Sunday, October 27
The Major Tones
Outside of If That Mockingbird Don't Sing, this was likely my favorite film of the festival (and another by a first-time feature director), a sweet and quirky light drama about a teenage girl in Buenos Aires who is pretty sure she's receiving some kind of communication from... somewhere through the metal plate that was inserted in her arm after a childhood accident.
A good setup, for sure, and while I was worried at the very outset of the film that it might try a little too hard to give us that quirk, I quickly realized this wasn't going to be a problem. Ana feels the "messages" as pulses in her arm, and maybe as varying pitches, and she sends the patterns to her friend, who writes them down and notates them as if they're musical notes, which the two girls are collecting into a larger musical piece. Without knowing what these messages are, or what they mean, if they mean anything, and without knowing how to interpret whatever any of this is, it's as good an approach as any, and maybe better than a lot of other ideas, because this one will create something to put out into the world.
The two girls have a fight, as people (and especially young people) will, and one night Ana finds herself roaming the streets of the city, when she ends up in a restaurant, tapping out her arm messages on a glass, and she's overheard by a young soldier who tells her this is clearly morse code, and, even better, he can tell her what they messages are saying. Now, what they're saying still doesn't make sense, but they're words, and some numbers, and that's more than Ana had before. And so, it's up to her to interpret all this, and maybe, somehow, to figure out who's sending the messages, and to whom, and why.
It's hard to make sense of the world when you're young (it's hard to make sense of the world when you're a lot older), but it's such a vast canvas that we can come at it from a nearly infinite number of angles. And that feeling comes through in this film, as Ana tries to work her way through this, in the way young people do, and the movie gently guides her, and us, through the process. It feels wistful, and confounding, and even sometimes a little exciting, just like being young does.
And that would be enough, but the movie adds another gentle layer, with Ana's father trying to kindle (rekindle?) a romance with an old flame, and seeing someone who is decidedly not young also trying to navigate a part of life that doesn't often make sense reminds us this isn't something that really ever stops. What a strange, wonderful place this can be.
Queen of the Ring
This is going to sound a fair bit worse than I mean it to, but: Mildred Burke is an incredibly fascinating person who deserves a much better movie made about her.
Now, I didn't know who Mildred Burke was before seeing this movie, so all credit is due to the film for telling me about her. And at 135 (or so) minutes, it told me quite a bit. It's also made me want to learn more, which is what we public radio fans want out of anything, and so still more credit is due for that.
And the movie is... fine, basically, but its troubles are constant and glaring, and they were hard to get around, and especially in a movie with this runtime.
First, I will say, I don't think the length, in and of itself, is a problem, as the movie does generally keep the story moving and doesn't spend a lot of time repeating itself, even if there were parts of it that could have been dropped to save time, if one had been so inclined. And so I appreciate that. The film tells the story of Mildred, who (as the movie tells it) was introduced to professional wrestling while working at her mother's diner in Wichita, and who decided that was to be her life, setting out to join the pro wrestling ranks and becoming massively successful on the circuit, also partly being responsible (along with her promoter/husband) for the expansion of pro wrestling opportunities for women, and for women of color. Her promoter/husband, Billy Wolfe, is a cad, which is clear from the start, and Mildred probably knows it, but that's not clear, at the start or for a very long time after. And part of that is because the people in the movie are written broadly and very much not deeply— they are all, basically, the words on the page, and those words, by and large, are clunky and cliched and obvious, flaws that extend to too many other aspects of the movie, with its endless needle drops and imitations of other, better movies. Whether all of this infected the actors, too, or if they were simply directed this way, the performances are, almost to a person, uncomfortably wooden, and this includes the more high-profile names in the cast.
Having said that, the movie is a whole lot more at home when people aren't talking to each other— the dialogue is not strong at any point, but the wrestling scenes are plenty watchable, and sometimes even a little exciting. And we're drawn in when we see Billy and Mildred building their national business, and that, as much as anything, is what spurred me to want to know more. I liked these things, and I wish the rest of the film could have matched that level of success.
(A side note, but one I can't let go: At one point, another wrestler says to Mildred, "let's show them how we do things in the South!" and I absolutely lost my mind BECAUSE MILDRED IS FROM KANSAS. Unforgivable.)
American Underdog
A movie that had a real shot to be pretty good, but that takes on too much and loses its way. It's still not bad.
We meet Jai, a janitor at a boxing gym, who's relatively recently out of prison, and who, one night, wrestles a man who's robbing a convenience store to the ground and holds him until the police get there. As fate (luck?) would have it, the robber is a well known MMA fighter, and, we learn, Jai used to do some fighting himself. And wouldn't you know it, his gym is hosting a major MMA exhibition in six weeks, and Jai is itching to get back to it.
Of course, Jai is also 45 years old now, and it's been a long time since he's fought. So he calls up an old trainer, as you do in a movie like this, and this one happens to be Danny Trejo, who we always love to see, and Jai gets to the running and the punching and the breathing hard.
And, frankly, if this had been more or less it? I think the movie would have been a winner. It's at least technically proficient, sometimes better, and a lean story of a man trying to get back his lost glory to fill some sort of hole in himself is one that's been told dozens of times, but it's also one that's pretty easy to like. Vishy Ayyar, who plays Jai, has a strange, quiet charisma (especially when he's not talking, which isn't to say he ruins it all when he opens his mouth, but more that there's just something intriguing in his expressionless face), and the bones of this story are enough to make us happy.
But add in half a dozen subplots and we get into trouble. Jai finds a girlfriend, but she's having custody trouble with her son; Jai went to jail for mortgage fraud, and it was his family's mortgage business, so there's a rift in his family, but also then there's a medical crisis with his mother... oh yeah, and also I guess Jai was going to get married years ago and he occasionally stands outside the woman's restaurant now, pining or something? One of these could have been just fine, six of them are not.
And so by the time Jai has trouble focusing on his training at some point during those six weeks, we can certainly understand where he's coming from, but this was all unnecessary manufactured drama that really doesn't get us anywhere, because, yes, we can all guess how the entire thing turns out. I sound more critical than I feel, but it's only because I'm disappointed. This movie really needed Danny Trejo to train it up and cut it down to fighting weight.
To Kill a Wolf
I haven't decided yet whether this movie is helped or hurt more by its central conceit. I lean toward the former, but I wonder.
This is explicitly a retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood story, separated into various chapters: The Woodsman, Red, The Wolf, and so on. We meet the Woodsman first, a heavily bearded man in the snowy woods in Oregon, where he's tripping wolf traps other people have set. He lives alone in a cabin and seems to have little interest in spending much time with other people. One day in the woods, he discovers a young woman sleeping, nearly frozen, by a tree, and he takes her back to his cabin to help her, and our story takes off.
She's been running from something, and it all becomes more clear as the movie goes along, as we begin to see which characters fill which roles in this retelling, and how, exactly it will all fit together. And that's all well and good, but a problem arises for us as viewers, as we are constantly trying to line up what we're seeing with the classic tale we know, and (involuntarily) trying to anticipate what will come next. And this takes us out of the movie too much and too often. I don't think this is exactly anyone's fault, neither the filmmakers' nor the audience's, but it is a natural reaction to watching something that sets itself up this way.
On the other hand, it does seem, by the end, that the movie has something different on its mind than simply a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, and it had been using the device to explore other ideas— not entirely to subvert the story we know, but at least to misdirect us just a little bit in order to tackle deeper, more real issues. And that, I like. I just wish writer/director Kelsey Taylor had taken this even a bit further, as she just begins to get to the edge of something pretty profound when we wrap everything up.
That said, this is Taylor's first feature as a director, and it's a good one— she has good (not yet great! But good) control of her tone, and the photography in the wintry Pacific Northwest is often stunning to look at. To Kill a Wolf is a good idea that's maybe not fully formed here, but I like where Taylor was headed, and I'm very interested to see where she goes next.
Paper Marriage
Like To Kill a Wolf, this is one of the three films in this year's Stubbornly Independent program (the third is The Paper Bag Plan, see my post from Thursday), which features U.S. narrative features made for less that $750,000. And... it's pretty charming.
The movie is written and directed by Jeff Man, who also stars as a man named Jeff, who agrees to marry a Chinese woman in return for $1,000 a month so she can stay in the U.S. He's sweet and easy-going, and she's very driven, career-oriented, and emotionally guarded. Much of the way she treats their relationship seems transactional, but of course, that's what it is— Jeff doesn't necessarily seem to figure they're going to have any kind of romance, but he does at least seem to want some kind of human connection. Naturally, there's friction because of all of this, and we see how the situation plays out in the months between when they make the arrangement and when they're required to sit for an interview with immigration, to determine that they aren't doing exactly what they're doing.
The movie is pleasant, and easy to watch, and, like Jeff, quite sweet, and the vast majority of the credit for this must go to Jeff Man— not just because he wrote it and directed it and stars in it, but because of how well he embodies "Jeff," and how much of a winning character he makes the man despite Jeff's quiet demeanor. He has a way of talking that makes it feel like he's not completely sure about what he's saying, even though inside he is pretty sure, as if he's constantly asking if what is happening in any given moment is ok, even though deep down he knows what he wants and what he wants the answer to be. And remarkably, this doesn't come across as needy at all (or, rarely), he just seems like a nice person who doesn't want people to feel bad or uncomfortable. And Man mines a lot of humor from this character, and this performance.
Over time, of course, both Jeff and Fanny (his wife) begin to recognize the layers their spouse has, and maybe to see some things in themselves they might not have expected either. And while none of it gets terribly deep or profound, neither does life all the time. Sometimes small changes can make huge differences.
Missing From Fire Trail Road
In January of 2023, for the Sundance Film Festival, I watched a miniseries called Murder in Big Horn, which described the absurd difficulty Indigenous communities have in even getting anyone to pay attention to the fact that Indigenous women are being assaulted, kidnapped, and murdered at horrifying rates. In a lot of ways, this could essentially be the same movie.
And that is very much not a criticism of either work— sometimes you watch a documentary that covers nearly the same ground as another (details are different, of course) and you wonder why both exist, but in this case, it's clear why both exist, and clear there should be many, many more of these shouting as loudly as possible.
I wrote then, and I'll repeat:
"According to the CDC and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the murder rate for women living on reservations is 10 times higher than the national average, and is the third leading cause of death for Native women. 80% of Indigenous women in the U.S. have experience violence, 56% have experienced sexual violence. In 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing Native women and girls. And the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System logged… 116 of those cases."
Undoubtedly there has been more attention to this in the last few years (we see U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, herself an Indigenous woman, at a meeting of the people this film focuses on, on the Tulalip reservation near Seattle), but it goes without saying that even this attention is barely noticeable, in the grand scheme. Which isn't to say people aren't trying— these communities are clearly working as hard as anyone can possibly work to make people understand the crisis. And still, few people are listening.
This movie focuses on the disappearance of Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis, but this is really a jumping-off point to describe the overwhelming trauma these communities face, and how much of it has its roots in the boarding schools the federal government created to take Indigenous children from their homes and "assimilate" them into white culture, plunging them into horrific abuse and the cultural (and, frankly, human) genocide of Indigenous peoples. The permission structure to treat Indigenous people as subhuman already existed, but this organized institutionalization of that behavior didn't just destroy the lives of the people directly involved, it's carried down through the generations and continued that permission to treat Indigenous people as something other than people.
The movie notes at the end that no federal official has ever apologized for the boarding schools, although as of just a few days ago, that's no longer the case— President Biden did formally apologize, calling the many, many decades of systemic abuse "a sin on our soul." And this is important. But more important, now, is action.
Friday, October 25
If That Mockingbird Don't Sing
It may just be coincidence or it may have something to do with the democratization of filmmaking (or it may be a bunch of different, probably unrelated factors, which is the real answer), but we've seen a number of surprisingly emotionally sophisticated films made by very young people in the past four or five years. Movies made about young people, dealing with problems young people experience, but made with an emotional maturity far beyond what many of us expect young people to produce (this is maybe a problem of our assumptions, but also I know what I was like in my late teens and early 20s, and you know what you were like, too). Cooper Raiff was a college student (well, maybe a college dropout) when he made Shithouse, the French director Suzanne Lindon was 15 when she wrote her film Spring Blossom and was 20 when she directed and starred in it, and it's a movie with an absurd amount of artistic confidence, especially for a first film, and especially from someone barely out of her teens.
And here's If That Mockingbird Don't Sing, written and directed by 19-year-old Sadie Bones, with a complexity and comedic restraint that it's just really hard to expect from someone this age. I learn Bones is the actor Kevin Corrigan's daughter, and so I can assume she was also able to surround herself with talented people (many of them show up on screen, faces we know, and they are, almost universally, delightful) who could help lift her up in places she might not yet be fully comfortable. But also, she did the work, and it's pretty darned good.
The movie's about 17-year-old Sydnie, who realizes she's pregnant after her (loser) boyfriend dumps her on the way out the door to college, at which point she decides if she keeps the baby, maybe he'll get back together with her and they can live happily ever after. Her parents are supportive of her but also generally exasperated, her brash sister thinks she just needs to get it together, and her boyfriend does, indeed, come back, though hardly by choice. And so we follow Sydnie through the pregnancy, with the emotional and physical ups and downs and ebbs and flows. But while Sydnie mostly does act like a girl her age would act, the movie doesn't operate with the same level of maturity— Bones is much more nuanced about her characters' feelings and behavior and the challenges they face, and the insights they express (and that she wrote) are occasionally things you don't think people learn until they're quite a few decades into life.
More than that, though, is the comedic restraint I mentioned. The humor in the movie is often laugh-out-loud funny, but it's rarely yelling that humor at you. The characters toss off lines and surprise you with what they say, and while plenty (plenty!) of credit is due to the wonderful cast (David Krumholtz is particularly on his game here), Bones doesn't shove what they're doing in your face. It's a kind of remarkable thing to have the ability to let the movie come to you (or, really, to let anything come to you instead of just forcing it to happen) when you're a young director, but Bones seems to have that ability.
Arrive Alive
I continue to question the wisdom of making a straight-ahead crime movie when you have an extremely low budget and inexperienced actors, because it often comes out seeming like play-acting, or like you're trying to fight against the restrictions of your own circumstances instead of finding a way for them to work for you (see They Call Her Death, from yesterday's post, for a somewhat more successful example of negotiating your obstacles). And Arrive Alive hasn't really changed my mind about this. I do, though, understand the attraction of a shallow grave, so in a way, I get it.
This is a Wichita-made movie, with locations and faces you may know very well (I admit I had a lot of trouble getting past two people drinking glasses of wine at Kirby's, of all places, early in the film), about a pair of women with a dark secret, and a man just out of jail who's coming after them (and, apparently, after everyone else— this guy likes to murder). And, look, its flaws are evident, and I suspect the filmmakers are already well aware of what they are, and there's no need to tear into the hard work people did.
But I do think the movie might have been better served, and even potentially pretty successful as a movie, if instead of simply continuing down the murdery crime path this film (and too many like it) takes, they had used the crime to jump off into a more subtle, more nuanced exploration of... something. Guilt? Grief? Trauma? There's a lot that can be done, and a lot that can be said, with little money or technical wizardry, but just some interest in telling some kind of emotional truth. Ah well.
Where the Trees Bear Meat
It's becomingly increasingly difficult to watch, well, anything, but especially a movie like this without thinking immediately and constantly of the ravages of climate change, even if, like this film, the phrase is never mentioned. When all you see is dryness and the daily death of animals, it's impossible to ignore.
And the farmers in this documentary simply appear resigned to this reality. "It is what it is," they say, because what else can they say? The cows die from being too skinny, one farmer says. From being sick. From hunger. From thirst. "The cows die from death," is where he ends up. We get the idea these farmers have been doing this their whole lives, and likely so have many generations before them, and so what are they to do? This is what they do, and they'll keep doing it for, I guess, as long as they live.
But it's also true that there will be generations after. This truly does look like a dying world, but throughout the time we spend in this movie with Omar, one of the farmers, we see him interacting with his four-year-old granddaughter. There is still life coming, there is still some sort of future, even though we have no idea what it will look like or if it will bear any resemblance to the one we have now.
We also see Omar's 90-something mother, as she prepares for her own death, and we see that woman's old photograph of her own parents, who she expects to soon be buried with. And within all of this, we're keenly reminded of the vastness of time, and the passage of it. We have ruined much of this world, and yes, we may be a tiny blip in its history, but also, this is our blip, and we are experiencing it, no matter how important or unimportant we may be in the grand scheme of things.
The film is often gorgeous to watch, and it's slow, and it's contemplative, and it never tells us what to think about what we're seeing. But all of this I've said runs through it, even in just 72 minutes. This world can often be far too overwhelming to know what to do with, but here are these people and these are their lives, at least for now.
Bajo Naranja (Underground Orange)
The film opens with two of the most gorgeous shots you're likely to see all year, the dark purples and blues of that moment right before the day ends followed by the frame completely saturated with the red and orange of the sun, and then immediately abandons the tone it appeared to be setting for something far more idiosyncratic. Not that this is a complaint, but gosh those first two shots were pretty.
At any rate, we meet an American in Argentina who gets robbed and ends up falling in with a sort of polyamorous guerrilla art commune who are writing and rehearsing a play that puts Henry Kissinger on trial for his role in supporting Argentina's military dictatorship in the 1970s and '80s. They quickly decide our American would be great for the Kissinger role, maybe because he's American, but also because he's there and they need someone for the role, and also because maybe some of the actors are also attracted to him? It's fuzzy.
A lot of it is fuzzy, mostly intentionally, as a number of the characters and situations are maybe a bit hyperreal or hyperstylized, and there's plenty of silliness and tangents. There's also a very serious undercurrent in all of this, and one that I'm forced to admit I couldn't have caught all of— the artists are all heavily anticapitalist (that part I understand) and there can be no doubt that Argentina's national scars still bear social weight to this day (that part I can't fully understand, simply because I don't have the personal or societal context). This is, clearly, one of those situations where what I'm seeing is not a movie that was made for me, exactly, even if I can still be entertained while watching it, and I can read it in its broad strokes. Still, there are times you wish you understood everything in the world, and I regret that I don't.
Thursday, October 24
Othelo, o Grande
I mention this fairly often as a public radio supporter, but a great joy in life is learning about something you had no idea existed, even if you find yourself feeling a little bit embarrassed that you didn't know about it. Grande Otelo was (I learn) a massively important Brazilian star, an actor, comedian, and musician whose film credits are easily into the triple digits. His story is also one that might feel familiar to American audiences, in an unfortunate way, in that throughout, it's a tale of perseverance in a racist society.
The film is made up entirely (or seemingly so) of archival footage of Grande Otelo (born Sebastião Bernardes de Souza Prata), with him narrating his own life through pieces of interviews between an enormous number of photos and film clips of the man. Early on, he describes a situation where he's paid less than a companion for doing the same work, and he reveals a major theme of his story and the stories of so many others: "It was the start of something that's a constant in my life: exploitation." He left home at a young age to begin a life of performance, though like many Black American entertainers, he was often forced into cartoonish roles that played on the stereotypes audiences apparently wanted, or at least that the people producing the work thought people wanted. Toward the end of the film, he explains: "When you see me playing roles that are nothing like myself, it's because they're nothing like Brazilian Blacks at all. But I had to make a living."
Director Lucas H. Rossi largely does a marvelous job stitching together all of the footage— it's not always necessarily a linear journey, except in the broad outline, but he keeps Grande Otelo constantly in front of us, displaying his astonishing charisma even in moments when the man is hardly moving.
But throughout we're reminded again and again of the racism the performer faced, and the larger societal racism and oppression of Black Brazilians, both within the country and from outside. We often return to the destitution of the favelas, we hear about Grande Otelo having to use back entrances to venues despite his enormous fame, and we're told of the time Orson Welles came to film in Brazil for the U.S. government, which was none too happy with Welles's focus on the poverty and racism present in the country.
It is probably true that a few times it feels like Rossi is padding time by just showing us some more photos of Grande Otelo, seemingly unrelated to the thread of the story (other than, you know, the whole thing is about the entertainer), but this might simply be me looking for nits to pick. I find myself more and more interested in archival documentaries these days rather than the kind with narration or talking heads, thinking about the amount of work they must take, and the creativity required to build a story out of existing material. And to hear all of this from Grande Otelo himself, it's kind of riveting.
They Call Her Death
On to exploitation of a different kind...
There are ways to embrace a lack of budget when you're making a movie, and one of those is to pay tribute to earlier movies that were remarkable because of their cheapness. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, basically. By now, many of us are familiar with grindhouse exploitation films, largely because of people like Quentin Tarantino trumpeting their virtues ("virtues"), and so it makes sense to call back to those if you're going into making a movie with very little in your pocket, since you can revel in your movie's defects instead of trying to cover them up. (There's not much worse* than watching a movie that is desperately trying to pretend it's something it's not. I made plenty of those when I was in high school, and maybe you did, too.)
They Call Her Death combines exploitation with the western, with good portions of it shot at Wichita's own Cowtown, telling us of Molly Pray (good name), whose husband is killed by a man supposedly seeking justice for another murder (it's more complicated— and nefarious— than that). And so Molly seeks her own revenge, something she wants to exact not only from the man who killed her husband, but from all the people involved as she climbs the ladder of conspiracy.
A good, traditional setup for this kind of movie, and as long as we're sticking to that, everything moves along swimmingly. Or, at least, it does eventually— the movie is undoubtedly far too pleased with itself early on, trying too hard to show us what it wants to be instead of just letting it be what it ought to be. I imagined being at a midnight screening of the film and hearing the one guy in the audience laughing loudly and performatively at bits that are not nearly so funny as he makes them out to be.
But! It does settle in, and the last 40 minutes are particularly fun. Plenty of good blood and guts, heads being blown off, etc. (and some genital mutilation, so watch out for that), and that's really what we're here for, of course. It hardly matters that this or that person is maybe not the best actor, or that the movie has some technical flaws, because who can tell which parts are intentional and which aren't? That's not the point. Or maybe it's exactly the point. My only wish is that maybe it had all gotten even nuttier than it does— there's plenty of room to get wilder with a movie like this, and it reaches a few heights, but there's a lot more up there.
*I realize there are, in fact, zillions of things worse than this.
The Paper Bag Plan
A sweet, well-intentioned movie with a lovely performance and a few terrible filmmaking decisions. We can't have it all.
When Oscar learns he has colon cancer, he realizes he needs to do more to enable his disabled son, Billy, to be independent. So he starts to push Billy to cook for himself, to go grocery shopping on his own, and, soon enough, to get a job. Which job? How about sacking groceries at the local independent grocery store?
This is, largely, the movie, as Oscar and Billy spend the rest of the time practicing and preparing to show the grumpy grocery store owner that Billy has the necessary skills and speed to perform the task, and Oscar rather clumsily tries to teach Billy a few things and talk the store owner into giving his son the job.
He's also, apparently, trying to make up for a whole lot of lost time— I wondered throughout why he had never tried to teach Billy any of these things before. The son is clearly intelligent and capable, and though we do get acknowledgment from Oscar that he's kept Billy too sheltered (and had to deal with the absence of Billy's mother), the man's apparent lack of faith in his son's abilities is surprising.
But, fine, people do confusing things for all sorts of reasons, and so here we are, with Oscar wanting to help Billy be self-sufficient before he can't be there for him anymore. The very bright spot in all of this is Cole Massie, who plays Billy, and who's full of charm and magnetism. Massie rarely feels like he's acting, and you feel throughout like we should be spending more time with him, rather than Oscar (Lance Kinsey, who plays Oscar [and was Proctor in the Police Academy movies!] is fine, but Billy is far more interesting, and, all respect to Kinsey, so is Massie).
Oscar's need to develop more trust in his son is evident, and is what he's working on as the movie progresses, but a lack of trust is also what holds the movie back. Meaning, the movie doesn't trust us to have our own feelings about it. From the outset, the musical score is manipulative, telling us what we're supposed to feel at any particular moment, even insisting on it, and this is worse than distracting, it's intrusive. And director Anthony Lucero commits an egregious movie sin as the film draws to a close, showing us a flashback montage of "touching" moments from the movie we've all just seen, as if we can't remember and need to be told how to feel. Please, parents, have trust in your children, and please, filmmakers, have trust that we know how to watch a movie.
All that said, it is sweet. And more Cole Massie, please.
