IFFBoston 2021.09-11: First Date, Luzzo, Last Night in Rozzie, Weed & Wine, The Gig Is Up, and How It Ends

One of the useful things about the way IFFBoston ran this festival online is that, when either my second vaccine shot on Friday (14 May 2021) or just being out and about all had me pretty wiped out at the end of the day, I could basically just push the rest of the festival off a day, since they were giving every movie a 48-hour window as opposed to having a hard wall at the end.

I'm guessing Nancy, Brian, and all won't let me do that when I have trouble getting to Brookline from Burlington next year, though.

Anyway, as you can tell by looking at the sidebar, I've kind of fallen off updating this, in part because of that bump and in part because of other stuff, so I'm going to just quickly catch up before diving head-first into another festival. Some of these deserve a little more than I can give them here, but it's been a few months, and I have stuff falling out the back of my brain. The good news, I guess, is that some are now actually easy enough to see on demand, if they catch your interest.

First Date

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston, AgileTicketing via Roku)

I'm trying to remember if there were many movies like First Date when I was the age of the protagonists; teen movies seemed to range from John Hughes to Savage Steve Holland without really branching out much further into other genres than The Karate Kid or The Last Starfighter (although, I suppose, it's worth considering why that is thought of as a teen movie but Back to the Future isn't so much). This one's an odd duck, veering hard into crime and not really giving the kids time to be kids.

Which is a bit of a bummer, because it's very easy to like Tyson Brown's nerdy Mike and Shelby Duclos's athletic Kelsey, both of whom it turns out like retro tech, with the actors sincere enough to make it feel like their eccentricity rather than the directors trying to write today's teenagers with their own experience, even if a lot of the film feels like a script they've had a while but which the filmmakers never really updated to take cell phones into account. The stars capture different sorts of appealing goodness, with Mike pained by how doing the right thing always seems to hurt and Kelsey frustrated but clear about who should get cut slack.

They often get overwhelmed by the small-time crooks that they run into because Mike was convinced to buy a shady car from shady folks; bad people elevating recognizable foibles to the level of violence is just louder and more varied than awkward people stumbling into crime and violence. Still, it will be interesting to see what happens when some studio decides to give filmmakers Manuel Crosby & Darren Knapp a little money. Their movie's got some flaws, but they don't let anything become generic, and they know how to get things done when there's shooting and chases. Maybe they won't jump straight to Spider-Man like Jon Watts did after Cop Car, but it should be fun to see what they do with a bit more in the way of resources.

Luzzu

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston, AgileTicketing via Roku)

(Adds "Malta" visa to cinematic passport)

Luzzu is a great example of a category of movie seemingly designed to make me squirm and maybe stop the stream - the Guy Who Refuses To Make Things Easier For Himself - in large part because it's so close to things I really like: There's a chance to get into fascinating, almost-documentary detail about both a vanishing way of life and the mechanics by which it's vanishing, and then this abrasive, prideful jerk is one's path into it.

But, then, a person has got to be kind of prideful to still be trying to fish in a traditional small boat off the shores of Malta, where there's now giant corporations on one side and EU regulations on the other, and even the enterprising have a hard time finding the right way to support themselves via less legitimate means. The fisherman in question, Jesmark (Jesmark Scicluna), isn't that complex, but he gains a bit of sympathy as he feels the walls closing in, and writer/director Alex Camilleri doesn't go the easy route of making him sympathetic by putting him up against more noxious folks. The film winds up turning on a scene with Uday McLean, whose own eponymous character is a migrant originally from Syria or someplace like that, where it becomes clear that what it means to be a seaman and fisherman has fundamentally changed, and Jesmark just may not be able to change with it.

Camelleri doesn't over-romanticize the dying of a way of life, and the conclusion isn't defiant in the way many similar movies are; Jesmark's got to be practical because he's in a world that's got to be practical on a larger scale. It's not cathartic, but the world's not really designed for that.

Last Night in Rozzie

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston, AgileTicketing via Roku)

Ah, another one of my less-than-favorite movie plots, the one built entirely out of people making unreasonable requests and just not telling people the truth. It is at least suitably short, so the filmmakers don't have to keep making flimsier excuses for two hours. Still, it's not hard to feel that this capable cast and set of characters with an interesting history could have had another story built around them, one not so built around deception. After all, this isn't really a movie about people who don't understand each other; they know each other all too well and just don't have a lot of time.

Still, the movie gets some good mileage from its working-class neighborhoods and mostly-unaffected acting. It's the sort of movie that feels like it's found the right locations rather than having to decorate them, with the cast picking up the right vibes right away. The exception, maybe, is the Jeremy Sisto as the dying friend who sets everything in motion; he seems to be playing more to the balconies and his sweary lines are boring and trite in a way that feels like screenwriters trying to write working-class people even though it's probably no less authentic than the rest. Sisto also seems notably older than Neil Brown Jr. and Nicky Whelan, the other actors whose characters are supposed to be the same age, even figuring for a hard life, but he's apparently not that far off.

Weed & Wine

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston, AgileTicketing via Roku)

I wonder if director Rebecca Richman Cohen ever considered making Weed & Wine into two separate docs, because as much as there are thematic parallels to the Thibon family growing wine in france and the Jodreys navigating the transition to marijuana being a legal crop in California, they don't intersect, and there's probably enough material for each to be their own movie. And yet, the parallels are fascinating, as the friction between generations and the changing world make for intriguing drama.

There's mystery to both businesses, with weed previously being underground that the former-outlaw growers don't quite know how to react to legitimate regulation (especially since the state still kind of wants to treat them as criminals), while the vintners sell intangibles and romance but are highly precise and procedural in their methods. And that's on top of how climate change is making their long-held assumptions obsolete.

Cohen's found a couple of good groups here, and although she doesn't necessarily have boots on the ground at the moments when fireworks go off, she and editor Eric Phillips-Horst still piece together clear, dramatic storylines and deliver a lot of information in natural fashion. There's the sense that there could have been much more sprawling stories, but she's zeroed in on the figures who will get the audience the most interested and also bring out the movie's themes. It's solid storytelling and exposition that these sorts of docs don't always feature.

The Gig Is Up

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston, AgileTicketing via Roku)

Compared to Weed & Wine, The Gig Is Up often seems to be preaching to the converted, offering up multiple threads that don't so much reinforce each other as repeat. The main idea, that mobile-app based services like Uber and DoorDash and the like are based on circumventing labor law, is something that's fairly simple to grasp once it's been explained, and while a dozen examples gives an idea of how widespread the practice is, relatively few of the new tales added are truly new perspectives.

Which is perhaps why the thread featuring Jason Edwards in Miami sticks out: Not only is he rural and more visibly close to the brink of disaster than the rest, his "turk work" (named af the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing machine with a hidden man inside) is the seeming opposite of the physical last-mile work the rest are doing - and on top of that, it's clear that much of what success he's having comes from gaming the system, finding easy but high-paying bits of work.

It's a piece that could easily be overlooked, but shows how the whole system is a house of cards. I just suspect that most of the folks watching this already know that, even if that particular detail isn't so familiar.

How It Ends

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston, AgileTicketing via Roku)

How It Ends isn't really a good movie, but that's kind of not the point; it's a bunch of people making a movie during the pandemic because making movies is what they do, and they'd be climbing the walls otherwise. You can see these folks kind of having fun even when they're playing sad characters, just enjoying their work to the point where they'd probably be okay if they couldn't find a way to release it, because the process was important.

Which is good, because as talented as everyone involved is, it's more than a bit arch, enough that it feels a need to come out and reference "a hat on a hat" early on, since Liza (co-writer/director Zoe Lister-Jones) is not only dodging invitations to end of the world parties but hanging around with an incarnation of her younger self (Cailee Spaeny); such folks have apparently been appearing more frequently with the impending cataclysm. She wanders around, meeting up with various neighbors, friends, and family who keep a respectful social distance throughout even though they are, by and large, outdoors. These bits aren't quite outstanding in either individual or cumulative effect, but there's also none which really stop the movie dead, which counts for something. That would be the line between this movie being a fun time-filler that is worth sharing and something obnoxiously self-indulgent, and while it comes close, it never quite crosses over.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 4 June 2021 - 10 June 2021

Took my mask off in a movie theater the other day, which felt nice, although it still feels sort of impolite to do so until the lights are down. The staff still has to, and it would be rude to lord it over them, you know?

• Landmark Theatres Kendall Square is back to being closed Monday and Tuesday after the holiday weekend with the big openers, but the new release, Undine, is one I remember being sort of neat from when it played the IFFBoston Fall Focus online last November. It's a thriller with Paula Beer as a historian who meets a nice diver but is still dangerously obsessed with her previous boyfriend. A giant catfish is involved.
• At the multiplexes, it's sequel time, with The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It offering another case from the files of paranormal investigators Ed & Lorraine Warren, this one a murder case where people claim demonic possession was involved. It's at The Capitol, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), Fenway, South Bay (including Imax), Assembly Row (including Imax), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill, as well as on HBOmax.
  
  For the younger set, there's Spirit Untamed, which is apparently an adaptation of the CGI sequel TV series to Dreamworks's traditionally-animated girl-and-her-horse movie from almost twenty years ago. It plays The Capitol (which also opens Dream Horse for an obvious double feature), Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  The F9 count-up is up to Fast & Furious 6 on Friday night at Boston Common (also Monday), Fenway (for reward program members), and Arsenal Yards. Boston Common, Fenwayk, and South Bay have Raiders of the Lost Ark shows for $5 (mostly matinees); Bridesmaids has 10th anniversary shows at Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards on Sunday/Wednesday/Thursday.
• Top-grossing Vietnamese film Bo Gia (Dad, I'm Sorry) continues in South Bay; top-grossing Japanese film Demon Slayer continues at Boston Common and Assembly Row.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre has one last weekend of Big Screen Classics, with In the Mood for Love and Blue Velvet on Friday, Batman '89 and Prince: Sign o' the Times (on 35mm) on Saturday, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Y tu mamá también on Sunday, and a finale with Akira on Monday. As of Thursday, they're back to full capacity and masks-optional with In the Heights, also getting early-for-Thursday shows at the Kendall, South Bay, Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  The Virtual Coolidge picks up Ahead of the Curve, a documentary about Franco Stevens and the lesbian-focused magazine she founded with money from a good run betting on horses. It joins Us Kids, Duty Free, About Endlessness, and In Silico.
• Nature is healing - The West Newton Cinema is still only open Friday to Sunday, but they give a full screen to Shiva Baby even after it's closed elsewhere, because they serve the local Jewish community well. It joins Cruella, Together Together, Raya and the Last Dragon, Nomadland, Tom & Jerry, and Godzilla vs Kong.
• The Belmont World Film virtual World Refugee Month program has Antigone through Monday, with a discussion that evening. The entry that starts Tuesday has local interest, as The Jump tells the story of a Lithuanian sailor who literally lept from a Soviet vessel to an American one near Martha's Vineyard in 1970, only to be returned and sent to Siberia. It will have a discussion including director Giedre Zickyte on Monday the 14th.
• ArtsEmerson and The Boston Asian-American Film Festival partner to return Suk Suk (Twilight's Kiss) to local virtual screens starting Wednesday. It's a Hong Kong Film Award-winning story of two closeted gay seniors who meet and ponder a future together, and includes a pre-recorded Q&A with director Raymond Yeung.
• I could have sworn The Brattle Theatre had a new virtual presentation this weekend, but apparently not, paring their offerings down to Two Lottery Tickets, The Paper Tigers, RK/RKAY, Punk the Capital, and The Story of a Three Day Pass.
• Construction is still going on at The Somerville Theatre, and since I may have to go to Fresh Pond to hit Staples over the weekend, I may as well scope that out to see if Apple Cinemas is still in business.
• Theater rentals are available at the Coolidge, the Brattle, Kendall Square, West Newton, the Capitol, The Lexington Venue, and many of the multiplexes. The Coolidge has slots available to reserve the screening room and the GoldScreen online through the end of June, including private shows of the films they have playing in the larger screens.

I'm shocked by how little I remember of Undine, so I may catch back up with that, as well as catch Demon Hunter before it leaves. Maybe Raiders, because when you can watch that on the big screen, you do it.

 

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 28 May 2021 - 3 June 2021

Memorial Day weekend is looking like the first big movie weekend in 15 months, with capacities expanding, the Capitol reopening with two new blockbusters and, unless I miss something, just one new virtual offering.

It's kind of a weird in-between situation, though - demand for the new releases looks much higher than increased capacity, so they wipe everything out, which means if you've got a long rainy weekend, your choices are kind of limited.

• The big releases this week have been waiting to come out for a while. Cruella was originally planned for last Christmas, and features Emma Stone as the title character, before she was the villain in 101 Dalmatians, although the film is set in the mid-1970s, a decade or so after the original animated version came out, which is weird. Then again, it's a movie that apparently casts a woman who wanted to kill dozens of puppies to make a coat as an antihero. It's got Emma Thompson as the apparent alpha villain, though, and she looks delightfully nasty. It plays The Capitol, The West Newton Cinema, Landmark Theatres Kendall Square, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, Chestnut Hill, and Disney+ (if you shell out extra).
  
  The other big opening is A Quiet Place Part II, which picks up right where the first left off - what remains of the family having a way to fight the sound-sensitive aliens but waking into what may be a "people who have lost everything are more dangerous than creature-feature monsters" situation. It's been pushed back a full year by now, and opens at The Capitol, the Kendall, Boston Common (including Imax), Fenway, South Bay (including Imax & Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax & Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  The F9 count-up is up to Fast Five on Friday night at Boston Common (also Monday), Fenway (for reward program members), and Arsenal Yards. The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 have $5 shows at Assembly Row from Monday to (at least) Wednesday, in anticipation of its third episode.
• Vietnamese film Bo Gia (Dad, I'm Sorry) opens in South Bay; directed by star Thanh Tran, it's a comedy about a former biker living among a large family in Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon. It is apparently the biggest home-grown hit to come out of Vietnam and gets multiple screens over the weekend. Demon Slayer continues subtitled at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre is ditching reserved seating as capacities open up on Saturday, which means no sitting in some rear corner, seeing your favorite seat empty with nobody around it for a five-seat radius again (although maybe that was just me)! Anyway, that means that while Blade Runner and 2001 (on 35m) are sold out on Friday, there are seats to be had for 2001 and Aliens on Saturday; Akira and 2001 on Sunday; 2001 and Blade Runner on Monday; as well as The Grand Budapest Hotel and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown with "The Human Voice" on Thursday. Those are all in the main room, with the other three are still available for rental via the Private Movie Party link.
  
  The Virtual Coolidge is around for at least another week with Us Kids, Duty Free, About Endlessness, and In Silico available.
• Belmont World Film begins their virtual World Refugee Month program on Tuesday with Antigone, which transplants the Greek classic to a family of Algerian immigrants in Montreal. As with the spring program, films we be available for a week, with a live online discussion on the finale night (Monday the 7th).
• The Brattle Theatre re-opens in July and has their eye on that, with nothing new opening in the Brattlite virtual theater and take-out concessions off the menu, though Two Lottery Tickets, The Paper Tigers, RK/RKAY, Punk the Capital, The Story of a Three Day Pass, The County, and Work Songs continue to be available.
• The Somerville Theatre is not yet open, and it looks like I'm going to have to do a walk-by to see what the deal is at Fresh Pond.
• Theater rentals are available at the Coolidge, the Brattle, Kendall Square, West Newton, the Capitol, The Lexington Venue, and many of the multiplexes. The Coolidge has slots available to reserve Moviehouse II, the screening room, and the GoldScreen online through the end of June, with "Premium Programming" including Wolfwalkers, Promising Young Woman, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Father, Mank, Judas and the Black Messiah, Nomadland, Minari, Sound of Metal, and In the Mood for Love available, although all but the last are slated to no longer be available after Monday.

Looking forward to A Quiet Place II, morbidly curious about Cruella, and intimidated by all the various sorts of backlog staring me in the face.

Next Week in [Virtual] Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 14 May 2021 - 20 May 2021

Whoa - the Coolidge is putting in-person shows on their front page of their website and the virtual room off to the side. Makes sense, but, wow, I've gotten so used to the other lineup over the past year that this is going to take some re-acclimatization.

• Under normal circumstances, they would have hosted the last couple days of Independent Film Festival Boston a couple weeks ago, but IFFBoston is going to be virtual until the end on Sunday. They've backloaded the heck out of the schedule, to the point where I was grateful they added a couple extra days to Strawberry Mansion to give people some extra time to watch it. My plans for the weekend are First Date, Luzzu, and Sabaya for Friday; Last Night in Rozzie and Weed & Wine on Saturday; plus The Gig Is Up and closing night film How It Ends on Sunday, though I may use as much of the 48 hours each movie gives you as I can, even into Monday if necessary.
• As mentioned, The Coolidge Corner Theatre is back open for customers this weekend, although most of the shows have sold out. Friday has Enter the Dragon for the matinee (tickets still available!), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the evening; Top Hat and The Grand Budapest Hotel on Saturday; Frances Ha and "The Human Voice" & Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown on Sunday; Do The Right Thing on Monday, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Singin' in the Rain on Thursday. Next thing with tickets available is 2001: A Space Odyssey on 35mm come Memorial Day. That's all on Moviehouse I; the other three are still available for rental, although the Private Movie Party link is now a little harder to find, how in the "Visit" menu.
  
  Over at The Virtual Coolidge, documentary Us Kids opens, telling the story of the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who basically refused to be mealy-mouthed after a school shooting. It joins Duty Free, About Endlessness, In Silico, and the three Oscar Nominated Shorts programs (Animated, Live-Action, and Documentary, also available virtually from Landmark). And it looks like City Hall has its last day on Friday - a remarkable nearly seven-month run for a four hour documentary on city government.
• The Brattle Theatre is still pretty much virtual through the end of the month, and has a pretty strong influx this week. I can vouch for The Paper Tigers, a fun action-comedy about three former martial arts prodigies who reunite after their teacher's funeral. Another fun-looking and self-referential movie, RK/RKAY, features Rajat Kapoor as something close to himself, an independent actor/director whose latest part has escaped from the editing room. Both the Brattle and the distributor will be donating part of the ticket price to Covid relief programs in India.
  
  They also pick up Punk the Capital, a documentary about the DC punk scene in the 1970s, and jumps back even further for a new restoration of The Story of a Three Day Pass, Melvin Van Peebles's first feature, made in France from his own French-language novel. They join The County, Work Songs, Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts, Hope, and This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection in the Brattlite virtual room. Snacks and merch are also available for order and pick-up over the weekend.
• ArtsEmerson and The Boston Asian-American Film Festival (among others) team for another "Shared Stories" program starting on Wednesday, with Adele Pham's Nailed It looking at Vietnamese nail salons, which had an outsize effect on the beauty business in America. For the first 24 hours, there's also Spanish-language short "Abuela's Luck"
• The Regent Theatre still has Long Live Rock: Celebrate the Chaos available to stream.
• Landmark Theatres Kendall Square is still closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, but opens The Killing of Two Lovers, centered around a man who wants to keep his family together but is having a very hard time keeping himself together as his wife starts a new relationship. They're also still picking up the occasional Netflix original before they premiere, with Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead featuring Dave Bautista putting together a crew to steal $200M from a casino in zombie-infested Las Vegas before the government levels the whole city. There's also a one-night-only show of Lindemann: Live in Moscow, a concert film shot in March 2020, maybe the last big event before everything closed down.
• The big in-person opening of the week is Spiral: From the Book of Saw, a spinoff of the gruesome horror series with a story from star Chris Rock that I gather is not so tightly connected to the series's convoluted continuity, plus Samuel L. Jackson as his father and mentor. It's at Boston Common (including Imax), Fenway, South Bay (including Imax), Assembly Row (including Imax), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Those Who Wish Me Dead stars Angelina Jolie as a firefighter who comes across a kid on the run from people who will apparently start a forest fire to cover their tracks (a lot of that going around). Taylor Sheridan directs, and the film plays Kendall Square, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill. Universal also takes Timur Bekmambetov's Profile off the shelf; it's a "screen-life" film about a reporter infiltrating a Da'esh-affiliated group online told through what's on her laptop. It gets screens at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, and Assembly Row.
  
  There's also cute-looking "American girl in Ireland" movie Finding You, where a student studying abroad surprisingly befriended by a movie star shooting nearby. That's at Boston Common, South Bay, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Top Gun gets a re-release on the Dolby Cinema screens at Boston Common, South Bay, and Assembly Row. Scott Pilgrim Versus The World sticks around Boston Common, Assembly Row and Arsenal (Saturday only). The F9 count-up has reached Tokyo Drift on Friday night at Boston Common, Fenway (for reward program members), and Arsenal Yards. Arsenal Yards also has 25th Anniversary screenings of the De Palma Mission: Impossible on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday.
• Arsenal Yards is apparently the current home for Indian film in the Boston area, with Hindu-language action flick Radhe - Your Most Wanted Bhai featuring Salman Khan as an ACP cop hunting down a crimelord.
  
  Chinese films My Love and Cliff Walkers are still at Boston Common; Demon Slayer continues subtitled at the Kendall (including dubbed shows), Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards (including dubbed shows), and Chestnut Hill; it's now apparently Japan's highest-grossing film ever.
• The West Newton Cinema is on a relatively short schedule this weekend, only open Saturday and Sunday with Together Together, Raya and the Last Dragon, Tom & Jerry, and Nomadland; they're also available for private rentals.
• The Somerville Theatre isn't yet ready to open (but has construction going on!), but sister cinema The Capitol has their ice cream shop and concession stand open.
• Theater rentals are available at the Coolidge, the Brattle, Kendall Square, West Newton, the Capitol, The Lexington Venue, and the AMC/Majestic/Showcase multiplexes. The Coolidge has extended the slots available to reserve online through the end of May with early and late evening chances to rent Moviehouse II, the screening room, and the GoldScreen, and "Premium Programming" including Wolfwalkers, Promising Young Woman, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Father, Mank, Judas and the Black Messiah, Nomadland, Minari, In the Mood for Love, and Sound of Metal; the AMC app lists some "sold out" showtimes that are probably just meant to show the movies are available as part of rentals. The independent theaters also have other fund-raising offers worth checking out, and Apple Fresh Pond has plans to re-open in May.

I'm catching Enter the Dragon at the Coolidge after my second shot on Friday, taking up the last few days of IFFBoston, then may go for Army of the Dead, Wrath of Man, and some of the big box of discs that recently arrived from Hong Kong afterward.

IFFBoston 2021.06: The Oxy Kingpins

As much as I kind of knew that the guy who I hear opening every all-employee "Town Hall" call at work was going to show up in this movie, it's still awfully dispiriting when your employer's parent company appears prominently in a movie about how there was a pretty darn seamless pipeline between major pharmaceutical distributors, street drug dealers, and addicts that created a crisis that has killed many, with only the latter two groups actually facing consequences for their action. I didn't really choose to work for them affirmatively - I joined a small-ish start up looking to save lives by preventing chemotherapy drug interactions and overdoses, and then somehow a few years and two acquisitions later, that startup is a division of a business unit of a Fortune 10 company. I don't hate the vacation policy, but being even vaguely associated with this is depressing.

Anyway, it's a weird feeling to get to the end of a documentary still being in favor with corporations being hit with fines that are as proportionately ruinous as any individual would face but also hoping that when they make cuts to offset them, they'll ignore the good people in the chemotherapy drug reporting department.

End disclaimer, begin review, watch the movie.

The Oxy Kingpins

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)

Though many people are touched directly enough by what is often called "the opioid crisis" or "the opioid epidemic" for it not to be abstract, some are lucky enough for it to not be directly affected and others, quite naturally, are concerned enough about the immediate ill effects that they don't tend to think about the other end of the supply chain. The Oxy Kingpins does a fair job of remedying that; it may not have a proper ending, but the filmmakers do yeoman's work explaining how so many pills got into the wrong hands, and maybe what can be done about it.

The film starts provocatively, as a young man without either face or voice disguised says that he enjoyed being a drug dealer, and how oxycontin changed the game: A powerful painkiller that might as well be heroin, easy to transport, and insanely addictive, the only problem was getting enough, and while some people were selling unused pills from a prescription or stealing from pharmacies, parts of Florida were creating a cottage industry of "pain management clinics", basically doctors writing bogus scrips which could be filled at any drug store. He's not just sharing this information with the filmmakers, but with attorney Mike Papantonio, whose firm handles massive trials and is putting together a series of class-action lawsuits against the major drug distributors for how their push to over-prescribe has created addicts and their lax enforcement has allowed criminal networks to thrive.

In many ways, The Oxy Kingpins is most notable for what it's not: Directors Nick August-Perna and Brendan Fitzgerald spend almost no time on poverty porn or watching addicts suffer, with the main figure chosen to represent that side of the story has more or less come out the other end, rebuilding her life and not looking back, although it's clear that the spinal surgery that led to her painkiller habit still affects her today. At times, the filmmakers seem to be deliberately putting those stories to the side - even Papantonio emphasizes that he is not representing individuals, but the governments that have had to increase their budgets due to the suppliers' criminal negligence - because while those stories hit the audience hard on a gut level, that emotional response can be a distraction from what they're trying to get across.

And it's kind of necessary, because while what Alex-the-former-dealer and his more-anonymous colleagues talk about is exciting, Papantino's side of the story is kind of dry. Both are charismatic enough in their way, but Alex's stories are things you can get caught up in even as you blanch at the sheer amorality of it, even if you obviously much rather have someone like Mike Papantino on your side in a courtroom where the judge will brook no nonsense and grandstanding. It's a useful contrast, especially when you look at the two types of operations that this situation fundamentally entwines: The obvious relatively low-level criminals that traditional law enforcement is built to deal with, and the folks who are so rich and able to hire clever people as to be outside their reach.

Whichever part of the chain that they're dealing with, the filmmakers are adept at getting their information out clearly, not getting too bogged down in specific procedural details but giving the viewer the sort of specific facts and scenes that can stick in their heads. A big part of making a movie like this work is telling the sort of story that someone else might retell later, so that even if it doesn't give the movie a bigger audience, the facts get out there. This film lays the situation out clearly in a way that goes down pretty easy, and that is more or less the goal.

The one caveat is that it ends on a screen saying the trial in Nevada is set for April 2021, and while that does make one wonder why the filmmakers couldn't have waited for an actual ending. Of course, the goal here is to explain, not necessarily tell a story, and that ending could have forced a change in focus on what is considered important. Without it, The Oxy Kingpins does the job its makers set out to do - no more, but certainly no less.

Also at eFilmCritic

IFFBoston 2021.05: The Dry

I think America was roughly fifteen minutes into the pandemic before people started talking about not wanting to see masks, isolation, distancing, etc. reflected in entertainment, either as a way to pin a date down or as a metaphor, and it's been kind of odd to watch it play out on television as the likes of 911 and Law & Order try to feel current but also watchable afterward, and it doesn't always work. Australia has by and large dodged that bullet - not as completely as New Zealand, but orders of magnitude better than it's done in the USA pre-vaccination - but I wonder whether the heat waves would be seen the same way.

At any rate, this movie is all sort of my thing and should start hitting theaters next Friday, which means we'll have three consecutive weekends of movies where wildfires or the threat thereof, are a major part of the danger - The Water Man last weekend, Those Who Wish Me Dead next, and then this the week after. It's a weird coincidence, especially considering how the pandemic has shuffled release dates over the past year and into the future, but a thoroughly relevant one as both California and Australia have had some horrific fire seasons recently, and for all we know they won't be slowing down any time soon. Given where the movie industry is, one wonders if it's just going to be a more omnipresent thing that works its way into more of our entertainment.

(Fills in Amazon link that none of you are going to click, sees Jane Harper has written a second Aaron Falk novel, and hopes like heck that Eric Bana is up for another go.)

The Dry

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)

Early on in The Dry, there's a subtitle specifying that it's been 324 days since the last rain in the town of Kiewarra, and I wonder whether that was the inspiration for the story or just something the filmmakers couldn't avoid, given how bad the drought and heat waves have been in Australia in recent years. Either way, it's a way to add some color to a somewhat dour mystery.

Our sleuth is Aaron Falk (Eric Bana), a member of Australia's Federal Police Force who has recently broken a major financial case. He probably had no real intention of ever returning to the farming community where he lived as a boy - even if it is nice to see old friend Gretchen (Genevieve O'Reilly) again - and it would be completely inappropriate from him to investigate the murder-suicide old friend Luke Hadler was apparently involved in. But for as much as Luke's mother Barb (Julia Blake) thinks that maybe he can find something in the farm's books that would exonerate her son, his father Gerry (Bruce Spence) has gnawing doubts, as he's fairly sure that Luke didn't tell the whole truth when his girlfriend Ellie (BeBe Bettencourt) drowned twenty years ago. Most in town are more liable to look at Aaron where that incident is concerned, but local deputy Greg Raco (Keir O'Donnell) wasn't there then and doesn't particularly mind Aaron giving everything a second look.

Director and co-writer Robert Connolly have a neat little nested-mystery setup here, built in such a way that there's a good story to be had even if the most obvious connection between them - and thus the default explanation for both incidents - is true. It's compelling enough that even as Raco points out a crucial bit of evidence that would seem to cast doubt on Luke as the killer and enough characters are introduced in the present to make the viewer look closer, the impulse is still there to look at it more as an ensemble drama about how one maybe doesn't know anyone, or how secrets everyone knows can fester in a small town. It's a clever structure, full of red herrings which nevertheless seem essential even when revealed as such; it gives both the problem-solving and emotional halves of the brain something to do without making the other unimportant or over-complicated.

The drought also makes the difference between the two timelines striking, even if I'm not completely certain that Luke's body is found in the dried-up river where Ellie drowned (the implication is delicious, though). Kiewarra circa 1991 is filled with greens and blues, right up until Ellie's death, when the light shifts and everything gets darker. The present is all bleached sand and dried out, leafless trees; even the opening where the Hadler farmhouse briefly seems like it's in the middle of a haven of green is a fake-out before a grisly crime scene. There's a different feel to the relative emptiness of the town in the two periods, an undercurrent of how various factors from climate change to corrupt development are hurting towns like this.

Pieces are kept mysterious enough that Falk can easily seem a cipher, but Eric Bana does good work in giving him a sort of insider-outsider nervousness that reads a lot of ways - a kind of abrasive confidence in his early scenes with Raco that also says he knows he shouldn't be there, the non-specific guilt that can sometimes be pinpointed, and the right bit of happiness to push all that halfway aside when Gretchen greets him warmly. Genevieve O'Reilly plays the opposite sides of those scenes nicely, and puts a little bit more of a twist into the scenes when it looks like she might be a suspect. The crew of young actors playing their younger selves maybe doesn't entirely look like them, but Joe Klocek certainly catches the sort of earnest vibe that could believably be beaten down into what we see out of Bana, and Sam Corlett establishes enough about Luke that one can extrapolate some but not entirely to the present. BeBe Bettencourt is the standout in that group, though, carrying the whole load for Ellie and making her feel important enough that her death would blow this hole in the community. The rest of the cast is terrifically solid in parts that all need to be immediately understood but could potentially hold secrets, and Keir O'Donnell is sneaky-impressive as the cop who is not on Falk's level but also quite respectable. There's a fun scene when he reacts to the phrase "shooting rabbits" where the audience can feel him catching up, and the shift can make a viewer lick their lips.

There's a nifty climax as well, a tense confrontation that nevertheless feels like something new and doesn't shift the feel of what has been a nice, slow simmer for a couple of hours. Connolly and company deliver a mystery that's more than just a puzzle and a drama that benefits from the crime story's focus.

Also at eFilmCritic

IFFBoston 2021.04: I Was a Simple Man and Who We Are

Let's mostly go with release date rather than watch date , with this getting split up because I was doing all the Sunday crosswords and making pizza, so I got to I Was a Simple Man relatively late in the evening, too late to be up for a second movie (although I'd happily be up until almost 2am the next night).

Not a whole lot to say here. Both were pretty good. And it's a day late, but I think I heard construction as I walked past the Somerville Theatre on the way back from the camera shop on Saturday, so I'm guessing there will be an at least somewhat upgraded concession stand when they re-open.

I Was a Simple Man

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)

Point a camera in any random direction in Hawaii, and odds are that you're going to get a great-looking movie, and though that is not entirely the direction Christopher Makoto Yogi takes with I Was a Simple Man, it is a major part of what makes the film work. Not so much the scenery, but the star, who often seems to embody his character to the point where everything more than taking him in is (entirely welcome) elaboration on a theme.

Steve Iwamoto was likely cast for the vibe he gives off; his short list of screen credits paired with his age make one wonder if maybe he's taken up a new hobby in his retirement. He plays Masao Matsuyoshi, who may have been a troublemaker once but who is dying now, an unspecified cancer advancing quickly. It's a part that requires a certain amount of quiet presence early and quiet but pained absence later, as both the pain medication and his natural tendency to look back are going to make him less responsive to whichever family member is looking after him.

There will be several - son Mark (Nelson Lee), who is spiritual; daughter Kati (Chanel Akiko HIrai), who is practical; and grandson Gavin (Kanoa Goo), who is still mostly interested in skateboarding. Unseen by any of them is Grace (Constance Wu), his wife, who died on the day Hawaii became a state. Seeing her ghost sends his mind back in time, to when they were first courting - to his parents' disappointment, as she was Chinese - to when he found himself unable to reconnect with his children without her.

That is, perhaps, the greatest tragedy of the film - that Masao effectively died with her, and though the timing of it seems meaningful, Yogi doesn't necessarily dive into the parallel, which is a bit of a shame, because there's something gripping about the central idea of how, despite having apparently never moved from the house where he and Grace lived during their short time together, he died in a different country than the one he considered home. Indeed, by choosing to live there, he arguably gave up his first homeland, as his parents would return to Japan without him. This mostly feels like convenient sign-posting, and it's the empty spaces that matter - assume the "present" is roughly Y2K, and there are 40 years left almost completely empty after Grace's death, and another 20 before without much else. Tim Chiou does a nice job of matching Iwamoto during those flashbacks - beyond resemblance, they both seem to play the same way against Constance Wu - and if Kyle Kosaki and Boonyanudh Jiyarom don't quite seem the same, it still kind of works - Masao grew with Grace, and froze without her.

It thus falls to the cast playing Masao's adult children and grandchildren to sell the effects of his inability to be a proper father, whether a son only heard on the phone from the mainland or the folks puttering around as Iwamoto is part of the scenery. It's nice work from all three, too: Nelson Lee does a nice job in showing how Mark finds himself strained as he tries to act on a connection his beliefs say should be natural, while Chanel Akiko Hirai plays the caretaker who best remembers who her father was before the tragedy (with a nice flashback featuring Alexa Bodden showing how she has strived for that connection even when he pushed her away). For Kanoa Goo's Gavin, Masao is almost an abstraction, a way for him to learn a bit more about life outside Honolulu and how life has a decay and end, which he has not yet had to face.

Yogi and cinematographer Eunsoo Cho wrap it up in a fine looking package, embracing digital brightness and sharpness to enhance the tragedy of Masao's weathered face and slumped posture. They find shadows among the bright colors and make darkness especially oppressive even before the world turns red after the eclipse prefigured in one of Grace's paintings. As the film goes on, Yogi has Masao's memories become more dreamlike, with his dog seemingly able to run into a past where, in memory, Grace tells him the future. His life, as it ends, goes from being a string of events to one thing which is linked to other lives in a way which would mystify the outside world.

The end comes, and everyone must make peace with that, even if they don't entirely forgive. Yogi could perhaps have done more with this, but he gets an awful long way on beautiful country, a lived-in face, and a uniformly impressive supporting cast.

Also at eFilmCritic

Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)

There's a segment early on in Who We Are when Jeffery Robinson tries to have a conversation with a man standing in front of a Confederate statue with a matching flag, and it goes about as well as it can: There's no profanity or violence, but also no visible movement. It's not exactly the film in miniature, but it does make one worry about how much two hours of even the most earnest, well- crafted talk on the subject can be.

It's a talk Robinson has likely given a lot, and the film is built around a lecture on America's history of anti-Black racism given at New York City's Town Hall theater in 2018. That presentation is somewhere between skeleton and meat, as he visits notable sites from just down the street to Selma and Tulsa, both visiting his own history, talking to those keeping the memories of these incidents alive, and occasionally talking to survivors.

This is often grim material that sometimes actively seeks to overwhelm; no matter how much one has learned before now, there's probably some particular incident or document that Robinson mentions that a viewer may not have heard of. Robinson acknowledges that it's a lot, and that even he wasn't fully aware of the full extent of it until relatively recently. There are enough items he could list, even limiting the focus strictly to anti-Black racism as the film does, that it's impressive how well Robinson and directors Emily & Sarah Kunstler pick out pieces that do not always directly follow from the previous segment but form a sort of lattice, the laws and norms which enable intersecting in ever finer ways. The group can't talk about everything, but the parts they do show make one wonder just how anything gets through at times.

That Robinson can be such a charismatic host when having to confront all this both in his own life and as the Deputy Legal Director at the National ACLU is, honestly, beyond my understanding, but I'm grateful for it. He shows a natural ability to connect with an audience that also works well in a one-on-one setting, which I imagine must help in his day job, whether gathering what one needs to build a case or present it. It is, I imagine, a tricky face to present - optimistic would feel dishonest, but the film would be unwatchable if he didn't see a way past the oft-referenced tipping point, even if he does often shift into justified anger.

The Kunstler sisters do a fair job of pulling material together (both direct and produce, while Emily also edits), although it's not necessarily the sort of dynamically-presented documentary that can pull in people who normally only watch narrative features. There's more than a few mid-interview cuts to Robinson nodding along that made one wonder what else they could do to mix a sequence up a little, and bits where Robinson will seemingly come to a place in order to be overcome by emotion, which doesn't feel less than genuine but which also doesn't have the impact of a truly spontaneous reaction. The important thing that they do is balance the field trips with the lecture well, giving a viewer time to let the emotional appeals sink in while Robinson approaches the intellect and vice versa.

This is the point where you wonder if folks like that pro-Confederate protester near the beginning will ever even see it - or, if they do, not have it just completely bounce off them because that worldview becomes a fundamental part of their identity, but I suspect that's not really the hope of the film or the lecture in draws from. The point is to make those who might be persuaded more certain, angry enough to act rather than just disagree. How effective that will be is anybody's guess, but it's well-enough put together to have a shot.

Also at eFilmCritic

IFFBoston 2021.03: Holler and We're All Going to the World's Fair

Neither of these movies are really bad at all, although I must admit that my thoughts after each were:

* Dang, Jessica Barden is not an actual teenager? She sure seems just that young.

* Was We're All Going to the World's Fair shot around Yarmouth, ME? Some of the exteriors looked really familiar, but also like the sort of streets you see in any sort of mid-sized town.

Anyway, I feel like both could have been sharper, though I did how Holler was satisfied to make Ruth regular-person smart rather than a genius (unless it was made by a bunch of people who think her doing some basic arithmetic is super-impressive, which has happened). She's not Will Hunting, but bright enough that this would actually make a decent pairing with the previous day's A Reckoning in Boston, stories about how there are probably a lot of smart people out there who just don't get the opportunity. Some of the most intriguing bits are about how everyone, even Ruth, kind of accepts that she's not cut out for anything but what she's got.

As to World's Fair, well, the EFC review is verging on spoiler territory already, so…

SPOILERS!

I think what made this fall flat for me was that it was really hard to tell for most of the movie whether this is "spooky internet thing having real-world consequences" or "teenagers play-acting online opening themselves up to adult predator", and it never developed tension between the two possibilities. I tend to gravitate toward the non-supernatural version anyway - the whole deal where people thinking outspoken young girls are witches is scarier than young girls being witches - and I think that there's a really good movie to be made about how these unformed teenagers are creating elaborate alter-egos online and earlier generations either don't get it or want to insert themselves into it. But you've got to leave room to play with that, rather than getting to the end and saying "oh, that's what this movie was really about".

It's a shame, because the very end, when they lean into it, with JLB smirking as he makes up a story about how he helped "Casey" a year later, is one of the most believable and genuinely unnerving things in the movie, and it would have been great if were able to get something even close to that level of intensity during the previous 80 minutes.

!SRELIOPS

Holler

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)

I wouldn't necessarily have guessed that Holler is filmmaker Nicole Riegel's second go at the material, but it makes sense in retrospect - the story at the center is straightforward, but with a lot more room to explore the world around it, even if she doesn't make things that much more intricate and complicated than you might find in a ten-minute short. It kind of lives right on the line where one might want her to explore certain things further but are also glad they aren't forced, winding up a familiar tale but still fairly satisfying.

It opens with Ruth (Jessica Barden) dashing down the street and hopping into a truck with brother Blaze (Gus Halper); with their mother Rhonda (Pamela Adlon) in jail because she can't afford rehab and jobs scarce in this small Ohio town, selling scrap to salvage-yard owner Hark (Austin Amelio) is the best way they can make ends meet. It means her attendance at school is lousy, which is a shame, because she's smart enough to get into college, although to make the kind of money where the family could afford that, they're going to have to get a little deeper into Hark's organization, where they raid abandoned factories at night for the copper wire, an order of magnitude more illegal, dangerous, and lucrative than what they've been doing.

The action in Holler probably stretch out over more than a couple weeks or so, but maybe not by that much, and one of its great strengths is that this fairly manageable slice of time means that the filmmakers don't ever feel the need to start from scratch or have anyone undergo a massive change. It lets one get a general idea what it's like to live in this sort of decaying town, and let the cast be generally authentic rather than getting tripped up on too many specifics. Jessica Barden is in nearly every scene and the audience gets to know her Ruth fairly well even without some defining trauma to hang on her, smart and angry enough to push back but just trusting enough under the cynical posturing for betrayals to hurt (and to occasionally believe what people say about her). She and Gus Halper are well enough in sync to come across as siblings without having to do too much to underline it - the script has them in each other's business and they don't oversell - with Halper playing Blaze as maybe not quite as positioned for bigger things as Ruth but not self-martyring about it. Becky Ann Baker doesn't need a lot of explanation as the friend of their mother's who takes an interest, and Austin Amelio finds a level of capable scuzziness that makes Hark dangerous but not obviously villainous.

The downside of it being so slice-of-life is that there are times when it feels like Riegel could dig a lot deeper but the path she's chosen doesn't allow it. There's this big, obvious metaphor in how it seems like the only way to make a buck in this town is to tear everything that American industry left behind up and sell the Chinese; maybe it deserves a movie of its own, but given that the film eventually leans toward "Ruth has what it takes to get out", maybe it deserves a little more. The whole deal with Ruth applying to college is also the part of the story that seems unique enough to maybe be worth digging into her thought process a little - she does everything up to sending her application in, which Blaze does in secret, and she's apparently buying into how college won't teach her anything staying won't until she's not. There's potentially great material in how so many folks in the lower economic classes see higher education as something that, paradoxically, is both corrupting and something they're not worthy of. Heck, at one point it walks right up to her having to convince a teacher that she deserves this and then just skips that scene. The finale similarly has the feel of everything that needs to happen occurring and in the right order, but never actually making this feel inevitable or something only Ruth would think of.

For all those flaws, it's pretty darn good for a first feature. The 16mm cinematography by Dustin Lane looks great, really capturing the windy and gray winter when it takes place, especially when a fair amount of the action takes place at night. The story may be simple, but the pacing is good; time rolls forward at a measured clip but the film never bogs down, and Riegel is good at inserting pieces of other connected lives in a way that gives a fuller picture of what this family is up against without ever pulling away from Ruth. The detail is solid enough that the film can make up in immersion for what it maybe lacks in complexity.

Holler is a well-made movie, although it does make me wonder if it would be better if there were more like it. Only a handful of movies seem to be set in this portion of America each year, compared to the cities and the comfortable suburbs, and if there were more, maybe they would have to dig a little deeper than this one does.

Also at eFilmCritic

We're All Going to the World's Fair

* * (out of four)
Seen 8 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)

There's a great movie to be made about the ground that this one covers, but I'm pretty sure that We're All Going to the World's Fair isn't it. It may be closer than I thought - for as much as I've dabbled in the sort of social-media storytelling that filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is playing with, I've never been that engrossed. It's a younger person's game, after all. Still, I found myself remembering the feeling of watching The Collingswood Story back in 2005 - a prototype for the later "screen life" movies that hadn't quite figured out how to make it work yet - and wondering what the next movie that plays with this hook would do.

It starts out in internet urban legend territory, with teenager Casey (Anna Cobb) taking the "World's Fair Challenge" - saying "I want to go to the World's Fair" three times, offering up a bit of blood, and playing a video with a lot of strobing lights. Others who have taken it have disconnected from reality in some ways - feeling no pain, skin taking on a plasticine consistency, and the like - and Casey promises updates to her followers. One of them, JLB (Michael J Rogers) is older and seems not so much worried about kids playing with the supernatural, but plunging themselves so deeply into viral role-play scenarios that they can't get out.

That's a topic that merits a lot more examination in popular culture than it's getting, and not just in genre cinema - though for all JLB talks about teens, they're not the ones being taken in by QAnon. Even if the movie winds up in "they think it's a game but it's real" territory, that's still a neat hook, but the trouble here is, Schoenbrun doesn't do a whole lot to establish the idea. The "World's Fair" lore presented in the movie isn't built up to the level where it's interesting on its own, especially since the film spends so much of its time with Casey and JLB that there's not much context for what Casey's getting herself into if it's real. Schoenbrun never gives the audience enough that a sudden twist could have an effect, and Casey is an isolated-enough character whose biggest trait is that she likes horror stuff, so the slow burn itself doesn't have that much effect.

That's probably realistic, but there are times when realism isn't necessarily an asset. Anna Cobb and Michael J Rogers are both thoroughly believable in their respective roles, but the characters are enigmas out of necessity - Schoenbrun sometimes seems to be saving any juicy details for a twist that sort of fizzles when it comes - and neither their body language nor the various details add up into much. They seem fairly average, and this sort of horror movie or thriller needs something a bit more out of the ordinary. Everything gets played so straight that the big scene where the audience is supposed to gasp at something impossible in thoroughly grounded footage never actually feels uncanny.

Schoenfeld seems primed to offer something unique at the start, as the film opens with an extended shot from the POV of Casey's webcam, a nifty inversion of those screen life movies that maybe emphasizes things moving from on-line to the real world in a way that the live feeds don't. She seldom does much to follow up on the hints she drops, which is unfortunate, because they individually feel like they could lead to something. The finale gets at something about how teens and adults approach this sort of content on the internet - and each other - that works as a satisfying conclusion but is also frustrating, because she's got something to say here but has spent so much of the film playing coy and half-heartedly feinting toward a more conventional horror movie that it's frustrating that she doesn't just dive right into this stuff earlier.

At least, that's how it hit my middle-aged eyes; it's entirely possible that a teenager more immersed in this stuff is going to see it more clearly. Even if they do, I still wonder whether there's enough meat on the movie's bones to actually pull a viewer in and actually make them scared of anything going on.

Also at eFilmCritic

IFFBoston 2021.02: The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet and A Reckoning in Boston

Is it just me, or is anyone else watching Brian Tamm's intro to these movies, especially the ones labeled "Generic Somerville" or "Generic Brattle", and seeing if they map to where they think the films in question would play during an in-person festival? For instance, I could absolutely see The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet playing the Brattle, while you head back to Somerville for A Reckoning in Boston. Maybe not scheduled for screen #1, but one of the odd-numbered side-screens, at least until a bunch of people with some connection to the production show up and are standing in the rush line, and it eventually moves up.

There'd also be a filmmaker Q&A that results in me having to use the "horrible photography" tag and gets into enough issues for long enough that I eventually have a hard time separating what was part of the film and what wasn't for the review, but not this year. Maybe in 2022.

Anyway, this is getting too late for these two to still be available via the festival site, but I'm A Reckoning in Boston will be on PBS later this year, and hopefully some streaming service or three will pick up The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet. It's odd and slight enough to disappear outside its home territory of Argentina, but as I say in the review, I'm impressed with its attitude toward randomness and chance. We're not wired to handle that particularly well as a species, from imagining gods to personify forces of nature to looking for scapegoats, and I often find the phrase "everything happens for a reason" kind of horrifying when it's meant to give comfort, whether it makes people think there was something they could have done to not deserved misfortune or that some jerk deity is being cruel to toughen you up for later. It's not healthy to think that way, but human brains are pattern-recognition machines, so it's awful hard not to.

Reckoning takes the other side - that there are reasons for the challenges Kafi and Carl face, a system designed to help those already with an advantage (maybe they have what they do "for a reason"), but in a way, that makes it the yin to Dog's yang - some things are random and some are part of a pattern, and being able to distinguish the two and act appropriately is one of the most valuable skills one can have.

El perro que no calla (The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)

The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet has maybe the strangest mid-film detour I can recall, surprising me as I watched it although I'll bet that two-weeks-ago me put this film on the schedule because the description hinted at it. Even before that, it's a movie that's as amiably eccentric as its title, well worth a look before it finds the most peculiar way it can to tell what could be a fairly conventional story.

The dog, Rita, doesn't seem particularly difficult as the audience meets her, but that's because her person, Sebastian (Daniel Katz) is home; apparently she whines non-stop when he's at work, to the point where the neighbors gather to complain. He tries taking her to work, and though Rita is well-behaved, it's apparently one of those offices afraid that anything out of the ordinary will be a slippery slope to chaos. So he's soon taking a job on a farm, with plenty of room for Rita to run. But that doesn't last, sending Sebas on other stops, until he sees a woman (Julieta Zylberberg) at his mother's wedding, also dancing by herself on the other side of the floor. They connect, and then…

Well, you've got to see what happens next to maybe believe it, but up until then, it's a well-above average guy-looking-for-his-place sort of movie. A big part of why it works so well is that star Daniel Katz plays Sebas remarkably straight-down-the-middle, even in the early scenes where he's sort of playing a straight man against the petty folks who have a problem with his dog. There's something a bit introverted and isolated about him, even when he's happy, but seldom with an abrasive sense of superiority. It's a performance built out of how he carries himself rather than what he does or says (and he doesn't really say a lot), and is especially complemented by Julieta Zylberberg and Valeria Lois, the former often a female reflection while Lois is the sort of confident, well-integrated-into-her-space mother that makes someone like Sebas seem a bit more uncertain.

As generally likable as Sebastian is, filmmaker Ana Katz recognizes that seeing him quietly be somewhat dissatisfied and move on could wear on an audience if drawn out too long, so not only does she keep the film itself short (a tight 73 minutes), but she makes sure that no individual segment ever wears out its welcome, telling a little vignette and then jumping on to the next stop, giving them just enough time to have meaning but to also let them be transitory. The crisp black-and-white photography proves flexible enough to reflect her main character's moods - almost always feeling a little gray and overcast, not at home among the office's harsh fluorescents, finding some quiet warmth in agriculture. There are a few animated segments which feel like how Sebas would process major shifts in addition to probably covering things this small picture doesn't have an effects budget for - though the production gets impressively creative when things take a weird twist in the last act.

Some may check out at the last act twist that literally comes out of nowhere, but I must admit to being impressed at just how thoroughly the filmmakers embrace that randomness as a theme. Sebastian might have been on the road to a predictable life had his neighbors not had a problem with his dog, but that sends him in a new direction, as does everything from what happens at the farm to meeting a girl to just helping give a stalled truck a push. But chance is not entirely something that happens to individuals; sometimes it's massive and completely unpredictable, a world-changing event that is absolutely an unfair thing for a screenwriter to drop into a script, but those things happen, arguably with increasing frequency, and they're not always timed to be what starts a story.

Those seeing this movie at a virtual film festival in 2021 don't need to be reminded of that, of course, although I'm curious about just when Ana Katz and her collaborators came up with this idea and shot it, just in terms of whether it's reflecting the world or the world is validating its thesis. Either way, there's insight to its oddity, and even the events before the big one are a fascinating way to treat chance as a real part of our lives beyond just chalking things up to fate or finding them cute and quirky.

Also at eFilmCritic

A Reckoning in Boston

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)

The title of A Reckoning in Boston suggests a confrontation with a somewhat definitive finale, but I don't know that anything has particularly changed in the city. In some ways, filmmaker James Rutenbeck gets caught between scales here, but then, that's where a lot of stories end up, especially when they involve race or poverty - it's not hard to see the large forces at work, but most stories are going to be about surviving them rather than bringing them down.

Filmmaker James Rutenbeck has been in the business for around 30 years, settling in the Boston area, and has taken to teaching "Clemente Courses" in the neighborhood of Dorchester. That's a program designed to give inner-city adults exposure to the humanities that they might not have received before. Two Black students in particular catch his attention - or at least agree to be filmed - in 2015: Kafi Dixon, a bus driver for the MBTA with a growing interest in urban farming, and Carl Chandler, caring for grandson Yadiel while his daughters concentrate on their education.

Kafi's story is the one most clearly entwined with the larger issues Rutenbeck points out early on - she's a state employee facing eviction and also working so that other women in the city can be more self-sufficient, but empty real estate is increasingly previous in Boston, and developers certainly have their eye on the parcel where Kafi has started her first farm. Rutenbeck points out that of the thousands of mortgage loans made as working-class neighborhoods gentrify and the Seaport is just developed out of whole cloth, only a trivial number are going to Black families. She doesn't feel that she's being taken seriously as she talks to people in city offices trying to make her farm official. Rutenbeck's empathy is clear, and though he makes a certain amount of effort to be invisible, he recognizes that this is impossible; having a white man with a camera in the room, even potentially, changes the environment, and he's not shy about expressing anger at how much this is the case.

Carl, meanwhile, is seldom in the middle of confrontations as dramatic as Kafi, which means they spend a little more time focused on his time in class, and the viewer quickly gets an idea of just how sharp he is, at one point spotting a hierarchy in ancient Egyptian art while his classmates are still seeing more surface-level properties. As with Kafi, one quickly gets a sense of much the filmmakers like and respect him, but it also highlights the extent to which one can find brains almost anywhere, but folks like Carl and Kafi don't get the same sort of encouragement when young and don't have the opportunities to climb out of a hole the way white people with just a little more money do.

There are moments when a viewer might suspect that Rutenbeck might have started out making a movie about the Clemente Courses program itself, and how studying philosophy and art can be just as valuable as the job-training programs that often seem more directly practical, if only because it gives one a better understanding of the big picture, as the reading is often used for transitions, and there's talk of economics and the city's racist history around busing. There are plenty of related stories that might be more dramatic, but Rutenbeck makes the choice to center Carl and Kafi whenever possible, making sure that when he includes himself or something more abstract, it's in a way that speaks about them, rather than positioning the teachers as saviors.

Has Boston particularly changed in the six years since production started? It doesn't seem that way; what reckonings have occurred have been more or less at the individual level. Not everybody is necessarily going to have the sort of determination Kafi and Carl show, although it certainly suggests that the right mindset and set of tools can make a big difference.

Also at eFilmCritic

IFFBoston 2021.01: Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

Thursday was opening night of Independent Film Festival Boston 2021, and since we couldn't be there in person, here's a little bit of IFFBoston Opening Night goodness:



We all miss this, and I hope to see a full set by Jon Bernhardt before the opening night of IFFBoston 2022.

Anyway, to continue the musical theme, Summer of Soul is a pretty darn fun movie, and while I don't know that there's a lot of time to see it even if you're reading it right as I post - it came online for 48 hours at 7pm Thursday and I don't know whether that's 48 hours to start or finish - it will be on Hulu come 2 July, and I wouldn't be shocked if Searchlight gave it a day-and-date or week-early release. Hopefully that means Disney+ Star outside the USA and a soundtrack album.

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)

Summer of Soul isn't quite a concert film, but it's hard to blame director Ahmir-Khalib "Questlove" Thompson for never wanting to stop the music: The raw material is a treasure trove of great performances not seen in fifty years, and more often than not, they say just as much on their own as anybody talking about them later might. The trick, which Questlove, editor Joshua L. Pearson, and the rest of the crew pull off nicely, is to insert just enough present-day reminiscences to give a little bit of context without slowing the party down.

The party in question was the Harlem Cultural Festival, six concerts that took place in Mount Morris Park during the summer of 1969. The country in general and black community in particular was a powder keg, and the city of New York wanted something to defuse the nervous energy in Harlem. Enter producer and emcee Tony Lawrence, who aside from being a charismatic host on stage also had the knack for convincing agents and labels that they should send their stars because they were also negotiating with someone else, leading to a lineup that had everyone from Stevie Wonder to Mahalia Jackson to Nina Simone. The Black Panther Party would provide security, 300,000 people would attend, and it would all be filmed - but nobody at the time was interested in the rights to "Black Woodstock".

I don't doubt that Questlove could have gone through the film, found two hours worth of great performance, and let it be, making for a solid film - and if the producers can get a soundtrack album out, it will likely be a great one to listen to. That's close to what he does, rather than make the shows a climax in a film mostly focused on the challenges of putting on an event such as this, but they're interrupted with voiceover just enough to underscore the point that this is a movie about the event, rather than just a recording of it. He and his team will generally let a song play in its entirety, but the whole event is compacted to seem like a single event, although the various themes of the different concerts (which, from the occasional glimpses of the advertising, seem to be presented in roughly chronological fashion) allow the film to have rough chapters - pop, blues, gospel, Spanish Harlem, more direct African influences.

It is by nature an overview, but a useful one; it is easy for those of us who are outsiders to the Black community, and I suspect even for those who are part of it but mostly familiar with their favorite contemporary music, to see all of this as one thing evolving, but Questlove picks performances and occasional bits of interview material to show how this is sometimes the case - Mavis Staples talks about how she didn't realize that her father was playing blues riffs until they were touring - but also how even what was popular in one summer covered a lot of ground. Audiences may be surprised by some of this,especially the gospel section, where what is often presented as dignified and maybe a bit watered-down has more than a bit of the revival tent and spiritual possession to it, but it strikes a balance by showing that even in this one summer, fifty years ago, Black culture had already started to grow in many different directions from the same roots, doubling back and intermingling with other traditions.

You can see that just looking at what's on stage - and just in terms of being a fun movie to look at, the colorful backdrops hold up pretty well for being of the period and the original footage looks great, whether restored or preserved - and Questlove proves the have the knack for both choosing interesting interview subjects and getting them to chat until something interesting and conversational to come out. Early on, it's fun to watch Billy Davis Jr. and Marilyn McCoo start out delighted to see this footage even if they cringe at their old outfits but move on to talking about how they were perceived as a white-sounding band and thus were more proud to be asked to play in Harlem. Later, he'll talk to Jesse Jackson about the overlap between music, religion, and the civil rights movement, discuss the change in language from "Negro" to "Black" that was going on at the time, , and give audiences an opening to think about how Black Americans are not really of Africa but are often keen to explore those roots.

It is not, by any means, a deep dive into any of those subjects, but it's less shallow than it may seem - by grounding the film in music, Questlove is able to use a lot of musical techniques, where a quote or a reference can serve as powerful shorthand and a contrast between music and lyrics can hint at a middle ground without minimizing the extremes. It makes Summer of Soul a movie that manages to cover a lot of ground even within a small window of time and space.

Also at eFilmCritic

Next Week in [Virtual] Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 30 April 2021 - 6 May 2021

Start the week by getting your IFFBoston tickets, end it by getting your Coolidge tickets. And get vaccinated! No excuses!

• By the time this posts, IFFBoston will have tickets for their virtual festival on sale for everyone, notably including opening night movie Summer of Soul. That comes online at 7pm on Thursday, with other features generally showing up at noon through the next week and a half. The full complement of shorts will also be available on Thursday at noon for those who want more filmed goodness, since we're not quite at post-screening parties yet.
  
  The ReelAbilities Film Festival also kicks off on Thursday, with most (if not all) of their films available to stream throughout, and an opening night event with author Riva Lehrer discussing her memoir Golem Girl.
• The Brattle Theatre gets a couple of new releases in their virtual room: The County is the new film from Icelandic director Grímur Hákonarson, with Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir as a widowed farmer who finds all sort of trouble in her small town. Work Songs, meanwhile, is a documentary about the relationship of people in their jobs, taking inspiration from Studs Terkel and leaning on interviews and observation. They join Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts, Hope, Małni – Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore, This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection, Center Stage, and The Fever in the virtual cinema. You can also order some snacks from their site and pick them up over the weekend.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre brings in About Endlessness, a dark but whimsical series of vignettes that apparently let writer/director Roy Andersson noodle on a variety of subjects. It joins In Silico, a documentary about an attempt to simulate the entirety of the human brain, as well as "Snapper", Hope, the three Oscar Nominated Shorts programs (Animated, Live-Action, and Documentary, also available virtually from The ICA and Landmark), and City Hall in the virtual theater.
  
  They've also announced dates and times for what will be playing on the main screen during the first of three weekends of Big Screen Classics starting May 13th, with tickets going on sale on the 7th, with about 68 seats available per screening.
• Wicked Queer sort of changes virtual venues this weekend, with their 17 short film packages and feature Wojnarowicz ending on Friday, but two new features whose titles translate themselves - Ma Belle My Beauty and NIMBY - Not in My Backyard - showing up in the ArtsEmerson virtual screening room that evening and running through the weekend.
  
  ArtsEmerson also partners with The Boston Asian-American Film Festival for "Projecting Connections: Chinese American Experiences" starting on Thursday, with three short documentaries on noteworthy figures in America's Chinatowns. Before that, BAAFF has a virtual sneak preview of The Paper Tigers on Saturday, including a conversation with the filmmakers. I covered it as part of Fantasia last summer, and it's a bunch of fun.
• Belmont World Film is reaching its conclusion; A Good Man plays through Monday (including the last-night discussion); the final film in the series, Cuban coming-of-age story Agosto, begins its run on Tuesday.
• The Regent Theatre has a 50th Anniversary "Reflections of Who's Next" show streaming from Friday evening to Sunday, with Wonderous Stories and a number of Broadway performers covering that album. They also continue to stream Long Live Rock: Celebrate the Chaos, and will live-streamt their hosting of the Boston Gay Men's Chorus "Encore" gala on Saturday evening, with a silent auction leading up to the event and a live one going on during the stream.
• I forget what the exact reason for Zhang Yimou's Cliff Walkers not being out yet is - he had three films completed and unreleased at one point last year - but it opens globally this weekend, a thriller with four spies returning to Japanese-controlled China on a secret mission in the 1930s. It plays Landmark Theatres Kendall Square (closed Monday/Tuesday), Boston Common. Another Chinese thriller, Home Sweet Home, opens at Boston Common and has a family of four see their lives thrown into chaos when an interloper takes up residence in their basement.
  
  Also opening are a couple things that seem counter-intuitive enough to be interesting. Limbo, for instance, mines comedy from the story of Syrian refugees waiting to find out the results of their asylum requests on an isolated Scottish island; it plays the Kendall and Boston Common. Four Good Days, meanwhile, finds Mila Kunis taking the role of a heroin addict trying to get clean with the help of her estranged mother (Glenn Close). That one is at the Kendall and Boston Common.
  
  Horror movie Separation opens at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay; it's a "widower tries to get a new start but his daughter is seeing things which may be her mother or something more sinister" thing.
  
  Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train gets the Imax screen at Boston Common, and also continues at Kendall Square, Fenway, South Bay, and Chestnut Hill. It apparently did almost as well as Mortal Kombat last weekend.
  
  Scott Pilgrim Versus The World gets a Dolby Cinema re-release at Boston Common and South Bay, while The Fast and the Furious starts a countdown to movie #9 with the original playing Friday night at Boston Common, Fenway (for reward program members), and Arsenal Yards. 25th Anniversary screenings of Fargo play South Bay and Arsenal Yards on Sunday/Wednesday. Arsenal Yards also has religious golf movie Walking with Herb on Friday and Saturday.
• The West Newton Cinema shows Maine-produced documentary Privacy & The Power of Secrets on Friday night and Saturday afternoon; it finds common threads in the lives of isolated lighthouse keepers, China's "social score", crimes against Maine native peoples, and an animal-testing laboratory in Texas. They also continue to show Together Together, the Oscar Shorts, Godzilla vs Kong, The Father, Raya and the Last Dragon, Tom & Jerry (Sunday only), and Nomadland through Sunday, and are available for private rentals.
• The Somerville Theatre and The Capitol are still not showing movies, though the Capitol has their ice cream shop and concession stand open.
• Theater rentals are available at the Coolidge, the Brattle, Kendall Square, West Newton, the Capitol, The Lexington Venue, and the AMC/Majestic/Showcase multiplexes. The Coolidge has extended the slots available to reserve online through the end of April now offers early and late evening chances to rent Moviehouse II, the screening room, and the GoldScreen, with "Premium Programming" including Wolfwalkers, Promising Young Woman, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Father, Mank, Judas and the Black Messiah, Nomadland, Minari, In the Mood for Love, and Sound of Metal; the AMC app lists some "sold out" showtimes that are probably just meant to show the movies are available as part of rentals. The independent theaters also have other fund-raising offers worth checking out, and Apple Fresh Pond has plans to re-open in May. There is, as yet, no word on AMC re-opening the Assembly Row theater when that's possible next week.

I'm likely going to hit the Chinese movies, maybe Limbo, and do some catch-up before IFFBoston kicks off.