"Accomplishments"
In theaters: After Past Lives, I knew Celine Song was a writer-director to watch, and while Materialists is designed (or at least marketed) to draw in the romcom crowd, it's just about the smartest romcom most mainstream audiences are likely to have seen in a long time. Dakota Johnson is a pragmatist by trade, a matchmaker who sees relationships as a numbers game and not something she's looking for herself. Until she finds herself between thirst object Pedro Pascal and her messy ex Chris Evans and has a crisis of faith vis à vis her work (what you think it just part of the "comedy interviews" with clients explodes into an important, life-changing subplot). I don't think the outcome is too surprising, but that's not the point. The point is an exploration of modern dating and love (not mutually inclusive) from different points of view. When it's a comedy, it's like someone made a movie out of Bo Burnham's "Lower Your Expectations", but it definitely fits better in the Romance section, and on that score, you get two for the price of one. It has its fantastical (or "romantic") elements, but still full of truth.
At home: An improv coach (Bryce Dallas Howard) and two of her pupils - an over-the-top method actor (a very funny Orlando Bloom) and a newbie who doesn't know much more than "yes, and" (Nick Mohammed) - are roped into a cop's undercover scheme in Deep Cover, a scheme that soon turns very real, but they have to commit to the bit or run the risk of getting whacked. What might save our little troupe is that the bad guys and the cops who are after their "characters" aren't that smart. It's basically a British take on Key and Peel's Keanu, and very amusing. (I would consider rewatching it with subtitles, however, as some of the accents are rather thick.) Now as an improv artist myself, Deep Cover isn't teaching me anything new (much like Howard's improv class which is basic cringe), but it's at least fun to see the basic improv lessons everyone's heard (if not understood) used in a high-stakes crime story. Yeah, it makes improv out to be a loser activity for failing actors, but we're still at that stage of representation. At least, it's representation!
Geraldine Chaplin is just out of prison and returns to her husband Anthony Perkins who's moved on in Remember My Name, a very deftly judged drama that makes you wonder if she's trying to reclaim her old life, take revenge, or simply obsessive. The film only reveals things naturalistically, always resisting exposition, so you revise your idea of what's going on all the way through to the end. A lot of this works because we're seeing a woman who hasn't lived in the real world for twelve years and who has to relearn certain skills even as she works on her plans. There's almost a workplace comedy brewing with young Jeff Goldblum and Alfre Woodard at a local store, and I would have watched the heck out of that too, honestly, even if it sours into curdled drama by the end. Moses Gunn has a great turn as her landlord/super. And a great jazzy soundtrack just enhances what is already a cool, unpredictable film.
Jacques Rivette's Le Pont du Nord is many things. It's a semi-improvisational Quixotic journey through an ugly, industrial Paris. It's a collaboration with his frequent star Bulle Ogier and her daughter Pascale (who would tragically die only three years later), playing strangers of no fixed abode. It seems a play on a primitive board game or fantasy RPG, as the two women navigate a crime thriller going on... somewhere. Some call it political. It's definitely philosophical, whimsical and eccentric. Marie (Bulle) is a claustrophobic ex-con manipulated by the man she loves. Baptiste (Pascale) is her shadow and guide, fighting works of art like the Don tilting at windmills. But while I found it a pleasant series of scenes, I just could never decode its puzzles, as if it changed the rules on me every so often. Right down to the paired endings that threw everything in the waste paper basket again. One to rewatch and reevaluate one day, but THIS day, I don't know what to make of it.
Lee Chang-dong challenged his audience with Oasis, and reviews are correspondingly all over the place, usually based on whether or not they could forgive a certain (attempted) act early in the film (or felt they needed to). So it's not an easy watch. In part because it's very cringy, in party because the depiction of cerebral palsy is extreme enough as to be uncinematic. Some will be offended by the depiction - I'm no expert, but it CAN manifest this way - some by Gong-ju's vivid imagination allowing to share her inner desires with the audience as a kind of cop-out. Part of the difficulty is also that the world is harsh on the people it's rejected, and it's hard to see the romance that develops between the two leads having a happy ending. So Oasis sets itself up to fail, but I personally don't think it does. The male protagonist, Jong-du, is just out of prison and is stunted in his maturity. His crimes even sound like misunderstandings due to his asocial behavior. And he has many things in common with Gong-ju - both are taken advantage of by their families, and both have trouble communicating with others, which gets them into trouble and leads to tragedy. And that's what the oasis is. Not a place, but a relationship that's, at first, perhaps the only one available, but that becomes a fragile sanctuary for the dregs of this society.
All of Jia Zhangke's films I've seen have been raw guerrilla films, but those were made in the early 00s. Ash Is Purest White (2018) is a much slicker piece, though it still shows you the squalid parts of China like no other films will, and of course, still stars his deserving muse Zhao Tao. She plays the girlfriend of a small-town criminal and a very spritely spirit she is. There's just something wonderfully bright about her, like she stands apart from the dark underworld she moves through. And we spend enough time with her that, after she goes to prison for five years to save her man, we can feel the loss of that spirit. Speaking of spirits, he totally ghosts her after she makes this sacrifice and the film is totally unpredictable - and very human - in the way it deals with her quest to find him and get resolution. If one ever gets a resolution when the love is asymmetrical. But the volcanic title perhaps has an answer for us. Destruction may lead to purity, blasting away everything unnecessary...
[Liberia] As its title accidentally suggests, Fragment 53 feels fragmentary, as if the documentary's film makers padded things out with stray footage and tried to wrap it all up with mythological notions. The core of the film is a series of seven interviews with veterans of the civil wars (massacres, genocides) in Liberia, men who - whether traumatized or at peace - have no problem admitting to war crimes and atrocities because they come from a different tradition than the modern soldier who MIGHT have done similar things, but wouldn't frame them so directly. With the inclusion of a kind of warrior-cleric who sees war in mythological terms, we actually get the sense of a talking heads documentary made in ancient times (give or take references to modern armaments), when war WAS more direct and less codified. Calling the interviewees "warriors" also taps into this idea, as does the unfortunate animal sacrifice captured by the camera, and might just justify the somewhat pretentious opener.
[Ivory Coast] I can't believe Philippe Lacôte filmed Night of the Kings actually in la MACA, a notorious Ivorian prison run by the inmates, but it seems to be the case. I don't know how much of the world-building is real beyond that, but there's a lot of it, and I'm not entirely confident I understood everything. Namely, the role of the storyteller - thrust on a new arrival - in the context of the old boss' abdication. I've got my head canon, but I can't make any claims. I just accept that we're in this world where the new "Roman" (novel, in French) has to Scheherazade through the night lest his story come to a close too early. The audience is lyrically participative, which I found more interesting than the cut-aways to the (by design) slapdash tale of a gang leader on the outside, which Roman is desperate to keep going using every story tradition he can think of. And it perhaps has some bearing on the prison boss who has to commit ritual suicide, too, and how he is mythologized by insular traditions as much as any legend a griot might care to tell. La Nuit des rois fired up my imagination, I just wish I had more of a handle on it. (And as a French co-production in Africa, you bet Denis Lavant plays a weirdo in it.)
[Sao Tome and Principe] Ângelo Torres returns to his native Sao Tome to shoot Sea and the Jungle, an island nation trapped between the murderous ocean and the murderous jungle. it's an interesting look at a small corner of the world and ends with a local festival as, I've found, these kinds of documentaries about resilience always seem to. A pleasant example of the style, with strong interviews.
[Togo] Resurrection is a slim, but efficient performance in which the artist sheds the clothes of a Westernized slave to become his true African self. At least, that's what I get out of it.
[Equatorial Guinea] Good claymation cat in Electric Anomalies, but weak cat voicing. Stay 'til the end for a fun bit using the models.
Books: When a Doctor Who adaptation is penned by Malcolm Hulke, you can expect a lot of changes, especially if it's one of his own scripts. And I like that. I often blame the lame title for my localized amnesia about "Colony in Space", so changing it to Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon was probably a wise choice. In prose, we also don't have to contend with the restrictive sets and terrible-looking aliens. But Hulke does a lot more than that. He makes the action more exciting and gives us so much backstory on the guest characters and the dystopian Earth they left behind as to make everything more interesting. The opener with the Time Lords is dissimilar to the onscreen version, and the ending is better, too, as is the final punchline. The one change that will give the reader whiplash is that it introduces Jo as if it were her first adventure with the Doctor (shades of Doctor Who and the Daleks), a quirk of the books' release schedule, but I don't mind it too much, especially since it gives us the secret origin of Jo Grant in the process. As an early Target, it has some illustrations, but sadly, they're not very good.
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