The Fall Guy(5/1/2024)

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In early 2021 the increasingly reactionary and cranky “comedian” Bill Maher aired a rather odious and proudly ignorant monologue about the upcoming Academy Awards scenario where he complained that the nominees that year were “downers” that were “virtue signaling” and “woke.”  As tends to happen when people say hacky shit like this about “highbrow” movies he noted the failures of the movies in question at the box office compared that week’s top grosser Godzilla Vs. Kong.  Paradoxically Maher then says “not that I want to see Godzilla Vs. Kong either!”  It’s easy to bash the contradictory logic of assholes who complain about Oscar movies, but you get the same issue when you deal with people on the other end of the spectrum who complain endlessly about the stupidity of Hollywood franchise CGI-fest but still go to them instead of hitting up the art houses to make finer cinema profitable.  Instead both of these people seem to want some sort of “Goldilocks” film which is still entertainment for basic people which won’t challenge them or make them think but which doesn’t engage in the more maximalist trends of modern Hollywood blockbusters.

However, there is a difference between stated preference and revealed preference and for the last decade audiences have revealed that they really want franchise shit.  But 2024 feels like the year that might finally put that to the test.  Last year several superhero movies flopped at the box office, suggesting audiences really are finally hungry for something different and the successes of Barbie and Oppenheimer suggest that there may finally be an appetite for non-sequels that present audiences with something a bit more actor driven.  If that’s the case then this summer is going to be the real trial by fire for that as D.C. doesn’t have any movies coming out and the MCU only has one and there are a handful of other options that could prove to be trendsetters if they succeed.  The real canary in the coal mine seems to be the summer movie season’s first film The Fall Guy, which comes out on the first Friday in May, a date that has been held by an MCU movie damn near every year for the better part of fifteen years.  If the film can become a box office smash it could be indicative of a sea change at least symbolically if not literally given that it’s kind of everything people have been asking for: it’s not about a superhero, it isn’t a sequel, it’s sold on the chemistry between the movie stars on its poster, and the fact that it’s about stunt performers makes it inherently a statement against the overuse of CGI in modern blockbusters.  So I must say I have a certain investment in this thing becoming a hit, but does that mean it’s a good movie unto itself?

The film is ostensibly an adaptation of a 70s T.V. show that I’d never heard of despite usually having some knowledge of classic television.  As best as I can tell from my research it has nothing in common with that except for the title and the theme of stunt men so don’t worry too much about that.  The film is about a stunt performer named Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) who specializes in doubling a movie star named Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and who had a fling with a camera operator Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt) before he was injured in a botched stunt, at which point he cut himself off from her and the movie industry.  However, he eventually gets a call from Ryder’s agent/producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) saying that Jody has been tapped to direct Tom Ryder’s next movie and they really need Colt to come out and double for him.  The prospect of reuniting with Jody is enough to bring him out but when he gets there he finds that Gail has a bit of a double agenda as she wants Colt to help her retrieve Tom from some shady characters he’s fallen in with, which sparks an adventure that may well put this stuntman in very real danger.

The Fall Guy is ultimately a very lighthearted take on the summer blockbuster, essentially a romantic comedy but one that has an action element added to it because of the stuntman angle and the murder plot that emerges in it.  So a lot of the movie hinges on the chemistry between Gosling and Blunt and I would say that, yeah, they pull that off.  It’s not like a normal romcom where you’re in suspense over whether the two will fall for each other as they’ve already pretty much done that at the beginning, instead it’s like a movie length version of that part of the formula where they split over some misunderstanding and we follow them as they rekindle things over the course of the adventure.  As for the action element, well, as the concept would suggest it’s a movie with a whole lot of fairly impressive stunt work.  The film operates on the perhaps questionable logic that someone who can do stunt work would have the skills to be a somewhat competent action hero in real life when pressed and we do indeed see this dude pull off some good moves.  Not every action scene here is a winner, there’s an awkward sequence in a nightclub and what should have been one of the movie’s better set-pieces is compromised a bit by the strange decision to intercut it with a song performance, but for the most part they work well for the movie and there’s also some interesting behind the scenes material involving the trade of stunt performing.

The film was directed by a guy named David Leitch who was himself a stunt performer and choreographer before becoming a director and rose to fame as the uncredited co-director of John Wick.  His former collaborator Chad Stahelski ended up sticking with that franchise while Leitch went on to other things like Atomic Blonde and Bullet Train.  Frankly I think Stahelski might have been the superior director out of that duo, he’s got a slicker style and a bit more of a feel for brutality in his action scenes, but Leitch’s lighter touch and more comedic sensibilities are likely the better fit for this movie.  The film’s screenplay by Drew Pearce is a bit of a mixed bag.  On one hand a lot of the dialogue here is appropriately witty and it constructs a nice simple little romance for the two leads.  It also mixes in some kind of meta elements in which the making of the film-within-a-film mirrors the actual film, which is hardly Adaptation level in its cleverness but is fun enough to give flavor to a film like this.  On the other hand, well, there are definitely some glaring plot hole to be found here and some character behaviors and motivations to be found here that don’t quite add up.  If that CinemaSins youtube channel is still around they will definitely find a bunch of stuff here to complain about.

The Fall Guy is a very nice piece of escapist entertainment that mostly lives up to its promise of being a summer blockbuster that’s made “like they used to make ‘em,” by which I mean it’s the kind of high concept non-franchise action movie that was made pretty regular back in… let’s say the early 2000s.  That’s very cool and this will be an easy movie to recommend to the normies, but I do think it’s important to not make this into something it isn’t as I do think there’s a temptation to overrate it given what it potentially represents in terms of the evolution of summer blockbusters.  I’m definitely rooting for the movie and consider it fine entertainment but don’t consider it to be anything terribly substantive and it’s not something I necessarily expect to remember for months on end or to consider it one of the year’s best or anything.  But man, if audience pleasing programmers like this can’t attract people to theaters we’re probably in trouble because this does what most people theoretically want and that might just not be enough.
***1/2 out of Five

Home Video Round-Up 5/9/2024

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Road House (4/23/2024)
Doing a remake of the 1989 cult classic Road House seemed like an inherently terrible idea to me.  That original movie was remembered more for its oddness than from any innate quality and that wasn’t really replicable and its base story otherwise doesn’t provide much material to build a new story with.  So I went into this new version with extremely low expectations but can say it turned out to be a somewhat pleasant surprise insomuch as I found it to be a reasonably entertaining if rather “mid” viewing experience.  Unlike most remakes these days, this version of Road House does not seem that interested in using the original film’s IP as a means of attracting old fans and instead feels like more of an old school remake that is targeted at new viewers unfamiliar with the original.  There aren’t that many callbacks or Easter eggs about the original film and it changes up a number of things about it like relocating the story to the Florida Keys and giving the protagonist a new backstory.  Jake Gyllenhaal proves to be a pretty smart casting choice in the lead as, like Patrick Swayze before him, he’s someone who’s muscular enough to be a credible fighter but isn’t necessarily a dedicated action hero and has more of a sensitive side to him.  The movie also has a somewhat over-qualified director in Doug Liman, a guy who doesn’t always get the best material to work with and can be inconsistent because of it but who’s generally a reliable journeyman behind the camera and knows how to put together a decent action scene.  The movie also features an enjoyably silly performance by MMA star Conor McGregor and it uses its Florida setting pretty effectively.  At the end of the day I don’t think this is going to be all that memorable, but at the very least it competes well with the kind of working class action movies you get from the Liam Neesons and Jason Statham of the world this time of year.
*** out of Five

Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told (4/26/2024)
The “Freaknik” was a gathering of sorts that happened in Atlanta during the 80s and 90s which was sort of a bacchanal that served as spring break festivities for historically black universities at the time.  The documentary looks to chronicle the rise and fall of this celebration and make a case for its importance to the city and to black culture more generally during the era.  I can’t say I’d ever heard of this event before this movie came out (my knowledge of black youth culture in the 90s tends to be of the Northern variety) and the movie made a decent if perhaps not overwhelming case for it being something that mattered at least to the generation that experienced it.  The film is largely made up of talking head interviews with various people who attended the events or lived in Atlanta at the time and they discuss how the event grew from a small gathering into an increasingly large crowd and how things grew increasingly debauched over the years and delve into the positives and negatives of that.  When discussing the morality of the event the interviewees frequently compare it to the white spring break festivities that happen in places like Daytona, which is a fair point, but perhaps ignores that those events happen in small communities that are kind of built for events like that and have tourism based economies rather than a major metropolis with a lot of other things going on like Atlanta.  The film itself doesn’t feel particularly cinematic and despite only being about 82 minutes long it still kind of feels like it’s straining for material at a certain point.  It will probably appeal more to people with local connections or nostalgia for this event and time.
**1/2 out of Five

Spaceman (4/30/2024)
Adam Sandler has done enough work outside of his usual comic shtick at this point that people are no longer popping their monocles when he shows up in something that isn’t entirely goofy, but his newest movie Spaceman still probably goes further in that direction than anything he’s done previously.  Movies like Punch Drunk Love and Uncut Gems might not have been normal Sandler movies but they still had elements of comedy and were riffing on his established persona in certain ways but there’s not much of that at all in Spaceman, which is a pretty straight faced work of science fiction.  The film concerns an astronaut who’s alone on a ship investigating a cloud cluster that’s appeared near Jupiter and upon arriving starts getting visions of a giant spider on board who speaks to him.  The tension of the movie is whether this spider is purely a manifestation of his psyche as he cracks under pressure or if there actual is some sort of alien psychic communication going on here.  The film is based novel called “Spaceman of Bohemia” by Jaroslav Kalfař, a Czech American author who writes in English but made the novel about Czech characters and the movie maintains this, having everyone speak in American English while having names like Jakub, Lenka, and Hanuš which just sort of feels strange throughout.  That’s distracting but the presence of Adam Sandler here is just generally an even bigger distraction.  He’s not doing bad work by any means but he’s not doing great work either, certainly not great enough to distract you from the fact that you’re watching Billy Madison having a mental breakdown in space and I’m kind of not sure why this casting choice was made at all.  As for the material itself, well, it’s kind of an interesting science fiction premise and it goes in some interesting enough places but I wasn’t really feeling the CGI spider and it just generally failed to “blow my mind.”  Mileage will probably vary though and I could maybe see this hitting me better on a different days. As it stands though it just seemed kind of mid.
**1/2 out of Five

Spermworld (5/3/2024)
Spermworld is a documentary which looks at the very strange sub-culture of men who make several sperm donations and thus become the genetic father to potentially hundreds of children.  They aren’t doing this by making donations to sperm banks to be given out anonymously either, they’re meeting the potential baby mamas and then producing “donations” in the bathroom which are then applied with turkey basters or something.   Why so many women are apparently seeking these services when there are presumably any number of other more traditional way to conceive children is discussed in the film briefly but never quite fully explained.  Instead the film seems more interested in the donors and their unusual lifestyles.  We spend much of the time following three donors, and in particular one guy who says he’s produced over a hundred children and travels the country visiting them, which seems like a terrible idea for all involved but the baby mamas seem to be happy with the arrangement for some reason.  The is pretty cinematic as docs go and avoids stuff like talking heads and voice overs in some kind of clever ways but this approach can be a bit of a double edged sword at times as there are some unanswered questions here and also some of the interactions feel a touch staged.  By the end of the film I don’t quite feel like we’ve gotten to the bottom of what’s making all these people tick but there are definitely some interesting moments along the way.
*** out of Five

Rebel Moon – Part 2: The Scargiver (5/9/2024)
I’m someone who often has a compulsive urge to finish things once I’ve started them, which is the part of my personality that drove me to watch this second part of Zach Snyder’s two part Rebel Moon project despite having thought that part one pretty much completely sucked.  Had I needed to actually pay for a movie ticket to do so I probably would have just let this go, but since watching it was as easy as pressing play on Netflix I was willing to finish this on principal.It’s pretty well known that the idea behind this whole series was to make Seven Samurai but in the Star Wars universe and that once Lucasfilm turned that pitch down Snyder tried to “file off the serial number” and make it as an “original” film.  The first part covered the recruiting of the warriors who would take the place of the samurai to defend a village against the galactic empire while this part covers the actual village attack part.  So like a lot of second parts of two part movies this ends up feeling like the climactic action scene of a normal movie that’s been stretched out over the course of an entire feature film with only some cursory story at the beginning and end.  Usually that’s a bad thing but the story of Rebel Moon is so un-engaging that a more strict action focus is probably for the best and because of that I would probably consider this a slight improvement over the first movie.  In fact had that first movie done a much better job of getting me to invest in this world and these characters I could see a lot of this being a lot more satisfying.  Snyder does know how to film an action scene and is able to give some of these sequences some heft, but a lot of it was to no real effect because I barely even remembered anything about any of these characters despite it having only been something like four months since I saw the first movie so it all felt pretty empty.  If they were going to insist on making this two movies they probably should have just put them out on the same day because whatever interest would have carried over from Part 1 pretty much dissipated in the wait.  So, this whole endeavor was a real waste of both money and goodwill for Zach Snyder because even his craziest fans don’t seem to be into this thing and it kind of exposes why this dude usually works in comic book adaptation because world building is actually something he’s pretty bad at.
*1/2 out of Five

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World(4/21/2024)

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Can something still be called a “new wave” if it’s been going on for twenty years?  It became clear in the mid-2000s that cool stuff was going on in Romanian cinema and it got labeled a “New Wave” as such things are inclined to be, but the filmmakers who emerged at that time like Cristian Mungiu and Cristi Puiu are still doing important work today and they’re still making movies that are roughly of a kind with what came before, but at a certain point does this just become a new normal?  That’s a little hard to say, at some point it’s just semantics, but it does perhaps speak to a certain slowdown in interest around a once exciting movement during the 2010s, but things do seem to be heating up again at least a little during the 2020s.  Last year we saw a major work from a revitalized Mungiu with his film R.M.N. for example, but the guy who’s really putting Romania back on the map has got to be Radu Jude, who’s a bit younger than those other guys and while he fits into the Romanian New Wave his style tends to be more confrontational and energetic than what you get from someone like Puiu.  In fact I’d say he’s one of the best satirists working in cinema right now and has been on something of a run of making urgent movies that take a scabrous look at life right now and the various absurdities in modern society.  His latest film, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, continues that run and perhaps does what he does on the largest scale yet.

The film posits itself as being in dialogue with a 1981 Romanian film called Angela Merge Mai Departe, which as far as I can tell has never been shown outside of Romania and frankly doesn’t look very impressive from the various clips we see included throughout the film.  That movie appears to be about a female taxi driver and her day to day experiences in Bucharest during the early 80s.  This is contrasted with another woman named Angela (Ilinca Manolache) who also has a job that involves a lot of driving around but does so in a very contemporary setting.  Angela works as a production assistant and is presently working with an advertising company on some sort of workplace training video themed around encouraging workers to always wear their safety gear.  This video will involve interviews with people who’ve had workplace accidents whose stories are meant to serve as cautionary tales and Angela’s job is to drive around the city making audition videos of these people to help the filmmakers make a final decision of who to include.  Angela is not happy about this job: she’s been working outrageous hours, has an unreasonable boss, and finds the project itself to be rather dubious.  To cope she’s been making these vulgar TikToks in which she uses some sort of (not very convincing) deep fake filter and voice distorter to make her look like a man and in character does these deeply misogynistic rants as a parody of “manosphere” figures.

One of the first things that jump out at you about Jude’s films, or at least the satirical films he’s been making of late, is just how of the moment they are and also how applicable they feel to issues that are occurring throughout the western world despite seemingly being very laser focused on life in Romania.  His 2018 film I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (he’s not a fan of brevity when it comes to titles) focused on the various debates raging in that country about how to address their past as one of the axis powers and how that squares with the rise of right wing nationalism in Europe today.  Seems like a pretty provincial concern, but the debates it raised struck me as basically identical to any number of similar debates raging closer to home about things like school library books.  Meanwhile Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn was one of the first movies to meaningfully engage with what life during Covid was like while also raising salient points about the way debates around social issues have become hypercharged in our increasingly online world.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World continues in that tradition in part because the woman at the center of the film is something of a symbol for burned out and fed up (though ultimately complacent) millennial workers.  I’m pretty sure the “end of the world” referred to in the title is something like “the end of history” or “late capitalism” because it’s basically a takedown of the “rise and grind’ mindset and the borderline exploitative work culture in the world and especially in the lower rungs of the film industry.  Angela (the younger) is said to be working dangerously long hours for this production company in service of a project without artistic merit which will just be used enable the even greater exploitation of other workers even lower down the chain than her and which itself exploits the misfortune of people who’ve experienced the worst of what employment has to offer via workplace accidents.  The movie lays all these conditions out but Angela is not exactly an angry rebel about all of this, at least outside of some relatively empty rhetoric.  Like most people in her position she kind of just goes along with conditions, cursing under her breath about it, and tries to find ways to make the most of things and find daily pleasures along the way.  Her activities in some ways mirror and are contrasted with the woman from the old Romanian film, though the exact ends of this comparison aren’t always entirely clear.  The elder Angela’s life in Ceaușescu’s Romania doesn’t seem great but also doesn’t seem to be worlds away either at least when it comes to day to day life, though the full context of that film isn’t entirely clear and I’m not sure how much of a accurate depiction of the era it’s supposed to be.

Aside from the clips from that older movie, the younger Angela’s Tiktoks, and an extended epilogue, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is shot in low contrast black and white for no readily apparent reason except to contrast it with the aforementioned clips.  It’s certainly not a decision made to make it feel like a period piece because the film is otherwise almost outlandishly topical and willing to make extremely “of the moment” references that place the movie very much in the here and now.  For example we get talk about the recent deaths of Queen Elizabeth and John Luc Godard and there are mocking references to the online influencer Andrew Tate (who was imprisoned in Romania recently) and other less specific signposts of daily life in these times.  That gives the movie a lot of energy and topicality but there are places where the movie lets its stream of consciousness go astray.  The movie runs a full 163 minutes, which is probably longer than necessary.  Those clips from the older movie make for an interesting contrast but I don’t think we needed as many of them as we got and there are other flights of fancy like an extended montage of gravestones that go on forever and probably slow down the momentum more than anything.  There’s also this extended epilogue at the end done in a single unbroken shot which makes a very salient point but which maybe didn’t need to be as long as it was.  Still, for whatever misteps the film makes it’s still part of a larger project by Jude that I’m very much “here for.”  We need more voices like this making movies that are engaged with the world today and I think this is going to prove to be quite the interesting time capsule in years to come.
**** out of Five  

Cinemap: South America

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One of my favorite things about Letterboxd, the popular Goodreads style tracking website for movies, is having personal statistics.  When you have a “Pro” level membership to the site it will allow you access to a page that tracks all sorts of things like who your most watched actors and directors are and what your average ratings are.  One of the coolest things about this stat page is this “world map” at the bottom of the page showing every country you’ve seen a movie from and if you move your cursor over any given country it will tell you how many movies you’ve seen from that country.  According to these statistics I’ve logged well over three thousand movies form the United States, close to six hundred from France, and around two hundred form Japan.  There are of course any number of countries I’ve only seen a couple of movies from, but what really irks me is the number of countries that are presently not filled in at all on my map.  It’s in this place where the map is filled in extensively enough that I have this tantalizing desire to use this to track things such that one day I could say that I’ve seen at least one movie from every country in the world.

And it’s with that goal in mind that I am starting a new series of “crash course” types articles in which I watch a half dozen or so movies from a given region in hopes of filling in large voids on that map.  For my first series I’m looking at a continent that is in some ways generally under-exposed in terms of filmmaking but which is also kind of easy to fill in simply because it has relatively large countries and that is South America.  At present, I’ve already seen movies from seven of the thirteen countries in that continent: Brazil, Columbia, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.  Now there are asterisks to that because what Letterboxd considers to be a movie from a country is often unintuitive thanks to co-productions.  For example, the only reason that Venezuela is filled in for me is because I’ve seen the movie Embrace of the Serpent, which the site counts as a co-production of that country, Columbia, and Argentina but it’s directed by a Columbian and is generally considered a product of that country in terms of things like Academy Awards submissions.  Similarly, I’ve only been able to fill in Uruguay because of the movie Monos, which Letterboxd counts toward the tallies of ten different countries across three continents but which I think takes place in Columbia as well.  But the most dubious of all is Peru, which Letterboxd generously says I’ve seen a movie from because I’ve logged Burden of Dreams, the documentary about the making of a Werner Herzog film that was filmed in that country but is clearly a European production about a European director.

So clearly this isn’t an exact science but for the purposes of this exercise I’m just going with what Letterboxd says counts and in the coming month I’m going to try to fill in the remaining gaps for that continent which are: Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guyana.  Now, I’m going to try not to cheat too much in my movie selections on this.  If I wanted to there are some English language Hollywood style movies that Letterboxd considers to be movies from these places but I’m going to try to avoid those and pick things that are more clearly culturally relevant.  “Try” is perhaps the key word there.  At the end of the day there are some relatively slim pickings in some of these places and I do not have the time and energy to try to hunt down difficult to find “classics” from these countries if I can’t easily find them and I will by and large be rolling with whatever I can find on streaming and that’s largely going to skew towards contemporary titles.

Paraguay: 7 Boxes (2012)

I’m going to start my South American cinematic tour in Paraguay a landlocked country that acts as something of a buffer between Brazil and Argentina.  The country does not have a particularly long or rich cinematic history outside of co-productions with Argentina but things are starting to get going a bit as of late and one of their bigger successes is the movie I’ll be looking at today: 2012’s 7 Boxes, a thriller which is probably the most mainstream of the movies I’ll be looking at through this six movie series and thus a logical starting point.  The film was co-directed by Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbori and begins with a desperate seventeen year old taking a job for $100 USD to deliver seven mysterious boxes he’s not supposed to open to various locations within this market district.  As it turns out there were some misunderstandings amongst the criminals involved in stuffing those boxes and now they’re trying to get them back.  Not a terrible setup for a thriller but the movie doesn’t really stick with the young protagonist who’s in trouble as much as I would have liked, it instead spends a lot of time with the criminals and police chasing after them and that sort of distracts from the suspense of being in the middle of all this.  One gets the impression at times that it wants to be some sort of “hyperlink” movie with multiple storylines converging but I’m not sure that was the best idea.  There is interest in this from a sociological perspective though as Asunción is a not very widely seen location for stories like this and the market this is set in is kind of interesting.  There’s also something of a sub theme to the movie about the country’s hyper-inflation at the time, establishing early on that that $100 bill that the kid is working for is worth something like $100,000 in the local currency, though I’m not sure this ultimately plays too much into the plot beyond giving the movie some topical flavor. That’s a little interesting but ultimately this isn’t particularly elegantly made and not particularly entertaining and just generally isn’t good enough to go out of your ways to see, but it’s a nice enough try.
** out of Five

Suriname: Wan Pipel (1976)

While looking through the cinema of South America I’m going to be looking at movies from each of those small countries in the northeast of the continent which are unique for having colonial histories removed from the Iberian culture you find elsewhere on the landmass.  The first one I’ll be looking at is a film from Suriname, a nation that was colonized by the Neatherlands and thus speaks an (often nativized) version of Dutch.  The country actually has a pretty unique ethnic mix with a plurality of the population being black descendants of slaves (with that population being sub-divided into “Maroons” and “Creoles”) and a sizable percentage of the rest of the population being made up of the descendants of workers brought over from Asia, specifically India and Java.  Together these disparate people groups come together in the melting pot to form “one people,” which is what this movie’s title translates to.

For the purposes of this series I’m trying to focus on movies that are authentically the product of the countries in questions rather than movies from richer countries that are set elsewhere and one could argue that I’m already breaking that rule with this one.  The film was directed by a guy named Pim de la Parra, who was born in Suriname but appears to have been based in the Netherlands for much of his career, and while the film is primarily set in Suriname and about a Surinamese Creole man the film does appear to have been very much made with Dutch and international audiences in mind rather than Surinamese locals given that it opens with a longish text scroll briefly explaining where Suriname is what its history is.  The main character here is a guy named Roy, whose been studying in Amsterdam for several years but is called back to Suriname when he hears that his mother is on her deathbed.  He rushes there in time to be at her side before the end but once there he starts to re-consider his relationship to his home country and considers not going back.  He also starts a relationship with an Indo-Surinamese woman despite still having a Dutch girlfriend back home (played by Willeke van Ammelrooy, who’d go on to star in Antonia’s Line).

That love triangle becomes symbolic of the main character’s torn affections between the opportunities that Europe offers and the homeland he belongs in, but is maybe a little less effective when just looked at on its face as a personal story.  The film is also working with a Surinamese cast that probably consists largely of non-actors and while the film’s cinematography and direction is pretty professional and has some interesting scenery to work with there are limits to what they can do in this environment.  Ultimately the film is something of a tourist’s eye view of the country which kind of goes out of its way to do a survey of the country its set in and the various people groups involved (though it oddly seems uninterested in the divide between Maroons and Creoles, a division that would contribute to a civil war that would begin just four years later) and it’s not exactly subtle in its telling of the conflicts facing its protagonist and his torn affections as an expat and may have benefited from making him a bit more conflicted than he is for most of the movie.  Ultimately it’s a very interesting movie if you’re interested in this country (which is kind of what I’m looking for in this series) but less so if you aren’t particularly.
*** out of Five

Ecuador: Virus Tropical (2017)

While Ecuador is a bigger country than some of those little countries in the continent’s Northeast but it’s a country I tend to forget about when I think about South America.  It always just kind of seemed like Columbia’s quiet little brother.  So perhaps it’s telling that the film I picked to represent the country in my jaunt through South American cinema was a co-production with Columbia which maybe skews closer to having been produced by that larger country and is set about half-and-half between the two nations.  The film is called Virus Tropical and it is animated film for adults about the coming of age of a girl named Paola, who was born to a middle class family in Ecuador and then moved to Columbia as a teenager.  Paola is clearly a stand-in for Paola Andrea Gaviria Silguero, who works under the pen-name Power Paola, who initially told this story as a graphic novel.  This animated adaptation of that graphic novel is likely to draw immediate comparisons to the 2007 film Persepolis both in terms of style and subject matter as both are coming of age stories for teenage girls of roughly the same generation and both are meant to look like black and white comic books come to life.  The girl in Persepolis could be said to have had a more dramatic life having had to adjust to the Iranian Revolution whereas Virus Tropical is more into mundane observations of youth along the lines of something like Ladybird, though there are some interesting geographical touches like the very distant specter of the drug trade that exists in 1980s Columbia.  The animation style is kind of neat and works quite well on a design level, thought he technical execution is not seamless and there are certain effects that kind of reek of computer and stands out in kind of a bad way.  That’s a quibble though, for the most part this is a pretty good example of the female coming of age narrative and of adult animation generally and it probably deserved a slightly wider audience than it got.
***1/2 out of Five

Guyana: The Terror and the Time (1979)

Guyana is a country that is, as its former name British Guiana would imply, a nation with a British colonial history making it the only English speaking country in South America.  However, like its neighbor Suriname (which used to be connected to it) it is a country whose population is predominantly African and East Indian rather than Amerindian owing to its long history of importing slaves and later Indian indentured servants to work the country’s sugar plantations.

This long and painful history is at the heart of The Terror and the Time, a documentary about the country’s lengthy struggle for independence in various forms.  The film was made by a group called the The Victor Jara Collective which consisted of a number of radical Marxists Guyanese grad students who met in a reading group in Cornell University and proceeded to make films about their home country.  This film is said to be more specifically the work of a man named Rupert Roopnaraine, who apparently went on to be Guyana’s Minister of Education during the late 2010s, but who was very much considered an enemy of the establishment when this film was made.  The film opens and closes with quotes from Frantz Fanon, which probably gives you a good idea of its political outlook.  It’s a film about years of oppression against the population of Guyana but focuses on events in the early 1950s when they were allowed to hold local elections in a move towards self-government only to have the British disapprove of the party that won the election (why they accused of being communists) and then suspended the constitution and jail many of the rightfully elected leaders.

That’s a pretty potent example of colonial oppression and Cold War national interference but the way the film lays all this out is perhaps not as straightforward as I might have liked.  The basic facts are recounted but it also includes a bunch of montages of images set to radical poems by Martin Carter.  That’s a treatment I might have appreciated more in a documentary about well tread subject matter but this is a relatively obscure world even that maybe could have stood to have a more straightforward “just the facts” approach.  I suppose that wouldn’t have been needed on the part of Guyanese audiences, but this movie mostly wasn’t shown in Guyana… in fact it was banned there and its director was actually jailed at one point.  Because of that The Victor Jara Collective only made one more film, a thirty minute short called In the Sky’s Wild Noise, and they never made a planned second and third parts for The Terror and the Time that the film’s closing title cards announce.  As for the movie they did make, well, if you’re really into post-colonial agitprop documentaries this is plainly a good example of that, though it is probably a movie with more politics on its mind than cinema.
*** out of Five

French Guiana: Aluku Liba- Maroon Again (2009)

The decision to include Fench Guiana in my project of seeing a movie from every South American country is a bit dubious as French Guiana is not, strictly speaking, a country.  Unlike its nearby neighbors of Suriname and Guyana, French Guiana never formally broke off from France and has instead become an “Overseas Department” of that country, a status that essentially makes them as much a part of France as Hawaii is a part of the United States.  Its inhabitants have full French citizenship, travel on a French passport, vote in French elections, and the territory itself is technically part of the European Union.  Letterboxd, however, still has it as its own territory that needs to be filled in on their map (a choice they make about a lot of regions that aren’t technically countries) and as such I’m rolling with it.

I knew going into this projects that certain countries were going to have fairly slim pickings in terms of movies to choose from and this one in particular proved to be a pretty big challenge.  If Letterboxd is to be believed, the country/overseas department has only produced four feature length films of which this was the only one I could easily find streaming so I chose it even though it seemed completely obscure and had this blown up poster that gave it a whiff of amateurish.  Unfortunately that vibe I got from the poster proved prophetic, this thing barely qualifies as a professional movie.  It looks like it was shot on consumer grade cameras and was almost certainly edited on consumer grade software as it uses the same crappy digital dissolves and fades you’re likely to see when watching in the home videos you see made by your friends and family and every time text shows up on screen (which happens kind of frequently) it’s in jarring stock fonts.  The film, especially in the beginning is officially a work of fiction and follows a character named Loeti, who’s part of the “Maroon” subgroup, an ethnic group made up of former slaves who escaped Dutch plantations in Suriname and fled to the jungles and reverted to their African culture there and essentially lived an indigenous lifestyle despite not being indigenous.  Loeti had left his village and was working in an illegal gold mind but eventually needed to flee from there and found his way back to his home village.  At this point the film sort of stops bothering to play along with this being a story and just turns into an ethnographic documentary, complete with the villagers occasionally referencing the cameraman in their midst.  It eventually tries to bring the story back at the very end, but by then you’ve forgotten about it.  This isn’t some challenging mixing of documentary and fiction either, it just feels sloppy in the movie and the movie is also sloppy about giving context for all this, bafflingly choosing to wait until the very ending to provide context for everything.  I don’t want to be too harsh against the movie, which was obviously made on limited resources by someone who was more interested in just presenting this community than they were in making cinema, but I found it a bit of a chore to watch.
* out of Five

Bolivia: Blood of the Condor (1969)

It’s perhaps a little surprising that I haven’t seen a film from Bolivia before.  It’s one of the largest countries in South America in terms of size but not in terms of population or GDP, but there’s been plenty of drama there and there’s certainly a lot of photogenic scenery so you’d think there would be more of a film industry but there hasn’t been a ton.  As best as I can tell their most notable filmmaker was Jorge Sanjinés, who followed in the path of Brazil’s Cinema Novo in making some pretty radical left wing cinema about the poor and disenfranchised including Blood of the Condor, his most famous work.

The Blood of the Condor opens with an indigenous man being shot by the police but getting away and finding himself in the hospital where they say they can heal him, but only if his brother can get enough money to pay for donor blood to assist with the surgery.  At this point we watch both the brother try to find money in the present while also seeing flashbacks to what led up to the shooting.  Those flashbacks are almost certainly the most contentious and infamous element of the film.  In them we learn that he was being chased by the police for having been part of a lynch mob of sorts that went after a group of American peace corp workers which the film asserts were engaging in forced sterilizations of indigenous women as part of their health care services.  Sanjines based this accusation on some sort of rumor he heard from a friend and likely viewed the idea as some sort of larger metaphor about U.S. influence in Boliva.  I looked into this and as far as I can tell there is to date not no actual documentary evidence that such abuses occurred and frankly the allegation does not really pass the smell test: even the most racist forces in the United States are unlikely to be that interested in preserving the “racial purity” of such a remote and faraway place and certainly aren’t going to do so through an institution like the Peace Corps that essentially exists to generate good PR and increase soft power.  Audiences however took the film’s claims literally and its said that the claims made in this fictional film created an outrage so large that it convinced the government to eject the entire peace corps from Bolivia.

I generally think I have a pretty thick skin about anti-Americanism in film and art more generally, especially when the accusations being made are actually true and there was certainly no shortage of actual factual claims that could be made about American foreign policy in Latin America during this era.  Here, however, we may have found something that managed to actually offend me.  This forced sterilization accusation is just a little too ugly to just laugh off; it feels more like a blood libel than a good faith criticism.  That the film both makes this accusation and tacitly endorses vigilante violence against the “gringos” supposedly doing these things may be “punching up” but it’s bartering in the same rhetorical tools as something like The Birth of a Nation but with different people involved.  Looking beyond that the film just generally feels like some pretty blunt agitprop.  Its basic ethnographic account of the indigenous Bolivians is interesting and the present tense material with the brother searching for enough money to pay for the surgery works well enough in the tradition of exaggerated social realism.  I feel like I would be interested to see some of Sanjines’ other works as he seems to have been a pretty… intense… person who was an important voice in South American cinema but I don’t think I can get behind this one.
*1/2 out of Five

Conclusion

And that’s basically a wrap for the continent of South America.  Technically Letterboxd has the Falkland Islands and some place called South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands as blank spaces on the map and there are some Caribbean islands that are close enough to be considered part of the continent if you want them to be but as far as the major mainland countries I’ve now seen one from each.  Overall I think I covered a pretty good mix of movies and did a pretty good job of choosing titles that had something to say about the respective countries in question and learned a whole lot about colonial legacies along the way, but the pick of the liter was probably the least political of the bunch: Virus Tropical.

Will be taking a bit of a break on this, I haven’t settled on what the next cinemap region I’ll be tackling but it will probably be some region in Africa.

Challengers(4/22/2024)

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For the last ten years Zendaya has sort of been Schrödinger’s movie star in that she very obviously has a huge following but has essentially been untested as an actual leading lady in a theatrically released motion picture.  She gained a bunch of Gen Z popularity through a handful of Disney Channel productions in the early 2010s which seems to have been what gave her all her career momentum and she really became a star amongst the non-teenybopper population through her Emmy winning work on HBO’s “Euphoria,” where she plays a cynical teenage drug addict.  Unlike her co-stars Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney though she hasn’t really sought out star vehicles on the big screen, possibly because hustling in indie roles almost seems beneath her.  She’s instead opted to appear in blockbusters like Spider-Man: Homecoming and its sequels or the Dune movies but in supporting love interest type parts, which have certainly added to her resume but in typical 2020s fashion those are projects where the franchise is the bigger star than any of the actors in them.  Her only real starring role in a movie has been in the two person pandemic era Netflix movie Malcolm & Marie, from “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson, which is perhaps not coincidentally one of the only projects she’s made to date where she isn’t playing a teenager.  Of course it’s hard to gauge how popular a streaming movie like that is so it remains to be seen if she can be a draw unto herself and be the huge Gen Z movie star she seems destined to become.  That is until now, as she’s finally found a star vehicle working with director Luca Guadagnino on a film called Challengers, which will be something of a test both for her drawing powers and if non-genre cinema for adults can have much of a life at the box office at all.

Challengers begins in 2019 and converges on the final match of a small scale “challengers” tournament occurring in New Rochelle, New York between a guy named Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and another guy named Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor).  These two are in very different places in their careers.  Donaldson is a major star player whose won Grand Slams but is recovering from an injury and is playing in this rinky dink tournament largely as an exercise to get his confidence back by beating some scrubs who aren’t on his level.  Zweig on the other hand is a formerly promising player whose descended into mediocrity and is only barely a professional at this point and is having trouble scraping together enough money for a hotel stay.  The two have a lot of history, however, much of it involving Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a formerly amazing player whose career was cut short before it began due to an injury.  She once dated Zweig but left him for Donaldson, to whom she is now married and also coaches.  This single match between Zeig and Donaldson will serve as the framing story through the movie as we get flashback to both the events immediately leading to this match and also to the three character’s shared past and their history of competing with each other both on the courts and for the affection of Duncan.

Challengers was written by a playwright and novelist named Justin Kuritzkes and while this is his first screenplay cinemagoers will still have a sort of familiarity with him as a person through the work of his wife Celine Song, who made the film Past Lives last year which featured a character played by John Magaro who was almost certainly based on Kuritzkes.  So you’ve got both husband and wife writing back to back movies about love triangles amongst ambitious well off professionals who come in and out of each other’s lives culminating in a present tense meeting.  It does not take too much imagination to conceive of this screenplay emerging from whatever insecurities the events Past Lives depicted brought out in Kuritzkes, at least as a starting point.  The two of course approach the topic in very different ways with Past Lives having clearly been an autobiographical with a rather chill and realistic feel while this is a bit more heightened and involving a lot more direct competition between the two men who are literally and figuratively competing for the affection of the woman in question and also some subtext (and text) implying that they may be a bit into each other as well.

Directing this screenplay is Luca Guadagnino, an Italian filmmaker who has largely been working on English language productions starring American and British actors for the last ten plus years but whose films retain a certain intrinsically European sense of wealth, decadence, and sexuality just the same.  His last film Bones and All was a bit of an exception to this as it involved a road trip through Middle America, but this film set in the wealthy world of tennis and its related institutions is a bit closer to what I’ve come to expect from the guy.  This has been sold as a fairly sexual movie in which Zendaya has a threesome with these two guys during their younger years, but that’s not really the case.  That potential threesome gets aborted and while sex and sexual jealousy are a theme through the movie but there isn’t really that much skin and I don’t think there’s even a single actual completed sex scene to be found.  But that’s not to say that the film doesn’t have its finger on the pulse of these characters’ intense three way horniness and the ways it evolves over the course of their lives and affects their competitive drive on the court.

There were stretches of Challengers that felt like it was among the best films of the year, but I did feel like it fell short in a couple of places.  For one, I think Guadagnino got a little too cute in places and went way overboard in trying to pull a few too many tricks out of his bag, especially when filming that final tennis match.  It feels like he thought simply letting tennis play out would get boring and instead tries a bunch of camera tricks that make sections resemble a series of Nike ads more so than a straight drama.  I’d also say that while I quite liked Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ music as tracks unto themselves I did find them a bit louder and more intense than they needed to be and felt like this movie might have benefited from a bit of a lighter touch in the music department at times.  This should not, however, obscure the film’s many other strengths.  Kuritzkes’ screenplay is very fun as a piece of writing unto itself and this rather impressive young cast does a lot with it, successfully portraying their characters at various ages and allowing the audience to like their characters flaws and all.  It’s exactly the kind of hip mid budget filmmaking for adults we’ve been begging Hollywood to give us and the movie mostly delivers on that in exciting fashion.
**** out of Five

April Round-Up 2024 – Part 2

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Abigail(4/18/2024)

I should say before I begin, that I think this movie has been done something of a disservice by its advertising campaign which gives away the secret of what the deal is with the character of Abigail, which I think is kind of meant to be at least something of a surprise in the movie.  Granted I’m not sure how you’d effectively advertise the movie without giving that away given that it’s basically the high concept of the film, and this review will also go forward under the assumption the reader has seen those trailers and know this secret.  There will also be another little semi-spoiler in there as well.

Abigail is a film produced by Universal Pictures as part of an initiative that’s meant to bring adaptations of Universal Monsters movies to the screen as stand-alone modern horror films which started promisingly with 2020’s The Invisible Man but it hit a snag with 2023’s Renfield and The Last Voyage of the Demeter (if you want to count that one), both of which tried to stripmine Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel for ideas and to some extent that’s also the case with Abigail, which is actually being touted as a semi-official remake of the 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter despite basically having nothing in common with that movie besides being about a female who is nominally the offspring of Dracula.  Instead the film feels more like a spiritual sequel to Ready or Not, a previous film by directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (members of the “Radio Silence” Collective) which also dealt with people being hunted down while trapped in a mansion.  In this case the people being hunted down are members of an assembled team tasked by a mysterious underworld figure to kidnap a wealthy child for ransom purposes.  The tables then turn on them when it turns out this kid was a vampire and the abandoned house they were told to bring her to was a trap to allow her to hunt them down for sport.

The film pretty much plays out how you’d expect from there and with varying degrees of success.  The movie assembles a reasonably good cast to fill out the team of kidnappers with people like Melissa Barrera and the late Angus Cloud and the film also has Giancarlo Esposito in a small role as the guy who hired the team.  Some of the side characters are less successful though with Dan Stevens delivering a performance that teeters between being enjoyably over the top and just being kind of cheesy.  Young actress Alisha Weir is also effective as the titular teenage vampire, though I do think the filmmakers might have miscalculated a bit in putting her in a balarina outfit through the whole movie, which I don’t think is as scary as they think it is.  The movie does have some strong moments throughout though including a cool gore effect that’s recycled from the aforementioned Ready or Not and the basic twist on the Vampire mythos here is a good one.  I was pretty close to giving it a pass but the movie has a bit of a weak action oriented ending and culminates in one of the most undwhelming cameos I can think of and that left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.  Ultimately I’d say it’s a step down from Ready or Not and just not good enough to compete in a fairly competitive horror marketplace, but there is fun to be had with it and it may tip the other way amongst though watching it a bit more generously.
**1/2 out of Five

Evil Does Not Exist(4/25/2024)

Looking back, the ascention of Drive My Car into Oscar contention is kind of wild.  The Academy is a lot more receptive to foreign cinema than they used to be but even compared to other international movies they’ve gone for like Parasite and Anatomy of a Fall, Drive My Car was a pretty challenging and “artsy” choice and its three hour runtime a clear barrier for a lot of people.  For his follow-up Ryusuke Hamaguchi has made a film with a much more manageable running time of 106 minutes, and yet I’d argue that this will prove to be an even less accessible movie to most audiences in some ways, including to myself.  The film is set in a rural community outside of Tokyo which finds itself mired in controversy when a company buys a plot of land intending to build a “glamping” (glamorous camping) operation which will bring tourists to the area.  The community isn’t completely against this idea but have some serious objections to aspects of it like the size and location of the septic tank and the level of overnight supervision that will be ongoing.  Among the strongest objectors is a local handyman named Takumi and the two PR reps from the company come to the conclusion that winning him over to their side will go a long way towards getting approval for the project.  All of that is interesting but that plot takes up less of the run time than you might expect.  Other portions of the film are this more meandering material about country life which I found much less interesting.  In some ways the film is almost jarringly unwilling to dedicate itself to either being a plot based narrative or an exercise in slow cinema and its unwillingness to pick a lane in some ways undermines both halves effectiveness.  And then all of this is leading up to a very strange and rather abrupt ending that left me kind of baffled.  I think there might be something here I’m missing, there’s a good movie in there somewhere and I wouldn’t say I regret giving it a go for the parts that work but the movie is just presented in a way I didn’t really vibe with and I’m not sure what to make of it.
*** out of Five

We Grown Now(4/28/2024)

The movie American Fiction features a fictional book within the film called “We’s Lives In Da Ghetto” whose very existence infuriates the film’s protagonist sight unseen.  The outlook of that guy is not, however, entirely endorsed by that movie and when we finally meet the author of the offending book we find that she’s actually not the grifter he assumes her to be and the book sounds like it may well actually be a thoughtful exploration of poverty.  The new film We Grown Now has a title that’s perhaps dangerously close in syntax to that fictional book but like that book it’s actually a pretty thoughtful work that I suspect Thelonious “Monk” Ellison would approve of if he gave it a chance.  The film is set in the Cabrini-Green housing complex in Chicago during the 90s and follows two elementary aged kids living there who have somewhat different outlooks on their lives and who may be on different trajectories in life.  The film it will likely be compared to is last year’s One Thousand and One, which also looked at black life in the 90s in another major city, but that movie covered a longer span of time and had a bit more of a gimmick to it while this one is even less plot driven and is more of an observational character study with a keen interest in the time and place it’s set in.  The movie generally finds a good balance between presenting a sympathetic and in some ways even nostalgic depiction of life in Cabrini-Green without being oblivious to the less than pleasant aspects of life there.  I might argue that the film could have stood to have a couple of other little plot twists or maybe a couple extra character development steps as it does feel like there’s maybe an ingredient or two missing, but maybe it was better to play it safe and keep things stripped down.
***1/2 out of Five