"Accomplishments"
In theaters: I'm not sure Na Hong-jin's Hope could be any more different than The Wailing, even if a country town's ordinary cop is also at the center of it. Though there are metaphors crawling around - we're on the North Korean border, the "others" are played by Westerners ostensibly for a reason... - it's really an action movie, with extended (relentless?) chases and firefights between regular folk totally unprepared for this, and powerful rage monsters coming out of the woods. What I find well done is how it withholds information and ekes it out only when we're ready for it. For the longest time, we don't see the monster. When we do, we have to reassess what we think this movie is about. And every so often, we get new information that has us reassess AGAIN, until the creatures are voiced. Of course, budget constraints mean the CG is, at best, variable, and the creatures tend to look like video game characters. I'm okay with it so long as the action is this strong, and the humor clicks. The only reason I'm not entirely enthusiastic about Hope is that it ends very abruptly, and turns out to be the first part of a (probably over-ambitious) trilogy that, in this economy, may or may not ever be completed. Talk about Hope!
At home: Part spoof of Hard Day's Night (or, I suppose, Help!, since the titles are similar), part anti-war film, Head is a surreal assembly of sketches and what we would later call music videos, and it works well enough for me. Me being someone who has seen a few episodes of the show, but couldn't really tell you anything about them. I certainly like how it explains its title - feels like a Jodorowsky seminar - a "heady" (ha!) justification for the film's vignettes and, perhaps, all music videos ever. Certain cameos made me happy - Teri Garr, Frank Zappa, that belly dancer who's in all the 60s franchises, most notably Star Trek's The Wolf in the Fold - look, I'm not all that complicated. The film does seem to have a preference for Micky, at least, early on, then Davy, and since Peter has one of the most differentiated personalities, Mike brings up the rear. Was it like this on the show? As for the music, it's usually pleasant without being too memorable (I certainly frown at how they decided to do - or really, not do - the famous opening theme of the show). I always thought they were a perfect Beatles emulation group, like all the group's B-sides that would have failed to become popular, and that's more or less what we get here. There's not ENOUGH of it, honestly, the balance definitely tipping towards sketch work.
I recognized several of the young actresses in Linda Linda Linda from other things (several are in Battle Royale, for example), but was surprised to see Korea's Bae Doona in it as well, playing the exchange student roped into becoming a vocalist for a girl band that has to play a set at a school festival just three days from now (language barrier not withstanding). Can they learn the songs in time? The film starts on a deadpan promotion for the festival where a student says that this is students last chance to be themselves before they have to grow up, and it's in that spirit that group takes the challenge on. It's really about friendships - the one that ended, forcing the group to find a new member; the pre-existing ones within the band; the new, budding friendship in which the outsider learns to like her new bandmates; and more besides. It's sweet, and includes a lot of slow beats where we get to develop each of the quartet. Fun J-punk songs, too... I'm gonna have "Linda Linda Linda" stuck in my head for days.
The story of an unsuccessful all-female punk rock band in the late 80s, Prey for Rock & Roll is entertainingly narrated by its lead singer, played by Gina Gershon, about to hit 40 and giving this music thing one last go before she gives up. Not easy to stick with it when you get shafted by everyone around you (men, mostly), but then, every incident seems to turn into a badass song, so... However it ends up, my twentysomething self (though not my teenage self at the time it's set - I was probably too radio hits/adult contemporary) would have loved to discover "Clam Dandy" and played it on loop. There's a surprising number of songs for a movie that mostly plays as an angry soap about the four band members and the people they love, and just as I was wondering if that enough for me to recommend it, Gershon finishes her story in a way that reminds me of just how fricking COOL she is in this (and, obviously, not JUST in this), so yeah, gotta recommend it after all.
[2008] Prince of Broadway: An early Sean Baker about a street hustler called Lucky (Prince Adu) who sells counterfeit bags and sneakers on the streets of New York, until his life is turned upside down by an old girlfriend dropping a baby on his lap and running off. Is it even his? I gotta say, great baby. And with Baker at helm, you know there's not real script and a lot of people are just being themselves, just like that baby. The push and pull of Lucky doing right by a child who may not even be his, even though it really screws his life up, is as sweet as it is real, and it plays into a low-key theme about "knock-offs". Is this purse real? Is this fatherhood real? The secondary story, starring Baker regular Karren Karagulian as the hustlers' boss, also features a less than real marriage, and though Karagulian is a criminal (but is this really much of a crime?), he surprises you with his kindness. I love the last couple scenes - the sincerity, the ambiguity, that whole resolution - but then I'm usually impressed by Baker's ability to fashion an engaging film out of nothing.
[2009] 2012: A post-ID4 Roland Emmerich movie that didn't make me angry? I'm probably more surprised than you are. Because it's not like the science isn't complete nonsense. It is - neutrinos turn into microwaves that boil the Earth's core, but have no effect on anything else is the technobabble required to fulfill the Mayans' prophecy, and that's just the beginning. And it's not like all the decisions makes sense - the FOURTH act problems could have easily been avoided, for example. And Emmerich uses many of the tropes I normally criticize, like the conspiracy theorist who was RIGHT, and the divorced dad who just wants to save his family from universal Armageddon. I won't deny this IS a dumb popcorn movie. The apocalypse is presented as an obstacle course you can drive through (why is the sci-fi author a precision driver? For that matter, why is the plastic surgeon who got all of two flying lessons as good as a Jedi pilot?). Really the only way the family can survive this is with preposterous amounts of luck and script convenience. It's ridiculous. So why did I feel engaged at all? The cast. I kept asking myself why such strong actors were in this kind of movie, but then, why did the 1970s disaster films have all the big names? It's part of the genre, and dammit, I wanted John Cusack and Amanda Peet to succeed. I wanted the scientists like Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandiwe Newton to stick it to bureaucrat Oliver Platt. And though 2012 is obviously an exercise in making every possible disaster happen at once and create beautiful images of destruction, its plot twists are actually pretty good (unlike, say, Moonfall's). Sometimes dumb isn't that terrible.
[2010] Incendies: The film that put Denis Villeneuve on the map, internationally, the elliptically-titled Incendies presents an intriguing quest for berieved adult children, tasked in their mother's will to find the father they thought dead and the brother they didn't know they had. A quest that takes them - and us, through the mother's story, at the risk of spoiling the revelations before they hit the children - to Lebanon, its 1975 Civil War, and the lingering consequences of it in the present day. The context is involving, and remains relevant today, with Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin (as the sister) an engaging investigator (who gets one of the best gasps in cinema history) and plays a pure mathematician, something that has strong thematic resonance for this "puzzle" (in fact, I wish Villeneuve could have done even more with it). Where it goes wrong for me is in the overly melodramatic solution to that puzzle - it's just not the kind of thing I enjoy, it's just too preposterous and "shocking", the reaction to it ultimately too low-key - even if I do understand it as a symbol for necessary reconciliation.
[2011] Lemonade Mouth: I brought it on myself, in a way, by watching Linda Linda Linda - a naturalistic take on the same basic story - back to back with this Disney Channel "Original". Talk about stylistic whiplash! It's the kind of "kids' movie" where the adults are either buffoons, badly acted, or both, and we know I hate that kind of "talking down" to the audience. But the young stars are rather engaging (Naomi Scott is the most recognizable, but the real heart of the film is Hayley Kiyoko's high school rebel), and the story works with musical rules that make the silliness and drive for happy endings acceptable. Or are we to believe five random kids find themselves in detention and can suddenly improvise a fully-produced pop song with heavily processed vocals WITHOUT musical rules? It's all coming too easy for the band, so the impediments are other people, like the wicked rival band, or the arts-hating school principal, or teenage EMOTIONS. The music is youthful and cute. So while I can't give Lemonade Mouth an adult pass, I was surprisingly charmed by it.
[2012] Beasts of the Southern Wild: ...is a postapocalyptic film, or if you prefer, a mid-apocalyptic film. The way the outsider community in the deltas of southern Louisiana, living in abject poverty, but fiercely defending its way of life, as seen through the eyes of a six-year-old girl, is very much like a science-fiction film - a Mad Max or a Logan's Run - where some are living among the rusting ruins of a civilization, and others in aseptic, gleaming cities. A medical visit to the other world looks like an alien abduction. Riverboats are filled with nomadic sub-societies just as disconnected from the rest. Hushpuppy's imagination is captured by a teacher's lesson on climate change - which has an almost immediate impact on their home - and stories of prehistoric animals which then start to stalk her. Is humanity to go the way of the aurochs? Has the apocalypse already begun? For some, it already had. In 2012, it still seemed far enough away to be fantastical. The modern world only on the edge of Hushpuppy's has since caught up.
[2013] Short Term 12: There are a lot of orphanage movies, but you don't see modern group homes a lot. Short Term 12 (AKA State of Grace) provides a strong and truthful glimpse into one of those facilities for kids who "enter the system" for a short while, though the film shows the period is pretty elastic. There's a BUNCH of name actors who are just on the cusp of their stardom, including LaKeith Stanfield in his first feature, playing different situations in the slice of life drama. Two new arrivals grab our attention - a new counselor who seems out of his depth, and a teenage girl who doesn't plan on staying very long - but also a kid who's simply aging out of the system, and more experienced counselors (like Brie Larson, queen of the side-eye) who give us a look into the kind of experiences that leads one to social work in the first place (very recognizable if you know anyone in that field). It's all about not giving up on others, even when you have your own stuff going on, and I found it very touching, top to bottom.
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