Sunday, December 4, 2022

MOVIE REVIEWS #199: "PARALLEL MOTHERS", "SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS", "ALONE (Hyams)", "MR. SOUL!", and "CHARM CITY KINGS"!

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted recently. Even by my stutter of a standard, I seem to not be able to get out as much as I'd like to recently. Much of this is just me being busier lately. In the case of my movie reviews, well, I just haven't been writing them, because most of the movies that I've been watching lately have just been too old. For several reasons I don't review every film I'm watching anymore, and frankly if a movie is over two years old, I just don't review them, and frankly, due to a couple different flukes in my viewing queue, I haven't watched a lot of films that I required myself write a review on. Nowadays, I usually post a new batch of movie reviews every ten films I watch, no matter what, but in this case, I had seen so few recent films that I decided that I should at least have a minimum of five films reviewed before I post, so it took a little longer than normal. 

Speaking of getting to films older than a couple years, yes, I've seen the new Sight & Sound's poll results. To say the least, I'm a little surprised, but I really don't know, in general what to make of them. Mainly because, well, I'm never actually seen "Jeanne Dielman...". Yeah, usurping both "Vertigo" and "Citizen Kane", on this, much more eclectic and yet, strange list from the BFI of their once-a-decade polls of Critics and Filmmakers of the greatest films of all-time, Chantal Ackerman's "Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" was named the greatest film of all-time. I've only seen on Chantal Ackerman film, her last feature, "No Home Movie" a documentary she made about her mother, a Holocaust survivor, documenting the end of her passing, which was completed shortly before Akerman took her own life. Honestly, I don't have much of an opinion on that film either, partly because the version I watched was only available in French with no English subtitles, and while I did fail four years of French in high school and college, I can't say I grasped as much of it as I could, but also it was a bit of a disturbing film in general, especially knowing that she would commit suicide shortly after...- honestly, while I'm aware that, like some of her contemporaries like Agnes Varda, another female filmmaker who did incredibly well on this list, as did many other minority and female filmmakers, (This is the first time since "The Bicycle Thief" in 1952 that a foreign-language feature has won the top honor, and the first time ever  that a female director has topped the list.) they're known for some more avant-garde work, especially regarding documentaries that self-insert themselves into the film, but yeah, I suspect that that's not a particularly great or representative to look at Akerman's career. "Jeanne Dielman..." is definitely a movie I've heard about and thought would show up on this list, but, yeah, number one is very surprising, but I won't say more than that until I finally get around to it. 

There's more than a few movies that I indeed haven't watched yet, which is good, I mentioned in my earlier post about my thoughts on the list, which you can read here, that I find the results of everybody who voted, far more interesting, and they do inevitably publish the ballots, and the complete results of the polls and not just the top 100, and I prefer them, because I like to see what else gets on there so I can now have more stuff to watch. I don't when I'll inevitably be getting to "Jeanne Dielman..." I'm sure she's about to bump up my list and a bunch of others sooner than later though. As for other random thoughts on the list, eh, I don't get how "Sherlock, Jr." topped "The General" in terms of Buster Keaton films. I called all three films "The Portait of a Lady on Fire", "Parasite" and "Moonlight" getting in, which they did, and I'm proud of that. (And now, I didn't delete "Get Out" from being on there. Also called "The Searchers" falling out of the Top Ten, I did okay on the predictions all things considered.) Frankly it's not a list I would make, but it's a mostly good list. The only films I've seen that I genuinely think are just lousy are WONG Kar-Wai's "Chungking Express", (And frankly I'm not huge on "In the Mood for Love" either which broke the Top Ten), Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West", which I get making the directing list honestly, but critics, really? It's 2 1/2 hours of boring before something happen, I think it's pretentious, just pick "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", the Leone film people actually like, and Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Mirror", which- I'm sorry, I love Tarkovsky, but do not get the appeal of "The Mirror" at all. Especially the Directors who loved it, what the hell? 

Oh yeah, the Directors Poll also came out, and for the second consecutive year, they put Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" at number one. "Jeanne Dielman..." made five there, but the list has got it's own quirks. Lot more Scorsese and Kurosawa and a few oddities. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" getting in must mean; I never did think about it, but I guess that film is a movie that I can see a lot of directors relating too. (As a writer, my favorite Charlie Kaufman script is "Adaptation.") If anything, I think this means they polled a greater, more eclectic group of critics and scholars and the directors' poll was a little bit less eclectic and hence the subtle but noticeable differences from the list, but top-sheets results aside, they're interesting lists so far, but trying to get meaning out of it other than, "Oh wow, I should see/go back and rewatch this movie", or "That movie", I think is missing the point. Right now, "Jeanne Dielman..." is number one, and that's the moment we're at right now in the zeitgeist, you can like it, you can hate it, I don't care, I don't think BFI or the pollsters themselves care either, but that's where we're at and that's all you need to know. We'll see where we're at in ten years time and what to make of it then. 

Oh, as to the film's I'm reviewing here, eh, honestly, it's a small and weak group. I mean, I guess it's not quite that, but maybe it feels this way 'cause most of the films I didn't review weren't exactly ones I would be licking my chops to do so, one way or the other. It's been a lot of blah lately. The best film I can recommend that I've seen lately is the documentary, "That Way Madness Lies..." a horrifying documentary by "60 Minutes" producer Sandra Lackow about about having to deal with her brother as he descends deeper and deeper into untreated schizophrenia and how it impacts both him, her, and her family as the medical system seems to be only be able to do something, once he checks himself into therapy, or until he acts out so badly that the law has to come and intervene. It's a stunningly powerful film about the disease and how exactly and suddenly it can change people and the kinds of horrors that come from having to deal with it, in your own family. It's streaming on Kanopy at the moment, and it's definitely the movie that I've been thinking the most of lately. It shows the lack of the ability to get people the help they need, especially when they don't think they need it, can really lead to disaster along the way, and how it effects everybody. Like, how the police become more terrified because of how they fear he'll do something crazy that ends up on the news, and especially with lax gun control regulation, you wonder how many mass shootings could've and should've been prevented if people who were legit dangers to society, were put into treatment, even against their will,.... It makes you think and care the most, very powerful film. 

Let's get to the proper reviews now: 


PARALLEL MOTHERS (2021) Director: Pedro Almodovar

⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

   

Pedro Almodovar is so distinctive a filmmaker, that while I can instantly recognize any film of his from a single shot, it's stunning how often he can still manage to surprise me. Not necessarily in terms of what film he makes, although, really, he's always kinda stunned us with that, but in how there's so many very recognizable aspects of his films. The romantic settings, his parade of great Spanish actress that he rotates through his films, his tales about women and the struggles for their place in the world, the tales about men and how they struggle with their place in a greater world, usually regarding how they're treating women, somehow, or just his regularly campiness when he just wants to have fun, that I think we don't always analyze him from every possible perspective. For instance, while I don't think there's any real argument that he is Spain's most famous and prolific filmmaker, I don't think we bring up much that, he indeed is, a Spanish filmmaker. In that he's from Spain and, Spain has a history....

It's actually got a pretty complicated present too, but the main thing to know at the moment, is that Spain is full of unmarked mass graves. Remnants of General Franco's fascist reign, and right now, and I won't go into every detail of it, but the Spanish Civil War was pretty damn brutal and destructive. There's so many mass graves in Spain that there are maps outlining them and Spain is currently in the middle of a process of actually trying to dig up a lot of these graves and identifying the bodies and give them burials. Or, just, you know, make the history known.

This is probably why "Parallel Mothers" begins with a photoshoot for an archeologist. Arturo (Israel Elejalde) is the archeologist that a renowned photographer named Janis (Oscar-nominee Penelope Cruz) is photographing. She's intrigued by Arturo and also, she's trying to get a mass grave unburied in order to find the remains of her great grandfather. She has her reasons, and during the talks about the excavation details, she and Arturo have an affair. He's married at the time, and she's approaching her 40s quickly, so she decides to be a single mother like her mother had. Arturo doesn't like this, but this doesn't get in the way of the excavation plans, which are slow-going as their paperwork, permissions and preparations that need to get done for that. 

Meanwhile, she ends up having her baby and meeting a fellow new mother Ana (Milena Smit) while at the hospital, as they share a room while they're heading into labor. She even becomes close to Theresa, (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) Ana's mother, who's an old-time actress who still works mainly in theater. Janis's mother died young of an overdose while Ana's mother is more prolific, she wasn't around much either growing up and isn't really around now, even with her presence. 

Eventually, after both parents give birth, Janis and Ana's friendship, turns into a relationship. I'm reluctant to reveal some of the revelations in the movie between that though. Without giving anything away, on the surface, you could read what happens as a nature vs. nurture debate being played out, but I think that's too simple for this film, and generally too simple for Almodovar. (Although one of my favorite films of his, "Volver" literally has a built-in excuse for what happens in the film being that the town is fully of crazy people, so maybe I am giving him too much credit.) And with the Spanish Civil War, reliving and rewriting the past, and all these talks of absent relatives and parents, I suspect there's a much more powerful metaphorical message going on here. 

Come to think of it, one of Almodovar's biggest, but more subtle themes is transformation. The literal process of going from one thing to another. "The Skin I Live In" is a pretty literal version of this, but think about "All About My Mother" about a mother exploring the world that her gay son lived in after he had passed from AIDS, and how the experience changes and evolves her. Or how in "Volver", characters who are presumed dead soon start living as literal ghosts haunting the town. At one point Ana confronts Janis about her obsession with the mass grave and her family. She's much younger, and hasn't lived through Franco's Spain, and more importantly is to separated from it to be effected by it. That was a major transforming in the country of Spain, but Janis herself insists that one doesn't get over the pain and suffering of one's ancestors and the country doesn't heal itself either until it's confronted with it's past. That seems illogical on the surface, but I don't know, I once remember seeing an interview with the great Joel Gray talking about going to Germany for the first time, and just getting off the plane making him uncomfortably sad, being the son of Jewish parents, he could tell right away that something felt wrong there. 

I'm not kidding when I talk about Spain just having tons of mass graves, literally all over the country, and most of them, are just there, unmarked and unnoticed. If you're not looking for them, you won't see them, but once you realize they're everywhere you can't like, not see them. "Parallel Mothers" on the surface seems to be about two mothers who gave birth around the same time, but I think the time aspect is much more cerebral. Even the movie itself has sequences shown out of chronological order, to give us a sense that events aren't always linear, and sometimes time does revolves and seem out of touch, as life goes on, the past is still being relived and even linear time itself can somewhat get caught up in it sometimes and "Parallel Mothers" is a story about why and how when that happens, we really need to, and should, get things right, in order to get back on the right track, whatever that may be. 


SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RING (2021) Director: Daniel Destin Cretton

⭐⭐


(Scratches head)

So, not too long ago, I actually watched an episode of "Avatar: The Last Airbender" for the first time. I know, I'm way late on it, and frankly I wasn't even planning to watch it at all, but I kept thinking about how some of the criticism of "Raya: The Last Dragon" included a lot of people talking about how similar it was to the TV series, and frankly the interest finally wore me out, so I watched it, and..., well, I don't know exactly what I was expecting but absolutely, "Raya..." is a complete ripoff of it. 

Now, "Raya..." is still a good movie, my thoughts on the film itself haven't changed, and I only watched the one or maybe two episodes, I forget now and I don't want to double-check my Paramount Plus subscription in the meantime, but it did put it in another context for me. That said though, even without having finally watched "Avatar: The Last Airbender", I can't help but think that I've seen, just a lot of Chinese magical realism mythology based stuff lately. I'm not entirely questioning why, I get why, it's part of their heritage, both culturally and literally, and by literally, I mean, through their literature. Not just modern stuff, and modern films made by mostly Americans at that, but stories like "Journey to the West" for instance, have a deep resonance in their culture. Things means stuff there that frankly, I don't quite understand. On the surface, of course a Marvel superhero of Chinese heritage would be intimately familiar and connected to this culture, hence a piece of work like "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings", I totally understand that, and think that if you're going to create a superhero that appeals to this audience, this is the direction to go. 

That said, as a westerner who's gone through, way too many of these damn Marvel films at this point, and has just become completely numb to this insipid onslaught  of overly-pervasive superhero culture, I just cannot make myself care about it here. I think in a different context this material might've intrigued me, in very much the same ways that stuff like "Raya..." or "Avatar: The Last Airbender" or even something like the "Kung Fu Panda" sequels have. The best parts of a fantasy story are of course, the discovery of the world at large. And, if this wasn't a Marvel movie I might be intrigued by the world here. 

Shang-Chi or Shaun (Simu LIU), is the son of Xu Wenwe (Tony LEUNG), the leader of the Ten Rings and Ying Li (Fala CHEN) the Guardian of Ta Lo. Ta Lo, is a-eh, basically it's a "Land of the Lost" for Ancient Chinese mythological creatures. Unlike, most of those other aforementioned Chinese-based recent tales, this film takes place in modern day, and naturally, the modern MCU universe. Now, the Ten Rings, are, well, ten rings, but they apparently grant it's owner immortality, and they're also, like, an organization that's started by the father who's taken over and topples various kingdoms and other world powers....- I don't quite get it to be honest. In fact, the fact that the rings' origins are still kinda vague actually made me like one of the movie's two post-credits scenes where the discussions was about what exactly they were and what they were doing. Anyway, Shaun had long left the family but he and his best friend Katy (Awkwafina), who doesn't know any of his past, suddenly get called back in, believing that the sudden attacks on him and Katy are about Ta Lo, and a belief that his mother, who was killed when he was young, might still be alive and in the hidden myth-filled land. 
Now, this first involves collecting his sister Xialing (Meng'er Xhang), who's taken over the Ten Rings organization has been running an underground fight club in Macao. After that, they find they their aunt Ying Nan (Michelle Yeoh) in Ta Lo, where they confront their father who's trying to re-collect the ten rings in order to possibly contact his mother. 

Like, on paper, this can be compelling, in of itself, but of course, at this point, nothing is Marvel is in of itself. In my mind, I see a lot of this story, and I'm thinking, "Black Panther" did this so much better. "Black Panther" created a secret world, and that world had a lot greater meaning to it, it was a futuristic world where an African society existed in modern day that was free from all the atrocities of colonialism, and we can see how a so-called dark continent would've naturally progressed on it's own, without Western influence. But Ta Lo, is just a place with a bunch of Chinese mysticism creatures. It's a link to a past, and frankly it's only done because, this is the Marvel movie with the Asian superhero. This is why I'm thinking back so much on "Raya..." and "Avatar...", it's not that these are bad stories in of themselves, but, when it's the default..., and you keep feeling like you're running into it....- 

I don't know, maybe it's just that it's Marvel. It's funny how all the MCU films are on Disney+ at the moment and Disney owns them as well, but the thing is, Disney as a brand can get away with this. Introducing us to different people and lands through their most basic and infamous cultural iconography and stories, it's basically been their brand since the beginning. I don't even like, "Mulan", either version, I might add, but with those films and when they do dive into the cultures and peoples of places that, for the most part, haven't been predominantly featured in western media, Disney, the brand, makes these tales feel like they have more gravitas and importance. These stories that Disney puts their label, that they tell, feel like we're being taught their culture by people through their most important tales and narratives. Marvel, on the other hand, is a brand focused on forcing everything to be around, superheroes. Fighting bad guys who try to take over the universe. Everything, no matter what they do, whether it's good or bad, has to be centered somehow, around these continuous properties and,- frankly that framing makes this film, far less interesting and compelling. I mean, I've sat in front of Marvel films before staring at my watch, waiting for the misery to end, but none that I've ever been so troubled by for the lack of interest I have in them, and none for a film that really should be a lot better. I can admire the attempt, and I think clearly, the film wanted desperately to be something bigger, but, eh, this just gets thrown onto the pile of all the other MCU films to me. Just another origin story retelling, only this one uses up old ideas and tropes from several other origin stories I've heard many times before, many times by Marvel themselves, and the nearest I can tell is that they think their brand is equivalent to Disney and they can just simply make a movie to satisfy every demographic they can and it'll automatically, well, not necessarily be good, but automatically have that same kind of resonance and power that Disney's label has. And that's the arrogance that I felt with "Shang-Chi..." that totally turned me off. 

It's a shame too, there's stuff here I like. I'm a huge fan of Awkwafina, and she was really good here. As was Simu Liu. I don't know Ben Kingsley is here playing some kind of former bad guy-turned-prisoner-turned actor hippie-type...- I guess he showed up as this character in a previous Marvel movie that I've probably seen and do not remotely remember, but, eh, at least he's having fun in this movie. I don't know why it always seems like he's having the most fun in his worst movies, but he's good here for comic relief I guess. And I do think Shang-Chi has a lot of potential as a superhero character; this is probably one of the few times I'm actually panning a movie where I'm actually kinda intrigued by the idea of the sequel. There's some good directions this character can go, both in his own narrative and in the greater MCU world. I like the film's director Destin Daniel Crettin a lot, he made "Short Term 12" and "Just Mercy", both of those are damn-near great films; he's a fascinating filmmaker, and he is Asian-American, and I think he did a decent job technically here. The effects aren't inspiring necessarily, but I thought they were done well; I liked that last sequence with the dragon especially. But, I also feel like this character is probably more interesting outside of the world of Ta Lo than he is inside of it. 

Here's to hoping that, like Superman, Shang-Chi is one of those superheroes for whom the worst and most boring and useless aspect of them is their origin story. 


ALONE (2020) Director: John Hyams

⭐⭐⭐1/2


I've very much struggled to begin to describe "Alone", exactly, even though it's pretty straightforward on it's surface. It's a bare minimum horror that you'd think a first-time filmmaker would've made on a budget, but John Hyams, is a director with a pretty extensive resume, even if most of it has been television dramas for the last few decades. Yet, there are clearly some fascinating influences here. 

The opening sequences in particular were incredibly inspiring to me, not as a critic but as a screenwriter, and they're just they very stoic shots, of a woman packing her things into her U-Haul trailer, leaving the plant that she deems doesn't fit, and then walking into her car and driving off. And then staying with her, often inside the car, for a very long, quiet and tense ride. I've actually written in my own writing in a similar scene and it was for a horror film script that also began with a character, "Alone" just driving in their car and away from everything. There's an eerie quietness to it, and I think it's a great idea to start off a horror movie. 

Another interesting idea for a horror movie, two cars driving, and one of them is frustrating the other. I know this, because I've seen Spielberg's "Duel", and at a certain point in the opening, the girl, Jessica (Jules Wilcox) while driving up a mountain on a two-lane road, runs into a driver who seems to be driving in a way that frustrates her and that's when she tries to take things into her own hands at first, but that eventually fails. 

That's when we get the other major influence I was thinking about with "Alone", the single female revenge film. There's actually been quite a few of these films in recent years that are, essentially revenge fantasies to some extent where women end up with a distrustful man, usually and ends up in a situation where they seek out murderous vengeance upon them for being harmed. Some of them I like, Coralie Fargeat's "Revenge" comes to mind, where a character is left for dead in the African desert by rich yuppie assholes and she turns into a killing machine as she survives through the desert. Others I don't. Sarah Daggar-Nickson's "A Vigilante" made my Worst List recently. It was incredibly simplistic tale of an a scorned woman determined to just destroy her abuser. I like the idea of these movies in theory, but in practice, you need more than just, here's an attacker, here's the victim, let's get revenge. In this case, the other driver, known in the credits as "Man" (Marc Menchaca) apparently uses his giant SUV and calm demeanor to kidnap women travelling alone on secluded roads, and taking them to his cabin to sexually and mentally torture until he kills them, and Jessica is his latest victim. Menchaca is very good as a menacing villain who otherwise seems like an average part-time outdoorsman when he's not at home working. During one scene, we see Jessica watching him calmly eat a sandwich while calling his wife and children, definitely doesn't seem like he's acting like there's a girl locked up in his kill room that he's apparently built in his basement. 

From here on in, the movie is essentially just, get the protagonist into a situation she can't get out of, and then get her out of it. There isn't much else to the film, and that's a strength. We don't learn anything deep about what the Man does this, or we find out something special about the girl, it's basically just a nightmare scenario played out and gotten out of, and that's fine for me if it's done well, and it's done well. There's a good cameo by Anthony Heald at one point that's nice to see and you hoped we'd see more of, but it was not to be. Part of me wishes there was more potential here. I mean, essentially this could've been a more elaborate "Psycho" but mostly it feels like a better-than-average filmmaking exercise. It's a good one, that strangely has moments that make me feel like there was more inspiration than at the surface.


MR. SOUL! (2020) Director: Melissa Haizlip and Samuel D. Pollard

⭐⭐⭐⭐


A lot of the story of American television that we have, often ignores, among other things, PBS, weirdly enough. It's always under some threat, usually by the far right, mostly by those who either don't watch it to begin with, or those who do, but want to control it entirely. It also just tends to get ignored. As much as the major networks are struggling right now, they're not in any real fear of having to hold telethons every six months or so in order to keep their shows on the air. The thing is though, while PBS rarely submits to Neilsen for their ratings breakdowns most of the time, they're generally watched by a lot of people and it's actually quite an even breakdown on the American populace who's watching PBS. There's a myth that it's for a certain, more aged and affluent audience, especially their primetime lineups, but that's totally not true, and in fact a lot of the most important and groundbreaking television has either been aired on PBS or produced by them in some way and much of it crossed demographics of all ages and races. It wasn't always that way though; in fact it wasn't always PBS, up until the late '60s it was NET, or the National Education Television, and it wasn't ;til the late '60s when the network was beginning to be put under the microscope by Washington, who didn't like how NET was producing their own content that they deemed to be too liberal and radical. 

What kind of programming was that? Well, there were quite a few news and educational programs, but probably the biggest one was "SOUL!". It's been deemed the first "Black Tonight Show", and I-, until now, never heard of it, although I'm certain I've seen clips from it over the years. The history of African-Americans on television is it's own quite complicated discussion, but basically for most of the early days of television they were non-existent on a regular basis. One actress who worked on "SOUL!" even said that she didn't want to work on television, because she knew she'd just be "Beulah". Also, a lot of NET has kinda either been forgotten, or the stuff that survived like "Sesame Street" and "Washington Week" is now basically morphed into the PBS brand so much that we don't even think of them as starting from a completely separate network. "SOUL!" was a NET program, and it was a showcase for African-American art and talent of it's time, and was the show that often was the premiere debut showcase for artists on national television, as wide-ranging as The Lost Poets to Earth, Wind and Fire. Poetry especially was showcased in a manner that I don't recall ever seeing on television much elsewhere before. Pretty much every African-American name across all literary, popular, political and cultural arts came through there. It's practically a documentation of the 2nd Harlem Renaissance and a first hand view of the Civil Rights struggles through the African-American perspective. 

Honestly, I'm kinda just stunned it exists at all. Especially for Variety shows, African-American-lead series just didn't survive very long. Harry Belafonte's series was canceled after just touching Petula Clark, a white woman, somewhat romantically during a song performance on a show. The only other African-American host I can think of from that time was Flip Wilson, and while that was a Variety Show but it wasn't a talk show, and "SOUL!" predates "Flip", and actually lasted a little longer on the air. Granted, "SOUL!" started locally in New York before it eventually went national though.

The show was produced, and eventually, after they ran out of other options, hosted by Ellis Haizlip. Haizlip wasn't a journalist, or much of a performer; he was mostly a theatrical producer and hadn't done much television before, as neither had most of the staff of the show. Ellis is an interesting character, with his skinny frame and wirey glasses, he looks like he could double for Malcolm X, if not for his Richard Roundtree moustache and he James Baldwin-like cadence, he seems like a strange amalgorithm of the entire era. He's quiet, calm, soft-spoken but speaks intensely when he needs to and seems just the right amount of unprofessional when the situation needs to. He was openly gay, even at the time, and his main objective was simply to present African American art and culture to the public, make sure others like him were on the television screen. He interviewed everybody from Sidney Poitier to Harry Belafonte to even Louis Farrakhan, who basically opposed his entire existence, and knew how to confront him while also seemingly showcasing his immense oratory skills. He didn't shy from confrontational figures, even interviewing George Jackson's mother after his assassination. 

Questlove gave a great soundbite at the end, after the show wasn't picked up for renewal after Nixon took over the PBS budget, mentioning how different the landscape of television would've looked if the show had, even like a ten or twenty years run instead of the very brief five years it had. You can basically say that pretty much only in my lifetime, outside of Don Cornelius on "Soul Train" has there been numerous regular African-American and other races and sexes hosts across all of television. Like, I date myself back to when Oprah and Arsenio first hit the airwaves and it was and felt revolutionary and different back then, but that's only because others like Haizlip who should've been given that chance were denied it, or just given it for a brief flutter of a moment before television reverted back to the norm. 

"SOUL!" was written and directed by Melissa Hailzip, Ellis's niece who's been an actress and performer for most of her career before finding her way into documentary filmmaking; this is her first feature and it's a very loving portrait to her uncle putting his and the television show's place in television history back into the context that it should've been all along. 


CHARM CITY KINGS (2020) Director: Angel Manuel Soto

⭐⭐⭐1/2


"Charm City Kings" doesn't necessarily do anything new as a coming-of-age story, especially for one about growing up in the inner city, but for what it does, it does well enough. Well, it might not do anything particularly new as a story, but as to depicting and creating a world, it's got enough new wrinkles to capture your attention. For one, it's backdrop is the Baltimore dirt-bike gang scene. At night, the dirt bike gangs run the streets, so much so that police are even told not to chase them down after they break up whatever gathering they're having, not that they can catch them half the time anyway. 

The movie follows a young preteen boy named Mouse (Jahi Di'Allo Winston) whose brother was a member of the Midnight Clique, one of the bigger biker gangs in the city. His brother died young however, and since then, his mother Teri (Teyonah Parris) has been a bit too spread out taking care of him and his younger sister. Mouse has a couple good friends in Lamont (Donielle T. Hansley Jr.) and Sweartagard (Kezii Curtis) both of who also want to get in on the dirt bike culture. He also has a crush on a new girl-next-door, Nicki (Chandler DuMont) who likes taking photographs. 

Eventually, Mouse gets in with Blax (Meek Mill) the leader of the Clique, and he starts skipping school and his afternoon job at a vet's office in order to work at his garage. He even starts getting trusted with delivering bikes across town to other bikers. This, in spite of some pretty clear warning signs that associating with Blax is already a fairly sketchy idea. He gets some warnings from others, including Rivers (William Catlett) a police detective and family friend who he warns to stay away from Blax, knowing about his past.

Like I said, there's not a lot new here. We get the coming-of-age crossroads story, we get the two competing male characters representing Mouse's tendencies to either inevitably go good, or inevitably go bad, and we do see that neither side is completely black and white either. After Mouse gets robbed of one of his bikes by an old rival/friend of Blax, we see Blax go a little too far in trying to get the bike back. And of course being an African-American cop is already full of it's own gray areas, especially in a city like Baltimore which is already known for it's violence. 
There's also an intense scene involving Blax's dog, who is injured and Mouse has to put him down at Blax's request. Mouse is an animal lover and his work at the animal clinic after school, shows that he has a career path outside of the biker gang culture, however he's still wildly drawn to it, even if he knows that the dangers of the world. 

I will say this, the motorcycle work, and the photographing of it, is quite impressive. The cinematography is quite good, and the filmmaking from director Angel Manuel Soto is quite skillful. "Charm City Kings" originally debuted on HBO Max, but it's one of the productions of theirs that recently was taken off of the streaming service as HBO Max begins it's bizarre morphing into, whatever it's next failed form is going to be. I'm not gonna pretend it's the biggest loss from the service, for one, there is a DVD release so you can find this elsewhere legally, but also, while it's an interesting film, it's not exactly the most necessary thing missing from the network that should've been on there, but it was a good film, and it shows this world of the Baltimore dirt bike scene pretty well, and  why it can be appealing to youths in the area as a career or life choice, and how easy it can be to get sucked into that life, and in some cases, how lucky it is for some of them to be able to get out of it. 

Wednesday, November 9, 2022

CANON OF FILM: "BEFORE MIDNIGHT"

BEFORE MIDNIGHT (2013) 

Director: Richard Linklater
Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke based on the story and characters by Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan

 

(Stares longingly at the date on the computer. Sighs)

I guess, this time, they didn't show up. 

I was holding out hope still believe it or not. I know, they said they weren't making a new one, but they said that last time and they secretly made "Before Midnight" so.... but no, this-, this time, it looks real. I mean,- I don't know, they might come  later on when we're not expecting, but for now, this trilogy is going to remain a trilogy. 

For those unfamiliar with Richard Linklater's "The Before Trilogy",- well part of me just wants to tell you to watch them and then we'll talk; it's definitely the kind of the film project that it's better to discover on your own, but...- anyway, in 1995 Richard Linklater made "Before Sunrise". Inspired by an actual conversation, the movie details two strangers on a train who have a "Brief Encounter" during one of those romantic endless nights that might've ended with them falling in love. Two romantic, inspired 23-year-olds, an American named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and a French girl named Celine. He's on a Eurorail Pass and it's his last night before his plane leaves out of Vienna, and he meets Celine on the train on his last night in Europe and convinces her to get on the train and then spend the rest of the night walking around Vienna and talking about the meaning of life and other such meanderings, and falling in love before they both have to leave in the morning.

Now that movie ended with our two lovers promising to meet again in six months.  Nine years later we got "Before Sunset", where they actually meet again in Paris. Jesse has become an author and written a book about that one night and they meet again at the end of his book tour, but he has to catch a plane at night back home, and only have the one afternoon to catch up. 

Well, nine years later, like clockwork, Jesse is finally at the airport. He's talking to his teenage son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) as he sends him away to go home to his mother in Chicago, and he exits to meet back up with Celine, and their two eight-year-old twin girls Ella and Nina (Jennifer and Charlotte Prior). Products of,- well, that time he missed his plane...,- anyway, things got complicated and to quote Sheryl Crow, who I'm fairly certain didn't actually say this first, but "Life is what happens while you're making plans". Jesse continues his success as a writer and Celine's still working away as a global environmental activist, although she's thinking about taking a government job now. Jesse's become successful enough  with subsequent novels that his writing career has taken off and he's invited to stay the summer on the shores of Greece by the invitation of Patrick (Walter Lassally, a rare acting performance from the acclaimed cinematographer and director) a writer himself who's surrounded himself with an ecclectic mix of friends and family living a full albeit reclusive life outside the tourist-laden Athens. Jesse's son went home early and as a departing gift for their visit, they have a hotel room for the night, which leads to Jesse and Celine, having rare time to walk around, explore and just sit down and talk, for the first time without their daughters hanging on to them, in a long time. 

Their conversation at first seems like they're back where they were. They even visit a small church like the one they visited in Vienna. And their flirtations are a lot more-eh, I guess risque isn't the word, but familiar; they're not two people trying to gauge each other's interest, trying to figure out any subtle meaning in the slightest glances or the slips of the tongue, they talk like two people who are insanely familiar enough with each other to know how to get under their skin, both literally and erotically. And they each know how to push each other's limits in private and public, whenever the mood feels right. (There's one gestures that Julie Delpy makes that I don't know how it hasn't become like, the ultimate meme by now [Although I don't seem to get meme culture anyway]) And they've now got nine years of moments and life lived together, to call back and draw upon whenever they're verbal dance turns into verbal combat. It is so strange to watch these films and hear characters talking about Skype and on cell phones, and reminiscing about how these characters met before e-mail was regularly a thing and just trusted each other that they would meet months later at a time and place. 

But they were kids then and now they have kids now. They try to forget about their regular problems, but eventually, they come up. And soon, we're thrust back into the realities of a couple struggling to determine if they're still in love with each other. Or more importantly, if they should stay together or not? Maybe? That's something that's kinda new, we don't really know the stakes on the line; we can think we do, but you can make a decent argument either way.

They're still recognizable the romantic idealists we once saw meet each other on that train years ago, we still hear that in them. The spark is still there, the attraction is still there, and their love is still there, but perhaps it's just time for their paths to diverge. She calls it right away, in the car ride from the airport in the beginning how it's the moment, and we see glimpses of it briefly pop up in their conversations with others and each other, like when the Jesse expresses his desire to go home to Chicago to be with his son and his concerns about his living with his mother back home most of the time. There's accusations that maybe Celine's had a wandering eye too. Her anger and frustrations seems to be so internalize every slight that might be a sliver against her she can interpret and rearrange as a slight against all of womankind. And maybe she's right. I don't know. I remember I keep wanting to yell at the screen for Jesse to stop talking about how great it is to actually be living in Paris, France, as a reason to show how great their life is, like, "Dude, she's from Paris! It's not special or unique to her!" 

But that's kinda what's so great about "Before Midnight" too.  I listed it years ago as the Best Film of 2013. Rechecking my old original review, I realized that I discussed the shift in the discussions over the movies as the first dealt mostly with abstractions and the more they've spent time together, they move into specifics, actual things. I didn't comment on it, at the time but I do remember a lot of discussion at the time about how autobiographical the films were. Some people desperately wanted to make some parallels to how Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's lives and how they connected to their characters. I guess it is true that you can trace them pretty well, if you wanted to. Reportedly they did talk about a 4th film but Linklater, Hawke and Delpy couldn't agree on a good idea, and yeah, I kinda get it. I mean, you can definitely come up with several ideas and situations to put these two in if you wanted to, they even did this once for a brief non-Trilogy canon scene in Linklater's animated stream-of-consciousness masterpiece "Waking Life", but I get it now, we don't have to see them continued on. We loved "Before Sunrise" not knowing where these characters would end up before we had the continuations of their story, and now, we can have our own theories and interpretations. 

And again, maybe they will come back later. Most of the time when people try to come up with a comparison film to describe "The Before Trilogy" the typical closest that anybody lists are "The Up Documentaries". The mainly Michael Apted-led documentaries that document it's subjects and what they're currently doing starting from age seven and going back to check-in again on them every seven years after that. That is probably the best comparison, I've only seen a couple of those films myself, but yeah, it's really the only other comparable film experiment involving time like that. 

However, there is another cinematic couple I think about now when I think of this series. Recently, HBO did a remake of Ingmar Bergman's miniseries/theatrical feature "Scenes from a Marriage", but the original follows Liv Ullmann's Marianne and Erland Josefson's Johan as they go through twenty years of life, including kids, divorce, reconnection, and several other events and tragedies in between. It wasn't shot over twenty years, but it's one of his most beloved films, but people forget he eventually did make a sequel. His last feature as a director, "Saraband" went back to explore the two characters decades later, and I think it's one of his most underrated and surprisingly one of his best films. All the main actors were still alive and only too happy to revisit their characters and see what they were doing now as they suddenly reconnected much later in life than Bergman himself probably ever thought he would imagine them, or him, being at. And we also got introduced to other characters through the extended world, as the lives of the characters expanded and grew. 

Perhaps, thinking somewhere down the line a "Saraband"-like addition to "The Before Trilogy" is wishful thinking for me, but I don't see why it couldn't happen. Now that I think about, Jesse's kid today, would be about the age his dad was when he met Celine.... Or maybe we'll see where they're are years later, like when they're 82? 

It's so weird how Linklater's very best films are just amazingly timely and nostalgic at the same time; nobody manages to capture the essences of time periods the way he does, especially when that time period is the present day. Any shortlist of the greatest living directors that doesn't immediately include Richard Linklater is just somebody who has not paid attention. He's kinda had two different directing careers, so it can a little tricky analyzing him. On the one hand, he's known as one of the vanguards of the American Independent movement starting from the late '80s, starting with his breakthrough feature "Slacker", which also dealt with time in a way, as it was a multi-narrative feature that followed one character until it ran into another and then followed them until they drifted into a third and then a fourth and so on, all across a day in Austin, Texas. He'd toy with variations of that idea too like with "Waking Life". However, he would often fund projects like "The Before Trilogy" and "Boyhood" with taking occasional Hollywood features as well, like "The Newton Boys", the remake of "Bad News Bears", and probably most famously "School of Rock". At some point, and I'm not entirely sure when exactly, he did this so often that it became tougher to even determine which film was the personal indy and which one was the Hollywood feature, not because his style or subjects would change, it felt more like the Hollywood movies would find ways of drifting more into his evolving ideas and vice-versa. "A Scanner Darkly" and "Fast Food Nation" were released in the same year, and I think "A Scanner Darkly" was the indy, but it's got so many stars in it and it so ambitious, it certainly doesn't feel like it, and you can kinda say the same for "Fast Food Nation". Or "Me and Orson Welles" and "Bernie" a couple years later. 

The thing is, as great and versatile a director as he is, I don't know what he technically does special that constantly finds himself evoking a sense of place. Ask me what a Richard Linklater film looks like or feels like I can almost always spot it, but ask technically how he's different and it becomes a lot harder to describe. There's a few common motifs, long takes, and especially with the Before films, long, elaborate pieces of conversation that are full of wisdom, philosophy, and personal connections that can often hide deeper stories and truths underneath. Or perhaps he's just mastered the perfection of directing with exact precision, and especially in the case of "The Before Trilogy", mastered a collaborative writing process with incredible actors that manages to make these films seem like they're improvised when in reality the dialogue and directing are crafted to the most miniscule degree to get these films so exacting. 

That's the real secret of Linklater's greatest films, how easy he makes these films look, 'cause trust me, the directing might look like it's easy going, but it's not nearly as easy to make as they look. It's absolutely stunning how well he does it in most every film of his, and arguably, along with his epic masterpiece "Boyhood" which literally took 12 years to film, "The Before Trilogy" are his best at doing this. They capture moments of life and truths that secretly hide the greater stories, between the lines of dialogue and in those subtle inflections. If "Before Sunrise" was the moment two people were free to express themselves in a moment of truth, and "Before Sunset" was a more repressed moment of two people trying to see if they still connect, what is "Before Midnight"? Two people who know each other too well, and still connect, but are stuck in the middle of personal and emotional conflicts and they're trying to find all the ways to get through it? It makes it feel like I'm describing a chess match, where each side knew each other's next moves before they make them but, nah, I'm just describing a moment in time between these two. We all know people who we are that close to and we've had conversations like these with them. Perhaps this a major one for them, maybe a forboding one, perhaps it's just the one they're in now that they'll look back on in the future and laugh at the absurdity of the things they chose to care about. Like all his best films, Linklater captures a moment that's seems like it'll last forever in the moment, becomes fleeting once you get away from it, and becomes nostalgic when you revisit it. 

Perhaps this love ballad of Jesse and Celine is indeed a fairy tale that has finally ended at the stroke of midnight, but it's a moment of time for us that we'll always cherish. You know what they say, "We'll always have Paris",- well, in this, "We'll always have Vienna". And the Peloponnese Coast.... 

Friday, October 21, 2022

HBO MAX/DISCOVER+ REMOVING SERIES FROM STREAMING IN THE AFTERMATH OF MERGER: THOUGHTS ON MEDIA LOST AND MEDIA FOUND!

(Sighs)


(Shrugs)

What do you guys want me to tell you, I told you so? Alright, I told you so. 

But y'know, who cares now? I mean, I don't feel like bragging about this or anything, and not because I quietly like to rub it in, mainly it's because I stopped banging the drum on this fight years ago, and frankly now, I don't really care about this. 

Yeah, that's the thing, everybody else seemed to be really frustrated and annoyed at this, "How dare, HBO Max take off shows all for a tax write-off because Discovery+ plus wanted more room for their shows!" and it was the big thing for awhile and Kenan Thompson made jokes about it at the Emmys and all, and I was like,- (Shrugs) yeah, that's pretty much what I expected. 

I tried to warn everybody. I warned about streaming, and how it wasn't gonna be as secure or great a future as it you thought it was, and as long as film, and television were businesses, streaming was never gonna be as secure as actual physical media and it should be a secondary option, but everybody said, "Nah, nah, nah, you don't get it, streaming is the future!" And you know, that future is now; I'm watching Al Michaels commentate the most boring NFL games every Thursday night on Amazon, for some reason, and sounding like a dead relic of what he used to be inside unless he's making a sly reference to sports betting that goes over everyone's heads, but the point I always made when I would go after streaming, with blogs after blogs, starting, with this one, from like, eleven years ago!, was that, streaming was never going to be the ultimate catch-all of media that people thought it was. Especially when you let all the networks and studios themselves cultivate and collect their own exclusively libraries, and have them all charge their own separate fees and control the distributions of their content, then you were gonna to have stuff that slipped through the cracks and wouldn't be available for the most amount of people as possible. 

I mean, it's all bullshit that HBO Max and Warner Bros. is get lauded and controlled over by Discovery of all goddamn entities, 'cause that's what I wanted when I got by HBO Max account, more um-, what the hell even is on Magnolia Network...- (Goes to channel's website, clicks on original shows) eenie meanie, miney mo, catch a tiger by the toe, eh, something, something, not that word, eh, let her go, eenie meanie miney mo, more, um "The Garden Chronicles"?! whatever the hell that is. But, it's not like I saw anybody trying to stop it at the time either, or stop any of these bizarre corporate media mergers, that should all basically be illegal, but y'know, even if they weren't working within well-established, well-regulated and well-funded loopholes, if you did manage to legally close them up, good luck enforcing any of that. 

So you're losing a bunch of shows now, and yeah, it sucks, but you know what, it's not like shows haven't been going away or never returning to begin with. How often have your favorite shows or movies suddenly went on or fell off all your favorite streaming services? Not to mention that shows that for one reason or another just don't show up on streaming, or don't show up in their complete original forms. 

Film has always been a business, from the moment Thomas Edison put patent numbers on his short films, more than any other modern art form the moving picture, was spurned and evolved from a business standpoint, not an artistic one like most other art mediums. Until that's eliminated businesses and business decisions are always gonna get in the way. And no, this is simply not a good look on the business venture to begin with.

I don't know, what bizarre monstrosity combination of HBO and Discovery and what will inevitably become of HBO Max from it, which would be like HBO's what, fifth or sixth separate generation attempt at becoming a streaming service brand now? I mean, I could point out that this deal is just, nonsensical and ridiculous on several levels and that I ultimately would predict that, like say, when AOL and Time Warner combined way back when, that the deal is shortsighted and ultimately is gonna flop, and Warner and Discovery, have way overestimated Discovery+'s actual value in their programming and that the two brands are just not a good clash for each other, and that this forced removal of programming on both sides is the first sign that this is a truly bad combination, but eh, do I need to? 

Seriously, like, even before this news about the shows going away broke, we all knew this was just weird right? I mean, I wasn't surprised, but I feel like, in a normal world, Warner would've just bought out Discovery+ and incorporated it naturally into their own collection, let them otherwise be on their own and continue to create, produce and distribute their own programming and HBO would I feel, know to stay standoffish enough to let that happen, but instead, they merged and from these depictions, it feels like they're either being treated equally, or possibly the Discovery+ people coming into this, are actually higher up in the corporate structure, which baffles the fuck out of me the most out of this. I mean, obviously, the uproar and the fact that all these programs are getting taken off the air means that there's people who've noticed and care and I suspect either, after the year, they'll either be back on HBO Max/Discovery+-whatever, eventually be included into whatever the weird combination both of them come up with at Warner Bros. Discovery, or some other media distribution outlet will pick them up and have them streaming that way. And if they're not, then, I don't know, they'll join the same in-between media rabbit hole that stuff like, "Dream On", or "1st and 10", or the "If These Walls Could Talk" movies, or a bunch of other programs that HBO has previously lost the rights to or just refuses to air on HBO Max already. (As well as several other programs across all major networks and production and distribution companies; HBO's not alone in this.)

Look, there is commentary to talk about here, but everyone else has talked about it, and frankly, I'm tired of the business minutia of the entertainment world. Until we actually get, some kind of deal where everything that's ever been filmed is easily readily available on a single, legal platform, like the way a video store used to be, this is not gonna end with this deal, or in the near future at all. Everybody has to get together and just come to the conclusion that making sure everybody has equal availability of their content, than none of this matters. It didn't matter to most anybody else either, until the programs starting getting removed and everybody realized too late that maybe streaming has limitations. 

But this isn't about streaming either, it's about preservation, and film and television don't have a good history of preserving their arts. And, that's the big problem here, it's not the deal, it's not even the fact that they're doing it for a tax cut, although, yeah, that's bullshit capitalist greed for ya, but like, that loophole isn't the problem itself, the problem is that we don't encourage or enforce media preservation like we should. It seems like we do, because we have all these streaming services, logically you think, "Well, that must mean that anything that's possible to be available to me, surely must be available, right?" NOOOO! and that's really what the big uproar and frustration, that there's a massive amount of people at one time, who are only now realizing that that's not the case. And again, in terms of the big picture, this is minor. Half of Youtube entertainment media now can sometimes seem to be people finding, seeking out, or discussing lost media, and for good reason. There's a lot that's missing, some that seemed to be there for us to always have, and now they're not there. Or not as easy to get to. 

Anybody try to find Kevin Smith's "Dogma" on streaming lately? Yeah, it's, not easy. It's copyright's owned by Harvey Weinstein and it, among other titles are being held up while he's being held up, and some copies of the used DVD are priced in the $80 and up range on Amazon now, which is mindboggling to me, 'cause that was a movie when I was growing up, just always seemed to be around; I watched it rerun on cable dozens of times, and borrowed it from video stores and libraries regularly. It's not unavailable or lost or anything, you can find copies and plenty of people have downloaded their copies on Youtube if you have to see it, and most of them haven't been taken down yet, but it's kinda bullshit still that the filmmakers aren't making money on it right now. 

I'm using "Dogma" as a recent example but there's so much more out there that we've lost and we're currently losing and the thing is, most of it we might not ever even really know about until or unless things change and it pops up again. To use another famous example, John Frankenheimer's "The Manchurian Candidate", one of the great American movies was held without being re-released to the public until 25 years after it's release, all because Frank Sinatra didn't realize that he actually owned a majority of the rights to it. There were generations of filmmakers and cinephiles who might've only vaguely recalled seeing that film, or missed decades of possibly being influenced by that film's ever-presence, all because, it wasn't widely present. 

That's the thing, I've gone through the lists of the shows that have slipped off HBO Max, and I'll be damned if I know whether or not quality-wise these shows are "worth preserving", but that honestly doesn't matter as much as one might think because we shouldn't just be preserving the absolute elite of stuff, we should be preserving all media and art as best we can and as much of it as possible. Sometimes, we may not know what's important or what we're missing until years later on down the line. 

Anybody happen to catch Wink Martindale's Facebook page lately. I follow him and FB and Youtube 'cause in terms of classic American game shows, he's a goldmine of rare content and preservation, and recently he posted a link to this amazing find: 



For those who might not look at this and see much related here, but this is, currently the only known complete episode recording of the game show "The Wizard of Odds". It's not a particularly important, or even a good game show, it's basically just a low-end "The Price is Right" rip-off, except for this one thing, it marked the first American television appearance of it's host, of Alex Trebek. I had only heard about this for years, and only knew previously of a single sound recording that existed, and possibly one rare episode in an university archive that only existed because an actor Don Defore was on, (DeFore, oh, eh, he was on "Hazel", I think, old time, forgotten actor, more well-known for his work now as a SAG board member and early president of NATAS) and that was it, before somebody just randomly posted this one episode. This was a major piece of American television history, and it had been a lost show. Alex of course would host several game shows over the shows, most famously "Jeopardy!" for over thirty-five years before his sad passing a couple years ago, but this was where his national career in America started. (He had a few hit hosting gigs in Canada before he came here of course too, and not all of that is preserved either) The series only lasted one season, and lost big in it's timeslot to "Gambit" which wasn't even that big of a hit, and NBC just wiped out the series and taped over it. It wasn't just them that did that, a lot of television did that back then, in America and elsewise. BBC for instance, it's almost like, impossible to find any television pre-"Monty Python" from them.

That's really what this is all about the fear of media that we've got now, one day becoming lost in the future. And it is a real fear, especially since we thought, of all things, streaming, as opposed to actual physical media, was the way to go for the future. God help us if we're ever hit a "The Trigger Effect" calamitous event and the internet and electricity ever goes out completely. (Note: It's far-fetched, sure, but it's not as far-fetched as you'd think....)  

So, what is there we can do? In terms of what HBO Max and Discovery+ are gonna do, probably very little. If you can do your part to preserve the media they got rid of, in case they don't eventually return it the current or some other streaming or physical platform, be my guest. 

As for what really needs to happen. Personally, I'd go to Congress. Seriously, I think there should be laws preventing media producer and distributors requiring them to preserving their media. Once it's released to the public, at least, then, they need to take any efforts possible into preserving that media, in some reasonable amount of form. Now, I'm not gonna tell them, it has to go on a streaming site, or it has to be on DVD, or that it has to be out for the public all the time for anyone to see, that's taking it too far, and for several reasons there are certain pieces of media, that do indeed exist, and are preserved, but don't need to be shown or revealed regularly to the public. To name an extreme example off the top of my head, I know for a fact that there's footage, somewhere in Stamford, Connecticut at WWE headquarters of the night Owen Hart fell from the rafters and was killed, because they have to keep it for their own sake and protection, but it's in a vault and labeled not to be released, and it's evidence, and blah, blah, blah, preservation and public are two different things, and some things need to be preserved, even if they aren't, and in some cases, should never, be seen by the public. And even taking that extreme case out of the equation, there could be other good reasons, legal or not, why some media isn't public. Perhaps there's some other legal copyright claims that are in dispute, perhaps there's some unlicensed uses of footage or music that has to be resolved, or perhaps, people just don't want something to be readily available in the public. That happens too. It's there right not to put something out into the public, however, not preserving it, is something different to me. So, reasonable efforts should be made to preserve media as much as possible, that should be a requirement of any media electronic-based artistic media. We're documenting ourselves and our lives here, we should have notes of it. Once it's out there, it should stay out there. Even recently, if you think about all the old forms of streaming media sites, Vine, Blip, etc. that don't exist anymore, lots of recent media are gone now because there efforts aren't required by the owners and distributors of those sites, you make that a legal requirement, I can't guarantee it won't ever happen where something will become lost, but it's an extra level where it makes material more likely to be preserved and by the people who should be the ones preserving the media. It shouldn't be up to us to do this. 

I know, this is a longshot, btw, I seriously doubt that this kind of legislation would get any modern traction and to be frank, there are more important battles politically to have at times, but you know, starting the movement now for media conglomerates to make preservation a requirement is the first start. 

There's one minor thing that I think we could do right now, that won't help out this immediately, but something that really needs to get done. I've talked about this before occasionally, but in America, we do have the Film Preservation Board, which works with the Library of Congress every year to name films for preservation as apart of the National Film Registry. They compile a list of 25 culturally, historically or aesthetically important films in order to preserve America's film heritage. Whatever happens from here on in, these are the pieces of film that are of the greatest significance to evoking America. They've been doing this every year since 1989, a year after the National Film Preservation Act was passed into law as apart of an Appropriations Bill, and it's been renewed and refunded multiple times ever since, and it's gathered a huge collection of the history of American film. Not just the big films and titles you would expect either, on top of several feature films, there's lots of experimental films, documentaries, short subjects, even advertisement material, industry films, old shorts they'd only used to show in classrooms, home movies even, there's even a music video that's apart of the collection. What's not included in the registry are television productions. Nothing that's made exclusively and intently for television at least.

There's no equivalent Television Preservation Board and there's no National Television Registry, which is really kinda insane at this point, 'cause let's face it, television is a dying medium. A dying medium that you might think would get preserved through the advent of streaming but frankly it's a medium already missing a lot of it's media and as it continues to slowly die, it might continue to lose more, and more quickly than you think. 

I don't really know why we don't have a National Television Registry, but there should be one. I doubt one that's equivalent would've now or later would have saved any of these shows but, it's a start. I recommended this years ago, even gave a list on Facebook of what I would recommend be the first television programs inducted. 

"The $64,000 Question" (1955-'58)
"All in the Family" (1971-79)
"American Bandstand (1952-'88)
"An American Family (1973)
"Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949-'55)
"The Ed Sullivan Show (oka Toast of the Town" (1948-'71)
"Experiment TV Broadcast with Milton Berle (1929)
"Guiding Light" (1952-2009)
"Gunsmoke (1955-1975)
"The Honeymooners (1955-'56)
"The Jack Benny Program" (1950-'65)
"Life is Worth Living" (1952-'57)
"I Love Lucy (1951-'57)
"M*A*S*H" (1972-'83)
"Meet the Press" (1947-Present)
"RCA Felix the Cat Test Patterns (1928-'39)
"Roots" (1977)
"Saturday Night Live" (1975-Present)
"See It Now" (1951-'58)
"Sesame Street" (1969-Present)
"Star Trek" (1966-'69)
"Streets of New York" (1939)
"Texaco Star Theater" (1948-1956)
"The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson" (1962-'92)
"The Twilight Zone" (1959-'64)
"Your Show of Shows (aka Caesar's Hour)" (1950-1954)

I thought it was a pretty decent start list, that includes something from just about but even this is hard to preserve. The Original Felix the Cat tests, they only exist now in recreations and a few photos, and that's more than I can say for the original Milton Berle tests, of which nothing exists now. "American Bandstand", much of their old programs before 1964 were destroyed in a fire, including a lot of pretty historic and important television moments, especially for regarding documenting the history of early rock'n'roll. "Captain Video and His Video Rangers", only about 24 episodes of the estimated 1,500+ of the series is known to still exist; the rest are all long lost. "Streets of New York", one of the first dramatic productions made specifically for television, a 60-minute TV movie, it's reported that only eleven minutes of it still exists. Hell, we're still finding old episodes of "Sesame Street". Literally. 

  

Yeah, we're finding old episodes of "Sesame Street", but were losing Elmo's HBO Now talk show. I didn't care for his talk show admittedly, but how does that make any sense at all?

If there's a time to stress again that we need this, it's now. And this shouldn't just be an American thing, every country should have their own preservation boards for film and television and have registries like the NFR. I think they need a TV registry as well, and there should genuinely be a serious push for that. Make it a national to preserve the most important pieces of all media we have, and we do for film. We do for even recordings, there's a National Recording Registry as well, but we don't for television. I don't know what the hold up is or why we don't, but we really should.  

So if you're frustrated or annoyed at HBO and Discovery, these are the steps I would be channeling your anger towards. Creating and promoting legislation, not to prevent this from ever happening again, but to mitigate the loss of media when it does, and start calling Congressmen and those who might be influential to them and start the processes of getting these preservation regulations into law and to creating a real National Television Preservation Board and Registry. This is what the future can hold, and if we start using these weird HBO/Discovery decisions as the catalyst for it to come to pass, then by all means, perhaps the frustrations we have now will not be in vain. 






Monday, October 3, 2022

MOVIE REVIEWS #198: "ENCANTO", "HOUSE OF GUCCI", "TEST PATTERN", "AZOR", "ANNE AT 13,000 FT.", "BEANS", and "RAMS (Sims)"!

Ugh, procrastination. Like all writers, once we stop putting it off, it's our favorite. Lately, I've been getting around to it a lot. Not all of it my own fault, much of what's been delaying me from writing more here, and in general, has been stupid and idiotic things like life getting in the way, but other times, yeah, my free time has been going more towards turning my mind off than it has striving to advance it lately. It happens sometimes, I hate to admit. Every so often, you just gotta turn everything off. 

That doesn't mean I'm not watching and analyzing a lot. With the Emmys last month I tried to catch up on as much as I could. I haven't gotten to everything, but the Emmy shows were actually pretty decent this year. I've never been as sold as everyone else that we're in some kind of golden age of television; in fact, if anything, I think television might be dying quicker than any genre at the moment, but the quality at the top is always gonna win out. 

Movies-wise though, yeah, I've been slowing down more, and I gotta catch back up. Especially with all the Oscar films coming up and I'm still two years behind, and yikes, it's already October. Let's get some reviews in before I have to really start knuckling down and run through every inch of my spare time watching everything. 



ENCANTO (2021) Directors: Jared Bush & Byron Howard; Co-Director: Charise Castro Smith

⭐⭐⭐⭐


I think when it comes to Disney, separating a good one from a- well, rarely, if ever bad, but maybe, average or mediocre film, is that if it just has one little thing that I can notice as being truly unique, different and downright inspiring. You could probably argue that this is double for the princesses, and I'll be damned if I haven't seen a quote-unquote "Disney Princess" as uniquely intriguing in recent years as Mirabel. (Stephanie Beatriz) The obvious note that was in fact taken by request of a young woman in the UK, is that Mirabel, wears glasses. Yeah, I never thought or noticed it before, but there had never been a Disney Princess character that wears glasses. (You would've thought at least Belle must've had reading glasses, but no, she had perfect 20/20)  Which is a shame, 'cause not only do I generally find eye glasses to be appealing, but they do add a aura of intrigue and mystery to a character.

Mirabel's mystery is that she is the only one in her family who doesn't have, some kind of special X-Man-like power, but that's way too simple. She's a teenager for whom being a teenage girl is appropriate for the story and not at all about any kind of romance, thank god. She's a middle child in a busy family who's filled with magic. Abuela (Maria Cecilia Botero), the family matriarch founded their enchanted casita after escaping a conflict and in the decades since, their home in the mountains of Columbia has looked over the growing village town, that's formed from the large family and their special gifts (As well as the actual gifts of the enchanted house, which, is a lot more Disney and Pixar-like, but yes, does have moments where it feels like Pee-Wee Herman might live there) helping oversee and protect the town. Mirabel, however, is the one family outcast who doesn't have a gift, but she still remains very proud of her family and of their gifts, and of protecting them and the town. 

At first, I thought based on the opening Lin-Manuel Miranda song, which actually does go through all of these characters in quick succession, that perhaps her skill was as a storyteller. Their abuela is the matriarch and protector of the family after all, she's old and someone will have to eventually take her place, and the rest of her family seemed to be trying to find ways to move on with their personal lives. Again, this is also more complicated. Mirabel is quite complicated. In fact, it took me a minute to realize who I really think she reminded me of, and I couldn't confirm this, but I wouldn't be surprised if she was inspired by Vanessa Marquez's character in "Stand and Deliver". The young, really smart girl, Ana, the quiet shy one who does also wear glasses periodically in that film, but has a homelife where she has to help out the family restaurant business, and almost drops out of school because of it. Mirabel, feels like a similar smart character who's out-of-step from her caring but flawed family and has to struggle to find a way to appease them, and herself. I didn't find any evidence of a direct influence, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was there; she was always my favorite from that film, and I got the same good vibes from Mirabel that I always liked seeing from Ana. (Sidenote: BTW, I looked up the real Ana Delgado, to see whatever happened to her; apparently she was the only one of the students in that film who were directly inspired by an actual person and her life did turn out pretty successfully after. That said, um Vanessa Marquez's life, um, did not.... it's actually really tragic what happened to her and I didn't know about it until I looked it up. If you ever get a minute, google her and shed a tear for her.)  

The movie itself, like most Disney films recently, on the surface, is fairly predictable. We start with this beloved perfect world, and then, we start suspecting that something's off with the world, in this case, Maribel starts seeing cracks, literally appearing around the enchanted house. Nobody else sees them, at least publicly, but eventually, it becomes known how fragile the house and the family dynamic actually is. Obviously, this movie is basically a huge metaphor for the internal struggles of families, and how they will often try to eradicate those elements when they fear them. Obviously, the most notable one from this movie is Bruno (John Leguizamo) who was found to see the future and apparently was the first to see the cracks. He was tossed out of the family years ago for it, and has since been secretly living within the halls of the house, "Parasite"-style looking over the family, concerned as their gifts have been eroding. The metaphor is also too obvious in this case, but I can see why it's an important film to be made. In fact, I really should be more mad at this movie; it's problem and solution is petty simple when you break it down, but the way it's revealed and discovered is good.

"Encanto" is a rare Disney film that gives us a complex but loving complete family, and is about the family coming to help strengthen their bond. Usually Disney films are often about the struggle to find or reconnect with family in some ways from having been lost from it, but here's a film about a family starting off well,-, relatively well on the surface anyway, and then overcoming their own obstacles to be back to fulfilled again. It's inspiring and unique in its own way. As for the film, perhaps there's potential for more fulfilling stories in sequels, but I still liked this a lot. The music helps, Lin-Manuel Miranda could probably be given a potato and he would manage to make it an entertaining three-star musical, but "Encanto" shows how we can be "Enchanted", and yet, still have to struggle to stay together and that even the happiest of families still have secrets they have to overcome and come together on.  It's different enough and done well, and for that, it's an easy recommend. 


HOUSE OF GUCCI (2021) Director: Ridley Scott

⭐⭐1/2


I gotta be a little honest here, of all the tabloid fodder that paraded through that most alien of time periods that we mysteriously call the 1990s, the murder of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), done by a hitman paid off by his wife Patrizia (Lady Gaga), and the circus of the trial therein, was kinda off my radar. I imagine this may have been bigger in Europe, as for us, at that point, we were just done with the epic that was the O.J. Simpson trial and frankly sports is much bigger than fashion in this country, especially American football. Honestly, Gucci, as a brand and image,- uh, you know, I'm not anti-fashion per se, I mean, I'm watching the new season of "Making the Cut" while I'm writing this in fact, but the name,- in fact a lot of the big names in fashion in recent, I feel like have become so shorthand for something luxurious or exquisite, that honestly I kinda feel like the appeal has been lost on me. In fact, I actually know someone who constantly uses the word "gucci" as a way of saying something, anything, is "Good", and it's not like I don't like Gucci, or think it's bad, but y'know, I-eh, I don't know. I mean, it's- yes, Guccio Gucci did start the idea of leather hand bags that he noticed appealed to the customers he was serving as a bellhop, and he was an entrepreneur and even though Gucci itself is more of a brand, a label, than a specific idea of fashion anymore, I still feel like, we're kind of way off using a designer's name as just a pronoun for good. (Especially in the urban and hip hop communities, like, what is your deal with Italian fashion designers, exactly? Even this movie basically tells you at one point that the "fakes" or  "replicas" of their own items are often just as good. Or, as long as your going through fashion history books anyway, how about we use "Chanel" as a pronoun for exquisite more often? Or St. Laurent? or Dior? Of Van Furstenberg? Or Ann Lowe?)

Anyway, most of that wasn't what I was thinking of anyway during this film. Mostly, I was thinking a lot about how generally underwhelmed I usually am with Ridley Scott's films. Seriously, for a household name director, he's got one of least compelling filmographies I can think of for any great director. And he is a great director; I'll always give him that even I think much of his work is overrated, the guy's made more than his fair share of great films, and yet, for a lot of his supposed best films he's always had some storytelling tendencies that I just find frustrating. Oddly, I won't go over most of them here, even though this movie did in fact, feel like it had like, six or seven endings.... The main observation I had was that this is kind of a strange subject matter to discuss to begin with, and after thinking it through, this wasn't the best way to tell it. 

This is definitely a film that might've been way more compelling if say, the people behind "I, Tonya" had written and made it. But, man it did get me thinking that, Ridley Scott's apparently been into a lot of stories about the foils of the privileged lately. Or the rich. Just something I've noticed, to me, unless he's doing sci-fi stuff, his most notable recent films have been about people with money, sometimes it's about the unscrupulous ways they get them, but most of the time it's about their erratic behaviors. "The Counselor", "All the Money in the World" and now, "House of Gucci". That's what's always kinda befuddled me about Ridley Scott, he's the biggest name director who you just can't get an auteur-like read on. Stylistically you can, but content-wise, I never know what he's gonna make and worst than that, I never know why either. 

It's just weird. And I know that are plenty of great directors who are infamous and well-known for being chameleons, two of Scott's British director compatriots that come to my mind are Stephen Frears and Michael Winterbottom in this regard. Yet, it doesn't bother me with them, partly because Ridley's constantly put on a taller pedestal, but also their films are also done much more on indy-film level scales and while they are chameleons, there's definitely more definable trends in their work and inspiration. Ridley, is a big time Hollywood director and every time I hear somebody try to list themes to his oeuvre, I feel like I'm hearing things that apply to, maybe a quarter of his films, maybe. Like, the guy's in the science-fiction Hall of Fame, and yet, I never think of him as a science fiction director. Maybe it's because I'm the weirdo who thinks both "Alien" and "Blade Runner" are both highly overrated, but-, I think it's more that I just never get a sense from his films about what he's actually passionate about. (Maybe that's why everybody singles out "Blade Runner"; perhaps Ridley Scott is just a replicant who's inspired by the false memories that have been put inside him and now he's making his movie choices believing that they're something about them that he relates to closely, but he's unaware that those memories and personal instincts themselves aren't real? Well, that's my theory anyway...)

Anyway, I guess I thought a lot about that 'cause I had a very hard time caring about this film. Scott himself has called this film a satire; um, yeah, I can kinda see that, but eh, he's not exactly a great comedic director.... This movie definitely could appeal to some; this wouldn't be a bad film to put on to make fun of at times, and not because it's bad, because it just is a little too over-the-top at times. It's a story of a rich aristocratic family with an outrageous outsider character joining in and it's all very soap opera melodrama. I mean, Salma Hayek plays Patrizia's best friend who happens to be a high-end psychic that advertises on TV. That's before we get into Jared Leto's weird role as Paolo Gucci a failed designer who was basically the Fredo of the brothers. Oh yeah, the Gucci legacy is actually pretty familial, and before Patrizia just goes ape-shit mad, she orchestrates how her husband Mauricio manages to overtake through legal and questionable means the family business from the elder Gucci's the New York based Aldo (Al Pacino) and the Milan-based Rudolpho (Jeremy Irons). Paolo is Mauricio's brother who's put up with, but is basically too incompetent for anybody to really trust with anything serious, and it's him who gets manipulated into selling his shares. Nice makeup jobs, and mostly good acting all around, but honestly, I wish they focused more on the murder and trial instead. A lot of this history is just not as compelling as they think it is. 

Well, maybe it is in some fashion circles. For a film comparison, there's a lot of similar ownership drama involving the Warner Brothers and their studios and brands and IP over the decades, and it does intrigue me, but that I don't think about it every time I see a Warner Brothers logo before a film or a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and I don't think about the struggles over the ownership and rebranding of Gucci every time I see a leather handbag with it's logo on it. There are interesting characters here, but "House of Gucci" is a painfully narrow tale to watch. It's a movie that makes the simple mistake of having a film be more about the extravagance and popularity of the brand as opposed to creating a compelling story narrative about the people behind the brand. There are moments where it tries to show it, but yeah, maybe a director with more vision and care could've pulled this off. I'm sure Ridley Scott got whatever compelled him to make this film out of his system and had it fulfilled, but many, I just never know exactly what that is from watching his films. as for me, I just found myself struggling to much to find a reason for me to care enough about this story.   


TEST PATTERN (2021) Director: Shatara Michelle Ford

⭐⭐⭐⭐


I don't normally look through the User Reviews on IMDB.com, because...- well, because they're user reviews on IMDB.com, of all amateur critic reviews, they're by a large margin, the absolute least credible or worth looking into, but I was scrolling down the page, I caught one of them, and-eh, yikes....! I won't say which of the reviews for "Test Pattern" popped up on the front page, or quote it directly, mainly because I don't want to give this ignorant asshole any form of acknowledgement, but trust me, even saying that doesn't narrow it down as much as you'd think it would. Man, there are some real ignoramuses who write what they think are their "hot takes" on this film in particular. ("Ignoramus" is the nice word I would use to describe them btw. Some might find it hard to believe but I do actually censor myself here.) 

Anyway, some of those (finger quotes) "reviews" (blows raspberries) ring as being especially horrid considering the subject matter of "Test Pattern", the low-budget indy from first-time writer/director Shatara Michelle Ford. The movie begins  following the early parts of the romance between Renesha and Evan. (Brittany S. Hall and Will Brill) She's an African-American corporate worker who eventually begins transitioning to working on the business end of social work, while Will is a white tattoo artist, and they seem quite lovely together. Very caring and knowing how to give each other space when needed and love when needed. The next major sequence is Renesha going out with her friend Amber (Gail Bean) the night before she starts her new job. Evan, is not worried, not jealous, nor should he be. The two girls do connect with a couple of guys, Mike and Chris (Drew Fuller and Ben Levin) while out at the bar. 

Then, the movie takes a very dark turn. I should warn people who might be sensitive to talk of sexual assault, but yeah, while Amber seems okay, Renesha has a bad reaction to an edible and inevitably blacks out, and wakes up on one of the guy's bed, and with one of the guys. She doesn't remember what happened but she knows something bad did, and doesn't quite know what to do about it. Much of the rest of the movie is something I've never actually thought about before, but after I did think about it, the nightmare possibility scenarios did begin to go through my head, as Evan drives Renesha around from medical center to medical center, searching for somebody to administer a rape kit. 

Now, a normal and admittedly trivial movie, might use this time to have some kind of great conflict between these characters, probably one where, in an effort to blow off steam, the boyfriend would become angry, unsupportive and begin making some backhanded statements about how and why she ended up in such a position. "Test Pattern", doesn't do that. Oh, he's definitely mad, in fact he's madder than she seems to be. She seems content to forget the whole situation entirely, especially as it does get comically and tragically more and more difficult and ridiculous to find a place that A. has rape kits and B. has somebody who's actually certified to use them. Yeah, I didn't know this either until I looked it up, but in America they're called Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners, or SANEs, and because of how invasive, time consuming and possibly traumatizing the rape kits themselves are to conduct-, well, it's not always a requirement that administrators be trained, but it's not exactly a bad idea, especially considering that this is a process of gathering evidence for the police. and there are ways in order to preserve that evidence without tampering or compromising it, that a regular, standard-issue nurse might not be astute or aware of how to do it. And, not every medical facility has them on hand, and this frustrates the boyfriend who basically wants to get whoever did this, while the wife would rather, just want to forget the whole night and day.
 
Maybe I'm just a guy, but I relate to Evan here; this guy drugged and assaulted his girlfriend and he'll do it again to someone else. I get his anger and I like that, it's not him blaming her and while she's nowhere near being the most comfortable she could be, nor how comforting he could be in this situation, but...., mostly we get her perspective and that means, it's all traumatic, insidious, and very useless. Like, the whole affair, and just how things can happen to her and even after going through that, and everything that comes after, and still have little-to-nothing done, that kind of uselessness, where the system's basically too weak to protect her. Or designed not to. 

"Test Pattern" is fairly minimal overall, It's barely 80 minutes long and doesn't come with any satisfactory ending. I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be shocked if this film was at least a little autobiographical, and it's nakedness is basically just an attempt to document not just the events, but to get to the core emotions afterwards. This feeling that everything around you is freaking out and scared, but you're just trying to block out all such noise in an effort to shelter one's own pains and traumas of being violated. "Test Pattern" is a good title for this, and it is the peoples' reactions to these events and how they're portrayed that says more about the audience than the film and story itself. This is a movie that's definitely intended to show and reveal our biases while it shows it's flaws in society and the system's treatment of rape victims, and how we perceive them, and for that, I think it more-than-accomplishes it's goal. Strong, memorable and albeit, disturbing first feature film. 


AZOR (2021) Director: Andreas Fontana

⭐⭐⭐⭐


It's always at times where a country needs major reforms, isn't it? It's never when the country, is just doing okay, or just needs a few changes. That's what a bellhop at the beginning of "Azor" tells the movie's protagonist Yvan (Fabrizio Rongione) when asked about some of the country's delays he's noticed when getting into town. I'm not entirely sure, if it's always when the country was actually in a bad place, when dictators would rule to power, or if perhaps that's only what the propaganda that they themselves probably perpetuated said, but it's not incorrect to say that most countries are indeed struggling at the time. I mean, the trains really did used to run late in Italy. 

It's something that peppers along the edges of "Azor", the debut feature by Swiss filmmaker Andreas Fontana, a Carol Reed meets Joseph Conrad mystery that dives deep into the depths of rule under dictatorship. Yvan and his wife Ines (Sephanie Cleau) travel to Argentina searching for Yvan's partner in banking Keys. They're Swiss bankers who have quite a few customers among the Argentinean upper crust, but his banking partner has become missing.

He's not the only one though. The more he dives into the sophisticated world, the deeper in the nation's underbelly he goes. The movie takes place in 1980, four years after Videla headed a military junta to overthrow Isabel Peron, and this would've been right in the middle of what's been called the nations "Dirty War", a time when, well, a lot of Argentineans who protested, criticized or rejected the military dictatorial rule, were suddenly apart of "Los Desparacidos" or "The Disappeared". 

It's a weird kind of mystery where we'll dealing with a search for what happened to a missing comrade, but essentially you're there to ensure everyone he was working with that the job of handling their money is still secure. Swiss banking is of course infamous for it's strict adherence to privacy and it's severe lack of quality control over it's clientele, so while, in the streets there's murder and crimes against the public going on, we're actually getting guided through this journey of capitalist corruption, through the eyes, of another person participated in that corruption essentially, but he's seeing it from a differing perspective. I saw a lot of Conrad comparisons in the reviews, and by the end, he actually is travelling down a river into a literal jungle, looking for his Kurtz, but he never does find his "friend", he just finds the situation and the country, and perhaps himself, deeper and deeper into this world of dictatorship.  

Of course, why go down that trip down a river when there's a rooftop pool one could traverse at the hotel you're at? "Azor" is a complex film that says a lot about authority and genocidal dictatorship and those who help fund their orchestrations. It shows how easily some can get suckered into such a world, especially when you're surrounded by it and only observe the horrors of the world from, the inside of the cab you're taking, at a distance. Or even if you do see it, you just remember, just how bad it was beforehand....


ANNE AT 13,000 FT. (2021) Director: Kazik Radwanski 

⭐1/2


There aren't too many genres that are genuinely guarantee to always pissed me off, but "Anne at 13,000 Ft." is definitely a good member of one of them. It's that classic indy genre I call, "Movie Where You Keep Waiting To Find Out What-The-Fuck's With This Person, And Then They Never Tell You"! Or as I sometimes might call it, "The Other Parker Posey Indy Film Genre." It's slightly different than the normal "Parker Posey Indy", where you only have like half of a movie written out, so you cast Parker Posey as a lead and hope that if she'll go as over-the-top and ridiculous as possible, and somehow by doing that, you'll end up with a full movie. No, this is the other version, where the main character just keeps acting out in weird ways and you keep waiting and wondering for why and what the great reveal of this character's behavior is going to be, and then eventually, you don't really get an answer, she just, apparently is that. I don't really associate Parker Posey with this genre, although she's definitely been in a couple, but my usual go to example for this genre is Tea Leoni's performance in "Spanglish", but despite how batshit what-the-fuck performance that was, it's not really the best example in this case. These are small indy drama films where we focus in on a troubled erratic character, often, usually a young attractive woman like Anne (Deragh Campbell), who's behavior is just so bizarre and out there, but she's still somewhat sympathetic and you're just trying to figure out why she's acting in such ways, and then, they don't really get to a good answer or any answer really.

Not that you necessarily need a good answer for films like these mind you; in fact there are actually some really good films that have this structure, but the best of these, do reveal and filter through, not complete answers always, but they give us more exact indications as to why these characters act in the ways that they do. Patty Jenkins's "Monster" with Charlize Theron's performance for instance, can easily fit this. One of my more favorite recent ones is Adam Salky's "I Smile Back" which has a very underrated performance from Sarah Silverman at it's core, but in those films, they dive way more into why a character is like that. "Anne at 13,000 Ft.", it-, I don't want to say it doesn't have an answer to it, but boy, it's not a real good one. Basically Anne acts in these ways where she's constantly struggling to get her grip on the world, because she went skydiving.

Skydiving????

Yeah, skydiving. This is supposed to sorta explain why she's a trainwreck, I think; I guess? 

This is actually a Canadian film, so-eh, perhaps there's some kind of stigma or cliche about skydivers in Canada that I'm just not aware of, maybe? There's a decent chance that I could just be missing something here. Well, okay, maybe I am missing a little bit; I've never skydived myself, but I do know that people who skydive a lot, tend to enjoy it, (At least I hope they do; that'd be a dumb thing to keep doing if you really hated doing it) but I've also heard that the reason that a lot of them do it, on top of the adrenaline rush obviously, is that they're often more, "at home" or "at ease" in the air, than they are when they're simply going about the regular goings-on of the day. I've heard similar anecdotes about a lot of extreme activities in fact, people struggle with the benign and trivial realities of life and so they find activities like skydiving to help them get through that. (Shrugs) The thing is so, with this film, it kinda feels like, we start with the skydiving and then the main character Anne, starts behaving strangely to the world, which, I'm not sure that's how that works. I think it's more likely that people who are already struggling with their environments and then they find a sense of relief with activities like skydiving. Is this why she's like the worst elementary school teacher who's constantly complaining and getting belittled by all the other teachers because she comes in late, doesn't sign in for work, or throws water on teachers who are trying to help her, under some vague threat of feeling closed in? Is this why her dating life is a mess? Or her homelife? It's all erratic in ways that you keep feeling like there's gotta be more going on here. We don't get any solutions or answers and the last shot is of Anne, being the last one to exit a plane, by skydiving, and, I assume her parachute works and all, but I don't know, she really likes skydiving and everything else is kinda just, bleh?

I feel like there's gotta more to this. I was stunned when looking this film up that it took two years to film, it's barely 75 minutes long, and frankly felt like it was stretching for that; I would thought this was shot in like, a month, at most two months. I have a few suspicions about this, perhaps there is a greater, more deeper script but it got sliced heavily in the editing room, or during shooting they could barely get enough time and money together to shoot the material they had and that means they didn't quite get enough? Or it was too thin on the page and he just kept shooting and shooting and possibly improvising a lot, until he had enough to sorta cobble together for a feature. I'm speculating on this here, I'm not too familiar with the film's director Kazik Radwanski, but he's mostly known documentaries for television and short films before; this is only his third feature film but his other two features, at least by their descriptions, "Tower" and "How Heavy This Hammer" sound like similar kinds of meandering slice-of-life pieces, but they also sound way more interesting and much more like they're telling a full story, or at the very least, giving a full and perhaps more complex character arc. They seem way more thought through. "Anne at 13,000 Ft." I think had potential; maybe if they showed real differences and distinctions between Anne, before she goes on her first skydiving adventure and then seeing a lot of these interactions afterwards, and really showing how the experience changed and shifted her, I think it would be more compelling and I'd be more accepting of some of her stumbles through work and life, but here, it just seems like a character who stumbles through life, had always stumbled through life, and she stumbles through it so badly that you're downright amazed that she somehow was competent enough to become an elementary school teacher, and after she stumbled into skydiving, she's now stumbling with an obsession of going skydiving? 

Honestly, she seems way more like the unstable best friend Jo, played by Norma Kuhling in Dan Sallitt's film "Fourteen", a character who goes through severe undiagnosed and diagnosed mental disorders and drug addiction before dying too young, which, might possibly be true for this character, but I don't think that was the intent. 

There's potential here, but as this films stands, on a letter grade of A-F though, it's an incomplete. 


BEANS (2020) Director: Tracey Deer

⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

  

George Carlin was right about golf courses. He was right about a lot of things, but whether you admire, participate or like the sport or not, it is a stupid amount of wasted land and there are too many of them out there, and they should be retaken by the public. Or, in this case, the rightful owners. 

"Beans" is a Canadian film, but really it's a Mohawk film. It's filmmaker Tracey Deer grew up on the Kahnawake First Nations Reserve in Quebec, and was the creator/producer of the series "Mohawk Girls". which was kinda the First Nations version of "Girls". "Beans" is titular nickname of 12-year-old Tekehentahkhwa (Kiawentiio) a young Mohawk girl who's life and family get caught up in Kanesatake Resistance. Or, as it was known more often at the time, the Oka Crisis. 

If you're a millennial American like me, you'll probably have little-to-no recollection of this, even if, again, like me, you were alive through all of this.... Okay, so Oka, Quebec is right on the Ottawa River, it's about 30 miles west of Montreal, and near the Reserve. Brief history of Canada treatment of Indigenous Peoples, um,... think of America and Indigenous People and it's about the same, and maybe worst even, somehow.... I'd be here all day if I go into everything, but for our purposes, there was a land dispute that involved Oka wanting to build a golf course on property claimed by the Mohawk. Eventually, Now, this original dispute went all the way through the courts before a small golf course was built, but when they wanted to expand the golf course over more land, the city used that original ruling to claim that it was their property and despite stiff resistance and protest, refused to even consider or acknowledge the Mohawk's claim. The Mohawk people, refused to let this go through. This lead to a severe standoff between them; it's one of the few really big and violent and yes, deadly disputes to take place in the Americas between Indigenous Peoples and national government in the late 20th Century, and this Resistance lasted a couple months, and, there are documentaries and other texts that go over all the details, and we see it play out through Beans's eyes here, 'cause this thing lasted well over two months, including bringing in several policing forces- and all over a goddamn golf course of all things.... I don't think you could've concocted something more moustache-twirling cliche and evil if you tried. 

It's at this time that Beans is caught in the middle of several growing crossroads here. At the beginning of the movie, we see her in a school interview that her mother Lily (Rainbow Dickerson) was pushing for at an exclusive mainly white private school. She's smart enough to go of course, but once the Resistance starts, she begins to get disappointed and disillusioned with some of the expectations after experience the racism and violence first-hand. She also befriends a tough, older Mohawk girl, April (Paulina Alexis) who she sees as inspiration for her outspoken don't-give-a-fuck demeanor. Once she gets in with her, she becomes influenced by her. Making her clothes slightly more adult and modern, starting to use more cursed language, and even, during one weird bonding moment, eh, whippings with a stick, so that she can learn to live with pain...- That part was weird, but I kinda got it, when afterwards she starts cutting herself after flipping out after the family car was attacked by rock-throwing Quebec protestors and the cops that didn't do anything to protect her. Only in Quebec can "They don't even speak French" be considered an insult to people who speak English. (Oh yeah, eh, Quebec is weird. I know we all like to link all of Canada together as though they're all just they're own land, but there are different parts of the country and different traditions and such, and without going into too much detail, eh, Quebec is like their weird province. [Especially back then, I might add, 'cause there was actually a lot going on in the province back in the '90s, people forget that now, but it was fairly contentious there on multiple fronts.{I mean, contentious for Canada at least, but still....}])

Beans also has a tender crush on April's brother Hank (D'Pharoah Woon-a-Thai), who's probably not the greatest choice for a first crush, and also, her relationship with her younger sister Ruby (Violah Beauvais) who admires her, begins to get suddenly strained, but as things get worst around everyone from the Resistance and as Beans starts acting out in response, she gets caught up in the middle. 

Believe it or not, I'm still kinda being vague about a lot of the events in the film; it's ultimately a coming-of-age story, but even then, there's a lot of life going on here and it's not just as simple as one side vs. another; it's a complicated film that has more layers to it. Like how April's family is much more troubled than Beans but she doesn't quite see that on first glance and only kinda eventually realizes it. In some ways the Mohawk deal with the same problems as we do, and in others there's deeper and more troubling contexts to their problems that resonate far deeper from centuries-old wounds that will never heal. 

For those curious, eventually the Tribes and several of the nation's liberal and empathetic Canadians begin to come together and defend the Mohawk from the impeding militarization of the conflict and the government eventually bought out the land, cancelling the golf course, although the land still remains in the government's control, not the Mohawk. As for "Beans", she finds herself, probably in a little too cliche a tidy-up manner, almost going for a little too much symbolism in the end, but it works. It's both a good reminder of a very dark time in recent history, and also shows the struggle of having to grow up, not just in the shadow, but right in the crossfire of the conflict. It's a bit of a story of a war-torn country with Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen" in the middle, but sometimes the story at the center of your own life will differ greatly than the one going on outside that'll be written about in history books. 


RAMS (2020) Director: Jeremy Sims

⭐⭐⭐


"Rams" is a curious little film. It's an Australian film that's a remake of an Icelandic film. Now Australian cinema has it's own quirks that fascinate me, but Icelandic cinema is a little more of a mystery to me, but I had heard of "Rams"; the film was their submission for the Foreign Language Oscar film that year, and it's a highly beloved film there. One publication called it the 2nd greatest Icelandic film of all-time! That's high praise. Unfortunately I haven't seen that original film yet; it's on my Netflix queue, and I'll get to it eventually. but I'm not surprised this was an Icelandic film first. However, I'd also buy it if you told me this film was Australian. Both countries, are surprisingly similar in a lot of ways, one of them, is their farming traditions, especially sheep farming.

"Rams" is about two brothers, Colin (Sam Neill) and Les (Michael Caton), who are neighboring sheep farmers, often competing in local competitions, but never talking to each other.  We don't get exactly why they're so at odds, and why it's been going on for, apparently several decades. Things change after one of Les's prized sheep are diagnosed with Ovine John's Disease, or OJD. It's a pretty nasty disease and it can spread like a pandemic. The whole Western Australian area is in trouble, which is sparsely populated an they're in a heavily sheep-farming area, and now, all the sheep have to be killed because of how serious the disease is. This puts the whole town and especially the two brothers at odds. Colin is the more dependable farmer, who seems to be obliging by the federal regulators who are coming in to oversee the humane slaughtering of all the sheep in the region, with compensation for the inconvenience, but such a change to the area. Both brothers inevitably find a way to fight against the government's attempts to cleanse the area. 

Western Australia is actually fairly known for having been free of this disease, so I imagine something similar has either happened there, or this story is a warning or an imagining of what could happen if that changes. The movie has a somber feeling for most of the film, especially as so little is revealed and so slowly about why these two brothers don't get along. Actually, this strange disagreement oddly reminded me of Walter Salles "Behind the Sun", and the conflict between the two families in that film, which is weird 'cause tonally that's not at all comparable, although that was a film based off of a European text that was adapted to be told in a completely different part of the world. I can't tell if this kind of tension is just common, or perhaps if this Eurocentric idea of conflict kinda contrasts with the location here. It seems reasonable enough though. 

The film was directed by Jeremy Sims, the guy behind "Last Cab to Darwin", an intriguing road movie that dealt with a man dealing with his own impending death. So far, I can't quite get a read on him as a filmmaker, but "Rams" is probably a little better. I think I would've enjoyed it more if I didn't see it after a surviving a pandemic. Sam Neill is really good here, and Miranda Richardson is strong as the local veterinarian who likes Colin, but isn't really willing to make any real leap romantically, hell he can't even talk to his brother who literally owns the shed next to him, and they're both grazing sheep that came from their father's own lineage and barn. I do like how the movie inevitably comes together and reveals itself at the end, but it also portrays the government in this instance as particularly douchey. Apparently the ending from the original was changed from a snowstorm to a fire where the climax ends; I think that was a good idea, but I think the film had ultimately dried up for me by then. I might appreciate it more when I finally get around to the original, but I don't like it that much more. For what's good about it, it's worth recommending.