This is one of three New York Times "OpDocs," little featurette short documentaries released by the newspaper, that made the Academy short doc short-list for the Oscars this year. It was shot at an Olympic diving pool in the Netherlands, and is comprised of a series of static shots of various amateur swimmers contemplating (and in some cases even braving) taking the 10 meter plunge from platform to pool. It is an interesting take on human nature, watching how fear and nervousness are handled by a succession of ordinary people. Perhaps it's a little trivial compared to the subject matter of most documentaries. But for the most part it is very entertaining. And, personally, I had to wonder how I'd face up to the challenge. Maybe when I was 20 I'd jump. Today I probably wouldn't even climb up to the platform.
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116 Cameras 2017
How many Holocaust documentaries about personal reminiscences are left to be made? After all, as time goes on the survivors die off. But their stories are a vital reminder of the darkest days in human history. Eva Schloss, is an 88-year old Auschwitz survivor, post-war step-mother of Anne Frank, and a celebrated, vocal voice for the dead. She was flown from her home in England to Los Angeles to take part in a project to make a 3D holographic interview of about 1,000 questions and answers (recorded with 116 cameras in a dome-like studio) for interactive viewing by people in the future. This documentary shows the process of the taping session and gives us a glimpse of Ms. Schloss's vivid storytelling. It is enormously moving...rarely has a 16 minute documentary moved me to tears.
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Kayayo – The Living Shopping Baskets 2017
This documentary short subject follows Bamunu, an 8-year old girl from a small village in Ghana. She has been sent by her parents to work in the capitol, Accra, as a laborer (a "kayayo", literally a shopping basket girl) transporting goods in a tub on her head from the markets to customers, who tip a pittance for that work. What little she makes goes to pay for food and squalid lodging...and what is left over she saves for her family. She hands her savings for safe keeping to a woman, who sometimes steals the money since Bamunu cannot read or count. In the course of the documentary we follow Bamunu through her labors, and accompany her when she visits her village and family, where her brothers can go to school; but the girls are virtual slaves whose sole function is to support their impoverished families. This is the kind of documentary that exposes horrible third world child exploitation with no real solution offered; but Bamunu, herself, is clever and personable and an ideal subject to tear at the heartstrings of the viewer.
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Out of Sight: Stop the Stigma, Start a Conversation 2017
There is an epidemic of teen-age and older youth suicides, most based on depression and hopelessness. The stigma of mental illness is still common; and even though signals such as self-harm, anorexia, and isolation may be present, they are often ignored or downplayed by parents and counselors. That is the subject of this informative and vitally important documentary...utilizing a series of interviews with a variety of recovering depressed people and involved care-givers. They are all well-spoken and impart with their personal stories some hard earned lessons for an intended audience of young people suffering and needing a helping hand. One sequence in particular, two parents that lost their attractive, football star son despite their own caring involvement, is heartbreakingly presented. The film is well edited, with an effective editing schema that provides a coherent narrative building to its hopeful conclusion...help is available. And a subtle, low-keyed original guitar score along with nicely designed graphics that present an overview of the problem all add to the professionalism of the presentation. My one complaint was the too short reading time of the titles, especially those describing the current status of the interviewees. Bottom line: this is an instructive documentary that succeeds in being a helpful one for those young people (and their parents) who need desperately to watch it.
[Personal story: when I was at university in the early 1960s my dorm roommate committed suicide back at home during spring break my sophomore year. I had no clue that he was in such pain. So this film resonated with my own experience.] -
Ex Libris: New York Public Library 2017
This lengthy documentary illustrates the breadth of activities and workings of the New York Public Library system. It's done in director Frederick Wiseman's typical style: a string of intellectually stimulating (or boringly quotidien, depending on one's point of view) vignettes - edited with no particular order or dramatic build, and with no explanatory narration whatsoever. The film jumps apparently randomly from meetings to performances to lectures to branch activities to donor events to librarian activities and back again until it is almost tedious. And then something wonderfully touching or fascinating or informative happens and all is forgiven. But the very length and randomness caused my mind to wander...for instance noting that just about every person shown talking in the film used excessive, if expressive, hand gestures; or focusing on the constant use of interesting and diverse faces as cutaways during lengthy sequences. I guess as a former documentary editor myself I'm more attuned to the mechanics of editing, and Wiseman (who edits his films) has certain identifying tics that sometimes annoy me. Yet, for all that, I end up loving his films...because they are always intelligently illuminating of their subjects.
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Unrest 2017
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a very real antibody antagonist disease at the cellular level. Since it primarily strikes women (85% according to this documentary...however I knew a male colleague who was severely disabled with the disease several years ago), it has been reviled as hysteria, malingering, mental illness and even worse for ages, and ignored until recently by the medical profession for lack of observable causation.
Director Jennifer Brea contracted the disease while working on her PhD at Harvard and set out to systematically make contact with other victims on the internet. Smart and personable, she makes an impressively effective spokesperson for not only the existence of the disease, but also by championing the cause of victims, especially in Europe, where the laws do not recognize the existence of CFS. This important and moving documentary tells Ms. Brea's story through unsparingly real video sequences of her treatment, suffering, and complicated life with her supportive husband. But it also broadens the film's aspect by comprehensively covering the history of the disease; and even more importantly by delving into the lives of several international victims that Ms. Brea found and video chatted with on the internet. All of these disparate elements are skillfully edited into a convincing tapestry that both educates and activates its audience. Rarely has an actual victim had the skills and intelligence to make such an impassioned and proactive documentary film which advances her cause. Brava!
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The Greatest Showman 2017
This is a resolutely retro filmed musical about the career beginnings of famed circus impresario, P.T. Barnum. The story is set in the mid-nineteenth century; but the song score is anachronistically modern pop at its most bombastic, even when the plot calls for operatic. In fact, that's a good term for the film: bombastic and, incidentally very un-PC (Barnum made his start by featuring midgets and a bearded lady for people to gawk at.) Still, for all that, this is a gigantic entertainment of a film, a one-ring circus spectacle which bursts through the screen...with acrobats and freaks and CGI lions and elephants to spare. Hugh Jackman has the pipes and physical grace to lead the huge musical numbers, at least more than Zac Efron, who underwhelmed as Barnum's rich, young apprentice. The Director Michael Gracey is Australian, and with this film it is hard not to think of him as a Baz Luhrmann acolyte on crack. The film is excessive and at times sappy and tacky...but I couldn't help but enjoy it for its scope and ebullience.
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Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool 2017
An ailing movie star, blonde bad-girl Gloria Grahame, famed for her noir films in the 1950s, has had an affair with a much younger Liverpudlian man, bisexual, part-time actor Peter Turner. She ends up in 1981 staying with his affectionate, lower class English family for her possible recuperation. That's the starting point for this immensely affecting and moving film based on a memoir by Turner. The film features two amazing lead performances by Annette Bening and Jamie Bell as the May/December couple. And Julie Walters is wonderful playing Bella, Pete's mum and Gloria's sympathetic caregiver. Director Paul McGuigan adds an intriguing element of theatricality by his artful transitions from past to present scenes without using cuts, rather with fluid camera sweeps. Intimate, beautiful, truthful...I can't even come up with adjectives sufficient to express my affection for this film and its cast. OK, how about superb.
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi 2017
Who cares what I think? Just about everybody here that follows me will have already seen the film, along with the rest of the Galaxy. I've never been a fan, even if I've dutifully watched every film in the series as they came out. From the start of the franchise I've been annoyed by the abandonment of the laws of physics, by the supernatural nature of the "force," and the ridiculous excesses of the space opera genre (as opposed to hard SciFi, which I love.) That said, this was well done, for what it was. All credit to Rian Johnson who took on the mantle and ran with it. The film looks and sounds spectacularly great. One sequence: an amazing, impossible tracking shot through an interstellar casino will be long remembered in film history for its jaw dropping technical brilliance. However, the film is overlong, with one tiresomely repetitive light sabre duel after another, and a static dramatic arc typical of the middle film of each of the trilogies in this series. The special effects get better, the CGI creatures get more convincing, the level of acting slowly improves; but the innate flaws of Lucas's original grand scheme still don't add up.
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All the Money in the World 2017
I'll admit that the 1973 story of the kidnapped 16-year old "poor" Getty grandchild in Italy riveted my interest at the time. Who could not feel a touch of Schadenfreude at the troubles of the super rich? So, hardly any of the major developments in this film came as a surprise to me...which probably won't be true for most of the audience. Nevertheless, the the actual film is a gripping, well acted thriller...despite when the script took a few excessive detours for dramatic license and stretched credulity beyond the breaking point.
By now, everybody knows that director Ridley Scott made the decision to re-cast a major character less than a month before the final release date. It's something of a distraction to wonder what Kevin Spacey would have done with the role of J. Paul Getty had he not become perceived as radioactive box-office poison. As it turns out, his rushed replacement in twenty-two reshot scenes was a fortuitous development, as Christopher Plummer aced the role, perfectly embodying the real Getty. Why was he not cast in the first place? Also, kudos to Michelle Williams, who plays the young Paolo Getty's mother with steely intelligence and integrity. Bottom line: despite my foreknowledge of the plot, I was enthralled and impressed by the sumptuousness of the production.
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Heroin(e) 2017
Huntington, West Virginia is a predominately blue collar city with about 10 times the national average of drug overdoses. This heartening documentary short subject tells the story of three women who work tirelessly to ameliorate the opiate epidemic in their town. One is a compassionate Judge of "Drug Court", who deals with a series of users, many of whom are repeat relapsers. Another is a fire chief who is constantly on call administering Narcan opioid inhibitor to overdose victims. Another represents an outreach ministry who aids street prostitutes and addicts. Their tireless and often moving efforts are illustrated verité style, in the mode of the reality TV show "Cops."
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Phantom Thread 2017
A prissy London couturier in the mid-1950s falls for a beautiful waitress and turns her into a model for his ravishing gowns in the Cristóbal Balenciaga mode. A+ to the costume designer. However, all I can say is that Paul Thomas Anderson shouldn't make love stories. And even if Daniel Day-Lewis may be the greatest film actor since the invention of celluloid, Reynolds Woodcock, his neurotic and controlling character, was such a turn-off for me that I hated the film. However, Vicky Krieps, playing the feisty Trilby to Day-Lewis's Svengali, turned it around. Boy, was she terrific in those fabulous gowns! I guess I'm just not a PTA fan...his films always look great and arouse conflicting emotions in me; but I never seem to actually enjoy them.
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The Shape of Water 2017
I'm going to be something of a contrarian here, so quit reading right now it that will offend you. Upside: the women characters were, unsurprisingly, incredibly well portrayed and believable: Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer and Richard Jenkins (the gay character counts) . Downside: the male characters were all cardboard stock villains of one sort or another: Michael Shannon (even more over-the-top than usual) and Michael Stuhlbarg (the Soviet spy counts). Upside: the non-human fish man character (Doug Jones) was strangely sympathetic, even if a total cypher. Downside: the girl/fishman love story failed to ring true for me, too much a fairy tale romance to allow for suspension of disbelief in an otherwise realistic story (for some value of "realistic"). Bottom line: I wasn't enchanted. However, in the Q&A, director del Toro was so charming and open about when he was six years old and fell under the spell of the movie The Creature from the Black Lagoon which was his influence in writing this script, that I felt compelled to raise my rating a half point. Even I can be enchanted against my will by this amazing story teller.
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Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405 2016
Mindy Alper is an artist living in Los Angeles, working primarily with paper maché sculptures of torsos of people she knows from her life. Since childhood she has had a troubled life, perhaps on the spectrum, perhaps psychotic...we only get a sketchy idea of her diagnosis from the dozens of meds she takes daily which she carefully annotates on camera. This documentary short subject tells her story, mostly told by Mindy herself in several interviews where she speaks to the camera in her halting speech. But we also are able to watch the artist at work and in group therapy sessions, and hear her mother's problematic narration of her own relationship with her daughter. I had never heard of Mindy Alper before...regretfully. The film culminates with her first gallery show, a stunner. She is an artist of rare talent, a person whose triumphs over her disabilities are a moving testament to the human condition. Even 40 minutes wasn't enough time to spend on film with this intriguing artist and personality.
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Hostiles 2017
I happen to like westerns, especially ones that view the late old west (circa 1892) through the lens of modern attitudes about genocide, as this one does. Army captain Joe Blocker (Christian Bale), serving in New Mexico, and on the cusp of retirement, is ordered against his will to form a platoon accompanying a dying Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) to his ancestral burying ground in Montana. Once enemies on the field, the two must co-exist, as they travel through hostile territory where a renegade group of Comanche outlaws had massacred a farm family with one survivor, the wife (Rosamund Pike.) This is film making on the Sam Peckinpah model: unsparing of the violence, psychologically astute in its character development, and with cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi's spectacular long shot vistas, gorgeous scenery. Writer/director Scott Cooper's direction is particularly well paced with subtle pauses for the actors to illustrate humanity along with the savagery. Is the Western dead as a genre? I hope not based on this example.
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Alone 2017
The New York Times apparently makes or showcases slice of life short documentaries. Alone tells the story of a 20-something black girl in Louisiana, who is in love with a prisoner apparently serving a ten year sentence and intends to marry him. I say apparently, because this black and white short is frustratingly vague about details. It's mainly composed of close-ups and voice overs of the girl pining and musing in dream like reveries. One scene is shot behind closed doors where the girl's mother is screaming cautionary invective. Another scene is a long shot of the girl talking to her fiancé's lawyer on the courthouse steps, purveying little actual information. Much of the dialogue is poorly recorded or in accented speech that I had trouble understanding. But the visuals are startlingly beautiful at times: one dream like scene shows the girl trying on a diaphanous wedding dress, fantasizing in voice over about diamonds and jewels. This isn't my idea of documented reality. The film made the Oscar documentary short final 10. Honestly, I'm not sure why.
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The Post 2017
This is essentially a political thriller about a whistleblower (Daniel Ellsberg) who uncovers a government conspiracy (the continuing losing war in Vietnam), and then gives the information to the press, causing a First Amendment Constitutional crisis when it is published. The film covers about a week in 1971 when the then small regional paper, the Washington Post, its editor Ben Bradley (Tom Hanks), and especially its owner, Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) risk everything to challenge a powerful and vindictive sitting President, Richard Nixon (played by the taped voice of Richard Nixon). Under Spielberg's usual capable direction, the film resonates today with a fourth estate again under siege. But there is an added element of female empowerment in an era of male dominance. Kay Graham was a socialite woman of her time, faced with a profiles-in-courage moment she was unprepared for. Streep's portrayal of that inner conflict and resolution is the stuff of acting legend. And in the final analysis, this film works as a rousing political parable...no surprise that the mostly liberal Academy audience broke into cheers during several culminating scenes. Old fashioned Capra-corn film making? Perhaps. But thank you, Hollywood, for the reminder of what America actually stands for.
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The Disaster Artist 2017
First off, I never watched the film The Room, despite living for 15 years a few blocks away from the movie theater (the Sunset 5) that became known for frequent screenings of this cult classic from the very beginning of its cultdom. I was tempted to see what the ruckus was about; but I knew that I probably wouldn't have become an enthusiast. Nevertheless, I was excited to see what the Franco brothers would do with this story; and I wasn't disappointed. I'm not going to make any effort to explicate the story...how mysteriously weird Tommy Wiseau made this super-indie joke of a bad film with all seriousness. It's enormously fun to watch...especially the process of making the film-within-the-film, scenes of which are shown side-by-side with the original footage in the end credits. What really impressed me was the way James Franco left all inhibitions behind in his amazing portrayal of Wiseau.
I was lucky to witness a Q&A with the Franco brothers after last night's screening. Actor/director James told amusing anecdotes, often slipping into the Wiseau character apparently without even trying. I've loved Franco as an actor ever since "Freaks and Geeks" and his startlingly true-to-life portrayal of James Dean in the TV biopic of several years ago. He never fails to surpass expectations as an actor, even in weird stoner roles. But until now, his promise as a film director has only sporadically been visible, mostly in short films. This is a full bore tour de force for Franco both as actor and director. More power to him!
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Downsizing 2017
One of my favorite directors, Alexander Payne, essays a social satire about saving the world by downsizing humans to conserve resources and avert ecological calamity. The message is disguised as an involving story of an everyman (Matt Damon), who descends into the miniature world, where his meager savings as a full-size person are magnified in an economy of reduced consumption. He becomes involved with a pint-size, but fervent Vietnamese boat person (Hong Chou, remarkable), who is a member of the servant class, living behind a "wall" separating the poor from the wealthy Lilliputians. As you might expect, the "message" here was laid on a bit thick. Still, the world the film invented was convincingly portrayed, feeling lived-in rather than as an abstraction. Even the unlikely scientific process of downsizing people and objects was done with surprising realism. High marks for social relevance, less so for emotionally resonant drama.
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Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars 2017
I was already mature in the 1960s; but music was my life back then. And Eric Clapton was the guitar god of my salad years. I didn't know much about him personally, that his sister was actually his mother, that he was in love with his best friend George Harrison's wife, that he was an incorrigible heroin addict and then an alcoholic, that he tragically lost his 4-year old son which somehow turned his life around. But I did know his music: Cream, Blind Faith, "Layla" etc. This long and comprehensive bio-doc skips around his life, combining tragedy and triumph; but he survived and is the better man for it today. In the annals of rock stars, he was a cypher...but no longer after this fascinating, tell-all, take no prisoners film.
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Icarus 2017
The director of this issue documentary, Bryan Fogel, was an excellent amateur bicycle racer determined to study the topic of doping to enhance performance, with himself as test subject. It was recommended that he contact a Russian expert on doping, Grigory Rodchenkov, who prescribed in a series of Skype chats a 3-drug regimen for Fogel to try before competing at an amateur cycling race in France...which would avoid detection. However Rodchenkov was also the director of a major testing lab in Russia, hired by such organizations as the Olympics to test athletes for doping. And the entire subject was about to blow up into a huge international scandal involving cheating Russian athletes before the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Suddenly Fogel's project turned into a filmed thriller, with Rodchenkov, newly arrived in the U.S., as whistle-blower, and Vladimir Putin as the major villain. And Fogel and his camera crew were fortuitous recipients of an insider view of what was about to happen. The resulting documentary exceeded its initial impetus by a large margin. It's geopolitical implications overshadowed the sports story. It was the stuff of spy fiction, only all too real.
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Water & Power: A California Heist 2017
Made at the height of a 4-year drought, this documentary factually covers the corrupt ways that California water policy has been turned into a capitalist tool for agribusiness and the rich to exploit and enrich themselves utilizing the most vital of the public's natural resources...water. As an issue documentary it does make its point, discloses smoking guns etc. But the presentation was perhaps a tad too dry to inspire necessary action. As a Californian myself, and a water-wasting big city denizen, I was left feeling that my options to protest my state's unfair water allocation policies were beyond my control.
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Short Skin 2014
A sweet Italian coming-of-age film about a gawky 17-year old boy who is dealing with a foreskin so tight that an erection is too painful to bear. He's afraid to undergo the obvious surgery; but his hormones are raging. Matteo Creatini plays the teen, Edouaro, with authentic age appropriateness. His relations with his best friend, his parents, sister and two prospective girl friends are painfully real. The film gets up close and personal about his member problem without ever crossing the line into prurience. All in all this is a well observed, authentic YA story about a subject that is rarely (if ever) shown on film.
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Surviving Peace 2017
Director Josef Avesar is an American Jew who has made a documentary which poses an interesting intellectual exercise: what would it take to bring actual peace to the sliver of land which is Israel/Palestine? He interviews people on both sides of this intractable dilemma...intelligent and passionate people (sometimes both qualities in the same person.) His proposal to solve the problem seems like pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by: a confederation of two equal entities with mutual vetoes. OK, it's more complicated than that; but for all the necessity for a peaceful resolution to the problem, it doesn't seem to me that what is proposed here could ever come to fruition. Still, it is a hopeful sign that some people are at least pondering a solution to the problem that might eventually work. As a secular, American Jew, I'm always torn when I think about this issue. But for some reason, just thinking about this situation rationally, as the people, scholars and politicians from both sides have done here, makes me feel even a slight bit more optimistic about the future.
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Kiki 2016
Kiki is a scene where LGBT+ black and latino young men get together to vogue and have fun. This documentary follows several of these men, some transitioning, some HIV+, most more or less gay. This is basically an update of the scene in the 1990 indie film Paris is Burning. In the film the men wear flamboyant costumes, have dance contests, discuss their family situations, even attend an affair at the White House in 2015. They exhibit a kind of activism and commitment that is specific to their generation. I'll admit that the kiki scene, despite being predominately gay, is about as far from my world as it is possible to imagine. Nevertheless, I found myself intrigued by and sympathetic with these youths. I only wish that the film making was a little more organized and that I could understand more than about half of the dialog and slang.
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Earth: One Amazing Day 2017
I'm not a huge fan of nature documentaries. Admittedly, the technology is getting much better in capturing the world around us with all its beauty and dangers. The BBC produced a recent TV series, Planet Earth II; and I watched the first couple of episodes, but gave up. I guess I lack enough of the sense of wonder about the natural world to persevere at watching such a series. However, this documentary is a shortened, greatest hits version of Planet Earth II, with a cohesive, if occasionally cringe-worthy, narration by Robert Redford that tells the story of what happens around the planet during one entire earth rotation. The film focuses on animal life, and the eternal struggle for food and species survival, all more or less powered by the sun. It's quite gorgeous to watch with an expressive orchestral score by Alex Heffes; and I'm sorry I missed seeing it on the big screen.
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Intent to Destroy: Death, Denial & Depiction 2017
[It may not seem obvious, but I am currently intensely involved in watching as many of the 170 Oscar submitted documentary features as I can before the upcoming preliminary voting deadline. There is no particular order to this task, no intended agenda. However, by pure happenstance, I was scheduled to watch this documentary about the Armenian genocide immediately after watching another film on the the same subject: Architects of Denial. The two films have very differing ways to approach the same subject. Both are fine films, that I have rated highly. However, the more narrow focus of this film seemed more intellectually stimulating; while the unbridled passions of the first film seemed more emotionally resonant. I have picked reason over feelings in my ratings of the two films; but I wonder if I had watched them in reverse order what my reaction would have been.]
Director Joe Berlinger shot a behind-the-scenes documentary of the making of a Hollywood epic that I missed called The Promise. That film was a love story about an American journalist (Christian Bale) covering the horrors suffered by an Armenian couple in Turkey during WWI. However, Berlinger used this footage as background to accompany a well written, exhaustively researched documentary about what has become known as the Armenian genocide of 1915-1920, a historical fact that the government of Turkey is determined to deny with all its geopolitical power. The documentary that resulted was particularly convincing in explaining why Turkey has continued to suppress and deny, despite increasingly strong evidence; and why governments in the West even today continue to cooperate. The documentary was particularly strong in depicting the genocide itself...likely due to the power of the Hollywood epic film making device used as background. But the documentary also made a convincing case for genocide using real historical evidence and allowing contrasting historians to make their cases without obvious editorializing. IMHO this was intelligent documentation at the very highest level.
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Architects of Denial
In 1915, a million and a half Christian Armenians were slaughtered by Moslem Turks, who deny it to this day. The Turks in Azerbaijan continue the systematic oppression of Armenians, and attacks on the historic enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh are a major flashpoint of violence even today. For geopolitical reasons, the U.S. is complicit in passively supporting what amounts to continuing genocide. And the policy of the Turks and Azeris remains: deny, deny, deny. And it is working: "genocide denied is genocide continued." Anyway, that is the basic thesis of this unabashed and passionately polemic documentary. Parallels are drawn to other historic genocides. But, this particular one is shown to be one of the few that has been effectively whitewashed throughout recent history.
At times, the passionate advocacy for the Armenians in this film comes off as unbalanced and over done. But the facts do speak for themselves. I cannot see how any objective American (and this film is slanted towards affecting U.S. public opinion) can remain unmoved or neutral on the issues raised by this film. That is the measure of effective advocacy. Watching this film made me concerned and even angry, as if I need another cause to join the dozens of other injustices in today's world. But I guess I do.
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Dream Big: Engineering Our World 2017
The Bechtel Corp. (the big engineering and construction firm) funded this IMAX documentary about, well, engineers and the wonderful results of their brains and toil. In keeping with its message, it focused on several women engineers who have achieved such results as building bridges in third world countries and studying earthquakes to make buildings safer. The visuals and cinematography were truly spectacular, in keeping with the IMAX image of traveling the world in search of gorgeous images. The script, however, was a little pat and commercially self-serving. But, some of the stories (for instance the high school that beat out colleges in an underwater robot competition) were uplifting and emotionally satisfying.
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Oklahoma City 2017
The story of the 1995 domestic terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is a familiar one. Many, including toddlers in a day care center, died that morning. Timothy McVeigh was caught and executed. But this documentary recounts more than that story, instead focusing on the events and cultural rot that led to this tragedy. It started with the rise of militias made up of white supremacists and rebels. It then told in detail the story of Ruby Ridge, where a family of gun nuts living off the grid was decimated by the FBI; and continued to the more familiar story of Waco, where a religious cult sacrificed itself in a mass suicide by cops. Exactly 1 year to the day after Waco, the seeds planted in the sick mind of McVeigh sprouted into death and destruction.
The visuals of these tragic events were shown on television at the time, hashed and rehashed in the media ad infinitum. So for me, at least, there wasn't much new to learn watching this documentary. But putting it all in one place provided a valuable lesson about the sickness seething inside our culture. We ignore it at our peril.
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Atomic Homefront 2017
In 1942, the enriched uranium to produce the atomic bomb was manufactured in secret in a nondescript building in downtown St. Louis. For the next few years truckloads of discarded radioactive materials were sent by road to a landfill north of the city, which became in time surrounded by a suburban housing development. Over time the landfill material started burning and reeking; and radioactive waste slowly escaped into a nearby creek. People started dying from cancers. The EPA claimed that the level never exceeded safety; but with long term exposure to sub-lethal dosages, who knows?
In previous years documentaries decrying the environmental dangers of fracking to nearby homes and people by contaminated water supplies were all the rage. Then global warming became the hot topic, with rising sea levels and weather irregularities. Then species extinctions, the decimation of the rain forests. On and on and on.
This documentary adds to the endless list of environmental disasters the terrible dangers to our people and homes from atomic wastes and radiation poisoning. It's told from the point of view of the people whose homes are poisoning them, who cannot afford to move and lose everything. It's a slowly progressing tragedy. And if the EPA under Obama was slow to act with nothing being done, imagine what the EPA gutted by the current administration will do (the film leaves that outcome up to the viewer's imagination.) This is a fine example of the kind of documentary that presents with logic and passion a tremendous problem that may be unsolvable. It's frustrating and tragic.
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Cuba and the Cameraman 2017
Jon Alpert has spent over 40 years as a journalist with a video camera visiting Cuba. In the course of his travels he became "friends" with Fidel (an interview with the smiling dictator on Castro's plane to New York to speak before the U.N. in 1979 was fascinating, even groundbreaking.) During his many visits to the island he continued to meet and relate with a disparate group of Cubans, including a family of three elderly farmers, a black marketeer who went from jail to capitalist prosperity, and another family that eventually emigrated to Florida. His long time-frame view of the island and the plight of its citizens under the U.S. embargo provided an invaluable and even moving historical document. If Alpert's running multi-lingual narration and often vapid questions were a little annoying at times, it's forgivable...since the stories he told were so compelling and filled with human interest and sheer entertainment value. Interestingly enough, I just happened to watch this film on the 1st anniversary of Fidel's death. Cuba never meant much to me before watching this film; but I find my perceptions and attitudes have altered. Can't ask for more than that from a documentary.
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The Final Year 2017
This film documents the people and activities of the foreign policy branch of the Obama administration during 2016, its final year in power. It is told from the point of view of four important policy makers: Ben Rhodes, long-time Obama confidant and assistant National Security Advisor; Stephanie Powers, Ambassador to the United Nations; John Kerry, Secretary of State; and Barak Obama, President of the United States. The film effectively illustrated their difficult tasks and their commitment to progress. Ultimately this was a tragedy that has yet to have a final act. But to paraphrase Obama: history never works in a straight line. As a film this was superbly made, with an editorial schema that was intelligent and decisive. I think history will ultimately show that these were heroic, principled and righteous people fighting the good fight. But I certainly don't take any optimistic solace looking to the future after watching this film.
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Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower 2017
Joshua Wong was 14, a high school student in Hong Kong, when he became world famous as an activist against China's attempt to control and communize the city's school curriculum. This involving political documentary follows Wong and his many friends and supporters as they continued the struggle against Beijing and its increasing tyranny. It's thrilling to watch at times, as hundreds of thousands march and occupy the city center. But Wong remains something of a cypher, or as one acolyte said: a robot, seemingly with unlimited energy and little fear. The events in this film somehow escaped my notice at the time; but it's impossible not to be stirred by the events shown here.
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Gaga: Five Foot Two 2017
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. This documentary follows her in 2016, a year when she came out of her disguises, made serious music, and culminated with the Super Bowl half-time show. Much is made of Gaga's physical pains since she broke her hip; but she's a trouper. It's almost impossible not to compare this film to Madonna: Truth or Dare, which was made in 1990 when that singer was the same age, and at the same relative level of fame as the Lady Gaga in this film. However, frankly, there is no comparison in the quality of the film making. Gaga, herself, however, comes off as painfully human. That's about the best that can be said for this agrandizing celebridoc.
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I Am Another You 2017
Documentary film maker Nanfu Wang left her native China in 2011 to find the elusive freedom of expression that she needed for her art. She settled in New York City; but returned to China to make an important documentary, Hooligan Sparrow, following a group of dissidents from city to city, and herself getting into trouble and barely escaping with her smuggled tapes.
But prior to her Chinese adventure, she had taken her video camera to Florida, and by chance hooked up with a young homeless man, Dylan Olsen. Wang learned that Olsen came from a Mormon family, his father was a detective, he had a younger brother and sister. Wang decided to accompany Olsen for a while, experiencing the personable boy's homelessness and itinerant lifestyle (the ultimate expression of the freedom she emigrated for) along with him, and openly taping his encounters, mostly with surprisingly friendly, open and generous people. She eventually left him on the road; and after her film making adventure in China, she decided to search for Dylan's roots in Utah.
She did find his family; and hooked up with Dylan again for another extended encounter. The resulting film was surprisingly moving and illuminating, with Dylan as vagabond and street poet...and incidentally Dylan as poster boy for the millions of mentally ill homeless in America. Ms. Wang had fortuitously tapped into a subculture that has been crying out to be seen; and her alien sensibility was the ideal vessel to experience it with.
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A Gray State 2017
David Crowley was an attractive, vibrant young man whose pessimistic vision of America probably stemmed from serving in the military in the Middle East and becoming disillusioned. He spent two years making a concept trailer for a futuristic film about a dystopian society of total government control that he titled "Gray State." The trailer went viral; and his cause was championed by the alt-right. Crowley went to Hollywood to find funding for a $30,000,000 production budget and commenced to finalize the shooting script.
David Crowley was married to a smart, accomplished ex-Muslim woman. They had a clever young daughter; and he loved his dog. Yet on Christmas day, 2014, someone shot David Crowley and family to death and smeared "Allah Akbar" in blood on the walls of his Minnesota home. The authorities said murder-suicide. Conspiracy theorists said otherwise. This documentary attempts through interviews with friends and family, home movies and readings from Crowley's journals to discover some kind of truth. The film is startling and upsetting, ostensibly a journey into madness. But there is just that smidgen of ambiguity that turns it into a kind of mystery thriller, stranger than fiction. But the fact is immutable that three beautiful people died on that fateful Christmas day.
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Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story 2017
This is a perfectly serviceable bio-doc about Austrian born, glamorous and beautiful Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr nee Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. The film tells of her several marriages, three children, many face lifts, and checkered movie career starting at age 16 in the scandalous Extasy and reaching a peak with her portrayal of Delilah in the C.B. deMille biblical epic. But the emphasis of this documentary was that this was not just a pretty face (although it definitely was that); rather Ms. Lamarr was smart, and actually invented and patented the idea behind wireless, bluetooth and secure communications that she called frequency hopping.
The film making was rather prosaic, strictly chronological with commentary by such insiders as Robert Osborne and Peter Bogdanovich, and generous clips from her films and TV talk show interviews. The real revelations which made this a current film came from some lost interview tapes for a Forbes magazine article that were found behind an office waste basket. The tapes proved that the elderly Lamarr was an interesting raconteur with an intelligent philosophy of life...certainly more than the Austrian bombshell she was reputed to be.
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Arthur Miller: Writer 2017
Rebecca Miller, yes that Rebecca Miller, a favorite film maker of mine (Maggie's Plan), wife of Daniel Day-Lewis...but also, something I didn't know before watching this documentary, the youngest daughter of playwright Arthur Miller. Being his daughter, she had the great opportunity to shoot hours of conversations with Miller; but only now, 12 years after his death in 2005, did she decide to make this film.
Arthur Miller was a complex individual, three wives, four children, myriad plays including some so important that they probably will be revived a century from now. He was a workaholic and spent much of his later life on a farm in Connecticut. Probably the most significant line of this bio-doc was in an interview when Mike Wallace asked Miller what he would want his obituary to read. His answer: "Writer." That's it; but there was more to his life than that. And, even though I'm not particularly a fan of Miller's, his discourses to his daughter about his life and works were intellectually stimulating and worth listening to.
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Jane 2017
Simply put, this documentary shows the professional life story of Dame Jane Goodall: primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, animal rights advocate, and above all, speaker to chimpanzees. The film is comprised of copious filmed material from the past, starting in the 1960s when Goodall was sent to the Gambe forest in East Africa to study the native apes in their habitat. An interview with present day Goodall provides a narration that gives an up to date perspective on her work and her life. The historic film footage of Goodall joining the chimpanzee social structure was simply amazing, much of it shot in spectacular color with natural sound by her husband, Baron Van Lawik, one of the greatest nature photographers of all time. And Phillip Glass's electronic score somehow brought the natural sounds, visuals and narration together. Frankly, I found every aspect of this film fascinating, smart and incredibly informative. Humanity owes a great debt to Dame Jane for her efforts at inter-species communication.
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One of Us 2017
The Hasidim are an Orthodox Jewish sect born in the wake of the Holocaust. It numbers about 300,000 members, many of them living in the outer New York boroughs, speaking Yiddish, wearing specific clothing. And it is remarkably self-contained, insular and religiously strict. This documentary follows three apostate members who are variously struggling to exit the Hasidic world. Etti is trying to divorce her abusive husband, facing the prospect of losing her seven children to the legal prowess of the sect. Luzer is a thirty-something man, who left the fold early, moving to Los Angeles to try to make it as an actor. Ari is an 18-year old boy in deep revolt against his heritage, a cocaine addict who even sports a tattoo while continuing to wear a yarmulke.
Being a secular Jew myself, I was both fascinated and repelled by this depiction of the world these people lived in and were trying to escape from. I've seen depictions of the Hasidic lifestyle before, for instance the involving fiction film from earlier this year, Menashe. But nothing prepared me for the sympathy and empathy I felt for these three well chosen people entrapped by their upbringing, but somehow bravely prevailing despite long odds.
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Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton 2017
This excessively titled documentary followed actor Jim Carry while he performed his uncanny and divinely inspired impression of Andy Kaufman while making the film Man in the Moon. Half of the doc was a static close-up interview with present day (and bearded) Carry recounting his head trip during his full immersion into playing roles (especially Kaufman and his alter-ego Tony Clifton.) Most of the remainder of the film contrasted actual videos of the real Kaufman with material shot on the set by a documentary crew, along with scenes from the finished 1999 film. The resulting edit is entertaining and, in keeping with both Carry's and Kaufman's talents for building zany characters, unsettling. Kaufman excelled at challenging his audience. His humor played so close to the bone, so potentially offensive, that it went beyond comedy into discomfiting parody. Carry was able to successfully channel Kaufman 24/7 during the film making. And it was hard to take for 90 minutes, because frankly, I never liked the real Kaufman's comedy when he was alive. Good job, Jim!
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The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson 2017
Marsha P. Johnson was a 47 year-old transsexual living in New York City, when she was found dead in the Hudson River in July, 1992. She had been a beloved figure in the trans and gay community, and had been part of the Stonewall uprising in 1969. The police ascribed her death to suicide; but many at the time doubted that possibility. This documentary tells Johnson's story utilizing old videos and interviews with acquaintances and activists that are still alive (and some that have passed on). However most of the film is spent following the quest of current-day Anti-Violence Project worker Victoria Cruz to find out what really happened to Ms. Johnson. Was it an accident? A mob hit? An attack by phobic "Guidos" that were supposedly seen in the area? Perhaps even police misconduct might have played a part, since the official record was mysteriously missing and retired cops from the supposed investigation were antagonistic to Cruz's inquiries. In any case, the documentary was at its best when it examined the history of GLBT (with emphasis on the T) activism in NYC, especially from the point of view of Johnson's colorful friend, the late Sylvia Rivera. But through it all, the smiling, kind and generous presence of Ms. Johnson, alive on old videos, illuminated the screen.
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Strong Island 2017
William Ford, Jr. was a 24-year old African-American man who was shot and killed by Mark Reilly, a white auto mechanic, after a short altercation in 1992. A Long Island grand jury failed to indict Reilly; and Ford's family, bereaved and beset, never understood exactly why. His younger sister, Yance, set out a quarter century later to find out the true story; and she made this film to memorialize her brother and try to find closure. The film was slow paced and artfully shot. It also seemed narrowly focused on the corrosive effects of the murder on her family; and the lack of primary contact with the perpetrators was telling. As much as I respect Yance's quest and sympathized with her grief, for me the film struggled to justify its feature length.
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Voyeur 2017
For possibly 30 years Gerald Foos owned a motel with a secret attic from which he could spy on the clientele in the rooms below and masturbate. For much of that time he was in contact with famed journalist Gay Talese, who sat on the story until statutes of limitation and other considerations passed, and then wrote the story about his voyeur source, first for a New Yorker cover article and then for a book. However, for all the research and fact checking, much of the story turned out to be, let us say, controversial as to facts.
This documentary tells two parallel stories...first of Talese justifying his journalistic bona fides; and then that of 83-year old Foos and his wife, their lives under close scrutiny by the documentary crew. The actual re-creation of the motel and attic were artfully done with miniatures and actors. That part was creepy and degenerate. But the majority of the film was devoted to contrasting the evolving states of mind of the two old men, Foos and Talese, by following them around and filming interviews with them over time. Contradictions appear in their self-justifications; and I actually found myself laughing at times. The film doesn't satisfactorily conclude with all the t's crossed and i's dotted. But, let's face it, the story had just enough prurience to be entertaining, even as it seemed much ado about not much.
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Whose Streets? 2017
On August 9, 2014, a teenager named Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, MO by Darren Wilson, a white policeman. Witnesses said the boy had his hands in the air and was unarmed; but ultimately Wilson was "exonerated" by a grand jury. This documentary tells the story of the events that followed 8/9/14, a time of peaceful protests, riots, and a city (including nearby St. Louis) in turmoil. The cause of avenging Michael Brown's death became one of the major flashpoints of the national "Black Lives Matter" movement.
The film is comprised of gripping, contemporary videos shot on cameras and phones, edited verité style without narration or imposed film maker editorializing. It mostly follows three activists: an African American lesbian couple, and a family man eventually evicted from his project home at ground zero of the Brown shooting. The film is polemic and rousing...sympathetic with the protesters, with few attempts to balance that from the point of view of the tear gas and rubber bullets wielding policemen and national guardsmen.
I have to admit that I wasn't paying close attention to what was happening in Ferguson at the time. I was taking some time off from newscasts, and only had a cursory awareness of events there. This film filled the gap in my comprehension quite nicely. It makes a fine, up-to-date addition to the several documentaries this year about my own city's (L.A.) civil unrest in 1992.
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Abacus: Small Enough to Jail 2016
During the mortgage crisis which started in 2008, many banks and lenders were guilty of writing fraudulent, sub-prime mortgages and reselling baskets of this paper as high rated securities primed to default. Most of the big banks and institutions that played these games were considered "too big to fail;" and the government bailed them out and only issued fines. No banks were ever charged for the scandals and crimes that almost caused a worldwide Depression.
No banks except in New York City, where a small (6 branch) bank serving the immigrant community in China Town, Abacus Federal Savings Bank, was brought to trial for over 80 counts of aggravated fraud. Several loan officers admitted to padding applications and accepting what amounted to bribes to approve subprime loans. The bank's founders, an immigrant family (an 80-year old father and three lawyer daughters) was accused of conspiring with some dishonest employees to defraud. The prosecution had to prove that the bank itself was complicit in making these loans, which if proven would probably destroy the bank and the founding family. This bank, that was "small enough to jail," apparently spent five years and $10 million to defend itself. And this documentary goes deeply into the trial and later the jury proceedings to examine this case, which finally was decided in 2015. I'm not going to disclose the result of the trial...just say that the film deftly presented all the facts, allowing the viewer to follow the case as the jury did. It's an absorbing and involving legal thriller, and a hopeful example of American justice in action.
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Wonder 2017
Jacob Tremblay shows once again that he is a wonder of a child actor, playing Augie Pullman: facially disfigured from birth from a rare genetic disorder. His mother (Julia Roberts) has protectively home-schooled the boy until 5th grade; but his father (Owen Wilson) is determined to have the boy attend a tony New York prep school to attempt to adapt to and socialize with other children. That is the set-up for a heart-felt film that is sensitive to kid's issues such as bullying; but also a film about a loving family in crisis.
The film is cannily divided into chapters representing the ways the various major characters act and react. Augie's high-school age sister (Izabela Vidovik) loves and supports her brother while feeling ignored in the family. Augie's school mates initially act like typical cruel kids (Noah Jupe, who plays his new friend, is a true find), while Augie himself tries to hide his disfigured face behind a spacesuit helmet. I feel there are valuable life-lessons here for kids to learn. However, for me, the film itself tended to seem a little sugar coated and message laden. But that isn't to take anything away from auteur Chbosky's skill with actors and his script, a tender adaptation from the famous YA novel by R. J. Palacio.
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Faces Places 2017
JR (a pseudonym) is a 34-year old French photographer and artist who presents to the world a startling resemblance to the young Jean-Luc Godard, complete with sun glasses and black pork pie hat. He drives a tricked out van which serves as a photo booth and portable film lab to produce huge B&W prints which he, and a his crew post on buildings and other monumental sites. Agnes Varda is an 89-year old, famed new-age film maker and photographer in her own right. Together these two traveled through the north of France taking photos of people, and mounting huge displays of these photos on various edifices. This trip has been compiled into a very entertaining documentary, which combines a travelogue with some fascinating conversations about life, art and Varda's personal history (JR is not very forthcoming about himself, however.) The film culminates in a visit to Godard's actual house, where the reclusive and elusive film maker declines to appear. That is the only sour note in this beautiful and fun documentary, which manages to be a film about the essence of artistry and the passion of two artists of dissimilar ages but equal commitment.
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Call Me by Your Name 2017
My opinion has changed very little from my review 2 months ago; so I refer you to that page: Link to original review
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Darkest Hour 2017
Three weeks in May, 1940. An unparalleled crisis was unfolding in England as its army was encircled and trapped on the beach in France. The appeasing government of Neville Chamberlain was on the cusp of falling. All Europe was being consumed by Nazi hoards. Yet, against odds, the times thrust to power a complex, flawed alcoholic as Prime Minister, a man whose oratory almost single-handedly roused the nation to fighting spirit in the face of immanent doom. OK, if this were fiction that would make for a rousing, if sappy, melodramatic thriller. But Winston Churchill did exist; and Gary Oldman brought him to vivid life in this film, which has eerie parallels of time and place to the box office success from earlier this year, Dunkirk; but does it with actual character development and memorable dialog. True, some of the scenes here, (except for the three famous speeches at the time) were patently invented for dramatic purposes (one taking place in the London Underground was particularly ridiculous on its face). But, for me the film managed to personalize this crucial moment of history in Parliament, in Buckingham Palace and in 10 Downing Street as effectively as any film has.
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Justice League 2017
What is the use of my reviewing a comic book movie? I'm far removed from the intended audience; and in any case, I have a history of preferring the DC comics of my youth to the Marvel comic universe that didn't even exist when I was the kind of kid that absorbed comic books through my pores...in the 1940s. That said, I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Justice League this time around. Not so much for its predictable plot (evil monster threatens Earth and [SPOILER] almost but not quite defeats the combined forces of good.) Rather in this case, the "combined forces for good" were particularly well written: humanizing them with humor (particularly Ezra Miller's Flash, with canny eye-rolls and youthful quips), and convincing vulnerability...even extending to a magically revived and emotionally fragile Superman. The pacing seemed tight and non-bloated. And the world building which extended to sea and air and extraterrestrial planets was convincingly dense, with a welcome lighter touch than in Nolan's dark Batman trilogy. Despite the famous troubles in post-production, the film had enough wow! factor production design to, at times, astonish. And special kudos to the remarkably apt use of Leonard Cohen and John Lennon songs to enhance an effective, bombastic soundtrack. I was prepared from the trailer and scuttlebutt to hate this film; and ended up grudgingly admiring it.
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The Work 2017
California has instituted a program to fight against prison recidivism. Carefully chosen non-prisoner men spend 4 days at Folsom prison in intensive group therapy sessions with volunteer prisoners. This documentary followed three disparate "free" men as they interact with a circle of hardened internees in sessions that are often emotionally explosive, as well as therapeutic. What the film demonstrated is a particular strain of toxic masculinity and father issues that made me, as an audience of one, particularly uncomfortable. I have to admit that my subjective response seems to be unrepresentative of the usual feelings about this film as represented by other reviews on letterboxd. For sure, I respected the film making, especially the editing and positive intentions. However, I simply could not overcome my perhaps naive skepticism that what I witnessed was valid and truthful, and not just the emotional manipulations of sociopathic felons.
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Whitney: Can I Be Me 2017
Whitney Houston, probably the most skilled and talented singer I've ever heard, also had a tragic life of drugs and fraught relationships. Nick Broomfield eschewed his usual on-screen persona to make this straightforward, chronological biographic documentary of her life. The film is heavy with rare performance footage, especially from a 1999 European tour that was filmed by a documentary crew but heretofore never seen. But the film also has telling contemporary interviews with some of the people from her inner circle...but not her husband, the controversial singer Bobby Brown, and not her long time companion Robyn Crawford, and certainly not her daughter who died of a drug overdose at age 22. Still, the triumphs and the stark tragedy of this cruelly cut-off life burst from the screen...an achievement far more informative and telling than any random TMZ gossip segment could ever aspire to be.
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Take My Nose… Please! 2017
It's hard to imagine a less entertaining subject matter for a documentary than nose jobs and cosmetic plastic surgery. But make the subjects for study a century of female comics, many of whom made their living from denigrating their appearance, and leaven the mix with humor and compassion...and you strike filmic gold. Director Joan Kron is 89 and has been a contributing editor for the magazine "Allure," mostly covering plastic surgery. This is her first film; and it is a fine achievement, with high production values. In the course of the film we get to know the stories of a number of comediennes, from Fanny Brice to the tragic Totie Fields, from Phyllis Diller to Joan Rivers. But when the film interviews contemporary comics like Judy Gold and, especially Jackie Hoffman, who undergoes her operation and recovery on camera, the film really takes off, going more than skin deep into the entire subject of the societal pressures on women to be attractive. On a personal note: I was watching the film, smug in my male attitude of never feeling the need to enhance my looks with surgery, when a man in the end credits mentioned that he had braces when he was young, and that is a kind of plastic surgery. Busted!
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Roman J. Israel, Esq. 2017
Despite a great central performance by Denzel Washington as a lawyer with smarts who lacks people skills (maybe even on the spectrum), the film misfires plotwise. I simply couldn't buy into characters that changed their motivations 180 degrees in the course of three weeks without what seemed to me to be adequate set-up or rationales. However, to balance that, the film featured a rare, faithful depiction of downtown Los Angeles; and even more important, an impassioned exposé of a corrupt American justice system.
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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri 2017
For me, this film had everything going for it. A superb ensemble cast led by Frances McDormand at her furious best. A sensitive script that depicted a small mid-American town rocked by a terrible, unsolved crime with auteur Martin McDonagh's signature mix of humor and gravitas. Maybe it went a little over the top at times; but still about as entertaining as any film this year so far.
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Wonder Wheel 2017
A Tennessee William-ish domestic drama with a fine ensemble cast and an appropriately garish depiction of vintage, post-WWII Coney Island. Woody Allen has not lost his touch with actors; but the triangle affair and gangster subplot were a bit banal. At best, minor Allen.
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Murder on the Orient Express 2017
Predictably lush, with a vivid production design and overall fine cast. But somehow disappointing, too, with its old fashioned Agatha Christie mystery story format that seemed overly familiar (one reason: I watched the original film in the 1970s.) However, as contrived and unlikely as the story and setting were, it sure made me nostalgic for the long passed era of luxury trains and travelers dressed to the nines.
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No Greater Love 2017
Director Justin David Roberts served in Afghanistan as an army chaplain. Unable to carry a gun, he carried a video camera instead, and used it to record the activities of his unit of the "No Slack" Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division. Upon his return to civilian life, he made this documentary, weaving unsparing ground-level combat footage with interviews of dozens of his fellow soldiers, along with a moving celebration for those who died in battle. The main point of the film is to try to explain why more returning soldiers commit suicide (over 20 per day) than die in battle. Watching and listening to this film is a gut wrenching experience...not so much for the combat footage, which is bloody enough. Rather it is how the film makes one empathize with these men, some physically injured, most psychologically injured, as they try to re-integrate into civilian life. For most, the adrenaline rush of combat, the enhanced comradery of experiencing firefights together can never be matched. Whatever one's attitude is about the ongoing war against the Taliban, one cannot help but admire these men and women who fought for no greater love than honor, country and duty.
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Lady Bird 2017
Christine is 17, a misfit attending a Sacramento Catholic high school, in revolt against her controlling mother, anxious about her virginity, desperate to get out of Central California at any cost. She wants more than anything to be called Lady Bird by family and teachers. The film is a classic girl's coming-of-age story; and it has seldom if ever been done better than this version by the classic erstwhile coming-of-age actress Gretta Gerwig, who wrote the script and also directed it. Gerwig's casting is immaculate. Saorise Ronan, complete with authentic mid-Cali accent, is perfect for Christine...feisty and vulnerable by turns. Just as impressive is Laurie Metcalf as her mother, internalizing her love for her daughter and dealing with family economic problems by affecting an armor of stern. Christine is also dealing with a couple of inappropriate boy friends, incidentally played by my choices for the two best actors of their generation, Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalimet. Rounding out the superb cast Tracy Letts, as Christine's sympathetic father, Lois Smith as an understanding elderly nun and Beanie Feldstein, as the dowdy, but talented, best friend. Speaking of talent, the centerpiece of the film revolved around a school production of Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along," which was achingly authentic and wonderful to watch. Bottom line, I guess I'm personally more partial to boys coming-of-age stories, once having been a boy myself. But Gerwig and Ronin combined to make me a true believer in Christine's authentic teenage girl's life and times.
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LBJ 2016
Woody Harrelson does an effective impression of the 36th POTUS; and Jennifer Jason Leigh is even more convincing doing Lady Bird Johnson in this interesting, if limited biopic. The film effectively limits itself to the one-week period starting with JFK's arrival in Dallas on that fateful November day that Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President; and concludes with a shortened version of LBJ's first speech to Congress the next week to affirm his support for Kennedy's civil rights bill, which was strongly opposed by Southern Democrats who formerly considered LBJ one of theirs. That speech is a stirring film moment; and, to be honest, I was stirred. Maybe because I lived through that era as an adult and have come in time to believe that LBJ was unfairly reviled at the time...maybe because my own feelings mirror the passion and leftist leanings of director Rob Reiner...the film moved me on occasion to tears. In any case, this film makes an interesting companion piece to Pablo Larrain's Jackie, released in 2016 and covering the exact same time frame...from a completely different angle. Intercutting those two films would be an interesting exercise in re-creating on film a vital moment in the collective history of the U.S.
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Molly’s Game 2017
Jessica Chastain is truly luminous playing Molly Bloom, the tabloids' infamous "Poker Princess." Her saga, adapted from her autobiography by writer turned director Aaron Sorkin, is told at a furious clip in this involving film. Of course nobody else writes dialogue like Sorkin, with fast paced rhythms and incisive smarts. And with Chastain and Idris Elba (as her reluctant lawyer) he found actors who can deliver the goods. That Sorkin is a little vague about what happens at a poker table would only matter to experts. And some psychobabble from Molly's screen dad (Kevin Costner) somehow sounded real with the Sorkin spin. All in all I was captivated despite reservations.
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Thor: Ragnarok 2017
I'm not a fan of comic book super hero movies; and especially, the Marvel universe has never held much appeal for me. I skipped the 2nd Thor film without a second thought. However considering that the wonderfully sly and iconoclastic New Zealand indie director, Taika Waititi, had been hired to helm the third Thor film I figured it would be worth a look. I suppose it was up to a point. This film follows the Guardians of the Galaxy and Deadpool template of adding humor and satire to the serious mayhem of the genre. That is all to the good. However, even giving Chris Hemsworth's Thor a modern hairdo and throwing in a familiar Avenger or two couldn't make me care about the follies of the gods of Aesir and their city in the sky of Asgard. Well, except for Cate Blanchett who gave villainy a memorable feminist sneer. For my money, the film was just too long and too loud (although I did love the Mothersbough score which managed to sneak familiar electronic doodles into its orchestral bombast.) But then Marvel films always remind me that I'm 60 years older than the intended audience. So what does it really matter what I think?
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Prosperity 2017
This is a well meaning infocommercial style documentary touting the advantages of conscious capitalism. It's beautifully produced, great cinematography, positive message about responsible companies that benefit the Earth, their customers and workers over and above their shareholder (today's dominant paradigm of capitalism). Nice job; but I kept falling asleep. The film was so devoted to doing good and hammering that vital message home, that it somehow lost its entertainment value.
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Last Flag Flying 2017
Three Nam vets, each with an engaging back-story, are brought together in 2004 to bury the son of one of their number, a marine who died in action in Iraq. That's all I'm going to say about the plot. I was enormously moved by the artistry of the three actors (Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, Laurence Fishburne) who vividly portrayed different archetypes of the veterans of that war. And Richard Linklater's intensely personal script and direction managed to encompass the political realities of the post-9/11 world with very touching personal stories that never seemed sentimentalized. This is an intriguing departure for Linklater, a favorite director of mine (I've given him more 5-star reviews than any other film maker.)
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The Square 2017
Director Östlund proved in Force Majeure that he is one of the most effective examiners of contemporary morés on film. This film satirizes various aspects of modern art, advertising, battle of the sexes, beggers, pickpockets. It is centered on the curator of a major modern art museum in Stockholm, who is having a very bad week. Unfortunately, for all the cleverness of the script, the scattershot adding of event upon event caused a lack of focus. IMHO, the film could have cut out a few of the sub plots and been shortened considerably. Still, it's smart and amusing and I'm looking forward to Östlund's next film.
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Naples ’44 2016
In 1944 a British intelligence officer, Norman Lewis, kept a diary of his service in Naples during the occupation by the Allies after the invasion, later published in a book. This documentary is a pictorial representation of the intelligent and illuminating words of that diary, read by Benedict Cumberbatch in wall-to-wall narration. Director Patierno gathered together old newsreels, fiction films about the times (for instance, Mike Nichol's Catch 22, Roberto Rossellini's Paisan and many others), along with contrasting scenes of today's Naples to construct an editorial fabric of anecdotes about the war-torn city life of the times. The resulting narrative is brutal, truthful, and one of the best descriptions of the horrors of WWII from the civilian victims' points of view that we've seen on film. At times it is almost too hard to take; but somehow, the Italian people's resourcefulness and the British soldier's concern and compassion shine through.
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Neary’s: The Dream at the End of the Rainbow 2017
Jimmy Neary was born in Sligo, Ireland; emigrated to the U.S. at age 24 in 1947; worked for years as a porter at a New York City club; and finally in 1967 opened his own eponymous East Side pub which still operates today with some of the same waitresses as opening day. This convivial documentary tells his story: children and grandchildren, famous friends and diners at his pub (including Cardinal Dolan, Mayor Bloomberg, Joan Kennedy Smith), trip back to the old sod etc. etc. It's an entertaining, if somewhat commercialized version of the American dream exemplified by Neary's famous (and successful) smile. I guess if I ever make it back again to NYC I might just visit Neary's Pub and order herring (the Cardinal's favorite). After all, that's what such a feel-good documentary like this is supposed to do.
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Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry 2016
Wendell Berry is an 83 year old Kentucky farmer, author, poet and home spun philosopher. This documentary tells his story...small family farmer, nature lover, opponent of agribusiness and the government subsidies that encourage farm consolidation, crusading proponent of organic, back to the soil rural life. The film also tells the story of other farmers and their progeny, gradually forced off the land by economic necessity.
Personally, I'm traditionally as urban as it gets (although I did have my quasi-hippie return to the land period in the 1970s when I was in my 30s.) Yet through the power of Berry's words and film maker Laura Dunn's gorgeous imagery, I was overcome by a feeling of nostalgia for the beauties of the countryside and the romance of being one with nature. Every frame of this film is a beautiful visual...from the etchings which adorn the inter-titles, to the "Koyaanisqatsi-ish", stop-motion scenes of overpopulated, mechanized urban life, to the sun-dappled forests and loamy farmland scenes that could have been taken from one of executive producer Terrence Malick's films. I wonder if Berry's poetic narration extolling his rural philosophy actually makes any sense in today's world. But I sure wish it did; and I love this film for introducing me to Berry's world.
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Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold 2017
The life and times of essayist, novelist, dramatist and intellectual gadfly Joan Didion as told to her nephew, Griffin Dunne. Didion's tragedy filled life made her an expert at defining grief. But director Dunn has also managed to document and distill his aunt's life into a chronological social history of the Left and Right American coasts during the tumultuous half century of her influential writings. It's intellectually stimulating, with several celebrity interviews (including the elderly Didion herself) that are particularly relevant and informative. Didion is a Californian to the core; but one who has lived much of her productive life in New York City. She epitomizes cosmopolitan smarts. I never was a fan of hers, never read her books (only some of her magazine essays). But this fascinating and intimate telling of her life story, tragedy and triumphs both, deeply moved me.
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Goodbye Christopher Robin 2017
Pooh love eluded me as a youth (I was more into Dr. Doolittle, Freddie the Pig and the Oz books, and then Heinlein juveniles by the time I reached age 8.) Still, this visually beautiful and reasonably affecting (albeit emotionally manipulative) biopic about A.A. Milne and the young son he made a beloved literary hero without the child's permission was worth a free screening on the big screen. Crucial quote from the grown up Christopher Robin in the denouement: "I had a great childhood; but a terrible growing up." The film was mostly about that manufactured childhood, realized in Masterpiece Theatre, stiff-upper-lip mode. The cautionary tale conflicted with the nostalgic magic of the real 100 Acre Woods. But I found myself tearing up by the end despite all my efforts not to.
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120 Beats Per Minute 2017
The definitive story of ACT-UP Paris through the tumultuous AIDS era of the early 1990s before the advent of protease inhibitor drugs ended the ceaseless deaths in the affected communities. The story centers on one gay couple, especially one dying activist, Sean (played by the superb Argentinian actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) and his HIV-negative lover Nathan (Arnaud Valois.) But the film's core strength is its realistic representation of the group dynamics as the large cast comprising ACT-UP Paris plans and performs their acts of protest against government indifference and big pharma profiteering. The film was remarkably honest and true to its era. Bravo! [Personal note: in the early 1990s I lived the role of Nathan to my partner's Sean. We were Americans and not activists; but the second half of this film mirrored our story, written with affection and fidelity. So, perhaps my emotional breakdown while watching this film was explainable. ]
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Wonderstruck 2017
Two stories intersect. The first in 1927 when a deaf girl travels to New York City to find her mother, a silent film actress. The second took place 50 years later when a 12-year old, recently struck deaf boy, whose mother has just died in an auto accident, runs away from his aunt's home in Minnesota to find the father he knows nothing about...except for a clue that he might be in New York City. The 1927 story was shot in B&W, in the style of silent films, with an occasionally obtrusive music track which fit the era. The 1977 sequences were shot with a retro color film look. Each film brought its contemporary New York cityscapes to vivid reality, a triumph of production design on a relatively low budget. The film was adapted from a children's book; and has a kind of fantasy feeling to it. Coincidences abound; in fact the plot makes little real-world sense. But director Todd Haynes again proves he is a master of nostalgia, of bringing the imagined past to life with unique fidelity. I was enchanted.
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Human Flow 2017
Clearly artist and humanist Ai Weiwei set off with the intention of calling the world's attention to the plight of the more than 60,000,000 refugees caught in the red tape and degradations of today's world. He and his documentary crew traveled in the Middle East, Bangladesh, Africa, Europe and Mexico. They interviewed families stuck in the world of the homeless and stateless, fleeing from the ravages of war and famine. Utilizing drones his camera took to the air to disclose scenes of refugees packed into squalid camps scurrying like ants...except these were real people and children in real jeopardy, with little hope for the future. The artist in Weiwei could not help but make beautiful pictures of horrendous suffering. Hopefully his despairing message will have an impact on the people watching the film. I know it aroused my empathy, my privileged feeling of "there, but for the grace...go I." But for these refugees, caught in a world of increasing peril, little hope is offered. I ask myself: what can be done? What can I do? Even if the film has no answer to these questions, at least it makes raising these questions inevitable.
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Extraordinary Ordinary People 2017
The National Endowment for the Arts hands out heritage fellowships to deserving Americans who have accomplished outstanding achievements in a variety of folk arts. This documentary is comprised of sequences celebrating these "extraordinary ordinary" people of all stripes, from musicians to quilt makers, from circus acrobats to ethnic folk artists to lace makers and all points in between. These are special people, and their performances on film are enjoyable and enlightening. However, for all the film's good intentions, the film making, particularly the editing, lacked a sense of structure and purpose. The performances and information were entertaining and well worth celebrating; but the film just seemed to randomly string together as many examples of unknown artists and craftspeople doing their thing that could fit into an hour and a half.
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California Typewriter 2016
This is a documentary paean to the typewriter, may it rest in peace. The film gathers together an assorted selection of people involved with the machine: among them celebrity aficionados (e.g. Tom Hanks, John Mayer, Sam Shepard), collectors, historians, a sculptor who uses old typewriter parts to construct his creations, and the people who run a little typewriter repair shop in Berkeley. They all have stories, which are intercut rather randomly into a mosaic glorifying the tactile writing machine and regretting how the soul-less computer destroyed the industry. It's fun to watch; but after a while it just seemed like much ado about little.
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Tokyo Project 2017
In this HBO sponsored short film, a married man and a mysterious woman keep encountering each other while visiting in Tokyo. Eventually they hook up; but not before we are treated to a romantic view of Tokyo at its most picturesque. Ebon Moss-Bachrach (from Girls) and Elizabeth Moss (TV "it-girl" of the decade) are the two American tourists. It's a thoughtful script with a surprising hook and beautiful cinematography. Watch the artful preparation of an amazing cocktail at an upscale sake bar (and note the recipe is in the end credits.) It's little touches like this that enhance the pleasures of this gem.
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Breathe 2017
This is an emotionally manipulative, but nevertheless superbly shot and acted true story about an adult polio victim who famously triumphed over the disabling disease. It is one of those love stories on film that has the ring of authenticity...due primarily to the two lead actors, Claire Foy and especially Andrew Garfield. I needed a positive, human story and a good cry; and this film provided both.
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The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) 2017
This is an engaging, insightful collection of vignettes about three generations of a dysfunctional New York City family. It is centered around a curmudgeonly father (Dustin Hoffman) whose self-absorbed devotion to his failed career as abstract sculptor has emotionally stunted his three grown children. Fine script, great cast all around; but I'm adding a half-star for director Baumbach's miraculous resurrection of Adam Sandler's career as a serious actor, his most controlled performance since Punch-Drunk Love.
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Brimstone & Glory 2017
One of the most bizarre public religious rituals in the world takes place yearly in Tultepec, a suburb of Mexico City. The town's economy is based on the manufacture of fireworks; and they hold a festival devoted to memorializing the 16th Century saint "San Juan de Dios," whose main sanctifying miracle was that he exited unburned from a hospital conflagration after saving numerous lives. To celebrate the saint's day in March, the town builds enormous structures of pinwheeling fireworks displays the first evening. And the next day and night they parade through the town with gigantic effigies of bulls that explode in fiery splendor while the townspeople cavort and eventually covet their burn scars (and some actually die in the process.)
The documentary shoots these festivities vérité style. And the images of townspeople (including children) braving dangers along with the amazing pyrotechnics and colorful showers of embers are spectacularly beautiful...and a little terrifying. I found myself actually wanting to add this event to my own bucket list; but I'm not insane. For one weekend this town does go insane; and it is an unforgettably gorgeous experience to watch these images at the remove of film.
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Augie 2017
Augie Nieto was an entrepreneur and fitness guru (his company developed the Lifecycle exercise bike) when he was diagnosed with the fatal muscular deterioration disease ALS in 2005. He has battled the disease ever since; and has survived long after his supposed expiration date. But more than that, he has used his entrepreneurial skills to fund and wage a war of medical and technological science against ALS and similar wasting diseases. This hopeful documentary tells his story: husband, father, tireless fighter, still totally devoted to the physical therapies that have enabled him to stay alive and even make progress with controlling his body. This isn't the first documentary about ALS. Stephen Hawking, for instance, still survives and has been the subject of several films. Other victims have not been as lucky; but remain venerated on film for their courage and tragic lives. Augie's story contains more hope for a cure than any previous ALS doc. But still, the enormous rigors and expenses to keep him alive are exhausting to watch (and even more so to experience, of course.) I found myself occasionally suffering from empathetic ennui. But the lesson of this film is that Augie perseveres to this day, bless him.
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AlphaGo 2017
I've never quite understood the strategy and subtleties of the ancient board game GO. But I do know a bit about AI (artificial intelligence.) Much the way that IBM developed Deep Blue to beat the world chess champion, Google subsidiary Deep Mind programmed a computer named AlphaGo to attempt to beat the world's greatest Go player, a Korean named Lee Sedol. None of the programmers were expert Go players. Rather, as explained in the film, the program was designed as a neural network which allowed the computer to teach itself how to play intuitively and dynamically improve its odds of winning. However, nobody expected the computer to actually prevail this early in the program's development.
The heart of the film is a five game match that took place in 2016 in Seoul between Lee and AlphaGo. Even though the games themselves were hard for a non-player to follow despite the media commentary at the time, the film was edited so skillfully that each of the five games had all of the suspense and rooting interest of a superior sports documentary about a more familiar sport (e.g. chess or basketball.) Human vs. machine. GO nerd vs. tech nerds. Past vs. future. John Connor vs. Skynet. Chances are, like me, you weren't paying attention the way 60,000,000 Chinese were at the time; but this rousing, intelligent documentary takes you there up close and personal. Nice job.
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Searching Nafta 2017
A B&W vérité short documentary about a group of teenage boys wandering around Inhambane, Mozambique talking about girls, tech (especially their cell phones), emigrating as some friends did to the consumerist West, and finally the healthful qualities of baobab tree fruit. It is shot at such a remove from the subjects that it is difficult to identify individuals; and for all the realistic depiction of their lifestyle nothing much happens. Even Nafta, a girl that one of them is searching for in the market place at the start of the film, is quickly abandoned as a subject and never found.
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The Mountain Between Us 2017
Two survivors of a small plane crash on an isolated mountain crest are faced with the impossible odds of survival. That is the set-up for a film which combines two disparate genres, the survival film and the romantic melodrama. That it works at all is a tribute to a fine director, a cast of two superb actors, Kate Winslet and Idris Elba (who shows unexpected romantic hero chops), and some of the most remarkable outdoor mountain terrain cinematography ever put on film. I guess, considering my phobia against flying, that if I had realized how realistic the plane crash would be, I probably would have given this film a miss. However, by the end I just found myself submitting emotionally to this weird combination of chick flick and adventure saga.
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Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House 2017
The true behind the scene story of Nixon's downfall, told in quietly effective political thriller style. Liam Neeson plays whistle-blower FBI assistant director Mark Felt (aka "Deep Throat") during the Watergate era. It is a superb performance of stern rectitude and unusual restraint. It makes an interesting companion piece to the previous All the President's Men, which was told from the point of view of the recipients of Felt's information. I guess I just enjoy political thrillers...because Mark Felt seemed to unfold like authentic history for me. And this film is particularly well timed, considering how the Nixon White House obstructed the F.B.I. investigation of White House involvement in Watergate with possible parallels to today.
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Blade Runner 2049 2017
In fairness, I can't do an objective review of this film, so I won't. It has been ten years since I watched the original "final cut" Blade Runner, my third experience of the film on the big screen. Undoubtedly I should have viewed it again before watching this film, since BR 2049 is clearly a fanboy's conceptual continuation of the dystopian vision of Los Angeles from the first film, rather than a film that has created its own new world. (I loved director Villeneuve's explanation in Q&A that his snow covered futuristic vision of L.A. is a Canadian's revenge for my city's incessant sunshine). So, without actually following the narrative, I just let the amazing, amped-up sound track, the eerily effective, droning musical score, and the superbly lit futuristic sets and wonderfully integrated CGI wash over me and overcome any objectivity about the lame, predictable plot.
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The Florida Project 2017
In this sensitive drama, Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) is a precocious six-year old girl living from week to week with her economically challenged single mother (Bria Vinaite) in a bright pink touristy motel in Orlando, Florida within sight of an unattainable "magic kingdom." She and her young friends who roam the squalid neighborhood with youthful exuberance are representatives of the "hidden homeless." Her story, told mostly from Moonee's ground level point of view with a fluid hand held 35mm film camera, is one of childhood innocence and mischief existing in a visually arresting, but essentially horrifying environment. Director Sean Baker proved with his iPhone camera in his startlingly original film Tangerine that he can construct a coherent drama from elements that seem extemporaneous and unscripted, but somehow are also tightly controlled and pointed. In the case of this film, I was totally involved with the plight of Moonee and her young friends, while in the back of my mind I just wanted to escape the theater before something unbearable occurred. Baker is an auteur film maker with that kind of powerful vision and originality. I'd like to see what he does with that talent that doesn't give me the creepy crawlies.
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Long Strange Trip 2017
Long endless 4 hours with the Grateful Dead principals and associated personalities (inevitably centered on Jerry Garcia) spanning years. Some amazing historical footage of concerts and the group lifestyles that has never been seen before. Probing interviews providing context up to a point. Exhausting stuff, but never boring.
Strange synchronicity that I was personally involved with the group through my sister, who was married to one of their managers. I spent time backstage at their concerts, but I was never a Dead Head.
Trip down memory lane...the Dead defined a certain important part of the cultural Zeitgeist of the late 20th Century (and perhaps beyond.) But I still can't relate to their music.
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LA 92 2017
On April 29, 1992 a combination of factors led to a week of rioting and destruction in Los Angeles, an event I barely escaped from as coincidentally my moving van departed from Hollywood that day to points north. Yet the "Rodney King" riot, the worst in terms of casualties and property destruction in U.S. history, is etched in memory. This remarkably comprehensive cinéma vérité style documentary tells the story of that event chronologically using contemporary news footage superbly edited into a valuable historical document. The 25th anniversary of the event has engendered at least two remarkable documentaries...previously I watched with admiration John Ridley's Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992. However LA 92 is a more pointed, ground-level observational version of what happened...with little or no explanatory material, just a vivid re-living of what happened as it happened. This is powerful stuff: enthralling and emotionally shattering for me; and would have been even if it hadn't been about my city in flames.
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Score: A Film Music Documentary 2016
For a film lover, and a film professional like myself, a really well made documentary about the processes of film making is inherently interesting and valuable. But it has to be really skillfully done, uniquely original, and above all comprehensively illustrative of the essence of film making. This documentary takes one essential element of the process...namely the writing, performance and synchronization to visuals and story of the musical score...and scores! in the winning goal sense. The film achieves this with probing interviews with scores [heh] of composers, musicians and technicians along with an incredibly stirring array of filmed sequences that are memorable enough to both move (I teared up at times) and pointed enough to educate. Without singling out any of the many artists represented in the film, I can safely say that all of them are worth getting to know: both for their creative processes and their ability to communicate the ineffable. The resulting film is occasionally confusingly edited, skipping around from era to era, film to film, composer to composer. It was my only complaint...the film felt like it deserved 5-stars, an emotional triumph; but I'm subtracting a half-star because of that confusing editing schema. Still, this was a thrilling, vital and educational 1 1/2 hour experience of movies and music together...the two passions of my life.
Personal note: Back in my day as a creator of short films, I hired and worked with several composers, and watched their film scores come to life in the studio. I am indebted to these artists; and watching this film was particularly poignant for me.
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Sidemen: Long Road To Glory 2016
Three elderly blues musicians who most of their long careers worked in the shadow of band leaders Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, are given their places in the sun in this interesting, if not groundbreaking bio/music documentary. The life stories and musicianship of seminal artists Pinetop Perkins (piano), Willy Smith (drums), and Hubert Sumlin (guitar) are told in sequences intercutting simplified animation of their upbringing, interviews with such younger disciples as Eric Clapton, Gregg Allman and Johnny Winter, and wonderful performance films from the past featuring all three. They all died in 2011; and their legacy deserves to be immortalized, which this film does.
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Loving Vincent 2017
An animated film of superb content and almost unbelievable beauty. 130 animators from all over the world toiled to draw individual frames of oil paintings on canvas in the style of Van Gogh. Their materials included painting from live action images of characters played by actors projected onto the canvas. Every other frame some brush strokes were wiped off of the canvas and replaced by subsequent brush strokes to provide images in motion. In addition, hundreds of Van Gogh paintings were referenced to establish the visual style.
Thematically, the film is presented as a documentary "shot" in the period immediately after Van Gogh's suicide. A young man (Armand Roulin played by actor Douglas Booth) searches for the truth behind the artist's death. In colorful, impressionistic sequences drawn exactingly in Van Gog's style, Roulin interviews the townspeople, doctors, friends etc...all superbly portrayed by actors (including Chris O'Dowd, Saoirse Ronan, Aiden Turner). The film also establishes a back story of Van Gogh's life utilizing more realistic B&W painting techniques...a feature of the script that enhances the documentary like realism.
What results is an extraordinary mixture of art history and true fact documentary. Nothing like it has ever been attempted before, let alone released; and for my money it takes animation on film into a novel realm of artistic achievement that would be difficult to match; but the possibilities are endless.
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American Made 2017
An action flick based on a true story that seemed oversimplified and mendacious. It certainly wasn't worth killing two stuntmen pilots over. Fake history!
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Victoria & Abdul 2017
Worth watching if only for Dame "National Treasure's" sly geriatric performance and the sumptuous costumes and royal rituals. Especially if you're into Brit monarchy porn. It's a step up in budget for director Stephen Frears and he makes the best of it. But the script is oh, so stuffy, condescending and predictable.
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If You’re Not In The Obit, Eat Breakfast 2017
The film's title is from a Carl Reiner joke. He's in his 90s and doesn't eat breakfast until he's checked to see if he's in the NY Times obituaries. Reiner, along with several nonagenarian and centenarian friends (Mel Brooks, Norman Lear etc.), provide old-folk commentary and advice for longevity in the course of the documentary. It's often funny (considering the number of comedians that isn't surprising) and touching (99-year old Kirk Douglas, interviewed after his disabling stroke, a 101 year old woman who runs in a 100 meter race) and surprisingly entertaining. And for this septuagenarian filmgoer a valuable lesson: get off my duff, be active, be positive and maybe I'll actually make it to 90.
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Get Me Roger Stone 2017
Provocateur and genuinely evil Roger Stone is the carbuncle on the American political scene. Since the Nixon and Regan eras, and stretching disastrously to the successful Trump campaign, this unprincipled representative of alt-right media manipulation has arguably caused more damage to the U.S. than just about anybody (including his former partner in the lobbying hall-of-fame, Paul Manafort). And Stone even openly exults and takes pleasure from that fact. This impressively comprehensive documentary nails him to the wall with facts, commentary and his own slimy words on camera. Unaccountably he cooperated in the making of this film...fulfilling one of his rules that infamy is better than fame. And, I hate to say it; but he's probably right. In any case, this film successfully spells out his satanic methodology; and he's still standing. Hopefully not for long.
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Dolores 2017
This documentary recounts chronologically the life story of Dolores Huerta. She was born in 1930 in New Mexico, grew up in Stockton, CA, raised by a feminist divorcée mother. She, herself, was a feminist, tireless activist, union organizer (co-founder with César Chavez of what became the United Farm Workers of America), unmarried mother of 11 children. Today in her 80s she runs a foundation devoted to civil liberties. Along the way, she was jailed, hospitalized from police abuse, became an icon of women's lib, and finally achieved the fame and credit for her tireless work as a union organizer for farm workers in the 1970s when it really mattered. The film is stirring at times, with some fine editorial and graphic elements. But its script didn't rise to the level of emotional involvement that signify the great biographical documentaries.
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Battle of the Sexes 2017
This film tells the story of one of the defining moments of the 1970s, the infamous "battle of the sexes" tennis match in the Houston Astrodome between 29-year old woman's tennis champion Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and braggart huckster, 55-year old Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell). For me, King's nascent lesbian love affair that takes up the first half of the film was somewhat painfully stilted, token titillation to broaden the scope of the film's women's lib message. But in the second half, when Riggs took center stage with his humorous manipulation of the press, and the actual stirring tennis match was re-created, the film took fire and became the crowd pleaser that most will be left with. Credit the two lead actors who aced their respective roles...and the specter of Howard Cossell brought back to do the sexist TV commentary of the match. Thrilling stuff.
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Stronger 2017
Jake Gyllenhaal adds to his impressive actor's filmography the real-life characterization of Jeff Bauman, a young man who lost both of his legs above the knees in the 2013 Boston marathon terrorist bombing. Bauman's story is shown warts and all: his troubled relationships with his girlfriend (a welcome feature film role from Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany), living with his drunken mother (Miranda Richardson, wonderful here), and especially his arduous rehabilitation process. That it all works so convincingly is due to the diligence of director David Gordon Green, who does realism on celluloid about as well as any current director. And much credit is due to the incredible special effects that removed Gyllenhaal's legs. I'd seen part of this story before in last year's excellent documentary Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing. But Stronger personalizes Bauman's story as only a passionately written script and a great actor can do. The film occasionally resorts to emotionally manipulative situations (for instance a hockey game tribute to Bauman that was painful to watch.) But mostly, the honesty and the inherently moving story earned my tears.
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Chasing Trane 2016
This documentary is a loving and beautiful tribute to the life and work of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. I'm not particularly a jazz aficionado. However, when I was at university in Boston in the early 1960s, my dorm mate was; and he made me listen to Trane and Rollins and Miles, and even travel to NYC to watch them in action. But I never knew the personal story of Trane before watching this film: how he kicked heroin cold turkey, was a family man who married twice with 3 sons and 2 step-daughters, gradually became arguably the greatest sax player ever, finally surpassing even his idol Bird, and then died young of cancer.
So, the subject matter of this doc is interesting and even moving; but what raises the film that extra notch is the quality of the film making. The editing is superb, combining wonderful footage of Trane and his various jazz groups in action with current interviews with his surviving contemporaries. But the film also makes incredibly skilled use of special effects, including some innovative treatment of photographs (my own expertise in my career, and here done spectacularly well). When an entertainment biographical documentary has the power to turn a non-fan into a believer, that's worthy of note.
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American Media & The Second Assassination of John F. Kennedy 2017
So who really cares in 2017 about who in fact killed President Kennedy? After all, for most Americans today, the Kennedy assassination is just about as remote in time as the Lincoln assassination. Well, journalist and elderly conspiracy activist John Barbour cares. I guess, when all is said and done, I care...at least when the unanswered questions about the historical event that I definitely lived through are presented as a convincing narrative of conspiracy by big media and government to cover up the involvement of the C.I.A. and upper echelons of the U.S. in the assassination and investigation.
This documentary presents long suppressed material (tapes of the much maligned D.A. Jim Garrison talking about what his efforts uncovered...namely that Oswald probably wasn't in that 6th story book depository, and a myriad of other accounts of what actually occurred that November day.) Some of this material is literally mind blowing (e.g. watching JFK's head blow off from the front in the Zapruder film shown in its totality, plus the litany of suicides and murders of people connected to the case and subsequent investigation). Much of the material indicts in no uncertain terms the cooperation of such media luminaries as Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite in the media's failure to get to the truth. Even Barack Obama doesn't escape the barrage of accusations that go on and on for 130 minutes in narrator Balfour's strident, but forceful and convincing narration. But ultimately, who cares now? So many other fish to fry. And much germane material has been sealed from public view by the government until 2038. And by then there will be nobody left alive to blame.
So who is left to watch this hard hitting film? I hope not only conspiracy nuts. Still, one might wish that this film itself, no matter how important its message, had been made with a tad more dispassion. Barbour comes off as, perhaps, too hot and accusatory. Well, good for him. Barbour's central thesis is that the gradual destruction of the freedom of the press in this country started with the Warren commission and the government suppression of the facts of the Kennedy assassination, abetted by a craven and cowed media. And he makes his point.
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Rebel in the Rye 2017
Sorry, I'm not going to hate on this biopic like most everybody has. Nicholas Hoult's portrayal of the young J.D. Salinger might be a little one-note (conflicted writer with one dour expression). But that's my only complaint. The period rang true. Salinger's life of mystery and isolation intrigued me; and the characterizations of the people in Salinger's life (especially as portrayed by Kevin Spacey and Sarah Paulson) were particularly well limned. I left the theater anxious to re-read "Catcher," 60 years after my first, life-changing experience with the story. And lo and behold I found the old paperback still residing on my bookshelves. I doubt that Holden Caulfield will still cast the same spell over septuagenarian me today. But I'm willing to find out.
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Call Me by Your Name 2017
I'll let others go into details about this beautiful film; but suffice it to say that it is simply the best coming of age film I've ever watched. I've admired Timothée Chalamet ever since his understated role on the TV series "Homeland." However, nothing could have prepared me for his scintillating, intelligent portrayal of 17-year old Elio in this film, a performance that ought to make him the youngest best actor Oscar winner in memory, if there is any justice. It would be an error to consider this solely a gay film. Elio is simply a complex teenager in the 1980s, sexually fluid with a totally understanding. liberal Jewish family, spending his summer at his parent's vacation villa in Italy. That he has a puppy dog crush on handsome PhD candidate Oliver, his professor father's summer intern (Armie Hammer), is an inevitable consequence of the situation and Elio's artistic and sensitive personality. James Ivory's script (adapted from a novel by Andre Aciman that I plan to read) goes where just about every similar coming of age film has feared to tread: a realistic and non-prurient sexual liaison between a grown-up man (about 25) and a teenage boy. That it achieves this milestone with realism and true beauty is a tribute to director Luca Guadagnino's talent and bravery. I want to give this film 5-stars; but the film underplayed the romantic angle a bit...a practical necessity; but I felt I needed more emotional involvement. Perhaps a second viewing (which I plan to make when the film is officially released) will eliminate that nagging shortcoming.
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American Assassin 2017
Mitch Rapp (Dylan O'Brien) was a young American, wounded and traumatized in a terrorist attack while vacationing with his fiancée in Ibeza, Spain. That experience turned him into a hardened CIA active counter-terrorism agent, under the tutelage of grizzled agent Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton). His first mission as a green agent sent him on the hunt for an embittered American terrorist with a stolen nuke called "Ghost" (Taylor Kitch.) That is the background for this involving thriller that actually thrilled me (not so easy for this jaded thriller fan.) The story was based on a series of books by Vince Flynn...a series that I had never read before. O'Brien, the actor chosen to play Rapp, seemed a little young at age 26 to play such a battle scarred veteran agent. However, this former star of the Maze Runner series has real charisma and action cred, reminding me of a young Tom Cruise. Michael Keaton has also successfully changed his image as he has aged, selling physicality and mental toughness that is a total change from his Mr. Mom days. And Taylor Kitch, playing a tormented villain was a revelation, a 100% revitalization of a promising career that seemed to have stalled portraying heroes. Finally, I was quite impressed by the way director Michael Cuesta balanced action and characterization about as skillfully as these films are able to do. Despite the over-the-top violence, I enjoyed this film a great deal; and I hope that it is successful enough to spawn a series of films.
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First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers 2017
Cambodia under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in the mid 1970s told from the point of view (literally, with low camera etc.) of a 7-year old girl. It's based on the reminiscences of Loung Ung, who, along with her four siblings, survived the harrowing experience after losing her parents, and eventually emigrated to the United States. The production is massive and looks spectacular; and the young actor Sareum Srey Moch was convincingly stoic playing a child soldier and war waif. However, for my money the film was overlong and at times hard to relate to. Some of this can be ascribed to the original material. Watching events from a child's point of view, I felt that the critical geopolitical background of what is happening was missing from the story. I've watched documentaries and other films about the "killing fields" which were more informative and even more involving. The film was admirable in its intention; but for me it didn't work as either art or entertainment.
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Brad’s Status 2017
47-year old Brad (Ben Stiller) facing a mid-life crisis of self-doubt, accompanies his talented 17-year old son Troy (Austin Abrams) on a tour of Boston colleges. Stiller's entire performance is done in musing internal narrative, acting with his eyes. It's an amazing feat to watch, quite a departure for this usually outgoing comic actor. Abrams is a talent to watch for...a breakout performance of wit and intelligence that recalled the similar Oscar nominated impact of Lucas Hedges in last year's Manchester-by-the-Sea. The film is funny and trenchantly satiric, observant and relatable, all hallmarks of writer/director Mike White's oeuvre. It's a little, unpretentious film that may get lost in the shuffle. But that would be a shame.
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mother! 2017
How arrogant is Darren Aronofsky? In Q&A: "We got an F [on cinemascore]!! Yay!!!" Hey, bud. I'd give you at least an E for excessive and erratic. Or a D for dull and dingy (16mm film blown up to wide screen?). Or maybe, if I'm being generous, a C for cringeworthy and claustrophobic. The ecological symbolism and biblical metaphors were murky at best, more pretentious than clever. But at least you gave us back our beloved Michelle Pfeiffer. And two hours of Jennifer Lawrence close-ups ain't chopped liver.
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This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous 2017
For over a decade now, YouTube has made and enriched several international vlogging celebrities. Even an old codger like me has followed the lives of some of these millennial extroverts. However, I missed out on the young Gregory Lazzarato's activities as over the years "they" transitioned on-line from Canadian high school diving champion and femme oriented gay boy, to ravishing, transexual woman and celebrity, Giselle Loren Lazzarato (aka Gigi Gorgeous). This film, artfully edited and directed by the superb film maker Barbara Kopple, tells her story, emphasizing the transition process and her supportive family (two brothers and her father.) It's a fascinating story, well documented with YouTube video extracts and interviews. It is above all a heartening, entertaining, and relatively non-judgmental story of a courageous individual who embodies one aspect of the 21st century GLBT+ sexual revolution.
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Risk 2016
This documentary is a thematic follow-up to Laura Poitras's fascinating Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour. It tackles an equally incendiary whistleblower subject, Julian Assange and his creation, Wikileaks (although the film also extensively delves into the story of two other internet conspiracy luminaries, Assange's editor assistant, Sarah Harrison and darknet activist Jacob Appelbaum.) Poitras had apparently been working on this documentary, with on-again, off-again access to Assange, for years prior to her Snowden doc. But the gigantic task of shooting to video and then editing a reasoned and coherent history of Wikileaks and its activities may just have been too difficult for Poitras to pull off. The film imparts quite well the paranoia of its subjects; but after watching the film, I don't feel I had any more a grasp of their reality than before watching the film. Assange, in hiding from authorities in Sweden (rape allegations) and the U.S. (national security violations), remained for me a slippery, enigmatic presence. However, I must admit that Appelbaum, a journalist and hacker I'd never heard of before (and one also in the throes of recent sexual impropriety allegations), piqued my interest. Other than that (and Poitras's revealing conspiratorial narration), the film was a hot mess of discordant elements.
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In the Grayscale 2015
Bruno (played by Francisco Celhay) is a 30-ish, attractive Chilean architect, married with a young son. He is given a large public works project to design; but he has moved out of his home, vaguely dissatisfied with his marriage. In the course of studying for his work project, he befriends a gay tour guide, Fer (Emilio Edwards) and has to confront his own sexual ambiguity dating back to his youth. That is the set-up for this story of a gay identity crisis that rambles on amiably and doesn't quite resolve by the end. The one gay sex scene is hot, however, arty without being prurient (the film's saving grace, imho.)
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Dawson City: Frozen Time 2016
This documentary is literally 4X3 aspect ratio and mostly B&W. Which means some will think it is hopelessly old fashioned. But for anybody with an ounce of nostalgia for the past and for the movies, this is a treasure trove of delights. The film tells the story of the town of Dawson City, from the Yukon gold rush days of 1897 to the 1970s, when a cache of old nitrate films from the silent era was discovered somewhat unscathed while bulldozing the site of an old swimming pool that had been filled with crates of film and then covered over. The films were painstakingly restored; and along with another trove of old glass plate photographs from the era, they provide most of the visuals of this film. A symphonic music track, and some rudimentary sound effects were added, along with explanatory subtitles, rather than narration. The material was then edited roughly chronologically, with clever juxtaposition of footage from the found silent narrative films and newsreels (thought to be lost forever), as counterpoint to the narrative of the town's history. Some of the footage is partially whited out by the destruction of the elements. But even with that, what remains is sharp and surprisingly well shot, directed and acted. It comprises a living history of bygone eras that had me in tears at times, so astounding were the images and the story behind their restoration.
Personal note: my own family settled in the Iron Range of northern Minnesota at the turn of the 20th Century (a mining area similar, if less spectacular, than that of Dawson, Yukon Territory.) Members of my family owned the local Nickelodeon movie theater...at least until the entire clan moved to Los Angeles in 1926 and then mostly got involved in the Hollywood movie industry (culminating with myself). So, perhaps I had a more personal involvement than most with the history of movies. That might explain to some extent why I became so fascinated and moved watching this film.
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Step 2017
The Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women is a charter middle-high school founded in 2009 with only 6th graders. The school's objective was that all its inner-city students would graduate and go on to college. In 2015, that original senior class of 120 girls graduated...and this documentary recounts the stories of several of these young women, emphasizing those who took part in an extra-curricular dance program called "Step" (sort of like a cheer leading squad without the sports angle.) The film focuses on three students primarily; but they are really surrogates for a heartfelt examination of black women empowerment. The film is immaculately produced, well written, edited, photographed. It culminates with an intramural "Step" contest that is guaranteed to thrill. It isn't the film makers fault that I, personally, often found myself lacking engagement with the film and its subject matter.
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School Life 2016
The Headfort school in Kells, Ireland, is a boarding elementary school with diverse young students from many countries who reside in dormitories, and seem to thrive in the progressive environment the school provides. The documentary observes an entire school year, mostly from the point of view of two elderly teachers (Amanda and John Leyden) who met and married at the school in the 1970s. The Leydens are the kind of involved teachers that anybody would love to have; and the film finds them at the cusp of retirement. The film also follows the progress of some of the students, including one young dyslexic boy who is sympathetically dealt with by the faculty. The Leydens are primarily art and music teachers (also literature and maths, an aspect of the school that isn't stressed), so the film concentrates on the children's extra-curricular development. One sequence even shows a discussion of gay marriage in the classroom. The film has entertaining aspects; but I often found myself confused by the scattershot editing schema which didn't provide any sort of explanatory material. This is a purely observational documentary...focusing on lifestyle and artistic development of the students. As such, it's more inspirational than informative.
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The Settlers 2016
After the partition of Israel and Palestine in 1948 and the subsequent wars between the Arabs and Israelis, certain ultra-Othodox, ultra-nationalist Jewish cults were determined to settle lands in Judea and Sumeria (the so-called West Bank) promised to them by Elohim. Along with the secular, leftist kibbutzim and American evangelical Christians, they became what are known as "settlers," a form of European colonialism not much different from the conquest of the West by Americans. Or is it? This comprehensive historical and geopolitical documentary examines the settler question in detail. And fittingly, I was never quite sure which side the film makers were on, Israelis or Palestinians...a sure sign that the film was bending over backwards for balance. Except is balance possible? I'm an American Jew, and a passive Zionist, I suppose. And I even have West Bank settler "friends" in real life (and no matter how removed in time, I am the beneficiary of "settlers" of the American West, so who am I to point fingers?). But much of what I watched here was new to me, and, well, frightening, even as I was responding with a certain guilty elation. At least now I think I have a better understanding of what is happening in that part of the Middle East; and due to this film my attitudes are in flux. Your mileage may vary; but it doesn't make this film any less important.
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Machines 2016
A Frederik Wiseman like cinema verité documentary about workers in a textile factory in Gujarat, India. The film had no narration or explanatory material, just mostly a series of long steadicam shots exploring the vast factory floor. Occasionally the workers (and one supervisor) were given an opportunity to talk, mostly about their poverty and exploitative wages. For me, the mechanics of textile dying, involving a series of machines abetted by workers doing the heavy lifting, was interesting...but again the lack of context and exposition drained the processes of meaning. The sad plight of Indian factory laborers comes across; but the horrible conditions and editorial repetition were wearying.
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The Last Laugh 2016
Is it still too dangerous to make jokes about the Holocaust? How about 9/11? This documentary gathered several amazing comedians (among them Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Gilbert Gottfried and more than a dozen others) to try to answer these questions with examples. SPOILER: maybe. It's not a good sign that the only time I actually laughed out loud was at a joke Gottfried told in the end credits. Still, just gathering all those funny people together to talk serious stuff was quite entertaining.
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Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS 2017
Documentaries about the tragic and dangerous situation(s) in Syria and Iraq today are a dime a dozen. It has come to feel that there is nothing more to add to the slush pile. Except, obviously, there are still ways to be shocked and rendered aghast by the mess there, if this film is any indication. Hell on Earth is one of the first docs to take on the entire theater of civil war/humanitarian disaster/political quagmire by focusing on the big picture...spanning the entire area (including terrorism in the West) from the start of Iraq II in 2003 to the present day. The film also focuses on one family of refugees from Syria who represent in microcosm the mess that has been made by the warring factions. But overall, the film manages to convey how dangerous to the entire world this conflagration is. And it isn't over. Sure ISIS, the worst of a bad lot (although Assad's corrupt regime is not much better), is in retreat...but it is like the retreat of the ocean after the tsunami has wrecked everything in its path. This film presents arguably the best overview of the situation that we've seen so far from any source...with great graphics, and the amassing of an enormous amount of filmed material from many sources that are well integrated into a clear explanatory structure by utilizing superb editing and well written narration. But clarity doesn't make the reality any less scary. However, no matter how this still developing disaster finally settles out, millions will have suffered, been displaced from their homes, or died. And so far there is no end in sight.
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Hearing Is Believing 2017
Rachel Flowers was born 15 weeks premature. She survived; but was rendered totally blind from birth. She grew up in Southern California to become a true musical prodigy, playing piano, organ, flute and guitar with rare skill. This documentary, long in the making, tells her amazing story, with many examples of her performing classical and jazz pieces including some of her own compositions. Apparently she was made famous through YouTube videos (although I had never heard of her before this film.) Even watching alone in my living room, I was often roused to applaud...she is that great. One can forgive the film for seeming a tad long and repetitive, since Rachel's spirit and genius shines brightly from every frame.
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Escapes 2016
I consider myself an expert on actors. I've had the knack of picking winners early in their careers. But Hampton Fancher III was one journeyman actor that escaped under my radar. Probably because he was a pretty terrible actor (the IMDb gives him 51 movie and TV credits, none of them stand-outs.) However turns out that he's an easy and facile raconteur...and actually lived a pretty remarkable life as a B actor and minor celebrity gossip column Lothario...culminating in an unlikely late career success as the screen writer of the Blade Runner films. In this breezy Hollywood bio documentary, director Michael Almereyda lets Fancher ramble on with his interesting reminiscences, accompanying the running stories with film clips from Fancher's career (and other off-the-wall visuals) chosen to counterpoint the stories, rather than illustrate them. It's a novel and clever technique, edited to perfection. The result is an engrossing entertainment, like sharing a fascinating bull session with a (for me, at least) L.A. contemporary. We even intersected in our lives in a few places; but I never actually met the guy in real life.
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Elián 2017
What happens when a 6-year old "miracle" child becomes an international incident that affected history (probably leading to Al Gore losing the election of 2000)? Even I, living 3,000 miles away from Miami, the epicenter of the struggle, followed the saga of Elián at the time (although only filtered through U.S. media): the cute little boy rescued at sea hanging on to an inner-tube, sole survivor of his drowned mother's escape from Cuba. This documentary, with remarkable even-handedness and the perspective of years, recounts the well-documented case of the tug-of-war which ensued between the Cuban/American ex-pats and the boy's Cuban father (aided by Fidel Castro himself) for control of the boy's destiny. The film that resulted utilizes remarkable newsreel footage from all sides spanning the subsequent years, along with interviews with the principals today (especially grown-up Elián and his father, along with some of his American ex-pat relatives and others caught up in the drama.) Using well written narration and superb editing, the film succeeds in illuminating this event, both politically and personally. At times shocking, at times moving, the film presents a little slice of history that needs to be seen to understand our present day world better.
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National Theatre Live: Angels in America Part One: Millenium Approaches
Superb staging of this great American play. It features a fine cast, with special shout out to Nathan Lane, Andrew Garfield, Susan Brown and Russell Tovey (I'm always amazed at Brit actors who manage accents so flawlessly.) Even 25 years after it was written, Kushner's play has eerie political relevance to today's America, although to some extent the AIDS material has been made outdated by the miracles of modern medicine (however, I can personally attest from experience that it was true to its mid-1980s era time and place.) This was my third time viewing the play; and I must say, this "live" video presentation was flawlessly done and provided more intimacy than the play on stage (or even the star-studded 2003 HBO series directed by Mike Nichols that was more polished, yet a tad more remote.) This isn't an easy play to watch (nor, I'm pretty sure, to act in or stage.) But it is a journey into the recent past that is definitely worth taking.
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Logan Lucky 2017
A hillbilly heist movie, inventive and improbable. I sometimes had trouble understanding the dialog because the actors were so devoted to their accents, which might explain why I am tentative in my admiration for the film. The story, from a script by the mysterious Rebecca Blunt (a pseudonym for person unknown) followed the template of Soderbergh's Ocean's films...with a different, but no less star studded cast (although I challenge anyone to recognize Seth MacFarlane...I still was puzzled for a few beats after seeing his name in the credits.) Anyway, I'm glad that Soderbergh is back making films after his short retirement.
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Edith+Eddie 2017
Edith (age 96) and Eddie (age 95) met in Virginia over a lottery ticket, got married and lived happily ever after. Except no, it didn't go quite that way. This gut wrenching and sad documentary short film tells the story of how Edith's estranged daughters and her remote, court appointed "guardian" conspired to separate the couple and steal Edith's home. The film makers recorded this tragic travesty of elder abuse and how the system failed this couple. Maybe because I'm "elderly" myself, I was outraged and sickened watching this happen. But the film offered no recourse or resolution...just the way life did its worst to poor Edith and Eddie.
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Chasing Coral 2017
Ecological disaster documentaries are a dime a dozen. This one describes the frightening decimation of the coral reefs as the temperature of the oceans inexorably increases due to global warming. That's well and good...this is an extinction level event going on in our times that will probably have extreme effects on sea and land life, including humans. But this film is more a fascinating procedural, telling the story of how the film makers, engineers and marine biologists combined to construct automatic cameras to record the processes of coral death under water. And when those cameras failed, how the film makers spent tedious months recording time lapse photography manually, under the most trying of circumstances. That these hardy souls came back with some of the most startling, beautiful and terrifying footage makes this film something special. Oh, yeah, from watching this film it is just about impossible to remain a climate change denier...but I'm sure those who are hell bent to deny will manage to avoid this film in the first place.
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4 Days in France 2016
Pierre, a 30-something gay Parisian, leaves his sleeping lover Paul, and sets out alone on an automobile odyssey of sex and self-discovery through southeastern France. Pierre, good looking and modern, utilizes the Grindr app to search out tricks and trysting spots. And upon awakening, Paul, bereft, sets out to find his errant lover using the same smartphone app. That's about it for plot. But the film was more travelogue and reverie than sex tour (in fact the most erotic scene finds Pierre making love to a blank motel wall.) Pierre was played by Pascal Cervo with a stolid reserve that concealed a caring nature. Like a gay Odysseus, he encountered several vivid, quirky personalities on his travels. The scenery, which stretched from peaceful green forests to the snow capped Alps, was the real star of the film. One could fall in love with the French countryside, even as the story occasionally bogged down in Pierre's passivity and the languished pacing of the scenario. But for me, I was never bored. I found much to identify with, vicariously living Pierre's journey along with him. Director Reybaud and his intriguing cast conveyed just the right balance of real and neurotic, beauty and ugliness. I left the theater feeling more optimistic about life and love than when I entered.
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The Only Living Boy in New York 2017
Let's set the parameters: I love quirky. Marc Webb proved to be the master of quirk with his 2009 film [500] Days of Summer.. Then he took a detour into the Hollywood money machine with his two Spider-Man flicks, films which oddly quirked up its eponymous hero. With this new film he's back to relatively low budget quirk...and I loved it. I'm not getting into the convoluted Oedipal plot with its unexpected twists and turns and farcical elements. This is basically a character driven romantic dramedy...and the cast delivers. This might be Jeff Bridges best role since "The Dude," here playing a gruff, Salinger-ish, reclusive, best-selling author. He mentors a young wannabe writer, Thomas, rebelling against his uppercrust New York, success oriented family by living in a lower Eastside hovel. Thomas is played by the youthful Brit actor, Callum Turner, sporting a flawless American accent, and delivering an impassioned...here it is, quirky...performance of ingratiating intensity. The film isn't going to be everybody's cuppa. But it was mine.
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The Glass Castle 2017
A dramatized true story, based on a memoir by journalist Jeannette Walls, about a girl growing up along with her brother and two sisters in an itinerant family dominated by a crazed redneck father and a dotty artist mother. The film spans decades of personal anecdotes, with different, excellent child actors portraying the kids at various ages, up to their various escapes from their poisonous family situation in the 1980s. It's Jeannette's story; but the theme is her love/hate relationship with her parents...spectacular performances by Woody Harrelson as her father Rex, and Naomi Watts as her mother Rose Marie. Rex especially was a monster: smart, mentally abusive, alcoholic, borderline bipolar. I hated him for the harm he caused his family; but he epitomized the charming rogue, too. It's been a while since a characterization got under my skin the way Harrelson's did here. Director Destin Cretton proved with his previous film Short Term 12 (also starring Brie Larson, who plays Jeannette as a young adult here) that he has few peers among relatively young directors in bringing vivid characterizations to life. The film ends with a protracted documentary sequence of the real Walls family from home movies and modern day interviews. Bottom line, this is an excellent depiction of a dysfunctional family brought to life by a superb cast and a sensitive director. But be prepared to have strong mixed feelings about what is depicted here.
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Chosen and Excluded – Jew Hatred in Europe 2017
This documentary was originally made for public television in Germany and France. It was rejected in both countries for broadcast because of its incendiary contents. The film I watched at a screening at the Museum of Tolerance in L.A. was full length and mostly dubbed into English. The main point raised by the film, utilizing interviews and examples, is that both extremes, left and right, are in rare agreement in their anti-Semitism. The neo-Nazis and skinheads on the extreme right are obvious examples. However, the activist left disguises its extreme anti-Semitism by diverting the issue to anti-Israel propaganda. Examples: Israel poisons Palestinian wells (PLO head Abbas to the EU congress.) Israel slaughters children in Gaza (false...footage shot in the real Gaza belies this, and even Palestinian children interviewed in Gaza talk about Hamas corruption.) And the constant bombardment of Israel from Gaza is ignored by Euro activists. Bottom line: overt anti-Semitism by the left is out of fashion and no longer exists; but overt anti-Israel demonstrations and provocations by the left are totally acceptable. And violence against Jews by terrorists and thugs are commonplace throughout Europe. No wonder this is an issue too hot to handle.
However, for all its important message, the film's narration (at least with the dubbing into English) was somewhat heavy handed; and the scattershot editing blunted the film's affect, giving the false impression that the film was somehow totally unbalanced pro-Israel and anti-Palestine. From the Q&A, we learned that 9 hours of the first cut was pared to 90 minutes. However around the 75 minute mark in I had to check my watch. That is not a good sign that the film was working as well as it might have.
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Good Time 2017
This stomach churning, involving crime thriller tells the story of two 20-something brothers from the outer boroughs of NYC. Nick (a stone-faced, authentic performance by co-director Ben Safdie) is mentally challenged and cared for by his marginally normal brother Connie (an amazingly energized performance by the underrated Robert Pattenson.) In a misguided effort to get away from the city, the two commit a botched bank heist. Nick is caught, and Connie spends one increasingly frenetic night attempting to get him out of jail and escape a subsequent hospital internment. Think a modern film noir shot in vivid colors with a loud, energetic synth score. Something like a Dog Day Afternoon crossed with Nightcrawler, as directed by Godard or Noé. I cringed as I watched it; but the screen crackled with so much energy due to Pattinson's performance and the stylish direction of the Safdie brothers, that I was transfixed.
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Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story 2017
This documentary recounts some of the history of Bad Boy Records, mainly from the point of view of founder Sean (Puffy) Combs. The centerpiece is the feud in the 1990s between the East and West contingents of gangsta rappers, culminating in the shooting murders of Tupac Shaakur and Biggie Smalls. The latter was Combs' friend and one of the major stars in the Bad Boy stable. The drama of his murder and the following celebration concert (featuring Lil' Kim, among others) is shown using shaky, poorly shot videos edited at a frenetic fast pace that is difficult to watch. Maybe if I had more initial information about the hip hop movement and its stars, I might have found this documentary more informative. As it is, the film simply failed as a historical document despite brief moments of insight. But it also fell short as a concert video, since the sequences of performances were sparsely covered and edited too fast to entertain.
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Detroit 2017
Can an excellent, but difficult to watch and racially explosive film which pulls no punches make it at the summer box office? Obviously not. Too bad. This is Katherine Bigelow's third film in a row to which I've given 4 1/2 to 5 stars. For my money she's the finest director making American movies today (and that goes for her screen writer collaborator Mark Boal, also). I guess I understand why their brand of tough truth is a hard sell. But this film, telling a story that I well recall from 50 years ago...a story of police brutality, jury nullification, and institutionalized racism that could have been ripped from today's headlines...is still timely. I can't recall a film that hit me so hard in my white, male privileged gut. No wonder nobody wants to see it. *sigh.*
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My Scientology Movie 2015
Utilizing the expertise of two high ranking Scientology apostates, writer and on-screen narrator Louis Theroux delves into the mysteries that surround the church and its sinister leader David Miscavige. To say the least, the church didn't cooperate; so part of the humorous affect of this documentary is the hiring of actors to play the missing principals (including Tom Cruise.) Theroux tries to pierce the veil behind the church's operation...especially the mysterious Gold compound in Hemet, California...but he is continuously rebuffed by minions. The total take-away from the film is that there are terrible and dangerous secrets to be learned; but this film failed to get most of them. Still, the journey was wonderfully entertaining.
Personal note: In the 1990s, my little film company did a considerable amount of work as a sub-contractor for Golden Era Productions (the film branch of the CoS Org). As such, I was one of the few outsiders allowed free access to their Hemet compound. One evening, an emergency phone call requested my immediate attention to a project necessitating my driving the 70 miles to the compound. I demurred due to the late hour and hunger pangs. But I was told that dinner would be provided, anything my heart desired. I requested lobster. Sure enough, when I showed up around 9PM I was led to the massive dining hall, the only person in the room, and fed a dinner of fresh lobster. I never really had contact with the actual powers of the church; but the film people I did deal with were all pretty normal and friendly and at least didn't seem to be brainwashed.
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Mr. Gaga 2015
The eponymous Mr. Gaga is Israeli dancer/choreographer Ohad Naharin (no, not Lady Gaga's main squeeze.) Ohad was born in a kibbutz, trained in New York, appointed in 1990 to the post of artistic director of the Tel Aviv based Batshiva Dance Company. This fascinating and illuminating documentary tells his story from reminiscences and lengthy illustrations of his impressionistic, ultra-modern, avant garde dance creations. I was impressed by Naharin's creativity...his dances combine costumes, creative staging, singing and bodily contortions (a style termed "gaga" in the film) that are quite unique. The result is a film that entertains and even occasionally amazes.
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Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992 2017
This lengthy documentary is a brilliantly conceived and executed overview of the political and social dynamics that led to the Los Angeles riots of late April, 1992. Utilizing contemporary news footage and incisive interviews with people from all the groups involved (African-Americans, Koreans, politicians, the police, the public, and even a juror instrumental in the immediate causation of the riot), the film weaves an editorial tapestry that illustrates the artistic creativity of the fine writer/director John Ridley. I was living in Los Angeles at the start of the riots (coincidentally the day the riots started I was scheduled to move out of the city to a new home in the high desert; but my old hillside apartment had an unobstructed view of the fires and chaos raging in the metropolis below.) I can attest to the accuracy of Ridley's script, especially as it pertained to the politics of the city during the preceding 10 years. Bottom line: it is hard to imagine a more lucid, objective and complete dissection of such an important event of our times.
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An Inconvenient Sequel 2017
For importance and impact this documentary deserves at least 5 1/2-stars. It's a timely update to the 2006 original film that I gladly voted for the Oscar that it won. Now more than ever, Al Gore's heroic efforts to bring truth to power re global warming and its ongoing environmental impact are needed. What is special about this film is witnessing Gore's optimism amidst the ongoing catastrophes that are illustrated so well here, as well as his effective activism even in the dark age of the Trump presidency. I was fortunate enough to be able to help give Gore an extended standing ovation at the wonderful Q&A following the Academy screening. What a different world we'd be living in had Bush v. Gore gone the other way in the Supreme Court!
p.s. I've been asked, well why not 6-stars as long as you're giving out impossible ratings? Frankly, the film is not without flaws. The editing could have been a little more cohesive. To balance that, the cinematography and live sound recording were quite superb. The film is a polarizing political hot potato...the IMDb currently rates it 5.0/10, with more 1 votes [458] than 10s [419] out of a total of 1,072. I don't think those 1's were based on the film's technical merits. Welcome to Trump's America.
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Atomic Blonde 2017
Spy vs. Spy thriller set in Berlin during the 10 days preceding the fall of the Wall in 1989. Charlize Theron reverts to her hyper-masculated persona that she does so well (c.f. Mad Max: Fury Road), playing a skilled counter-espionage agent. James McAvoy shows more balls than usual as the roguish MI6 head of Berlin Station that Theron reports to. Director David Leitch proves that he's a master of choreographing bloody fight scenes. The sound mix is loud; and the rock dominated score is terrific. However, for all the propulsive energy of the production, the script had more U-turns than in a Ms. Pacman game, and seemed made up of one ridiculous contrivance after another. And pardon me if I don't get turned on by endless and gratuitous woman on men mayhem and overt lesbian sex scenes. Your mileage may vary.
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Last Men in Aleppo 2017
The "White Helmets" are a group of Syrian men who daily tasked themselves with rescuing victims (primarily women and children) who were buried in the rubble of destroyed cities, in this case Aleppo. They were reacting to the daily Russian and government air bombing of cities in revolt against the Bashar Assad regime during the recent Syrian civil war. Last year, the Oscar winning short documentary The White Helmets covered this ground. This feature length documentary covers it in even greater, more grisly detail. The film follows two men in the group over the course of more than a year, men more concerned with their absent families and a younger brother than for their own safety.
The cinematography is absolutely breathtaking...managing to be more impressionistic than newsreel, bringing the viewer into the heart of danger. One can only imagine: these men were subjected to the same incredible hardships, dust and mass destruction that we Americans witnessed at a remove watching the "first responders" to the 9/11 attack vicariously...only for these men it all continued on a daily basis for months on end. It's not really a spoiler to disclose that the final images are heartbreaking.
Actually, the entire film is an example of a government's inhumanity towards its innocent civilians. But it is also a tribute to man's unselfish devotion to a humanitarian duty all the while knowing that death is the most likely outcome. This film rates 5-stars for content; but for me the editing was confusing, and the sub-titles were often illegible white on white. Also the events were unalloyed sickening to watch. I wanted to stop watching. Reality sucks.
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Pretty Persuasion 2005
First of all, full disclosure: I have a passing acquaintance with the screen writer of this film. I know and admire his acerbic writing style, and this seemed like the dream cast for his vision. The film that showed up on the screen fulfilled that vision up to a point. It's an over-the-top satire of the teen movie genre, sort of a Heathers or Mean Girls on steroids. I think it was designed to offend just about everybody. Evan Rachel Wood is superb as a heartless bitch teen-queen sociopath, and James Woods chews the scenery as her father, a monstrous bigot whose anti-Semitic rants maybe go a little too far. The film's milieu is a tony Bevery Hills private school. Now, I grew up in the real Beverly Hills, and I'm not sure the film captures the reality all that well. Still, I have to say I enjoyed this film, for all its excesses. But most of the people I talked to hated the film...somehow it misses the mark, and I think that may be the fault of the somewhat flat direction and strangely stilted pacing.
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Wind River 2017
A U.S. government game trapper (Jeremy Renner) finds the raped and mangled body of a native-American girl on the snow bound Wind River reservation. A female F.B.I. agent (Elizabeth Olsen) is sent to investigate, into a Wyoming wilderness that she barely understands. That is the set-up for a contemporary policier thriller of grave violence and rare sensitivity. It features one of the most brutal gun battles ever, which isn't surprising since the novice writer/director, Taylor Sheridan also wrote a brutal gun battle in the excellent Hell or High Water, directed by another. But this is totally Sheridan's film now; and he is in complete control. He succeeds by utilizing Ben Richardson's superb cinematography emphasizing the austerity of the scenery; and a strikingly effective, unique score by Warren Ellis that used choral moans to ratchet up the tension. Fine script, excellent cast and direction. I was impressed.
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From the Land of the Moon 2016
At the start of this unabashed "woman's film," Gabrielle is a voracious, sexually needy teenager who has a physically painful crush on her married teacher. The era is post-WWII in rural France. And Gabrielle's bourgeois parents effectively sell her into a loveless marriage to a Spanish laborer that they set up in a lucrative business. Time and illness, a talented son, and an unrequited love affair ensue. It is basically an old fashioned portrait of female hysteria, impeccably played by the superb Marion Cotillard, with support of the always interesting actor Louis Garrel as a dying soldier that Gabrielle fixates on. For me, the lurid script only occasionally inspired skepticism. I was drawn into Cotillard's spell. But the title in English is one of the worst "translations" from the French ever: "Mal de Pierres" (literally, kidney stones). I think "Moonsickness" might have made a better, more appropriate title.
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Dunkirk 2017
The real-life "miracle" of the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation, told in three intercut stories (beach, sea, air) that briefly connect in a time-binding manner that only director Nolan would dare to attempt. It all works because Nolan is such a master of the techniques of film making...so that it doesn't really matter that the characterizations are so diffuse that for the most part we, as an audience, are kept at a remove from identifying with them. The spectacle is still spectacular. Interestingly enough I watched this in a 70mm film projection in a double bill with the digital 3-D Valerian flick, which entertained rather than edified. This film edified more than it entertained...which is an equally impressive achievement, maybe even award winning. But honestly, I enjoyed the mindless, escapist film more.
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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets 2017
Can a film survive a mind-numbingly silly and predictable script by the artful use of astounding special effects? If anybody could pull off this magic trick it would be Luc Besson, who did it before with The Fifth Element. Well, for me, at least, he did it again with this film. See it if only for the wonderful cameo by Rihanna, playing a shape shifting singer-acrobat. Her time on screen is incandescent. See it for Dean Dehaan, that most unlikely action hero who does it with inherent brain, not brawn. By all means see it in 3-D, done here with an ease and precision that defines the medium at its best. Unfortunately, you'll probably join the millions who won't see it at all because of the half-deserved drubbing by plot oriented critics. Still, the story did make a modicum of sense, enough to follow and even revel in its world-saving heroics...unlike some turgid failures of the genre (I'm looking at you, Jupiter Ascending.) I left the theater satisfied that I'd been entertained, if not edified.
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Keep Quiet 2016
This fascinating, stranger-than-fiction documentary tells the story of Csanad Szegedi, the Hungarian co-founder of the anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi political party Jobbik. When Szegedi is outed as Jewish on his mother's side (his grandmother was sent to Auschwitz, a family secret kept from the young man), he undergoes a remarkable transition to Orthodox Jew within the space of a year or so. Many doubt his sincerity; but once a fanatic, always a fanatic...only with new stripes. Szegedi doesn't become likable in this film (although the rabbi that helped him transition comes off as wise and good.) But the still developing transition is quite convincing and quite remarkably well portrayed in the film through interviews, fine camerawork and editing. The film presents a cautionary example of human nature at its most perverse and most hopeful.
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Karl Marx City 2016
U.S. resident and co-director Petra Epperlein returned to the city of her birth, Karl Marx City, GDR (now Chemnitz, Germany), to attempt to uncover the reason her father had committed suicide after the fall of the Wall. Had he once worked as a Stassi informant? The documentary camera then followed Ms. Epperlein, always carrying a gigantic microphone, as she explored the paper and video trail left by the secret police and their thousands of informants. In the course of her travels and interviews she does manage to re-create the terror of the Orwellian surveillance state that even today inspires "ostalgia" in some Germans (such a great word, ostalgia.) She even uncovers the ultimate smoking gun. However, despite the vital cautionary lessons of the film, I found the personal angle of the narration somewhat annoying. And the rudimentary sub-titles were hard to read on the small screen. Slight quibbles, of course; but they did affect my involvement with the subject matter.
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War for the Planet of the Apes 2017
Maybe the "Exodus" theme is a little on-the-nose (Moses parts the white snows and leads his enslaved people to the promised land, music swells and sky fills with angels...or something like that). But the acting and motion capture special effects are spectacular. All in all a satisfying end to a trilogy that was much better than it had any right to be.
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I Called Him Morgan 2016
Lee Morgan was a well respected jazz trumpeter. He started young in the 1950s with the Art Blakey band; and after fighting off a terrible heroin addiction with the help of his considerably older wife, Helen, he formed his own jazz band. On a blizzardy night in February, 1972, while playing a gig at Slug's, a New York city jazz club, the 33-year old Morgan was shot to death by Helen over an affair Lee was having with another woman. This documentary tells that story with films of Lee's performing, interviews with survivors and an audio tape of an interview with Helen just before her death in 1996. It's an interesting, hitherto unknown to me piece of American music history. But the film makers struggled to provide visuals to fill out the narrative, and settled for lengthy non-sequitur stock footage of snow falling and birds flying.
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Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent 2016
This documentary covers the life and career of super-chef Jeremiah Tower, man of mystery. I had actually dined at two of his restaurants, Chez Panisse and Stars...although not necessarily when he was in the kitchen. Tower was a child of the upper class, unloved by his peripatetic parents (his mother was an alcoholic, he hated his father.) He spent his childhood in deluxe hotels and English boarding schools, and admits to having been sexually abused (at least that was my interpretation, like much of the information here it is presented in code.) He studied architecture at Harvard; but his first love was cooking...something he apparently picked up by haunting hotel kitchens as a child and helping his family prepare for their lavish dinner parties (actors were used to portray these scenes from his youth.) He was also famously gay and at the center of San Francisco's glitterati social scene in the 1970s through the 1990s. In the midst of his successes as a restaurateur, he dropped out and moved to Mexico, only to resurrect his career in 2015, working as executive chef for a while at New York's Tavern on the Green.
The film had a flawed editing schema, jumping around time periods at random. Tower himself narrated some of the film with mysterious philosophical reveries that, for me at least, didn't work to explain much about him. And the film ended with much of his life story unfinished. However, for all its editorial flaws, I did find the subject matter fascinating (Tower himself, the history of California cuisine, high society dining in America.) A- for subject matter, C- for film making execution.
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I am Jane Doe 2017
"Jane Doe" in this documentary is a young girl from Boston who had been captured into a child sex ring that was advertised on the internet in the shady off-shoot of the once proud leftist paper "The Village Voice" called backpage.com. The current muckraking documentary also follows two other young runaway girls who were also trapped in the child sex trade. The courts have always protected backpage.com's right to carry ads utilizing code for child sex...citing Congress having passed in 1996 the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which states in section 230 that an internet site is not responsible for the contents it carries from others, regardless of the legality of that content. The aim of the current documentary is to raise public and Congressional awareness of the law and the way it is being misinterpreted by the courts. As such this is an admirable and important cause. However, for all its good intentions, the documentary is possibly too strident in its furthering that objective. This is an example of a film with a great cause that is made less effective by the lack of subtlety or the appearance of objectivity. However, if enough people watch the film, I have a feeling that it will arouse public opinion to achieve the objective of changing the CDA, either in Congress or in the courts. That is, after all, the real reason for making a documentary like this.
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Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story 2015
This enjoyable, Hollywood insider's documentary tells the story of an obscure, but vital married couple that toiled the vineyards of the studio system. Harold Michelson was a talented sketch artist who had a knack for visualizing movie scenes from the point of view of a camera lens. That made him a superb creator of storyboards (pre-visualized on paper depictions of the final movie for the use of the director, cameraman and editor in the making of the film.) His relatively unheralded work for such directors as Hitchcock (famously designing scenes for The Birds) and Mike Nichols (inventing unforgettable visuals used in The Graduate) stand the test of time as testaments to his illustrating genius. Harold's wife, Lillian, also was a relatively unknown player in the Hollywood scene, running a library that served as an invaluable visual resource for the look of many films. The film delved into the lives of this couple...married post-WWII, three children, including an autistic son, career struggles on the periphery of the studio system. It was mainly told from the narrative point of view of plucky survivor Lillian and illustrated with illustrations in the form of a running storyboard by Harold. Perhaps because it was such a novel view into the lives of such a relatively unfamous Hollywood couple, the film resonated for me as truthful and often fascinating.
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Spider-Man: Homecoming 2017
Never having read a Spider-Man comic book, I can't tell if making the eponymous superhero into a squeaky-voiced high school sophomore is a more realistic touch than in the previous incarnations of the character. It's clear that Tom Holland is an engaging actor who can fake adolescence (he's 21 in real life) better than his predecessors Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. And I do know that turning the franchise into an "Avengers" spin-off cum "High School Musical" (without the music) is probably canny marketing. However, with this iteration the bouncing and flying special effects still are pretty cheesy; and I'm not sure that having Michael Keaton replay his Birdman role as a villain worked for me. Other than that, it was an enjoyable evening at the flicks.
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God Knows Where I Am 2016
This impressive documentary examines the life and death of a woman whose body was discovered in an abandoned New Hampshire house. She had left a diary from the last few months of her life, explaining that she was a victim of abuse. However, it turns out that the 50-ish woman, Linda Bishop, was a bi-polar schizophrenic who had been recently released from a mental hospital on her own recognizance against advice. Basically, she was a victim of a mental health system that failed her at almost every level. The film is made up of readings from her diary: a description of her slow starvation (she had subsisted on apples she scrounged from wild trees during the nights...until the New Hampshire winter made that impossible.) But the film makers also interviewed members of her family, sister and daughter, who had been stymied in aiding the ill woman. The result is a gut-wrenchingly difficult film to watch...but also an invaluable, intimate, personal journey into the depths of mental illness told with a certain poetic beauty by Ms. Bishop herself.
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The Freedom to Marry 2016
In 2015 the U.S. Supreme court settled the U.S. gay marriage debate affecting all 50 states in a 5-4 decision Obergefell v. Hodges. However, the the court actually combined 5 different appeals cases into one. This moving, even stirring documentary concentrates on one of those cases: DeBoer v. Snyder (two Michigan lesbian nurses raising adopted children who were deprived of their right to live in a legitimately married family.) The film singles out one organization dedicated over many years to changing public opinion on gay marriage: the Freedom to Marry coalition, led by a true hero of the struggle, Evan Wolfson. It also tells the story of the victory through the eyes of GLAD attorney, Mary Bonauto, who argued the case for the gay couples before the Court. By narrowly focusing on one aspect of the eventual victory, the film made its points effectively...although the definitive story of the entire gay rights struggle for equal rights to marry is yet to be told.
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Finding Oscar 2017
The civil war in Guatemala lasted for over 40 years from the 1950s, and caused countless "disappearances," deaths, rapes, pain and strife. The U.S., especially during the Reagan years, was complicit with the rampages of the government's special forces against the populace. This documentary covers in detail one particularly horrendous event in 1982, when the entire town of Dos Erres, over 200 natives, were executed and thrown into a well by army forces disguised as guerillas. Two young, light-skinned boys (one named Oscar) were saved by participating soldiers, to be raised by their families. In the process of reconciliation that followed the end of hostilities in the 1990s, the two men were eventually found and were instrumental in bringing some of the ex-military killers to justice in the present day. The film had a relevant message and some moving moments. But for me, it seemed overlong and didactic, rather than involving.
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Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis (Our Friends) 2017
The Eagles of Death Metal are a rock band that I've never heard of before (not surprising since I'm an old fart.) Turns out that they were the lead act at the Bataclan club in Paris on November 13, 2015 when terrorists famously attacked various venues, including theirs. The band narrowly escaped; but over 80 died at the club. Utilizing interviews with the band members and surviving spectators, the film describes the massacre (although crucially, there was no footage of the event itself.) The film really worked when it depicted the aftermath, including two trips to Paris for concert appearances that the band made as a part of the healing process, both for Parisians and the band itself. Colin Hanks directed the film, and the actor/scion made the best that could be culled from the materials at hand. I didn't end up liking the band's music much; but the film captured real, heartfelt emotions from the musicians (the two major players, Jesse Hughes and Josh Homme grew up in nearby Palm Desert, California.)
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Cries from Syria 2017
This shatteringly effective documentary tells the inclusive story of the ongoing Syrian civil war. It ranges in time from the echoes of the Arab Spring in 2011, through years of deaths and destruction, to the mass exodus to the the West of much of the Syrian populous as of 2016. It combines footage from the war zones (primarily cities in West Syria), interviews with mostly young people involved in the freedom fighting, and narration by Helen Mirren providing some background information. The film makes no pretense to objectivity, in that very little time is given to the point of view of the forces fomenting the violence against the populace (Assad's government, his Russian allies, and ISIS.) On the other hand, nothing is spared in showing the atrocities: sarin and chlorine gas attacks by Assad against his own people, carpet bombing by the Russians, disappearing and torture, and the mass executions by ISIS. It's all hard to watch; but also indispensable in showing to the world these calamitous events. The film maker combined the amazing live footage, much of it culled from amateurs shooting on their phones, with fine graphics and an intelligent editing schema which clarified the chronology of events for the audience. It is up to this point the most effective depiction of this humanitarian catastrophe that has reached the screen.
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All These Sleepless Nights 2016
Situated somewhere between a documentary and a contemporary Malick reverie, this Polish film follows twenty-something Krzysztof and his friends (Michal, Eva, Adam etc.) through a year of aimless Warsaw living, loving, breaking-up, philosophizing, partying and dancing in the streets. There is little context. Who are these people? They don't work, go to school, have contact with families. (They're apparently real people, not actors; but I'm not 100% sure of that.) They're like a Millennial lost generation...Polish bohemians going from party to party, rotating friends and girlfriends, living their "reel" lives as in a musical written by Scott Fitzgerald and shot by Emmanuel Lubezki. I found it disconcerting, disorienting...yet smart and illuminating. Just not my cuppa. Your mileage may vary.
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Maudie 2016
Touching film about a real-life, mid-20th century primitive painter (the Grandma Moses of Nova Scotia) named Maud Lewis. Sally Hawkins gave another fabulous performance as Maudie, bowed by a birth deformity but eternally optimistic (she saw life and her art as a window into beauty.) Ethan Hawke was almost as good playing her curmudgeon husband. Some supposedly "feel-good" movies actually make me feel good, as this one did. At the end of the film the actual couple were shown in B&W documentary footage shot years ago; and with the perspective of the prior film and great performances, this was one of the most gratifying moments on film this year.
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Okja 2017
Bong is a visionary genius film maker. No doubt about that. The special effects are quite extraordinary. But he let two of my favorite actors, Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal go too far into parody. And the political satire was a little much. Other than that, this was a wonderful film...just one that left a bad taste in my mouth (no, not GMA pork.) By the way, the best scene was saved for after the end credits. Too bad nobody will be left in the theater since this wasn't a Marvel film.
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Baby Driver 2017
Yes, it's totally excessive (have you seen many Edgar Wright films? Excessive is his middle name.) But it's loads of fun. And if this film doesn't finally turn Ansel Elgort into a superstar, I'll be shocked.
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Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo 2016
At the start of this French film a naked man descended a staircase into a basement gay sex club in contemporary Paris. The lighting is all red and blue; and the action is full frontal: visible hard-ons, artistically choreographed writhing bodies. Gradually the camera focused on two 30-something men who, through eye contact, were magnetically attracted to each other, and eventually coupled energetically. This sequence seemed interminable; and for all the pornographic realism it was strangely non-erotic...sex as art.
After coupling the pair dressed and met outside the club, and proceeded to amble into the deserted Paris right bank streets around 4AM. The film then followed the pair, effectively in real time, for the next 2 hours, as they wandered about, got to know each other, dealt with HIV issues, and, more or less, bonded. Théo (Geoffrey Couët) and Hugo (François Nambot) were an attractive couple; and their perambulations around Paris served as a gay version of Linklater's Before Sunrise series (two people meeting and getting to know each other), combined with Andrew Haigh's Weekend (two gay people meeting and getting to know each other.) That the nudity and sexuality was totally explicit is a wonderful phenomenon of the French art cinema (cf Stranger By the Lake); and directors Ducastel and Martineau treat this as a casual and natural expression of male bonding...an incremental increase in explicitness from their previous films. For me the film was both truthful and exhilarating. [Personal note: in 1982 I had an almost identical late night walk through the streets of Paris with a boy I met in a bar. Paris and society clearly have changed greatly in the past 35 years; but the frisson of déjà vu I experienced watching this film added a great deal to my appreciation of the film.]
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The Book of Henry 2017
Jeez, from the reviews here on letterboxd you'd think this was the worst film ever to come down the pike. Well it isn't. I think the problem is that people are taking the story seriously, rather than as the children's moral fable it was meant to be (cf Stranger Things, an apt comparison.) So, 11 year old Henry (Jaeden Lieberher, great at playing weird as in last year's Midnight Special) is a super genius with psychic prophetic powers in the guise of a normal kid. He protects his diminutive younger brother (Jacob Tremblay, proving as he did in Room that he is an accomplished actor well beyond his years). But Henry is especially protective of his insecure mother (Naomi Watts) and a troubled young neighbor girl.
The plot is almost irrelevant, a series of contrivances adding up to a gifted child saves practically everybody even from his grave (oops! was that a spoiler? doesn't matter.) What makes this film special is the positive presentation of a uniquely tight-knit family. Naomi Watts is never better than when she is mothering gifted boys. Remember "Spiderman" Tom Holland playing her imperiled son in the tsunami film The Impossible? Watts has the rare gift of radiating maternal love without sentimentality.
Director Trevorrow uses a creepy synthesizer score by Michael Giacchino and an Oscar contender song (sung by Watts in the film and Stevie Nicks in the end credits) to add to the eerie unreality of the story. But it is his assured direction of the fine cast and sensitivity to the subtleties of family life that stood out for me. The film is something of a throwback tonally...sort of a modern day E.T. in feeling; but in this skeptical era, apparently a family oriented moral fable doesn't fly. I was moved and enthralled.
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Handsome Devil 2016
Ned (played by cute, red-headed Fionn O'Shea), was a 16-year old Irish prep-school student. He was an introvert, interested in music...enrolled in a boy's school that is batty for rugby, which made him a picked-on outcast. His new roommate, Connor (attractive Nicholas Galitzine), was mysteriously expelled from his previous school; but he turned out to be a talented rugby player, so he instantly became a BMOC. Also new at the school was a closeted gay English teacher (ingratiatingly played by Andrew Scott). Ned and Connor surprisingly became friends; but there is some sexual ambiguity surrounding both boys...which became the crux of the drama. I was totally involved in this well written and acted gay-friendly coming-of-age story. It made a fitting and positive ending to my 6-week long, 110 film Seattle Film Festival marathon!
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Free and Easy 2017
In this trenchant, if ploddingly slow, Chinese satire, two con-men, (a soap salesman and a fake monk) attempt to prey on a series of country bumpkins. They must elude two local cops and cope with their increasingly canny victims. The film almost degenerates into slapstick; but actually presents a rather amusing take on the greed and money fixation of modern Chinese society. It's just that the torpid pacing just about put me to sleep.
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This Is Our Land 2017
This timely French political drama tells the story of Pauline (Emilie Dequenne), a home-visitation nurse who was invited to run for her small-town mayorship by the right-wing anti-immigrant party led by a woman who somewhat resembled Marine Le Pen. Director Belvaux (who made the impressively contemporary "Trilogy" a few years ago), presented an informative and apparently accurate, if fictitious, portrayal of the people and issues that are consuming Europe today. But it also resonated with our own current American political situation.
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Mr. Long 2017
A taciturn Taiwanese hit man (Chang Chen) was assigned a target in Tokyo by his triad gang boss. When he failed to assassinate his victim, he went on the run, settling in a semi-deserted enclave populated by a friendly group of impoverished citizens (one small boy, in particular, whose Taiwanese mother was addicted to heroin.) Needing money to return to Taiwan without his passport, and with the aid of his inventively capitalist neighbors, he started a surprisingly successful mobile noodle stand...at least until his past caught up with him. That's the set-up for modern day samurai tale, a heartfelt thriller with comic elements. The frequent bloodshed was stylized, and frankly a little unbelievable; but I left the theater with a smile on my face.
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Trouble 2017
A 50-something brother and sister (Bill Pullman and Anjelica Huston) are feuding over their inherited New England property in this family drama with farcical elements. Despite a fine supporting cast, the script and direction never quite jelled for me...character motivations were suspect. And worse, the interaction of the characters with the local police and the laws of property ownership rang false. I kept rolling my eyes at the ridiculous plot mechanisms. Too bad. I liked the cast and wanted to like the film.
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The Witches 1990
I missed this 1990 kid's flick when it came out...so I was delighted to actually watch the pristine revival print at the Seattle film festival. The film was adapted from a fairy tale by Roald Dahl, utilizing the animated creature skills of the Henson studio and some of the best witch's make-up ever portrayed on screen. In essence it is the story of Luke, young orphan boy (Jasen Fisher) who while visiting an English hotel with his grandmother (Mai Zetterling), encounters a convention of witches led by the Grand High Witch (Anjelica Huston), and is transformed into a mouse. Well, that's only a small part of the magically entrancing story, which works on two levels: scary cautionary tale for children, and a wry satire of primordial, fear-of-the-other superstitions for adults. It was good fun and a superbly crafted film to boot.
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Escape Room 2017
A set of over-privileged, whitebread L.A. millennials end a birthday celebration for one of their members by accepting an invitation to play in person a game that they found on the internet. By using their intellect, they must within an hour escape from a locked room. However, it was not disclosed, nor did the group choose to ponder, the penalty for losing the game. What ensued was a typical horror film in the mode of "Ten Little Indians" (one by one the characters expire.) It was all ridiculously unmotivated; and the puzzles of the game seemed to be cheats, at best. The film had fine cinematography and special effects; but the over-broad acting and poor sound recording detracted from the film's production values. And to cap it off, the characters were so unsympathetic in their hubris, that I found myself wishing that they would all die...the quicker the better.
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The King’s Choice 2016
This was a large scale, involving war epic telling the story of the German 3-day invasion of Norway in April, 1940. It was centered around the actions of the democratically elected Royal family as they coped, on the run, with the political situation of a parliamentary government in turmoil (for instance the eponymously quisling traitor Vidkun Quisling, who pronounced himself puppet Prime Minister; and the overmatched Norwegian army). King Haakon VII (Jesper Christensen) was forced to meet with the German envoy who was directly representing the Fuhrer; and fateful decisions ensued. The film effectively portrayed the King's heroic thoughts and actions; and while not being exactly a gung-ho patriotic movie; still it was an effective portrayal of actual history unfolding.
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The Inland Road 2017
In this intimate New Zealand family drama, Gloria Popata plays Tia, a troubled 16-year old Maori runaway girl. In an effort to avoid spoilers, all I'm going to disclose is that Tia gets involved with two bereaved, white farming families; and with painfully slow steps involving Tia's inappropriate crush on married older men, she gradually comes of age. Like most films from New Zealand, the setting is beautiful. The family drama is well played (especially a blonde 6-year old girl actor, Georgia Spillane, who can't quite understand the death of her father); but I never quite was able to identify with Tia or the other characters; and the film lacked emotional resonance for me.
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Say You Will
The setting: the summer of 2006 in Orange County, CA. Sam, a sensitive loner, was in the process of graduating from high school, and spending one last summer working at a video store, before heading to a music college back East. His father had recently committed suicide; his mother was chronically depressed; he had an unrequited crush on a troubled girl from grammar school, and he busied himself composing songs of love and loss. That is the set-up for a well-observed, achingly authentic, coming-of-age film that was clearly semi-autobiographical. Novice film maker, writer-director Nick Naveda was able to draw some superb performances from his cast. Travis Tope and Katherine Hughes were ideally cast as the mismatched teen-age pair. And Michelle Forbes, gave a moving performance as Sam's bereaved mother (coincidentally Forbes played a meth-addicted mother in a film I watched yesterday, Columbus...she is apparently getting type cast as a troubled mom these days.) Even the subsidiary characters were immaculately cast: especially Israel Broussard in the quipster, formerly best friend role, and Sam Trammel as a different kind of father surrogate. The film could easily have gone off the rails into maudlin, teen film angst cliché territory. But Nevada's script played amazingly true-to-life, and was even inspiring...a fine debut effort anticipating more to come from this talented film maker.
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Nocturama 2016
This disturbing, but gripping film tells the story of a group of young Parisian radicals, who plot and carry out a horrendous feat of domestic terrorism: multiple murders and bombings around the city. Their motivation is murky and not well defined...seemingly sheer nihilism; but the plot execution is shown in exhausting detail, which held me in thrall. The group ends up hiding in a huge closed-for-the-night department store, where they variously interact and do their anti-materialistic thing. The film is suspenseful, and there is a feeling of impending doom. But as an audience member, I found myself surprisingly ambivalent about these young people who were acting out so destructively. Maybe some of this had to do with the attractive cast of unfamiliar young French actors; but also, the assured direction and excellent, vivid steady-cam cinematography added to my involvement, despite the revolting violence portrayed.
Columbus 2017
Columbus, Indiana (not Ohio, as I originally thought), is a small city with outsized modern architecture, including buildings by Eero Saarinen (who incidentally was the architect of Baker House, my famed dorm building at MIT.) In this slow-to-develop, meditative, character-driven story film, Casey (Haley Lu Richardson, a fresh and radiant performance) is a young girl, spending her post-high school year as an intern in the local library in lieu of college, and a fan of the local architecture. Her boss, a youthful MLA librarian amusingly played by yet another Culkin brother (in this case the youngest, Rory, possibly the most talented of all if he is ever given the right leading role) has an unrequited crush on Casey. But she is more interested in the older, Korean intellectual Jin (John Chu), in town because his famous academic father has been hospitalized and is on life support. The ubiquitous Parker Posey also has a small supporting role. I wanted to love this film; but honestly, the slow pacing and ambling plotlessness just never fully engaged me (I think I dozed off a few times, missing nothing, apparently).
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Santa & Andres 2016
In 1980s era Cuba, dissident, homosexual writer Andrés (a genial performance by Eduardo Martinez) has been ostracized to a difficult life in the Oriente province, the impoverished easternmost part of the Island. The local Communist leader has delegated a loyal woman, Santa (Lola Amores), to watch over Andrés and prevent him from contacting the foreign delegates from an international conference. But Santa and Andrés gradually forge a friendship. That is the basis of this off-center romance which discloses much about the status of people in rural Cuba under Castro. The film is slow paced and has little overt action. But it does successfully portray an unexpectedly humanistic side of the Cuba of that era.
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God’s Own Country 2017
In this bleak, but hopeful gay themed drama, Johnny (Josh O'Connor) is a young man gradually taking over his elderly parents' sheep farm in the contemporary, hardscrabble Yorkshire, England countryside. Johnny is attracted to men; but deeply closeted. His infirm father (Ian Hart, convincingly lame) hires a temporary worker, Gheorghe (attractive Alec Secareanu), a Romanian refugee who grew up on a similar farm in his own country. When innocent horseplay between the young boss and worker suddenly turns sexual, the two young men commence on a serious and troubled secret affair. This was an insightful coming-of-age story. The relationship between the two men rang especially true...sort of a more enlightened version of Brokeback Mountain, romantic and yet masculine, without the complication of women and with a minimum of homophobia among family and neighbors. The film was slow paced; but due to the the fine acting and assured direction from veteran actor Francis Lee making his directing debut, I was totally involved with these characters.
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Paris Prestige 2017
I stuck with this dark and turgid story of the Paris underworld of bars and nightlife for a half hour. Since I was unable to relate to the characters or their situation by that point, I bailed (something I almost never do at a film festival.)
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She’s the Boss 2017
This Vietnamese farce takes place at a large Saigon bank corporation, where dating between employees is forbidden. When, due to a computer glitch, excess sums had been dispensed by the bank's ATMs to various people, the job of getting the money back was delegated to a female head of department who, incidentally, was having a secret affair with one of her underlings. The two lovers, in some pre-marriage pact, then engaged in a battle of the sexes type of contest to see who could restore more of the dispensed money faster. It was all done at a frenetic pace with shrieking and annoying over-acting throughout, in the worst tradition of Asian comedy style. I can safely say that I hated the film; but stuck it out to the predictable end simply because leaving would have required too much energy. However, I must admit that the brightly lit sets and surprisingly capitalistic message (coming from the People's Republic of Vietnam), gave the film a gloss that at times was hard to resist.
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Lady Macbeth 2016
In this austere English drama (which was definitely not based on Shakespeare's Scottish play), Katherine (a strong performance by Florence Pugh) was a young bride who had been sold by her father to a cruel, elderly 19th century country squire who had then forced her to marry his middle-age son who was, for unknown reasons, uninterested in bedding his bride. In frustration, during her "husband's" absence, the sexually alluring maiden turned to the powerfully attractive gameskeeper (Cosmo Jarvis) for solace. They commenced a torrid affair which led to...well, a typically bleak Gothic tragedy unfolded. It was well acted; and the deserted, stark moors of rural England were suitably depicted. I only wish I were able to relate to these characters and their situation. But the relationships never caught fire for me; and the film seemed tedious and superficial.
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September 12th
Watched at the Seattle Film Festival under the title American Folk
In this affecting road-trip movie, Elliott (played by previously non-actor Joe Purdy) was a professional folk-singer, on his way the morning of 9/11/2001 by plane from L.A. to N.Y to play a gig, when the plane was turned back and all air traffic grounded. He had befriended his seatmate, Joni (Amber Rubarth), a youthful New Yorker on her way home to tend her sick mother; who then invited him to crash for the night at the Topanga Canyon house she had been staying at during her visit. By happenstance, the owner of the house had been storing an old hippie van for a New York friend; and the two stranded travelers set off in the van on a cross country drive. On the way Elliott learns that Joni was an accomplished singer herself; and they encounter a series of adventures that capsulized an America in transition, the drawing together of people in reaction to the events of 9/11. The result is a tender, lovely film, soaked in the traditions of folk music...a film that had me enthralled and often in tears, following along internally with the familiar tunes the characters were singing along the way. Of course, it just may be that I am the ideal, sentimental old codger that this film was designed to inspire. But I think there was more to the film than that: 25 years later, it's time to look back on that traumatic event in retrospect, to reflect on the changes to our society, and to help heal the wounds of that time. It's unfair to saddle a little American indie film with non-actors and no budget with such a heavy burden. But this unassuming film rose to the occasion. Watch for it. You won't be disappointed.
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Kills on Wheels 2016
Two disabled-from-birth youths and a former fireman, paralyzed from the hips down by an accident three years before, join together in a for-profit crime spree. Or maybe not, since the two boys are busy drawing a comic book about their capers. The Hungarian film combines action and comedy with social commentary about the disabled. One gets to know and like these misfit characters (authentically disabled amateur actors) as they gad about town in their wheelchairs. But there is a certain aura of unreality about their crimes...it all comes too easy. Still, the characters and their hi-jinks were just too much fun for this viewer to resist.
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Wallflower
At the start of this murky drama, we witness a horrifying act of domestic terrorism, as a man dressed in black and wearing an ammunition harness, and toting a shotgun and pistol, attacks and slaughters the partygoers at a Seattle house. The film then flashes back 24 hours, to disclose that the killer was a psychologically wounded young man from Montana, a social misfit attending a rave where drugs and alcohol flowed freely. He was invited to attend an after-party where he awkwardly encountered several young women and the stoned host. However, after interminable, more or less embarrassing conversations, I still found the psychological motivation for the killing spree unfathomable and the bloodletting gratuitously gruesome and stomach churning. One word for this film: ugh!
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May God Forgive Us 2016
This Spanish policier takes place in Madrid, 2011. Someone is raping and murdering old ladies. Two detectives: stuttering and competent Velarde (Antonio de la Torre) and tough cop with anger issues Alfaro (Roberto Alamo) discern that there is a serial killer on the loose, a man with a mother fixation. The film raises a number of red-herrings on the complex and over-long trail leading to the perp...including territorial in-fighting among the police. The film worked as a dark, yet involving police procedural, even though there was an annoying discontinuity in the chain of police work which led to the final resolution.
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The Journey 2016
In 2006, two powerful Northern Ireland politicians, life-long mortal enemies, had come together in Scotland under the guidance of British P.M. Tony Blair, in an effort to forge a lasting peace ending the terrible "troubles" which had plagued their country for decades. That is the background for this scintillating historical drama that was both instructive and fantastically well written, acted and directed. The two elderly men, Protestant reverend and faction leader Ian Paisley and Catholic "terrorist" leader Martin McGuiness were tricked into taking a supposedly unwitnessed auto trip together; and this film tells the (probably) fictionalized story of that fateful meeting. This is inherently fascinating recent history (that was little known to me beforehand.) But it is the powerful and incisive acting by the two principles (Timothy Spall in a career capping, Oscar deserving performance as Paisley; and Colm Meaney, no less deserving of an Oscar but not quite as imposing) that make the film so wonderfully memorable. One hopes this inspiring film gets the release and success it deserves.
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The Ornithologist 2016
In this strangely mysterious drama from the controversial (but fascinating and gay) Portuguese director J. P. Rodrigues, Fernando (in a charismatic performance by Paul Hamy) was a gay ornithologist, studying the birds of present-day northern Portugal, navigating the rivers by kayak and camping solo in the neighboring jungle-like forest. His kayak was wrecked, and he apparently drowned when he got caught in a series of river rapids. [I'm going to go into SPOILER territory here to try to explain the film, so beware.] After an interlude, he was resuscitated by a pair of Chinese lesbian pilgrims, who drugged and trussed him, preparing to torture him, until he managed to escape. He then became involved with a series of misadventures, including a sexual tryst with a deaf-mute goatherd named Jesus. Finally he was killed and, for some reason transformed into a dead man named Anthony (played by the director himself). The film is steeped in Christian mythology, which was totally opaque to me until I was turned on to a Wikipedia page which totally explained the metaphorical background of the main character. Here is the summary from that page, the knowledge of which made the entire film make sense: "Saint Anthony of Padua (Portuguese: St. António de Lisboa), born Fernando Martins de Bulhões (1195 – 13 June 1231), also known as Anthony of Lisbon, was a Portuguese Catholic priest and friar of the Franciscan Order. He was born and raised by a wealthy family in Lisbon, Portugal, and died in Padua, Italy." I hope that helps others who might have been as mystified as myself by the film despite really enjoying it.
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In the Radiant City 2016
Andy (Michael Abbott, Jr.) is a quietly morose, 30-something man who has returned after a 20 year absence to his small-town Kentucky birthplace. Turns out he had been instrumental in the murder conviction of his older brother...in a fatal fire whose actual cause is shrouded in the mystery of scantily written flash-backs. In the course of his arrival, Andy meets his delinquent teen-age niece, and eventually hooks up with his family: sickly mother and resentful sister. Issues of family, of disloyalty, of guilt come out as Andy confronts his repentant brother in prison. It's all a little murky and slow, and maybe a tad too arty for my tastes. But the fine acting makes up for a script which meanders and lacks a satisfactory resolution.
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Gook 2017
This involving B&W drama takes place on April 29, 1992 (a red-letter day in Los Angeles history: start of the Rodney King verdict based uprising (aka riots) in Paramount, CA, a minority enclave in South L.A. At the start of the film, Kamila is a precocious, pre-teen black girl living with her older brother, a resentful gang-member with anger issues. Kamila occasionally does part-time work for two Korean-American brothers (the "gooks" of the title, although I did learn that "gook" actually means "country" in Korean) who own a barely successful shoe-store...part of the Asian community of shop owners who were perceived by their neighbors at that particular time as exploiting the poorer minorities. As the riots grew in scope, the characters became embroiled in their various dramas, some horrifying, some hopeful, some tragic. [Personal note: I lived in L.A. at the time, and watched from the relative safety of my Hollywood Hills apartment the city burn below. For me, the film seemed particularly evocative and relevant.]
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My Happy Family 2017
50-something Manana is a high-school teacher, wife and mother living in her querulous, elderly parents' Tbilisi, Georgia apartment. The family situation is raucous and crowded; and, in an effort to assert her individuality and find inner peace, Manana (a gloriously transforming performance by Ia Shuglashvili) rents a decrepit, but promisingly open-air apartment to move into on her own...much to the surprise and disapproval of her family (the title "happy family" is decidedly ironic.) That is the set-up for a superbly made film about a woman's mid-life crisis. [Personally, having recently moved into an apartment alone after years of roommates and lodgers, I could totally relate to Manana's decision to seek the satisfaction of solitude.] As written and acted, this is a rare and truthful film about adults with real-world problems and grown-up solutions.
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Soul on a String 2016
This is a contemporary Chinese epic steeped in Tibetan Buddhism. It takes place in a gorgeous setting reminiscent of the American West, and follows a pilgrim as he sets out to deliver a sacred stone while being hunted down by a pair of brothers determined to settle an old family feud. Or something like that. To be truthful, I couldn't actually follow the story. Characters who follow the pilgrim come and go, and it is hard to keep them all straight. I was reminded in a way of Frodo's quest to deliver the ring; and this film is a similar type of epic...one which managed against odds to draw me in. It did prove that an entire film of incredible visual imagery could make up for a plot that I couldn't quite engage with.
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Landline 2017
This dysfunctional family dramedy was set in Manhattan in 1995. The parents (sensitive performances by John Turturo and Edie Falco) are feeling the stress of relationship secrets. But the film is really about their two daughters. First up is twenty-something Dana (innately funny and identifiable Jenny Slade), engaged to Ben (an achingly sensitive performance by Jay Duplass), and feeling pre-wedding jitters. And then there was potty-mouth, hi-school age younger sister, Ali (newcomer Abby Quinn, perfectly cast), who is living a secret life of sex, drugs and clubbing. Director Robespierre does a fine job of delineating the flawed characters from a particularly feminine perspective. The film is quite entertaining and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. And it does nail the 1990s era perfectly.
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Fermented
This is a fun and informative foodie documentary about the process of fermentation and how it has permeated our preparation of such staples of food preparation as cheese, sourdough bread, salami, beer, kimchi, miso etc. Korean-American author Edward Lee narrates the film on camera. He travels around the U.S. and Japan to visit the most outstanding creators of each of the fermented offerings, committed people who explain their manufacturing processes with clarity and passion. And it is all presented with enticingly beautiful cinematography. I guess I had never given much thought before to the micro-organisms that cause fermentation...nor how many of the staples that we take for granted utilize the process.
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Boundaries 2016
The tiny French speaking island nation of Besco lies off the coast of Labrador in the north Atlantic. [SPOILER: it's a fictitious country, ruled by a feminist Prime Minister (played by Macha Grenon); but so well described that I had to Google it to be certain that it wasn't a real gem of a nation nestled away in a corner of North America.] The plot involves the contentious political gathering of a group of foreigners lobbying the Besco government for mining concessions, refereed by an American negotiator (played by one of my favorite actors from TV, Emily VanCamp.) The political bickering is overshadowed by the personal interactions of the characters (including some hot sex scenes and lots of bar hopping.) But in essence this is a biting geopolitical satire about the potential dominance of big countries and big industry over small, relatively powerless independent countries, blurring the boundaries between them. I found the politics somewhat confusing; but the feminist oriented people story was involving enough to carry the film.
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Иван 2016
[Watched at the Seattle film festival under the title Ivan]
The film opens with a diminutive pre-teen girl named Tonya arriving by bus with her small Toto-like dog Tuzik at a backwater Russian town. She encounters (by design? happenstance?) an apathetic, irascible, middle-aged ambulance driver named Ivan, telling him that she has run away from her sick mother and abusive step-father. The two bond for a short time in mutual sympathy. This is a good example of the familiar genre of an old curmudgeon brought back to life by a small child, unforgettable done in the 1997 Oscar winning Czech film Kolya. This film isn't nearly as fine as that one; but the interaction between the two main characters (played by gruff Kirill Polukhin and clever-beyond-her-years Polina Gukhman) was innocently involving enough to sustain my interest.
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A Dragon Arrives! 2016
This strange amalgam of mockumentary, thriller and supernatural mystery starts in 1965 on an island off the coast of Iran. Three men (a police inspector, a geologist and a sound engineer) arrive at the desert site of an old shipwreck and cemetery to study the circumstances surrounding the death by hanging of a political prisoner. Suicide or murder? In any case, some of the investigators apparently were somehow disappeared along with other onlookers. The film intercuts with sequences taking place 50 years later, when evidence from the past events come to light; and the film makers interview survivors. That's about all I could glean from the story...since so much of the plot was shrouded in mysteries that I couldn't follow (localized earthquakes, weird creatures appearing as apparitions). Nevertheless, the film was technically brilliant, with a superb sound track of music and recorded sound effects and gorgeous cinematography. All I needed to high-rate this film was a glimmer of understanding of what was actually transpiring. Alas...
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Infinity Baby 2017
This B&W American indie comedy tells of a future company that has invented adorable human babies that never grow and need a minimum of care (weekly diapers, infrequent feeding etc.) The film centers around three salesmen and their weirdly comic lives: Kieran Culkin is a serial boyfriend, unable to commit to a relationship, who uses his carping mother (Megan Mullally) to rid himself of his cast offs. Martin Starr and Kevin Corrigan are a gay couple who seriously consider adopting one of these babies to humorous effect. It's all quite surreal and strange; but fortunately the fine cast and very short running time make this an off-beat satire worth watching.
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Julie and the Shoe Factory 2016
[Watched at the Seattle film festival under the title Footnotes]
This was a French musical about a young girl who, searching for a job, finds work in a provincial, high-end shoe factory which the management plans on shutting down and moving the manufacturing to China. What ensues is a series of occasional song and dance numbers as the women of the factory go on strike; and the girl commences an affair with a hot truck driver. In my humble opinion, the songs were terrible, the dance numbers poorly choreographed, and the story fairly ridiculous and cliché filled. At a moment when the musical film genre is ripe for revival, this retrograde French effort was an unfortunate detour.
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On the Road 2016
Michael Winterbottom returns to the music documentary genre with this intriguing hybrid (half-documentary, half fictitious love story) film. Ostensibly, the film follows the English rock group Wolf Alice on a lengthy tour of venues by boat and bus from Ireland through England, Scotland, Wales and culminating in a concert in London. Although there are copious amounts of concert footage from the band and their opening act, the film concentrates on an affair between the young female photographer sent on the tour by "management," Estelle (Leah Harvey), and one of the roadies on the tour, Joe (James McArdle). It was an interesting concept to combine reality with fiction; but honestly the love affair seemed superfluous. On the other hand, the group Wolf Alice (a foursome with a female lead singer-guitarist, a great drummer and two fine guitarists) really grew on me. Their brand of sweet, hard rock reminded me of an earlier similar group "Jefferson Airplane". The film comprehensively showed the ins-and-outs of modern day touring. Perhaps it ran on too long; perhaps a little pruning of the many venues the band played in would have been an improvement. Nevertheless, the film totally worked for me...simply because I fell in love with the band Wolf Alice and their music, talent and personalities.
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Mellow Mud 2016
Raya is a 17-year old high school senior living, along with her younger brother Robis, with their grandmother in rural Latvia. Her mother has emigrated to London, falling out of touch and leaving her two children in muddy near poverty. When their grandmother dies, the children fend for themselves in secret, while Raya plots to go to London to find her mother (and incidentally has a surreptitious affair with her handsome English teacher.) Raya is played by the beautiful young actress Elina Vaska; and she completely nails the role. The film is an effective drama and coming-of-age story about a brave young girl and a scrappy kid facing and overcoming great odds.
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The Hippopotamus 2017
Ted Wallace (played with ascerbic brilliance by Roger Allam), was a blocked poet, who was hired by a girl dying from leukemia to find out if his teenage godson David had mysterious healing powers. Anyway, that is the simplest introduction to the plot of this wonderfully witty film adapted from a 1994 novel by famed gadfly Stephen Fry. The film takes place in the almost surrealistically sumptuous estate of wealthy industrialist Michael Logan (Matthew Modine), whose younger son (and his own father during WWII) supposedly had innate healing powers, laying-on of hands, so to speak. For me, the sparkling dialogue and attractive cast made up for some script shortcomings (are rich and smart people that easily duped?) Think Gosford Park recast as a modern day social satire.
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Zoology 2016
This Russian film is a broad satire on modern life. Natasha (Natalia Pavlenkova) worked a supervisory job at a Crimean zoo, feeding and relating to the animals. However, she somehow developed a massive tail descending from her spine, which she kept secret from her co-workers...but not from the physicians she visited for examination and hopefully a cure. Surprisingly, her X-ray technician consultant turned out to have a fetish for women's tails. Haha. It was all done with deadpan seriousness; but ultimately the film, despite its metaphoric message (whatever that was, I was stumped) was just too strange and surreal for my tastes.
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The Landing
[SPOILER] This mocumentary (labeled on the IMDb as a documentary), purports to tell the shocking story of the undocumented conclusion of NASA's 1973 Apollo 18 mission (last one to land men on the moon.) Using actors, simulations and "interviews" from "survivors" shot in 1998, a virtually unnoticed landing of the capsule in China and the death of two of the astronauts by neurotoxin exposure finally came to light. The film production is done so flawlessly, the actors so convincing, that I assume many will leave the theater anxious to Google Apollo 18. Bottom line: good fun, but not a documentary!
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Feather 2016
Ferro and Cate are a youthful couple, whose schooling is jeopardized when Cate accidentally becomes pregnant. The dysfunctional families on both sides get involved as the film develops into a family comedy with farcical elements, covering the 9-months of Cate's pregnancy. Turns out the baby is going to be a girl, whom the immature parents-to-be name Feather (Piuma in Italian.) However, the central dilemma of the plot becomes what to do when the parents are too young to support a family. At times the film degenerated into bickering farce, Italian style. However, on balance, the film had some interesting and timely things to say about romance, love and relationships in modern day Italy (and life in general). Incidentally, Ferro was played by young Luigi Fedeli, in a frenetic performance that signaled a vital new presence in Italian cinema.
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Cook Up a Storm 2017
In this foodie dramady, two young chefs with contrasting styles (Cantonese street food vs. Michelin 3-star French) battle for restaurant supremacy in their Hong Kong enclave. A subplot involves winning one's absent father's admiration. The film is done with maximum glitz: gorgeous food wrangling in pristine kitchens, colorful sets from street scenes to high-gloss televised contests. The story develops predictably; but on the way it is involving and fun to watch. Warning: if you are a fan of visually enticing food, don't watch this film hungry!
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It’s Only the End of the World 2016
Second viewing of this Xavier Dolan family melodrama; and honestly I have to downgrade it a bit from my first experience. Briefly, the film is based on a 1990 play by Jean-Luc Lagarce, telling the story of a 30-something man (handsome Gaspard Ulliel), who returns home after a long absence to (perhaps) disclose that he is dying of AIDS. His family: dotty (but canny) mom played by Nathalie Baye; contentious older brother (Vincent Cassel) and his meek wife (Marion Cotillard); and adoring younger sister (Léa Seydoux.) In the claustrophobic confines of the family home, secrets and conflicts are exposed. Dolan is one of my favorite directors, a true auteur of his films: writer, actor, director, musician. This is his second adaptation of a theater piece written by another author (the first was Tom at the Farm.) And instead of conventionally opening up the confined space of the theater stage, Dolan goes the opposite route, shooting most of the film in extreme close-ups, taking advantage of his his great and skillful cast. However, the ultimate effect is to stress the extreme talky and theatrical nature of the encounters, which become tiresome and overwrought. Still, the very magnetism of the cast made up for much of the problems of Dolan's adaptation.
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At the End of the Tunnel 2016
In this fascinating heist thriller, the fine Argentine actor Leonardo Sbaraglia, plays Joaquin, wheelchair bound cripple and computer tinkerer. One day he rents lodging in his large home to a single woman (Clara Lago) and her young daughter. That same day he discovers that neighbors are digging a tunnel under his basement to rob a bank vault...a plot he is determined to stop. The film cleverly develops a complex web of mayhem, danger and deceit from there. This is enjoyable hokum...somehow all the pieces come together in the end despite the overly complicated plot that often defies belief.
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Lane 1974 2017
In this cautionary coming of age memoir, Lane (Sophia Mitri Schloss) is the oldest of three girls, daughter of "Hallelujah," an ardently committed hippie woman circa 1974. The family is surviving, more or less, in the rural countryside and seashore of the California Bay area. While the irresponsible mother (a fervent performance by Katherine Moennig) practices free love (separated from the girls' father), forbids sugary foods, and offers a potion of peyote to 13 year-old Lane, the young girl longs for a normal life. For me, the film hit closely to home...I lived through the era and had close family involvement with the California hippie lifestyle (in some ways I went there myself for a while.) The film was based on Clane Hayward's book telling of her early life with a counter-culture mom, obviously not a happy time for her. As a film it is a bit ponderous and, in today's world, almost incomprehensible. But I can attest that it evokes a reasonably accurate depiction of the hippie lifestyle from back then, not an insignificant achievement.
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Endless Poetry 2016
In this second of a series of filmed reminiscences, the great film maker Alejandro Jodorowsky recounts an impressionistic chapter of his life story as a young man growing up in Chile. In typical Jodorowsky style, it is visually dazzling (with cinematography by Wong Kar-wai's fave Christopher Doyle) and maddeningly surrealistic. The director himself played the role of his older self talking to his younger self (played by his real-life son Adan). The young man was in revolt against his bourgeois father and determined to live his life as a poet, until he escaped from Chile entirely to leave for Paris and the future. For me, despite my adoration of Jodorowsky for his previous films (especially El Topo), the current film seemed a tad self-indulgent. But the director's fabulous and original visual sensibility remains intact; and I couldn't help myself from feeling a sense of awe at his artistry.
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The Odyssey 2016
This big budget French biopic told the story of oceanographer and documentary film maker Jacques Cousteau and his family. Lambert Wilson and Audrey Tautou played the Cousteau parents, who refitted a large boat they named the Calypso, and set off with their two young sons and a large crew to explore the ocean depths. For the next 30 years, they made films and supported save-the-oceans environmental causes. Their younger son, Philippe (another wonderful, charismatic performance by Pierre Niney) turned to aviation to abet his family's causes. The film has large scope, with beautiful underwater sequences and an extended tour of the Cousteaus' pioneering excursion to Antarctica. I'm old enough to have followed the Cousteaus' filmed adventures on television; but the family's history of triumphs and hardships were new to me; and made for a fascinating and involving true life story.
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Searchers 2016
In the frozen tundra of Northern Canada (apparently in the early 1900s), a set of rogue, unattached men attack a peaceful family while their men are out hunting caribou. When the hunters return to their home, they found a scene of chaos: their igloo ransacked, the grandfather and younger son murdered, and the wife and teenage daughter kidnapped. The surviving father and older son set off by dog sled to rescue their loved ones. That is the set-up for this snowbound revenge film, which resembled in a way such Westerns as John Ford's "The Searchers" (coincidence?), or a hyper-violent Sam Peckenpah flick. Director Kunak (who previously directed the extraordinary Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner) used a rudimentary filming style, featuring long shots of tiny people in vast white frozen spaces. This isolating, documentary style may have fit the period and characters; however, because of this I had trouble throughout the film distinguishing the good characters from the bad. The film worked somehow despite this; but the impact of the drama was lessened, at least for me.
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The Net 2016
Nam Chul-woo was a happily married North Korean fisherman with a young daughter, who one morning set sail in his small motorboat to tend his nets. However, he was fishing in waters that separated South from North; and when the motor was accidentally snagged in his net, the boat drifted across the border, where Nam was interned by the South Korean authorities who were determined to expose him as a spy or, alternately, to make him defect to "freedom". That was the starting point for this Kafkaesque political drama by the great Korean director Kim Ki-duk. Nam was caught in a double bind of political cross-currents, leading to a heavily publicized international incident. The script cleverly explicated the insanity of the Korean partition by both sides. And actor Ryoo Seung-bum, who played Nam with exasperated passion, personified the dilemma of a person caught like a minnow in a metaphorical, geopolitical net.
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Swallows and Amazons 2016
In the innocent era of 1930s England, a mom (Kelly Macdonald) whose husband is away at sea for the summer, vacations to the Lake Country with her brood of five cute-as-the-dickens kids. The older four of the children are allowed to go on a boating excursion by themselves to a small island in the middle of the local lake, where they encounter a couple of local girls with which they enjoy a mock pirate battle (their boat "Swallow" vs. the girls' tribe "Amazons"). In the meantime, the girls' uncle (Rafe Spall) is a travel writer involved somehow in a real Russian spy story. Some non-threatening mayhem ensues. The story is adapted from a contemporary children's adventure book, sort of a more realistic "Narnia" without the fantasy element. As such it makes little real-world sense; but it's all in good fun, although perhaps a little too complicated for young children. The fine production values and beautiful scenery almost make up for the unrealistic plot, which, frankly, is full of continuity holes big enough to drive a train through.
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Person to Person 2017
Four stories of contemporary New York city life are intercut to good effect in this sprawling, mumblecore-ish film. In the main story, an insecure NY News reporter (Michael Cera) is following a possible murder story with his female intern (Abbi Jacobson). In the course of their investigation they encounter an elderly watch repairer (Philip Baker Hall), whose friends serve as an observing chorus of sorts. In parallel stories, which never quite intersect, a record collector is ripped off trying to buy a rare Charlie Parker jazz LP; and a proto-lesbian girl (an interestingly original characterization by Tavi Gavinson), explores her fluid sexuality by experimenting with her best friend's boyfriend's best friend. In the fine tradition of mumblecore, all of this is shot seemingly ad hoc on 16mm film, with only the fine, realistic performances and frenetic pacing to hold one's interest. It held mine; but I have a predilection for the genre. Your mileage may vary.
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150 Milligrams 2016
Irène Fanchon was a real-life pulmonologist doctor working in a teaching hospital in the provincial Breton city of Brest, France. In 2010 she noticed a suspicious series of deaths from diabetic patients using a medicine sold by a huge French pharmaceutical company. As played by Danish actress Sidse Babett Knudsen, Fanchon was an obsessive, often overly antic voice for her patients in the face of the entrenched health bureaucracy and big pharma. In her years long fight to get the medicine banned she was aided by a much more cautious fellow doctor (Benôit Magimel, getting heavy in mid-career). This is an example of a typical "whistleblower" film with a heartfelt and important message that was almost ruined by a script which is both too complex to follow and too lengthy to keep one's interest.
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Dean 2016
Dean is a morose young man, obsessively grieving for his recently passed mother. As played by the familiar stand-up comedian Demetri Martin (who also wrote and directed, a true hyphenate), Dean wears his heart on his sleeve. He makes a living drawing simple line cartoons, with witty, unexpected punch lines; but recently his artwork has been filled with humorous references to the Grim Reaper. His relationship with his father (sympathetically played by Kevin Kline) is strained. And he suddenly leaves his Brooklyn home to visit L.A. where he is gradually drawn out of his funk by a perky, meet-cute girl (Gillian Jacobs.) The film often was clever and amusing; but the humor was just a tad too downbeat for my tastes; and Martin's satire of the L.A. lifestyle (my home turf) didn't quite work for me.
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Tom of Finland 2017
This biopic follows the life of Touko Laaksonen, who became world famous as the artist Tom of Finland. Tom drew realistic sketches of leather men with huge dicks, built bodies and fetching demeanors that were published in physique magazines and picture books during the era from the 1960s until the artist's death in 1991. His art filled the imagination of generations of gay men (including myself.) The real Touko was a soldier in WWII, a victim of gay persecution in the repressive 1950s in Finland, and finally, after his art was recognized and published in America, he became a revered celebrity. Pekka Strang played Touko with a convincing dispassion. He was surrounded by a series of good-looking men (I was particularly enamored by Lauri Tilkanen who played Tom's ill-fated long time lover, Veli.) The film progressed as a typical biopic; but it had the scope of a large production; and just based on my interest in the subject matter held my interest throughout.
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Prom King, 2010
In this modern, gay slice-of-life romantic drama, Charlie is a college student living in New York City. He's mostly out to friends and family (his mother is particularly supportive); but he's dissatisfied with his sex life...longing 1) to finally experience as a bottom "real" sex; and 2) to find true love rather than casual hook-ups. What ensues is a series of encounters with various men that mostly end in disaster. That's about it for plot. However, the film was written and directed by young Christopher Schaap, who also was in every scene playing the central character of Charlie. And Schaap is the real deal: a gay auteur making the most auspicious debut since Xavier Dolan burst onto the scene as an 18-year old wunderkind. Shaap's script is clever and filled with realistic anecdotes that resonate. He's a personable film presence as an actor who nails the character's naive longing and innate good nature. His direction is assured, with high production values including vivid cinematography from Aharon Rothschild that capture New York as clearly as an old Woody Allen flick. The casting of Charlie's friends and boyfriends and family is inspired. For me, at least, this is the find of the festival so far. I'm really looking forward to see where Schaap goes from here as a film maker as he branches out from the personal navel gazing of this debut effort. I predict a bright future.
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Black Code 2016
This documentary offered several examples of the power of the internet, both to foment popular protests and aid government authorities by spying on and thus controlling the populace The film was based on the lectures of Canadian political science professor Ronald Deibert and his organization "The Citizen Lab." Deibert admires Edward Snowdon's whistleblowing contributions...and the film made use of Snowdon's webcasts to press its point. But the heart of the film were illustrative examples of protests and repression in Tibet, Syria and Brazil. Especially the latter, where an organization called "Media Ninjas" used live streaming phones to record protests and injustices. One extraordinarily edited sequence from a riot in Rio that involved a Molotov cocktail explosion that killed a policeman proved that the state was prosecuting an innocent man by stringing together phone videos from many sources. However, this sequence was an exception. With all the best intentions, the film was poorly structured and sequenced, so that the overall message was lost in tedious repetition.
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The Lovers 2017
The wonderful (and sorely missed) Debra Winger and playwright-actor Tracy Letts play an old married couple, Mary and Michael, whose relationship has soured (both are having secret affairs with others, played by Aiden Gillen and Melora Walters). They have a grown college student son (former kid actor Tyler Ross) who is slated to visit with his new girlfriend. And the parents are waiting until after that visit to disclose the truth about the affairs to each other and end their unhappy marriage. Then something unexpected happens. That is the set-up for a truly grown up "battle of the sexes" romantic comedy. It was beautifully acted all around. Maybe the script exaggerated a little for comic effect; but I was amused by the concept and enjoyed the film despite the contrivances of the plot.
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Small Town Killers 2017
In a Danish version of Dumb and Dumber, Ulrich Thomsen and Nicolas Bro play two weaselly crooked contractors who are sexually frustrated in their relationships with their wives. In a drunken moment they hire a Russian hitman to off their spouses...while the equally frustrated women hire an English nanny hitwoman to in turn off their husbands. That is the set-up for this over-the-top farce which brings new lows (or highs, depending on one's point of view) to the "battle of the sexes." It's all clever and funny, and ultimately predictable. The audience ate it up.
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Roberto Bolle: The Art of the Dance
Roberto Bolle is an Italian ballet dancer, star of the La Scala opera in Milan and currently with the American Ballet Theater. This documentary follows Bolle as he leads a troupe of fellow ballet dancers in performances taking place in 2014 in three historic Italian monuments: Pompeii, the Caracalla baths, and in Verona. The film intercuts interviews with Bolle (a strikingly handsome, tall, perfectly sculptured dancer) with scenes from some ballet performances both in rehearsal and in performance. Among them were a gorgeous pas de deux of the balcony scene from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, performed in a huge Veronese monument complete with stone balcony. But one number, Opus 100, for Maurice, featuring two men dancing to Paul Simon's "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" was so beautiful that it brought me to tears. The dance sequences were wonderfully edited, often combining two or more performances to show how intricate and exact the respective choreographies were. However, for all the beauty of each individual number, the film seemed overlong and repetitive...and the interview scenes perfunctory and not very revealing. Yet, for all these structural flaws, the high points were so amazing, the dancing so skilled and beautiful, that I was entranced.
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Becoming Who I Was 2016
This documentary follows young Angdu Padma from age 4, when he was recognized as the "Rinpoche," reincarnation of a holy Tibetan lama, to age 13 today. The boy grew up in the mountains of Northern India, far from his politically unreachable Tibetan monastery and putative disciples...cared for by an elderly acolyte, reviled by some as a false Rinpoche, expelled from his local Buddhist temple. The film becomes a road trip as Angdu and his teacher make the dangerous trek to achieve his destiny in Tibet. The film has some beautiful scenery; and Angdu's story is touching and at times affecting.
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Entanglement 2017
Thomas Middleditch (star of the HBO series "Silicon Valley" and ubiquitous Verizon commercials spokesman) plays Ben, a hapless wreck of a man after a divorce and five aborted suicide tries. In a series of miscommunications, Ben gets in contact with a girl who might have been his big sister in an alternate life (played by perky Jess Weixler, familiar as Robyn on "The Good Wife.") There were elements of fantasy in the story that for me were a give-away of some plot surprises. And, although the film started as a reasonably entertaining romantic dramedy, by the ending it just felt trivial, like the narrative was a cheat.
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The Bloom of Yesterday 2016
Toto is a historian, an author specializing in the Holocaust...perhaps motivated by guilt over his Nazi butcher of a grandfather. As played by the nimble German actor Lars Eidinger, he was supposed to be planning a Holocaust retrospective conference, while personally he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Into his orbit was thrust a young Jewish scholar, Zazie, to be his intern...a girl scarred by the history of her own grandmother killed in Latvia during the war. She was played by the wonderful French actress Adèle Haenel whom I had just seen and admired playing the young doctor in the Dardenne brothers' film The Unknown Girl. Sparks fly between the two protagonists as they travel to Latvia to examine a suspected fatal confrontation between their respective grandparents. The film developed as a kind of screwball romantic comedy in the midst of a serious examination of the present day consequences of the Holocaust. It all worked for me, both the central relationship and the intriguing background of their research.
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Come, Together 2016
In this bittersweet, social commentary drama, the Parks are a middle class Korean family beset with problems. The husband is laid off from his long-term desk job, the wife is barely hanging on to her job as a credit card salesman, and their daughter is sweating out the waiting list for college admission. The film follows these three characters as they desperately (and mostly unsuccessfully) try to cope. It was an inventive script, insightful in its examination of present day Korean society. If at times the events stretched credulity, at least they were usually amusing, like watching a train wreck...chaotic, but hard to look away. Bottom line: the film fulfills the adage: "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade."
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La verità, vi spiego, sull’amore 2017
Watched under the festival title The Truth About Love Is...
This Italian romantic farce tells the story of Dora (Ambra Angiolini), whose seven year relationship with Davide has ended, leaving her with two adorable young children. Into the mix are the two meddlesome grandmothers and a free spirit male neighbor who takes on the role of baby sitter. The film tries too hard to be witty and insightful about love and relationships. However, the bottom line for me was that it just came off as silly and frivolous.
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Heartstone 2016
The setting is late summer in a small Icelandic farming village. Thor and Kristjan are best friends, in that stage of adolescence where boys are just approaching (Thor) or have achieved (Kristjan) puberty. Thor is a typical 14-year old "boy"...attracted to the girls of the village, full of mischief; but Kristjan is more sensitive, protective of his smaller friend. The boys horse around; but clearly Kristjan has longings that he can't even express to himself. That is the basis for this achingly beautiful and truthful coming of age story that just illustrated that the difficulties of the teen years are universal...felt just as strongly in the sexually liberated Scandinavian climate as anywhere. The two actors playing the boys, Baldur Einarsson and Blaer Hinriksson, were naturals, perfectly embodying their roles, even if most of the other characters (mainly the girlfriends and parents) were sketchily written. But all in all, the central relationship and the bleak and gorgeous mountain setting of rural Iceland made for a film which resonated with a particular poignancy for me.
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The Nile Hilton Incident 2017
The setting is Cairo in January, 2011...during the weeks of the Arab Spring. An undocumented Sudanese maid working in the posh Nile Hilton hotel witnessed the brutal murder of a famous singer. The relatively honest police detective, Noredin, is handed the case to solve, which he slogs through despite what turns out to be a complex web of interference and corruption at the highest government levels. As a plus, the film is a police procedural with high production values, re-creating the political climate that led to the culminating Egyptian revolution of January 25th. But as a murder mystery thriller, at least for me, the plot was too cynical and too convoluted to grasp. I was left with more questions than answers about the crime and perpetrators.
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Solitaire
The daughter of a middle class Lebanese Christian family is in love with a Syrian man from an appropriate family. The problem is that the girl's mother detests Syrians because her beloved brother had been killed by a Syrian bomb. When the two families meet to set up the traditional engagement, deceptions and conflicts inevitably are revealed. That's the set-up for this bittersweet romantic comedy, which has enough political context and farcical family dynamics on both sides to entertain while sending an eventually uplifting message.
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The Wedding Plan 2016
Michal (a luminous performance by Israeli actress Noa Koller) is a young Hasidic woman living in Jerusalem, unmarried and desperate to find a husband after a long search and myriad meetings with prospective men. I suspect that she's just too modern and opinionated to appeal to the Hasidim men she is introduced to. Still, she's determined...so she sets a wedding date for the 8th night of Hanukkah, depending on God to supply the groom in the intervening 30 days. What ensues is a fun romantic comedy immensely aided by some fine performances (I particularly liked Oz Zehavi who convincingly played an unmarried pop star singer.) This was my second film in two days about the Hasidim (the other being Menashe)...this time from the female point of view. The two films make instructive bookends and gave me an entirely new perspective on present day Orthodox Jewish life.
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Bad Influence 2016
Tano is an alpha-youth living in Santiago, Chile. After getting caught in the confusion of a gas station robbery, the authorities parole him to the country to live with his auto mechanic father. At his new school he befriends out of sympathy his neighbor Cheo, a semi-outcast, shy Mapuche (the indigenous people of the area.) The Mapuche people are involved in a violent strike against the gravel company that is despoiling the community. That is the setting for this coming-of-age story of the two boys, combined with a social commentary drama of present day rural Chile. I found it involving enough to pique my interest; but the film was slow paced and the politics difficult to follow for an outsider.
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Bad Day for the Cut 2017
Donal is a middle age farmer and mechanic tinkerer, who lives with his elderly mother in present day, rural Northern Ireland. As played by Nigel O'Neill (who looks like a heftier Sam Neill, to the point that they may be distant cousins), Donal is far from a mommy's boy...rather a competent scrapper. One night, awakened by a noise, he stumbled into the scene of his mother's brutal murder and briefly encountered one of the killers. Soon he himself became the target of unknown assassins; and he was unwittingly thrown into a revenge story from the Irish Troubles several years before. Additionally, Donal got involved with a pair of young Polish siblings caught in a sex slave ring that somehow connected to Donal's situation. It was all very complicated and very violent; and I never was quite able to figure it all out. But the action was well directed; and bottom line, the film was a better than average thriller.
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Menashe 2017
Menashe is an observant Hasidic Jew living in Brooklyn. He works a menial job as a market checker, speaking Yiddish to family and clients. His wife, from an unhappy arranged marriage, has recently died, leaving Menashe with a clever preteen son to raise. Except for the problem that the elderly cult rabbi has issued an edict that the boy must be left in the care of his married uncle (who looks down on Menashe as a schlemazel [loser]) until Menashe remarries...a prospect for which the fat and immature man is unready. That is the set-up for this character driven family drama steeped in Orthodox Jewish lore. For some reason, I responded favorably to the film, found it enjoyable and informative...perhaps because I, a Jew from a totally secular family, could identify with the characters and feel heartfelt relief that I wasn't born into such a milieu.
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The Bar 2017
Provocative director Alex de la Inglesia does his usual outrageous thing in this strange, semi-fantasy horror film. The setting is a quiet Madrid bar, where an attractive young woman wanders in to recharge her phone. Soon the oddly varied clientele hear gunshots from the outside, and viewing through the door, bodies appear and disappear, and the streets seem strangely deserted. Panic ensues; and the situation escalates into a maelstrom of fire and possible biological terrorism as the characters descend into a literal sewer of contention. What started out as a one-room character study became an nontraditional horror film. It was all too much for me...sound and fury ultimately signifying nothing. It would have just been annoying; but de la Iglesia is so skilled at shooting and editing mayhem that despite the ridiculous lack of realism of the plot, the film almost worked as satire.
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Beach Rats 2017
In this realistic and disturbing coming of age film, Frankie is a teen-age boy spending a summer in the present day Brooklyn suburbs. At home, his father is dying, his younger sister is a pest, his mother is concerned but unsupportive. He runs with a group of straight boys who are into drugs and girls; but secretly he plies the internet gay chat-rooms to find older men to satisfy his inchoate longings. This is a particularly realistic (at least to my point of view) look at the psychology of the closet and the difficulties of growing up poor in the suburban lower classes today. Frankie was played by the attractive newcomer Harris Dickinson, who managed to project surly masculinity and adolescent homosexual confusion all at once. The film also got the tawdry urban milieu right, especially Coney Island and the summer beach scene. There's no happy resolution to Frankie's story here...which for me just seemed appropriate and true to life.
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The Trip to Spain 2017
In this third foodie documentary collaboration between director Michael Winterbottom and actors/impressionists/raconteurs Steve Cougan and Rob Brydon, the film makers tour southwest Spain by ferry and Range Rover. On the way, per usual, they enjoy the scenery, eat fabulous meals, and spend their time trying to one-up one another with their wit and celebrity impressions. Only, after their previous tours of Britain and Italy, they seem to have reached a point of diminishing returns: the same shticks seem overly familiar, and despite the gorgeous settings, I found a certain ennui setting in mid-film. Still, as with the previous films, I'd give up my left nut to be able to personally duplicate their high-life extravagant journey.
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Time Trap 2017
This low budget [in Q&A the director answered: "The budget was $10,000 and it went over-budget], time binding, sci-fi mini-epic, was surprisingly watchable. It told the story of a group of young people who went cave diving to try to rescue a teacher who went missing. Turned out the cave was a time warp out of the present into some unknown future (along with a reference that it was the setting of the legendary "fountain of youth.") This film joins such previous, similar time travel stories (such as H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, and the recent TV series Wayword Pines. However, in this case the script seemed aimlessly ad-hoc, as if the film makers cobbled together the story as the went along to fit the increasing budget. Still, the film had scope and some convincing special effects...enough to mostly keep my interest and actually wish for a higher budget sequel to be made. I think that despite its story flaws, there is definitely an appreciative audience for this film if it manages to get released.
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Beatriz at Dinner 2017
A deglamorized Salma Hayek plays the eponymous Beatriz, a Mexican immigrant who became a successful new-age therapist in a Los Angeles alternative medicine cancer clinic. As written in Mike White's script, she is a vegetarian health fanatic, and a liberal activist who had been profoundly damaged as a child by her family's mistreatment by a gringo corporation in her native Mexican small town. By mischance she is invited to a business dinner at a lavish Newport Beach residence, where she comes in contact with a rapacious billionaire (John Lithgow), an encounter which awakens Beatriz's psychic pain from her childhood. The film is suspenseful and well acted...but I found it personally painful to watch. As realistic as Hayek's characterization was, I found it almost impossible to understand and relate to Beatriz's activist motivations in the film. On the other hand, my identification with and understanding of Lithgow's character was easy and quite disturbing. I guess that is a tribute to the passions of director Arteta and writer White. Maybe others will have an easier time relating to and enjoying this film.
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The Fabulous Allan Carr 2017
Allan Carr (ne Alan Solomon) was a publicist and producer from Chicago who found fame and fortune in Hollywood being flamboyant until his death in 1999. His main product was selling himself as a celebrity with lavish parties and a gift for self-promotion. However, he produced some successful films (Grease,) some duds (Can't Stop the Music,) Broadway musicals (La Cage aux Folles,) and one historic Oscar telecast in 1989 which (in my opinion unfairly) was a critical disaster. For me, he was an outrageous gay icon, famed for wearing caftans and throwing parties that I wasn't invited to (in those days I was instead a part of the Venice Beach set that revolved around the star Divine.) Still, I admired Carr from afar, and this entertaining documentary definitely does him justice. The film utilizes some glitzy graphics, interviews with friends and colleagues, and rare video clips featuring Carr himself on TV and in action. It's a fascinating picture of a damaged personality who, with grit and determination just about defined an era in Hollywood.
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The Unknown Girl 2016
Jenny is a young Belgian medical doctor running a small clinic in Liège for the poor and needy (and amazingly making home visits.) One evening after hours she carelessly failed to respond to her doorbell. When it turned out the person ringing the bell had been a youthful black girl who was found dead in the area the next morning, Jenny became obsessed with solving the mystery of the girl's identity. That's the set-up for a typical Dardenne brothers mystery thriller, where the camera is constantly in motion following the main character doing increasingly frantic and/or dangerous things. Jenny is portrayed by Adèle Haenel, a young French actress who radiates intelligence as well as a freshly scrubbed beauty...I expect to see a lot more of her in the future. I figured out the "killer" pretty early in the plot; but there was still enough suspense and mystery to keep me involved.
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The Midwife 2017
Claire is a delivery technician (the modern, unisex term for midwife in her native France) at a suburban hospital that is slated for imminent closure. As played by the fine actress Catherine Frot, she's an empathetic, skilled worker, a concerned mother of a grown son, and the daughter of a man who had committed suicide years before after being deserted by the love of his life, a wildly independent woman named Beatrice. The film recounts what happens when, after many years, Beatrice, now dying of a brain tumor, contacts her former step-daughter Claire to try to make amends. Beatrice is played by the preternaturally youthful Catherine Deneuve, in one of her most memorable performances as an elder. The interplay between the two great actresses brings the story to life. Only the French can routinely provide meaty roles like this for older women. Vive la France!
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Ethel & Ernest 2016
The English artist and illustrator Raymond Briggs recounts through realistic 2D animation the story of his parents, Ethel and Ernest. The film episodically spans decades of their lives together, from their meeting and courtship in the late 1920s, through Raymond's birth and childhood during World War II, to the couple's post-war, reasonably comfortable, worker class existence until their deaths in 1971. On the way, the film brings to life the living conditions in the England of its time span with poignancy and a light touch. Much of the success of the story telling is due to the voice actors limning the couple: Brenda Blethyn and Jim Broadbent, who bring the realistically animated characters to life. In addition to being a loving family album of recalled anecdotes, the film creates an accurate snapshot of 20th century England...almost as if it were shot as an epic, expensive live-action film. It's a fine example of filmed animation targeted to adults, instead of the usual children's stories.
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Death in Sarajevo 2016
Sarajevo is the historic capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina (a crucial part of the Balkan peninsula and the nexus of conflict between the various factions of the area: Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim). In the 1990s the area was decimated by war and siege. This film tells the present day story of a luxury hotel in the city that is on the verge of bankruptcy and facing a strike by unpaid workers. The hotel is host to a newsworthy event: the 100th anniversary of Gavrilo Princip's assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo which precipitated WWI. The film intercuts several stories. First, a TV news crew interviewing experts on the subject of Princip: terrorist or freedom fighter. Another is the internal functioning of the hotel: corrupt manager, dissatisfied employees, the thugs who run an illegal gambling den in the hotel's basement. Yet another is the conference, personified by a famous French luminary whose trigger happy body-guards provide the "death" of the film's title. Director Tanovic manages to hold all these balls in the air with skillful editing. I was amazed by how much of the former Yugoslavia's history (which permeated the plot) that I recognized from the many movies I've watched from the area. Perhaps that was why the film had such resonance for me personally. I think most Americans, in political isolation, would find the meat of this film incomprehensible. Yet, even if only considered as a political thriller, the film still had enough suspense and realistic, complex characterizations to hold interest.
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The Big Sick 2017
This riotously funny and poignant romantic comedy tells the more or less true story of Pakistani-American stand-up comedian (and comic actor, familiar from HBO's "Silicon Valley" series) Kumail Nanjani's on-again, off-again and on-again relationship with his future "white" wife, Emily Gordon. The two wrote the script (and Kumail plays himself opposite the adorable Zoe Kazan as Emily.) In essence this is a culture clash story. Pakistani parents want Kumail to enter into an arranged marriage with a nice ethnic girl. Kumail falls for an inappropriate Caucasian girl whose parents (the wonderful combine of Holly Hunter and Ray Romano) are more liberal. But still the relationship is fraught with problems. I'm not a huge comedy fan...but this film was genuinely laugh provoking throughout, not only due to the familiar stand-up routines, but also the way Nanjani's wry persona copes with his everyday life experiences. It all seemed honest and fresh.
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Divinas Divas 2016
This documentary shows the life and times of a series of elderly Brazilian drag divas who bravely performed (and flaunted their at the time illicit lifestyles) from the 1960s on. They all worked together in an underground Rio theater called The Rival...a theater owned by director Leandra Leal's grandfather. Now in their 70s, several of these performers have been brought back for one last, spectacular revival show...and they rise to the occasion. The film intercuts vintage film footage from the past with the new material showcasing these aging divas. And additionally fleshes out these acts with interviews with these artists who recount interesting and often amusing anecdotes from their various lives. It's all quite entertaining, and a little sad to watch the ravishes of age on these divas (who are all my age now, so I felt a particular poignancy that perhaps would have been lost on younger members of the audience.) This isn't going to be a film for everyone...it is over-long and repetitive. But personally, I'm glad I was able to watch these stories and admire the pluck of these brave pioneers of the sexual revolution.
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City of Ghosts 2017
In the ongoing Syrian mess, the city of Raqqa (near the Turkish border) has been one of the most ravaged as ISIS captured it and turned it into the capital of its Caliphate. This documentary tells the various stories of a group of men from Raqqa who have dedicated themselves to telling the world (though the internet on a site called RBSS, "Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently") about their city's fate. Some have stayed, using their phones to document the destruction, some have moved across the border to Turkey, others to Germany. But ISIS, that malevolent black flagged movement of Muslim fanatics, is systematically threatening all of these brave freedom fighters, even those who fled to the West. The film follows these men, wherever they went, telling their stories from their point of view...which can be remarkably paranoia inducing for the audience. The film isn't a comprehensive look at the conflicts in Syria. It does show how ISIS filled the void caused by the success of the original revolt of the locals against the Assad regime. But in terms of getting a close-up view of ISIS in action, this is a valuable asset. And it is scary. But the bravery and valor of the RBSS resistance fighters, their skill at reaching out to the world through the internet, is heartening to watch.
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The Girl Without Hands 2016
This French animated film is a dramatization of a Grimm's fairy tale. A miller's daughter is sold to a demon in return for vast riches. And then somehow the girl loses her hands to be replaced with golden ones. And Prince Charming gets involved. OK. You might get the idea that I wasn't fully engaged by the story. The animation itself was unique enough to arouse admiration...washes of color that only suggested images, never fully formed them. Very artistic. Most of the story was told through the sound track. I always thought that fairy tales had to have a moral, some lesson to learn. But by the end of this film I was mystified by what the message was. I guess it boiled down to "don't make a deal with the devil;" but I might be wrong about this.
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Weirdos 2016
Just about anything I could summarize about the plot of this little B&W gem of a film from Canada would be a spoiler. Bare bones: summer of 1976 in Nova Scotia. 15-year old Kit runs away from his teacher father's home with his best friend, feisty Val. They hitchhike to the city to find Kit's mother, who turns out to be a bipolar mess. Adventures happen and truths emerge. The kids were played by Dylan Authors and Francine Deschepper; and both are naturals with a fresh youthfulness that rings true to life. Kit's mom is a cameo by Molly Parker, who maybe overdoes the craziness a little; but she lights up the screen with her energetic performance. For me it all worked. It's a mild SPOILER to disclose that this is essentially a gay coming of age story...and a beautifully tender and moving one. There! I've said too much.
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Finding Kukan
This entertaining and informative documentary tells the story of the making of a lost documentary film called Kukan, which apparently won an Oscar for best doc in 1942. That old film was a compilation of color movies shot in China during the Japanese conquest of that country by Rey Scott, an American photo journalist (and a Caucasian.) However, current day film maker Robin Lung discovered that a Chinese-American woman from Hawai'i named Li Ling-Ai, was most likely the driving force behind the film, acting as the de facto, if uncredited producer. But Li's role was minimized as "technical adviser" at the time; and there remained no copy of the film itself. Ms. Lung determined to search for the film and for information about the people involved. Her efforts, along with an old video of an interview with the mysterious Li Ling-Ai, comprise the current documentary. And to a great extent, much of the mystery behind the lost film was successfully solved in the process of making the current film; and some of the original footage turned up...incidentally providing an invaluable historical filmed record from that era. Nice job, Ms. Lung.
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Struggle for Life 2016
An intern is sent to the jungles of French Guyana to supervise the building of a ski facility for future "tourists" using fake snow. That's the set-up for this ridiculous French language comedy/farce about bureaucracy run amok. The script was silly beyond belief; and then when things got dull they threw in a lurid sex scene or a gruesome death. I would have fled the theater in disgust if I weren't boxed in by others who seemed to be equally appalled by the tasteless stupidity on view; but instead I tried to take a nap.
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The Paris Opera 2017
Director Bron has made a cinema verité documentary about the everyday happenings of the Paris Opera. The film resembles the works of Frederick Wiseman: lacking narration or title cards to provide background information, instead relying solely on editing to impart its multi-faceted message. In this case the subject matter included the business and artistic sides of the running of the complex organism of an opera/ballet/choral company during the labor and terrorist troubles of the 2015-16 season. Add in a confusing mish-mash of performances which left me dying to know details about the performers, conductors and choreographers that simply were not forthcoming in the edit. Only one character stood out, a young Russian basso opera singing student named Micha Timoshenko, whose unmistakable talent and outgoing personality outshined the rest of the artists by a mile. The saving grace for the film were some outstanding cinematography and a marvelous sound mix of music and dialogue, along with the inherent beauty of the opera sets and the corps de ballet. Too bad they weren't enough to overcome the overly confusing editorial schema.
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The Man 2017
Simon is a middle-age, world famous Danish artist. As played by Soren Malling, he's a something of a megalomaniac...an obsessive creator of huge expressionist canvases, aided by a slew of young acolyte employees. One day Casper, his 28-year old son who had been abandoned along with the boy's mother many years before, walks into Simon's atelier. It turns out Casper was also a world famous street artist, a Danish version of Banksy, under the name "The Ghost" (was that a pun on Casper the Friendly Ghost?) Anyway, that is the set-up for a fascinating father-son conflict drama, which pits these two exemplars of the artistic temperament against one another. Casper is played by the attractive and charismatic Danish actor Jakob Oftebro; and I hope to see more of this actor in the future (actually he's in another upcoming film in this festival playing "Tom of Finland's" lover Jack in that eponymous film.) But the bottom line is that few films have ever pegged the artistic impulse the way this script and these actors have done.
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The Farthest 2017
In 1972, President Nixon gave NASA the okay for the Voyager project: two unmanned space vehicles that would tour the outer solar system, relaying back hi-res photos. They would also carry a record of our Earth and its inhabitants into outer-space in the hopes of one day contacting alien intelligence. The two Voyagers were successfully launched in 1977; and this fascinating and beautifully made documentary tells the story of what the program achieved (and is still achieving) as the ships hurtle beyond the solar system. The film tells the Voyager story through interviews with the people who ran the program (at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California), and montages of the actual photographs produced in the fly-byes of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. But even more remarkable, it recreates the milieu of the vehicles in space through gorgeously designed special effects sequences. All in all, this Irish production is both thrilling and informative.
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The Winter 2016
Jara, a 30-something itinerant ranchero is hired by the new owners of a remote Patagonian (southern Argentina) sheep ranch to replace the aging foreman, Evans. The film develops as a kind of mixture of modern-day western, deadly rivalry thriller, and cautionary tale of capitalist greed. The mechanics of sheep ranching were fascinatingly portrayed, as was the austere beauty of the setting. However, the characters were so sketchily written that I found it hard to relate to their life style choices. And the slow pacing and enigmatic script somewhat obscured what was actually occurring behind the scenes. Still, the film had enough suspense and originality to hold my interest.
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500 Years 2017
The 500 years refers to the oppression over that length of time of the indigenous Mayans by the white Guatemalans, abetted in the 20th century by American imperialism. This documentary illustrates that systematic oppression with photos and anecdotes, culminating with a kind of "Arab Spring" grass-root revolution in 2015 against the corrupt government. Unfortunately, despite the film makers' best intentions, the resulting documentary is over-long and repetitive.
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The Dinner 2017
A powerful Congressman, his bipolar younger brother and their wives have a, to say the least, contentious dinner at a haute cuisine restaurant. Their conflict centers around a horrendous criminal act by their teenage children. But long simmering family problems also come to the forefront. That is the basis of this well acted, disturbing, and extremely unpleasant experience of a film...which left me both disgusted and dissatisfied with the unresolved ending. Director Oren Moverman has proved in the past to be a superior American indie film maker to watch. But this adaptation from Herman Koch's novel got away from him. Richard Gere, Laura Linney and Rebecca Hall gave their usual competent performances. However, Steve Coogan, with an occasional lapsing American accent, over does it playing the embittered, resentful younger brother (the brothers' unhinged mother loved her elder son more!). This was a performance of such raw, crazed energy that it unbalanced the entire film. The film ultimately raised a moral dilemma that it couldn't satisfactorily answer. Sometimes a film is well made, but virtually impossible to watch. This was one of those films.
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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 2017
The original Guardians had a unique freshness, a resolutely iconoclastic view of the sci-fi genre. The sequel has an order of magnitude better 3D special effects; but the irreverent humor now seems old-hat, victim of the law of diminishing returns. And the plot, whatever there was of it, was just the same-old same old: a lot of baddies ultimately foiled by a rag-tag group of savior heroes. The one new plot development: the tongue-in-cheek hero, Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), turns out to have an immortal, megalomaniac god for a father (Kurt Russell). Um, did this remind anybody of: "Luke, I am your father."? Oh, and the tree being is now Baby Groot, the cutest animated character ever. But what was once fresh (e.g. Star-Lord's obsession with old American pop music) is now tiresomely cliché and even, dare I say it, a little boring.
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The Hero 2017
Sam Elliott is playing close to the bone portraying Lee, a 71-year old washed-up former Western movie star. He's alienated from his family: ex-wife (Elliott's real-life wife Katherine Ross in a welcome return to the screen) and grown daughter (Krysten Ritter.) He is subsisting on commercial voice-over gigs that take advantage of his sonorous voice; and living off the reputation of his one great role playing the eponymous "Hero" forty years earlier. When Lee finds out he has pancreatic cancer, he starts to put his life in order...starting with an affair with a feisty younger woman (Laura Prepon, never better). It's a given that Elliott is perfect for a role tailor made for him. And it's obvious that at age 75, I'm the sort of audience that ought to be intrigued by such a realistic, wistful look at male aging. However, despite some clever dialogue, the script and character development were just a tad too predictable and the outcome too facile for me to commit to loving this film.
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Backpack Full of Cash
This muckraking documentary (narrated by Matt Damon) sets out to condemn the plight of K12 education in the U.S. by illustrating how taxpayer money is being systematically diverted in many places from the public schools, and donated to for-profit corporations running charter schools and on-line private schools. Every student (but mostly those from immigrant and minority families living in the impoverished central cities) is metaphorically portrayed as carrying a given amount of taxpayer cash in their backpacks, cash that is misused when greedy capitalism takes over the educational environment (Trump appointee Betsy DeVoss is potentially the ultimate villain in this ongoing situation.)
The film focuses on a struggling public high school in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania was particularly hard hit by budget shortfalls under a Republican administration.) But it also provides a hopeful anodyne to the decline of the public schools by also focusing on the working town of Union City, New Jersey, which successfully has bucked the trend. The film was enormously effective in making its point...basically that the for-profit schools and the modern trend to teach students only to pass standardized tests...are demonstrably not working for our kids betterment. But by repeating the same message over and over, it left me feeling that the point could have been reached even better with a bit of judicious editing.
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Moka 2016
Emmanuelle Devos is touchingly effective playing Diane, a grieving Swiss mother whose teen-age son had been killed by a hit-and-run woman driver who had been observed by a witness driving a mocha ("moka") colored Mercedes. Her obsessive search for the driver leads her to examine a French couple, especially the wife Marlène (Nathalie Baye, looking 20 years younger than her actual age.) Diane stalks Marlène, who is the owner of a perfumerie in Evian, across Lake Geneva from Diane's home in Lausanne. The film becomes a game of cat-and-mouse between the two women, both of whom are really fine actresses of a certain age. I was intrigued by the film; and, although I figured out the mystery slightly before I should have, just the beautiful Alpine lake scenery was enough to satisfy. And it isn't a spoiler to divulge that the final scene was particularly poignant.
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Goldstone 2016
This austere and slow to develop Australian thriller is the sequel to Ivan Sen's 2013 film Mystery Road. Like that film it is the story of outback corruption in the gold mining Queensland town of Goldstone. As in the previous film, the federal cop Jay Swan (a gruff portrayal by the fine aborigine actor Aaron Pederson), was sent to thwart some nefarious badness (in this case a Chinese woman who had been reported missing.) Also like the previous film the production values were high (gorgeous cinematography, great score by the director himself, fine cast including Jacki Weaver in her wonderful smiling villain persona, and Alex Russell as the attractive, honest local cop.) But to quote from my review of the previous film: "The film had atmosphere and interesting characters; but failed to present a coherent mystery story." This is one case where the sequel was marginally more successful than the original film.
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Two Irenes 2017
Two Brazilian families. Both have 13-year old daughters named Irene. One Irene is introverted and slow to develop; the other is lushly vivacious. The two girls become friends, have adventures with boys, reach puberty at a varied speed. But they share a secret. No additional plot spoilers from me...but there were enough surprises and realistic character development to keep my interest (although I must admit that the lack of propulsive action caused me to doze off at one point and possibly miss a crucial reveal that eventually became clear.)
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Heal the Living 2016
Three stories of the people involved in an every-day medical miracle of a heart transplant intersect in this gorgeously shot, immensely moving film. I'm not going to give any further summary of the plot, since just about anything I write about it would be a spoiler. Let's just say that the film is immaculately cast with a superb ensemble of French actors (among them one of my favorite actors, Tahar Rahim underplaying beautifully as a compassionate transplant coordinator.) Special kudos to the cinematographer, Tom Harari, who surprisingly managed to shoot both some of the best surfing footage AND most realistic surgery footage ever shot. Somehow a film that could have been depressing became a triumph of the spirit that moved me to tears without feeling I was being manipulated. That is the real triumph of the director and writers involved.
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Gholam
Gholam is a thirty-something Iranian man living and working two jobs as a cab driver and mechanic in present day London. His murky past involved some sort of heroic action as a 16-year old fighter in the Iran-Iraq war; but in the present day he is drifting through the drudgery of existence among his fellow Iranian expatriates (and some vividly portrayed Londoners). The film is a bleak examination of Gholam's enigmatic life; but its main saving grace is a fine performance by the great Iranian actor Shahab Hosseini (who seems to be in every film imported from that country) who gives Gholam's character a depth of emotional resonance that wasn't apparent in the script. Still, by the end of the film I was left puzzled and frustrated by the mysteries surrounding Gholam that remained unexplained.
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Hedi 2016
Hedi is a 25 year-old Peugeot car salesman, younger son of an upper middle class Tunisian family, and betrothed to a pretty girl in a family arranged, imminent marriage. However, Hedi is dissatisfied with his life; and dealing with his pre-wedding jitters, he embarks on a torrid affair with an entertainer at the hotel he's staying at in the course of his work. The film is a low key romantic drama, which seems to ignore the political and moral implications of a man-woman affair in Muslim Tunisia. As much as I liked the character of Hedi (stolidly played by Majd Mastoura), I never quite understood the psychology of his character's actions. But the milieu of the film (the Tunisian seaside) and the fine acting by the entire ensemble were engrossing enough to keep me interested.
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Nowhere to Hide 2016
Nori is an Iraqi family man and emergency room nurse living in north-central Iraq. This documentary follows him, his wife and his family (2 adorable tweener daughters and 2 cute younger sons) as they attempt to survive the internecine warfare that broke out after the Americans deserted their destabilized country in 2011. His home and the hospital he worked at were right at the epicenter of the running battles between Shia, Sunni, Kurds and ISIS factions. Nori shot much of the videos himself; and they are for the most part heartbreakingly realistic. The chronologically edited documentary covers about five years of the plight of the family as they became war refugees in their own country. Their suffering is unbearable to watch; but somehow they remained positive and intact as a family. However, most of the destruction of life and property occur off camera...which is probably why (SPOILER) the family survived, at least until 2016 and the conclusion of the film.
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Lemon 2017
I'm going to be honest here: I disliked this film, didn't get it, and felt that overall it was a terrible waste of a wonderfully talented cast. As near as I could tell, it was meant to be the comic story of Isaac, a middle age loser (Brett Gelman) who ran an L.A. acting school and whose blind wife (Judy Greer) was leaving him. In the course of this exercise in mumblecore nonsense, Isaac encounters several people; who live their lives as dysfunctional human lemons...all played by a panoply of familiar Hollywood character actors (Michael Cera, Rhea Perlman, Martin Starr, David Paymer, Megan Mullally, Jeff Garlin, etc. etc. etc.) The vaguely surrealistic plot was occasionally amusing; but for me it just added up to a confusing mish-mash.
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Chavela 2017
Chavela Vargas was a Mexican torch singer born in 1919, who achieved relative fame in Spain and Latin America for her passionate songs of love and loneliness. She was also an unabashed lesbian from early childhood. This documentary tells her story, much of it from interviews with Chavela herself shot during her long life, along with anecdotes told by her lovers and admirers to the film makers. Additionally the film presents films and videos of her public performances over the years; and they are remarkable at illustrating her talent, which I suspect will come as a revelation to the Anglophone world. Her music was not my personal cuppa; but her life story was fascinating and needed to be told.
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Food Evolution 2016
This documentary effectively studies the controversy surrounding GMOs (Genetic Modified Organisms) as it pertains to aiding the farming of basic foods by controlling weeds and pests genetically with seed manipulation rather than by the use of poisonous pesticides. Basically, the film gives equal time to both sides of the issue; however, the film leaves little doubt that the anti-GMO people are as anti-science (and against the application of the scientific method to real world problems) as the Vax and Climate deniers. Watching this film, I was convinced by the scientists and the evidence presented by the film makers that GMOs in themselves are not harmful, and actually improve the ability of crops to withstand weeds and pestilence and help feed the 9 billion humans (mostly in the 3rd world) that may inhabit the earth by 2050. However, adversarial films like this often only confirm the audience's confirmation bias...the tendency to only hear the side of the argument that one agrees with. I'm the choir the film is preaching to. Your mileage may vary.
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Hello Destroyer 2016
In this bleak drama, Tyson Burr is a rookie semi-pro hockey player in the Canadian Maritimes. During one game, goaded to activity by the coach while the team was losing, Tyson somehow (the action is unclear, typical of this confusingly shot and edited film) disables an opposing player...and is subsequently hung out to dry by the unsympathetic team ownership. The young, taciturn athlete enters a downward spiral as he returns home to unsympathetic parents and a dispiriting life working in a meatpacking plant. Even though actor Jared Abrahamson imbues Tyson with a convincing and sympathetic naivete; his passive acceptance of his fate is hard to understand. As a film, this is just too depressing, even as it probably is very realistic.
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Pyromaniac 2016
In this Norwegian psychological thriller, Dag is the 19-year old son of the chief of a one-truck rural fire department. The town has experienced a spate of arson fires...and it is soon disclosed that the boy has a compulsion to set fires and then help his elderly father and other volunteers to put them out. I was never quite convinced of the validity of the film's psychology. However, the actor Trond Nilssen played Dag as a clever psychopath, with dead eyes and canny cleverness. His mother suspects the truth; and her conflicted horror provided the emotional catharsis of the story. Not a pleasant film to watch; but there was just enough suspense to keep me interested.
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Afterimage 2016
In post-WWII Poland, the abstract artist and popular professor Wladyslaw Strzeminski came into conflict with the repressive Communist regime that emphasized social realism as the only valid art form. That is the basis for the great Polish auteur film maker Andrzej Wajda's last film (he died in 2016), continuing his career-long indictment of Stalinism. Strzeminski was a double amputee, having lost an arm and a leg in World War One; and the fine actor Boguslaw Linda, aided by amazing special effects, convincingly hobbled through the role (honestly, I had to Google him to make sure he really wasn't an actual amputee.) The film was beautifully shot and a convincing, if ultimately tragic biopic about an artist destroyed by political expediency.
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Showgirls 1995
I don't know now why it took me 22 years to watch this amazing Verhoeven film. The reaction at the time was so negative, the atmosphere poisoned by controversies that I avoided it like a plague. What was I thinking? The actual film is gorgeous...arguably more contemporary in look and attitude in 2017 than it was in 1995. Certainly the nudity and female empowerment were ahead of its time. If ever a film needs to be rescued from its bad reputation, this is the one.
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A Quiet Passion 2016
I'll be honest: Terence Davies is a film maker that I respect without much love; but this film tried my patience. It tells the disturbing story of the life of 19th century, Massachusetts-reared poet Emily Dickinson, from her spurning of religious tyranny and male privilege at Mt. Holyoke College, through her spinsterhood, reclusiveness, and final sickness. It is slow paced (I valiantly tried to stay awake); and all the characters (mostly Emily's family and acquaintances) are unlikable. More than that, Dickinson's poetry, and in fact poetry in general, has little appeal to me...I guess I have a prosaic soul.
What does make the film worth watching are the fine acting, the immaculate production design, the intelligent repartee, the period costumes and the cinematography. Cynthia Nixon is amazing as Emily, alternating stern New England rectitude with convincing scenes of her fatal illness. Davies has an ear for smart dialog and an eye for original visuals. For instance, two sets of actors play the Dickinson family characters at removed stages of their lives; and the transition is handled by slow move-ins while subtly morphing one actor to the other. It is a spectacular special effect, all the better for its unexpected perfection. Another Davies trademark is making slow, revealing 360 degree pans around the beautifully appointed, upper-class drawing rooms. Somehow more character is revealed by studying the family things than by their incidental dialog or actions.
This film is the perfect example of an artistic succès d'estime. I only wish I had a smidgen of interest in the actual Dickinson and her poetry. But clearly, Davies is smitten.
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Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer 2016
Have you ever hated a film while it was playing and loved it in retrospect? I'm not saying I'm there yet. Richard Gere, in his most "mature" role, is a wonder of naivety and guile playing Norman, a well-meaning, but delusional New York-Jewish mover-and-shaker (at least in his own head) business consultant. The plot is comprised of Norman's increasingly complicated maneuvers and outright lies about a supposed friendship with the Israeli Prime Minister (Lior Ashkenazi) which just dig him deeper into a geopolitical rat-hole reminiscent of the zaniness of Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog. Norman reminded my of my own father...not a good sign! However, the superb, American born and Israeli raised director Joseph Cedar has gathered a fine cast and basically invented an unique visual style to unravel the complex story. I still squirmed in my seat watching the plot unfold, feeling a mixture of trepidation and disgust...but ultimately, grudging respect for Cedar's having pulled it all together.
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Gifted 2017
A conflicted man attempts to raise his math genius 1st grade niece after his sister's suicide when she was a baby. Chris Evans proves once again that he's infinitely more interesting as an actor than his massive pecs as Captain America would indicate. And young Mckenna Grace is less annoying than most precociously bright actors. I loved this film, even though it was old fashioned and predictable. I credit director Marc Webb who seemingly makes moves (i.e. (500) Days of Summer) just designed to arouse my empathy, even as I recoil from their saccharine sweetness. Oh, yes. In Q&A I found out that Fred the one-eyed cat was played by Bob...a two-eyed cat whose right eye was CGIed shut in every shot, since they couldn't actually find a suitable one-eyed cat after a massive catsing (sic) call. Such expensive devotion to script is admirable.
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Frantz 2016
A former French soldier travels to Germany in 1919 to grieve for his now dead friend, Frantz, from past acquaintance in Paris. He meets and involves himself with his friend's family and his former fiancée; and experiences the post-war enmity of the German townspeople for the French. It's all gorgeously shot (mostly in B&W with occasional scenes in color). And for me, it was totally emotionally affecting, even if the entire film presented one misdirection after another...all very cleverly done. Pierre Niney, who portrays the French soldier, is an actor of rare sensitivity (much better here than in the title role of the "other" Yves St. Laurent film that didn't star Gaspard Ulliel.) His characterization is a wonder of rectitude and propriety, even as it smolders under the surface with longing and sorrow. Frantz's former fiancée was played by the superb Paula Beer, who gave a subtle performance, mostly with her tear brimmed eyes, that broke my heart. Ozon's direction is perfection...every scene beautifully composed and played. I couldn't help but compare this film favorably with another B&W masterpiece set in the same milieu: Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. Ozon's sensibility is as warm as Haneke's is cold. But both re-create the post-WWI era brilliantly.
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Wilson 2017
Apparently this film, about a middle age curmudgeon named Wilson, was adapted from a well-known graphic novel. I never read the source material (I'm not into graphic novels, big surprise there!); and based on this unpleasant film I'm not going to read it. However, give credit to Woody Harrelson, who delivered another great performance (he's on a roll lately.) And Laura Dern does her best work in years, here playing Wilson's neurotic ex-wife. The production is fine, although some character motivations were dubious. I just hated these characters and their unremittingly downer stories. My bad.
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Their Finest 2016
While we're eagerly awaiting Nolan's spectacularly realistic war film, Dunkirk, this little English gem arrived on our shores. It's a modest, old-fashioned film about the making of an even more modest and old-fashioned, fictitious English movie in 1940. That film-within-a-film was a simple, f/x free, romantic propaganda war effort about the Dunkirk evacuation that was made to buck up the home audiences, and incidentally try to convince the Americans to join the war by featuring an American hero. The clever script realistically re-creates the world of the London blitz and the film-making scene in 1940's England; and also features a tragic romance and enough comic relief to satisfy present day audiences. It's all done Masterpiece Theater style (albeit with big screen visuals and a sterling cast). Also, the film sneakily introduces a modern feminist element that may not be as anachronistic as one would suppose. Bottom line: I enjoyed the film immensely.
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The Discovery 2017
A respected scientist (Robert Redford, looking his age, but still a magnetic movie star) has announced that he has irrefutable proof that the afterlife, or at least an unknown astral plane, exists and that the dead actually go to this place. This causes a rash of global suicides by people seeking to find something better than this world; and forces the old man and his two sons (a morose, miscast Jason Segel; and the wonderfully idiosyncratic Jesse Plemons) to withdraw into a cult-like research institute on some remote New England island. Segel plays the skeptical son, who becomes involved with a sucidal girl (Rooney Mara) he meets on the ferry boat he's using to return to his father's compound. All this exposition takes place in the first 10 minutes of the film, so these aren't really spoilers...just the set-up for an eerie exploration of the possibilities of a real, palpable afterlife.
Pardon me; but even though at age 75 I most likely have one foot in the grave, I am extremely skeptical about the "afterlife" and have little interest in the subject. Even though the cast is attractive, and the director (Mary Steenburgen's son Charlie McDowell) was smart and personable in Q&A after the film, the only appealing thing about this film was the atmosphere of mystery and possible dread which never paid off. Like the director's previous effort, The One I Love, there simply wasn't enough there there to appeal to me.
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T2 Trainspotting 2017
The original Trainspotting had incomprehensible dialogue and a drug addled story that made little sense, but was nevertheless good fun to watch. The sequel, with all the characters 20 years older and still affected by the events of the first film (dimly recalled by this viewer), also had incomprehensible dialogue (with occasional sub-titles cleverly displayed) and a story that also made little sense. However, in 2017 it is not quite as much fun to watch. Danny Boyle's chaotic direction just isn't as revolutionary or effective in this film as it was when it really was revolutionary 20 years ago. Ewan McGregor sure has aged well, though.
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The Zookeeper’s Wife 2017
A true-life Holocaust story with its heart in the right place (and another fine performance from Jessica Chastain). However, other than cute animals and an avoidance of some of the worst horrors of the war in Poland, there was nothing to distinguish this film from the hundreds of other films about this era. Unusually for me with this genre, I just couldn't make myself become emotionally involved...the script seemed so predictable that I just started to get bored, hoping for the worst for a jolt of passion. It never came.
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Life 2017
Even more than Cuaron's Gravity, this film totally gets the realistic wonder of orbital space-station life perfectly. Even more than in the Alien[s], films, we're presented with an implacably terrifying, convincing alien life form. But this derivative, terror-by-numbers, narratively flawed movie just rehashes those sci-fi tropes without progressing beyond them. It's a waste of good actors and an unexpectedly ironic climax.
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Song to Song 2017
In the first minute of this film I recognized that nobody else in cinema could have made this film in this style other than Terrence Malick. And I also realized that I hate this kind of inner-dialogue musing, fractured-narrative noodling film making. Despite an amazing cast that personified their roles rather than "acted" them. Despite Emmanuel Lubezki's superlative cinematography (nobody shoots so rapturously into the sun like Lubezki!). Despite Austin's energetic music scene and Patti Smith and Iggy Pop and a hundred fabulous houses and apartments and a mysteriously motiveless suicide and a million other things, I still wanted to wring Malick's neck for wasting my time on such empty beauty. I envy the people who worship at the altar of Malick's recent work such as this and Knight of Cups. They are the chosen ones. My very cloddish being rebels against such faux-art-for-art's-sake pretension.
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Get Out 2017
Up to a point, this was a successful horror film despite its overplaying of the race card. But after the final reveal and the absurdly gruesome climax, the film turned out to be fake and deceptive, offensively so. I'm giving it an extra half-star because the production was so polished and the lead actor, Daniel Kaluuya, was so effective in the role of "guess who's coming to dinner." Oh, well, no wonder I usually avoid horror films.
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After the Storm 2016
Twenty-four hours in the lives of three generations of an ordinary, if somewhat fractured, lower middle-class Japanese family. Director Hirokazu Kore-eda has no peer in world cinema in creating humanistic narratives about realistic people living normal, everyday lives. His stories are so simple and artless on the surface; but they inevitably say more about the universal human condition than seems possible. There isn't a moment in this film that feels forced or unnecessary, despite its slow pace and lack of cinematic artifice. In that way his films remind me of that other master of the ordinary, the late, lamented Edward Yang (Yi Yi). I left the theater amazed by how such an unsparing look at flawed characters could somehow be so uplifting.
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The Memory of Justice 1976
Note: I only watched on the big screen the first half of this almost 5 hour documentary. I plan to watch part two on HBO when it premiers on April 24.
This is a meticulously made restoration of Marcel Ophül's important 1976 documentary about the Nuremberg war criminals tribunals that took place in 1946. The scope of the film was broadened to examine the entire question of war crimes (alluding to possible war crimes by the prosecuting WW II "victors" in what was at the time the freshly recalled Viet Nam war.) Additionally, there were many fascinating, contemporary interviews with the surviving perpetrators and victims from the WWII era who were still alive in 1976. The restoration is pristine, both B&W and color sequences. Also, the foreign language portions are subtitled in this new version, discarding the original overdubbing of dialogue by actors. This adds immensely to the authenticity of the documentary.
Still, even watching only the first half is something of a slog. One can appreciate the attempt at including much of the proceedings from the point of view of the various prosecuting countries (U.S., Britain, France and Russia.) However, some of it is repetitive and might have been served by judicious editing. I may revise my rating after watching the second half of the film next month. Most likely upward.
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Personal Shopper 2016
Humanistic French auteur Olivier Assayas may have found his Anglophone muse in Kristen Stewart. Here, just as in Assayas's previous film Clouds of Sils Maria, Stewart plays Maureen, the ideal assistant: smart, competent, ingenious. Only in this film she is firmly center-stage as she traverses the couture centers of Paris and London picking out clothes for her spoiled, rich celebrity employer. But Maureen has a another, weirder aspect. She's a medium, who can tune into ghosts; and she is trying to get in contact with the shade of her twin brother Lewis, who died of a congenital heart problem that Maureen shares. Thus the film has dual aspects: character driven thriller (there's a murder in the plot) and horror-tinged ghost story. The two genres side-by-side are an uncomfortable mix.
Frankly, I'm not a fan of either horror films or psychic spirituality in real life. And Assayas's screenplay raises more questions than it answers in the film's payoff. (Actually, my favorite character was never even seen in the film, Maureen's dead brother. I almost wish the film had been about him! How about a prequel starring Robert Pattinson as Lewis?) But for all my resistance to the horror genre, I was entranced by the film...a credit to Stewart and Assayas, who create a mood of intrigue that kept me interested and in suspense the whole experience.
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Beauty and the Beast 2017
The fully animated version of 1991 was arguably the best animated film of all time, getting story, character, music and visual technique totally right. This combination of live actors and 3D animated characters lost most of that. An example: the show-stopper musical number "Be My Guest" was delightfully rendered in animation...dazzlingly visual, yet restrained by its very artifice. In this film, the requirements of realism forced the designers to go berserk with details to the point it lost all its charm. It's hard to blame the actors, especially Dan Stevens wearing his "beast" CGI aided make-up. Somehow the soulfulness of his transformation from embittered tyrant to gentle lover got transmitted through the eyes. And Emma Watson proved to be a convincing and feisty Disney "princess," a good step towards progressing past Hermione Granger as a grown-up actor. But mostly the transition to real-life characters proved to be less effective than the animated counterparts. And the musical numbers, especially the new ones, suffered from the tendency to go big to the point of suffocating the intent of the story. Still, in the final analysis, the basic fairy tale love story had the power to move me again, even with this cloddish, overblown adaptation.
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The Last Word 2017
Shirley MacClaine, making no pretense at glamour, plays Harriet, a retired, perfectionist businesswoman (advertising, at that.) She's such a control freak, that she is determined to control her own obituary, which brings her into contact with Anne (Amanda Seyfried), the obit writer at her local newspaper. This is supposed to be Los Angeles; but it is a fake version of L.A., more like a small Midwest town (apparently the script originally was set in Ohio, and its naivety shows.) Anyway, Anne can't seem to find anybody with even a remotely good thing to say about Harriet, which is probably true to life. But during the course of the film Harriet somehow becomes humanized and likable...a nice wish fulfillment fantasy for all the curmudgeons of the world. So unrealistic, so faux optimistic about human nature. But somehow, MacLaine makes it work. She's a movie star, after all, and a fine elderly actress with the crimped facial expressions and age lines to match.
I didn't like this film, didn't believe it, didn't buy into the characters. However I was impressed by the director Mark Pellington in the Q&A after the film. He's a wonderful raconteur, and his description of working with La MacLaine was vastly more entertaining than his film. So, in retrospect, I have to be impressed that he made an indie film for under $5 mil in 25 days shooting. And it really is a showcase for some acting talent, including a sassy, young child actor named AnnJewel Lee Dixon, and a journeyman supporting actor named Thomas Sadoski, who really should be playing more romantic roles. If only the script weren't so by-the-numbers predictable.
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Logan 2017
Yes, mutants grow old and even are mortal. The mayhem and violent killings in this film justify the R rating, and were a little too graphic and overdone for my tender sensibilites. Also the U.S. as fascist state with over-run borders is maybe more on the nose than the film makers originally intended. This isn't the first time I left the theater remarking that Boyd Holbrook (the main villain here) is the sexiest man in movies that isn't yet a big star. And young Dafne Keen is a real find, an intense and physically capable action heroine. Also, the versatile Stephen Merchant in two movies in the same day (this and Table 19) can't be all bad. Bottom line: as X-universe films go, this one is better than most...at least more grown up than any of the previous one that I have caught.
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Table 19 2017
Just another stupid wedding party comedy. This one is all about table 19 where the misfits and forgottens were placed. None of the couples connected to the table had even the remotest of chemistry...although as individual actors, at least Anna Kendrick, June Squibb, Lisa Kudrow and Tony Revolori put forth some effort. Can't say that was true for the screen writer who rehashed every previous wedding comedy ever. This would have been a total waste of time except for the very last image of the film, which almost paid off for all the previous silliness, and caused me to raise my rating a half-star.
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A United Kingdom 2016
The film is both an inter-racial love story and a true-life historical drama about the formation of the nation of Botswana from its colonial past. In the late 1940s, that country was a tribal British protectorate, relatively small and powerless compared to its neighbor, Apartheid dominated Union of South Africa. After the death of the previous king, the tribe was run as a regency while the boy king was schooled in Britain until he reached his majority. But when the boy (now a man and played by the excellent David Oyelowo) falls in love with and marries a white English girl (Rosamond Pike in a restrained performance), it precipitates a power struggle with his uncle, the regent, and an example of "force majeure" when Britain bowed to pressure from South Africa and exiled the young king.
As a love story, the film is moving and convincing, if a tad predictable. As a historical drama, it is less successful at explaining tribal politics (although Oyelowo is given the opportunity to deliver some strong orations.) I knew next to nothing about Botswana, even though my niece spent her college year abroad there doing social work. I knew it has become a bastion of democracy in the region. And now I know a lot more why that is true.
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Zeta 2016
Alex is a young Roman man working in his father's fish market. He aspires to be a famous rap singer, and sacrifices his best friend and collaborator Marco to achieve that goal as he assumes the stage name Zeta and climbs the fame ladder. Who knew rap was a big deal in Italy? (I suspect it isn't...but this film is one long rap music video with Italian lyrics in subtitles.) Anyway, Alex/Zeta is played by Diego Germini, who has charisma as an actor...but maybe lacks the chops to sell his rap bona fides as he takes part in the culminating sing-off contest. The film has a cliché triangle love story sub-plot, where Alex guiltily and mutually falls for Marco's girlfriend Gaia (unconvincingly played by Irene Vetere, too plain Jane for the role.) And the Roman music scene is portrayed as drug fueled and corrupt (in some way the film reminds me of the world of the American ethnic serialized music biz TV show "Empire.") I'll admit that watching this film was something of a guilty pleasure, since I actually got into the music and Germini had an attractive vibe as Zeta.
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Tommaso 2016
Kim Rossi Stuart is a fine Italian actor whose career I've made a point to follow. Here he directs himself, playing Tommaso, a journeyman actor virtually immobilized by neuroses and mother issues to the point that all his relationships are ruined. Even his saucy, sexy girlfriend (a star-making turn by Cristiana Capotondi) can't ultimately satisfy him. The role of Tommaso is played so close to the bone that Stuart runs the risk of being mistaken himself for his unsympathetic, perfectionist character. It's fun to watch such an unalloyed, out-of-control ego portrayed to the point of comic discomfort. However, maybe a stronger director would have reined in Stuart's tendency to over-act here.
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Sacro GRA 2013
Director Gianfranco Rosi may win an Oscar tonight for his (imho) underwhelming documentary Fire at Sea. But I was curious to watch his previous effort which was the only documentary ever to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. "GRA" stands for the Great Ring Road (Grande Raccordo Anulare in Italian) that encircles Rome. And the film purports to tell the stories of a varied group of people who travel or inhabit the environs of that well-traveled highway, shot in cinema verité style, with no narration and no particular editing scheme that I could discern. Among them is a paramedic whose ambulance deals with accident victims on the road, a wealthy adjacent property owner who rents out his palatial villa for movies and photonovels, a botanist studying the palm trees on his property being devoured by weevils, and various inhabitants of a high-rise apartment house whose lives are illustrated through their open windows. These people stories are interspersed with artistic shots of moving traffic on the road (mostly out of focus night effects that are pretty, but interminable.) The effect is one of random, illuminating vignettes that are often interesting and beautifully shot, but also somewhat tedious in long sections of scenes of ordinary Romans living prosaic lives. It's not a documentary style that as an editor I admire; but the film's outstanding cinematography does merit a level of artistic success.
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No Country for Young Men 2017
Italy offers few paths to upward mobility for young people, and 100,000 of the elite emigrate to other countries every year to find employment and a fulfilling future. That is the basis of this high gloss drama that tells the story of two young Roman men who emigrate to Cuba to start a Wi-fi based beach resort. The film benefits from fine performances from its leads, handsome Sandro (Filippo Scicchitano) and scrappy Luciano (Giovanni Anzaldo). It also represents one of the best depictions of present day Cuba we've seen: gorgeous cinematography and no political axe to grind. I watched the world premiere at the L.A.-Italia film festival, where it was well received. The film is not without flaws...it's slightly over-long, and character motivations are occasionally suspect (especially Luciano's masochistic descent into illegal, often fatal street boxing.) But all in all this is an entertaining drama with current day relevance.
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L’ora legale 2017
This Italian comedy tells the story of a Sicilian town that throws out its corrupt mayor and elects an honest man dedicated to enforcing laws and ending crony favoritism. Except that when the town, and even the new mayor's family, experience the actuality of honest government, all hell breaks loose. In my experience, foreign comedies, especially politically based ones, do not translate well. However, this one does. Even when it stoops to over-the-top satire, the laughs are genuinely earned. However, the film probably went too far in making every character so ridiculously corruptible.
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13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi 2016
The battle of Benghazi on September 11-12, 2012 became a political football in the 2016 election. However, this film is a depiction of the real event, a sort of gung-ho recreation of an Alamo like siege, as fought by CIA security soldiers against an unknown enemy, with a less tragic outcome. As directed by action oriented Michael Bay, it is a surprisingly non-political, pure war film with high production values. Credit to the actors (particularly John Krasinski and James Badge Dale, as conflicted, battle tested heroes.) But also credit to the director, who captured flawlessly the realistic ebb and flow of the 13 hour battle.
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My Life as a Zucchini 2016
This Swiss animation is the story of Courgette (his nickname, translated as Zucchini), a nine year old kid orphaned when he accidentally killed his drunkard mother. A sympathetic cop takes him to live in an orphanage (or maybe a reformatory) among kids his age, where he eventually makes friends and has some heartwarming adventures. The film is shot with stylized stop-motion puppets; and the background art is rudimentary and child-like. Still, the characters manage to come to life, mostly through exaggerated, expressive eyes. The film was adapted from a children's book; and its slight, ultimately positive story was touching. However, the same film could have been made with real child actors...there was nothing special here about doing it with animation. But watch for the post-end credits scene which was a meta commentary on exactly this reaction.
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Star Trek Beyond 2016
I watched this film a second time just to check out what made the "make-up and hairstyling" deserve an Oscar nomination. I didn't like the film much the first time...and this time every last flaw stood out: especially the poor special effects which defied physics, the cheesy models and sets which looked even worse in murky 3D; the script and characters that didn't add up; and the frenetic pacing and confused direction. But the character makeup was pretty OK. Way to go, Academy!
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The Edge of Seventeen 2016
Much better than average teenage coming of age story...mainly due to Hailee Steinfeld's authentic depiction of adolescent despair. But a sensitive script helped. And a fine supporting cast were also instrumental (especially the grounded guys in her life, portrayed by Woody Harrelson, Blake Jenner and Hayden Szeto). Even Kyra Sedgwick, who usually annoys me to the point of avoiding her films, was pretty good as Hailee's troubled mother. Writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig gives her first directorial effort a fresh point of view.
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Arrival 2016
Second time viewing, the film came together for me. The plot involves a sleight of hand regarding the time line, which is a signature of director Villeneuve's oeuvre. But for me the film worked better knowing what actually was happening. Anyway, what interested me most this time around was the idea of communicating with aliens through their visually arresting calligraphy. The script was much smarter than usual for this sort of visit-by-aliens fare. And Amy Adams as the central linguistics professor character was perfectly cast. One of these days Villeneuve is going to make a truly great film.
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The Jungle Book 2016
Kipling without subtlety. But the visual effects are dazzling, creating a perfectly realized three-dimensional jungle in "Downtown Los Angeles" (according to the end credits). Also, give credit to young Neel Sethi, the boy actor playing Mowgli, the foundling raised by wolves after a tiger killed his father. He's energetic and athletic enough to be convincing as he swings from vines and clambers over realistic tree limbs. The vocal talent voicing the various animal animations (for example Bill Murray as the wise-cracking bear side-kick, Ben Kingsley as a heroic panther, Scarlett Johansson as a seductive snake, Christopher Walker as a comically rapacious great ape, and Idris Elba as the evil, villainous tiger) are quite convincingly anthropomorphic as directed by fellow actor Jon Favreau. This is one of the finest examples yet produced of studio created green screen compositing. The story was just too emotionally manipulative and simplistic for me as audience. But give credit where credit is due: to the technical wizards who made it all seem convincingly real.
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Trolls 2016
This Dreamworks animated film is a riotously colorful musical fable. A dour race of giant Bergens traditionally consume their pixie like troll slaves to absorb the trolls' "happiness." What ensues is a pop and disco music inflected, cartoon Sparticus, where the slaves revolt and somehow overcome. Well, sort of. The film is pitched to children; but has enough subtle subversive humor to appeal to adults. I loved the familiar song score, with tunes from such 20th century artists as Paul Simon, Lionel Richie and Donna Summer adapted to further the story. It all comes together through the creative input of Justin Timberlake, who also voiced the lead Troll, along with Anna Kendrick. But what set this film apart for me was the nature of the 3D animation, which was as excessively colorful as an imaginative LSD trip. I wanted to dislike this film...but I just couldn't.
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La La Land 2016
Second big screen viewing...and just about every objection I had on first viewing didn't matter any more. Maybe because the music was more familiar months later. Maybe because I was in a more accepting mood of Gosling's character's flaws. Maybe because Stone really sold me on the inner life behind those soulful eyes, and moved me to tears during the "Audition" song and the climactic "what-if" montage. Maybe just because I'm emotionally fragile - and Chazelle's vision of L. A. and reliving vicariously my own personal Hollywood fantasy broke my heart and put it back together again. Yes, it still isn't a perfect romantic musical film. Chazelle isn't Jacques Demi, Justin Herwitz is no Michel Legrand, and Gosling is no Fred Astaire (but I love him anyway). Despite all that, this is an authentic twenty-first century dream factory experience; and I intend to re-watch it on the big screen every future re-release for the rest of my life.
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Moana 2016
A Polynesian princess teams up with a demi-god to save the world. After one minute of gorgeous animation from the Disney folks, I knew the predictable outcome and was bored for the rest of the film. Even the music, which had such promising provenance, was totally unmemorable. Oh, let's face it, I'm just NOT the right audience for this film! (however, my 7-year old great niece enthused: "the best film of my entire life.")
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Timecode 2016
This short comic film tells the story of two underground parking lot security attendants, who spend their work days and nights sitting at a computer screen watching the multiple security cameras. Except, the cameras eventually disclose that the pair are spending much of their lonely working hours at another, quite entertaining activity. It's a slight premise; but well executed.
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Sing 2016
This Hungarian short film tells the story of an elementary school choir from the point of view of two young girls of varied singing skills. The driven teacher is more concerned with her choir's winning interscholastic contests than the welfare of her students. The film is involving, and tells its simple story with economy. Plus the music is beautiful. But despite a fine production, the film seemed comparatively slight, a one joke moral fable.
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Silent Nights 2016
A young Danish girl who devotes herself to aiding immigrants in a Salvation Army shelter, becomes involved with a Ghanaian immigrant struggling to survive and support his wife and three children he'd left in Ghana. For me, the personal story of these two characters seemed forced and more symbolic of the politics of immigration and interracial relations than a realistic and moving people story.
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The Railroad Lady 2016
Jane Birkin is luminous as ever (she's 70! and I honestly didn't recognize her until I was shaken up by her name in the end credits) in this Franco-Swiss short film dramedy. Birkin plays a lonely, elderly shopkeeper whose house is directly opposite the tracks of the Swiss high speed (TGV) trains. Twice a day the train passes by, and Birkin's character happily waves the Swiss flag out her window. Then one day she finds an admiring message thrown from the train which changes her life. It's a life affirming, pleasant enough (if slight) story; and it's just nice to watch the great Birkin in action again.
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Enemies Within 2016
In this dramatic short film, a middle age Frenchman of Algerian birth is being interviewed by a much younger, fully assimilated Arab government functionary. The older man is seeking official French citizenship after years of a productive life in France. His interrogator is more interested in extremely vetting the older man...trying to get him to name names of possibly subversive acquaintances. In France, this is undoubtedly political dynamite; but it also has enormous (and erstwhile unexpected) resonance with the current American political situation. It's basically just a two person dialogue...but powerful stuff well acted and directed.
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Pearl 2016
This animated short tell the time binding story of a girl growing up through a series of music infused road trips with her semi-hippie dad and family. The 2D animation is simplistic, the film very fast paced (maybe too much so), and the effect for me was more frenetic than poignant, as the film makers obviously meant it to be.
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Pear Cider and Cigarettes 2016
This animated Canadian short tells the tragic story of accident prone Techno, real-life friend of the film makers. It is done film noir style, with hard boiled Chandleresque narration, and a semi-realistic and stylish 2D animation technique. The film feels authentic to its milieu, with a documentary like realism; but after a while the downer story starts to overstay its welcome.
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Borrowed Time 2015
An animated short featuring an old-West sheriff and his unfortunate confrontation with bad hombres and a dangerous cliff. The stylish 2D animation was particularly artful with its characterizations; and I was moved by the poignancy of the film's central motif of a symbolic pocket watch.
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Blind Vaysha 2016
Animated short from Canada about a girl who can see only the past in one eye and the future in the other, effectively blinding her to the present. The layered 2D animation, presented on screen in 3D, was rudimentary, but effective...especially when the screen was split to show Vaysha's complex and confusing point of view visuals. A film of rare philosophical depth and originality.
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Manchester by the Sea 2016
Second big screen viewing; and the film was just as impressive and affecting as the first time. Great script, wonderful cast, impeccable direction. The story may be a downer; but it is the most realistic, touching, and heart rending family drama of the past few years, IMHO. Maybe I should rewatch Lonergan's Margaret, a film which failed for me first time around. This film is the work of a true auteur, in control of every aspect of his film making talents.
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Hail, Caesar! 2016
On 2nd viewing on the big screen (indispensable for this film), the musical production numbers were even better than recalled. But the rest of the film was just as meh.
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iBoy 2017
In the gang infested London projects a teenage student has iPhone parts embedded in his head after being shot fleeing from the scene of his platonic girlfriend's gang rape. It turns him into a sort of mental Spider-man, determined to bring the tormentors to justice. The phone emission special effects are OK; and the two lead actors, Bill Milner and Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams, are not bad. However, this is one Netflix original flick that isn't very original and proves that not every indie super-boy flick is worth watching.
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The Red Turtle 2016
After an unseen shipwreck and a terrifying storm-tossed ocean ordeal, a man is washed up on a small, isolated atoll. Miraculously, a giant red turtle washes up and transforms into a beautiful woman; and like Adam and Eve the two propagate and thrive. This symbolic legend is told in simple 2D animation, with no dialogue other than grunts and screams, and a superb sound track of natural sounds and an unmemorable music score. The film is a co-production of Studio Ghibli and various European animation houses. The animation is occasionally beautiful (especially effective with animating water effects); and the human characters are well drawn, if in a minimalist style, to transmit their emotional states. Comic relief is consigned to little crab creatures scurrying about. However, the film's story is too slight to sustain feature length of 80 minutes. And I couldn't get to the point of suspension of disbelief to accept the central supernatural premise.
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The Nice Guys 2016
Two detectives who can't shoot straight stumble into a series of increasingly zany killings in this fast paced, but nonsensical, comic chase film. It was all very 1970s L.A. noir, only garish and outlandish...sort of L. A. Confidential as bad farce. However, Ryan Gosling proved to be particularly adept at slapstick; and he had a weird chemistry with Russell Crowe who seemed to be stuck in a more serious genre film.
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Point Break 2015
I liked the original. The remake was virtually unwatchable, so I quit watching half-way through.
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Moonlight 2016
Second time watching the film, I was impressed by the subtly truthful black experience film that actually was...instead of the disappointing "gay" film that I had expected to see from the advance word. Fine acting, a nuanced script and innovative camera work added up to a film that deserves its surprising Oscar nomination showing.
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The Oath 2016
A successful Icelandic heart surgeon violates his Hippocratic oath by exacting harm against a suave drug dealer that he perceives is degrading his daughter. That is the set up for this revenge thriller, directed and acted by Baltazar Kormákur in the father role. If this plot seems familiar, we have seen similar stories featuring such actors as Liam Neeson and Charles Bronson. However Kormákur's doctor is somewhat more subtle in his attempt to perform the perfect crime than those archetypes. The film is fast paced and slick enough to enable the viewer to put aside moral reservations (after all the daughter is old enough to make her own choices and mistakes) and some plot holes.
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Brimstone 2016
A religious fanatic reverend in the American old west beats his timid wife and abuses his 13-year old pubescent daughter. But that's just the third of four parts of this film, which is structured in reverse order so that the consequences of characters' actions come before the actions themselves. This works better than one would suppose...mainly because the characters are such archetypes and the film doesn't soft pedal the violence and gore which is taken to extremes rarely depicted in films.
Guy Pearce plays the reverend with steely malevolence. His character is almost superhuman, metaphorically Satanic; and he's superb, as usual for this fine actor. Dakota Fanning is equally strong, playing at the start of the film Elizabeth, a mute rancher's wife and mother...although later chapters take her back in time when she was called Joanna, the reverend's abused daughter, and played convincingly by Emelia Jones. And rounding out the cast are two actors from Game of Thrones, Kit Harrington as a good-hearted outlaw and Carice van Houten, familiar as the Red Witch Melisandre, who plays the reverend's long suffering wife.
I'm not even going to try to explain the complex plot which takes over 2 1/2 hours of unmitigated depravity to unfold. It was never boring, however, just sometimes almost laughably extreme. That's a good thing, and I've got to give Dutch director Martin Koolhoven credit for creating an original take on the American western genre.
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X+Y 2014
I found this film on my DVR under the title A Brilliant Young Mind. I had recorded it months ago, and it did sound interesting. I looked at my blog and didn't find the film marked as seen, so I started watching it. Of course I had the feeling of déjà vu immediately after starting it...probably because I had already seen it in 2015 on the big screen under another name X+Y. It doesn't seem quite fair when a film has two titles just to fool me. Anyway, I liked it just as well for the second time. It's a little gem, brilliantly acted by Asa Butterfield playing a young, autistic math wizard. I don't watch many films a second time, since at my age life definitely is short and there are so many unwatched films to experience for the first time (so why do I have thousands of DVDs that I'll never watch again...who knows?). Anyway, I'm glad that something as simple as a title change allowed me to catch this particular film again.
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Loving 2016
This film tells the story of the 1960s legal precedent that changed history, "Loving v. Virginia," from the personal point of view of the relatively unknown appellants (although a 2011 documentary The Loving Story previously filled in the blanks.). The film is well acted. Joel Edgerton plays the painfully shy Richard Loving with convincing taciturnity; and Ruth Negga limns Mildred Loving's hidden steely determination with minimalist gestures. However, Jeff Nichols' script is painfully slow to develop its story; and his all too subtle direction reminded me of Terrence Malick (without that director's patented use of character narrations), always bordering on being pretentious, but never actually crossing that line. Still, this Warren Court decision, which established marriage as a Constitutional right, still echoes today with same-sex marriage and a Supreme Court under siege by conservative forces. Never has the story of the Lovings seemed as relevant as it is now. The film has cultural implications; and hopefully it will find an audience.
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Warwick 2016
Emmet, a 20-something Ohio man, flies into Seattle for a job interview, staying at the Warwick hotel, meandering about the area (even driving to Olympia for no particular reason). Back at his hotel, he encounters "Phoenix," a part-time hustler from Yakima; and they spend the evening together vaping and evading and eventually fucking. Basically this is a variation of the plot of one of the great gay films, Andrew Haigh's Weekend, only done with literally no budget and some technical deficiencies (torpid editing, terrible sound mix) by a director who is trying to stretch a short film to feature length without an adequate script to sustain the viewer's interest.
And yet, I found myself strangely involved with the film, probably for the same reason that I loved Weekend: the two men interested me. And their interaction resonated with me as being particularly truthful (even the end where Emmit stalks the unmasked, middle-class Phoenix, was a scene out of my own life from 50 years ago.) The director himself played the hustler; and he has an attractive, intelligent presence...honestly he's a much better actor than a writer director, at least at this stage of his career. I can't recommend the film for any but a specialized audience (gay art film connoisseurs such as myself.)
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A Monster Calls 2016
A clever and sensitive young English boy attempts to cope with his mother's sickness and possibly impending death by creating a fantasy monster in his mind to serve as a metaphor for coping. The fantasy scenes are depicted quite beautifully in glowing, stylish animation. And young Lewis MacDougall is perfect in the difficult role of the child acting out egregiously in the face of tragedy beyond his control. Felicity Jones is fine, working against recent type as the frail mother; but Sigourney Weaver is hardly there playing the supportive grandmother. However, what really distinguishes the film is Liam Neeson, who provides enormous gravitas as the voice of the animated "monster." I'll admit that by the end I shed honest tears, despite fighting as hard as I could against the script's obvious emotional string pulling.
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Sing 2016
This animated feature from Illumination Entertainment (Despicable Me) was a frenetic version of X-Factor with Matthew McConaughey voicing the Simon Cowell like entrepreneur role and zany animals trying out for a talent contest, and singing their hearts out after much difficulties. It's all in good fun and quite fast paced. And the singing and musical numbers were well done (they must have spent a fortune on music rights.) But all-in-all the plot was too predictable and puerile for my tastes.
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The Comedian 2016
Robert de Niro has rarely been better as he is here playing Jackie Burke (ne Burkowitz), an embittered New York Jewish stand-up comic still living off of his reputation as star of an old, but still fondly recalled popular TV family sitcom. In the course of his [fictitious] life, he relates to a panoply of famous real-life comics (including a sardonic Billy Crystal and a superannuated Cloris Leachman, hysterically funny as a Friar's Club roastee.) He has a difficult relationship with this brother and his termagant sister-in-law (Danny DeVito and Patti Lupone.) And he has a melancholy affair with Judd Apatow veteran Leslie Mann, who plays the daughter of an ex-gangster turned Florida retirement village owner (Harvey Keitel.) Director Taylor Hackford imbues the film with high gloss production values; and De Niro's schtick is full of comic zingers, mostly scatological. But the total effect of the film is one of sardonic bitterness, which is the very opposite of comedy. I enjoyed, even respected the film; but can't say I liked it.
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Paterson 2016
A Paterson, N.J. bus driver named Paterson exists, writes poetry in the style of William Carlos Williams into his secret notebook, and otherwise doesn't do much. His wife is an aspiring artist, obsessed with black and white graphic design and making cupcakes. As wonderful as Adam Driver is in the role of Paterson, the film was just too mumblecore and lacking in a propulsive narrative for my tastes, even as it satirized its characters with a wryly comic sensibility. But director Jarmusch did manage to make Paterson, N.J. look like a beautiful place to live.
