Emergency (11/14/2022)
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Out of the two separate films about the black experience in college that premiered at Sundance and were then picked up and released through Amazon Prime Video, Emergency is the better one. Unlike Master, which was sort of trying to be a horror movie, this film is straightforwardly a dark comedy focusing on a pair of African American students who have big party plans that get derailed when they come home and find a passed out white girl they’ve never seen before lying on their floor. Afraid to call 911 out of fear for how the police react they decide to take this semi-conscious teenager to the hospital themselves, but events conspire to lead them through a very hectic night. So, in many ways this is trying to be something like Superbad but in college and with a tacit assumption that the police are less hilarious than they were in that movie. I’m maybe in a privileged position to judge but I will say I didn’t entirely buy into these characters’ decision not to call 911 from the beginning given that this was a medical situation rather than a crime they would have been reporting, and not exactly one that’s unheard of on college campuses. I would also say that this teenager being in a pretty dire and vulnerable state through the whole thing does dampen the comedy a bit. I wouldn’t say this is a comedy that really had me laughing a whole lot but I did enjoy being around the characters for the most part and there is a wit to the whole thing. I don’t think this would have rejuvenated the comedy genre if it had been allowed a more traditional release but on some level it does feel like it deserved a bit more than to be dumped to streaming like it was.
*** out of Five |
Navalny (11/15/2022)
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I must say, the true depths of just how messed up Russia has become sort of snuck up on me over the years and I think that’s true of a lot of people. During the whole “war on terror” era they just seemed kind of irrelevant, but that whole time Putin was forming quite the dictatorship and we’ve recently seen the dire consequences of that via the war in Ukraine, but even without that military aggression the domestic terror in Russia is also frightening. That is put on full display in the recent documentary Navalny, which looks at the Russian dissident politician Alexei Navalny, who survived an assassination attempt by poisoning and then returned to Russia only to be arrested at the airport on obviously trumped up charges. This film was made with Navalny’s cooperation during his time recovering from the poisoning in Germany before that defiant return and features interviews with him (he’s fluent in English) and also behind the scenes footage of him as he remotely tracks down the truth about the assassination attempt. In fact the most compelling part of the film is a jaw dropping moment when he essentially does a prank phone call with one of his would-be assassins and gets him to basically confess to the crime under the mistaken impression he’s talking to a superior. That said I think it’s safe to say that this is not exactly an unbiased look at Navalny, and while I don’t doubt that his opposition work in Russia is important and positive, he is at the end of the day a politician and as such his answers are guarded. I maybe would have appreciated a slightly deeper look into why Putin has such a grip on the public opinion and why Navalny faces such an uphill battle when trying to win people over (besides the obvious media blackouts, arrests, and murder attempts). This is clearly a documentary intending to give the basic Western public a peak into the opposition against Putin rather than give them a deep dive and it serves that purpose well, but it only does so much.
*** out of Five |
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Thirteen Lives (11/16/2022)
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I try to go into things with an open mind, but sometimes you can’t help but be skeptical and “movies about the Thai Cave Rescue directed by Ron Howard” is definitely something to be skeptical about. I had the thought of just watching that and submitting “Just watch the documentary” as my review, but I ended up thinking the movie had more going for it than that. For one thing I think I maybe missed some of the more positive things that “Thai Cave Rescue movie directed by Ron Howard” promises. Whatever you think of Ron Howard he is a pretty competent professional and reenacting true stories of human heroism is kind of a specialty of his, so he does manage to do the diving scenes here some justice and he also manages some of the “media circus” elements of the whole story as well. I was pretty impressed with the aforementioned documentary version of this story, The Rescue, so I was already pretty familiar with this story and in many ways this was always going to feel redundant. That movie I think gave me a better rounded understanding of the main diver, Richard Stanton (played here by Viggo Mortenson), and what makes him and his fellow cave divers tick, but this version also has some strengths the documentary didn’t. Namely, I think it is a bit better at getting the Thai side of this story, though it too is ultimately telling the story of the western rescue workers. On the less positive side I would say that the movie is absolutely too long at 147 minutes and drags out its climactic rescue much longer than it needs to. Still I must say that Ron Howard showed at least some restraint in not making the whole ordeal needlessly sappy and he also captures a lot of nice scenery and the like. I can’t say this movie is anything groundbreaking or meaningful (at the end of the day it’s a straightforward reenactment of a well-documented news event) and its impact is kind of dulled by being beaten to the punch by a big budget National Geographic documentary, but I would lean toward calling it a “good” movie if this is what you’re in the mood for.
*** out of Five |
Beba (11/18/2022)
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Beba is the work of Rebeca Huntt and is named after a childhood nickname she once used and is a sort of autobiographical video essay about her thoughts about her life and identity. I think I’ve seen Huntt described as a poet or perhaps just as an “artist” but it’s not terribly clear to me that this thirty two year old has really accomplished before this, so it’s not necessarily a recounting of various accomplishments and what led to them, but more just her accounts of her feelings about herself. That, could come off as a bit naval gazing in the wrong hands and… I’m not so sure these are the right hands. To be blunt, if the “BIPOC pangender” student who got into an argument with the title character of Tár about whether or not Bach needs to be canceled was asked to make a movie it would probably be a lot like Beba. Huntt describes the film as an exploration of her afro-latina background and the “generational trauma” involved in that but… you know, she doesn’t seem to be doing all that badly to me. She didn’t grow up rich, but she had two present parents working to give her the best life possible and eventually went to college and became a successful artist. Sounds like the American dream, and her horror stories of the racism she experienced mostly seems to amount to a few kind of cringe conversations, but she certainly thinks these are great struggles. Her Venezuelan mother seems similarly baffled at her attitude as well in a particularly tense and revealing interview where she accuses her clearly war weary mother of having a “microagressive attitude” for what certainly sounded like straightforward answers to me. So, I can’t say I was terribly impressed by Huntt’s insights here, but there is some talent onscreen. Huntt does mix home video footage and other imagery into this pretty effectively and also knows not to overstay her welcome too much. I think if she finds some subject matter she has a bit more distance from she could do some good work but this thing really just isn’t it.
** out of Five |
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Catherine Called Birdy (11/21/2022)
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Lena Dunham is a pretty polarizing figure, one I’ve personally not had much to say about since I’m a movie guy and most of her output since Tiny Furniture has either been television or social media antics. But this year she came out with not one but two new movies and the consensus is that Catherine Called Birdy is “the good one” and while it certainly isn’t going to be for everyone, it’s certainly not without its charms. The film is about a fourteen year old girl living in 13th Century England who’s part of a family of some social standing but who have some precarious financials and are looking to marry off Catherine for bride price. Pretty familiar story, but the catch to all this is that the movie is told very much in Catherine’s voice and is steeped in very recognizably modern and precocious teenage girl emotions. Catherine’s voiceover in the film in many ways sounds like it’s coming straight out of a suburban girl’s diary and the film uses fairly anachronistic language, maybe not to the point of actively using modern slang, but Catherine certainly thinks and talks more like a modern person or perhaps like someone from at least a little bit later in history than when this is set. The thing is that setting and some jokes around that are probably the main thing differentiating this from a lot of other movies, the whole “teen girl rebels against women’s lot in life during their era” thing has been done a lot. It’s all pretty light hearted as these things go, not really a laugh out loud comedy or anything but I was mostly entertained by it though I’m not sure it will stick with me.
*** out of Five |