by ·Comments Off on Lone Star (1996, John Sayles)

A high-quality modern Western drama, solid cast and writing, with a couple of elevating factors. The stylistic trick of transitioning into flashbacks with a camera move instead of an edit or fade, past characters sharing physical space with the present, is impressive every time. And just when the story is wrapping up, when Chris Cooper learns that his late father Matthew McConaughey did not shoot the sheriff, he also learns that his old flame newly re-enflamed (Elizabeth Peña) is his half-sister… and they decide they can live with that.

Bad Sheriff Kristofferson’s final act:

Bar owner Otis later played a detective in The Empty Man. His estranged military son Joe Morton was the doomed robotics inventor in Terminator 2. Peña was in The Second Civil War, which it’s probably time to rewatch. Nominated for a bunch of awards that Fargo won, so it’s good to see key Coen critic Adam Nayman defending.

Its qualities of thoughtful, hard-edged sociological storytelling and analysis are currently in short supply. They don’t make ’em like this anymore … For all its skepticism about the American tendency to mythologize (and mass market) its sins away, the film is tender about the necessity of forgetting, or at least trying to. It’s a measure of Sayles’s superlative construction that a story that begins with something being unearthed ends with a plea to keep another secret buried — and of his empathy as an artist that the sentiment rings true.

Sisters Lovers:

Coen Connection:

by ·Comments Off on Past Lives (2023, Celine Song)

Pretty good movie, well-deserved star turn for Greta Lee. Inspired by the director being in the exact position of the opening scene, sitting at an NY bar between a husband and an old flame, wondering how she looked to outsiders.

by ·Comments Off on Mija (2022, Isabel Castro)

Our feelgood closing film was the opposite of Sirens, which claimed not to be a “rock doc” but was one. Castro set out to make a rock doc, but the subject dropped out, so she followed pop star Cuco’s jilted manager Doris instead, as Doris discovers a possible new star in Jacks. None of this was my kind of music, especially when played “live” (as in Sirens, we only get one concert before the pandemic hit), but the story goes to interesting places. The inter-generational immigrant experience brought back The Namesake, and Doris’s dad getting his green card was the fest’s biggest moment since the kidnapping, and the second time we heard mid-film applause. Opener Andreas Kapsalis plays classic covers on fancy acoustic guitar – I remember him from previous fests, and had the same reaction: annoyance at the Pink Floyd song, then warming up to his captivating style.

by ·Comments Off on Minari (2020, Lee Isaac Chung)

The cool guy from Burning and his wife (Yeri Han of the recent Wolf Brigade remake) are professional chicken sexers starting an Arkansas farm to grow Korean veggies in their spare time. Yuh-Jung Youn (Sense8 and a couple Hong Sang-soo films) is MVP as their grandma. The kids hide from parental arguments and reluctantly spend time with grandma, who feeds them weird things and teaches them to be aggressive card players. Potential dangers include snakes, a heart murmur, a cross-dragging Christian (Will Patton), and drought + trash fire, which strikes when grandma, struggling after having a stroke, accidentally burns down the storeroom while the others are in Tulsa. Funny timing since this week I was playing an album for the first time in decades that I bought in Tulsa when our family drove down from Arkansas. The sympathetic, struggling family and personal resonance wasn’t enough to make the actual movie, a brownish wood-paneled drama, especially great.

by ·Comments Off on Stranger In Paradise (2016, Guido Hendrikx)

We thought we’d already seen intense, slippery, ethically complex movies at True/False, and then this one came along, a hybrid documentary in which an actor (Valentijn Dhaenens, playing “Europe”) interacts with classrooms of refugees hoping to be accepted into a European country, taking different approaches. After an immigration-philosophy intro, in Act 1 Dhaenens is harsh and accusatory, says new immigrants will cost his country money and they’ll import religious beliefs which run counter to state law. V. Rizov: “There’s a bracing, hateful clarity in someone who’s willing to say exactly what they mean, even/especially if it’s vile.”

In Act 2 he’s generous and understanding, says Europe owes them all charity due to its colonialist past. Europe has resources to go around, and he points to a study saying that erasing state borders entirely could bring all states greater wealth. In Act 3 he follows the rules, eliminating anyone not eligible for residency in the Netherlands, then he interviews the rest to see whose stories hold up, until just three remain.

Rizov:

After mastering montage and close-quarters conflict, Stranger closes strong in a new mode with a super-long (both distance/time) shot epilogue; now “out of character” on the street, Dhaenens meets a group of migrants who ask for cigarettes. Given what we’ve been watching for an hour, the suspicion that they might take violent, understandable revenge on the outnumbered teacher (thereby setting up any number of racist headlines about migrants running wild) lurks, but instead everyone has a nice chat. By the time Dhaenens points back to the director behind the camera it’s increasingly clear that this tableaux as staged as anything in the film (for this sequence, the migrants wrote their own dialogue). Here’s another film that summarizes with great clarity a particularly sordid/inhumane strain of contemporary thought it’s attempting to combat, while at the same time pointing out how unhelpful the film itself is in effectuating change.

Katy says the movie, particularly the epilogue conversation, seemed ethically unsound until the director’s Q&A assured us that the refugees were paid participants, aware of the film’s structure and intentions, and the final scene was even scripted (though based on a real conversation).

I’d been looking forward to Sarah Kendzior’s intro, which she read stiffly from a book of notes and didn’t hold half the interest as Jeong’s Star Wars net neutrality essay. Kendzior is still a catastrophist, but at least she humorously acknowledged that her worst predictions about our country haven’t (yet!) come to pass.

by ·Comments Off on Dheepan (2015, Jacques Audiard)

At first I thought Audiard seems influenced by the Godfather movies, from the young enforcer who takes over a crime business in A Prophet to this movie’s immigrant stories (dunno how Rust & Bone would fit in), but after it became clear that Dheepan was heading towards rage and revenge, I thought of it as a more currently-fashionable Harry Brown (others are saying Straw Dogs).

The most interesting twist: Dheepan and his “family” are only pretending to be a family in order to get refugee status and flee Sri Lanka, where Dheepan was a Tamil Tiger. They live together like strangers, only playing the family role for outside observers, but gradually begin to respect and protect each other. Meanwhile, the block of apartments where they live and work is a drug hub which turns violent when lead dealer Vincent Rottiers (young Jean in the Renoir biopic) returns from prison. With these pieces in place, the movie gets to create a crowd-pleasing finale where Dheepan draws on his violent past to protect his makeshift family. M. D’Angelo: “After nearly two hours of depicting the improvised family’s patient adjustments, negotiations, and compromises, Audiard abruptly switches to Hollywood fantasy, and there’s no sign that he’s doing so ironically, metatextually, or with any other subversive purpose in mind.”

Still a pretty good movie. I’m not as upset about this winning the palme d’or (or Loach winning in 2016) as others are. Regardless of the winner, I’m still seeking out as many of the acclaimed competition films as possible (so far: Carol, The Assassin, The Lobster, Sicario).

by ·Comments Off on A Bigger Splash (2015, Luca Guadagnino)

Rock goddess Tilda Swinton is relaxing at a Mediterranean island paradise with boyfriend photographer Matthias Schoenaerts (Rust and Bone) when her ex, music producer Ralph Fiennes (an overpowering, charismatic performance) shows up with his newly-discovered daughter Dakota Johnson (Black Mass). Sexual and other tensions get extremely high, and the movie, which has an otherwise excellent soundtrack, tries in vain to get me to appreciate the Rolling Stones song “Emotional Rescue.”

I was disappointed when the story twists into murder-investigation territory after Matthias drowns a belligerent drunk Ralph in the pool, but this ends up justified. After initial interviews the chief investigator reveals himself to be a trembling Tilda superfan, gets her autograph and lets them all go. Tilda had previously, not at all convincingly, suggested to him that one of the immigrants flooding onto the island (many dying at sea) could have snuck onto the property, drowned Ralph, stolen nothing and run off. We didn’t realize that Tilda or her friends, in their wealthy bubble, even noticed the immigration crisis in the background noise around them – until it becomes useful to get themselves out of trouble.

Based on a story previously filmed by Jacques Deray with Alain Delon, and by Francois Ozon with Charlotte Rampling. Played in Venice with Anomalisa, Francofonia, Blood of My Blood and 11 Minutes. I finally warmed up to “Emotional Rescue” during the St. Vincent cover over the closing credits.

D. Ehrlich:

There are few better metaphors for the myopia of hedonism than a swimming pool on an island paradise surrounded by the sea … In lesser hands, this could’ve been a Woody Allen movie, but Guadagnino — always with his chef’s hat on — takes the ingredients for a sunbaked creampuff and slowly stirs them into a three-course meal. Working with regular cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, Guadagnino shoots in a sensual register where every shot feels just a hair too perfect to exist anywhere outside the movies. Snap zooms playfully focus on emotions that burst like firecrackers, rhythmic cuts throw you back on style whenever things risk becoming too realistic, and Marianne’s aviator shades reflect every character against their true intentions. Best of all, the soundtrack is wild and true, running the gamut from Harry Nilsson to Popol Vuh.