make it his next movie after Bethlehem, but somebody else got there first. Getting a film made can take ages, though, so it just went through development, with Adler calling every couple years until finally, in 2021 or 2022, it became available and he pounced. It was originally set in New York during the winter, but then Nicolas Cage was cast and it not only wound up relocated to Las Vegas because Cage lives there and his wife was expecting a child soon, but it had to fit into a very narrow window because, in case you haven't noticed, Cage makes a lot of movies these days. He's also a movie star with ideas about his characters, and you kind of wind up bending to that. Adler and Ungar had a bunch of interesting stories about that; they had to find a soundstage, with everyone going through a learning curve with the scenery-projection tech that has become popular since The Mandalorian, with relatively little shot on location, and that cut short by approaching rain, which is a thing you don't think about having to worry about in Vegas. It did mean they got some shots of apocalyptic-looking lightning on the horizon, which fit it pretty well. Not being able to get Cage and Paradise on stage was a shame, because, as much as this is sort of a minor thriller, the talk of how this sort of collaboration happens and winds up coherent is fascinating.
Also, the jacket Adler is wearing there is the same one Cage wears in the movie. I could not pull it off. They mentioned that it was supplied by a clothier in a Vegas hotel, and that four $7,000 jackets gets you a pretty nice logo in the closing credits.
Clark had some fun stories to go with it, such as how Russell Mael wound up narrating because they both wound up on the same Zoom movie-watch-along during the pandemic and were exchanging emails, and that Clark himself wound up playing the aliens in their natural form because the cast was Chicago-based and the guys fabricating the costumes were in New York, and in this sort of microbudget indie, you limit who is racking up air miles on the production dime. He also couldn't help laughing at how, yes, the weird cultist character were stupid and ridiculous, but have you seen the folks he was basing them on? Just so, so stupid.
Anyway, both The First Slam Dunk and Sympathy for the Devil are opening Friday, 28 July. If I had to guess for the Boston area, Slam Dunk will play Boston Common while Sympathy might show up at Fresh Pond, as Nic Cage movies are wont to do, although who knows with how well the big ones opened this weekend - sometimes a thing opening soft means there are extra screens available, sometimes the opposite means opportunities to run dry up.
As an aside, I probably messed up two promotional photos yesterday, sitting up front and center but not collecting a megaphone for Slam Dunk or sunglasses for Becomers, though not out of any sort of "telling the audience they are part of the entertainment sets a bad precedent" principle; they just weren't handed to me. Hopefully, I won't do the same today, where the plan is Ride On, Sand Land, Raging Grace, and New Normal
"Otamatoon: Let's Play Chirirrin"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: Axis, digital)
These little vignettes by director Novmichi Tosa and Maywa Denki are about a minute long, but cute as heck, in this case pulling a lot of personality out of two baby toys, one of whose face doesn't really move while the other has a big mouth that lets out contrasting wails to his friend's bells.
Adorable. I hope there's more before other animes this week.
The First Slam Dunk
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: Axis, DCP)
The First Slam Dunk is a genuinely terrific sports movie and manga adaptation that, like many, probably benefits some from familiarity with the source material - there are plenty of characters who probably carry a ton of weight in the high school drama parts of the manga spend the bulk of the film on the sidelines, cheering the starting five on. But the laser focus on this one game keeps the movie from getting anywhere close to bogged down, or otherwise getting to the point where you're worrying about what's "really" important.
Ryota Miyagi (voice of Shugo Nakamura) is apparently something of a secondary character in the main Slam Dunk manga, but here he is presented as the heart and soul of the Shohoku basketball team, despite his relatively short stature. Just turning 17, he's been a huge basketball fan since he was a little kid idolizing his big brother Sota, who died in an accident soon after they lost their father. Now, though, he is playing for the national championship against powerhouse high school Sannoh, and the starters will get most of the minutes: Hisashi Mitsui (voice of Jun Kasama), a versatile guard; Hanamichi Sakuragi (voice of Subaru Kimura), a former hooligan with red-dyed hair who thinks he's more a basketball genius than he is; Takenori Akagi (voice of Kenta Miyake), a goliath of a center with confidence issues; and Kaede Rukawa (voice of Shinichiro Kamio), Ryota's first friend at this new school, a three-point threat who has a tendency to hog the ball.
Not that is entirely in the game; there are plentiful flashbacks to Ryoga as a 9-year-old kid idolizing his older brother and reeling from the loss, as well as his first days in a new school and on this team. It's mostly good, foundational material, showing what the main force behind these kids' supercharged emotions and showing just how much Ryoga's desire to follow in his brother's footsteps (though he's now older than Sota will ever be) is a strain on his mother. Given that the main line of the original comics and animations primarily follow Sakuragi, it's a nifty way for filmmaker Takehiko Inoue (who also wrote and drew the original manga) to insert a feature into a story that is mostly complete without retreading much. There are moments that longtime fans of the material will probably seize upon, and things that feel like cut subplots to us newbies (like, are Ryoga and team manager Ayako crushing on each other?), but it works, overall.
It's the basketball that people are going to come out of the film racing about, though, and they should: For all that animation carries the risk of looking weightless or letting the filmmakers do an end run around human capability, the action here is heavily motion captured and rendered in a style that keeps the characters rigidly on model as opposed to enabling cartoon-style exaggeration. What the style does allow for is the filmmakers getting the virtual camera right into the middle of the action in a way that could never happen on an actual sports broadcast, sometimes slowing things down maybe 10% so normal people can follow the unfolding action that players can see instinctively, and otherwise just pulling one into the game. It's written to deliver the full roller coaster of an underdog playing a powerhouse, and the festival audience responded like it was a real game.
There are, admittedly, a couple stretches where a flashback goes on a bit long or doesn't seem particularly connected to the immediate game situation and one wants them to get back to basketball, but it's more than enough to give it some heft. And for a first-time director, Inoue handles the push and pull between these two halves very well. He and his animators also do a very impressive job of combining two animation techniques, as the game action is digital but most of the flashback material is a more hand-drawn style, but the transition between the two is unusually seamless, especially considering that the things that looked unreal in the trailer look much better when presented in context rather than quick-cut clips.
It's a heck of a thing for an animated high school basketball game to bring out the same response as attending a game live, but this one manages. It's a heck of a ride, even for those of us who barely know the comic exists.
Sympathy for the Devil
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Confession: As a New Englander, a Nicolas Cage character announcing he's from Southie made me tense up as much as anything else - I mean, folks are going to expect me to have opinions on this. Beyond that, though, the accent is the sort of thing that can just eat an actor up when he's already playing to the rafters, and thus serve as a test for just how big one enjoys Cage going.
It starts smaller, of course, with David Chamberlain (Joel Kinnaman) dropping his son off at his mother-in-law's so that he can get to the hospital where his wife is about to give birth to their second child in her third difficult pregnancy. As he attempts to park, though, a man in red (Cage) casually slides in the back seat and says to drive; when David mentions that this isn't a rideshare, the man pulls a gun and directs him to the outskirts of Vegas. It soon becomes clear that the passenger was looking for David specifically, but why? He's just a nobody, certainly not someone an East Coast hood would be interested in!
And so, the movie becomes Nicolas Cage just Nicholas Caging all over the place for a bit under 90 minutes, and you're kind of either all in for that or not. Cage never mails this sort of thing in, though, and he doesn't here, from the moment he steps out of the shadows with his hair dyed a Satanic red to match his suit to when he eventually, inevitably, sets everything on fire. By now, I suspect writers know that he'll take their script as a starting point to riff and give him more raw meat when he gets attached, and that's what one remembers: Cage takes great joy turning a good line over in his mouth, staring without blinking for far too long, putting more energy into an outburst than is on the page, and walking up to the edge of meta-commentary, both as an acknowledgment that the audience has seen a lot of these movies and hinting that he may be the actual devil who knows how this sort of thing always goes. Still, you can't claim he doesn't actually find something amid the genre trappings; there's undeniably a bit more than the mad-dog killer to his role, even if he's going to let the audience have fun until they really need to see it.
If he's in almost the full 90 minutes, Joel Kinnaman is in more, and though this can be kind of a thankless sort of role, it's worth remembering that the laugh at Cage going big often comes from when the camera cuts to Kinnaman's everyman reacting in the same stunned disbelief anyone else would. Of course, the audience going into the movie is going to have their suspicions that there's more to David than meets the eye, and part of his job is to convince us that, no, maybe there's not, but there still might be enough to him that he can turn the tables at some point in the last act, whether or not he's who his passenger thinks he is.
In the meantime, this is a small but mostly well-mounted little movie. I don't know that it really takes advantage of how Vegas can be a sort of in-between place intentionally; while Boston and New York are mentioned, there aren't any flashbacks, instead relying on Cage telling a story, and it sort of becomes limbo, but not entirely. There are moments that come across more as something the actor can have fun with than the natural response, but the filmmakers make that work as an agent-of-chaos thing, and when the time for action comes, they do a solid job of building suspense from what the audience can see rather than cutting together a lot of action and hoping the vibe is right.
Which is good, because this isn't really a story that hasn't been told before or anything. It's fairly straightforward and has a couple good parts, but even the surprises aren't really surprises. Movies like this fill out a theater on a slow week or are good for an hour and a half when you find it on a streaming service. There's a good chance you'll move onto something else soon enough, but it's better than just fine.
"Drumming Makes You Happy"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival Underground, digital)
This thing is two minutes long, so I'm not going to go too deep into it, but I hope that the one note I took during it, "Like Paul Reubens playing a buddhist monk", is what filmmaker Josh Coen and lead actor Chad Jamian were going for. It's cheery and silly and gets dangerously close to its joke being spent in a very short time, but it is certainly good for a couple of laughs.
The Becomers
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival Underground, digital)
The Becomers is an enjoyably odd piece of sci-fi that takes a familiar if not exactly common trope (alien visitors/refugees displacing human bodies) and makes it work in large part by maintaining their point of view and maybe not overthinking it. So many movies playing with this get too caught up in the morality of it, where this one seems to get to those questions at the right pace.
The first alien arrives on Earth in a cloud of pink smoke, possessing a hunter before winding in the body of Francesca (Isabel Alamin), a young woman about to give birth. They get acclimated - with a motel manager seeming a little too eager to be of assistance - before the law starts looking for Francesca. From there, they get a chance to jump to Carol (Molly Plunk), who lives in a nice suburban house, and when their lover locates them, they can take over Carol's husband Gordon (Mike Lopez). Seems like a nice, quiet place to reside after fleeing one's home planet's destruction, but they don't know what Carol, Gordon, and their friends were into.
It's an interesting decision that a lot of the humans these folks encounter are weirdos, rather than doing the thing where they observe normal humans and find our everyday lives strange, but get into an even weirder situation. One could say that they do, and most of humanity is just more twisted than we give ourselves credit for, but it lets the filmmakers ride a line where anything can happen but it's not entirely because of aliens-doing-alien-things randomness, letting writer/director Zach Clark do outrageous surprises while still playing kind of fair. It's actually kind of interesting, because on the surface there's not a whole lot of reason for the aliens to really begin to feel remorse and affection for humanity, but testing that ability manages to strengthen it.
This is a very tight little indie, so there aren't going to be a lot of big set-ups, but Clark offers a lot of weird fun regardless. Russell Mael offers narration that seems just off-kilter enough for one to shake their heads as he describes the Lovers' lives on their home planet but also feels grounded in familiar pleasures, hardships, and threats, just the right sort of us and them. There's a really mean-spirited bit early on that works as a joke (and doesn't entirely turn one away from the first lover) because Clark isn't even trying to make the effects believable, and some alien sex that is appropriately gooey and ridiculous, a nice but nasty companion to Mael's earlier narration about "missing your orifice".
The cast does a fairly nice job of taking these protean characters and making them work, with each Lover played by at least three actors each. I wonder, a bit, if maybe the first has a tendency to backslide and have to relearn in each new body, although Isabel Alamin and Molly Plunk both capture some of the same weird vibe (Plunk, especially, makes one wonder how this redhead isn't already at the stage in her career where she's not only joined the cast of Saturday Night Live but is moving on because she keeps getting all the great zany roles in spin-off movies). Plunk has good chemistry with both characters who play her character's lover, with Mike Lopez an enjoyable straight man who can get weird himself on occasion.
This one's going to be an acquired taste; I can already see people asking me why I would recommend it to them. But it's a pandemic production - I'm not sure whether half the characters wearing masks around their chins is a barbed joke or a compromise - and in all its goofy, cynical, and bizarrely hopeful oddity, it captures how that time made us a little nuts as well as anything can.
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
Monday Double Feature: The League and Lost in the Stars
An odd case where I worked backward in building a double feature because, initially, Lost in the Stars was only playing shows 9:30pm and later with the last show on Monday as Mission: Impossible grabs all the screens on Tuesday, and as you might expect considering that this is apparently the biggest movie of the summer in China, the folks next door in Chinatown bought up tickets even before i knew it was playing, so that last show on Monday was my best shot at a decent seat.
After I did that, AMC put on more shows (and it's playing for a second week), but I wound up sticking with my reservation, although that meant finding something earlier because it can be a pain to pull myself out of the apartment at 9pm. Factor in AMC's 20 minutes of trailers and how a lot of movies are well over two hours these days, and it can be tough to make a twin bill work.
Maybe not surprisingly, it was looking like I was going to be on my own for The League, in part because of its weird booking strategy: Magnolia Pictures apparently booked with AMC directly for three weekdays, which is a Fathom-like booking but doesn't get it into the Fathom block of previews, and I don't think I saw a trailer before any films. The most advertising I saw online was tweets about it playing AMCs in Chicago. Some other folks did show up, all of us, I think, at least middle aged, and I don't know that I saw any folks of color either, though I wasn't looking behind me from my third-row seat.
On the other hand, Lost in the Stars was fairly busy, already pretty packed when I arrived and then filling up behind me.
And, after that, a good twenty-minute wait for the Green Line Extension heading home, arriving there at 1am with a 9am conference call scheduled the next day, which is a big part of why I don't do a lot of double features that aren't built as such. Who goes to those 10:45pm shows at an AMC with how early the T stops running?
The League '23
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2023 in AMC Boston Common #5 (special engagement, DCP)
As documentaries that probably don't tell their intended audience a whole lot that they weren't already aware of, The League at least had the benefit of being about something fun and only having to compact thirty or so years into a feature length presentation. It is, as I tend to say about a lot of these docs, Negro Leagues 101, but as someone who could use that, I certainly found my curiosity piqued.
Those 30 years are roughly the length of time between World War I and Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers. Director Sam Pollard doesn't exactly present it as the story of Black businessmen who owned the teams and shaped the leagues, from "Rube" Foster, whose Chicago Giants were the lynchpin of the original Black National League, to rival owners in Pittsburgh, to Effa Manley in New Jersey, who saw clearly that the white leagues signing their players without compensation would lead to the Negro Leagues' collapse. There's plenty of time spent on the famous players - one will hear the stories of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson - but as the story of the leagues, the film focuses on the people who made things happen, directly.
The timing of it was lucky for me, arriving during the MLB All-Star break when there's relatively little actual baseball, leaving the major papers ceasing their daily sports coverage as one of the bigger stories in sports, because a major theme is that sports are important to a community, in both tangible and emotional ways. There's sentimentality here, but also nuts and bolts of how sports teams can be a central part of a community, even when they are not one of the most visible, accessible pictures of Black excellence. The filmmakers are good at recognizing how they're intertwined without diminishing either.
It's well put together, too, making good use of the names the audience is likely to know but also giving plenty of time to those they might not, and doing a fair job of mixing recreation, animation, and plenty of archival material together so that it's seldom overdone, or static (there's a danger of feeling like you're rehashing Ken Burns in substance and style here that is mostly avoided) Maybe a little too smooth at times; the transition from grainy home movies to something sharper can supply a bit of excitement at the filmmakers perhaps finding some great archival material that is probably actually a recreation, with the same happening on voice-overs one may presume are from audio interviews but are actually actors narrating, especially when there are on-screen titles for the speaker. It's not exactly fraudulent, but it does raise the question of whether one is seeing the thing raw or someone's interpretation. That comes right down to one of the central threads; the film is largely based upon the writings of former umpire Bob Motley, but it's not clear when one is hearing his voice, or if one ever is.
A bit of a shame, that, as there's something especially apt about having one of the League's umpires being a primary point of view - an ump is by nature both an insider and expected to call a fair game, compared to players or executives who may have agendas. It's the same story, in many ways, but told well and down the middle.
Xiao shi de ta (Lost in the Stars)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2023 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, DCP)
Chen Sicheng of Detective Chinatown fame knows his mysteries, so it's not exactly surprising that he would be part of adapting a 50-year-old French stage thriller into a modern Chinese movie, though others direct and contribute to the script. His name being attached to the story's solid hook certainly got my attention, and it has been a massive summer hit in China; if you're looking for a nifty little thriller as a massive blockbuster, you could do a lot worse while it's playing North America for a couple weeks.
The film opens with He Fei (Zhu Yilong) bursting into a police station on Bankal Island (a resort implied but never stated to be in Thailand), in a panic because his wife Li Muzi (Kay Huang Ziqi) has been missing for 15 days, but with no evidence of foul play, the police can't help him, though an ethnically Chinese officer, Zheng Cheng (Du Jiang), offers to help. But when He Fei wakes up the next morning, there's a woman in his bed (Janice Man Wing-San) who claims to be Li Muzi, and she's got the passport, photos, etc. to support the assertion. With just days before his visa expires, He Fei hires lawyer Chen Mai (Ni Ni) to help him get to the bottom of this.
Based on a play by Robert Thomas, "Trap for a Lonely Man", that has been adapted for television and film at least ten times in nearly as many languages, and I'm tempted to dig up one of the English-language versions to see if it was a more leisurely, chatty thing than this occasionally frantic production with room for a chase or two, although one way to make it work as a movie is to have He Fei and Chen Man literally running down every bit of evidence. I'm not sure that the film ever entirely recovers from introducing itself with a great premise for a psychological thriller and then bounding ahead at full speed rather than giving the ambiguities time to fester in the audience's collective mind, though; it's the sort of mystery where mentioning a potential twist seems to eliminate it as a possibility, and folks in the audience are probably already wondering whether this is more like Gaslight, The Game, or something else well before the filmmakers are ready to spring a surprise.
I suspect that, even as the Chinese filmmakers modernized and made the story their own, the core of it is something that could easily attract actors, with Zhu Yilong and Ni Ni having a pair of fun opposites to play, especially since Zhu has a chance to play the gaslit husband as an everyman rightfully panicked by all these things happening to him that make no sense, with Ni countering as the cool lawyer who is believably good at everything the story needs her to do, trusting that this sort of chemistry doesn't require a sexual or romantic component. Still, Janice Man's "impostor" probably channels the film's exact gonzo energy best; whether she's the con artist He Fei thinks she is or is having her actions twisted by his delusions, she unbalances every scene she's in, in precisely the right way (right down to how just a little sexiness can feel quite dangerous to someone concerned with reasoning out a puzzle).
Chen, co-writers Gu Shuyi & Yin Yixiong, and directors Cui Rui & Liu Xiang could maybe stand to find more ways to use Ni Ni, both to add a little tension to having to operate in plain sight and to make a movie that doesn't really spend much time questioning He Fei's point of view a bit more ambiguous. Still, you can see why this has been a massive hit in China, and thus one of the biggest movies of the summer worldwide. It's slick and fast-paced, and if the finale may seem like a lot to swallow, making one believe that this is possible is only half of what a thriller has to do along with making it click emotionally, and the pieces fall into place nicely, right down to a scene that has me think that made me smile at how properly cowardly it was. It's also beautiful in spots, with Cui, Liu, and company teasing the audience with mirrors and lighthouses, and eventually coming up with a nifty demonstration of how how to take transformative inspiration from something like "Starry Night", compared to the "immersive Van Gogh" exhibits.
I'm tempted to give it a second look sometime when I know to expect magic rather than moody, on top of seeing how else it has been adapted. It's a mystery just good enough to be worth seeing how many clues were planted that one missed without becoming too ponderous.
After I did that, AMC put on more shows (and it's playing for a second week), but I wound up sticking with my reservation, although that meant finding something earlier because it can be a pain to pull myself out of the apartment at 9pm. Factor in AMC's 20 minutes of trailers and how a lot of movies are well over two hours these days, and it can be tough to make a twin bill work.
Maybe not surprisingly, it was looking like I was going to be on my own for The League, in part because of its weird booking strategy: Magnolia Pictures apparently booked with AMC directly for three weekdays, which is a Fathom-like booking but doesn't get it into the Fathom block of previews, and I don't think I saw a trailer before any films. The most advertising I saw online was tweets about it playing AMCs in Chicago. Some other folks did show up, all of us, I think, at least middle aged, and I don't know that I saw any folks of color either, though I wasn't looking behind me from my third-row seat.
On the other hand, Lost in the Stars was fairly busy, already pretty packed when I arrived and then filling up behind me.
And, after that, a good twenty-minute wait for the Green Line Extension heading home, arriving there at 1am with a 9am conference call scheduled the next day, which is a big part of why I don't do a lot of double features that aren't built as such. Who goes to those 10:45pm shows at an AMC with how early the T stops running?
The League '23
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2023 in AMC Boston Common #5 (special engagement, DCP)
As documentaries that probably don't tell their intended audience a whole lot that they weren't already aware of, The League at least had the benefit of being about something fun and only having to compact thirty or so years into a feature length presentation. It is, as I tend to say about a lot of these docs, Negro Leagues 101, but as someone who could use that, I certainly found my curiosity piqued.
Those 30 years are roughly the length of time between World War I and Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers. Director Sam Pollard doesn't exactly present it as the story of Black businessmen who owned the teams and shaped the leagues, from "Rube" Foster, whose Chicago Giants were the lynchpin of the original Black National League, to rival owners in Pittsburgh, to Effa Manley in New Jersey, who saw clearly that the white leagues signing their players without compensation would lead to the Negro Leagues' collapse. There's plenty of time spent on the famous players - one will hear the stories of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson - but as the story of the leagues, the film focuses on the people who made things happen, directly.
The timing of it was lucky for me, arriving during the MLB All-Star break when there's relatively little actual baseball, leaving the major papers ceasing their daily sports coverage as one of the bigger stories in sports, because a major theme is that sports are important to a community, in both tangible and emotional ways. There's sentimentality here, but also nuts and bolts of how sports teams can be a central part of a community, even when they are not one of the most visible, accessible pictures of Black excellence. The filmmakers are good at recognizing how they're intertwined without diminishing either.
It's well put together, too, making good use of the names the audience is likely to know but also giving plenty of time to those they might not, and doing a fair job of mixing recreation, animation, and plenty of archival material together so that it's seldom overdone, or static (there's a danger of feeling like you're rehashing Ken Burns in substance and style here that is mostly avoided) Maybe a little too smooth at times; the transition from grainy home movies to something sharper can supply a bit of excitement at the filmmakers perhaps finding some great archival material that is probably actually a recreation, with the same happening on voice-overs one may presume are from audio interviews but are actually actors narrating, especially when there are on-screen titles for the speaker. It's not exactly fraudulent, but it does raise the question of whether one is seeing the thing raw or someone's interpretation. That comes right down to one of the central threads; the film is largely based upon the writings of former umpire Bob Motley, but it's not clear when one is hearing his voice, or if one ever is.
A bit of a shame, that, as there's something especially apt about having one of the League's umpires being a primary point of view - an ump is by nature both an insider and expected to call a fair game, compared to players or executives who may have agendas. It's the same story, in many ways, but told well and down the middle.
Xiao shi de ta (Lost in the Stars)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2023 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, DCP)
Chen Sicheng of Detective Chinatown fame knows his mysteries, so it's not exactly surprising that he would be part of adapting a 50-year-old French stage thriller into a modern Chinese movie, though others direct and contribute to the script. His name being attached to the story's solid hook certainly got my attention, and it has been a massive summer hit in China; if you're looking for a nifty little thriller as a massive blockbuster, you could do a lot worse while it's playing North America for a couple weeks.
The film opens with He Fei (Zhu Yilong) bursting into a police station on Bankal Island (a resort implied but never stated to be in Thailand), in a panic because his wife Li Muzi (Kay Huang Ziqi) has been missing for 15 days, but with no evidence of foul play, the police can't help him, though an ethnically Chinese officer, Zheng Cheng (Du Jiang), offers to help. But when He Fei wakes up the next morning, there's a woman in his bed (Janice Man Wing-San) who claims to be Li Muzi, and she's got the passport, photos, etc. to support the assertion. With just days before his visa expires, He Fei hires lawyer Chen Mai (Ni Ni) to help him get to the bottom of this.
Based on a play by Robert Thomas, "Trap for a Lonely Man", that has been adapted for television and film at least ten times in nearly as many languages, and I'm tempted to dig up one of the English-language versions to see if it was a more leisurely, chatty thing than this occasionally frantic production with room for a chase or two, although one way to make it work as a movie is to have He Fei and Chen Man literally running down every bit of evidence. I'm not sure that the film ever entirely recovers from introducing itself with a great premise for a psychological thriller and then bounding ahead at full speed rather than giving the ambiguities time to fester in the audience's collective mind, though; it's the sort of mystery where mentioning a potential twist seems to eliminate it as a possibility, and folks in the audience are probably already wondering whether this is more like Gaslight, The Game, or something else well before the filmmakers are ready to spring a surprise.
I suspect that, even as the Chinese filmmakers modernized and made the story their own, the core of it is something that could easily attract actors, with Zhu Yilong and Ni Ni having a pair of fun opposites to play, especially since Zhu has a chance to play the gaslit husband as an everyman rightfully panicked by all these things happening to him that make no sense, with Ni countering as the cool lawyer who is believably good at everything the story needs her to do, trusting that this sort of chemistry doesn't require a sexual or romantic component. Still, Janice Man's "impostor" probably channels the film's exact gonzo energy best; whether she's the con artist He Fei thinks she is or is having her actions twisted by his delusions, she unbalances every scene she's in, in precisely the right way (right down to how just a little sexiness can feel quite dangerous to someone concerned with reasoning out a puzzle).
Chen, co-writers Gu Shuyi & Yin Yixiong, and directors Cui Rui & Liu Xiang could maybe stand to find more ways to use Ni Ni, both to add a little tension to having to operate in plain sight and to make a movie that doesn't really spend much time questioning He Fei's point of view a bit more ambiguous. Still, you can see why this has been a massive hit in China, and thus one of the biggest movies of the summer worldwide. It's slick and fast-paced, and if the finale may seem like a lot to swallow, making one believe that this is possible is only half of what a thriller has to do along with making it click emotionally, and the pieces fall into place nicely, right down to a scene that has me think that made me smile at how properly cowardly it was. It's also beautiful in spots, with Cui, Liu, and company teasing the audience with mirrors and lighthouses, and eventually coming up with a nifty demonstration of how how to take transformative inspiration from something like "Starry Night", compared to the "immersive Van Gogh" exhibits.
I'm tempted to give it a second look sometime when I know to expect magic rather than moody, on top of seeing how else it has been adapted. It's a mystery just good enough to be worth seeing how many clues were planted that one missed without becoming too ponderous.
Friday, March 03, 2023
This Week in Tickets: 20 February 2023 - 26 February 2023 (Universal Horror 2023)
I was telling myself that I might hit the midnights at the Coolidge more often, but Friday night I really didn't want to be waiting for a cab outside the Coolidge after the Green Line or 66 stopped running - and, sure, maybe there would be a late one, but it was expected to be really cold. So there's some of what's not on this spread!
Lets look at this a bit out of chronological order, just because it's more interesting that way: The week had two Film Rolls entries, with The Internecine Project on Tuesday and The Bad News Bears on Thursday, and might have had another once i decided I was staying in Friday night, but sometimes the player, basically being a computer, sometimes doesn't boot properly and needs a full unplug-and-wait reboot, but it's hard to reach back there.
On Wednesday, I headed downtown to pick some stuff up at Fenway and then headed to Boston Common on the way back for Knock at the Cabin. Three days later, I was in the Somerville for Cocaine Bear, and while both of them are pretty decent, what's kind of interesting is that they are both from Universal, which is spending the first half of 2023 dropping roughly one high-concept but mid-budget horror thing a month, which is an interesting strategy.
Saturday also featured the first entry in the Brattle's "Greenaway x4" series, The Draughtsman's Contract. The series is going to get its own write-up, but it was a good start, since I figured Greenaway would either be completely my thing or something I wanted to flee ten minutes in.
Then on Sunday, the week is finished with a couple things I had just not gotten around to before - The Amazing Maurice, which has had a pretty decent run at Fresh Pond for looking like a one-week four-wall a month ago, and Hidden Blade, which I'd planned to catch after Knock at the Cabin on Wednesday before seeing that it would be extended another week.
Pretty enjoyable. First drafts, as always, on my Letterboxd, if you're impatient and don't want to wait until it's almost Next Week to read what's going on This Week.
The Internecine Project
Seen 21 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
I don't necessarily know that I'll actually have a lot more than this to say when I do a Film Rolls write-up: It's a nifty premise for a movie, but the writers seemed so excited to build their perfect murder(s) that they forgot that the fun starts when something throws a wrench into the gears, and this movie is wrench-free for far too long.
Knock at the Cabin
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)
A preview that includes a shot or two from the last stretch of Knock at the Cabin kind of let the air out of the film for me a month ago because, as a rule, I find people torturing headstrong (or epileptic) girls with exorcism scary while girls possessed by demons are just silly made-up shit, and the same goes for apocalypse cults. The second it looked like the crew led by Dave Buatista's Leonard might be in the right, I'm rolling my eyes, and the film doesn't really give them a point to have or anything that resonates. The world will end unless there's an arbitrary sacrifice, and that's it. It's just a plot device, not something which has a pesky ring of truth, and the script can't balance giving it one and allowing for skepticism.
Aside from that (which is an admittedly large value of "that"), it's a darn solid movie. M. Night Shyamalan has settled into his groove as a horror guy making modest flicks over the last decade, but he still has great chops as a director that made his films an event during that early-aughts run, and it's a level of confidence others might not have. He gives the film a steady pace, using flashbacks to keep tension from snapping and having enough confidence to try and create memorable images of his own and cut away rather than focus on gore or do the sort of call-outs other genre filmmakers do. He wants violence to create sadness and torment, not an adrenaline rush, and he's able to do that without deflating the moments when he needs tension.
He gets very nice performances from his cast as well; he may encourage them to go a little big and odd - it's kind of hard to believe Leonard was actually a second-grade teacher before his calling - but that's not a bad thing. There's a sense of who they are and how this situation has pushed them from being who they usually are, even if they're destined for a quick exit. Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge get chances to carve out important differences despite coming across as the same sort of generically handsome young father, for instance; Abby Quinn, Rupert Grint, and Nikki Amuka-Bird all get a chance to present as normal people doing very abnormal things, while Bautista uses his size and quiet reserve to be both a steadying anchor and kind of unnerving. Shyamalan's been great working with children forever and has found someone terrific in Kristen Cui; she always feels like that kid rather than just a kid, and that lets the opening set the stage nicely.
If I didn't have that atheist's outlook toward supernatural horror, there's a fair chance I'd consider this one of Shyamalan's best. But I do, and this movie doesn't quite do what it needs to in order to get past that for me.
The Bad News Bears '76
Seen 23 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
This one, I suspect, I might go long on; it's one I never particularly avoided but also never sought out, even once I realized just how much I liked Walter Matthau. It's a kind of surprising classic, more than just the foul-mouthed underdog sports story it can get reduced to, but kind of a New Hollywood family comedy on the one hand and an unconventional love story on the other. Not a romance - mind out of the gutters! - but Buttermaker and Amanda want to be father and daughter the way romantic partners want to be together if not for circumstances, and the moments when that is right out front are just as great as all the stuff about youth sport parents being kind of awful
The Draughtsman's Contract
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2023 in the Brattle Theatre (Greenaway x 4, DCP)
A fine opening to a series because, within it, one can see a lot of the themes Peter Greenaway would pursue throughout the rest of the films, but it's fairly straightforward in its way even as it does get downright peculiar at times. I knew I was down for the other three, and while Greenaway would return to favored themes constantly, he doesn't exactly repeat himself.
I admit, I am very much the sort to look at this and say "there's a murder mystery here - solve it!", but also can't particularly find fault with him not doing so.
Cocaine Bear
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2023 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, 4K laser DCP)
Cocaine Bear does what it says on the package, both from, yeah, having a bear that does cocaine and goes on a rampage and from how the filmmakers and audience are pretty much on the same wavelength about how silly a premise this is, with the folks on screen attacking it accordingly. Almost everybody in the cast goes big, the film is splashed in bright 1980s colors, and the songs on the soundtrack aren't always obvious but do feel like they're hitting a target. Heck, even the CGI bear not always looking quite right works; a creature feature being fun kind of depends on it not completely selling itself as authentic, and the star of Slither understands this just as well as anybody else who might be called on to direct such a film.
Is it all it could be? Not quite. The movie maybe coasts a bit on the gonzo story and having the right attitude, like the filmmakers know you were sold on it when you bought the ticket and just kind of have to maintain that initial buzz. Elizabeth Banks directs the film with energy, especially toward the start, and most of the characters come across as just oddball enough to work - Banks, writer Jimmy Warden, and the cast all get that a character in a comedy who is not funny in some way is contributing less than they should, and you can see how these folks are funny more or less as soon as they show up on-screen. There's a lot of them, though; even considering the need to have bodies drop on the regular, there are too many characters split up and bumping into each other randomly for the film to really flow. It often comes off as a collection of possibilities Warden came up with along with the title, and it's got the sort of finale where something is missing even if all the elements are there.
It works most of the time, at least, and nailing the vibe counts for a lot here.
On Wednesday, I headed downtown to pick some stuff up at Fenway and then headed to Boston Common on the way back for Knock at the Cabin. Three days later, I was in the Somerville for Cocaine Bear, and while both of them are pretty decent, what's kind of interesting is that they are both from Universal, which is spending the first half of 2023 dropping roughly one high-concept but mid-budget horror thing a month, which is an interesting strategy.
Saturday also featured the first entry in the Brattle's "Greenaway x4" series, The Draughtsman's Contract. The series is going to get its own write-up, but it was a good start, since I figured Greenaway would either be completely my thing or something I wanted to flee ten minutes in.
Then on Sunday, the week is finished with a couple things I had just not gotten around to before - The Amazing Maurice, which has had a pretty decent run at Fresh Pond for looking like a one-week four-wall a month ago, and Hidden Blade, which I'd planned to catch after Knock at the Cabin on Wednesday before seeing that it would be extended another week.
Pretty enjoyable. First drafts, as always, on my Letterboxd, if you're impatient and don't want to wait until it's almost Next Week to read what's going on This Week.
The Internecine Project
Seen 21 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
I don't necessarily know that I'll actually have a lot more than this to say when I do a Film Rolls write-up: It's a nifty premise for a movie, but the writers seemed so excited to build their perfect murder(s) that they forgot that the fun starts when something throws a wrench into the gears, and this movie is wrench-free for far too long.
Knock at the Cabin
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)
A preview that includes a shot or two from the last stretch of Knock at the Cabin kind of let the air out of the film for me a month ago because, as a rule, I find people torturing headstrong (or epileptic) girls with exorcism scary while girls possessed by demons are just silly made-up shit, and the same goes for apocalypse cults. The second it looked like the crew led by Dave Buatista's Leonard might be in the right, I'm rolling my eyes, and the film doesn't really give them a point to have or anything that resonates. The world will end unless there's an arbitrary sacrifice, and that's it. It's just a plot device, not something which has a pesky ring of truth, and the script can't balance giving it one and allowing for skepticism.
Aside from that (which is an admittedly large value of "that"), it's a darn solid movie. M. Night Shyamalan has settled into his groove as a horror guy making modest flicks over the last decade, but he still has great chops as a director that made his films an event during that early-aughts run, and it's a level of confidence others might not have. He gives the film a steady pace, using flashbacks to keep tension from snapping and having enough confidence to try and create memorable images of his own and cut away rather than focus on gore or do the sort of call-outs other genre filmmakers do. He wants violence to create sadness and torment, not an adrenaline rush, and he's able to do that without deflating the moments when he needs tension.
He gets very nice performances from his cast as well; he may encourage them to go a little big and odd - it's kind of hard to believe Leonard was actually a second-grade teacher before his calling - but that's not a bad thing. There's a sense of who they are and how this situation has pushed them from being who they usually are, even if they're destined for a quick exit. Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge get chances to carve out important differences despite coming across as the same sort of generically handsome young father, for instance; Abby Quinn, Rupert Grint, and Nikki Amuka-Bird all get a chance to present as normal people doing very abnormal things, while Bautista uses his size and quiet reserve to be both a steadying anchor and kind of unnerving. Shyamalan's been great working with children forever and has found someone terrific in Kristen Cui; she always feels like that kid rather than just a kid, and that lets the opening set the stage nicely.
If I didn't have that atheist's outlook toward supernatural horror, there's a fair chance I'd consider this one of Shyamalan's best. But I do, and this movie doesn't quite do what it needs to in order to get past that for me.
The Bad News Bears '76
Seen 23 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
This one, I suspect, I might go long on; it's one I never particularly avoided but also never sought out, even once I realized just how much I liked Walter Matthau. It's a kind of surprising classic, more than just the foul-mouthed underdog sports story it can get reduced to, but kind of a New Hollywood family comedy on the one hand and an unconventional love story on the other. Not a romance - mind out of the gutters! - but Buttermaker and Amanda want to be father and daughter the way romantic partners want to be together if not for circumstances, and the moments when that is right out front are just as great as all the stuff about youth sport parents being kind of awful
The Draughtsman's Contract
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2023 in the Brattle Theatre (Greenaway x 4, DCP)
A fine opening to a series because, within it, one can see a lot of the themes Peter Greenaway would pursue throughout the rest of the films, but it's fairly straightforward in its way even as it does get downright peculiar at times. I knew I was down for the other three, and while Greenaway would return to favored themes constantly, he doesn't exactly repeat himself.
I admit, I am very much the sort to look at this and say "there's a murder mystery here - solve it!", but also can't particularly find fault with him not doing so.
Cocaine Bear
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2023 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, 4K laser DCP)
Cocaine Bear does what it says on the package, both from, yeah, having a bear that does cocaine and goes on a rampage and from how the filmmakers and audience are pretty much on the same wavelength about how silly a premise this is, with the folks on screen attacking it accordingly. Almost everybody in the cast goes big, the film is splashed in bright 1980s colors, and the songs on the soundtrack aren't always obvious but do feel like they're hitting a target. Heck, even the CGI bear not always looking quite right works; a creature feature being fun kind of depends on it not completely selling itself as authentic, and the star of Slither understands this just as well as anybody else who might be called on to direct such a film.
Is it all it could be? Not quite. The movie maybe coasts a bit on the gonzo story and having the right attitude, like the filmmakers know you were sold on it when you bought the ticket and just kind of have to maintain that initial buzz. Elizabeth Banks directs the film with energy, especially toward the start, and most of the characters come across as just oddball enough to work - Banks, writer Jimmy Warden, and the cast all get that a character in a comedy who is not funny in some way is contributing less than they should, and you can see how these folks are funny more or less as soon as they show up on-screen. There's a lot of them, though; even considering the need to have bodies drop on the regular, there are too many characters split up and bumping into each other randomly for the film to really flow. It often comes off as a collection of possibilities Warden came up with along with the title, and it's got the sort of finale where something is missing even if all the elements are there.
It works most of the time, at least, and nailing the vibe counts for a lot here.
Tuesday, March 08, 2022
Short Stuff: The 2021 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts
Watching the selection of short documentaries nominated for this year's Academy Awards, one gets a sense of how much work goes into getting them into shape, considering how most are independently produced. There's not a mask to be seen and only a brief mention of Covid-19, a reminder that for the most part, these shorts were shot before 2020, and between the time necessary to edit, do other post-production, and then travel the festival circuit before being picked up and nominated, films often meant to be relatively immediate can look like time capsules.
Not that all of them are necessarily built around looking at the world right now; two of the five are more personal looks into the past. It's an interestingly varied slate, at least.
"Audible"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2022 in the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (Oscar Shorts, digital)
It's not uncommon to watch an Oscar-nominated piece that is pushing right up against the definition of a short subject and wonder if the original or ultimate intention is a feature, especially when the movie is something like "Audible". Filmmaker Matthew Ogens has a subject in Amaree McKenstry-Hall who has the sort of "ordinary life in unusual circumstances" situation that lets one connect and learn - Amaree plays on the top-tier football team of Maryland's School for the Deaf - and his film is put together well enough, but it could perhaps benefit from greater focus or room to get into more depth across the board.
Part of the issue is that most viewers have likely seen the broad strokes of Amaree's story plenty of times before, minus the "...and they're Deaf!", and the specifics of it never manage to take it to the next level. A coach gives out some sports-movie platitudes about them being underestimated; Amaree's father follows the familiar arc of walking out on his family, doing some time, finding God and preaching at a storefront church; Amaree and his girlfriend apparently had a fight and don't know what the future holds. It's material that has inherent power, and which could be even more intriguing if Ogens dug into what this means for these kids specifically. And I don't necessarily mean doing a touristy "how do Deaf kids handle this?" thing, but consider how an early scene is a montage of Amaree clearly being too rough on the field, but Ogens doesn't use this as a starting or ending point. It's seemingly not connected to the loss of a friend, and it's not something the viewer sees him grow out of despite his apparently being more centered later on. It's one moment relatively unconnected to others in the film.
It's also odd that one can't exactly tell what position Amaree plays, or even particularly suss out whether his team is really good or if their good record and long winning streak against other Deaf schools is because they're elite or because they're the best in a lower division. A documentary short isn't going to have the same sort of coverage that a big-budget feature or top-level sporting event does, but if the game is going to be central, it should help tell the story more. Meanwhile, there are other scenes that are too dramatically staged or cut between angles too much like a fiction film. It doesn't make one question the authenticity of this movie, but it does create a movie that doesn't quite become engrossing the way a documentary short can.
"When We Were Bullies"
* * (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2022 in the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (Oscar Shorts, digital)
It would be nice if Jay Rosenblatt's "When We Were Bullies" also tried to extract something universal from its specific group of (former) kids, but it instead winds up embracing its navel-gazing to the point of near-insufferability. There's an interesting idea or two at the center, but the main takeaway often seems to be that these Boomers really need to get over themselves.
Rosenblatt opens by mentioning that he has used the incident that inspired the film, a reaction to a stern teacher that turned into a pile-on against an introverted student, in a previous short ("The Smell of Burning Ants"), but that it still stuck with him 50 years later, and apparently did so for other classmates as well. So he begins a quest to speak to them, work out what it all means, and eventually speak to his fifth-grade teacher who is still alive and once again living in New York City.
There are questions to be answered here, about how these kids were primed to turn on "Dick" (as the fourth "Richard" in his class, he got the worst nickname) and how it apparently haunts them later, but it's a narcissistic sort of self-examination, rather than a systemic interrogation, with a great deal of talk about how making this film was something Rosenblatt had to do and asides of how he was going through something awful at the time, and little grappling with how Dick apparently decided he'd finished with this thing twenty-odd years ago. There's some cut-out animation and public-domain clips to cover the narration and phone interviews. Ultimately, though, Rosenblatt never seems to reach any conclusion beyond "I still feel bad and don't like it", and makes little case for this mattering beyond PS 194.
"Three Songs for Benazir"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2022 in the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (Oscar Shorts, digital)
For Elizabeth & Gulistan Mirzaei's "Three Songs for Benazir", the history that has outpaced it is not (just) Covid, but the American retreat from Afghanistan and fall of the country to the Taliban. In a movie that already features one cut to how things changed while the filmmakers were away, it's hard not to wonder what the next jump would reveal, although that hardly makes this film feel incomplete.
Indeed, the Mirzaeis seem less interested in the way the world around young couple Shaista & Benazir is changing and how the present moment is frustrating. They're a delightful pair - Shaista is clearly besotted with his wife and the way she laughs at the songs he improvises for her shows that the feeling is reciprocated (as an aside, Pashto as a language seems impressively able to turn simple statements into beautiful music). But they're in a refugee camp, and options are limited: Shiasta has a third-grade education and hates making bricks, so the army seems to be the best way out, but joining is not so simple.
There is tremendous power in the setting - the clay buildings of the camp seem simultaneously temporary and ancient, a place likely meant to be transient but becoming a community of its own as the endless war continues. The surveillance balloon above them has an unnervingly bomb-like shape. It's a specific-seeming mire, but even if one doesn't really know what a regular life is for a young Afghan couple, it's easy to grasp this pair wanting and trying to live one despite everything. That's why "Three Songs" becomes an impressive example of what film can do, sketching out what's necessary to create empathy in a short burst.
"Lead Me Home"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2022 in the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (Oscar Shorts, digital)
Directors Pedro Kos & Jon Shenk don't have solutions to offer to the situation outlined in the opening text of "Lead Me Home" - that Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle have all declared states of emergency related to homelessness in recent years - but if they've got rage, it's been buried under the same weight one sees affecting its subjects, whether they are the ones living rough or trying to help that group survive. There may be plenty of reason for anger, but it can't interfere with the work.
Though the unhoused people in the movie do speak their names and occasionally give their backstories, Kos & Shenk are careful with their narratives - the purpose here isn't to show how the system can be navigated, to celebrate success stories or highlight how any specific situation can put a person on the streets. Kos (credited as editor as well as director) and his team make sure that the viewer can follow these people but tend to only show middles of stories, giving a sense of how there's no single story but also showing the commonality of the experience. Homelessness makes people uncomfortable enough that they will often try to find a justification or (like the NIMBYs shown at a city council meeting toward the end) a reason not to engage, and the filmmakers do their best to make the situation clear without providing folks that escape route.
If Kos is in charge of framing in that way, cinematographer Shenk is the one who gives scale. He's fond of the shot that starts from a prosperous-looking neighborhood and pans slightly to show not just one, but several shelters huddled together. It repeats often enough to become a bit played out by a certain point, but it's a good illustration. The scale of these encampments seems to grow larger as the film goes on, and the film is impressively disciplined with how it uses scale: Tight, staring-into-a-camera framing as people tell their stories; something a little more broad as the unhoused go about their days and others try to help, and broad widescreen shots that show that this isn't just a couple of people here and there, but a large-scale problem. Without narration or talking heads, they make the clear point that the size of the problem as a whole is much larger than the people trying to fight it can handle, and the causes are too individual for a one-size-fits-all solution. As a result, the film can't help be a bit despairing, but also doesn't quite give into pessimism - these folks have to keep trying, after all.
"The Queen of Basketball"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2022 in the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (Oscar Shorts, digital)
After four shorts like that, the people packaging the nominees must be extremely grateful to have Ben Proudfoot's "The Queen of Basketball" to end on. It's a upbeat movie whose subject is the sort producers must dream about - accomplished, charismatic, and apparently just waiting 40 years to tell her story.
Luisa Harris's story is pretty straightforward - born in Mississippi in 1955, she grew to 6'2" in high school and was the potential superstar women's basketball needed when Title IX opened the doors for more women in college sports, the only Black woman on her school's team. She was on Team USA when women's basketball was added to the Olympics in 1976, was drafted by the NBA's New Orleans Jazz, and then… Well, there was no WNBA back then. What's important is not so much the recitation of these facts but seeing how Harris carries this with her. She knows just how good she was, what she owes to her coaches, and what her place in history is, and she relates it in a way that suggests she remembers the joy of those days but isn't stuck there. Throw in enough quick bits of material backing up her words, and Proudfoot can build a nice rapport between her and the viewer.
He's conscientious with what he does and doesn't include, too - it's eventually clear that Harris is in a wheelchair now, but as this fact likely has little relevance to the story he's telling, he doesn't make a thread out of it, or dig too deeply into Harris not trying out for the Jazz, as the change in Harris's tone indicates that she maybe wonders what-if a little more than she says. The basketball footage is revealing; one can see that Harris was in fact very good while also showing that the women in today's WNBA are clearly next-level without diminishing her importance as a pioneer.
It's interesting to look at "Audible" and "Queen" as bookends to the presentation; much as the latter could easily be dismissed as a feel-good puff piece, it's got its eye on a message it communicates smoothly, while the former can't quite make its scattered nature a virtue. If I had a vote, I'd probably give it to "Three Songs" or "Lead Me Home", though I'm loath to handicap what a group that collectively decided "Bullies" was one of the year's five best in this category will say.
Not that all of them are necessarily built around looking at the world right now; two of the five are more personal looks into the past. It's an interestingly varied slate, at least.
"Audible"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2022 in the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (Oscar Shorts, digital)
It's not uncommon to watch an Oscar-nominated piece that is pushing right up against the definition of a short subject and wonder if the original or ultimate intention is a feature, especially when the movie is something like "Audible". Filmmaker Matthew Ogens has a subject in Amaree McKenstry-Hall who has the sort of "ordinary life in unusual circumstances" situation that lets one connect and learn - Amaree plays on the top-tier football team of Maryland's School for the Deaf - and his film is put together well enough, but it could perhaps benefit from greater focus or room to get into more depth across the board.
Part of the issue is that most viewers have likely seen the broad strokes of Amaree's story plenty of times before, minus the "...and they're Deaf!", and the specifics of it never manage to take it to the next level. A coach gives out some sports-movie platitudes about them being underestimated; Amaree's father follows the familiar arc of walking out on his family, doing some time, finding God and preaching at a storefront church; Amaree and his girlfriend apparently had a fight and don't know what the future holds. It's material that has inherent power, and which could be even more intriguing if Ogens dug into what this means for these kids specifically. And I don't necessarily mean doing a touristy "how do Deaf kids handle this?" thing, but consider how an early scene is a montage of Amaree clearly being too rough on the field, but Ogens doesn't use this as a starting or ending point. It's seemingly not connected to the loss of a friend, and it's not something the viewer sees him grow out of despite his apparently being more centered later on. It's one moment relatively unconnected to others in the film.
It's also odd that one can't exactly tell what position Amaree plays, or even particularly suss out whether his team is really good or if their good record and long winning streak against other Deaf schools is because they're elite or because they're the best in a lower division. A documentary short isn't going to have the same sort of coverage that a big-budget feature or top-level sporting event does, but if the game is going to be central, it should help tell the story more. Meanwhile, there are other scenes that are too dramatically staged or cut between angles too much like a fiction film. It doesn't make one question the authenticity of this movie, but it does create a movie that doesn't quite become engrossing the way a documentary short can.
"When We Were Bullies"
* * (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2022 in the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (Oscar Shorts, digital)
It would be nice if Jay Rosenblatt's "When We Were Bullies" also tried to extract something universal from its specific group of (former) kids, but it instead winds up embracing its navel-gazing to the point of near-insufferability. There's an interesting idea or two at the center, but the main takeaway often seems to be that these Boomers really need to get over themselves.
Rosenblatt opens by mentioning that he has used the incident that inspired the film, a reaction to a stern teacher that turned into a pile-on against an introverted student, in a previous short ("The Smell of Burning Ants"), but that it still stuck with him 50 years later, and apparently did so for other classmates as well. So he begins a quest to speak to them, work out what it all means, and eventually speak to his fifth-grade teacher who is still alive and once again living in New York City.
There are questions to be answered here, about how these kids were primed to turn on "Dick" (as the fourth "Richard" in his class, he got the worst nickname) and how it apparently haunts them later, but it's a narcissistic sort of self-examination, rather than a systemic interrogation, with a great deal of talk about how making this film was something Rosenblatt had to do and asides of how he was going through something awful at the time, and little grappling with how Dick apparently decided he'd finished with this thing twenty-odd years ago. There's some cut-out animation and public-domain clips to cover the narration and phone interviews. Ultimately, though, Rosenblatt never seems to reach any conclusion beyond "I still feel bad and don't like it", and makes little case for this mattering beyond PS 194.
"Three Songs for Benazir"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2022 in the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (Oscar Shorts, digital)
For Elizabeth & Gulistan Mirzaei's "Three Songs for Benazir", the history that has outpaced it is not (just) Covid, but the American retreat from Afghanistan and fall of the country to the Taliban. In a movie that already features one cut to how things changed while the filmmakers were away, it's hard not to wonder what the next jump would reveal, although that hardly makes this film feel incomplete.
Indeed, the Mirzaeis seem less interested in the way the world around young couple Shaista & Benazir is changing and how the present moment is frustrating. They're a delightful pair - Shaista is clearly besotted with his wife and the way she laughs at the songs he improvises for her shows that the feeling is reciprocated (as an aside, Pashto as a language seems impressively able to turn simple statements into beautiful music). But they're in a refugee camp, and options are limited: Shiasta has a third-grade education and hates making bricks, so the army seems to be the best way out, but joining is not so simple.
There is tremendous power in the setting - the clay buildings of the camp seem simultaneously temporary and ancient, a place likely meant to be transient but becoming a community of its own as the endless war continues. The surveillance balloon above them has an unnervingly bomb-like shape. It's a specific-seeming mire, but even if one doesn't really know what a regular life is for a young Afghan couple, it's easy to grasp this pair wanting and trying to live one despite everything. That's why "Three Songs" becomes an impressive example of what film can do, sketching out what's necessary to create empathy in a short burst.
"Lead Me Home"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2022 in the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (Oscar Shorts, digital)
Directors Pedro Kos & Jon Shenk don't have solutions to offer to the situation outlined in the opening text of "Lead Me Home" - that Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle have all declared states of emergency related to homelessness in recent years - but if they've got rage, it's been buried under the same weight one sees affecting its subjects, whether they are the ones living rough or trying to help that group survive. There may be plenty of reason for anger, but it can't interfere with the work.
Though the unhoused people in the movie do speak their names and occasionally give their backstories, Kos & Shenk are careful with their narratives - the purpose here isn't to show how the system can be navigated, to celebrate success stories or highlight how any specific situation can put a person on the streets. Kos (credited as editor as well as director) and his team make sure that the viewer can follow these people but tend to only show middles of stories, giving a sense of how there's no single story but also showing the commonality of the experience. Homelessness makes people uncomfortable enough that they will often try to find a justification or (like the NIMBYs shown at a city council meeting toward the end) a reason not to engage, and the filmmakers do their best to make the situation clear without providing folks that escape route.
If Kos is in charge of framing in that way, cinematographer Shenk is the one who gives scale. He's fond of the shot that starts from a prosperous-looking neighborhood and pans slightly to show not just one, but several shelters huddled together. It repeats often enough to become a bit played out by a certain point, but it's a good illustration. The scale of these encampments seems to grow larger as the film goes on, and the film is impressively disciplined with how it uses scale: Tight, staring-into-a-camera framing as people tell their stories; something a little more broad as the unhoused go about their days and others try to help, and broad widescreen shots that show that this isn't just a couple of people here and there, but a large-scale problem. Without narration or talking heads, they make the clear point that the size of the problem as a whole is much larger than the people trying to fight it can handle, and the causes are too individual for a one-size-fits-all solution. As a result, the film can't help be a bit despairing, but also doesn't quite give into pessimism - these folks have to keep trying, after all.
"The Queen of Basketball"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2022 in the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater (Oscar Shorts, digital)
After four shorts like that, the people packaging the nominees must be extremely grateful to have Ben Proudfoot's "The Queen of Basketball" to end on. It's a upbeat movie whose subject is the sort producers must dream about - accomplished, charismatic, and apparently just waiting 40 years to tell her story.
Luisa Harris's story is pretty straightforward - born in Mississippi in 1955, she grew to 6'2" in high school and was the potential superstar women's basketball needed when Title IX opened the doors for more women in college sports, the only Black woman on her school's team. She was on Team USA when women's basketball was added to the Olympics in 1976, was drafted by the NBA's New Orleans Jazz, and then… Well, there was no WNBA back then. What's important is not so much the recitation of these facts but seeing how Harris carries this with her. She knows just how good she was, what she owes to her coaches, and what her place in history is, and she relates it in a way that suggests she remembers the joy of those days but isn't stuck there. Throw in enough quick bits of material backing up her words, and Proudfoot can build a nice rapport between her and the viewer.
He's conscientious with what he does and doesn't include, too - it's eventually clear that Harris is in a wheelchair now, but as this fact likely has little relevance to the story he's telling, he doesn't make a thread out of it, or dig too deeply into Harris not trying out for the Jazz, as the change in Harris's tone indicates that she maybe wonders what-if a little more than she says. The basketball footage is revealing; one can see that Harris was in fact very good while also showing that the women in today's WNBA are clearly next-level without diminishing her importance as a pioneer.
It's interesting to look at "Audible" and "Queen" as bookends to the presentation; much as the latter could easily be dismissed as a feel-good puff piece, it's got its eye on a message it communicates smoothly, while the former can't quite make its scattered nature a virtue. If I had a vote, I'd probably give it to "Three Songs" or "Lead Me Home", though I'm loath to handicap what a group that collectively decided "Bullies" was one of the year's five best in this category will say.
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