It's Sundance's last year in Park City (Utah, that is, if it were the Park City a couple minutes outside of Wichita, that would have made everything a lot simpler). Here's hoping the mountain snow doesn't prevent a drive to Boulder, CO for next year's fest!
Sunday, 2/1
Seized
KMUW has done enough reporting on the raid on the Marion County Record that a lot of us at least know the basics of the story, so a tiny part of me was skeptical that this documentary on the events in Marion was going to give me a lot I didn’t know. And in broad strokes, I guess it doesn’t, but it does let us hear from the people involved (and it presents at least one really good movie character in newspaper publisher Eric Meyer) and we see and hear a lot of details we likely hadn’t before, much of it straight from police body cameras that some of the police (especially former chief Gideon Cody) seem to have forgotten was rolling.
It's also presented a lot more entertainingly than you might expect—it’s taken seriously but not presented gravely. These are important issues, but we can still have fun learning about them. I’ll avoid rehashing it all, but briefly: the Marion County Record newspaper was raided by local police and had their computers and telephones taken, all primarily because they were investigating former Police Chief Cody. The raid also included the house of owner/publisher Meyer and his 98-year-old mother (co-owner of the paper), and the woman then died the day following the raid. This all blew up into a national story and the Record became a symbol of the fight for a free press in a repressive era.
What maybe shouldn’t be surprising, but what we may not have considered, is how parochial a lot of the issues surrounding the whole thing are—we see all of this in the grand sense, as part of the fight for the First Amendment, and that is part of it, but it’s also true that Meyer and the Record were (and, I assume, still are) simply annoying to a lot of people in Marion and the other towns the newspaper covers. It’s never really shown that Meyer is malicious in his intent, but a lot of townspeople say that he’ll “go after” you if you make him mad (this isn’t really ever demonstrated, so I couldn’t say whether those kinds of statements are overblown or if the movie’s director, Sharon Liese, chose to leave supporting examples out of the film). One woman describes the trouble it caused her to have her name printed in relation to some risqué video she’d made in the past. Others note that Meyer prints names and criminal violations each week in the paper. Meyer, for his part, seems to think this is all part of being a newspaper—it’s possible he’s petty, but it seems more likely he’s just self-important to a fault. He seems to believe in what he does, and everything else be damned.
The movie has a great entry point to small-town journalism in the arrival of Finn Hartnett, a young reporter who comes from New York to work at the newspaper right on the heels of the raid, and we see him adjusting to a much different life and learning about the small-time power struggles that exist in a place like Marion (and, certainly, any other small town in the U.S.). We can tell he’s uncomfortable with some of the approaches Meyer takes (reporting on lawsuits the newspaper itself is involved in, just as one example), but he’s also young, and relatively inexperienced, and he defers to Meyer despite any misgivings. It was a fortunate development for Liese, the director, to have Hartnett show up, and it helps to add another layer to an entertaining treatment of a pretty fascinating story.
Josephine
CW: Sexual assault
I think this movie can be read in two different ways, each running parallel to the other, one that has some problems and one that’s quite a bit more successful.
The first is the almost entirely literal version: A second grader named Josephine witnesses a sexual assault in a park, after which her parents struggle to help her manage the trauma while she acts out in unexpected and sometimes violent ways, all while she’s going to be expected to testify in the assaulter’s trial, a trial that hinges entirely on her testimony, as the woman who was assaulted has left town and apparently won’t testify herself. This is all as difficult as you expect, with the girl regularly seeing a specter of the assaulter in the corner of her room, with her not having the skills to even begin to figure out how to process all this, and with her parents occasionally acting as if—well, not as if nothing happened, they clearly understand the gravity of the situation, but also sometimes they just expect Josephine to behave normally when it seems like that’s the last thing you should expect. And this goes to why the movie struggles if this is your only reading of what’s happening, because none of the adults really behave all that much like people who’ve met kids before. And that is not completely an unrealistic view to take of adults, we often seem to forget what it’s like to be a kid, but also it gets frustrating enough that it strains credulity a bit. Josephine’s mother wants her to see a therapist directly after the assault, but her father (Channing Tatum) apparently doesn’t really think this is necessary, preferring to, as he says, “deal with it physically,” by which he means engaging in physical activity, which is how he processes things (perhaps not always successfully, either). And then therapy is never brought up again, despite it being obviously necessary, and despite the poor girl’s mother saying to her, “It’s your responsibility to fix your own pain.” ARE YOU KIDDING ME. She is literally her mother. “Figure it out, kid,” cannot be the course of action you decide on.
The other adults are even more obtuse, especially the cops and lawyers, and while, again, this is not in and of itself unbelievably, it gets a bit silly (“Will the man go away forever?” Josephine asks her father. “Actually, it’ll be three to eight years,” says a detective. OK, thanks, pal.) The movie’s writing also falls apart a bit about halfway through, as if writer-director Beth de Araújo had an idea and knew how to get us so far, but only so far.
BUT, there is another way to look at what we’re seeing, and this works a lot better in helping us see the way sexual assault is often treated in the world. That is, we can see Josephine as a stand-in for a woman who was, herself, sexually assaulted. It’s appalling to say, but we have a kind of complacency when it comes to sexual assault, and certainly sexual assault on screen—it makes us sick, yes, but we’ve seen it before, and it can be hard for us to experience it with the horror it truly necessitates. Grafting that experience onto a child (and actually having a child be assaulted would be too horrifying for an examination of the ways we disregard those who’ve experienced sexual assault) brings fresh emotion with it that helps us be as frustrated as we are as she’s often treated the way a person who’s gone through that experience is treated. She has to navigate her own confusing and painful feelings while dealing with a system that is far too cold, her own support system is shaky and uncertain, she struggles to get the help she really needs, and she’s expected to perform her trauma for the benefit of the court. These are awful things for a child to experience, yes, but they’re also awful for an adult, and putting Josephine in that role helps us see this with fresher eyes.
Joybubbles
I remember hearing about this guy on a public radio show (Radiolab? this really seems like it would be Radiolab)—back in the 1960s or ‘70s, he’d figured out how to make long-distance phone calls by whistling specific tones into the telephone receiver. He could call anywhere in the country for free. Turns out, this is Joybubbles (his actual name… well, eventually).
Joe Engressia was born blind and grew up with most people treating him as if he would never make anything of himself because of his blindness. As someone in the documentary mentions, life usually ended after high school for blind people at the time. Engressia was too curious about the world, too smart, too talented, to let things stop for him there (not to say that other blind people are/were not also smart, talented, and curious, but we’re telling his story here) and he ended up going to college, impressing people with his ability to make these whistle-calls, running afoul of Ma Bell (who weren’t happy he was making free calls), and becoming part of an underground culture of phone hackers, not so much because he liked being transgressive, but because he just thought it was all so interesting.
And this would have made a great documentary short, but fortunately, Engressia was also fascinating in all sorts of other ways. When he was young, he had an out-of-body experience during a strong fever, and he went to what he called “the people place,” a place of total love, where he was surrounded by “loving bubbles,” and, he says, where he learned he had chosen to be blind in this life. He experienced sexual assault as a child, and this eventually led him to trying to recapture his childhood by changing his name to Joybubbles and deciding he was now, and forever, five years old. And we see the massive importance Mr. Rogers played in his life, in helping him feel more comfortable and loved in this world (something I found even more fascinating since earlier in the film, I thought to myself that the tone and cadence of his speech immediately called to mind Mr. Rogers).
Director Rachael J. Morrison’s film makes a ton of use of archival footage, much of which is out there because of the notoriety Joybubbles received from his surprising phone talents, and she keeps things moving along briskly and (generally) lightly. We maybe don’t have enough engaging documentaries that are simply about interesting people, but fortunately, here is one.
The Best Summer
I’m not sure director Tamra Davis’s home movies (which is essentially what they are) showing Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Pavement, Rancid, Beck, and Foo Fighters on tour in the mid-‘90s are going to hold a ton of interest for people who weren’t, at some point, fans of some of those groups, but they are at least a decent nostalgia trip for those of us who remember the musicians in that time period. Davis had already had an established career as a music video director and was hot off the success of directing Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison (she’d also just married Mike D of Beastie Boys) when the groups all went on tour in Australia, and she shot hours and hours of camcorder footage of performances and the musicians talking to each other backstage, often with Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna asking a standard set of questions to the others about their feelings on performing in front of people, whether they separate their public and private personas, and so on.
And this is largely what we get (edited to 85 minutes), after Davis found her box of tapes while escaping the Palisades fire last year. The video and sound quality is what you’d expect from mid-1990s camcorder footage 30 years later, and you’re not going to learn a lot, really, about any of the musicians—their answers to Hanna’s questions are not terribly interesting, and they generally seem like young (youngish) musicians on tour would be, if a little less raucous than you’re typically led to believe about rock stars. They seem largely nice and fun and I’m sure Davis wouldn’t want to portray them in another way, anyway. My extremely old-person take is that everyone looks so young, but, then, they mostly were.
But you know why you’re here, if you are here at all. If you like any of these groups, the nostalgia pull is strong, and even if none of this will blow your mind, it’s a good enough time for a little while.
Saturday, 1/31
BURN
One huge misstep makes me question the motives behind the whole thing, but before that this is exciting filmmaking that treats a well-worn genre (The Disaffected Youth) in a way that held my attention far more than this sort of movie usually does.
It’s also a pretty rough watch. Ju-Ju’s stutter caused her father to beat her mercilessly (“Your disorder is a sign of your tainted soul!”), and not just her, but her younger sister, too (“Collective punishment!” he yells, but really he’s just a sadist). For 10 years, Ju-Ju and her sister pray that her father will die, and he does, so maybe it worked, although 10 years is a long time to wait. But her father also beat her mother, and now that he’s gone, the mother takes her rage out on the girls, too. So Ju-Ju leaves, abandoning her sister, and finds community in a group of young people known as “Toyoko Kids” (this is a real thing) who live in the middle of a city square in Tokyo. These kids have also been through it—some of their parents died, some of their parents were abusive, some of their parents were even worse than that. Other kids were repeatedly raped. It’s not pretty. But here they’ve found each other, found other kids who are “empty,” and at least they’re together.
Ju-Ju ends up meeting another girl who makes money as a sex worker, and the two begin a sex business together, with Ju-Ju intending to make enough money to go back and get her sister from whatever hell that girl is living in. Things are good (relatively speaking), and then they’re not, and then they’re really not.
Director Makoto Nagahisa’s style is often exhilarating, sometimes impressionistic, sometimes making use of a sort of time-lapse effect, and at least once combining that with some kind of animation to create a bizarre nightmarish effect. And there are a few things I’m not sure I ever recall seeing before.
There will be enormous spoilers following, so fair warning: I seriously question what Nagahisa is doing when, late in the movie, Ju-Ju kills her (former) business partner with a bright, sparkly pink dildo while Beethoven plays loudly over the scene. The dildo, and Beethoven, have both represented important things, so in terms of symbolism, I guess I get it. But he has to know what this all looks like, there’s very little way to take someone getting beaten to death with a dildo entirely seriously, and the ironic, self-aware remove it creates causes me to wonder if the director has actually taken any of this seriously this entire time. There has to have been another way for this same thing to happen, one that doesn’t take us out of the movie, one that still respects the people and the situation and the gravity of it all. (This is not to say no one has ever been beaten to death with a dildo, although I don’t know. This is to say in a movie, it’s going to be really hard to do this and not push us out to some degree.) There’s a lot to appreciate in BURN, but the deflation I felt as this was happening was a big disappointment.
Filipiñana
A lot of people wonder why critics like things that end up being unusual, or slow, or a little bit hard to get a handle on, and part of the reason is that we all watch so many movies that we often place a lot of value on surprise—not plot twists or jump scares, but ideas and images and ways of thinking about and approaching filmmaking that we haven’t seen four billion times before.
I watched this with a half-smile on my face the entire time, partly because of the subtle, wry humor throughout, and partly because of its beautiful sense of rhythm, timing, composition, and movement. As I watched it, I thought: “Movies!”
The film takes place on a golf course in the Philippines, and I guess not a whole lot happens, although we’re given a look into a complex social structure and how each of the parts fit together (and how the upper echelons exploit the lower). It’s hot, very hot, and the constant droning of the insects in the trees and the slow pace of the people and the day make us feel that heat, while the women wearing pink act as caddies for the rich golfers and the women wearing light blue act as “tee girls,” setting a new ball onto the tee each time a golfer swings at the driving range. An American woman and her Filipino uncle play a round while he tries to talk her into coming across the ocean to work at his company.
Throughout, we see tightly controlled scenes that nevertheless feel lightly playful, sometimes with workers coordinating to music, or with the slapping of a bug on an arm setting off a long line of golfers all swinging at the same time. This is made by someone who has a fantastic sense of what a movie can do even without flashy effects—you simply put people in the right place at the right time and let the gears turn.
The film must be a rich text, not just as filmmaking but also as a social commentary (I say “must,” because I can only really catch the obvious things, not whatever layers someone might find if they were more familiar with Filipino life). We can certainly see how the golf course’s workers are treated by the rich patrons (and the club’s president and his wife) and how these pieces all fit together to create something sickeningly exploitative, even though the film doesn’t entirely call attention to many of those things. They simply are what this place is, and the way director Rafael Manuel shows it to us provides one of the lovelier finds of this festival.
The Friend’s House Is Here
A thing it’s easy to forget (or never to realize) about people who live under a repressive government (let’s mostly leave more local current events aside) is that there are, indeed, people living there, mostly just going about their lives and doing a lot of the things people do. And how, especially under repression, small acts of living life and finding ways of creation and expression can be profound acts of resistance. It’s also important to remember that sometimes these aren’t overt acts of resistance, they’re just people making art, but that that, in itself, is a radical act.
Much of what’s so compelling about this film (which makes the bold move of answering Abbas Kiarostami’s question with its title) is how unremarkable much of what we see is, with a group of artists living in Tehran, laughing, loving each other, having coffee, listening to music, and doing all the things we simply don’t see as we watch the news and learn about more protests (and only about that). We ought to have a concept of what life is like there, since in many ways it’s so much like ours, and for whatever reason we can’t or won’t see that. Hanna is a dancer, her roommate Pari is a performance artist, and they both work in the underground art scene in Iran. Pari’s work is somewhat political, but then all art is political, and especially under these circumstances—Pari doesn’t exactly hide what she’s doing, but she hasn’t gotten permission from the government to do it, which is necessary to do it legally, and would probably mean her compromising a lot of her vision. Hanna intends to leave Tehran soon to go overseas, which will mean leaving behind Pari and Hanna’s new love interest, Ali. But these are things that happen in young lives. And for a long while, we simply stay with these people in their lives, although their lives are occasionally interrupted by events that are far outside our American conception—at one point we learn everyone had to evacuate the city because of bombings, and no one got to talk to each other for a couple of weeks. Ah, well, but that’s just what happens, not that anyone likes it or shrugs it off, exactly, and not that anyone wants to get used to it, but when it’s part of your life, it’s just one part of your life.
And eventually, something happens that we’ve been worried might happen, and Hanna has to make a decision about what it means to be a friend, and we see how fragile a lot of this life is right under the surface. And if we read a little, we learn this film was also made without government approval, which means much of it was shot in secret, and we think about how extraordinary those circumstances are and what it must mean to someone to continue to make their art even knowing the possible consequences. And more, we think about other Persian filmmakers who’ve had to bend the earth to their will just to get their movies out for people to see, and how easy it would be simply not to do that, except that of course that’s not an option. People are astonishing, even when they’re just living their lives.
Friday, 1/30
Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!
Probably one of the stranger things you’ll see at Sundance this year, not because of what happens (there are some strange things here but I’m sure there are much stranger things happening in some other films), but because of the way it happens. This is director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s follow-up to his excellent 2021 crime thriller Catch the Fair One, which was exceedingly grim and almost unbearably dark. If it weren’t obvious by the title to this new film, things have changed.
But it’s not even the (purposeful) extreme tone shifts we see in this movie that make it strange—rather, it’s that you’d expect a movie like this to be raucous and bursting with excitement, and what we’re given here is often much more measured, even quiet, especially considering the big swings it takes. I’m not sure I loved it, but I might have, and I’m sure that I loved seeing a director do just the thing he wants to do to, to just say “sure, why not, let’s do it” and to see where that takes him.
Haru (her friends call her “Ha-chan”) and her husband Luis are a masterful ballroom dancing pair, but one night when they’re on the dance floor, they float into the air in dancing ecstasy and Luis drops dead from a heart attack. Haru is appropriately devastated, and even nine months later when we pick up the action again, as her friends are trying to talk her into getting back on her feet, and maybe even dancing again. They drag her to dance class, where she meets the new instructor, Fedir, who’s beautiful and muscly and kind and intriguing and—one of Haru’s friends finds out—has an open marriage. Haru takes a leap of faith and begins seeing Fedir, and soon enough is really seeing him, and maybe she’s finally pulling out of this depression.
Of course, Luis is still around, sort of, in that he’s an enormous black bird who shows up sometimes at Haru’s house just to say hi and hang out a bit. And we naturally break into huge dance sequences when Fedir beats up a group of rude men who’ve besmirched Haru’s honor. And there’s also a big Dirty Dancing number. And all of these things (and plenty of others) are odd, and fun, and even delightful, but they never feel manic or explosive like you might think you’d find with something that so happily blurs the line between fantasy and reality. There’s plenty that will make you laugh out loud, and plenty to thrill, but you’re still led through the film at a truly unexpected pace—whether it’s because Wladyka is respecting the confusion and unpredictability of the grieving process, or whether it’s because he simply wasn’t in a hurry, this doesn’t completely zip along. It doesn’t drag, but it does something else, something slower, something more contemplative, and I’m still not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it unquestionably sets this movie even further apart from others that might (somehow, sort of) be trying to do something similar.
The Incomer
A movie that pushed my buttons, both the good buttons and the bad buttons, and that ultimately ends a lot more sweetly than the rest of the film would have indicated.
Your mileage may (will) vary.
In incomer is Daniel (Domhnall Gleason), who arrives one day, alone, on the Isle of Auk, an almost entirely uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland. The problem here is that it’s almost uninhabited—Isla and Sandy live there, and they’re a 30-something brother and sister who’ve been there pretty much their whole lives. Just the two of them. And their father, before he gave himself to the finfolk who live in the sea around the island, told the two that they had to protect themselves and the island from all incomers. Meaning murder, probably. Of course, Daniel didn’t just show up accidentally, he’s been sent by the local government to clear the island of its two inhabitants and to relocate them on the mainland. He doesn’t really want to be there, and they certainly don’t want him there, but this is where we are.
The broad arc of the film is not terribly unexpected, in that Daniel gets captured, there’s a lot of butting of heads, understanding is reached, and eventually Daniel helps the two defend their island against others who would have them move. The details are a lot more fun, with the lore surrounding Isla and Sandy being steeped in Celtic mythology (John Hannah has a delightful turn here as a fin man who’s constantly trying to convince Isla to throw herself into the sea so he can eat her), and Sandy, particularly, being entirely ignorant of, well, just about anything about the world. And you’re pretty much going to hook me if you’re going to incorporate local mythology into your film, especially if we sometimes sidetrack, however briefly, into those stories.
This is also, though, very much a comedy, and while that’s not a problem, the kind of comedy it presents is the kind that sometimes makes me grit my teeth. I’ll admit to laughing plenty of times, there’s a lot that’s surprising and just silly enough. But there’s also a lot that’s aggressively surprising and too silly, too loud, too obvious, as if they needed one more pass on the jokes to make them not the first jokes you’d think of in any particular situation. Comedy that announces itself as funny (FUNNY!) is not too funny for me, and there’s more of that here than I’d like. But, of course, there’s not much that’s more subjective than comedy, so whether this works for you or not, I can’t say.
But, again, I did laugh, and plenty of times, and there’s a sweetness and melancholy to the film’s end that I welcomed, but that didn’t quite seem to fit with the rest of the movie. Which is not at all a complaint, I liked it, but I’d also kind of like to see the movie that ending hints at, one with a few more layers.
Night Nurse
From the outset we know what this movie will be, or at least the kind of movie this will be, with its too dramatic piano music laid over a woman having some kind of sex play over a telephone (this turns out to be stranger than we could have probably guessed)—this movie is going to be sleazy and trashy, and it’s going to be happy about it.
Now, if something is going to be trashy, I want it to really go for it (what’s the point, if not), and so I could always do with MORE, but I have to acknowledge this film’s insistence on maintaining its tone and trash level and not trying to do more than that, and I think I have to respect that. This sort of thing has been done much worse when the filmmaker hasn’t known exactly what they’re wanting to do, and I give director Georgia Bernstein a whole lot of credit for keeping a tight hold on this.
Eleni is a new nurse at a retirement home, and she’s been assigned to an old man named Douglas who supposedly has dementia, although it’s unclear to us if he actually does or if he’s just incorrigible. Eleni was fired from her previous job, though we don’t know why (and by the end we still don’t, but we can understand she probably deserved it), but she seems quiet and passive and a bit unsure about how to handle what she’s given. She’s partnered with Mona to assist the man, and Mona has obviously been working with Douglas for a while. She knows the ropes. Which is to say, she knows Douglas is actually pretty with it, and his sexual advances are part of the game, and, well, maybe she’s ok with that. Things get weirder when Douglas forces (“forces”) Eleni to make a phone call to another local man with dementia, pretending to be the new man’s granddaughter who’s been arrested and needs $10,000 to get out. Eleni turns out to be very good at this, and turns out to like it quite a bit, and we move into a kind of psychosexual erotic thriller where things get more intense and complicated. Douglas is a sort of Svengali with all of the young nurses in the home, and Eleni becomes jealous, which leads us to even darker places.
As I said, I credit Bernstein with largely maintaining her tone throughout, this kind of thing can easily slip off the rails—I see she was a producer for the movie Anything That Moves, which played at last year’s Tallgrass Film Festival, and which was also committed fully to itself, but stylistically, the absurdist fever dream just didn’t hit for me. Here, we have someone doing similar things with a drastically different style, and if I have to choose, this is the direction I’d go every time.
Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild]
A largely conventional documentary that I’d gotten the idea was not at all conventional, but nonetheless one about an exceedingly important topic and one that gives voice to people who’ve been ignored (or worse) for far too long.
We’re told (if we weren’t aware) that museums have held the remains of thousands of Indigenous Americans for decades and centuries, and that only a paltry few (comparatively) have ever been repatriated so that the Native people can be returned to their families and the land. It goes without saying that this is horrifying, though it needs to be said, again and again. The film shows us how the explosion of race science, not to mention the simple, sickening need for white people simply to show off all the things they could collect, led to “artifacts” being collected by major institutions, and how probably generally well-meaning archeologists blocked the repatriation of these Indigenous remains in the continued name of science, not considering that similar remains were never collected of white people, nor would they be likely to refuse repatriation of white remains had they been collected. “Museums view Indigenous bodies as a resource,” one person says, and we’re chilled by how much we know this to be true.
But we learn this isn’t all simply about having one’s ancestors remains returned—through the voices of many Indigenous people, we’re told about a concept of time and existence that’s far outside the traditional Western viewpoint, one that considers that past and the future to be touching, if not outright the same thing. The film’s title is a word that refers to all of those things in brackets—Aanikoobijigan means ancestor, and great-grandparent, and great-grandchild, the things that came before and are yet to come. One person points out that another way of referring to each other means (something like) “my bone,” meaning my bone is your bone, and the bones of ancestors locked in museums are the bones of their descendants, and if that’s the case, what exactly is still being held? We’re introduced to Indigenous people who are working to fight for the return of these remains, and we learn about the groups they’ve formed to carry on this struggle for something that seems so clear they shouldn’t even have to struggle for.
Sundance’s own website describes this as a “formally daring film,” and I simply don’t see that—there are some unusual visual elements, but this is almost entirely conventional. That also doesn’t lessen its importance or impact. Why the need to oversell when the goods are already there?
Thursday, 1/29
If I Go Will They Miss Me
When the movie opens, with a kid’s voice talking over pictures of people looking right at the camera, it felt for all the world like director Walter Thompson-Hernandez had just finished watching David Gordon Green’s transcendent debut film George Washington right before he made this. (Green’s film is enormously important to me, so yes, I’ll notice it when something echoes it stylistically, but also I’m not looking for it in places it doesn’t belong, and I understand the other movies that also influenced it, so I feel comfortable that I’m not off base here.) There’s an ethereal quality to what we’re seeing and feeling, and it made me wonder if Thompson-Hernandez had also largely used nonprofessional actors for this film (it appears, not, although the actors he does use—some of whom are familiar to us—do a good job of feeling natural enough to be nonfactors [if you know what I mean then you know what I mean]). And then after a while, I noticed stylistic touches lifted from other filmmakers: RaMell Ross, Barry Jenkins, Spike Lee (this film even uses Lee’s famous double dolly shot, which is a bold move, and probably misguided), and even some of the music and the accompanying images call to mind Payal Kapadia’s exquisite All We Imagine as Light. (There’s also an element that reminds us of last year’s Weapons, but given the timing of this movie, I’m going to chalk that one up to bad luck for Thompson-Hernandez, it seems unlikely that would have had time to make its way into this film.)
All of which is, you might be surprised, not to say this film is simply made up of parts of other people’s movies, although it’s not entirely not that, either. It is to say that Thompson-Hernandez is cribbing from the right people, although I’ll be disappointed if he hasn’t stretched his own artistic wings by his next film. This one stars Bodhi Dell as Ant (“Little” Ant), a young teenager whose father (Big Ant) has just gotten home from prison. Little Ant has an interest in Greek mythology (kids that age do, but also they’re studying it in school), and especially in Pegasus, the winged horse, possibly because his ability to fly represents a way for Little Ant to imagine leaving—things aren’t appallingly dreadful for the kid, but they aren’t too great, either. He’s often looking to the sky, watching airplanes, dreaming of flight, one way or another. Big Ant is having trouble adjusting to being back home (makes sense), but also to realizing the need for him simply to grow up and be something unexceptional and boring for his family. They just need him to be there for them. Little Ant’s mother (Danielle Brooks) does what she can, but makes her own mistakes.
I appreciate the chances Thompson-Hernandez takes in mixing fantasy with reality in his film, even if it doesn’t all completely feel like a cohesive idea, as if maybe he should have taken more time just to sit with the script and his ideas before he actually made the movie (some things just take their own sweet time to gel… that said, for all I know he could have been sitting with all of this for many years and enough is enough already). Little Ant’s drawings and creations carry a lot of meaning for him and for Big Ant (who struggles with them, for his own reasons), but this part of the movie sometimes feels like it exists alongside the more grounded aspects, rather than pulling all together to enhance each other. But the movie shines when it’s simply showing us small, unremarkable parts of Black life, giving us these people as they exist during each day. Thompson-Hernandez has the right ideas and the right sensibilities, he’s got all the right influences. His next step is to make something that’s wholly his own.
Extra Geography
Unlike If I Go Will They Miss Me, this movie shows its obvious influences but also feels like director Molly Manners has taken them and made her own film. We can see plenty of “teenagers at rich private school” movies in this one, most obviously Rushmore (this film even has a play that is a major factor, although it’s Shakespeare, so we can’t really figure it was here entirely because of Max Fischer, or maybe even at all), but this is more of a film that fits in the genre than one that tries to approximate any other particular movie. It’s about Flic and Minna, teenagers at an all-girls school in England, right on the edge of having to figure out what comes next in their lives and having to reluctantly negotiate their burgeoning sexuality (“sexuality” is even a strong term here, for the most part they’re not even far enough along to be thinking about it in those terms). They insist on doing everything together, which means they write all the same things, they finish their tests at exactly the same time, and they equally have no use for anyone else. When they decide to try out for the school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (put on with the help of the local boys school, which is a massive affront to the girls) as a way to make their resumes look better, the play’s focus on the craziness of love causes the two girls to decide it’s time for them to fall in love. Of course, they want to do this together, so they decide they’re each going to fall in love with their geography teacher, Miss Delavigne. This, too, is entirely calculated—they cock their heads just so, they each draw little hearts on their notebooks, and they work as hard as they can to do all the things you’re “supposed” to do when you fall in love (as they shove their plates of food away at dinner: “We can’t eat! We’re not supposed to be able to eat!”).
The thing is, we get the idea (and it’s later made more obvious) that maybe Minna has some interest in boys, and maybe Flic has some interest in girls. And maybe this all would have been easier if Flic could’ve just fallen in love with Minna, and vice-versa. And maybe whatever is happening now would be easier if it weren’t the case that Flic actually is falling in love with Miss Delavigne while Minna becomes a little more into the boys in the play. Being a teenager is horrible, and horribly difficult, and the two understandably begin to break apart, even while each fights it and doesn’t know what to do about it and hates and loves the other.
The movie is often quite funny, living just on the edge of sometimes being too much or making the too obvious joke, but rarely tipping over that line. And it’s smart about getting where teenage girls are coming from and taking their confusions and anxieties and bizarre behavior seriously while also being, you know, a comedy. And part of taking things seriously is understanding that, sometimes, not everything is fixable.
LADY
For me, one of the joys about watching non-American movies is being transported to places that are so different (and, sometimes we see, not so different) from where I live—I feel pretty comfortable saying that I’ve seen more African movies than the average American, but that still doesn’t mean I’ve seen a lot (probably fewer than 50, although I certainly haven’t counted). And so it’s a thrill to me to be able to see a movie like LADY (I’m not sure why it’s capitalized but there’s probably a reason), which takes place in Lagos, and especially as I know Nigeria is exploding socially and culturally right now, and Nigerian film is exploding right along with it.
I should say, it’s a thrill to me to be able to see Lagos in a movie like LADY, as that’s probably the biggest thing the film has going for it, for someone like me. The movie, as a movie, is just fine, but I’m not sure it’s truly more than that, as it feels like it leaves some things on the table in its treatment of social upheaval in Nigeria, but there’s also the very good possibility that this movie wasn’t at all made for me (as if that weren’t obvious), and that people who know exactly what’s going on there will be much more satisfied.
Lady is a taxi driver in Lagos who is having to deal with a fuel shortage (in this massively oil-rich country… more on that in a moment), when one night her old friend Pinky shows up out of nowhere. Pinky turns out to be a sex worker, and she takes Lady to meet the man who arranges her appointments, a man who needs someone new to drive his workers around (the old driver, a man named Senator, seems to have disappeared and no one will say anything more about that). Lady doesn’t want to do it, but she’s trying to get enough money to leave Lagos for Freetown, Sierra Leone (which seems like a questionable destination to those around Lady, but this is more about what it represents than about the actual place), so she agrees.
Lady obviously has trauma she hasn’t resolved, likely involving her mother, likely involving sex, and this is part of what keeps her from being at all comfortable in her new role (even just as a driver), and also what causes her to keep everyone at more than arm’s length. As you might expect, things get pretty dark after a while, and Lady has to make some decisions about who she’s really going to look out for.
All of this while a radio personality named DJ Revolution is riling up the people in Lagos to protest the government, a government that has just ended fuel subsidies, which means already skyrocketing costs are about to go up even more. The unrest surrounds Lady, although she does her best to stay out of whatever is happening. This, too, she’ll need to make a decision about. Nigerians will know and understand exactly what’s going on with all of that, and maybe that’s enough for it to be treated to the degree it is, but me, I wish we’d had more.
The movie is well shot and occasionally invigorating, especially when it makes use of a soundtrack including high octane highlife and hip hop music, and while some scenes maybe went on a bit long, and the movie maybe spins its wheels for a bit, the 94-minute runtime means we don’t have to deal with those issues all that much. All things considered, what this really made me want to do is to watch more movies about Lagos, and that can’t be a bad thing at all.
Wednesday, 1/28
Public Access
When I was a kid, nothing seemed cooler than the idea of my cousin and me having a show on a public access channel, where we could do whatever we wanted and also be on TV (this was pre-Wayne’s World, which I say just to bolster my already obvious and considerable street cred). Of course, after we saw Pump Up the Volume, nothing seemed cooler than having a pirate radio station, because that was even more transgressive, but being kids with ideas and little idea how to implement any of this, of course we never did anything about any of it. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, there’s something about public access television that is inherently attractive and exciting to a whole lot of people, or at least was, before this age when technology lets us all broadcast (“broadcast”) ourselves to anyone at any time.
David Shadrack Smith’s documentary makes use of piles and piles of archival footage to tell the story of public access television, specifically focusing on Manhattan Cable Television, which began in New York City in the early 1970s. And those early days also make for the most exciting parts of the film, with people just trying things and seeing what sticks. So many different kinds of people, all with their own little worlds and ideas just throwing it all up there for anyone (and everyone) to see, both informing and being informed by the explosion of creativity and subversion and excitement taking place in the city at that time. The film also uses voiceover interviews with major players in the development of public access television, which helps us understand where they were coming from idealistically and practically, and it all only adds to the fun.
The movie’s tone and pace become more measured as more calculated elements move into public access TV, people who have developed their own aims and agendas beyond “let’s just see what we can do with all this.” And while the pure excitement wanes, this allows for a number of case studies that help to describe the development of the medium both in ways that pushed boundaries about as far as they could go (and sometimes further), and in ways that also seem to describe the progression of any new technologies and art forms, as people find ways to monetize and publicize what they’re doing. This is all most obvious in the amount of sexually explicit material that ends up being shown on the public access channels, with programs that became incredibly popular and also challenged Time Warner (which ran the stations) and the public and our perceptions of “decency” and what should be allowed. But we also see more marginalized and/or unrepresented groups exert their newfound power (the Gay Cable Network, feminist programs, Squirt TV), reflecting a major part of the early concept of what public access TV should have all been about and also helping us see the interplay between how these shows impacted society and how the shows themselves impacted their creators. And more than anything, the movie is a rich document of specific moments in time and larger societal change over those the course of those times. I’ll always wonder what my cousin and I would have done if we’d ever actually had a public access show. It would have been stupid, that’s for sure.
Levitating
We don’t know what’s happening as Levitating opens, but whatever it is, it’s thrilling. A large ring of people surround other people who are moving, jerking, dancing, gesticulating in all sorts of unusual ways while musicians with wildly different instruments all play their own songs, in a way that both feels like unrelated chaos and also somehow comes together to create an invigorating, coordinated whole (not entirely unlike New Orleans jazz, although that’s certainly not the first thing you’d think of here). It becomes clear that what we’re seeing is a trance session, in which the dancers are being inhabited by various animal spirits and the musicians are guiding them through those trances, and, well, talk about kicking down the door to start your movie.
The tone of much of the rest of the film is not exactly what you might expect after such an opening, but that’s not to say it’s not quite a lot of fun, and it thankfully doesn’t leave those trance parties behind. I’m not sure they ever quite reach the highs of that first scene, but that’s a lot to ask, and besides, director Wregas Bhanuteja finds a whole lot of other ways to keep us involved. We follow Bayu, a young man in rural Indonesia who lives with his father and who dreams of becoming the top spirit channeler for the Central Trance School, the best trance center in the area. His father seems to be kind of a loser (this is highly debatable, but that’s not obvious at first), and he frustrates and aggravates Bayu, who is desperately trying to keep his dad from selling their house to a huge corporation that’s buying up all the land around them and moving himself and Bayu to Jakarta. The school is also about to lose its land to the corporation, but they’ve found a way to save themselves—throw a huge trance session fundraiser to get the money to pay the landowner so he doesn’t sell to the corporate guys (for his part, the landowner wants to keep the land with the Trance School, but also the corporation is offering a lot of money).
So, yes, we have a “big event to save the school” going on here, plus a teenager who dreams of bigger things, plus a girl he meets who he maybe has a crush on, and what’s not to like with all this. And then you throw in animal spirit possession and those electric trance sessions? Twist my arm. Bayu has to compete to get the top spirit channeling spot (the story beats just keep on coming, keep ‘em coming!), and we see him play his special flute against all of the other competitors, who have drums, electric guitars, harmonicas, all sorts of stuff. And we get to see each of them use different animal spirits, leading to all sorts of bizarre dances and movements from the people who are channeling the spirits: turtles, chickens, heck, even leeches. And throughout, fantastical images slam into the reality we’re watching, and especially as Bayu’s anxieties and thoughts intrude into the trance realm he creates, causing all sorts of problems for him and the dancers.
Yes, of course, this is another example of me wishing I had more cultural context for what I was watching (I say this a couple times every Sundance), but the broad story strokes are so entertainingly familiar and the imagination on display is so engaging that it’s plenty easy to watch this for those things alone. I will say: you wouldn’t really call this a horror movie, but it does take quite a dark turn for a while and there are a few scenes with an extraordinary amount of blood. Since all I’ve really seen are other Indonesian movies that also have huge amounts of blood, this didn’t seem all that surprising to me, except that I didn’t exactly expect it from this one. At any rate, queasy stomachs be warned.
The Oldest Person in the World
By now it’s just about the quickest way to lose my interest when your documentary starts out with your awkward voiceover and it becomes clear you’re going to be a (major) character in your own movie. So director Sam Green had a big hole to climb out of as his movie starts with not only his own voice but also a shot of him holding a sign at a birthday party for the oldest person in the world (at that point), a Brooklyn woman named Susannah Mushatt Jones. And what’s even a little worse—or, what seems to be worse, before we get deeper into the film—is that Green’s meta-commentary on what he’s showing us and his assumption that we’re as interested in his subjects as he is just all feel like he’s trying to drag us along into his film, as if he’s just selling it all a little too hard.
Which is not to say that a movie about the oldest people in the world wouldn’t be interesting. And truth be told, that first paragraph isn’t how we end up feeling about the movie as a whole. Because it becomes clear the reason Green is setting everything up this way is that he gets cancer during the movie’s filming, and the whole thing becomes about the anxiety and tension he feels while raising a young son and facing his own mortality—Any of us might also be pretty likely to flail around for something tangible if we were facing similar circumstances, and the ultimate messiness and introspection Green displays all seem to arise from this. Green’s initial intention with this documentary was to meet each of the oldest people in the world once they achieve that recognition (no one stays in the seat very long, understandably), and maybe to reach some insights about life, or aging, or, well, something. And we do enjoy seeing these women (I think I remember them all being women) and learning at least a bit about them, and we can’t help but be affected (and a couple of them bring us some remarkable moments, like the Jamaican woman Violet Brown, who recites Byron to us and has us riveted to the screen). But as we go on, and Green reveals his cancer diagnosis, and we learn about his brother’s suicide, and we see how he’s trying to wrestle all of this and have it make some kind of sense for him, we get that he’s not being entirely self-indulgent (well, he is, but we can now find our way to forgiving it), and we’d have to be pretty steely not to feel something, maybe a lot of things, as we extend Green’s questions and anxieties to ourselves. By the end, Green still doesn’t seem to have figured out exactly what this movie is supposed to be, or what he wants us to take away from it, or even if he feels like he’s finished what he set out to do (he doesn’t feel that way, at all) and so a big part of us feels similarly unfulfilled. But it’s also hard to deny the real emotion he pulls out, and even if the journey isn’t finished, it’s still largely worth taking.
