Not really a talent show, but admissions week at an art academy. A pretty enjoyable True/False doc. Vadim Rizov: “beautifully shot and consistently funny while observing a zone where inspiration and bullshit perpetually dwell side-by-side out of impossible-to-separate necessity.”
Rae Fitzgerald again, solo this time, and better suited for the Globe venue. No music during the psychic/medium sessions – was there any music at all? Some false leads and wrong guesses during the sessions, some spot-on apparent knowledge of strangers’ lives, and lots of affirmation – it’s posed as a form of counseling/therapy, for the mediums as well as their customers. Present, but uncaptured by DP Stephen Maing (who was down the street introducing Union) were the ghosts of beloved partners, children, a great(x5) grandfather, and a bearded dragon. Some humor but the crowd never laughing at the film’s participants, and breaking scenes to talk to the director/crew is left in, the cameras welcomed to the mystery. An A24 release so hopefully this will play out, and all the Everything Everwhere / Past Lives fans will watch it.
Scott Tobias in The Reveal:
Most admit that they’re improvising through uncertainty, working from an intuition that often betrays them. A cynic might consider them con artists. Wilson’s film frames them as seekers.
I’d read a little about this movie beforehand, and didn’t bring any kleenex, so stood outside the Missouri Theater staring up at its walls thinking “I am the brick, I am the mortar, I will not cry at the movie,” and this pretty much worked. Slyly highlights the broken horrors of the prison system through personal stories from inside and outside, the two sides meeting at the father-daughter dance, an invention of activist and co-director Patton. The dads are told to use the dance as a promise to change and be present for their families, and soon some are getting out but others are being shut away for decades (the movie never says why any of them are inside). A particular five year-old is so open, talking lovingly and often of her feather, then in postscript she’s eight, acting completely distant on a phone call with him. Older jaded kids have trouble with the concept, but give in when it’s dance time. A lovely movie that will go far unless it’s immediately dumped onto streaming and lost in the content ocean. At least twenty producers, and a production company that did Faya Dayi and The Territory. Opener Good Looks was a noisy four-piece rock group.
More wide-ranging than Boys State, the governor race not the only thing going. Conservative girl Emily is the star (has she mentioned she’s conservative?), decisively losing the governor race then quickly putting together an article about the differences in funding, prestige, and programming between Girls and Boys State, and winning a scholarship. Complaints in the air that the boys have triple the budget, participation from elected officials, and more discussion of real issues. Nisha doesn’t get a supreme court seat, so becomes the judge of a lower court that sends a case on forced pre-abortion counseling to the supreme, where Tochi is the DA arguing the state’s opinion while believing the opposite. It’s all super slick and heartwarming – they had so many cameras running. Production company Concordia worked on some of the big T/F titles: Time, Bisbee 17, Bloody Nose. We stayed for the Q&A, with three Missouri-based subjects in attendance. Rae Fitzgerald played too softly for a noisy noontime crowd, even with her rhythm section.
David Ehrlich in Indiewire:
The closer Girls State gets toward its climactic elections, the more it confronts the same patriarchal bias and performative empowerment that might have girl-bossed the life out of a lesser film (although this one still plays a particular Taylor Swift song over its end credits). And the more it confronts the role those phenomena manage to play on the university campus where the Boys and Girls State programs are being held at the same time for the first time in Missouri history (but still completely separate from one another in order to avoid sins of the flesh and whatnot), the more frighteningly it reflects a near-future — or now present — in which political agency is just something young women get to pretend they have if there’s room in the budget for a bit of make-believe.
Good photography (by others) and music (by Mary Lattimore) but this falls straight into the personal/parents doc template with the usual outcomes. Mom died before Rachel was two, R doesn’t remember her, so she goes on a journey to find footage and associates. Goes where mom went, meets who she knew, makes mom’s ex-boyfriend cry while Rachel is breaking up with her own husband. I don’t feel like they came up with compelling way to turn their audiotape archives into cinema – re-enactments with faces hidden, video of tape machines, the old kachunk-slideshow from Sr. She performs as her mom, edits herself into film of her mom, interviews other girls who didn’t have moms, generally makes everything about herself and her loss. The stuff about the nature of photography and memory was more interesting than the parental pinings. Her dad seems cool anyway. Some good voices in this, but not the director’s, which is who we’re mostly hearing. When looking for trailers I found one from a decade ago – this was shot and kickstartered back then, and it took this long to finish. Somewhere in the long process it picked up producers who worked on Joonam, Hottest August, Aquarela, Her Smell, and Cameraperson, and the editors of Crip Camp and The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Horns and drums by Gora Gora Orkestar made the trip to the Jesse worthwhile.
Gwetto (2023) and Todisoa and the Black Stones (2013)
“Economically disadvantaged,” they call themselves in Gwetto – true of both movies, though the displaced people of Todisoa are also geographically disadvantaged. They’re forcibly relocated by white exploiters who run a mine with local labor. A guy carrying charcoal to the next town inevitably reminds of the much more interesting Makala. Gwetto is car wash kids who are stressed that the neighbors think they’re thugs. Katy calls it impressionistic – we don’t get to know these guys individually. One bit of excitement outside a carnival where you can see people in the background clambering on the outside of the ferris wheels. Andrianaly won a T/F career award, but Katy and I are suddenly less interested in catching up with his Nofinofy.
Gwetto:
I sat up front, enjoyed the opening drum, sax, and knob-twiddling from BSA Gold, and prepared to enjoy the film, which starts strong in sharp black and white then gradually lets me down. A worthwhile story framed as a protracted podcast mystery, withholding information so it can introduce twists, the interviewees frustratingly vague. Lot of archive footage including TV appearances by our participants on alien report shows. Ultimately when unknotted, it seems that Ernesto, who ran sound and acted for Ruiz in 1970, became a Pinochet supporter involved in the disappearance/murder of government critics. In the 1980s he gets into radio and invents a Friendship Island story, maybe playing different roles to expand the conspiracy, becomes friendly with some other radio people who’d planned to travel to the island but who turned back on the day of the Challenger explosion. The alien cult stories spread locally but nobody seems to have found (looked for?) the island. We see Ernesto in person, belatedly, and his funeral. The director previously made an art theft doc.
We didn’t recognize Thao sitting on a chair playing solo slide guitar until she stood up for some vocal songs, including a terrific solo version of “Temple.” Glad we attended because of her – the movie was nothing special, a blow-up of circa-2000 DV home movies shot by their mom while nearby neighborhoods in Palestine were under attack, the family alternating between “it’s fine” and hiding in the basement. I did enjoy this slightly more than Sr – not saying much – and it’s a ton more straightforward. All tension comes from worrying what might happen, whether they should run, and that’s not too much tension since mom is doing the present-day voiceover. Onscreen timecode means you can deconstruct the editing choices.
A missed opportunity, no musician for a full house. Maybe an obvious picturesque crowd-pleaser but I find no cause for suspicion. Bhutan took away citizenship from Nepalese-origin residents, our lead surveyor is in his forties and was born in Bhutan but can’t get a passport to follow his young girlfriend to Australia. Cute onscreen titles showing the happiness quotient of interviewees, then the movie goes in-depth with a trans woman and her mom who has cancer, a schoolgirl upset that her mother won’t stop drinking, a Very Happy man with three wives who like each other more than they like him, a widower who speaks only of his late wife until we see his newborn grandkid at the end. The crew (or the edit) returns to past interviewees, weaves their stories together instead of showing their happiness score and moving on, so when you finally see the calculations of someone whose full story you’ve heard, the quantifying seems absurd. We stayed with the Q&A, our second time seeing these filmmakers after The Next Guardian.