Huh. I remember this story having more in the way of prostitutes and black comedy in The President's Last Bang (which is apparently not available to watch in high definition, which somehow boggles my mind). Might have to check that one out again.
Unfortunately, it's pretty much too late for folks in Boston to check this one out theatrically, as its last screening at Boston Common is right about…. now. An underappreciated consequence of every movie having night-before screenings rather than just the big events is that you can't really do last-chance Thursday nights any more, especially a bummer since I had trouble squeezing this one in. Partly my own fault - I had stuff I wanted to see at the sci-fi film festival and HFA over the weekend, and felt kind of lousy on Tuesday, but on Monday it looks like AMC cancelled the 6:45pm show in order to fit an extra screening of Parasite in after its Oscar victories, which is fair, although there's a bit of irony in those wins actually making it more difficult to see a South Korean film here!
Even with that taken into account, this seemed a little cursed - I got to the ticket kiosk and it the only printed out half a stub before crapping out, and then the snacks I'd pre-ordered just weren't ready when I got there. The guy at the concession stand was cool when he saw the mistake, giving me a LOT of corn dog bites and making sure I knew they were willing to give me some extra candy or something, but it turned out to be a very good thing for me last night that they stick twenty minutes of previews before their movies.
Namsan ui bujangdeul (The Man Standing Next)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, DCP)
The Man Standing Next is a pretty fair example of a movie that takes the known facts of recent history and stitches them together in the way that most resembles a thriller. The suspense comes as much from the craft as the pieces of that history where one doesn't know the exact details, meaning the most exciting set piece is in the middle rather than the climax. There's no mystery for many watching the film in South Korea, but at least some tension.
After a brief flash-forward to 25 October 1979, the film rolls the clock back 40 days to show Park Yong-Gak, the former director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency giving testimony before the United States Congress about the corruption and autocracy prevalent in their supposedly-democratic ally. He also announces plans to publish a memoir, incensing President Park (Lee Sung-Min), who dispatches current KCIA head Kim Kyu-Pyeong (Lee Byung-Hun) to get his predecessor under control. Kim returns with the manuscript and a warning, that the American CIA is tracking a figure they call "Iago" who secretly controls a large faction of the agency. Could that be Gwak Sang-Cheon (Lee Hee-Joon), the head of the President's personal security who seems far too much of a hot-head to be any kind of secret mastermind?
(Note that while the events of the film map fairly closely to actual history and real people, most of the names have been changed.)
This story ends with President Park's assassination, and whether Gwak's testimony in Washington set events in motion or was just one of many examples of how an institution that had rotted from the inside finally falls apart is treated as something of fairly minor concern. Instead, writer/director Woo Min-Ho focuses on the process of the collapse - the increasing paranoia, the machinations that grow more complex and dangerous to what seems like little purpose, and the gradual realization by Kim that what he's doing has drifted far from public service. Both the outside forces at play and the factors in Park's fall that derive from his own personality are visible mostly on the edges of the film - at a certain point, Woo suggests, both dictatorship and the forces of international politics are machines that my run slow but are are only stopped when the larger one crushes the smaller.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Thursday, February 13, 2020
Saturday, February 08, 2020
Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2020.01: Proxima
I'm going to try and project as many good vibes about this festival as I can this year, because while we've had issues in the past, the schedule that's been put together for the first weekend, at least, is impressive as heck and Proxima looks like the sort of movie I really like that just misses the cut to playing in Boston. Yes, it's got an actor or two you're familiar with and a filmmaker people have heard of, but we've only got so many screens and it's not like the upscale theaters that have been built here show more grown-up movies as opposed to the same thing with a better wine list. At best, it probably gets the same sort of one-week release as Aniara or Little Joe, because the Kendall is close to MIT and hopes this might get some trade from there.
Anyway, heck of a start to the festival. Here's hoping the rest lives up to it!
Proxima
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)
Among the many things that intrigue about Proxima is how the standard narrative of movies like this seem built to push the story, and the audience, in a specific direction. Lots of movies that didn't live up to their potential have made it as easy to joke about them being about "discovering what's really important" as "friends we made along the way" or the like. And yet that construction works, because what counters it? Proxima is at its best when it makes you wonder.
It is, from one side, the story of Sarah Loreau (Eva Green), a brilliant engineer and astronaut candidate at the European Space Agency, who has just been selected for the "Proxima" mission, a year-long stay on the International Space Station with American Mike Shannon (Matt Dillon) and Russian Anton Ocheivsky (Aleksey Fateev) which will serve as a sort of dry run for a mission to Mars. The training at Space City in Russia will be intense, but that is not the hardest part: She has a daughter, Stella (Zélie Boulant), a bright seven-year-old (though dyslexia and dyscalculia make school more difficult), and while it's likely that her ex Thomas Akerman (Lars Eidinger) will step up more than he has, a year is a very long time at that age.
From the other, it's the story of a little girl who has seemed to get through a divorce unscathed but is now faced with not just moving to a new city in a new country, but her mother voluntarily leaving her for over a year. Though Matt Dillon is naturally going to be billed and credited second, young Zélie Boulant is clearly the film's other lead, and she does impressive work for one so young, aided by a script by director Alice Winocour and co-writer Jean-Stéphane Bron that seldom presumes to get inside a child's mind but certainly gives Boulant many opportunities to present all the nervousness and anger that seeming abandonment will cause while also demonstrating the immense, unbreakable love and awe she has for her mother. Children are often pawns or abstractions in movies about parents trying to balance family and career, but Stella is a real kid whose needs and desires are not necessarily simple. Indeed, part of what makes this so agonizing for Sarah is that she and the audience can see the very real possibility of Stella not being destroyed but growing away from her mother.
Anyway, heck of a start to the festival. Here's hoping the rest lives up to it!
Proxima
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, DCP)
Among the many things that intrigue about Proxima is how the standard narrative of movies like this seem built to push the story, and the audience, in a specific direction. Lots of movies that didn't live up to their potential have made it as easy to joke about them being about "discovering what's really important" as "friends we made along the way" or the like. And yet that construction works, because what counters it? Proxima is at its best when it makes you wonder.
It is, from one side, the story of Sarah Loreau (Eva Green), a brilliant engineer and astronaut candidate at the European Space Agency, who has just been selected for the "Proxima" mission, a year-long stay on the International Space Station with American Mike Shannon (Matt Dillon) and Russian Anton Ocheivsky (Aleksey Fateev) which will serve as a sort of dry run for a mission to Mars. The training at Space City in Russia will be intense, but that is not the hardest part: She has a daughter, Stella (Zélie Boulant), a bright seven-year-old (though dyslexia and dyscalculia make school more difficult), and while it's likely that her ex Thomas Akerman (Lars Eidinger) will step up more than he has, a year is a very long time at that age.
From the other, it's the story of a little girl who has seemed to get through a divorce unscathed but is now faced with not just moving to a new city in a new country, but her mother voluntarily leaving her for over a year. Though Matt Dillon is naturally going to be billed and credited second, young Zélie Boulant is clearly the film's other lead, and she does impressive work for one so young, aided by a script by director Alice Winocour and co-writer Jean-Stéphane Bron that seldom presumes to get inside a child's mind but certainly gives Boulant many opportunities to present all the nervousness and anger that seeming abandonment will cause while also demonstrating the immense, unbreakable love and awe she has for her mother. Children are often pawns or abstractions in movies about parents trying to balance family and career, but Stella is a real kid whose needs and desires are not necessarily simple. Indeed, part of what makes this so agonizing for Sarah is that she and the audience can see the very real possibility of Stella not being destroyed but growing away from her mother.
What can counter this? Obviously, you have to be extremely driven to be an astronaut, almost single-minded, something that kind of seems cute early, as Sarah uses spaceflight jargon as she tucks Stella into bed, or just that she has a daughter named "Stella", a cat named "Laika", and an astrophysicist for an ex-husband, because where else is she going to meet someone? She's so focused that she seems surprised by the ESA assigning a child psychologist (Sandra Hüller) to her family But on top of that, Winocour and Bron do a tremendously impressive job about detailing the special pressures a woman must put up with in this environment - the seemingly dismissive comments Mike makes during a press conference, the male doctor who won't immediately accept her decisions on whether or not to suppress menstruation during the mission, and all of the women who are so much behind her that she's worried about letting them down. It's not something Winocour ever has Sarah address directly, but it's something one can easily see in both her attempts to push herself too hard and her moments of despair.
Eva Green picks that up and runs with it. Winocour taps into how there's something a bit larger-than-life about Green - it's not just that she's beautiful, but she's always projected incredible confidence to go with it, something that translates to Sarah being headstrong and a little intimidating, even to Stella. How does a kid say what she really feels when she's meeting her astronaut mom in the room where they give press conferences during quarantine? Green takes that charisma and makes sure that Sarah doesn't become a villain even as Stella is hurting, while also showing that others emotional investment can be a lot to bear. There are moments when one wonders if this is the first time she's ever felt self-doubt toward the end, a slight variation on the nerves that many films call for at that point.
She does this against an interesting background that could easily overwhelm the film, but never does. It would be easy for the details of the training in Star City to take over the film, but that never happens; Winocour instead makes the specifics interesting but never never overwhelming, and the space between astronaut being just another job and something completely divorced from most of the audience's experience is not so wide as one might think. She and cinematographer Georges Lechaptois also have a real talent for building and finding great shots, from one where Stella wanders off during a press event and winds up in a lunar diorama to a final shot of her watching wild horses from a train, the audience noting the one running with a foal and how often Stella looks up.
It's a real credit to the movie that it can get to that scene without having to do something obvious to tip audience sympathies one way or another, or particularly note that we as a society don't ask the same questions about men like Mike taking on these sort of commitments that we do for women like Sarah. There's never much doubt that the movie is about this, but it seems rare that a film will can be about it in such a clear and elegant fashion.
(Formerly at EFC)
Fantasia 2019 Catch-up, Part 2: The Deeper You Dig, Away, Jade's Asylum, Almost a Miracle, The Wonderland, Hit-and-Run Squad, Dreamland, Chiwawa, Porno, and Mystery of the Night
On the one hand, I'm sad that Away didn't wind up getting a theatrical release, because I really loved it and the audience was into it.
On the other, you can purchase it on Amazon Prime Video for six bucks in HD. You can also rent it for two or three, but, come on, that's an absurdly good price even to just hold
Anyway, enjoy me trying to make a case for/against movies based upon my Letterboxd entries and notes several months later!
The Deeper You Dig
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)
Every time I see a movie like The Deeper You Dig, I wonder how many more groups there are out there like the family that made it, tight-knit enough to do something as resource-and-time-consuming as a movie not just for no money but without the expectation that it will lead to something else. Hundreds, probably, with vanishingly few cracking the lineups of a major genre festival, mostly winding up on virtual shelves next to a hundred times as many self-published novels and indie rock MP3s online. Like most of that material, it will almost certainly not be the most accomplished or easily-recommended movies you'll see all year, but it's individual enough that it will speak almost directly to those who like it.
Ivy Allen (Toby Poser) has a good little grift going as a fortune teller, with 14-year-old daughter Echo (Zelda Adams) helping, shall we say, to set the scene. With other things to do around the house, Ivy's not able to watch Echo as she goes sledding on one of those winter days where the sun goes down quickly, and she is hit by a drunk driver. Horrified, Kurt (John Adams) starts to turn his life around, even making firends with Ivy when they meet in town and guiltily helping out where he can. Of course, it turns out that Ivy's connection to the spirit realm isn't completely imaginary, and Echo is not resting easily.
It's a bit strange to call a horror movie "cute", but that's the sort of vibe this DIY production gives off, especially once you know that the main cast are real-life parents and daughter. It's less actually scary than an earnest attempt to make a scary movie, with the basic shape of a ghost story and the bones of a good parallel between the haunted parties, though it can't help but feel more like people excited to make a horror movie than a group into the particular story they're telling. On top of that, it's a bit of a case where ghosts aren't necessarily as interesting as the guilt that they represent. That said, when the film takes an odd twist that leads to the movie trying to do two or three different things at once that don't quite mesh, it at least handles it better than a lot of films that take a big swing do. The last act may not be quite so eerie or unnerving as it is meant to, but it is also not nearly so unintentionally funny as expected.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Away
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
It's a rare feature film that is as singularly the work of one artist as Away, and of that small sample, few are this good. With nobody else credited on the film, director Gints Zilbalodis strips an adventure story down to fundamentals, makes some choices that maybe a larger team might not have, and comes through with an animated film for all ages that comes across as unique but not gimmicky.
The plot is dead-simple - a boy has survived a plane crash, starting the movie dangling from a tree by his parachute. He's in the middle of the wilderness, and the nearest city, Cloud Harbor, is some distance away. He's soon befriended by a yellow bird who seems to be about as alone as he is, and together, they journey through dangerous and surreal landscapes in hope of getting to the place that can get him home.
Away is a very simple movie in a lot of ways - Gints Zilbalodis made it on his own, and he's smart to keep from overburdening himself in ways that filmmakers telling this sort of story often do. He doesn't bother with dialogue, for instance, and makes it feel natural by not feeling the need to give the boy someone to talk to. He has, in large part, structured the film like a video game, and rendered it either with a gaming engine or some similar software, and it becomes an intriguing artistic choice on top of being very practical: It works as this boy attacking his problems in a way he understands, and why he doesn't necessarily need to be vocal. Zilbalodis doesn't make it an overt theme by being judgmental - this isn't a "kid who only knows the world through screens can't handle the real thing" movie - but going for a gaming aesthetic lets him buck filmmaking conventions and create different ways of understanding a character who doesn't have much reason to explain himself.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Jade's Asylum
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival, ProRes)
I can't say I much enjoyed Jade's Asylum, but the discussion with the filmmakers included one of the more tellingly confessional moments I've seen at a festival screening: It went from mostly indoors to mostly outdoors when they got on site and saw that their monster suit didn't look good in the mansion they'd rented. It doesn't make the final product better, but it gives one an idea of how many different pieces have to come together for a movie to work and an appreciation for how often you have to try and fix things on the fly.
The mansion is somewhere in Costa Rica, to which Jade Williams (Morgan Kohan) has come with boyfriend Toby Hunter (Kjartan Hewitt), one of several guests Toby's brother Wesley (Jeff Teravaninen) has invited for a housewarming party. Most are obnoxious bro types, although Mike (Sebastian Pigott) seems pretty decent despite coming with Instagram-diva girlfriend Tanya (Deanna Jarvis). Jade's in a fragile state and ready to walk back to the city to try and get home despite not having the money to fly back to Canada and Toby unwilling to help despite not really wanting her there, and that state of mind is not going to improve with a bunch of dudes covered in mushroom coming out of the woods to attack the gringos.
There's potential to that, if you want to dig into these characters' relationships and maybe make what's got Jade reeling feel much more central, but filmmaker Alexandre Carrière never seems to find anything there, and stretches what he has thin. This movie is 83 minutes long, but includes a whole ton of outtakes and such over the end credits, along with other big chunks of runtime wasted on pointless nonlinear circling back around to various flashbacks and flash-forwards throughout the film. Take out the subplots that go nowhere and the repetition and there's maybe a half-hour of movie here, and that half-hour doesn't make a lot of sense. One suspects that it is missing a lot of pieces that could have clarified things, but Carrière instead pursues the sort of ambiguity that does a movie little good unless there's something more compelling behind "real or not?" Maybe retooling while they shot put the filmmakers in a bad position, but the result isn't good.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Machida kun no sekai (Almost a Miracle aka Machida's World)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
It's always the ducks. No matter what the cartoon, or movie, or what, the ducks will be the funniest part. They don't actually make themselves known until relatively late, but the teenagers in this movie give them a run for their money, making for a high-school comedy that, for all of its eccentricities, often gets at the heart of what it means to be growing up and finding oneself.
Most notable is Hajime Machida (Kanata Hosoda), who is helpful and altruistic to the point where folks really don't know what to make of him. He winds up at the infirmary at the same time as Nana Inohara (Nagisa Sekimizu), and while something seems to spark, Machida immediately makes it weird. Meanwhile, Ryota NIshino (Taiga Nakano) likes Inohara but accidentally sends his letter declaring it to Machida, recently-dumped Sakura Takashima (Mitsuki Takahata) likes Machida but is liked by Yu Himuro (Takanori Iwata), and a struggling writer (Koichi Sato) thinks that there's a story in all this.
The teens are a bunch of lovable weirdos trying to figure themselves out, sometimes from odd starting points, and the compulsively altruistic Machida is intriguing for how he's such an extreme character who is such an odd type that one might find him hard to believe in, at least compared to some of the others - the cynical, gossiped-about Inohara is certainly much more immediately recognizable. It's often hard to be sure just what to make of Machida's broad-ranging generosity, especially since Kanata Hosoda's performance often makes it clear that Machida is doing what he has been told he should do, but there's not a contrasting "real Machida" behind it. It's a bit of a put-on, but also genuine. It's often easier to recognize the suspicion and confusion in Inohara's reactions; Nagisa Sekimizu plays a more conventional complex teen.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Bâsudê wandârando (The Wonderland)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, digital)
The Wonderland (aka "Birthday Wonderland") has all the surface elements of big, respectable anime - a decent coming-of-age story, absolutely beautiful animation, certain specific character types, a traditional life/environmental message - and does each of them well enough that it plays really well from minute to minute. The trouble is that the whole doesn't fit together in a way that does those pieces justice. It's kind of about moving forward but also accepting destiny and how modern life isn't good for the soul but also shopping… It's all over the place.
It has a common sort of template. Akane (voice of Mayu Matsuoka) is a moody girl turning thirteen, sent by mother Midori (voice of Kumiko Aso) on an errand to the junk shop run by Akane's weird aunt Chii (voice of Anne Watanabe), which gets stranger than things usually do around Chii: A secret passage opens and the alchemist Hippocrites (voice of Masachika Ichimura) and his apprentice Pipo (voice of Nao Toyama) emerge, seeking the "Goddess of the Green Wind" and deciding it's Akane. Soon, they're all transported back to another land, magical and of an earlier era, where Zan Gou (voice of Keiji Fujiwara) and his bat-like sidekick Doropo (voice of Akiko Yajima) are collecting metal for a nefarious purpose, and if Akane doesn't stop them with her "Momentum Anchor" necklace, she'll never get home.
I can't speak for Sachiko Kashiwaba's original novel, but the movie is scattered as heck. That doesn't make it bad, although it can start to wear; it's got the sort of quest structure that has a viewer just starting to get a feel for something before it's on to the next thing, leaving characters and settings and the like behind. For all that growing up is in many ways the process of taking all of this and figuring it out to make it part of oneself, there's not much time spent on Akane resolving these complexities or coming up with her own perspective. The film is never quite just things happening to Akane, but she finds herself along for the ride more often than leading the charge.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Bbaengban (Hit-and-Run Squad)
* * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
How does a movie about Seoul's car-crash investigators, on the tail of a Formula 1-driving criminal mastermind, have so little in the way of automotive action? For crying out loud, when a person buys a ticket for a movie named "Hit-and-Run Squad", they've got expectations, so get to the car chases already! This thing is 133 minutes long and really only has a couple of worthy bits of stunt driving.
That mastermind is "JC" Jung Jae-Chul (Cho Jung-Seok), who retired from the track early to get into business and has seemingly gotten as far as he has with bribery and extortion. It's being investigated by prosecutor Yoo Ji-Hyun (Yum Jung-Ah) and Lieutenant Eun Shi-Yeon (Kong Hyo-Jin), but when a sting backfires in disastrous fashion, with a star witness (Park Hyoung-Soo) attempting suicide during an interrogation and Eun reassigned to investigating car accidents. Not exactly a great career step for a rising star, and she's partnered with Seo Min-Jae (Ryoo Joon-Yeol), who can read an accident scene like a savant but isn't allowed to drive himself because of his checkered past. Then again, it's not like Eun is actually going to let this go, and Seo's skills may prove useful considering that JC still really likes his cars.
Even when you consider that JC is still invested in racing and racing-adjacent businesses, there's still a fairly substantial gulf in what goes on in those two types of stories, and the screenplay by Kim Kyung-Chan and director Han Jun-Hee doesn't do the best job in bridging it. The worst part is, all of the twisty corruption stuff which takes up the bulk of the running time not only doesn't make much sense, it's boring. The writers never seem to figure out who should be the big villain and why - the corruption seems to be fairly generic as opposed to in the service of something in particular - and it keeps stretching out and reversing until it becomes extremely hard to care about all the material that is just making the movie longer. There is so much going on that just doesn't matter, and it dilutes the bits that at least hint at something interesting in the focus on corruption.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Dreamland (aka Bruce McDonald's Dreamland)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The opening stretch of Bruce McDonald's Dreamland introduces a bunch of visually striking characters against a moody environment, has then open their mouths to begin a story, and then summarily has the all shot them in the head. The rest of the film isn't quite that nihilistic, but it is fairly pointedly eccentric and detached, the sort of thing that needs the idea that anything can happen in the audience's head lest they get frustrated with how little is happening right now. McDonald is going for a specific idea of cool here above all else, where it's more important to be stylish than tense.
It is plenty stylish, mostly taking place in the neighborhoods of a European capital where the movies that make a person want to visit Europe take place, the parts not developed into glass skyscrapers or filled with historical buildings that remain preserved in amber. There's cafes and clubs and pawnshops, and the assassin who frequents them taps into a network of cigarette-smoking urchins in suits, one of several places where the wires seem to be crossed and weird chimeras created. McDonald and his collaborators do a decent job of finding entertaining ways of mixing familiar tropes up into different arrangements so that there's often something both comfortingly familiar and bizarrely creative about them when he attempts to do so usually misses the mark.
Not everybody can fit into that sort of milieu, but frequent McDonald collaborator Steven McHattie can, and this movie fits him like a glove. He has a dual role, laying both a world-weary assassin and a decadent trumpet player, and a viewer probably wouldn't want anyone else playing either of those parts, even if the way the film winks at it is another thing that makes a viewer more aware of the games being played than a part of them. Watching him shamble around as the drug-addled musician or trying to do good while not really believing in his own humanity is a distinct pleasure even when a scene is going on too long. He's surrounded by similarly entertaining support - Henry Rollins as a gangster who seems laid-back to a fault but still carries grudges, Juliette Lewis as a maniacal Countess, Lisa Houle as a sympathetic ear in a bar - but these guys are never quite completely engaged with others, just as part of their nature.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Chiwawa-chan (aka Chiwawa)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Chiwawa is structured kind of like a murder mystery, but it's 50/50 as to whether that's the direction it's going to go at any point, and that's fine. After all, it seems like the other way they could have gone with it is faux documentary, which probably would have seemed more like middle-aged folks trying to make a movie about youth, despite actually having been made by a filmmaker relatively close to his characters in age. As someone who has never been a Japanese person in their early twenties, I can 't exactly say how well the film represents that group, but it nevertheless paints an interesting portrait.
It opens with a news report on the especially grisly murder of Yoshiko Chiwako, a twenty-year-old nursing student who, it is suggested, also found herself involved in less savory situations. It is a shock to their friends - they knew Yoshiko (Shiori Yoshida) as "Chiwawa", an effervescent party girl who parachuted into their group when Yoshida (Ryo Narita) picked her up in a bar, sticking around even as relationships changed between her, best friend Yumi (Tina Tamashiro), camera-toting Nagai (Nijiro Murakami), cynical model Miki (Mugi Kadowaki), and Yoshida's friend Katsuo (Kanichiro Sato). There are some wild times and emotional blowouts, but nothing that seems to actually explain what happened to Chiwawa-chan.
Screenwriter/director Ken Ninomiya adapts a manga by Kyoko Okazaki, and though he leads off with homicide, the actual crime is not quite so important as what it implies about the life she and her friends lead, and how it lacks the stabilizing influences and structures that their parents may have had. There's rocket fuel in certain sections of this movie, like how they find a bag with six million yen (roughly $60,000 American) and blow through it in three days of partying, and it doesn't necessarily feel like something that's pushing the plot to how things are going to end. Instead, it's a sign of the abandon with which it is possible for young people to live, while the news occasionally give them reasons to live like there's no tomorrow. People stop in the last leg of the movie to be transfixed by reports of a bombing in Singapore, and like the party, it's less a story point than illustration of the times and how little is in their direct control.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Porno
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Porno is the sort of movie that feels like someone should have thought of it and done it before, but I can't think of anything particularly similar, and I bet those with better catalogs in their brains won't think of a better "monsters in a run-down movie theater" picture (although, as this is very much my thing, I'm happy to hear what obvious example I'm blanking on ). Inspiration usually seems obvious in retrospect, and thus is inspired even before the nice cast and quality, fearless execution shows up.
It takes place in the early 1990s (Encino Man and A League of Their Own are on the two-plex's marquee), and as they do every Friday night, the teenagers who work there are going to watch a movie after the customers leave. Chastity (Jillian Mueller) has just been made assistant manager, and Ricky (Glenn Stott) has just come back from camp, though his talk of the girlfriend he met there have had no noticeable effect on Chaz's crush. Also working are Abe (Evan Daves) and Todd (Larry Saperstein), but before they can tell projectionist Heavy Metal Jeff (Robbie Tann) what they want to watch, a homeless man bursts in and uncovers a secret door, behind which they find a strange archive and a third screen in the basement. Obviously, when that happens, you watch what you just found - and, of course, it's inevitable that in addition to being more sexually explicit than anything these nice church-going kids have seen before, those reels of film are exactly the sort of thing hide and seal away in horror movies because they imprison a demon.
The last quarter-century or so of cinema construction has given us recliners, digital projection and sound, stadium seating, and, more to the point, buildings where even the first wave has more or less remained in its original configuration (even if the box offices are sometimes unnervingly unmanned). I will not argue for the superiority of the places that came before, their large screens awkwardly divided, their behind-the-scenes areas cramped and labyrinthine, and their projection booths filled with equipment bolted onto projectors that have been there since the silent era, but they undeniably have history and personality, and a large portion of the audience for this movie has probably spent enough time in those places for it to resonate. The oddity of the architecture combines with the way film holds frozen life to make the movie fantastical but also kind of right.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Misterio de la noche (Mystery of the Night)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Everybody's folklore is kind of messed up, but this movie makes it feel like a competition that the Philippines could win. It's a simple but impressively nasty combination of colonial horror and local legend, giving the audience what they've come for, albeit on a scale that may be a little too grand for what the filmmakers have to work with.
It starts with a town's mayor, Anselmo, going out to the forest to hunt, doing Father Parorozo a favor by taking a ranting, pregnant woman with his party and perhaps not being too concerned if she returns with them. A generation later, his son Domingo (Benjamin Alves) makes his own trip to the woods, where he discovers and makes love to a beautiful but feral woman who was raised by the forest spirits after her mother was killed by an angry sow. She is spellbinding but Domingo must eventually go home. "Maria" (Solenn Heussaff) follows him, but she has no more been prepared for the fact that a man who has been so attentive on his trip out of town may have a wife and child at home than she has been taught to walk on two feet. She reacts badly.
That's kind of inevitable, once you've seen Solenn Heusaff's performance leading up to that, which is a no-holds-barred take on the wild child tope that's kind of impressive in that it still has a sort of fantastic authenticity despite the fact that she's got to play things a little more broadly than one might necessarily have to do in order to stay ahead of the rest of the cast, which isn't exactly being restrained themselves. It's an enjoyable physical performance, unabashed in its sexualilty - the filmmakers tend to treat shame and denial as worse than actual sexual activity - and always a nice complement to what Benjamin Alves is doing as Domingo, whether he seems earnestly smitten or casually dismissive when he gets home and decides it can't continue. He does a nice job getting between those states, too, not making it feel like a switch has been turned or like Domingo had been dishonest before.
Full review on EFilmCritic
On the other, you can purchase it on Amazon Prime Video for six bucks in HD. You can also rent it for two or three, but, come on, that's an absurdly good price even to just hold
Anyway, enjoy me trying to make a case for/against movies based upon my Letterboxd entries and notes several months later!
The Deeper You Dig
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)
Every time I see a movie like The Deeper You Dig, I wonder how many more groups there are out there like the family that made it, tight-knit enough to do something as resource-and-time-consuming as a movie not just for no money but without the expectation that it will lead to something else. Hundreds, probably, with vanishingly few cracking the lineups of a major genre festival, mostly winding up on virtual shelves next to a hundred times as many self-published novels and indie rock MP3s online. Like most of that material, it will almost certainly not be the most accomplished or easily-recommended movies you'll see all year, but it's individual enough that it will speak almost directly to those who like it.
Ivy Allen (Toby Poser) has a good little grift going as a fortune teller, with 14-year-old daughter Echo (Zelda Adams) helping, shall we say, to set the scene. With other things to do around the house, Ivy's not able to watch Echo as she goes sledding on one of those winter days where the sun goes down quickly, and she is hit by a drunk driver. Horrified, Kurt (John Adams) starts to turn his life around, even making firends with Ivy when they meet in town and guiltily helping out where he can. Of course, it turns out that Ivy's connection to the spirit realm isn't completely imaginary, and Echo is not resting easily.
It's a bit strange to call a horror movie "cute", but that's the sort of vibe this DIY production gives off, especially once you know that the main cast are real-life parents and daughter. It's less actually scary than an earnest attempt to make a scary movie, with the basic shape of a ghost story and the bones of a good parallel between the haunted parties, though it can't help but feel more like people excited to make a horror movie than a group into the particular story they're telling. On top of that, it's a bit of a case where ghosts aren't necessarily as interesting as the guilt that they represent. That said, when the film takes an odd twist that leads to the movie trying to do two or three different things at once that don't quite mesh, it at least handles it better than a lot of films that take a big swing do. The last act may not be quite so eerie or unnerving as it is meant to, but it is also not nearly so unintentionally funny as expected.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Away
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
It's a rare feature film that is as singularly the work of one artist as Away, and of that small sample, few are this good. With nobody else credited on the film, director Gints Zilbalodis strips an adventure story down to fundamentals, makes some choices that maybe a larger team might not have, and comes through with an animated film for all ages that comes across as unique but not gimmicky.
The plot is dead-simple - a boy has survived a plane crash, starting the movie dangling from a tree by his parachute. He's in the middle of the wilderness, and the nearest city, Cloud Harbor, is some distance away. He's soon befriended by a yellow bird who seems to be about as alone as he is, and together, they journey through dangerous and surreal landscapes in hope of getting to the place that can get him home.
Away is a very simple movie in a lot of ways - Gints Zilbalodis made it on his own, and he's smart to keep from overburdening himself in ways that filmmakers telling this sort of story often do. He doesn't bother with dialogue, for instance, and makes it feel natural by not feeling the need to give the boy someone to talk to. He has, in large part, structured the film like a video game, and rendered it either with a gaming engine or some similar software, and it becomes an intriguing artistic choice on top of being very practical: It works as this boy attacking his problems in a way he understands, and why he doesn't necessarily need to be vocal. Zilbalodis doesn't make it an overt theme by being judgmental - this isn't a "kid who only knows the world through screens can't handle the real thing" movie - but going for a gaming aesthetic lets him buck filmmaking conventions and create different ways of understanding a character who doesn't have much reason to explain himself.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Jade's Asylum
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival, ProRes)
I can't say I much enjoyed Jade's Asylum, but the discussion with the filmmakers included one of the more tellingly confessional moments I've seen at a festival screening: It went from mostly indoors to mostly outdoors when they got on site and saw that their monster suit didn't look good in the mansion they'd rented. It doesn't make the final product better, but it gives one an idea of how many different pieces have to come together for a movie to work and an appreciation for how often you have to try and fix things on the fly.
The mansion is somewhere in Costa Rica, to which Jade Williams (Morgan Kohan) has come with boyfriend Toby Hunter (Kjartan Hewitt), one of several guests Toby's brother Wesley (Jeff Teravaninen) has invited for a housewarming party. Most are obnoxious bro types, although Mike (Sebastian Pigott) seems pretty decent despite coming with Instagram-diva girlfriend Tanya (Deanna Jarvis). Jade's in a fragile state and ready to walk back to the city to try and get home despite not having the money to fly back to Canada and Toby unwilling to help despite not really wanting her there, and that state of mind is not going to improve with a bunch of dudes covered in mushroom coming out of the woods to attack the gringos.
There's potential to that, if you want to dig into these characters' relationships and maybe make what's got Jade reeling feel much more central, but filmmaker Alexandre Carrière never seems to find anything there, and stretches what he has thin. This movie is 83 minutes long, but includes a whole ton of outtakes and such over the end credits, along with other big chunks of runtime wasted on pointless nonlinear circling back around to various flashbacks and flash-forwards throughout the film. Take out the subplots that go nowhere and the repetition and there's maybe a half-hour of movie here, and that half-hour doesn't make a lot of sense. One suspects that it is missing a lot of pieces that could have clarified things, but Carrière instead pursues the sort of ambiguity that does a movie little good unless there's something more compelling behind "real or not?" Maybe retooling while they shot put the filmmakers in a bad position, but the result isn't good.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Machida kun no sekai (Almost a Miracle aka Machida's World)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
It's always the ducks. No matter what the cartoon, or movie, or what, the ducks will be the funniest part. They don't actually make themselves known until relatively late, but the teenagers in this movie give them a run for their money, making for a high-school comedy that, for all of its eccentricities, often gets at the heart of what it means to be growing up and finding oneself.
Most notable is Hajime Machida (Kanata Hosoda), who is helpful and altruistic to the point where folks really don't know what to make of him. He winds up at the infirmary at the same time as Nana Inohara (Nagisa Sekimizu), and while something seems to spark, Machida immediately makes it weird. Meanwhile, Ryota NIshino (Taiga Nakano) likes Inohara but accidentally sends his letter declaring it to Machida, recently-dumped Sakura Takashima (Mitsuki Takahata) likes Machida but is liked by Yu Himuro (Takanori Iwata), and a struggling writer (Koichi Sato) thinks that there's a story in all this.
The teens are a bunch of lovable weirdos trying to figure themselves out, sometimes from odd starting points, and the compulsively altruistic Machida is intriguing for how he's such an extreme character who is such an odd type that one might find him hard to believe in, at least compared to some of the others - the cynical, gossiped-about Inohara is certainly much more immediately recognizable. It's often hard to be sure just what to make of Machida's broad-ranging generosity, especially since Kanata Hosoda's performance often makes it clear that Machida is doing what he has been told he should do, but there's not a contrasting "real Machida" behind it. It's a bit of a put-on, but also genuine. It's often easier to recognize the suspicion and confusion in Inohara's reactions; Nagisa Sekimizu plays a more conventional complex teen.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Bâsudê wandârando (The Wonderland)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, digital)
The Wonderland (aka "Birthday Wonderland") has all the surface elements of big, respectable anime - a decent coming-of-age story, absolutely beautiful animation, certain specific character types, a traditional life/environmental message - and does each of them well enough that it plays really well from minute to minute. The trouble is that the whole doesn't fit together in a way that does those pieces justice. It's kind of about moving forward but also accepting destiny and how modern life isn't good for the soul but also shopping… It's all over the place.
It has a common sort of template. Akane (voice of Mayu Matsuoka) is a moody girl turning thirteen, sent by mother Midori (voice of Kumiko Aso) on an errand to the junk shop run by Akane's weird aunt Chii (voice of Anne Watanabe), which gets stranger than things usually do around Chii: A secret passage opens and the alchemist Hippocrites (voice of Masachika Ichimura) and his apprentice Pipo (voice of Nao Toyama) emerge, seeking the "Goddess of the Green Wind" and deciding it's Akane. Soon, they're all transported back to another land, magical and of an earlier era, where Zan Gou (voice of Keiji Fujiwara) and his bat-like sidekick Doropo (voice of Akiko Yajima) are collecting metal for a nefarious purpose, and if Akane doesn't stop them with her "Momentum Anchor" necklace, she'll never get home.
I can't speak for Sachiko Kashiwaba's original novel, but the movie is scattered as heck. That doesn't make it bad, although it can start to wear; it's got the sort of quest structure that has a viewer just starting to get a feel for something before it's on to the next thing, leaving characters and settings and the like behind. For all that growing up is in many ways the process of taking all of this and figuring it out to make it part of oneself, there's not much time spent on Akane resolving these complexities or coming up with her own perspective. The film is never quite just things happening to Akane, but she finds herself along for the ride more often than leading the charge.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Bbaengban (Hit-and-Run Squad)
* * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
How does a movie about Seoul's car-crash investigators, on the tail of a Formula 1-driving criminal mastermind, have so little in the way of automotive action? For crying out loud, when a person buys a ticket for a movie named "Hit-and-Run Squad", they've got expectations, so get to the car chases already! This thing is 133 minutes long and really only has a couple of worthy bits of stunt driving.
That mastermind is "JC" Jung Jae-Chul (Cho Jung-Seok), who retired from the track early to get into business and has seemingly gotten as far as he has with bribery and extortion. It's being investigated by prosecutor Yoo Ji-Hyun (Yum Jung-Ah) and Lieutenant Eun Shi-Yeon (Kong Hyo-Jin), but when a sting backfires in disastrous fashion, with a star witness (Park Hyoung-Soo) attempting suicide during an interrogation and Eun reassigned to investigating car accidents. Not exactly a great career step for a rising star, and she's partnered with Seo Min-Jae (Ryoo Joon-Yeol), who can read an accident scene like a savant but isn't allowed to drive himself because of his checkered past. Then again, it's not like Eun is actually going to let this go, and Seo's skills may prove useful considering that JC still really likes his cars.
Even when you consider that JC is still invested in racing and racing-adjacent businesses, there's still a fairly substantial gulf in what goes on in those two types of stories, and the screenplay by Kim Kyung-Chan and director Han Jun-Hee doesn't do the best job in bridging it. The worst part is, all of the twisty corruption stuff which takes up the bulk of the running time not only doesn't make much sense, it's boring. The writers never seem to figure out who should be the big villain and why - the corruption seems to be fairly generic as opposed to in the service of something in particular - and it keeps stretching out and reversing until it becomes extremely hard to care about all the material that is just making the movie longer. There is so much going on that just doesn't matter, and it dilutes the bits that at least hint at something interesting in the focus on corruption.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Dreamland (aka Bruce McDonald's Dreamland)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The opening stretch of Bruce McDonald's Dreamland introduces a bunch of visually striking characters against a moody environment, has then open their mouths to begin a story, and then summarily has the all shot them in the head. The rest of the film isn't quite that nihilistic, but it is fairly pointedly eccentric and detached, the sort of thing that needs the idea that anything can happen in the audience's head lest they get frustrated with how little is happening right now. McDonald is going for a specific idea of cool here above all else, where it's more important to be stylish than tense.
It is plenty stylish, mostly taking place in the neighborhoods of a European capital where the movies that make a person want to visit Europe take place, the parts not developed into glass skyscrapers or filled with historical buildings that remain preserved in amber. There's cafes and clubs and pawnshops, and the assassin who frequents them taps into a network of cigarette-smoking urchins in suits, one of several places where the wires seem to be crossed and weird chimeras created. McDonald and his collaborators do a decent job of finding entertaining ways of mixing familiar tropes up into different arrangements so that there's often something both comfortingly familiar and bizarrely creative about them when he attempts to do so usually misses the mark.
Not everybody can fit into that sort of milieu, but frequent McDonald collaborator Steven McHattie can, and this movie fits him like a glove. He has a dual role, laying both a world-weary assassin and a decadent trumpet player, and a viewer probably wouldn't want anyone else playing either of those parts, even if the way the film winks at it is another thing that makes a viewer more aware of the games being played than a part of them. Watching him shamble around as the drug-addled musician or trying to do good while not really believing in his own humanity is a distinct pleasure even when a scene is going on too long. He's surrounded by similarly entertaining support - Henry Rollins as a gangster who seems laid-back to a fault but still carries grudges, Juliette Lewis as a maniacal Countess, Lisa Houle as a sympathetic ear in a bar - but these guys are never quite completely engaged with others, just as part of their nature.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Chiwawa-chan (aka Chiwawa)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Chiwawa is structured kind of like a murder mystery, but it's 50/50 as to whether that's the direction it's going to go at any point, and that's fine. After all, it seems like the other way they could have gone with it is faux documentary, which probably would have seemed more like middle-aged folks trying to make a movie about youth, despite actually having been made by a filmmaker relatively close to his characters in age. As someone who has never been a Japanese person in their early twenties, I can 't exactly say how well the film represents that group, but it nevertheless paints an interesting portrait.
It opens with a news report on the especially grisly murder of Yoshiko Chiwako, a twenty-year-old nursing student who, it is suggested, also found herself involved in less savory situations. It is a shock to their friends - they knew Yoshiko (Shiori Yoshida) as "Chiwawa", an effervescent party girl who parachuted into their group when Yoshida (Ryo Narita) picked her up in a bar, sticking around even as relationships changed between her, best friend Yumi (Tina Tamashiro), camera-toting Nagai (Nijiro Murakami), cynical model Miki (Mugi Kadowaki), and Yoshida's friend Katsuo (Kanichiro Sato). There are some wild times and emotional blowouts, but nothing that seems to actually explain what happened to Chiwawa-chan.
Screenwriter/director Ken Ninomiya adapts a manga by Kyoko Okazaki, and though he leads off with homicide, the actual crime is not quite so important as what it implies about the life she and her friends lead, and how it lacks the stabilizing influences and structures that their parents may have had. There's rocket fuel in certain sections of this movie, like how they find a bag with six million yen (roughly $60,000 American) and blow through it in three days of partying, and it doesn't necessarily feel like something that's pushing the plot to how things are going to end. Instead, it's a sign of the abandon with which it is possible for young people to live, while the news occasionally give them reasons to live like there's no tomorrow. People stop in the last leg of the movie to be transfixed by reports of a bombing in Singapore, and like the party, it's less a story point than illustration of the times and how little is in their direct control.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Porno
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Porno is the sort of movie that feels like someone should have thought of it and done it before, but I can't think of anything particularly similar, and I bet those with better catalogs in their brains won't think of a better "monsters in a run-down movie theater" picture (although, as this is very much my thing, I'm happy to hear what obvious example I'm blanking on ). Inspiration usually seems obvious in retrospect, and thus is inspired even before the nice cast and quality, fearless execution shows up.
It takes place in the early 1990s (Encino Man and A League of Their Own are on the two-plex's marquee), and as they do every Friday night, the teenagers who work there are going to watch a movie after the customers leave. Chastity (Jillian Mueller) has just been made assistant manager, and Ricky (Glenn Stott) has just come back from camp, though his talk of the girlfriend he met there have had no noticeable effect on Chaz's crush. Also working are Abe (Evan Daves) and Todd (Larry Saperstein), but before they can tell projectionist Heavy Metal Jeff (Robbie Tann) what they want to watch, a homeless man bursts in and uncovers a secret door, behind which they find a strange archive and a third screen in the basement. Obviously, when that happens, you watch what you just found - and, of course, it's inevitable that in addition to being more sexually explicit than anything these nice church-going kids have seen before, those reels of film are exactly the sort of thing hide and seal away in horror movies because they imprison a demon.
The last quarter-century or so of cinema construction has given us recliners, digital projection and sound, stadium seating, and, more to the point, buildings where even the first wave has more or less remained in its original configuration (even if the box offices are sometimes unnervingly unmanned). I will not argue for the superiority of the places that came before, their large screens awkwardly divided, their behind-the-scenes areas cramped and labyrinthine, and their projection booths filled with equipment bolted onto projectors that have been there since the silent era, but they undeniably have history and personality, and a large portion of the audience for this movie has probably spent enough time in those places for it to resonate. The oddity of the architecture combines with the way film holds frozen life to make the movie fantastical but also kind of right.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Misterio de la noche (Mystery of the Night)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Everybody's folklore is kind of messed up, but this movie makes it feel like a competition that the Philippines could win. It's a simple but impressively nasty combination of colonial horror and local legend, giving the audience what they've come for, albeit on a scale that may be a little too grand for what the filmmakers have to work with.
It starts with a town's mayor, Anselmo, going out to the forest to hunt, doing Father Parorozo a favor by taking a ranting, pregnant woman with his party and perhaps not being too concerned if she returns with them. A generation later, his son Domingo (Benjamin Alves) makes his own trip to the woods, where he discovers and makes love to a beautiful but feral woman who was raised by the forest spirits after her mother was killed by an angry sow. She is spellbinding but Domingo must eventually go home. "Maria" (Solenn Heussaff) follows him, but she has no more been prepared for the fact that a man who has been so attentive on his trip out of town may have a wife and child at home than she has been taught to walk on two feet. She reacts badly.
That's kind of inevitable, once you've seen Solenn Heusaff's performance leading up to that, which is a no-holds-barred take on the wild child tope that's kind of impressive in that it still has a sort of fantastic authenticity despite the fact that she's got to play things a little more broadly than one might necessarily have to do in order to stay ahead of the rest of the cast, which isn't exactly being restrained themselves. It's an enjoyable physical performance, unabashed in its sexualilty - the filmmakers tend to treat shame and denial as worse than actual sexual activity - and always a nice complement to what Benjamin Alves is doing as Domingo, whether he seems earnestly smitten or casually dismissive when he gets home and decides it can't continue. He does a nice job getting between those states, too, not making it feel like a switch has been turned or like Domingo had been dishonest before.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Friday, February 07, 2020
Short Stuff: The 2019 Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Shorts
Though I'll be watching the Oscars on Sunday with no small amount of interest in who receives awards, I genuinely do believe that the most important part of awards season is the period between nominations being announced and the actual ceremony; it's a decently-curated list of good films and a manageable bit of pressure to see and discuss them now. For the live-action shorts, it's even more; while the animated and documentary shorts have some outlets to get seen, if not as many as features, these films' best chances to find an audience are undeniably in the blocks that play theaters in the lead-up to the ceremonies.
It shouldn't be that way; there's often greatness in these films and a streaming service that could get people to watch one of these rather than just dipping into The Office again could do a world of good, but the algorithms are fickle and would need to be trained to serve up these small, generally independent productions. Maybe I'll try and start training Prime to offer them to me this spring by finding what I can and watching a bunch; in the meantime, this showcase is their biggest stage.
"Une Soeur" ("A Sister")
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
The first one included in this year's batch is "A Sister", written and directed by Delphine Girad, which opens with a nervous woman (Selma Alaoui) and an agitated man (Guillaume Duhesme) in a car, driving down a dark road. She says she needs to call her sister Lucie, who is looking after the kids, and anybody watching can see that she's choosing her words carefully to avoid upsetting the driver. After a minute, it rewinds to also show the woman on the other end of the call (Veerle Baetens), which paints a much different picture.
Girad takes these simple building blocks and creates a tight little thriller, a game of cat-and-mouse that isn't exactly low-stakes to the people involved but which is pointedly limited in space and where specific threats are not entirely laid out. In telling this story this way, she is applying genre trappings to something more urgently real, pointing out that for many women, a lot of everyday life can be as nail-biting as any suspense picture but much less fun, with Alaoui and Baetens making sure that even moments that can play as cool or collected come off as ill-conceived bravado or with frustration and resignation. These women know this bad situation, but that doesn't make handling it easier or less dangerous
Girad gets a lot out of simple environments, and the cinematography by Juliette Van Dormael is so aggressively not showy that it sometimes can seem frustrating, as there's rarely any extra light, so it's fairly dark inside the car - and darker still in flashbacks to earlier in the evening - while the lights are down back in the city as well, just dim enough to make "Lulu" seem clearly defined but anonymous. Depending on presentation, viewers may sometimes feel themselves squinting to catch what is going on, though it certainly captures how much situations like this happen outside of view.
"Brotherhood"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
We move from Belgium to Tunisia for "Brotherhood", which begins with a shepherd (Mohamed Grayaâ) and his sons putting down a goat that has been felled by a wolf, something older son Chaker (Chaker Mechergui) is having a hard time mustering the stomach to do. Chaker is, in fact, his second-oldest son, with Malek (Malek Mechergui) just returning from Syria with new wife Reem (Jasmine Lazid) in tow, hidden behind a burqa and pregnant. Though mother Salha (Salha Nasraoui) is forgiving, the circumstances of Malek's return sit as poorly with Mohamed as his reasons for leaving.
The audience learns those in time; writer/director Meryam Joobeur has a knack for letting important pieces of information reveal themselves without the film stopping for a character to shout them and then slowing down enough so that the viewer has a few moments to chew on them without much distraction. That one can feel her doing this is interesting because one can often sense that Mohamed is not reconsidering things in that way, at least not until he's finally got every last piece. Joobeur nevertheless lets the idea of how that mindset can be dangerous as well as unkind simmer, even though the very first scene highlights a decisiveness that expects a lot out of his family.
It's a nice little performance, meshing well with that of Salha Nasraoui, giving this married couple a history that hasn't soured despite the amount of wear they both display; they get how to argue passionately enough that one feels how strongly the pair disagree and a sense of the line that both know not to approach and how bad it would be to cross it. Jasmin Lazid does very nice work even when almost completely hidden behind black cloth, and while Joobeur wanting to keep some cards close limits what Malek Mechergui can do a bit, the scenes between him and what I presume (from the shared last name) are his real-life brothers are terrific, underlining the sense of familial bonds even when the older characters are speaking about something less purely emotional but more easily defined.
"The Neighbor's Window"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
"The Neighbor's Window" is a sitcom plot that someone decided to take seriously, starting with thirty-ish Alli (Maria Dizzia) and Jacob (Greg Keller), parents of rambunctious twins with another baby on the way, noticing that the attractive new neighbors across the way haven't bothered to put up drapes or blinds or the like before getting it on in their new apartment. They never really get around to it, and over the next year or so, the older couple never really stops looking, even if it prompts both a little jealousy and reminders that they aren't exactly those sort of free-spirited 22-year-olds any more.
Filmmaker Marshall Curry and his cast work to elevate the story over a Friends subplot, with discussions of the meaning of why Alli and Jacob watch coming early rather than in an epilogue and a more dramatic twist coming somewhere around the midway point, but it the story doesn't quite make the jump from coming across an experiment in playing a comic trope straight to playing like the anecdote that gets simplified. The film also feels like the characters' lives are built around the times they're looking out the window with references to the rest of their existence not quite organic. Relatedly, it's also got one of those endings where the bad fortune that befalls others transparently exists solely so that the protagonists can learn from it
Still, that last scene has co-star Juliana Canfield doing her level best to turn the perspective around, even if the material just doesn't seem to be there. Keller and especially Dizzia do well with what they're given as well, making asides about their kids being a handful pull their weight in keeping things moving. And if the bulk of the film often feels by-the-numbers, the sequence where Alli is unable to look away at the moment when it would be most mortifying to have the neighbors see her watching is likely enough to get the entire short nominated on its own.
"Saria"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
Bryan Buckley's "Saria" opens with a great sequence of its own, with a sizeable insect zipping across the floor, and in a way it's both the woman whose heavy footsteps it dodges - vermin that endangers the orphans under her care and also the kids, small and easily endangered even if they are sometimes quick-witted enough to skitter out of the way. Saria (Estefanía Tellez) certainly is; the pre-teen may not yet understand big sister Ximena (Gabriela Ramírez) being interested in boys, but she's brave and quick-witted, with a plan to escape this place and flee to America, even if it means walking 2,500 km from Guatemala. And when Ms. López (Imelda Castro) subjects her to horrific punishment for mouthing off in class, that only makes her more determined.
Based on a true story and performed in large part by children who were present during the events of 17 March 2017, "Saria" appropriates its namesake's bluntness, forsaking any euphemisms for how many of the children in this "safe home" are regularly being raped and otherwise abused and instead having the girls talk frankly about it and scream the fact in protest as they flee. Buckley infuses the film with hot rage from beginning to end, making sure to leave very little room for any sort of idealized innocence or ideas that this was an avoidable tragedy where people were trying their hardest. Even if it was, his insistence on maintaining Saria's point of view until moments before the end means that the audience will see very little room for forgiveness, and will have to connect their own dots of just what awaits a group of dozens of Latino kids at the American border. It's harsh, but an earned harshness, careful not to exaggerate in either direction, not sanitizing the situation or making the kids too wise.
The young cast is very good for being either non-actors or on some of their first roles, with Tellez and Ramirez especially good. Buckley handles the more active parts of the film nicely as well, making for a fine climax even if the epilogue is a bit curt.
"Nefta Football Club"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
After that heavy true story, it's fun to finish up with "Nefta Football Club", a fun shaggy-dog story where a goat wearing headphones is lost in Algeria and found by a pair of brothers across the border in Tunisia - who also find the many packages of white powder in its saddlebags, which older brother Mohamed (Eltayef Dhaoui) figures he can sell, although naive, football-loving kid brother Abdallah (Mohamed Ali Ayari) has another idea.
Yves Piat's film is endearingly odd, the sort of thing you could easily see being the first act of a Coen Brothers-style caper that gets weirder and more twisted as it goes along, so it's actually somewhat impressive that he knows where to stop, establishing just enough to make the eccentric premise work but also limiting things to the point where it can come in for a smooth landing after 17 minutes. Piat is good at packing everything he needs into that space - set up something that will pay into the climax as local color early, make the smugglers' differing interests part of the plot, get from one thing that needs to happen to the next with snappy jokes that nevertheless don't make the kids sound like miniature adults, that sort of thing.
On top of that, the film's got two separate entertaining odd couples, with Lyès Salem and Hichem Mesbah having a bit of a Laurel & Hardy thing going on the one hand and Eltayef Dhaoui & Mohamed Ali Ayari having great sibling rapport on the other. Ayari is especially fun, a ball of kid-brother energy who is able to sell that Abdallah is a bright kid while also having the sort of wide-eyed innocence that can throw a major wrench into his brother's plans.
"Nefta Football Club" and "A Sister" are my favorites from the package, although I wouldn't bet against the rawness of "Saria" in terms of who actually receives the award. Mostly, I just want it to be easier to quickly find a good short or three two watch when I've got fifteen minutes or a half hour to fill.
It shouldn't be that way; there's often greatness in these films and a streaming service that could get people to watch one of these rather than just dipping into The Office again could do a world of good, but the algorithms are fickle and would need to be trained to serve up these small, generally independent productions. Maybe I'll try and start training Prime to offer them to me this spring by finding what I can and watching a bunch; in the meantime, this showcase is their biggest stage.
"Une Soeur" ("A Sister")
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
The first one included in this year's batch is "A Sister", written and directed by Delphine Girad, which opens with a nervous woman (Selma Alaoui) and an agitated man (Guillaume Duhesme) in a car, driving down a dark road. She says she needs to call her sister Lucie, who is looking after the kids, and anybody watching can see that she's choosing her words carefully to avoid upsetting the driver. After a minute, it rewinds to also show the woman on the other end of the call (Veerle Baetens), which paints a much different picture.
Girad takes these simple building blocks and creates a tight little thriller, a game of cat-and-mouse that isn't exactly low-stakes to the people involved but which is pointedly limited in space and where specific threats are not entirely laid out. In telling this story this way, she is applying genre trappings to something more urgently real, pointing out that for many women, a lot of everyday life can be as nail-biting as any suspense picture but much less fun, with Alaoui and Baetens making sure that even moments that can play as cool or collected come off as ill-conceived bravado or with frustration and resignation. These women know this bad situation, but that doesn't make handling it easier or less dangerous
Girad gets a lot out of simple environments, and the cinematography by Juliette Van Dormael is so aggressively not showy that it sometimes can seem frustrating, as there's rarely any extra light, so it's fairly dark inside the car - and darker still in flashbacks to earlier in the evening - while the lights are down back in the city as well, just dim enough to make "Lulu" seem clearly defined but anonymous. Depending on presentation, viewers may sometimes feel themselves squinting to catch what is going on, though it certainly captures how much situations like this happen outside of view.
"Brotherhood"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
We move from Belgium to Tunisia for "Brotherhood", which begins with a shepherd (Mohamed Grayaâ) and his sons putting down a goat that has been felled by a wolf, something older son Chaker (Chaker Mechergui) is having a hard time mustering the stomach to do. Chaker is, in fact, his second-oldest son, with Malek (Malek Mechergui) just returning from Syria with new wife Reem (Jasmine Lazid) in tow, hidden behind a burqa and pregnant. Though mother Salha (Salha Nasraoui) is forgiving, the circumstances of Malek's return sit as poorly with Mohamed as his reasons for leaving.
The audience learns those in time; writer/director Meryam Joobeur has a knack for letting important pieces of information reveal themselves without the film stopping for a character to shout them and then slowing down enough so that the viewer has a few moments to chew on them without much distraction. That one can feel her doing this is interesting because one can often sense that Mohamed is not reconsidering things in that way, at least not until he's finally got every last piece. Joobeur nevertheless lets the idea of how that mindset can be dangerous as well as unkind simmer, even though the very first scene highlights a decisiveness that expects a lot out of his family.
It's a nice little performance, meshing well with that of Salha Nasraoui, giving this married couple a history that hasn't soured despite the amount of wear they both display; they get how to argue passionately enough that one feels how strongly the pair disagree and a sense of the line that both know not to approach and how bad it would be to cross it. Jasmin Lazid does very nice work even when almost completely hidden behind black cloth, and while Joobeur wanting to keep some cards close limits what Malek Mechergui can do a bit, the scenes between him and what I presume (from the shared last name) are his real-life brothers are terrific, underlining the sense of familial bonds even when the older characters are speaking about something less purely emotional but more easily defined.
"The Neighbor's Window"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
"The Neighbor's Window" is a sitcom plot that someone decided to take seriously, starting with thirty-ish Alli (Maria Dizzia) and Jacob (Greg Keller), parents of rambunctious twins with another baby on the way, noticing that the attractive new neighbors across the way haven't bothered to put up drapes or blinds or the like before getting it on in their new apartment. They never really get around to it, and over the next year or so, the older couple never really stops looking, even if it prompts both a little jealousy and reminders that they aren't exactly those sort of free-spirited 22-year-olds any more.
Filmmaker Marshall Curry and his cast work to elevate the story over a Friends subplot, with discussions of the meaning of why Alli and Jacob watch coming early rather than in an epilogue and a more dramatic twist coming somewhere around the midway point, but it the story doesn't quite make the jump from coming across an experiment in playing a comic trope straight to playing like the anecdote that gets simplified. The film also feels like the characters' lives are built around the times they're looking out the window with references to the rest of their existence not quite organic. Relatedly, it's also got one of those endings where the bad fortune that befalls others transparently exists solely so that the protagonists can learn from it
Still, that last scene has co-star Juliana Canfield doing her level best to turn the perspective around, even if the material just doesn't seem to be there. Keller and especially Dizzia do well with what they're given as well, making asides about their kids being a handful pull their weight in keeping things moving. And if the bulk of the film often feels by-the-numbers, the sequence where Alli is unable to look away at the moment when it would be most mortifying to have the neighbors see her watching is likely enough to get the entire short nominated on its own.
"Saria"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
Bryan Buckley's "Saria" opens with a great sequence of its own, with a sizeable insect zipping across the floor, and in a way it's both the woman whose heavy footsteps it dodges - vermin that endangers the orphans under her care and also the kids, small and easily endangered even if they are sometimes quick-witted enough to skitter out of the way. Saria (Estefanía Tellez) certainly is; the pre-teen may not yet understand big sister Ximena (Gabriela Ramírez) being interested in boys, but she's brave and quick-witted, with a plan to escape this place and flee to America, even if it means walking 2,500 km from Guatemala. And when Ms. López (Imelda Castro) subjects her to horrific punishment for mouthing off in class, that only makes her more determined.
Based on a true story and performed in large part by children who were present during the events of 17 March 2017, "Saria" appropriates its namesake's bluntness, forsaking any euphemisms for how many of the children in this "safe home" are regularly being raped and otherwise abused and instead having the girls talk frankly about it and scream the fact in protest as they flee. Buckley infuses the film with hot rage from beginning to end, making sure to leave very little room for any sort of idealized innocence or ideas that this was an avoidable tragedy where people were trying their hardest. Even if it was, his insistence on maintaining Saria's point of view until moments before the end means that the audience will see very little room for forgiveness, and will have to connect their own dots of just what awaits a group of dozens of Latino kids at the American border. It's harsh, but an earned harshness, careful not to exaggerate in either direction, not sanitizing the situation or making the kids too wise.
The young cast is very good for being either non-actors or on some of their first roles, with Tellez and Ramirez especially good. Buckley handles the more active parts of the film nicely as well, making for a fine climax even if the epilogue is a bit curt.
"Nefta Football Club"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2020 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
After that heavy true story, it's fun to finish up with "Nefta Football Club", a fun shaggy-dog story where a goat wearing headphones is lost in Algeria and found by a pair of brothers across the border in Tunisia - who also find the many packages of white powder in its saddlebags, which older brother Mohamed (Eltayef Dhaoui) figures he can sell, although naive, football-loving kid brother Abdallah (Mohamed Ali Ayari) has another idea.
Yves Piat's film is endearingly odd, the sort of thing you could easily see being the first act of a Coen Brothers-style caper that gets weirder and more twisted as it goes along, so it's actually somewhat impressive that he knows where to stop, establishing just enough to make the eccentric premise work but also limiting things to the point where it can come in for a smooth landing after 17 minutes. Piat is good at packing everything he needs into that space - set up something that will pay into the climax as local color early, make the smugglers' differing interests part of the plot, get from one thing that needs to happen to the next with snappy jokes that nevertheless don't make the kids sound like miniature adults, that sort of thing.
On top of that, the film's got two separate entertaining odd couples, with Lyès Salem and Hichem Mesbah having a bit of a Laurel & Hardy thing going on the one hand and Eltayef Dhaoui & Mohamed Ali Ayari having great sibling rapport on the other. Ayari is especially fun, a ball of kid-brother energy who is able to sell that Abdallah is a bright kid while also having the sort of wide-eyed innocence that can throw a major wrench into his brother's plans.
"Nefta Football Club" and "A Sister" are my favorites from the package, although I wouldn't bet against the rawness of "Saria" in terms of who actually receives the award. Mostly, I just want it to be easier to quickly find a good short or three two watch when I've got fifteen minutes or a half hour to fill.
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 7 February 2020 - 13 February 2020
It is genuinely weird to have the Oscars get in the way of the sci-fi film festival; I know that even awards contenders cycle through theaters so fast now that they've got to keep moving up, but this feels way too early.
- But, believe it or not, The Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival kicks off Friday night in The Somerville Theatre, and for all that I've given the festival and its organizers a hard time in the past, they have (in combination with other local film organizations) put together a schedule with some pretty noteworthy entries: Opening night film Proxima, for instance, stars Eva Green and is written and directed by Alice Winocur, while Saturday night includes Synchronic, the new one from Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead, who haven't done a less-than-great feature yet. Mattie Do is here from Laos to do a Q&A after The Long Walk Sunday afternoon, and… Well, I'll admit, I haven't actually been that excited with the rest. Shorts packages and conferences will be at The Rockwell through Tuesday before moving back to the Somerville's Micro-Cinema for the rest of the fest, and there will also be a special "first-person cinema" live commentary for Serenity at the The Museum of Science on Tuesday night..
- Upstairs (mostly) in the Somerville's big room, the week's only new release, Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn is the week's only wide release, also playing at Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), Boston Common (including Imax/Dolby Cinema), Causeway Street (including Wide Screen), Fenway, the Seaport (including Icon-X), South Bay (including Imax/Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax/Dolby Cinema), the Embassy, Chestnut Hill, and Revere (including MX4D/XPlus).
The Kendall, Boston Common, and Fenway all continue their Best Picture showcases this weekend, with the Kendall notably being the only one to include the Netflix productions. Fenway and Assembly Row will have 50th Anniversary screenings of Love Story on Sunday afternoon, with Revere joining them on Wednesday evening. Filipino (but English-language) historical drama Quezon's Game is at Boston Common on Monday, while Revere has Fatal Attraction that night. Concert film Break on Thru: A Celebration of Ray Manzarek and The Doors plays Wednesday night at the Kendall, Boston Common, Fenway, and Chestnut Hill. The latest Russian film at Fenway, Vtorzhenie ("Invasion") is a sequel to 2017's first-contact story Attraction, and I won't lie about being curious despite not being impressed with the first. There are also special preview screenings of Portrait of a Lady on Fire at Boston Common, Causeway Street, Fenway, the Kendall, and the Embassy on Wednesday, before the "regular" night-before shows on Thursday prior to its opening next weekend. - The Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square, and Boston Common open The Assistant, which arrives here soon after playing Sundance, with Julia Garner as an executive assistant having rather a lot asked of her. The Coolidge also begins showing some of its screenings of Parasite (doing a really impressive job of hanging around despite already being out on disc) in the new black-and-white version.
The Coolidge also adds the documentaries to their mix of Oscar-nominated shorts, the 160 minutes broken into two (roughly) 80-minute programs. If you wish to catch the shorts before (or after!) the ceremony, the Coolidge, Cinema Salem, and Causeway Street have everything every day; Kendall Square and Boston Common have live action and animation daily; The ICA has documentaries on Saturday (in two programs) and animation & live action on Sunday, with a program of Sundance shorts starting Thursday; The Lexington Venue has animation Friday/Saturday and the documentary and live action programs Saturday/Sunday; and the Luna has everything on Saturday.
The midnights at the Coolidge this week feature new digital restorations, with Fulci's The House by the Cemetary playing Friday and Saturday, Slumber Party Massacre II only on Friday, and a 35mm print of Trouble Every Day on Saturday. If you'd rather show up early, Sunday morning has both a show of Kids' Flicks from the New York International Children's Film Festival and a Goethe-Institut screening of The Goldfish. Monday night's Science on Screen show is a 35mm print of Panic in the Streets with microbiologist Silvia Caballero discussing new approaches to fighting disease. There's Open Screen on Tuesday and an already-sold-out Valentine's show of When Harry met Sally… on 35mm Thursday. - Kendall Square also picks up Citizen K, a documentary from Alex Gibney that puts the spotlight on Mikhail Khodorovsky, one of the first Russians to get extremely rich after the fall of the Soviet Union, who was later imprisoned for ten years and later exiled after speaking out against Putin.
- Apple Fresh Pond has three new movies from India this week - Telegu-language high-school reunion romance Jaanu; Tamil action/romance Malang - Unleash the Madness, and Tamil family drama Vaanam Kottattum, with Jawaani Jaaneman and Panga also continuing their run.
The runs for Dominican comedy Los Leones at Revere and Weathering with You at Boston Common also continue. Boston Common also opens The Man Standing Next, a political drama from South Korea featuring Lee Byung-hun as a fictionalized version of the head of the KCIA in the 1970s, in a more straight-ahead telling of the same events that inspired The President's Last Bang. I am kind of mildly surprised that this is the first Korean film to open here since Parasite; you'd think someone might have tried to see if that was a wave they could ride a bit. - The Brattle Theatre leads up to their Sunday night Oscar Party with 35mm screenings of Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood (and a special 35mm preshow) from Friday to Sunday. On Saturday it shares the screen with Boston Jewish Film's Boston Israeli Film Festival, which also has shows at The West Newton Cinema from Sunday to Tuesday and finishes at the JCC Reimler-Goldstein Theater on Wednesday and Thursday.
After that, the Brattle has the first DocYard screening of the season on Monday, with directors Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside there to discuss América, their film about a family coming together to care for their deteriorating mother. There's a "Cinema in Context" screening of Carol on Tuesday, with a post-film discussion led by KJ Surkan. There's nothing on the schedule Wednesday, but Thursday starts the Valentine's programs, with 35mm prints of Casablanca and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. - The Harvard Film Archive completes The Films and Videos of Richard Serra, with "Prisoners Dilemma" as program #3 on Friday and a pair of 16mm shorts on Sunday evening. Their Angela Schanelec program also reaches its end, with screenings of The Dreamed Path on Friday and Saturday night and Ms. Schanelec visiting in person for her latest, I Was at Home, But, on Monday evening. The Weekend Matinee on Saturday afternoon is a subtitled 35mm print of Studio Ghibli's relatively little-screened Whisper of the Heart, showing for $5 and free with a Cambridge library card. Finally, the weekend's Silent Hitchcock shows are The Ring on Saturday evening and Downhill on Sunday afternoon, both on 35mm..
- The Museum of Fine Arts begins a run of documentary 16 Bars on Friday, with Sam Bathrick's film about the music being made inside the American prison system also playing Sunday and Wednesday. Much of the rest of the week is given to the Boston Festival of Films from Japan, including Dance with Me (Friday/Saturday), an "on the fringe" show of Spirited Away (Friday), Blue Hour (Saturday), Killing (Wednesday), Okko's Inn (Thursday), and Erica 38. There's also a second show of "The Blunderwood Portable" on Sunday.
- Bright Lights has what I believe is the first Boston-area showing of A Vigilante on Tuesday, with producer Andrew Corkin there for discussion. Thursday's show, #Female Pleasure, has director Barbara Miller on hand. Both are free to the public in the Paramount's Bright Screening Room
- In addition to the Oscar shorts, The Luna Theater has Parasite on Friday and Tuesday evenings, Casablanca all day Sunday, and the usual free Sunday Morning Magical Mystery Movie Club and Weirdo Wednesday surprises.
Wednesday, February 05, 2020
This Week in Tickets: 27 January 2020 - 2 February 2020
I hate the reason that it happened, but I would have run myself completely ragged going to movies if the Lunar New Year Movies hadn't all been cancelled/postponed.
It's fairly rare for me to run the table for a series at the Brattle these days, and I didn't really do it here (I skipped the previous Saturday and Sunday and left after the first movie on Thursday because I just saw Dr. Cyclops a year ago), but I did spend the first four days of last week at "Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema", catching The Man They Could Not Hang, The Boogie Man Will Get You, Just Imagine, L'Inhumaine, and Mad Love over four days. It's a crying shame that more big-budget sci-fi wasn't made during this period - I can't think of another blockbuster fantasy aside from The Wizard of Oz between Metropolis and Forbidden Planet - because the raw visual imagination was kind of stunning.
Friday night was back to Harvard Square for more Silent Hitchcock at the Archive, with The Lodger the first entry for the weekend. Hitchcock was really starting to become Hitchcock there.
On Saturday, I spent an afternoon doing Oscar-nominated shorts, starting with the Documentaries at Causeway Street - the only place playing them on the T this week - and then heading down the Green Line for Animation at Boston Common. There was just enough time to make that trip, but it was worth it. In a fun coincidence, both were showing on screen #7 in their respective buildings.
After that, back up the Red Line to Harvard, to catch the silent version of Blackmail at the Archive. I enjoyed it a great deal, and the introduction had me curious enough to come back the next night to see the talkie version. I think it might have been my first time seeing that film with sound, despite being told how rare the silent version was before each of the three or four times I have attended a screening in the past decade or so.
As always, keep up with my Letterboxd page, because I'm pretty sure I'll start falling behind soon, what with the first festival of the year starting on Friday.
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm accompanied by Martin Marks)
There aren't enough characters in The Lodger to create an actual mystery around the identity of its serial killer, which means that when you see it now, there's almost a century of people playing with you, from Hitchcock to whoever is doing the accompaniment, emphasizing how obviously Ivor Novello's title character is bad news. It only makes the scenes of him and the girl that fits the killer's type sexier, especially when contrasted with the cop next door who is clearly talking their future together for granted.
I do kind of wonder how that guy would have delivered one of his last lines, "lucky I got here in time!", if this were a sound film. It's just the right amount of funny and twisted as an inter-title, but being spoken could have made it too important or silly or the like.
What I thought back in 2013, the last time the HFA did a Hitchcock retrospective
Blackmail
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm accompanied by Martin Marks)
Seen 2 February 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm sound version)
Though both are fine entertainments, I found myself liking the silent version of Blackmail more. It just feels right, especially considering how the elongated beginning of both is identical, with the missing dialogue feeling strange in the sound version, but more so because the camera feels a bit less restricted, though not always - having both Anny Ondra's heroine and Cyril Ritchard's creepy artist on-screen at once works better than the cutting in the silent version, even if it was done to show off Ritchard playing the piano and singing. It is, if nothing else, a fascinating artifact both for how the industry was scrambling to figure shooting with new, less mobile technology out and how Hitchcock immediately seemed to grasp how useful it might be to not have the music under the control of some random accompanist when he wanted chilling silence, or how he could choose what the audience heard to create subjectivity. Both of those are a huge part of why Alice's reaction to killing said artist in self-defense feels like a genuine state of shock
Alice's "dubbed" voice (provided by Joan Barry on the set but off-camera) threw me, not because I know Anny Ondra's (I don't), but for how working class it is. It seems like it wouldn't take long for those accents to become comedic as opposed to just how many Londoners talked.
What I thought in 2005, when I saw the silent version with the Alloy Orchestra accompanying
It's fairly rare for me to run the table for a series at the Brattle these days, and I didn't really do it here (I skipped the previous Saturday and Sunday and left after the first movie on Thursday because I just saw Dr. Cyclops a year ago), but I did spend the first four days of last week at "Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema", catching The Man They Could Not Hang, The Boogie Man Will Get You, Just Imagine, L'Inhumaine, and Mad Love over four days. It's a crying shame that more big-budget sci-fi wasn't made during this period - I can't think of another blockbuster fantasy aside from The Wizard of Oz between Metropolis and Forbidden Planet - because the raw visual imagination was kind of stunning.
Friday night was back to Harvard Square for more Silent Hitchcock at the Archive, with The Lodger the first entry for the weekend. Hitchcock was really starting to become Hitchcock there.
On Saturday, I spent an afternoon doing Oscar-nominated shorts, starting with the Documentaries at Causeway Street - the only place playing them on the T this week - and then heading down the Green Line for Animation at Boston Common. There was just enough time to make that trip, but it was worth it. In a fun coincidence, both were showing on screen #7 in their respective buildings.
After that, back up the Red Line to Harvard, to catch the silent version of Blackmail at the Archive. I enjoyed it a great deal, and the introduction had me curious enough to come back the next night to see the talkie version. I think it might have been my first time seeing that film with sound, despite being told how rare the silent version was before each of the three or four times I have attended a screening in the past decade or so.
As always, keep up with my Letterboxd page, because I'm pretty sure I'll start falling behind soon, what with the first festival of the year starting on Friday.
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm accompanied by Martin Marks)
There aren't enough characters in The Lodger to create an actual mystery around the identity of its serial killer, which means that when you see it now, there's almost a century of people playing with you, from Hitchcock to whoever is doing the accompaniment, emphasizing how obviously Ivor Novello's title character is bad news. It only makes the scenes of him and the girl that fits the killer's type sexier, especially when contrasted with the cop next door who is clearly talking their future together for granted.
I do kind of wonder how that guy would have delivered one of his last lines, "lucky I got here in time!", if this were a sound film. It's just the right amount of funny and twisted as an inter-title, but being spoken could have made it too important or silly or the like.
What I thought back in 2013, the last time the HFA did a Hitchcock retrospective
Blackmail
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm accompanied by Martin Marks)
Seen 2 February 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm sound version)
Though both are fine entertainments, I found myself liking the silent version of Blackmail more. It just feels right, especially considering how the elongated beginning of both is identical, with the missing dialogue feeling strange in the sound version, but more so because the camera feels a bit less restricted, though not always - having both Anny Ondra's heroine and Cyril Ritchard's creepy artist on-screen at once works better than the cutting in the silent version, even if it was done to show off Ritchard playing the piano and singing. It is, if nothing else, a fascinating artifact both for how the industry was scrambling to figure shooting with new, less mobile technology out and how Hitchcock immediately seemed to grasp how useful it might be to not have the music under the control of some random accompanist when he wanted chilling silence, or how he could choose what the audience heard to create subjectivity. Both of those are a huge part of why Alice's reaction to killing said artist in self-defense feels like a genuine state of shock
Alice's "dubbed" voice (provided by Joan Barry on the set but off-camera) threw me, not because I know Anny Ondra's (I don't), but for how working class it is. It seems like it wouldn't take long for those accents to become comedic as opposed to just how many Londoners talked.
What I thought in 2005, when I saw the silent version with the Alloy Orchestra accompanying
Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema at the Brattle
The Brattle Theatre is doing a year-long series of series for science fiction film this year, which is quite obviously a Thing I Am Excited About, enough so that I hunkered down for most of a series for the first time in months, perhaps longer if festivals like BUFF and Noir City Boston don't count. I'm looking forward to many more; if there's one per calendar, I figure on seeing 50/60s red-scare stuff in March, the weird and fascinating 1970s and early 1980s in May, shaking a fist as I miss independent/foreign voices while I'm at Fantasia in July, the mainstream blockbuster era in September, and the new group of international/independent voices that China, streaming, and digital effects have enabled in November. Maybe a Japan/animation series in there somewhere. Ned will surprise me.
Of course, one has to admit that the early years are kind of thin, for a number of reasons. The series starts with Georges Méliès and H.G. Wells, but what's inescapable is how, between Méliès's short fantasies and the re-emergence of the genre in the 1950s, there's not much. Lang did some great silents in Germany but never was able to make that sort of pulp when he came to America, and there were a fair number of "Fantastik" films coming out of the Soviet Union during this period (Saturday's program paired Aelita, the Queen of Mars and Metropolis), but there are relatively few silents and almost no talkies coming from the big American studios. I suspect that the mainstreaming of the movies had a large effect on it - just as women had their creative roles reduced as film became seen as big business and more than low art, genre work that was mostly the thing of pulps in print and which required resources that couldn't easily be reused wasn't seen as a great investment. Even what is arguably the biggest sci-fi film from the early talkies, King Kong, had lots of material reused for/from The Most Dangerous Game, while the films like Frankenstein and other works featured during Sunday's "Mad Scientist Marathon" were horror and from what was then called "Universal International Pictures", which I believe was more a scrappy upstart at the time than the major studio it became later (I mean, look at that name doubling down on insisting what a big deal they are!).
Plus, there's Just Imagine, Tuesday night's show, which was the sort of huge bust at the box-office that had the major studios shying away from the like afterward. It's a shame - while this wasn't good, it had some amazing work in it, the sort that makes one wonder just what production designers and costumers inspired by the first generation of pulp illustrations, not filtered through years of reappraisal and irony, might have made of the genre if they'd been given the occasional chance to spend some money and time on it. Heck, even this one was only available on the sort of print that has Ned coming on-stage before the show to not necessarily apologize for it but remind the audience that this is what a 90-year-old movie that hasn't been considered important enough to preserve often looks (and sounds) like.
Imagine Fritz Lang coming to Hollywood and making a big-budget space opera with clear parallels to what was going on his native Germany at the time. It would have been glorious. It's a crying shame that we can only imagine it.
"Une Voyage dans la Lune" ("A Trip to the Moon")
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, DCP)
Is there more to say about this than what I said before? Probably not; it's a pure fantasy and trying to read too much into its explorers defying the stuffy scientific establishment who present themselves as wizards or the way they just run roughshod over the native life they find at the moon likely says more about how shallow my knowledge of turn-of-the-twentieth century Europe than anything really clever.
Still, just look at this thing. Consider that it was made at the dawn of cinema, and feels both freewheeling and dense, a few minutes of fast-paced mayhem that had to be planned precisely. It's partly happenstance that the man in the moon with a rocket in his eye became the image that defines early cinema to people, but also wholly reasonable, as this is something that burrows directly into the imagination.
What I thought of a Méliès "Ciné-Concert" a few years back
Things to Come
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, digital)
Time has been kinder to Things to Come than it might have been; a modern viewer can see an unfortunate believability in its villains and an arrogance to its utopian visions that were perhaps not intended at the time. The future we live in is strange and not what most envisioned, the types of progress that H.G. Wells and the filmmakers extolled has been revealed as a mixed blessing, and the film is lucky to be well-enough made that some of that emerges from the details.
Some things have come back around, though. The filmmakers' fears of an all-consuming conflict are likely darker than most in 1936 would allow themselves to imagine, and its idealized future feels real enough in terms of lived-in details, with one of he nicer bits of "grandfather explains old world to grandchild" bits. The anti-progress orator comes across as a strawman, but, well, look at 2020. The effects work shows some seams, but the design is nice and most of the execution is excellent.
It's dull, though, more so because there is often such bombast around the boring characters that the film cycles through, sometimes with the same actors playing descendants who don't differentiate themselves. There wasn't much like it at the time, so filmmakers likely had to go slower, but there's seldom the feel of a story being told, history being related, or a point being made, just a movie that lands slickly but uncomfortably between all the things it could do.
The Man They Could Not Hang
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, 35mm)
The Man They Could Not Hang is the sort of b-movie where it's very difficult to tell "moral ambiguity" and "sloppy writing" apart, which I suppose is inevitable when such things are cranked out the way these were. In 1939, the question that kicks this movie off, the willingness to risk and sacrifice lives in the name of scientific progress, hadn't yet run head-long into Mengele and Tuskegee, but to a certain extent that doesn't matter; this is the sort of movie that sees this sort of ethical question as a way to motivate a villain, rather than something to mull over and make the audience squirm.
So the filmmakers do a bit of everything - science fiction, courtroom drama, killer picking people off one-by-one - crammed into a mere 65 minutes, which isn't much time for any of them to flourish. It doesn't help that they have few resources besides Boris Karloff, who is terrific in his channeling fine mad scientist arrogance and rage. He's a hissable villain whose charm and self-certainty never makes him sympathetic, and I suspect that, while it makes the scenes where he's off-screen less enjoyable, there's something to be said for not having a hero that's his equal The villain has to feel larger than life, and ordinary people need to band together to stop him.
The Boogie Man Will Get You
* * (out of four)
Seen 27 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, 35mm)
"Oh, no," Jay thought as the bouncy music started under the titles, "this is going to be zany."
And it was, a screwball farce that ties its jokes together in very casual fashion and, not having people good at nuance (aside from genre stalwarts who will put in a professional day's work for a paycheck), instead goes for big and loud. It's amiably stupid, at least, with Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre both more consciously relaxed than usual. Lorre regularly did stuff that seemed casual in this way, but absent-minded Karloff seems a little more off - not quite fun enough to impress you with previously-unseen range but not bad enough to stand out. I don't think the filmmakers knew where they wanted to go with a joke half the time they came up with it, and there's lots of genuinely weird slapstick and gags that feel like they'd be a lot funnier if the people making it had an idea for arranging them in some sort of order, instead of tossing them into a pile.
At least it's short, finishing up well before "WHEN is this going to END" kicks in. Peter Lorre brings a kitten with him everywhere he goes, because why wouldn't you, and it's a clear case of how him going through a dumb movie at half-effort is often more entertaining than his co-stars really trying.
Just Imagine
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, 35mm)
I found myself whispering "don't laugh, don't laugh" at the first bit of special effects in Just Imagine, as J-21 (John Garrick) clambers from one hovering plane to another, because yes, it looks silly, but it's also kind of awesome, and you've got to meet these things halfway. This was nominated for an Art Direction Oscar, so parts of it were pretty good in its day, even if it bombed badly enough that there wouldn't be another big-budget science fiction film made in Hollywood for twenty years.
It probably deserved to; the cast is not exactly the sort that can make good scenes out of bad material (although, hey, baby Maureen O'Sullivan) and it often stumbles desperately between mostly forgettable song-and-dance numbers. It's vaudeville in the future at times, kind of interesting for how it's not timeless in the least - there's jokes about Prohibition and Henry Ford's anti-semitism, and probably a dozen other bits that are a lot more obscure ninety years later (with the movie itself set in the far-off future of 1980). It's not the raciest pre-code thing you've seen, but it's not exactly wholesome in its ogling.
It is, on the other hand, gloriously weird, especially during a trip to Mars which seems like a whole B movie compressed to twenty minutes with the wackiest parts kept in and the boring explanations cut to the bare minimum. That opening plane bit is something I downright adore, an insane combination of carefully extrapolated aviation and utterly lunkheaded activity as J-21 apparently just decides to casually wing-walk to chat with his girlfriend hundreds of feet in the air. On top of that, this is a movie that apparently feels the need to spend ten minutes prepping a mainstream audience for the very idea of a story set in THE FUTURE and then has people named LN-18. At least the costume designers and set decorators clearly had an absolute ball.
And there's something to be said for being the real thing, however peculiar and sometimes ill-considered that may be. This is arguably what every retro-futuristic thing made in the past half-century is trying to be, but it's sincere even when being deliberately silly in a way that those things can't manage.
"Paris qui dort" ("At 3:25")
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, DCP)
Does it say something about René Clair that, upon discovering the entire city of Paris frozen in its tracks, all those protected from the effects of this phenomenon by how far from the ground they were at the time are far more interested in stealing than investigating, succumbing to boredom in a few days before an answer is dropped into their lap? It's a cynical vision, though I suppose one that has them interacting with the people standing stock-still for a unique visual rather than proposing theories to each other.
That's the main draw of Clair's creation, and as a silent short, it's a unique, striking experience, one where you can marvel at visual jokes, people standing stock-still no matter what madness goes on around them, and peculiar situations before and after things change. It makes the ending a bit unsatisfying as he's got nothing to resolve, but by then, he's done what he set out to do in terms of showing the audiences of 1924 something they likely had never seen, and the story is secondary.
L'inhumaine
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, digital)
This king-sized silent is brilliantly designed but unfortunately quite dull, even once you reconfigure expectations for a different time and place. It probably wouldn't have a story worthy of its cavernous sets and visual imagination even if the "hero" (Jaque Catelain) wasn't kind of a creep trying to teach an independent woman (Georgette Leblanc) who spurned his advances a lesson. There's a better story in there about a performer reconnecting with an audience, digging into how the "inhuman woman" of the title lost touch and was able to find it via a new, intimate piece of technology, but it gets buried behind a fan faking his death to get a woman's attention.
Its numbing overall length also means one can feel kind of checked out when the climax comes and all of the rapid-fire Expressionist stuff starts to work. It's genuinely cinematic then, doing all sorts of fast cutting and visually inventive things that would go out of favor with the arrival of sound - people started expecting more realism then - enough to make one wish it was as exciting on the way there. I'm mildly surprised that I can't find any instance of a clever French director who has recreated its sets in a more interesting movie as an homage, because I bet they would still pop today and the folks who see it could feel really clever for recognizing it.
Mad Love '35
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, 35mm)
Peter Lorre's first American film may just be his best English-language role, in large part because it's so unrepentantly sleazy in a way that's uncomfortably familiar: His Dr. Gogol is arrogant and entitled, the thinnest veneer of sophistication over base creepiness, with an ultimate descent into madness that is gloriously unhinged. Gogol is one of the nastiest monsters he played (in a career that wound up specializing in them) because he's not exactly something that men hide and can deny, but an example of things that force us to confront just how flimsy the things holding people back from being their worst selves are. It's all the better because Frances Drake makes the object of his affection seem genuinely uncomfortable around him from the start, and the filmmakers never mess around with acting like psychosis is an acceptable trade for genius.
It's not just Lorre, though; there's a twisted delight in seeing Colin Clive with Frankenstein scars on his wrist, for instance; there's no particular reason for this film to wink at Frankenstein (and it doesn't), but the audience can do the wink themselves. The script is surprisingly tight, in that while this 70-minute B-movie is often pretty crazy, it has room for seeming digressions which come together toward the end in a way that's kind of wild but not really cheating. The creation and staging of Gogol's disguise in the last act is brilliant; Gogol walking through his house, halfway through taking it off, feels genuinely deranged and symbolic even as it looks plausibly improvised.
Mad Love is lurid and kind of nuts and has a lot of short-cuts that B movies take, but it revels in the macabre and the nasty in a way that also feels real and genuinely disquieting; it's one of the best examples I can think of where a movie like this is able to balance the human desire for nasty thrills while also looking at them unflinchingly.
Of course, one has to admit that the early years are kind of thin, for a number of reasons. The series starts with Georges Méliès and H.G. Wells, but what's inescapable is how, between Méliès's short fantasies and the re-emergence of the genre in the 1950s, there's not much. Lang did some great silents in Germany but never was able to make that sort of pulp when he came to America, and there were a fair number of "Fantastik" films coming out of the Soviet Union during this period (Saturday's program paired Aelita, the Queen of Mars and Metropolis), but there are relatively few silents and almost no talkies coming from the big American studios. I suspect that the mainstreaming of the movies had a large effect on it - just as women had their creative roles reduced as film became seen as big business and more than low art, genre work that was mostly the thing of pulps in print and which required resources that couldn't easily be reused wasn't seen as a great investment. Even what is arguably the biggest sci-fi film from the early talkies, King Kong, had lots of material reused for/from The Most Dangerous Game, while the films like Frankenstein and other works featured during Sunday's "Mad Scientist Marathon" were horror and from what was then called "Universal International Pictures", which I believe was more a scrappy upstart at the time than the major studio it became later (I mean, look at that name doubling down on insisting what a big deal they are!).
Plus, there's Just Imagine, Tuesday night's show, which was the sort of huge bust at the box-office that had the major studios shying away from the like afterward. It's a shame - while this wasn't good, it had some amazing work in it, the sort that makes one wonder just what production designers and costumers inspired by the first generation of pulp illustrations, not filtered through years of reappraisal and irony, might have made of the genre if they'd been given the occasional chance to spend some money and time on it. Heck, even this one was only available on the sort of print that has Ned coming on-stage before the show to not necessarily apologize for it but remind the audience that this is what a 90-year-old movie that hasn't been considered important enough to preserve often looks (and sounds) like.
Imagine Fritz Lang coming to Hollywood and making a big-budget space opera with clear parallels to what was going on his native Germany at the time. It would have been glorious. It's a crying shame that we can only imagine it.
"Une Voyage dans la Lune" ("A Trip to the Moon")
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, DCP)
Is there more to say about this than what I said before? Probably not; it's a pure fantasy and trying to read too much into its explorers defying the stuffy scientific establishment who present themselves as wizards or the way they just run roughshod over the native life they find at the moon likely says more about how shallow my knowledge of turn-of-the-twentieth century Europe than anything really clever.
Still, just look at this thing. Consider that it was made at the dawn of cinema, and feels both freewheeling and dense, a few minutes of fast-paced mayhem that had to be planned precisely. It's partly happenstance that the man in the moon with a rocket in his eye became the image that defines early cinema to people, but also wholly reasonable, as this is something that burrows directly into the imagination.
What I thought of a Méliès "Ciné-Concert" a few years back
Things to Come
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, digital)
Time has been kinder to Things to Come than it might have been; a modern viewer can see an unfortunate believability in its villains and an arrogance to its utopian visions that were perhaps not intended at the time. The future we live in is strange and not what most envisioned, the types of progress that H.G. Wells and the filmmakers extolled has been revealed as a mixed blessing, and the film is lucky to be well-enough made that some of that emerges from the details.
Some things have come back around, though. The filmmakers' fears of an all-consuming conflict are likely darker than most in 1936 would allow themselves to imagine, and its idealized future feels real enough in terms of lived-in details, with one of he nicer bits of "grandfather explains old world to grandchild" bits. The anti-progress orator comes across as a strawman, but, well, look at 2020. The effects work shows some seams, but the design is nice and most of the execution is excellent.
It's dull, though, more so because there is often such bombast around the boring characters that the film cycles through, sometimes with the same actors playing descendants who don't differentiate themselves. There wasn't much like it at the time, so filmmakers likely had to go slower, but there's seldom the feel of a story being told, history being related, or a point being made, just a movie that lands slickly but uncomfortably between all the things it could do.
The Man They Could Not Hang
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, 35mm)
The Man They Could Not Hang is the sort of b-movie where it's very difficult to tell "moral ambiguity" and "sloppy writing" apart, which I suppose is inevitable when such things are cranked out the way these were. In 1939, the question that kicks this movie off, the willingness to risk and sacrifice lives in the name of scientific progress, hadn't yet run head-long into Mengele and Tuskegee, but to a certain extent that doesn't matter; this is the sort of movie that sees this sort of ethical question as a way to motivate a villain, rather than something to mull over and make the audience squirm.
So the filmmakers do a bit of everything - science fiction, courtroom drama, killer picking people off one-by-one - crammed into a mere 65 minutes, which isn't much time for any of them to flourish. It doesn't help that they have few resources besides Boris Karloff, who is terrific in his channeling fine mad scientist arrogance and rage. He's a hissable villain whose charm and self-certainty never makes him sympathetic, and I suspect that, while it makes the scenes where he's off-screen less enjoyable, there's something to be said for not having a hero that's his equal The villain has to feel larger than life, and ordinary people need to band together to stop him.
The Boogie Man Will Get You
* * (out of four)
Seen 27 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, 35mm)
"Oh, no," Jay thought as the bouncy music started under the titles, "this is going to be zany."
And it was, a screwball farce that ties its jokes together in very casual fashion and, not having people good at nuance (aside from genre stalwarts who will put in a professional day's work for a paycheck), instead goes for big and loud. It's amiably stupid, at least, with Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre both more consciously relaxed than usual. Lorre regularly did stuff that seemed casual in this way, but absent-minded Karloff seems a little more off - not quite fun enough to impress you with previously-unseen range but not bad enough to stand out. I don't think the filmmakers knew where they wanted to go with a joke half the time they came up with it, and there's lots of genuinely weird slapstick and gags that feel like they'd be a lot funnier if the people making it had an idea for arranging them in some sort of order, instead of tossing them into a pile.
At least it's short, finishing up well before "WHEN is this going to END" kicks in. Peter Lorre brings a kitten with him everywhere he goes, because why wouldn't you, and it's a clear case of how him going through a dumb movie at half-effort is often more entertaining than his co-stars really trying.
Just Imagine
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, 35mm)
I found myself whispering "don't laugh, don't laugh" at the first bit of special effects in Just Imagine, as J-21 (John Garrick) clambers from one hovering plane to another, because yes, it looks silly, but it's also kind of awesome, and you've got to meet these things halfway. This was nominated for an Art Direction Oscar, so parts of it were pretty good in its day, even if it bombed badly enough that there wouldn't be another big-budget science fiction film made in Hollywood for twenty years.
It probably deserved to; the cast is not exactly the sort that can make good scenes out of bad material (although, hey, baby Maureen O'Sullivan) and it often stumbles desperately between mostly forgettable song-and-dance numbers. It's vaudeville in the future at times, kind of interesting for how it's not timeless in the least - there's jokes about Prohibition and Henry Ford's anti-semitism, and probably a dozen other bits that are a lot more obscure ninety years later (with the movie itself set in the far-off future of 1980). It's not the raciest pre-code thing you've seen, but it's not exactly wholesome in its ogling.
It is, on the other hand, gloriously weird, especially during a trip to Mars which seems like a whole B movie compressed to twenty minutes with the wackiest parts kept in and the boring explanations cut to the bare minimum. That opening plane bit is something I downright adore, an insane combination of carefully extrapolated aviation and utterly lunkheaded activity as J-21 apparently just decides to casually wing-walk to chat with his girlfriend hundreds of feet in the air. On top of that, this is a movie that apparently feels the need to spend ten minutes prepping a mainstream audience for the very idea of a story set in THE FUTURE and then has people named LN-18. At least the costume designers and set decorators clearly had an absolute ball.
And there's something to be said for being the real thing, however peculiar and sometimes ill-considered that may be. This is arguably what every retro-futuristic thing made in the past half-century is trying to be, but it's sincere even when being deliberately silly in a way that those things can't manage.
"Paris qui dort" ("At 3:25")
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, DCP)
Does it say something about René Clair that, upon discovering the entire city of Paris frozen in its tracks, all those protected from the effects of this phenomenon by how far from the ground they were at the time are far more interested in stealing than investigating, succumbing to boredom in a few days before an answer is dropped into their lap? It's a cynical vision, though I suppose one that has them interacting with the people standing stock-still for a unique visual rather than proposing theories to each other.
That's the main draw of Clair's creation, and as a silent short, it's a unique, striking experience, one where you can marvel at visual jokes, people standing stock-still no matter what madness goes on around them, and peculiar situations before and after things change. It makes the ending a bit unsatisfying as he's got nothing to resolve, but by then, he's done what he set out to do in terms of showing the audiences of 1924 something they likely had never seen, and the story is secondary.
L'inhumaine
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, digital)
This king-sized silent is brilliantly designed but unfortunately quite dull, even once you reconfigure expectations for a different time and place. It probably wouldn't have a story worthy of its cavernous sets and visual imagination even if the "hero" (Jaque Catelain) wasn't kind of a creep trying to teach an independent woman (Georgette Leblanc) who spurned his advances a lesson. There's a better story in there about a performer reconnecting with an audience, digging into how the "inhuman woman" of the title lost touch and was able to find it via a new, intimate piece of technology, but it gets buried behind a fan faking his death to get a woman's attention.
Its numbing overall length also means one can feel kind of checked out when the climax comes and all of the rapid-fire Expressionist stuff starts to work. It's genuinely cinematic then, doing all sorts of fast cutting and visually inventive things that would go out of favor with the arrival of sound - people started expecting more realism then - enough to make one wish it was as exciting on the way there. I'm mildly surprised that I can't find any instance of a clever French director who has recreated its sets in a more interesting movie as an homage, because I bet they would still pop today and the folks who see it could feel really clever for recognizing it.
Mad Love '35
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, 35mm)
Peter Lorre's first American film may just be his best English-language role, in large part because it's so unrepentantly sleazy in a way that's uncomfortably familiar: His Dr. Gogol is arrogant and entitled, the thinnest veneer of sophistication over base creepiness, with an ultimate descent into madness that is gloriously unhinged. Gogol is one of the nastiest monsters he played (in a career that wound up specializing in them) because he's not exactly something that men hide and can deny, but an example of things that force us to confront just how flimsy the things holding people back from being their worst selves are. It's all the better because Frances Drake makes the object of his affection seem genuinely uncomfortable around him from the start, and the filmmakers never mess around with acting like psychosis is an acceptable trade for genius.
It's not just Lorre, though; there's a twisted delight in seeing Colin Clive with Frankenstein scars on his wrist, for instance; there's no particular reason for this film to wink at Frankenstein (and it doesn't), but the audience can do the wink themselves. The script is surprisingly tight, in that while this 70-minute B-movie is often pretty crazy, it has room for seeming digressions which come together toward the end in a way that's kind of wild but not really cheating. The creation and staging of Gogol's disguise in the last act is brilliant; Gogol walking through his house, halfway through taking it off, feels genuinely deranged and symbolic even as it looks plausibly improvised.
Mad Love is lurid and kind of nuts and has a lot of short-cuts that B movies take, but it revels in the macabre and the nasty in a way that also feels real and genuinely disquieting; it's one of the best examples I can think of where a movie like this is able to balance the human desire for nasty thrills while also looking at them unflinchingly.
Short Stuff: The 2019 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts
Most years, the program for the Oscar-nominated animated shorts is built with an eye toward family-friendliness, often arranged to put the one or two entries that might prove to be too much for the younger viewers at the end so that parents with small children can duck out early. The nominees this year have made that a bit trickier; though none are particularly violent or otherwise unsuitable, there's plenty of adult themes that make this year's selections a different group.
That's something to be celebrated, on the one hand; animation is an amazing medium that can be used for so many things that treating it as something only for kids is only recognizing part of its potential. Still, it's a bit of a shame that this means that there might be a little less in the ceremony celebrating the uplifting rather than the dark.
"Hair Love"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
Then again, the first entry in the program, "Hair Love", is in some was the most traditional: Brightly-colored and playing at an energetic but no overwhelming pace, it has a little girl whose nappy hair is apparently particularly difficult to manage enthusiastically pulling up a YouTube channel about styling hair for black ladies ahead of a special occasion but having trouble doing it on her own, with her father also fairly daunted by the prospect.
It's a delightfully sweet-natured short that managed to get some theatrical play last year, full of playful and good-hearted visual gags that never appear to be making fun of anyone. The design is delightful, mostly drawn in a simple enough way to feel like it's from the kid's point of view but letting her hair become this scraggly, hyper-detailed other thing that's not quite a monster but plenty overwhelming. And for all it spends time on hair-related gags, it's got more than enough room at the end to pivot to something that brings bigger smiles without changing the tone.
"Dcera" ("Daughter")
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
Things change up quickly for "Daughter", though, as the title character is watching her father decay in his hospital bed, and a bird crashing through the window causes her to remember a similar incident when she was younger. The short doesn't have dialogue, and occasionally uses jittery camera work and close-ups to obscure how it is jumping around in time, but that also allows one to layer one's own fears upon the characters. The daughter's exceptional vulnerability in the past and identifying with the baby bird that needs to be cared for hints at adoption and/or also losing her mother, while a similar situation in the present hints that she is realizing that there is nothing more she can do.
It's a visually fascinating movie beyond that, although one that sometimes asks a lot out of the viewer. The technique is incredible and also difficult to pin down - it looks like stop-motion the the maquettes' eyes and mouths repainted between frames, with the camera-work is incredibly smooth for being that complex. The care taken in the design impresses as well, with a lot of changes between periods done with paint rather than changing body types. The film sometimes has trouble escaping its darkness, beyond the extent that seems intentional; there's a helplessness to the silence in the present-day scenes that probably shouldn't be so powerful in the past, but filmmaker Daria Kashcheeva doesn't adjust quite as much as the film could use. There's also something showy about the close-ups and transitions that seems more like she's trying to impress with the cinematography than telling a story.
"Sister"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
There's a similarly heavy tone to Song Siqi's "Sister", which opens with a family picture picture and narration from a man about how, as a four-year-old boy, he was annoyed by the arrival of his new sister in 1991, but, as time passed, he grew to love the troublesome, often-eccentric little girl But, of course, it's at best 50/50 as to whether a short film with this sort of atmosphere ends with "and we remain incredibly close to this day".
Its particular twist to this is somewhat unique, at least, and Song has some visually whimsical twists on this material that are fun to watch, even if this is the millionth story of a kid not initially welcoming a younger sibling that one has seen. It's frequently clever and often well-executed, and the fact that these visuals come out of modern middle-class China without being ostentatious about it makes it stylistically unique among the group. It is also, alas, a bit predictable in the broad strokes if not the details, and that a canny viewer knows how this goes inevitably means it walks the line between creating dread and underwhelming the audience, likely winding up on the wrong side a bit too often for some.
"Mémorable"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
There's also something kind of familiar to "Mémorable", in which filmmaker Bruno Collet introduces the audience to Louis (voice of André Wilms), an elderly artist whose mind is falling apart, and his wife Michelle (voice of Dominique Reymond), who loves him but is not necessarily shy about displaying how this is taking a toll. His life as an artist melds well with the animation, as it allows Collet to vary his visual style and use effects to illuminate Louis's state of mind.
It's been done a few times before, but works well here. There's an impressive solidity to the digital animation that makes it seem more three-dimensional even as the characters become more stylized and fanciful, with Louis developing thick layers of paint with more visible brushstrokes as time passes and he recedes further into a world disconnected from reality, while other things and people become less defined, smeared shapes that he should recognize but doesn't. It's tragic, and the fact that Michelle is not perfectly comfortable makes it feel more real, but there's definite beauty in how it's being reconstructed.
"Kitbull"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
The last of the nominated shorts in the package is "Kitbull", which despite being made at Pixar was not attached to a Disney film last year, with the logos indicating that Rosana Sullivan's short is more of a side project than a regular production. It opens by introducing a stray kitten who is mostly doing all right on its own, but one must be wary when living on the street, and when a dog shows up near its cardboard box, the kitten is naturally wary, especially since its owner is trying to train the pit bull to fight, though it doesn't really seem to be in the dog's nature.
Despite coming from Pixar and seeming to use many digital tools, "Kitbull" is mostly hand-drawn, and though the style is a bit odd for the cat, it does get across a stray kitten's twitchiness and fear without just imitating familiar movements, with nice character animation for the dog as well, especially since he's got to have a softer but still distinct personality. The short moves pretty quickly, sometimes to the point where it seems like it could have used a side adventure or gag or two just to flesh the pair out or keep the end from being rushed.
"Henrietta Bulkowski"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
Because animated shorts run just a few minutes, this program is often filled in with a number of "Highly Commended" shorts that presumably just missed the nomination, the first of which is Rachel Johnson's "Henrietta Bulkowski". The title character (voice of Christina Hendricks) dreams of being a pilot but can't as she has kyphosis, a large bony mass fused to her spine. Hearing of a derelict plane still sitting in the junkyard where it crashed years ago, she decides to move in and repair it, not aware that the area is set for demolition until security guard Danny Wilcox (voice of Chris Cooper) finds her on the cusp of completing her project.
It's an odd one, having the air of being based upon a true story, although if so, more "inspired by" than anything else. There are a fair amount of interesting bits in it, although maybe not always the right ones; Johnson has a strong idea of how she wants themes to resonate but sometimes one can see what she's doing rather than feel it. She's got a distinct style that gets a fair amount of emotion out of models that don't necessarily move a whole lot, and makes a models-of-models bit work, although some of the more unusual bits of design don't feel quite as solid as they could.
"The Bird & The Whale"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
The next goes for a different look, with Carol Freeman's "The Bird & The Whale", which blends deceptively simple character design with painterly style from the first moments when a baby whale winds up apart from its pod and a bird who appears to be the sole survivor of a sunken ship, its cage resting on a piece of flotsam. It's an odd friendship, out in the middle of the sea.
Can it last? Well, that's the trick, but Freeman is awfully good at getting the audience to quickly buy into this unlikely friendship even as she doesn't shy away from the dangers of being lost at sea. Despite the cheerful character design and charming high concept, there's room for more than just surface appeal even when the film looks like it's going to be built entirely on cuteness, leaving her plenty of room to create dramatic or ethereal imagery later on. The film's final moments are actually quite beautiful.
"Hors Piste"
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
In contrast, "Hors Piste" is unabashedly a cartoon, but it is also one of the absolute funniest cartoons to be shown in one of these programs, starting from two rescue workers in a helicopter flying to recover an injured skier from the top of a peak that makes one wonder how he got there in the first place and then just having everything go incredibly wrong in such a way as to make one wonder if the guy they're helping wasn't better off before.
Comedy really doesn't get enough respect in awards contexts, especially this sort of Chuck Jones humor where the filmmakers have likely agonized on just how many explosions from a crashed helicopter, spaced apart by how many seconds, is funniest, or whether a bit of slapstick that might be terrible with more realistic character designs works with this look. The four credited directors of "Hors Piste" seem to get every single frame of this right, down to the bombastic retro logo and soundtrack. The audience responded enthusiastically to this one, and it's not hard to see why - after 75 minutes of animation where even the funny ones are looking to pull at heartstrings and be taken seriously, this short zeroes in on making a viewer laugh and does not fail.
"Maestro"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
The last "highly commended" short, "Maestro", also came from a large team of French animators, and bless them for using detailed, photo-realistic animation to do something this delightfully silly, just two minutes of a blue jay singing opera and a squirrel direction a swamp choir. It looks like a lot of effort being expended on something with no larger message than music being fun, but at least the first time, it works. Maybe I wouldn't laugh quite so hard at the goofy mismatch if I saw it a few more times, but at least the first time, it does the job.
If I had a vote, I would probably give it to "Hair Love", though I wouldn't bet against Pixar's "Kitbull" for the actual winner. Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that when people leave the showcase, it's going to be "Hors Piste" that they love the most.
That's something to be celebrated, on the one hand; animation is an amazing medium that can be used for so many things that treating it as something only for kids is only recognizing part of its potential. Still, it's a bit of a shame that this means that there might be a little less in the ceremony celebrating the uplifting rather than the dark.
"Hair Love"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
Then again, the first entry in the program, "Hair Love", is in some was the most traditional: Brightly-colored and playing at an energetic but no overwhelming pace, it has a little girl whose nappy hair is apparently particularly difficult to manage enthusiastically pulling up a YouTube channel about styling hair for black ladies ahead of a special occasion but having trouble doing it on her own, with her father also fairly daunted by the prospect.
It's a delightfully sweet-natured short that managed to get some theatrical play last year, full of playful and good-hearted visual gags that never appear to be making fun of anyone. The design is delightful, mostly drawn in a simple enough way to feel like it's from the kid's point of view but letting her hair become this scraggly, hyper-detailed other thing that's not quite a monster but plenty overwhelming. And for all it spends time on hair-related gags, it's got more than enough room at the end to pivot to something that brings bigger smiles without changing the tone.
"Dcera" ("Daughter")
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
Things change up quickly for "Daughter", though, as the title character is watching her father decay in his hospital bed, and a bird crashing through the window causes her to remember a similar incident when she was younger. The short doesn't have dialogue, and occasionally uses jittery camera work and close-ups to obscure how it is jumping around in time, but that also allows one to layer one's own fears upon the characters. The daughter's exceptional vulnerability in the past and identifying with the baby bird that needs to be cared for hints at adoption and/or also losing her mother, while a similar situation in the present hints that she is realizing that there is nothing more she can do.
It's a visually fascinating movie beyond that, although one that sometimes asks a lot out of the viewer. The technique is incredible and also difficult to pin down - it looks like stop-motion the the maquettes' eyes and mouths repainted between frames, with the camera-work is incredibly smooth for being that complex. The care taken in the design impresses as well, with a lot of changes between periods done with paint rather than changing body types. The film sometimes has trouble escaping its darkness, beyond the extent that seems intentional; there's a helplessness to the silence in the present-day scenes that probably shouldn't be so powerful in the past, but filmmaker Daria Kashcheeva doesn't adjust quite as much as the film could use. There's also something showy about the close-ups and transitions that seems more like she's trying to impress with the cinematography than telling a story.
"Sister"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
There's a similarly heavy tone to Song Siqi's "Sister", which opens with a family picture picture and narration from a man about how, as a four-year-old boy, he was annoyed by the arrival of his new sister in 1991, but, as time passed, he grew to love the troublesome, often-eccentric little girl But, of course, it's at best 50/50 as to whether a short film with this sort of atmosphere ends with "and we remain incredibly close to this day".
Its particular twist to this is somewhat unique, at least, and Song has some visually whimsical twists on this material that are fun to watch, even if this is the millionth story of a kid not initially welcoming a younger sibling that one has seen. It's frequently clever and often well-executed, and the fact that these visuals come out of modern middle-class China without being ostentatious about it makes it stylistically unique among the group. It is also, alas, a bit predictable in the broad strokes if not the details, and that a canny viewer knows how this goes inevitably means it walks the line between creating dread and underwhelming the audience, likely winding up on the wrong side a bit too often for some.
"Mémorable"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
There's also something kind of familiar to "Mémorable", in which filmmaker Bruno Collet introduces the audience to Louis (voice of André Wilms), an elderly artist whose mind is falling apart, and his wife Michelle (voice of Dominique Reymond), who loves him but is not necessarily shy about displaying how this is taking a toll. His life as an artist melds well with the animation, as it allows Collet to vary his visual style and use effects to illuminate Louis's state of mind.
It's been done a few times before, but works well here. There's an impressive solidity to the digital animation that makes it seem more three-dimensional even as the characters become more stylized and fanciful, with Louis developing thick layers of paint with more visible brushstrokes as time passes and he recedes further into a world disconnected from reality, while other things and people become less defined, smeared shapes that he should recognize but doesn't. It's tragic, and the fact that Michelle is not perfectly comfortable makes it feel more real, but there's definite beauty in how it's being reconstructed.
"Kitbull"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
The last of the nominated shorts in the package is "Kitbull", which despite being made at Pixar was not attached to a Disney film last year, with the logos indicating that Rosana Sullivan's short is more of a side project than a regular production. It opens by introducing a stray kitten who is mostly doing all right on its own, but one must be wary when living on the street, and when a dog shows up near its cardboard box, the kitten is naturally wary, especially since its owner is trying to train the pit bull to fight, though it doesn't really seem to be in the dog's nature.
Despite coming from Pixar and seeming to use many digital tools, "Kitbull" is mostly hand-drawn, and though the style is a bit odd for the cat, it does get across a stray kitten's twitchiness and fear without just imitating familiar movements, with nice character animation for the dog as well, especially since he's got to have a softer but still distinct personality. The short moves pretty quickly, sometimes to the point where it seems like it could have used a side adventure or gag or two just to flesh the pair out or keep the end from being rushed.
"Henrietta Bulkowski"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
Because animated shorts run just a few minutes, this program is often filled in with a number of "Highly Commended" shorts that presumably just missed the nomination, the first of which is Rachel Johnson's "Henrietta Bulkowski". The title character (voice of Christina Hendricks) dreams of being a pilot but can't as she has kyphosis, a large bony mass fused to her spine. Hearing of a derelict plane still sitting in the junkyard where it crashed years ago, she decides to move in and repair it, not aware that the area is set for demolition until security guard Danny Wilcox (voice of Chris Cooper) finds her on the cusp of completing her project.
It's an odd one, having the air of being based upon a true story, although if so, more "inspired by" than anything else. There are a fair amount of interesting bits in it, although maybe not always the right ones; Johnson has a strong idea of how she wants themes to resonate but sometimes one can see what she's doing rather than feel it. She's got a distinct style that gets a fair amount of emotion out of models that don't necessarily move a whole lot, and makes a models-of-models bit work, although some of the more unusual bits of design don't feel quite as solid as they could.
"The Bird & The Whale"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
The next goes for a different look, with Carol Freeman's "The Bird & The Whale", which blends deceptively simple character design with painterly style from the first moments when a baby whale winds up apart from its pod and a bird who appears to be the sole survivor of a sunken ship, its cage resting on a piece of flotsam. It's an odd friendship, out in the middle of the sea.
Can it last? Well, that's the trick, but Freeman is awfully good at getting the audience to quickly buy into this unlikely friendship even as she doesn't shy away from the dangers of being lost at sea. Despite the cheerful character design and charming high concept, there's room for more than just surface appeal even when the film looks like it's going to be built entirely on cuteness, leaving her plenty of room to create dramatic or ethereal imagery later on. The film's final moments are actually quite beautiful.
"Hors Piste"
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
In contrast, "Hors Piste" is unabashedly a cartoon, but it is also one of the absolute funniest cartoons to be shown in one of these programs, starting from two rescue workers in a helicopter flying to recover an injured skier from the top of a peak that makes one wonder how he got there in the first place and then just having everything go incredibly wrong in such a way as to make one wonder if the guy they're helping wasn't better off before.
Comedy really doesn't get enough respect in awards contexts, especially this sort of Chuck Jones humor where the filmmakers have likely agonized on just how many explosions from a crashed helicopter, spaced apart by how many seconds, is funniest, or whether a bit of slapstick that might be terrible with more realistic character designs works with this look. The four credited directors of "Hors Piste" seem to get every single frame of this right, down to the bombastic retro logo and soundtrack. The audience responded enthusiastically to this one, and it's not hard to see why - after 75 minutes of animation where even the funny ones are looking to pull at heartstrings and be taken seriously, this short zeroes in on making a viewer laugh and does not fail.
"Maestro"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in AMC Boston Common #7 (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)
The last "highly commended" short, "Maestro", also came from a large team of French animators, and bless them for using detailed, photo-realistic animation to do something this delightfully silly, just two minutes of a blue jay singing opera and a squirrel direction a swamp choir. It looks like a lot of effort being expended on something with no larger message than music being fun, but at least the first time, it works. Maybe I wouldn't laugh quite so hard at the goofy mismatch if I saw it a few more times, but at least the first time, it does the job.
If I had a vote, I would probably give it to "Hair Love", though I wouldn't bet against Pixar's "Kitbull" for the actual winner. Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that when people leave the showcase, it's going to be "Hors Piste" that they love the most.
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