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Some March Movie Picks


Best of March Movies

I missed going to summery Austin, Texas this March for the South By Southwest Festival. But I did get a preview screener for an outstanding documentary feature The River and the Wall which played to standing ovations and was awarded the fest’s Louis Black “Lone Star” award. An intrepid crew navigates the full 1,200-mile length of the Texas-Mexico border along the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf coast using bicycles, on horseback, and by canoe.  The rugged environmentally sensitive locations are awe-inspiring and the film includes bipartisan commentary (from both Democratic presidential aspirant Beto O’Rourke and Republican Congressman Will Hurd) showing how senseless is Donald Trump’s blowhard “build the wall” approach to border security. See and read more at: http://theriverandthewall.com/.
            Below I briefly review the Netflix South American action-thriller Triple Frontier.  Also now streaming on Netflix is the British production The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind about a young Malawi schoolboy who saves his village’s crops by fashioning a makeshift wind turbine capable of pumping water to the fields.  The directorial debut of actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, it premiered at Sundance 2019. More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Harnessed_the_Wind.   

Never Look Away (Germany/Italy)
Nominated for two Oscars (best foreign-language film and best cinematography), this sprawling saga from writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck that runs over three hours exposes deep wounds in Germany’s past through its central character Kurt Barnert (loosely based on the life of famed painter Gerhard Richter).  The film opens in Dresden in the late 1937 with Kurt as a young boy taken by his free-spirited aunt Elizabeth to a modern art exhibit denounced as “degenerate” by the Nazis. Considered unfit, the young woman falls victim to the Nazi eugenics sterilization and euthanasia program in which a physician Professor Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch) plays a key role as an SS officer.  Seeband’s skills as a gynecologist save him after the occupation by the Soviet Red Army.
            In Communist East Germany after the war, we see the developing artistic talent of the young man Kurt (Tom Schilling) now constrained by the stifling conformism of “socialist realism”. Kurt falls in love with a student Ellie (Paula Beer), the daughter of none other than Professor Seeband who enjoys a protected position under the new regime. The protagonists later escape to the west—Barnert to pursue his art in the avant-garde circles of Düsseldorf ; Seeband to avoid exposure of his Nazi past.  Amidst the terrible truths and consequences of sequential totalitarianisms, what prevails is the young couple’s passionate love story and the courageous artistic inspiration instilled from childhood to “never look away”.  Although the drawn-out drama occasionally sags, the spirit it honours never flags.  B+
Hard to believe it’s been a half century since the first human walked on the moon on July 20, 1969.  But sorry, flat-earthers and conspiracy nuts, this isn’t “fake news”.  Director Todd Douglas Miller uses archival footage, some behind-the-scenes and never previously shown publicly, to outstanding effect in telling the story of the Apollo 11 mission, the culmination of a space program first mandated by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo11.html).
More than Damien Chazelle’s dramatized narrative First Man, this documentary takes one back to the time and place in vivid stirring detail.  (An editing marvel, for more on how it was put together see: https://filmmakermagazine.com/107173-moonshot-todd-douglas-miller-on-apollo-11/#.XIwRmChKiM9.) Along with the excitement of the crowds, the science and engineering, the awesome extra-planetary sense of discovery and risk, there is also the personal human factor, down to the level of monitoring the astronauts’ heart rates. We are reminded too of America’s summer of ’69—Vietnam, Chappaquiddick, Nixon as president. Coming in peace for all mankind had a different sense during the depths of the Cold War.
            I was 17 at the time and had no idea what a “computer” was. The revolutionary Apollo technologies now seem primitive. The unassuming first moonwalker Neil Armstrong died in 2012. His two companions on this amazing journey, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, are both 89. No human has set foot on the moon since 1972. It’s worth looking back at what was accomplished and wondering when or if space travel will again capture such worldwide imagination.  A+
Triple Frontier
Every week brings new Netflix productions of varying quality.  This one, in the crime-thriller genre, provides several hours of solid B-movie action and misadventure. Director J.C. Chandor shares writing credits with Mark Boal, the frequent partner of Kathryn Bigelow who’s an executive producer.  Ex-special forces agent Santiago (Oscar Isaac) uses a female informant to target a Brazilian drug lord and his money. He recruits four former agents for a rogue operation in the Amazonian jungle—the hapless Tom (Ben Affleck), gruff William (Charlie Hunnam), gung-ho Ben (Garrett Hedlund), and pilot Francisco (Pedro Pascal).  They do find a fortune in hidden cash but you know this testosterone-fueled narrative isn’t going to end well, leaving a trail of bodies at every stage.  Mules are briefly employed to haul the loot after the gang’s overloaded helicopter crashes attempting to cross the Andes to a waiting boat.  Soon it’s down to sheer will, manpower and survival. Forget dreams of living large, in the end anyone who can walk away should just be glad the ordeal is over.  B
3 Faces (Iran)
Iranian master Jafar Panahi cannot travel outside his country and in 2010 was officially barred from filmmaking, yet resourceful as ever, this is his fourth feature to screen internationally since that ban. Indeed 3 Faces was awarded best screenplay at the 2018 Cannes film festival.  It begins with a desperate young girl’s mobile-phone video making an apparently suicidal appeal. The girl Marziyeh is desperate to be admitted to a drama conservatory in Tehran. Playing himself as concerned filmmaker, Panahi is back in the driver’s seat as he was in 2015’s Taxi, taking famous actress Behnaz Jafari along narrow winding roads to the girl’s dusty provincial village in the Turkish-speaking northwest, hoping to find the girl still alive.  The scenario plays with different mood pieces from the distressing to the droll—an outraged younger brother, honour codes, village grievances, car-horn signals, an injured stud bull blocking the road, an old man’s oddest hopes. Working within the limits of his situation, Panahi weaves these together into a small miracle of a film. A-


     


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