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Review: The Man Who Sold His Skin

What is art?

The Man Who Sold His Skin is one of the Oscar nominees for Best International Feature Film. It was written and directed by Kaouther Ben Hania and represented Tunisia. It is mostly in Arabic, though some of the dialogue is in English and French, with subtitles.

Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) is a young Syrian, deeply in love with Abeer (Dea Liane). A misinterpreted utterance in a public venue gets him into trouble and he ends up as a refugee in Lebanon. He has a chance encounter with a hot, trendy artist Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw), thanks to Godefroi’s aide Soraya (Monica Bellucci).

Jeffrey wants to tattoo Sam’s back and then tour with his “creation.”. Sam agrees because he would be able to travel to Europe and optimally find Abeer.

This is fascinating stuff. Who owns the artwork? How does one make a profit as an artist? And what consideration does the “art”, who is, after all, a human being, receive? Can you “sell” the art? How would THAT work? The conversations with the exhibition halls and the insurance agents are heady musings.

Can you DO that?

Moreover, is the relationship a form of exploitation, or even slavery, of a refugee or a rare opportunity? Is Sam even seen as a person or something less than?

The way art has been recently traded in cryptocurrencies makes the notion of this film far less absurd than it might have been only a few years earlier. And the ending, I swear, I’ve seen a variation of in recent months, but it works. And I won’t tell you where because I hate to provide spoilers.

I was most fond of The Man Who Sold His Skin. The Rotten Tomatoes critics were 94% positive, although the audiences were only 74% thumbs up. John Powers of NPR says, “It weaves together satire and humane political awareness to create an original fable about art, privilege, freedom, and identity.”

All of the Best International Feature Film nominees, except the winner, Another Round, were on Hulu.

Movie review: Quo Vadis, Aida?

Bosnian war

Quo Vadis, Aida? is a film nominated as the best in the International Feature Film category. It was the entry from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Jasmila Zbanic is the writer, director, and co-producer. The film is mostly in Serbo-Croatian and is subtitled.

The movie is based on true events in July 1995. We see the commander of the local United Nations brigade in Bosnia calling the chain of command. Where are the airstrikes to stem the invasion by the Serbian army? It becomes clear to all involved, including the local translator, Aida (Jasna Đuričić), that no air support is forthcoming.

The Serbian army takes over Srebrenica. Thousands of citizens are looking for shelter in the UN camp. Its capacity is maybe 4000, leaving a sea of 20,000 outside of its gates.

Negotiations take place among the Serbian army leaders, the UN peacekeepers (mostly Dutch), and a handful of local representatives. But the talks are, as it turns out, largely for show. Then we see the UN bureaucracy deal with the invading force, or try, violating its own rules.

Tense

Quo Vadis, the title of a 1951 film, means Where are you marching? And that is most applicable of Quo Vadis, Aida? Every one of the 54 reviews in Rotten Tomatoes was positive, as well as 88% of the general audience. It is a taut thriller, with Aida feeling frustrated that, even as an “insider,” she’s very limited in terms of what she can accomplish.

Anna Swanson of the Globe and Mail writes: “Refreshingly, this is a war drama that doesn’t hinge on indulgent or shameless violence. Instead, it focuses on the heart-wrenching devastation of more offhand cruelties.”

This is a few days during a war that took place in my lifetime that I know too little about. The fine acting, especially by Jasna Đuričić, and the excellent direction and editing make this an important, albeit sad, movie. I viewed this on Hulu.

Movie review: The Mole Agent

From Chile

The Mole Agent is a film that was nominated for Best Documentary Feature in the most recent Oscar season. It lost to My Octopus Teacher, which I have not seen. Regardless, I found it a charming movie.

“A private investigator in Chile hires someone to work as a mole at a retirement home where a client of his suspects the caretakers of elder abuse.” One of the respondents is Sergio Chamy. He is one of a half dozen men responding to a newspaper ad looking for a healthy 80-89-year-old in fine health and with good technological skills.

It appears that NONE of the candidates are particularly tech-savvy. The job requires the spy to operate a pen that has a mini-camera, wear glasses with a camera inside, and use an iPhone. None of these are in his initial skill set.

Nevertheless, Romulo hires Sergio anyway. The mole, a recent widower, is one of only a small number of men in the retirement home; the women outnumber them by about ten to one. He attracts considerable attention from some of the female residents.

Reviews well

I suppose the movie, especially the beginning is “contrived and cutesy,” as one critic noted. Yet, more true, “Sounds depressing. Its big reveal was that it was often the exact opposite. Sweet, charming, and poignant, it was a meditation on growing old, loneliness and making a life when confined in an institution.”

That said, “the ‘documentary’ nature of this hybrid is very much in question. The filmmakers acknowledged at the Sundance Film Festival, that the lead protagonist was cast by them and that scenes were invented.” I don’t think it diminishes what’s on the screen.

The Mole Agent is in Spanish with subtitles. I saw it on Hulu when I forgot to cancel it after my free trial.

Spider-Verse: 4+ different Spideys

Good thing I don’t suffer from arachnophobia

As I’ve noted, Spider-Man was my favorite character in the Marvel universe. So I decided to watch, in one week in August, four different iterations of the web-slinger, none of which I had seen before. Essentially each is it own Spider-Verse.

Spider-Man 3 (2007): This is the third of the Sam Raimi films. I loved the first two, which I saw back in 2002 and 2004. I’m fond of the players – Tobey Maguire as Peter/Spidey, Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane, and James Franco as Harry Osborn. Yet the film felt too overstuffed with villains. Sandman has a backstory that makes him rather sympathetic. Meanwhile, Eddie Brock is pretty unlikable from the beginning.

And Peter was pretty oblivious to the travails of his girlfriend. If she had left him for Harry, it would have been totally understandable. When this black goo appears on earth, why didn’t it trigger Peter’s Spidey sense?

It was about 1.4 good movies. In other words, too much. Yet I didn’t hate it as much as I had feared.

Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014): This is the second of the Marc Webb films, with Andrew Garfield as Peter and Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy. But also overstuffed. I never cared that much about this Harry Osborn. The Elektro villain (Jamie Foxx) had a cringeworthy origin and was not terribly interesting. But this is what tipped me off that I didn’t care: the climax of the film I found oddly undramatic.

Swinging younger

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018): Now this was intriguing. Miles Morales is a nerdy teenager who becomes the Spider-Man of his universe. Is he ready? Heck, no. But he gets help from one Peter B. Parker. At this point, it’s a bit of a buddy pic, in a good sense.

Eventually, fellow web slingers also show up, and they’re wonderful in their own unique ways. The visuals are weird and wonderful, including an absurdly large Kingpin with a relatively tiny head. The movie works because of some fine voice actors, starting with Shameik Moore. I haven’t read the comic book in a quarter-century, yet I recognized this film as the love letter to Spider-Man it was intended to be.

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019). Where I grew tired of the first two Spidey franchises, I’m actually warming up to the Tom Holland character. Part of it is him being totally weirded out when it appears his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) might be expressing romantic interest with each other.

Meanwhile, Peter is going on a class trip to Europe with his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), his major crush MJ (Zendaya), and the others. Peter ends up doing the superhero gig again, taking on some elementals. Fortunately, he is aided by an alien ally, Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal)! Or so it would seem. Very satisfying up through the closing credits. Then the OMG coda.

A franchise?

Rotten Tomatoes considers Spider-Man, in its various iterations, a franchise. And a successful one, at that.
Average Tomatometer Score/Rank: 81.25% (11th)
Average Audience Score/Rank: 77% (15th)
Average Domestic Box Office/Rank: $411,579,893.13 (7th)

Could the new Spider-Man movie bring all the Spider-Men together?

Movie review: Mank (as in Herman)

Herman Mankiewicz

The first movie I saw in an actual cinema was Mank. I viewed it at Landmark’s Spectrum 8 in Albany the Thursday before the Oscars. Only some of the seats were available, for COVID reasons. I’ve been vaccinated so I was feeling reasonably comfortable.

I had been looking forward to seeing this film since Ben Mankiewicz, a host on Turner Classic Movies, talked about it several months earlier on CBS Sunday Morning.

Ben’s interest was not just cinematic, though. He is a grandson of the topic of the film, Herman Mankiewicz, a noted writer for newspapers and magazines, who famously may have co-written as many as 40 films.

The movie is about “1930’s Hollywood is reevaluated through the eyes of scathing social critic and alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) as he races to finish the screenplay of Citizen Kane (1941),” the only movie for which he was, with Welles, actually credited with writing.

Didn’t love it

This was a story I knew something about. Mank’s peculiar platonic relationship with actress Marion Davies (a very good Amanda Seyfried), who was the paramour of William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance). Mank’s long-suffering wife Sara (Tuppence Middleton) explains why she stays with her husband: “It’s never boring.”

But despite the cool black and white details, I found the narrative frustratingly jumbled. The review in Jacobin magazine addresses much of it. “The ‘Mank’ story hardly needs embellishment, but the Finchers, father, and son, give it plenty anyway. There are about fifty published posts out there that explain which parts of Mank are factual and which are made up.”

“The dinner party scene is a garbled mess, though [director David] Fincher seems to have lavished elaborate care upon it.” It’s set up as Important but it felt oddly flat.

“The way it’s filmed is so blandly unmemorable, it would’ve done much to undercut it. The film’s lax flashback structure from Mankiewicz’s point-of-view seems to be in contrast to Citizen Kane’s dynamic flashback structure from multiple, contradictory points of view.” While the chronology was noted throughout, the need for jumping back and forth in time was lost on me.

Or maybe I just missed it

Think Christian suggests that in the “Oscar-nominated film, Gary Oldman plays a truth-teller in a gadfly’s clothing.” So “Mank repeatedly lampoons the latent hypocrisy and brutal inhumanity of Hollywood’s dream machine. In doing so, this self-described ‘washed-up’ screenwriter impishly reminds viewers that, flaws and all, great prophets (and artists) courageously speak truth to power.”

For instance, “Mank witnesses Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) earnestly plead with his MGM employees to accept a fifty-percent pay cut so the studio may survive the Great Depression intact… Knowing Mayer’s self-serving nature and deep pockets, Mank sardonically observes, ‘Not even the most disgraceful thing I have ever seen.’” But he doesn’t say this to Mayer, so…

Still, “whereas Mayer feigns caring but lives indifference, Mank takes the opposite path.” Mank’s transcriber Rita Alexander (Lily Collins) works with him on the Kane script as he recovers from a car accident.

“When asked [by Rita] to defend her loyalty to her alcoholic and antisocial patient, Mank’s German caregiver, Fraulein Freda (Monika Gossmann), reveals that he secretly donated the funds necessary to save 100 Jewish residents in her village from Nazis. Confronted with his altruism, Mank replies, ‘Dear Freda. What’s German for blabbermouth?’

Perhaps all of the goodness of the movie is there somewhere. The critics gave it an 83% positive review, though only 60% of the general audience agreed. Or maybe I wanted to like my first cinematic experience in 14 months too much. Having finally seen all of the nominated films for Best Picture this season, Mank might be my least favorite; ah, well.