review Archives - Page 17 of 67 - Ramblin' with Roger

2023 Oscar-nominated shorts

An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake

On two days in mid-February, my wife and I saw some of the 2023 Oscar-nominated shorts at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, NY. I found some of the films online, which I have linked to.

Live action

Ivalu – DENMARK/16 MINS/2022

Director: Anders Walter, Pipaluk K. Jørgensen

“Ivalu is gone. Her little sister,” Pipaluk, “is desperate to find her. Her father does not care. The vast Greenlandic nature holds secrets. Where is Ivalu?”

While it was a touching bit when Pipaluk would retrace the locales they used to hang out, it was an unsatisfactory conclusion.

Night Ride (Nattrikken) – NORWAY/15 MINS/2020

Director: Eirik Tveiten

“It is a cold night in December. As Ebba waits for the tram, an unexpected turn of events transforms the ride home into something she was not expecting.”

I liked this piece a lot, possibly my favorite in the category. It was pretty funny, held a degree of danger, and showed real humanity.

More Live Action

Le Pupille ITALY, USA/37 MINS/2022

Director: Alice Rohrwacher

“From… Academy Award® winning producer, Alfonso Cuarón is a tale of innocence, greed, and fantasy. [It] is about desires, pure and selfish, about freedom and devotion, and about the anarchy that is capable of flowering in the minds of girls within the confines of a strict religious boarding school at Christmas.”

As the longest of the pieces, the story is the most complex, taking place in World War II Italy. It is or was on Disney+. I enjoyed it.

The Red Suitcase -LUXEMBOURG/18 MINS/2022

Director: Cyrus Neshvad

“A young Iranian woman at a Luxembourg airport is in a life-changing situation.”

While totally believable, it was most frustrating because we wanted to know what happened next.

An Irish Goodbye – IRELAND/23 MINS/2022

Director: Tom Berkeley, Ross White

“On a farm in rural Northern Ireland, estranged brothers Turlough and Lorcan are forced to reunite following the untimely death of their mother.”

My wife’s favorite, and for a good reason, even though we couldn’t suss out bits of the dialogue. The family tension rang true. It won the BAFTA in this category.

Animated

An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It -AUSTRALIA/11 MINS/2022

Director: Lachlan Pendragon

“When a young telemarketer is confronted by a mysterious talking ostrich, he learns that the universe is stop-motion animation. He must put aside his dwindling toaster sales and focus on convincing his colleagues of his terrifying discovery.”

This had a Truman Show/end of a Lego Movie vibe. BTW, the ostrich may be correct. I liked it a lot.

The Flying Sailor – CANADA/7 MINS/2022

Director: Amanda Forbis, Wendy Tilby

“In 1917, two ships collided in the Halifax Harbour, causing the largest accidental explosion in history. Among the tragic stories of the disaster is the remarkable account of a sailor who, blown skyward from the docks, flew a distance of two kilometres before landing uphill, naked and unharmed. The Flying Sailor is a contemplation of his journey.”

I wish I had known the above before I watched it for the first time. NOW it makes more sense.

More animation

Ice Merchants – PORTUGAL, UNITED KINGDOM, FRANCE/14 MINS/2022

Director: João Gonzalez

“Every day, a father and his son jump with a parachute from their vertiginous cold house, attached to a cliff, to go to the village on the ground, far away where they sell the ice they produce daily.”

The comments helped me understand this better than I did on first watching.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse -UK/34 MINS/2022

Director: Peter Baynton, Charlie Mackesy

It “is a story of kindness, courage, and hope in traditional hand-drawn animation, following the unlikely friendship of the title characters as they journey in search of the boy’s home. Based on the book of the same name.”

I liked the traditional artwork. It’s strange, though; I can believe the talking animals, yet we both had trouble figuring out where the boy came from. How did he not freeze to death? I think this is streaming on Apple+.

Animation with a warning

My Year of Dicks -USA/25 MINS/2022

Director: Sara Gunnarsdóttir // Writer: Pamela Ribon

“An imaginative fifteen-year-old is stubbornly determined to lose her virginity despite the pathetic pickings in the outskirts of Houston in the early 90s. Created by Pamela Ribon from her critically-acclaimed memoir.”

Before it aired in the theater, there was a warning that the content may not be suitable for some. The last time I saw that message, it was some grossly bloody and inartful six minutes.

This was fun in five chapters, the first of which is here. My favorite part, though, was Chapter 5, when the protagonist asks her mom a personal question, and the mom makes the dad explain sex to the daughter. I found it extremely funny.

Documentaries

I didn’t see the docs in the theater, but I did view two on YouTube.

THE ELEPHANT WHISPERERS – Kartiki Gonsalves and Guneet Monga

HAULOUT– Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev

Ninety thousand walruses outside your door is a sure sign that the planet’s ecosystem is out of whack.

HOW DO YOU MEASURE A YEAR? –Jay Rosenblatt

THE MARTHA MITCHELL EFFECT – Anne Alvergue and Beth Levison

STRANGER AT THE GATE – Joshua Seftel and Conall Jones

I saw a brief piece about a “Veteran’s Return from the Brink of Terrorism” on CBS Sunday Morning. I found this to be a powerful telling of how hate can be turned around. A review of all of the short documentaries states this film “reads a little too optimistic for the current moment.” I have no idea what that means.

Movie review: Women Talking

Writer/director Sarah Polley

The movie Women Talking should get a truth-in-advertising seal. It really is about women talking. It’s what they are talking about that’s noteworthy.

The narrative is based on Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel of the same name. In turn, it was “based on a true story of vicious serial rapes in an insular, ultraconservative Mennonite community in Bolivia.” The geography in the movie is not stated, but there is a specific reference to the 2010 Census, which suggests rural locale in the United States, though the speech pattern suggests Canada, where it was filmed.

In the real-life Bolivian community, “from 2005 to 2009, nine men in the Manitoba Colony, using livestock tranquilizers, drugged female victims ranging in age from three to sixty and violently raped them at night. When the girls and women awoke bruised and covered in blood, the men of the colony dismissed their reports as ‘wild female imagination’–even when they became pregnant from the assaults–or punishments from God or by demons for their supposed sins.”

Some of this narrative is incorporated in the movie, briefly shown in flashback. The men in the community are in town, but they are returning in 48 hours. What should the women do? They vote to choose among three options: stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave the colony. And since none of them can read or write,the tally sheet required pictures to insure that the women knew their choices.

The latter two options tied for the lead, so three families of women are appointed to meet in a barn and decide for the collective. And in doing so, figure out, e.g., what “stay and fight” would mean.

More than rhetoric

I know Women Talking could be perceived as another #MeToo movie, and I have seen reviews that suggest just that, which I think is a bit surfacy. Here’s a piece of one review: “WOMEN TALKING is a movie for people who think ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is too subtle an allegory about women being suppressed by the patriarchy.” No; just no.

What intrigued me was how the conversation was framed by their faith in God. Should the men be forgiven? What kind of God is there that would have the women do so? Another review summary I hated: “For all talk of a new order, Women Talking is eager to reassure us of its lack of interest in really rocking the boat, even outright including the phrase ‘not all men.'” These women are are doing a Brand New Thing, and they’re figuring it out, not coming out the gate with the proper framework.

The cast is stellar. It includes Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand, Judith Ivey, and Ben Whishaw. Sarah Polley, the director and writer of the screenplay, made a deliberate choice of the not-quite-black-and-white motif, perhaps to echo the ambivalence of their choices and the consequences of same.

Incidentally, I really liked Polley’s 2013 documentary Stories We Tell.

My wife and I saw Women Talking at a Saturday matinee in mid-February. There were about a dozen and half people in the theater; there was at least one other male in the audience.

All Quiet On The Western Front (2022)

World War I

The current iteration of the film All Quiet On The Western Front is the third World War I film I’ve seen in the last four years. I watched 1917 in January 2020, and the documentary footage of They Shall Not Grow Old a year earlier.

There’s a bit of surface similarity between Grow Old and All Quiet. In each case, the potential recruits, from Britain and Germany, respectively, are led to believe that going off to war will be an adventure. They’re so cheerful marching off to battle. But they soon discover they’re mired in a slog of trench warfare.

All Quiet is a remake of the 1930 film of the same name, which I have never seen. The original won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, Lewis Milestone, and was nominated in two other categories. The new film is up for nine Oscars, including Best Picture.

The characters even share the same names. Felix Kammerer plays Paul, the Lew Ayres role. Albrecht Schuch is Kat, played initially by Louis Wolheim. I did not know there was also a 1979 TV movie with Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine.

At some level, the charge by the soldiers, which happens thrice, looks almost exactly the same in the new film. Perhaps it’s to show what is explained in the epilogue, that tens of thousands of soldiers were killed to gain or lose only a few hundred meters of territory. This caused me slight confusion for a time.

Recycled

Even in the “quiet” moments, one sees the horrors. The uniforms are stripped from the dead soldiers and shipped to a factory where women sew up the holes created by bullets and bayonets. Often, the names of the previous wearer have not been removed until after the recruit notices the old nametag.

Still, nothing showed the utter pointless insanity of war more than a segment near the end.

The new All Quiet On The Western Front is an excellent movie worthy of its BAFTA win. But it inevitably has lots of wartime violence, some of it up close. Occasionally, the participants consider their actions’ emotional and moral consequences. Then there’s the next skirmish, and a soldier has no time to think.

The eyes. The image that will linger in my mind is often the blue eyes of the living and the dead on faces caked with mud.

Movie review: The Whale

Director Darren Aronofsky

When I went to see The Whale at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany with my wife in late January, I was concerned.

Would the film be fatphobic? I don’t believe it was. This is a man named Charlie (Brendan Fraser) who is in pain, and food is his drug of choice. At some level, I understand that. So the reviewers that complain that his eating disorder wasn’t adequately explained confound me.

Yes, the movie was claustrophobic. Long before reading the end credits, I knew the piece had to have been based on a play that Samuel D. Hunter wrote. For me, this works in its favor.

Charlie has closed himself off. He teaches an online English class, but his video on the laptop “doesn’t work.” His only friend, Liz (Hong Chau) is alternatingly irritated with him and understanding. She’s linked to him in another way.

He misses his daughter, who he had left along with his wife when the girl was just eight. The now-seventeen-year-old Ellie (Sadie Sink) unexpectedly shows up at his house against the express wishes of her mother. She plays mind games with both Charlie and the young evangelist Thomas (Ty Simkins), who keeps showing up at Charlie’s place.

Much has been made of Fraser’s Oscar-nominated performance, and for a good reason. Even those who don’t like the film praise the actor. Chau is also nominated. The performance of Samatha Morton as Mary, Charlie’s ex and Ellie’s mom, really jumped out for me..

Action

Director Darren Aronofsky is the source of much of mixed feelings about the movie. One critic said The Whale didn’t need the director’s “heavy darkness to be effective.” I thought it was appropriate.

Another said the adaptation was “empathetic and soulful,” which I agree with. A third: the “questions about its purpose – why is this difficult movie about a very difficult man even made – unanswered.” I don’t understand that observation.

Aronofsky directed one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. In Requiem for a Dream (2000), Ellen Burstyn was nominated for Best Actress. She should have won but lost out to Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, who was fine in that picture.

While I saw The Whale at a cinema, I think it could survive being streamed more than, say, the current Avatar film.

Review – Avatar: The Way of Water

sequel to the 2009 film

Here’s my problem when I watched Avatar: The Way of Water – I never saw the original 2009 film. So I didn’t know what supposedly terrible, traitorous thing Jake (Sam Worthington), the primary male character, did to trigger the massive military response. I’ve subsequently read a summary of the first movie. Oh, THAT’S what was going on.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed trying to figure out the relationship among the primary family. Jake and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have sons Neteyam and Lo’ak and daughters Tuk and Kiri. There’s also a human boy named Spider, who relates more to the Na’vi culture. Jake accepts him, but Neytiri is distrustful.

Their tranquility is broken when a spaceship of humans returns to Pandora to capture it. Quaritch (Stephen Lang) has been cloned into a Na’vi body. The attack, even out of context, reminded me of how powerful the military-industrial complex is. Even in this fictional space, it always seems to find a way to pay for heavy-duty armaments and technology.

Jake, Neytiri, and their family flee from the Omaticaya Clan and retreat to the coast of Metkayina. It’s at this point that not knowing what had happened previously didn’t much matter. There is a period of adjustment for both the sojourners and their hosts. Eventually, the space invaders come looking for the family.

Loverly

I found these worlds visually stunning, and even without the story were almost worth watching, irrespective of the narrative. This is probably a movie that is best seen in a cinema.

The story addressed imperialism, racism, and environmental injustice, sometimes with success and occasionally a bit hamfisted. It was interesting to me that the parenting skills of Neytaki and especially Jake sounded very much like almost every parent I grew up around.

The movie, at 195 minutes, is LONG, maybe overlong. I assume James Cameron allows his editors to work.

Ultimately, I guess I need to watch the first film to ascertain whether Way Of Water has fixed the flaws of the original or if it is too much of the same thing. I’ve read multiple reviews with each point of view.

I saw the film at a weekday matinee at Madison Theatre in Albany, and as has happened twice before, I was the only person present.