I’ve finally been back to my favorite independent
Ottawa theatres, the ByTowne and the Mayfair, with precautions and limitations
(mask-wearing, distancing and a 50-person audience maximum). But let me start
with streaming suggestions from Netflix which already has over 36,000 hours of
content to which it is constantly adding.
Dark (Germany,
three seasons 2017-2020, 26 episodes, Netflix) A-
I only discovered this title recently
but it appears to have been Netflix’s first original German series, concluding
with the final season released in June. Although extremely strange as well as
dark, the production is of high quality. The setting is the small German town
of Winden in the shadow of the twin towers of a nuclear power plant. Linked to that facility is a spooky cave with
subterranean passages storing barrels of radioactive waste and, more
importantly, a time-travel portal on which is inscribed the Latin phrase “ Sic
mundus creatus est” (“Thus the world was created”) Scenarios affecting
multi-generational local families are more fantastical than Grimm’s fairy tales
and involve, inter alia: suicide, sex, missing and murdered children, time
machines and time travelers, 33-year lunar-solar cycles, wormholes, “a glitch
in the matrix”, a creepy priest named Noah and an “Adam”, key recurring
characters (like “Jonas”) in multiple guises, the God particle, pre-and
post-apocalyptic visions. The atmosphere is mysterious and menacing. Frequent drenching rains add to the dystopian
gloom. Characters sometimes encounter versions of themselves from other times
and ages. That’s just through the first
season. The next two get even wilder,
weirder, wackier as well as violent, with not only many altered times and states
but also alternate/parallel worlds. “What
we know is a drop; what we don’t is an ocean”.
Indeed. It’s nuttier than a
fruitcake, often defying description much less explanation, but becomes
compulsively watchable. Like explorers
with a light in a dark cave, we keep wondering what on earth is next.
The Business of Drugs (U.S.
2020, Netflix documentary series, 6 episodes) A
Netflix continues to invest in excellent
docuseries. This one is hosted and
narrated by Amaryllis Fox, a former CIA analyst and bestselling author. (More on her background at: https://screenrant.com/netflix-business-drugs-host-amaryllis-fox-cia-who/.) The six episodes delve deeply into the main
sectors of the enormous illicit drug trade: cocaine, psychedelic synthetics
(e.g. “ecstasy”), heroin, “meth” (methamphetamine), cannabis, and opioids (e.g.
“OxyContin”). Fox goes to the source,
often interviewing heavily disguised participants. She also takes a global approach, for
example, revealing the role of east Africa in the case of heroin networks and
southeast Asia in the production of meth.
What becomes increasingly apparent are the terrible consequences of the
vast trade—fueling armed conflicts, leading to corruption and money laundering,
mass incarceration, soaring overdose deaths—and
the catastrophic failure of “war on drugs” legal prohibitions. It is black markets from which criminal
networks profit most. (Worth noting is that
in early July the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police called for the
decriminalization of drugs for personal use: https://www.cacp.ca/news/canadas-police-leaders-recommend-adopting-a-public-health-led-diversionary-approach-to-illicit-subst.html.)
Father Soldier Son (U.S.
2020, Netflix) B+
This New York times production directed
by Leslye and Catrin Einhorn starts with former president Barack Obama’s 2010
decision to send thousands more U. S. troops to Afghanistan. One of them is
Brian Eisch, a proud third-generation soldier and 17-year veteran who is also a
single dad to young sons Isaac and Joey.
Eisch sustains a serious injury that will result in losing part of a
leg. Back home in New York state he is helped by a new partner Maria whose son
Jordan comes to live with them. Recovery means overcoming big challenges and
limitations. The filmmakers follow the family over the ensuing years. Its
trials include a terrible tragedy in 2015 and Brian’s struggle with depression,
but there is also joy when Maria gives birth.
The approach taken is empathetic and non-judgmental. Yet, from father to
sons, we also see a side of aggressive masculinity and uncritical
militarism. As much as we sympathize
with this family, the generational toll of America’s wars is mostly left
unexamined.
The Hater (Poland
2020, Netflix) A-
Director Jan Komasa’s previous film was
the Oscar-nominated Corpus Christi which
was among my best of 2019. In it a young
man on parole from juvenile detention impersonates a parish priest in a
grieving community. This new feature, a Tribeca festival award-winner, is
almost as impressive and is even more attuned to the maladies of contemporary
Polish society in which right-wing populism has flourished. (The illiberal “Law and Justice” party was
recently returned to power in national elections. More generally, the Polish-American author
Anne Applebaum analyses this concerning trend in a new book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of
Authoritarianism.)
The
central character of The Hater is
also a devious young man, Tomasz Giemza (Maciej Musialowski) who gets kicked
out of law school for plagiarism. Hiding that from the liberal cultured Warsaw
family that has supported his studies—in one scene the father worries about the
dark clouds over Europe of “tribalism, nationalism, and
authoritarianism”—Tomasz goes to work as an internet troll for “Best Buzz PR”
in the amoral business of creating fake accounts and fake news to take down
targets. The relationship with the
family—in which Tomasz has a crush on the daughter Gabi—follows the narrative
into darker political waters. The family
supports Pawel Rudnicki as a progressive candidate for mayor. Claiming to be
against “populism and evil”, Tomasz becomes a volunteer on his campaign, the
better to undermine it from the inside through xenophobic, Islamophobic, and
homophobic smears. Worse, in this climate of Trumpian disinformation and
incitement, Tomasz weaponizes online media through Facebook and videogame
avatars, resulting in a horrific act of political terrorism that takes place to
the paradoxical strains of the European anthem “Ode to Joy”. When Tomasz as the covert shameless and
sociopathic instigator gets praised as a “hero” of that situation, the savage
irony bites even harder. [An alienated
young man’s online violence is also the subject of Komasa’s 2011 feature Suicide Room, free to watch on Kanopy.]
As somewhat of a bibliophile with a
growing accumulation, this wonderful film connected with my appreciation of
physical books as valued objects for the mind—which the flood of online content
to be read on screens has not diminished.
Director D.W. Young focuses on the New York City book scene, notably in
rare, antiquarian and vintage first editions which can command high prices at
auctions. Book collectors keep that business going. There are renowned
locations like the Argosy Book Store run by three daughters of its founder
Louis Cohen who have the advantage of owning the six-story building which
houses it. The metropolis once boasted a
“book row” and a total of 368 bookshops. Of these only a relative handful of
independents remain. Still the culture of the book remains vital. Among its defenders is the inimitable Fran
Lebowitz who offers some typically tart observations and gets the post-credits
last word.
First Cow (U.S.
2019) A-
Director Kelly Reichardt is among
America’s most acclaimed independent filmmakers which is not an easy path. (On her struggles to finance productions see: https://theplaylist.net/kelly-reichardt-america-next-top-model-20200726/.)
She is also the editor and co-writer of
this story based on longtime collaborator Jon Raymond’s novel The Half-Life. The film begins in the present day as a woman
(Alia Shawcat) with a dog discovers a pair of entwined skeletons. Then the
narrative, presented in a retro squarish frame, harks back to the Pacific
Northwest Oregon territory of the 1820s as “Cookie” (John Magaro), the cook for
a group of grubby trappers, forsakes them to team up with another wanderer and
fortune-seeker, a Chinese man named King-Lu (Orion Lee) who claims to be
fleeing from Russians. The two meet at a trading post and share a shack in the
bush. Their luck changes when a brown cow arrives by river raft, owned by the
British “chief factor” (Toby Jones).
With King-Lu as a lookout in a tree, Cookie takes to surreptitiously
milking the “first cow” by night to obtain a key fresh ingredient for making
the “oily cakes” that sell like hotcakes to the locals, including the impressed
factor who remains clueless about the milk source even after he has Cookie whip
up a delicious blueberry clafouti for a special guest. The Indigenous Peoples of the region are
little more than bystanders to this commerce. (Canadian Gary Farmer has a cameo
appearance as a local chief.) When the milking scheme is discovered, Cookie and
King-Lu abscond into the wilderness to an unfortunate fate. Small scale and slow moving, Reichardt
wondrously recreates the frontier ambience of their unlikely friendship that
flourishes over a clandestine cow caper until it comes to a melancholy
conclusion.
Baljit Sangra helms this excellent
documentary about the legacy of the sexual abuse suffered by three daughters of
a conservative Indo-Canadian family—Jeeti, Kira, and Salakshana Pooni—growing
up in the small interior B.C. community of Williams Lake. The abuser was an older cousin who came from
India to live with the family. In an
atmosphere of racial and gender prejudice the girls did not feel valued, by
society or their parents. Decades later
the sisters break the silence and pursue a court case against their
abuser. (The legal proceedings resulted
in the film’s release being pushed back from an original 2018 Vancouver film
festival premiere.) This is a story of justice delayed but ultimately brought
to light through the power of sisterhood.
This “true story” from writer-director
Richard Bell takes place in the summer of 1926 at a camp for some dozen
fatherless boys at Balsam lake in Ontario’s cottage country. Several of the adult camp leaders are World
War I veterans. There are references to
wartime sacrifices as well as to deaths from the 1918 “Spanish flu” epidemic. After setting up the camp atmosphere, the film
keeps flashing back and forth to the disaster that befalls the group—an unseen
storm which leaves them desperately clinging to their capsized long “war canoe”
after night falls. The murky gloom of
these sequences is so deep it can be hard to make out individual actions. By
daylight only four survivors make it to a shore, three boys and the councilor
(Brendan Fletcher) who has lost family to the epidemic. The ingredients are there for a compelling
story but the dramatic potential remains underdeveloped.
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