Tag: review

Time: movie documentary review

60 years

Time amazon-documentaryTime is a black and white documentary film put together by the New York Times’ Op Doc folks, which I saw on Amazon Prime. It starts out as a series of snippets of home videos by Fox Rich, about her and her husband Rob, pursuing their American dream to start a clothing store.

Then things went south, financially. We discover Rob and a cousin decide to rob a bank, with Fox as the getaway driver. They are caught and both are given jail time. Fox, who was pregnant with twin boys, received a few years. But Rob got 60 years, without a chance of parole.

So the bulk of the film is about Fox trying to make sure her six sons remember their father while working unceasingly over two decades to get her husband out of prison. As the tag suggests, “this bears witness to the power of one woman to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds with the aid of her faith and family.”

Time was one of fifteen films that were considered in the “Documentary Feature category for the 93rd Academy Awards. Two hundred thirty-eight films were eligible in the category. Members of the Documentary Branch vote to determine the shortlist and the nominees.”

I’ll admit that it took me a while to see where the film was going. Once I picked up on the narrative direction, I found it fascinating and inspiring.

On Rotten Tomatoes, it received 98% positive reviews from the critics. But only 46% of the general audience felt the same. And I understand why, I believe.

This is NOT a story about persons falsely accused. These people clearly did the crime. Ought not they do the time? Perhaps. But 60 years?

Why is life so complicated?

Here’s a paragraph from an IMDB review from ferguson 6, 7 out of 10 stars. “There are some mixed messages delivered here, which is understandable given how complicated life can get. Perhaps the most vivid message is the impact incarceration has on a family.

“Fox is an extraordinary woman devoted to raising her sons as strong and smart young men. But she also decries that her boys have never had a father and don’t even know the role one plays. While Fox displays the ultimate in polite phone decorum despite her frustrations with an uncaring, inefficient system, we do see her sincerity as she stands in front of her church congregation asking for forgiveness of her poor choices.”

If you watch Time, please be patient. It probably won’t grab you at the outset. It’s only over the course of the film that you get to see the effect that  lengthy incarceration has on a family.

Movie review: Wolfwalkers

Cartoon Saloon

WolfwalkersOn AppleTV+, which I have free for a year, the platform announced that Wolfwalkers was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Film on March 15, mere minutes after the announcement was made. Since I hadn’t seen any of the other choices yet, I watched it, and I was entranced.

A young English girl named Robyn Goodfellowe (voiced by Honor Kneafsey), an apprentice hunter, and her widowed father Bill (Sean Bean) move to Ireland. Their job is to “help wipe out the last wolf pack. But everything changes when she befriends a free-spirited girl from a mysterious tribe rumored to transform into wolves by night.”

First off, it is a lovely, hand-drawn animation. The reviews, which were 99% positive, use terms such as “lush,” “gorgeous,” “beautiful,” a “visual splendor,” and its “use of color and detail make it continually dazzling to watch.” But it isn’t just eye candy.

“It’s endlessly beguiling, like the magic of the forest.” Wolfwalkers addresses the role of women and girls, deforestation and its effect, and I suppose the British version of manifest destiny.

Irish studio

The movie was created by the well-regarded Cartoon Saloon. They made Secret of the Kells (2009), which I did not see; it was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Film.

There is a long-running comic book series called Elfquest by Wendy and Richard Pini; I’ve met them more than once. I’ve only really read the first 20 issues back in the 1980s. This story faintly reminds me of that story’s ethos. Or maybe it’s just the wolves, though I don’t recall them shapeshifting as Mebh Óg MacTíre (Ava Whittaker) does.

“Here is an animated film that finds new beauty in ancient traditions; a film that fights back against the temptation to surrender what little magic this world still has left.” Yup, that’s right.

Review – Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm

slack-jawed horror

BoratI did not see Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006). Fortunately, you do not have to have watched the first movie to understand Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm.

The man (Sacha Baron Cohen) is in serious, perhaps lethal, trouble with his home government and the population at large because he showed his country in a bad light with the first film. He has a chance, though, to redeem himself by offering a gift to a famous person.

That idea goes awry. Plan B involves his 15-year-old daughter Sandra (Maria Bakalova) and maybe Mike Pence. It is part of the “Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”

Borat 2 shows the protagonist as a father who feeds his daughter a bunch of revolting lies about the nature of womanhood. To her credit, in time, she begins questioning them. And ultimately, the developing relationship between them is the most sustaining part of the film.

So THAT is what caused COVID!

But he seems to fit in well with Trump’s 2020 rallies, though even his new buddies question some of Borat’s most outlandish conspiracy theories. So it’s not what I’d call LOL funny stuff. Occasionally tasteless, yes. His anti-Semetic schtick, which he apparently did in the first movie, is gently brought up short here.

I think  David Sims hits on the core of the film in his review in The Atlantic.
It is “Less a Satire Than an Exposé.” “Borat, arguably, starts actually doing his job as a journalist—shining a light on the darkest corners of society and revealing them for what they are. By this point in the film, if you’re laughing, it’s likely in slack-jawed horror.”

The ultimate “cause” of the coronavirus actually makes sense in the context of the film. If this movie doesn’t entirely work for me, maybe it’s because the country has become more of a parody than he is. Yet I don’t regret the hour and a half I spent watching it.

Movie review: Nomadland

Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

NomadlandHow many movies can I watch on Hulu during the free trial? This is what my movie watching has come to.

Nomadland is about Fern (Frances McDormand), who lived in a Nevada company town. Then the company went bust, and so did the town. Fern, a self-sufficient widow, travels around the country. She’s attracted to the life of the nomadic existence, and the interesting people she meets and sometimes meets again.

The movie is based Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, a 2017 non-fiction book by American journalist Jessica Bruder. She wrote about “the phenomenon of older Americans who, following the Great Recession, adopted transient lifestyles traveling around the United States in search of seasonal work.”

The story was adapted by Chloé Zhao, who directed the film. The story blurs the line between fiction and reality, with the appearance of real nomads such as Linda May, Swankie, and Bob Wells, the video star of the movement. They serve as “Fern’s mentors and comrades in her exploration through the vast landscape of the American West.” Everyone, save for Frances, uses their real first names, even David Strathairn, as Dave.

No final goodbye

Nomadland is melancholy, but not particularly sad. The people she meets have gained a lot of wisdom. For instance, Bob uses this analogy. “The workhorse… is willing to work itself to death, and then be put out to pasture. And that’s what happens to so many of us. If society was throwing us away and sending us as the workhorse out to the pasture, we workhorses have to gather together and take care of each other.”

Many of the folks are uncomfortable with conventional capitalism, preferring to live in their vehicles, being reliant on themselves and their comrades. But the movie didn’t feel preachy about it.

Katie Walsh of the Tribune News Service notes that Nomadland “feels simultaneously like both a memory and a prophecy. Zhao has managed to marry these juxtaposing ideas in her film, which is the essence of bittersweet distilled into an arrow and shot straight through the heart.”

I suppose reviewer Ryan Syrek is also correct. The movie “has no plot or subplot, no character or narrative arc, no easily discernible thesis or moral. It just kind of ‘is.'” But that was not stated as a failure, though others felt the film was too slow, small, and/or simple.

I’ve neglected to mention the often gorgeous scenery that makes this rooted as a specifically American story. Nomadland is a meditation on the country. Think Christian has an interesting take on the film, both as a “critique of American ideologies and a celebration of God’s created order.”

Review: The Trial of the Chicago 7

Aaron Sorkin’s learning curve

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO-7.CastI became totally caught up in the movie The Trial of the Chicago 7, which I saw on Netflix. The time period in which it took place corresponded with my political awakening, so I was certainly a “market” for the film.

For those who didn’t know, there was violence between the police and Vietnam war demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968. The Justice Department under President Lyndon Johnson declined to press federal charges against the protestors, although there were local charges. But after Richard Nixon was inaugurated, Justice, under John Mitchell decided to prosecute eight men.

They (and the people who played them in the film) included Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), from the Students for a Democratic Society. Also, Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Alex Sharp), founders of the Youth International Party, or Yippies. Plus the pacifist David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), leader of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE); Lee Weiner (Noah Robbins), and John Froines (Daniel Flaherty).

Wait, that’s seven. Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) was the national chairman of the Black Panther Party. “Seale’s attorney, Charles Garry, cannot attend due to illness, leading Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella), [no relation to Abbie] to insist that William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) represents all eight defendants. This insistence is rejected repeatedly by both Kunstler and Seale.” Eventually, Seale’s trial is severed from the others’.

A long path

I did not know this. “Aaron Sorkin stated… that he first found out about the planned film during a visit to Steven Spielberg’s home in 2006… Spielberg told him “he wanted to make a movie about the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention and the trial that followed.” Aaron, who was born in 1961, had no idea what Steven was talking about.

Sorkin wrote the script in July 2007, but the making of the film was delayed numerous times. He noted, “Spielberg saw Molly’s Game and was sufficiently pleased [with Sorkin’s directing] to suggest I direct ‘Chicago 7’… At his rallies, (Donald) Trump started being nostalgic about the good old days beating up protestors and the movie became relevant again,” with the Black Lives Matter protests.

Praiseworthy

The Trial of the Chicago 7 was nominated for several awards, especially for Sorkin and Sacha Barron Cohen. On Rotten Tomatoes, “the film holds an approval rating of 90% based on 305 reviews, with an average rating of 7.8/10. The website’s critics’ consensus reads, ‘An actors’ showcase enlivened by its topical fact-based story, [it] plays squarely – and compellingly – to Aaron Sorkin’s strengths.”

I fully admit that I totally surrendered to the film, which showed the antiwar movement was not a monolith. It could be funny, shocking, and ultimately moving. This was a function of Sorkin’s use of language, as is his wont. Plus this was a fine ensemble, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Richard Schultz, assistant federal prosecutor, and the various actors who played the cops infiltrating the demonstrations. I’m a sucker for a good courtroom drama.

Yet I do understand the frustration some critics have, unhappy that Sorkin played fast and loose with the timeline and certain facts. I’ve even soured on certain movies – the climax of Bohemian Rhapsody, for instance – myself.

John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter writes, “Sorkin has made a movie that’s gripping, illuminating and trenchant […] It’s as much about the constitutional American right to protest as it is about justice, which makes it incredibly relevant to where we are today.”

Ramblin' with Roger
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