The already vast amount of streaming
content keeps growing. Some is on established specialty TV channels like
HBO. I’m grateful to it for showing the
wondrous 2018 Quebec feature Une Colonie (A Colony), from first-time director
Geneviève Dulude-De Celles, which has garnered numerous awards including best
film at the 2019 Canadian Screen Awards. I remember watching “Perry Mason” as a
kid with Raymond Burr in the title role.
Check out HBO’s new 8-episode version with Matthew Rhys as “Perry” and
Canadian Tatiana Maslany as “Sister Alice”.
Also just arrived on HBO is David France’s searing Welcome to Chechnya (https://www.welcometochechnya.com/)
about LGBTQ persecution, particularly deadly in this ravaged Russian province ruthlessly
ruled by Putin’s chosen strongman. Amid
harrowing scenes France observes the courageous work of activists in rescuing
endangered individuals and getting them out of Russia (Canada is a noted country
of refuge). This is guerilla-style
filmmaking at its finest.
Here’s what else I’ve been watching:
Normal People (UK/Ireland
2019, 12 episodes, CBC Gem) A+
A BBC/Hulu production directed by Lenny
Abrahamson (Room), this is one of the
best young adult series ever made, thanks in large part to the superb sensitive
acting of the two leads—Daisy Edgar Jones as Marianne and Paul Mescal as
Connell—and the excellent source material in Sally Rooney’s eponymous 2018
novel. She’s also a co-screenwriter. The setting take us through Ireland’s
economic crisis and Rooney calls herself a “Marxist” but there are no
heavy-handed polemics in this affecting story of falling in and out of love. The closely-observed narrative is emotionally
intense and sexually frank (including on Marianne’s several abusive
relationships), without ever being exploitive.
The story begins
when Marianne and Connell are schoolmates in small-town Ireland. She is the vulnerable loner who throws
herself into first love with a popular lad who is deep-voiced, hunky and highly intelligent. Then she feels terribly abandoned when he
takes someone else to the prom. Later at Trinity College, Dublin it’s Marianne
who has blossomed with confidence while Connell is the one who struggles. At first she’s living with a prominent
student activist Gareth (played by Sebastian de Souza, who has the role of an
early lover of Russian Empress Catherine in the Amazon Prime series “The
Great”). That is until Marianne forgives
Connell and they have a passionate reunion, which again doesn’t last. Their on-and-off relationship keeps evolving
in uncertain directions while pulling us in. The intimacies and complexities, as
raw and real as life itself, make us eager for the next chapter and where that
will take both of them. [*CBC Gem is
free to stream at: https://gem.cbc.ca/ but an add-free “premium” subscription is
$4.99/month.
More information on the series and
episodes at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_People_(TV_series)]
Artemis Fowl (U.S.
2020, Disney+) C-
Also set in Ireland, and adapted from
young adult material (the novels of Eoin Colfer) this fantasy falls flat (it
could hardly be more opposite “Normal People” or less compelling), even with an
admired actor Kenneth Branagh as director.
Artemis (Ferdia Shaw) is a kid genius whose rich dad (Colin Farrell), a
supposed “criminal mastermind”, goes missing.
That leads to adventures in the fairy world—among the denizens of which is
the white-haired “Commander Root” played by Dame Judy Dench. There’s lots of mumbo jumbo about a
mysterious magical object the “Aculos” but the story never captivates. Disney’s mega-bucks spent on fantastical
visuals are a wasted effort.
The Body Remembers When the World
Broke Open (Canada/Norway 2019, CBC Gem) A
I’ve been waiting many months to see
this multiple award winner (including the $100,000 Rogers best film prize)
since it premiered at the Berlin festival in February 2019. It’s finally on the
streaming service of the CBC, one of the producing partners.
Co-director
and co-writer Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers also stars as Áila, a young Indigenous
woman of mixed Canadian and Norwegian Sami heritage. On a Vancouver street she
encounters a younger Indigenous woman Rosie (Violet Nelson) in distress, standing
bruised and barefoot in the rain. Off-screen
an angry man can be heard yelling. Suspecting
a case of violent domestic abuse, Áila takes Rosie to her home, gets her
cleaned up, and convinces her to go to a “safe house” women’s shelter.
Overweight and pregnant, Rosie is both reticent and resistant. She doesn’t trust acts of kindness. She
swipes things and sometimes reacts negatively. In the cab to the shelter she spins
a story about the two being sisters with Áila having an addiction problem. The
world hasn’t been kind to Rosie and this intervention isn’t destined to have a
happy outcome; in fact it leads back to a rather dark place. Suffused with a low-key realism, shot on 16mm,
the film unfolds as if in a real-time, continuous tracking shot—with a result as
impressive as it is unsparing.
The Bureau (France
2020, Sundance Now, Season 5, 10 episodes starting June 18) A+
This fantastic French espionage series,
“Le Bureau des Légendes“, explores the activities of and machinations within
the French spy agency, the DSGE (Direction Générale de la Securité Extérieure). Locations include North Africa, the Middle
East, Iran, Central Asia, Russia, and Ukraine.
A key character is Guillaume Debailly (codenamed “Malotru”) whose
misadventures after a Syrian deployment include being held hostage by Islamist
militants and being targeted as a double agent. He’s played by noted actor and
filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz. In season
four the great actor Mathieu Amalric joined the cast. This new season is every bit as gripping,
with the final two episodes helmed by acclaimed filmmaker Jacques Audiard. [See:
Da 5 Bloods (U.S.
2020, Netflix) A
This sprawling epic from director Spike
Lee comes at a time when an America in the grip of a deadly pandemic is again
seething with protests against systemic racial injustice. Importantly, it
recalls the oft-overlooked legacy of the African-American experience of the
Vietnam war. (Blacks were just over 10% of the U.S. population but made up
nearly one-third of the deployed fighting forces. Then as now they bore
disproportionate human costs.) Lee pointedly
bookends the drama with images from 1960s civil rights and antiwar struggles.
The
narrative centres on four African-American veterans—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis
(Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), Melvin (Isiah Witlock Jr.) who return to
present-day Vietnam on a dual mission: to find the body of their commander
“Stormin’ Norman” (Chadwick Boseman) and to recover a stash of gold bars (a CIA
payment) they had buried following a 1971 helicopter crash. The politically
engaged Norman (“our Malcolm and our Martin”) is the fifth “blood” brother haunting
the post-traumatic visions of Paul whom Lee makes a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump
supporter. In a further twist, Paul quarrels with his son David (Jonathan
Majors) who joins the group. From an
“Apocalypse Now” bar in Ho Chi Minh City (with its American fast-food
franchises), a Vietnamese guide take them upriver (to the strains of Wagner’s
“Ride of the Valkyries”) to begin the unearthing quest. Into this Lee’s weaves many elements: the
discovery by Otis of a Vietnamese daughter; the shady Frenchman (Jean Reno) who
offers to convert the gold into cash; snippets of North Vietnamese propaganda
aimed at “Black GIs”; the encounter with a French NGO trio (LAMB, “Love Against
Mines and Bombs”); the ambush by a Vietnamese gang after finding the gold. Lethal events include explosions and several
shootouts as part of a violent catharsis that will nonetheless produce millions
of dollars in contributions to political causes (including the “Black Lives
Matter” movement.)
Lee
uses effective cinematic devices to convey an alternation between the wartime
sequences—grainy with a retro/TV squarish aspect ratio—and current action in
sharp widescreen. He also has the same
actors appear in both without any “de-aging” trickery, emphasizing how each still
carries within himself a vivid reliving of the burden of the past. This long complex movie was to have premiered
at the cancelled Cannes film festival.
But the timing of its streaming release in the midst of a highly-charged
and polarized American body politic makes an even more impactful connection
between historic wrongs and those of today.
My Darling Vivian (U.S.
2020, https://www.mydarlingvivian.com/,
video on demand) A
The director of this excellent
documentary Matt Riddlehoover is married to Dustin Tittle, a grandson of
legendary country singer Johnny Cash and his first wife Vivian Liberto with
whom he had four daughters before their divorce. They fell in love when he was
still an airforce cadet, before his 1950s meteoric rise to stardom and the move
from Memphis to a fancy California estate where she was relegated to the
shadows. Vivian, from a strict Catholic Sicilian-American family, largely
suffered in silence even as Cash fell into drug abuse and abandoned the family
to the temptations of the road. Worse, her dark features led to ugly rumours
and targeting by the KKK. There were also false negative portrayals in
Hollywood films like “Walk the Line”.
Through intimate recollections by her daughters and a treasure trove of
archival materials a fresh affectionate pictures emerges of this remarkable
woman who was written out of the Johnny Cash-June Carter mythology. Vivian also remarried. Late in life she had an affecting
reconciliation with an ailing Johnny. This fascinating portrait, which was to have
premiered at the South By Southwest Festival, restores her to a rightful place
in the story.
The Politician (U.S.
2020, Season 2, 7 episodes, Netflix from June 19) B
Season 2 moves beyond the high-school
setting as the ever-ambitious “politician” Payton Hobart (Ben Platt) and his
campy team of enablers try to wrest a New York state senate seat from longtime
incumbent Dede Standish (Judith Light).
A running gag is that Dede is in a “throuple” with two male partners (one
of whom is African American), which gets disrupted when one of them falls for
Dede’s right-hand woman Hadassah (Bette Midler). Payton’s campaign makes a play for progressive
causes, notably the youth activist “climate emergency” vote which draws cheers
from former rival “Infinity” (Zoey Deutsch).
Meanwhile Payton’s California mom played by Gwyneth Paltrow becomes
involved with a presidential aspirant. Dede is also a contender to be a
vice-presidential pick. While Light and Midler ham it up as sexually active
older women, the main reason to watch is Platt’s engaging turn as Payton, who
sings a couple numbers in the loony last episode. (Several years ago Platt won a Tony award for
best actor in a musical for his stage role in “Dear Evan Hansen”.)
That last
episode has Payton improbably elected, then skips ahead two years when he is
the father of a young son and receives a veepish offer from Dede, now the running mate of Payton’s mom in the
first elected all-female presidential ticket. Say what? Or perhaps dream on?
Because the scenarios are sometimes gross, often ridiculous, and almost always
cynical, any connections to current events come off as comically unserious. The satire is too far-fetched to have real
bite, which in the context of this fraught American election year is a missed
opportunity.
For the Love of Rutland (U.S.
2020, https://rocofilms.com/rutland/
HotDocs Online) A
This is a perceptive cinema verité
portrait of the small Vermont city of Rutland (population 15,000) by director
Jennifer Maytorena Taylor who spent childhood years there and whose parents
still call it home. Vermont may have
socialist Bernie Sanders as a senator but this community suffers from all the
downbeat anxieties and afflictions of Trump’s America: deindustrialization,
drug addiction, homelessness, poverty. At
the film’s heart is a young mother Stacie and her efforts amid these struggles.
(At one point the family faces eviction.) Most of the filming took place in
2016 when Rutland made national news for agreeing to accept 100 Syrian
refugees. That provoked some “Rutland First” hostility and phobias even before
the welcoming progressive mayor was “de-elected” and Trump shut down refugee
resettlement. By not glossing over the anger and fears, with which the town’s
religious leaders wrestle, the film’s candid observations highlight how places
like Rutland need a hopeful agenda for the future.
[More comment at: http://povmagazine.com/articles/view/hot-docs-review-for-the-love-of-rutland]
The Infiltrators (U.S.
2019, on Kanopy) A
This unusual docudrama, directed by Alex
Rivera and his wife Cristina Ibarra, was an award winner at the 2019 Sundance
film festival where it premiered. It
focuses on the plight of America’s “Dreamers”—undocumented youth brought to the
U.S. as children—and on activists from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance
who infiltrate the Broward Detention Centre in Florida—where inmates can
languish for years in prison-like conditions—in order to work on cases and stop
deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) . Some of the scenarios use actors to portray situations
of manifest injustice within this system. The Trump administration has made things worse
for the undocumented and asylum-seekers.
However the Dreamers remain resilient. (*And on June 18, 2020 they won
an important victory at the U.S. Supreme Court upholding their status against
Trump policies.)
7500 (Germany/Austria/U.S.
2019, Amazon Prime Video) A-
First-time director Patrick Vollrath
directs this taut thriller which opens with a quote from Gandhi: “An eye for an
eye leaves the whole world blind”. On a
flight from Berlin to Paris with 85 passengers three terrorists, armed with
shards of glass, attempt to take control of the aircraft by storming the
cockpit. (The title is an airline hijack distress code.) When the veteran pilot
is taken out, the focus is on his American first officer Tobias Ellis played by
Joseph Gordon-Levitt. An injured Tobias will have to make an emergency landing if
anyone is to survive. The terrorists’ threat to kill hostages has the added
twist that one of the flight attendants is the partner of Tobias and mother of
his two-year old son. A further lethal turn involves the panic of the
distraught youngest accomplice. Heightening the tension is a claustrophobic
point-of-view, limited to what can be seen from the cockpit, with life-and-death
situations taking place as if in real time. Few people are flying these days. This film’s white-knuckle effect won’t
encourage anyone to return to the skies.
Wasp Network (France/Brazil/Spain/Belgium
2019, Netflix) B+
This true-story drama from renowned
French filmmaker Olivier Assayas premiered at the Venice film festival in
summer 2019. The first part shows
apparent 1990s defections to the U.S. from Castro’s Cuba. Rene Gonzales (Edgar Ramirez) steals a plane
and flies it to Miami, abandoning a wife Olga (Penélope Cruz) and young
daughter in Havana. The handsome Juan Pablo Roque, played by Wagner Moura (Sergio), swims to the Guantanamo base to
seek asylum, soon getting married and living in high style. The only clue that something is amiss is when
Rene and Juan are shown together several times speaking Russian. It’s almost an
hour in when we flash back to a few years earlier as Cuban state security sends
Gerardo Hernandez (Gael Garcia Bernal) to set up a “wasp” spy network inside
the U.S. The purpose is to infiltrate
anti-Castro groups and to thwart potential attacks on the homeland. (The danger was clearly real. A subplot shows
a Central American mercenary recruited to place bombs in tourist hotels.) Rene
and Juan are revealed to be not “traitors” but spy “heroes”. Olga is eventually informed and joins her
husband in Miami, where they have another daughter, before the scheme collapses
and the FBI move in to arrest the network. Rene refuses to cooperate and gets a
12-year prison sentence.
In
lead roles Cruz and the Venezuelan-born Ramirez (best known for his role as the
terrorist mastermind in 2010’s miniseries Carlos)
do fine work. The movie, made with cooperation of the Cuban government, runs
over two hours. The multiple narrative strands still feel too sketchy, however,
and have disappointed even admirers of Assayas.
(The source material is Brazilian Fernando Morais’ 2011 book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War: The Story
of the Cuban Five.) That said, in light of decades of overt U.S. hostility
to the Cuban regime (not to mention the embargo and assassination attempts),
it’s easy to understand why Cuba would engage in counter-espionage. The story
of those efforts deserves to be better known.
The Vast of Night
(U.S. 2019, Amazon Prime Video) B+
Director Andrew Patterson’s sci-fi tale
has picked up more awards since being an audience favorite at the 2019
Slamdance festival. (It was also a Toronto
festival Midnight Madness selection.) Shot on a micro-budget, the story imagines
the little town of Cayuga, New Mexico in the 1950s, playing with old-fashioned tropes
of UFO sightings (“there’s something in the sky”) and alien abduction. While almost everyone is at a high-school
basketball game, strange noises and occurrences are investigated by two
students—the chain-smoking Everett (Jake Horowitz) who’s a radio station host,
and Fay (Sierra McCormick), who’s working the nighttime telephone switchboard. The film uses clever framing devices to a retro
“twilight-zone” effect that’s oddly compelling.
Nobody Knows I’m Here (Chile
2020, Netflix) B
The streaming service recently added
this small and very strange feature. The main character, the obese schlubby Memo (American
Jorge Garcia, best known for his role on the TV series “Lost” a decade ago),
lives with an uncle in a dingy abode on a sheep farm. As a chubby kid Memo had a golden voice but
not the right look. So his voice was
effectively stolen to make another sexier type a star. Memo indulges in
solitary fantasy until his vocal secret gets out leading to a televised
encounter and performance. More comment
at: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/nobody-knows-im-here-movie-review-2020.
Hesburgh
(U.S. 2018, Kanopy, Amazon Prime Video) A
Patrick Creadon directs this deep
profile of the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, a priest of the Congregation of the Holy
Cross who was president of the University of Notre Dame for 35 years. The
charismatic Hesburgh had remarkable influence as a confidant of presidents
(from Eisenhower to Obama), popes, and the advice columnist “Anne
Landers”. He helped define the modern
role of the Catholic university, and made an especially significant national
contribution serving for many years as a member, later chair, of the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights. The film,
which includes narration of some of Hesburgh’s writings (he died in 2015) and
commentaries by contemporaries, follows the course of his career against the
backdrop of America’s turbulent social history.
In recent years, when the Catholic clergy have been the object of
bad-news stories about abuse and cover-ups, Hesburgh
is a useful reminder of what inspired religious leadership can do in
troubled times.
Comments
Post a Comment