"Accomplishments"In theaters: Jack Quaid feels no pain in Novocaine - a real-life medical condition, though I expect his character would have died of shock regardless at some point during this - and uses his "power" to save the woman he loves (Amber Midthunder from Prey) after she.s taken hostage by bank robbers. Not gonna lie, I could have stayed in the romantic comedy all the way through - a very charming and romantic beginning for two broken, but good-hearted characters. It must, of course, turn into an insane action comedy, and a very gory one at that, with our boy Nathan (Novo) Caine tracking and fighting bad guys while taking incredible amounts of punishment. And when you think it's over, someone gets up and we're back into it. The joke is that, in action movies, people ignore pain and sepsis all the time, it's not just him. But being a tall, skinny nerd doing all this stuff is what makes it extra amusing. A lot of fun ultra-violence mixed in with the romance.
At home: A real Robert Townsend showpiece, both as performer and director, Hollywood Shuffle is a pleasant and sometimes savage satire of Hollywood from the African-American point of view. Townsend plays a struggling actor in a world where roles for black actors are restricted to stereotypes - oh wait, that's OUR world! Well, it's an extreme caricature of our world, especially in the 1980s, where "Bobby" dreams of playing heroes (Townsend prefigures his own Meteor Man in one sequence) rather than crooks and slaves, filling the run time with movie parodies both in the world and Bobby's imagination, using the same cast of actors across all realities. He makes some great points throughout and, in a way, manifests better roles for himself. But it would be true to say that the sketch comedy pacing can be troublesome and slow things down too much. The Siskel and Ebert bit, for example, is extremely long and the film clips aren't all that funny. Things like the School for Black Actors advert are much better. But if this is an audition reel for Townsend, he shows he can do it all.
Though one might see films like 2024's Ghostlight as part of a subgenre typified as "healing through art" - and that certainly wouldn't be a lie - the more interesting subgenre at play, for me, is "person discovers art for the first time". In this case, Keith Kupferer is a construction worker who has artistic kids, but it's a little far from his experience. By accident, really, he joins a community theater troupe putting on Romeo and Juliet, not realizing its events mirror his own family tragedy. Poignant, perhaps even more thanks to the casting of his real life family in the roles, the film's tearjerking elements are balanced by a healthy dose of humor at the expense of the group of oddball thespians trying to put on something they are woefully miscast for. But I think Romeo and Juliet CAN be done with an older cast, the impatient lovers of the original thinking "there will never be another love", while older lovers my express a "last chance" with just as much recklessness. Dolly de Leon (the best part of Triangle of Sadness) becomes his partner in art and is an irascible delight. Funny and sad and cathartic, like Shakespeare itself.
Jacques Rivette's first film, made at the start of the French New Wave movement, is the kind of French film that's normally parodied in American media. The characters in Paris Belongs to Us are intellectuals with theatrical deliveries, the women cold and inexpressive, the men on the opposite end of the spectrum. In this case, the setting IS, at least partially, the world of theater, and a trouble French production of Shakespeare's Pericles - a play that's largely unstageable. Perhaps Rivette was commenting on his own Freshman attempt. To me, the film is really about Cold War-era intellectual paranoia, where bourgeois artists talk like revolutionaries, at the risk of getting nabbed or killed by the State. And while art can certainly prove subversive, it feels rather satirical to say so here. They say just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you. But maybe they really aren't. Betty Schneider is Anne Goupil, a kind of participating witness to the conspiratorial melodrama, her fruitless investigations kind of like the "art" made (or attempted) by other characters. Rivette would go on to better things, but that's not to say this isn't a legitimately well-made picture. It's just that, decades on, it does feel of its time, and not so much of ours.
Rivette's L'Amour par terre (Love on the Ground) stars Jane Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin as tight-knit friends, two Anglo actresses in France, giving us every hope that this would be a nice follow-up to Céline and Julie Go Boating. What we get is more like Duelle, with a certain measure of symbolist surrealism, a very strange house, and the friendship tested by a play that mirrors the playwright's real-life drama and drags them into similar love quadrangles. Rivette is extremely playful here, invoking Shakespeare obliquely, crafting interestingly odd characters to court and confuse the leads, and playing with time with a subplot about visions that may or may not come true. He's so playful, I don't think one can get everything on a single viewing, but at almost three hours, additional viewings may be rare. Worth revisiting for sure because it's a witty play on his first feature, where perhaps pointless mysteries are investigated by participant witnesses rehearsing a play. Its humor makes it better film.
Lee Chang-dong's Poetry stars Yoon Jeong-hee as a grandmother who takes a poetry class, and there are several mentions of her probably being a heartbreaker when she was younger, and indeed, she was Miss Korea 1964 and the ingenue in hundreds of films in the 60s and 70s. So perhaps the casting is part of the theme of the film as this woman now finds herself facing cognitive decline - making the writing of a poem that much urgent before the words all go - and her grandson's moral decline and his possible connection to a young suicide, a girl who will never get to grow old. There's something about restrained emotions that I find incredibly poignant - more so than explosively emotional performances - and Asian cinema delivers more than its Western cousin. Tragedy abounds, but also grace, and the moral quandary in which Yoon's character finds herself, one which she seems clueless about, has to play out without words. She's confronted to a blank page in every facet of her life, but the blockage is about to fall...
[Guyana] A documentary about (British) Guyana's struggle for independence in the face of a repressive colonial regime in the 1950s, The Terror and the Time embraces poetics to tell the story rather than straightforward storytelling techniques. There are few talking heads, and much of the information comes to us in a furious montage of newspaper clippings, period photos and film clips. These pacey sequences are intercut with slow, lyrical interludes in which Guyana's national poet, Martin Carter, reads works written in the period, experiential images that apparently had a revolutionary influence on the oppressed. There are facts (some of which, sad to say, speak to our present moment rather clearly), but they take a back seat to the FEELING of being in a cycle of oppression/revolution. T&T (explosive in its way) is a Part I, but no Part II or III were made, unless the brief epilogues are it. No matter. Even as an unfinished work, there's a lot to take in.
[French Guyana] Martin Carter's poetry. A 1990s biopic flickering in single seconds. Naturalistic sound over black screens. Nou Voix is too experimental to really say what it's reaching to say about the relationship between film and history.
[Suriname] In Sranan Folktales: Arki Den Bigi Sma, half a dozen young people sit around a fire telling ghost stories, the frame tale for an anthology where modernity intersects with the past, where elders know make dark warnings about the supernatural, and young people glued to their phones don't heed them. It presents a recognizably modern (read: Americanized) Suriname where things out of local folk tales nevertheless exist. And in that way, it's got a certain wry humor, and the actors are, on the whole, engaging. But at under 40 minutes, their experiences with the unnatural are necessarily under-developed. Only the last couple have any real meat on the bone, with the last tale worth the price of admission given its twists and how it connects to the frame tale itself. But those early ones are so brief, you might want to tap out early from hunger.
[Bolivia] Blackthorn explores the notion that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid DIDN'T die at the Bolivian army's hands, with an aged Butch (Sam Shepard) raising horses in that country in the 1920s. As he's about to return to the States, a chance meeting with a Spaniard on the run sets him on a different, and potentially tragic, course. Because he's an outlaw defined by a friendship, it becomes his blind spot in the movie, embracing the other man and putting himself at risk. I like the relationship and where it's all heading, and the South American landscapes are beautifully dramatic, but Blackthorn does have pacing issues. The flashbacks to an earlier time when Butch and Sundance are together, while containing elements of import to the psychology of the man and his story, allow one's attention to stray and slow down an already fairly slow affair. In the end, good performances and cinematography, but it's hard to get too enthusiastic about this "final western".
[Paraguay] Making good use of small mobile cameras to get you into the action with immediacy, 7 Boxes sees "wheelbarrow boy" Victor spend his time running around Asunción's markets with suspicious packages, avoiding cops and his gangstery rival. There are some cool foot chases, a fun and somewhat irritating Gal Friday character, a larger and nastier crime plot, and a setting we haven't seen a hundred times in other movies. I do wish Victor had more sympathetic motivations - it's basically fame and fortune, and he doesn't really have an arc that leaves room for much growth - so I rather see his sister as the hero of the piece. She's part of a web of interconnectivity that some will call too coincidental, but I have no problem with it. After all, this is all about getting a cellphone, so interconnectedness is baked in. Formally, it's too early for a film shot entirely on an iPhone, but 7 Boxes looks it. A fun little thriller.
[Uruguay] There's a kind of paranoia that comes from having a new baby. Over-protectiveness. Not letting them out of one's sight. Worrying you're doing parenting wrong. And My Friend from the Park captures that feeling and, though Julieta Zylberberg's performance, transmits it to the audience. Where it complicates matters is when the eponymous friend (director Ana Katz) starts seeming sinister because of that paranoia. She's a bit of a mess, and perhaps unreliable, but are we freely sharing in a delusion in thinking her dangerous? Or are we, and Zylberberg's Liz warranted in our fears? Hey, just because you're paranoid... you know the rest. This is a portrait of those early months with New Baby, and "arcing" comes late, if at all. I'm not disappointed by the ending, but I thought I was going to be almost to the credit roll, if that makes any sense.
Books: I am rather disappointed in Vertical. Not that Steven T. Seagle was one of Vertigo's prime writers - Sandman Mystery Theater was mostly co-written with Matt Wagner, and even this project seems more "for hire" than most, an editor's idea to tie into the brand name - but even the art falls flat. I love Mike Allred's stuff and I love Philip Bond's stuff, but the latter inking the former looks stiff and scratchy. Never mind the obnoxious digital coloring effects. What Vertical really had going for it is the unusual format, but it's a liability more than a strength. The twinned themes of jumping off tall buildings and falling in love is noted, and there's certainly something interesting about setting this in the very "mod" world of Andy Warhol's Factory, but at 64 pages, it's too short to have much substance. Now consider that the thin strip format means these are, at most, half-pages, and you really have a 32-page "graphic novel", with lots of ideas that fall through the cracks - the nature of the ghost, the meta-textual narration characters can hear... Sad to say, but the verticality here goes mostly down.
Jean Harambat is a French comics artist who mainly works in historical fiction, and The Missing Play uses very real people from 18th-Century England in a (more or less) fictional quest to find Shakespeare's missing play, The History of Cardenio (based on early chapters of Don Quixote). There's a lot of research on show, which makes early pages of the graphic novel feel "educational" (but I'm not complaining seeing as I learned a lot), and the historical underpinnings mean the reader can only expect a Pyrrhic victory at best (or else we'd have the lost play). Our heroine is Peg Woffington, who, with her manservant Sancho (this is all real!) are trying to find the play so she can have its starring role and blow a competing theater out of the water. Along the way, situations will feel like they've been pulled out of a Shakespeare or Cervantes manuscript, and we'll meet several outlandish characters from Neoclassical literary history. Harambat's art, very much in the Eurocomics cartooning mold, is pleasant and expressive, and his writing is witty, even in translation. Recommended, but perhaps mostly to English majors.
Chinese illustrator and comics artist Daishu Ma's first graphic novel, Leaf, is a wordless, and yet poetic, fable about... well... I think it's message needs to be interpreted, even after reading it twice. In terms of plot, it's about a young man who finds a strange glowing leaf in a world where industrialization may have made all the leaves fall, or is using them as a resource... even if, to me, it just reads as Fall. His quest to find out more will eventually lead him down an almost-literal rabbit hole and to some kind of natural restoration, though that hopeful ending is kind of sinister to me. I'm not sure what to make of it. The graphite art, with spots of glowing color, is strong and though used for a comics story, is illustrative in a magazine kind of way. Its weakness lies in the way characters spend several panels silently speaking to each other, a kind of cheat that obscures the story while simultaneously forgetting its own idiom. Still, what mystifies about Leaf means the reader stays engaged longer than with many a wordier tale.
Comments