SHADOW IN THE CLOUD

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Special Effects: C+

There is so much to say about Shadow in the Cloud. Where do I even start?

If I were to start at the true beginning, then I would need to mention the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” from which this movie clearly gets its inspiration. In that episode, starring William Shatner, a man taking a commercial airline flight sees a “gremlin” on the wing, and no one believes him. The episode has been remade a couple of times, both in a 2019 reboot of the series, and perhaps most famously, in a segment of the 1983 film Twilight Zone: The Movie starring John Lithgow.

In this 2020 film, starring Chlöe Grace Moretz, the setting is World War II, and the cold open before the title cards features an old-school style animated instructional video cautioning pilots to stay focused and not blame their own errors on so-called “gremlins”—a real reference to a myth among aviators of the mid-20th century. This is even how they are first referenced, by character Murray Futterman, in the 1984 feature film Gremlins (which is far, far superior to this film). One could even argue that, at least in spirit, Shadow in the Cloud is the third film in the Gremlins franchise. It sort of blends the original myth with the literalization of the mischievous creatures of the films.

There’s even a serendipitous irony to the production of Shadow in the Cloud: it feels very much like a film that might have been made in quarantine, most of the run time featuring a single character onscreen, alone in a confined space. From this angle, it takes inspiration from films like Locke (2013), which featured only Tom Hardy driving a car for its entire run time. I’d estimate a good two thirds of Shadow in the Cloud features only Chlöe Grace Moretz, as Maude Garrett, in the Sperry ball turret of a B-17 bomber plane. She arrives at this plane with a crew of seven men, wielding a document proving she is on a top secret mission that means they must let her board. But, they demand that she ride in the turret.

It’s the setting, and the World War II context, where Shadow in the Cloud veers from that original Twilight Zone episode—which featured a man on a present-day commercial airline flight—but the basic premise remains exactly the same. She starts seeing a creature crawling around the outside of the plane, and, after the men spend a lot of time making openly misogynistic comments about her over the intercom, they don’t believe her when she tells them what she sees.

Before long, though, we see plenty of this creature, which, although they continually refer to it as a “rodent,” looks much more like a quasi-humanoid bat. This is going to qualify as a spoiler, but I don’t care because by this point the movie has gone into high-octane preposterousness: she has with her a “package,” which is later revealed to be concealing her baby. This package gets taken all over the place, including at one point being snatched by the creature. Whenever we see the box from outside of it, the thing is getting whipped around all over the place: flapping in someone’s hands as they run, or even dangling from beneath the wing, before Maude literally goes out of the turret to retrieve it and then crawl back into a hole on the underside of the plane, all while it is flying. At one point, even while Japanese aircraft are firing at them. And then? Every time Maude opens the box to check on the baby, it’s contented as can be.

The point is, there is no part of this film that is in any way concerned with realism. Having a “gremlin” somehow crawling around a flying fighter plane is one thing, but most filmmakers would at least compensate for that with some measure of plausibility elsewhere. Not director and co-writer Roseanne Liang (the initial drafts of the script were written by accused sexual assaulter Max Landis, which is a whole other story). It’s as if this film started with a literal cartoon just to prime us for the rest of the movie being just like one.

There’s a curious element to the tone of Shadow in the Clouds, which seems almost to be self-aware but stops just short. The storytelling is straightforward, which somehow makes it more entertaining. I won’t lie: even though this movie is objectively idiotic, I had a pretty good time watching it. Mostly because it was so shamelessly dumb. There’s a scene late in the film where Maude is essentially in a fist fight with the gremlin on the ground—and she’s kicking his ass. In no universe is it plausible that this woman could dominate this creater, but, perhaps Liang just made a conscious decision: in no universe would this gremlin actually exist either, so what does it matter?

The latter half or so of the movie is packed with this kind of stuff. The other men on the plane are dispatched, one by one, and somehow Maude narrowly escapes death herself each time. There’s even a moment where she literally falls out through an opening in the floor of the plane, and an exploding enemy plane just bounces her right back in—conveniently through the opening she just fell through. I laughed out loud. And nothing about the film suggests we’re supposed to find it funny.

The dialogue is nearly all completely contrived, which makes the “feminist” bent to the story a little hard to take. This movie is getting a fairly typical amount of hate by man-boys online who insist it’s made by “man-haters,” which is a stupid take no matter what. Still, even I would say the script lays it on a little thick, especially or a movie about a monster on an airplane. I’m usually all for feminist subtext, except in this movie it’s both unsubtle and clunky, lacking in any intellectual wherewithal.

Depending on your perspective, however, that arguably adds to its charms: the way this movie tries to be taken seriously as an action-horror filick and winds up being unintentionally campy. Not to an extreme degree, but it’s there. And it was a big part of what entertained me about it. I might have had less of a fun time if it were longer, but this movie not only clocks in at a mere 83 minutes, but the end credits begin with nearly 10 of those minutes to spare. It doesn’t even give you time to get too annoyed with it. It’s just a fun, dumb ride.

A gremlin snatches a baby in a box on the underside of an airplane, which is totally normal.

THE DISCIPLE

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Music: B+

The Disciple was only released a little over a week ago on Netflix, and it’s already one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year—ranked #20 for the year 2021 (so far) on MetaCritic—which, I will admit, was a big reason I decided to check it out. Knowing nothing else about it, aside from it being the story of a failed artist struggling to make it as a classical Indian music singer, I probably would have otherwise gleaned right over it.

The sad irony here is how much more easily accessible this film is on Netflix, ostensibly with a global audience, and yet it seems likely to have gained more media attention, and even more revenue, with a traditional theatrical release, even a limited one. Or rather, it would have before a pandemic happened, anyway. In spite of its impressively prestigious pedigree and history of accolades (executive produced by Alfonso Cuarón, Best Screenplay award winner at last year’s Venice Film Festival), its release on Neflix just throws it into a gigantic ocean of content, destined to disappear under the mass of it all. This movie isn’t even in the Netflix Top 10 in India right now.

That said, who would I recommend this movie to personally? No one, really. The Disciple is clearly constructed with measured skill and care, arguably to an almost Kubrickian degree, but I don’t know how much overlap there is in the Venn diagram of people interested in cerebral cinema and people interested in Indian classical music history. I’m sure they’re out there . . . I’m just also sure they do not make a very large group.

This movie moves at an almost glacial pace, which isn’t inherently bad, except that, again, it’s only available on Netflix. This does not feel like the kind of movie that benefits from at-home viewing. It’s the kind of film that requires immersion, which means it would be a lot easier to stay connected to in a darkened theater on a big screen. Which no one, at least no one in the United States (and that’s where I am and thus who I am writing for), is going to have access to with this film.

Which is to say: The Disciple is indeed a good movie. Writer-director Chaitanya Tamhayne has created a uniquely specific portrait of an Indian artist as a young man, and there is no question this is one of the best non-Bollywood films to come out of India and break into international markets in ages. Furthermore, Indian classical music is unlike any other kind of music you are ever likely to hear in film, particularly in America, and it is quite beautiful. The protagonist, Sharad Nerulkar (Aditya Modak), is meant to be struggling with mastering the form, and thus imperfect. But to any untrained ear, he sounds great.

As with youth in any context, this story also qualifies as a portrait of . . . just a young man. We meet him in his mid-twenties, with his guru asserting that he needs to be patient: focus only on practicing, until at least the age of forty. There is no sense in being frustrated with imperfection before then. Except this perspective ignores the realities of modern life, things like paying bills and debts, which are struggles even the guru contends with while being asked to travel long distances for performances in his twilight years.

There were moments of The Disciple that, for me, brought to mind Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Not in either form or content, but rather, more in tone: each scene exquisitely designed, staged, and framed, with an almost frustratingly quiet pacing. Except in this case there’s a lot more music, in particular that of the tanpura instrument, which is similar to a sitar. Sitting through The Disciple, it’s easy to imagine someone calling it a “masterpiece.” It’s just that sometimes a “masterpiece” is so lacking in excitement it struggles to maintain our focus and attention. I kept nodding off. Would that have happened in a movie theater? I suspect it would be less likely, but we’ll never know.

Reverence doesn’t pay the bills, Sharad.

Overall: B

THE MITCHELLS VS THE MACHINES

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+
Animation: B+

There’s a lot I very much enjoyed about The Mitchells vs the Machines, and there’s a lot about it I found dumb or annoying. In the latter case, I have this sneaking fear that it’s just because I’ve gotten old and out of touch.

I mean, what’s the target demographic of this movie, anyway? The main protagonist being a young woman about to go to college—in the end casually revealed to be queer, no less—notwithstanding, it is clearly young children. I am 45 years old. Some disconnect here is inevitable.

This film is made by Sony Pictures Animation, which has made a few great animated features (especially Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse), but also a lot of pretty forgettable stuff. You could argue back and forth about this: such an assessment is merely a matter of opinion. But, history still doesn’t like: unlike, say, Pixar Animation Studios, Sony hasn’t made much in the way of animated feature film classics. On the other hand, maybe the more pertinent question these days is: does that matter? I can’t really deny that The Mitchells vs the Machines will be wildly entertaining for plenty of viewers. This movie has been available to stream on Netflix for a week and it’s still #2 on their Top Ten list.

So, what difference does it make what I have to say about it? Do you want to know about how meta my thoughts about it got while I was watching it? Like, this movie regularly pokes fun at our tech-obsessed society, and yet it could never exist without the very technology it criticizes. Or maybe, is there some underlying layer where it’s making fun of our fear of A.I. rising up against us? There is literally a line where, right after a knowing throwaway line about giving tech companies far too much power, a character declares “it’s not all bad.”

Honestly, my biggest issue with this movie is the editing. Way too much going on at any given time, almost from beginning to end, in a movie that goes on for 113 minutes and would have worked better at 90. Relentlessly rapid-fire editing is just pandering to short attention spans. But is there a moral value to that, really? Perhaps not. Still, I find myself far more impressed with pacing that can keep us in rapt attention while still allowing the story to breathe. It is possible.

I cannot deny the clever wit in the writing, though. Even while I was finding myself overwhelmed with this movie’s aesthetic of sensory overload, it regularly cracked me up. Just the sequence where the robots turning off the world’s wifi causes the collapse of society—I don’t want to spoil it, but suffice it to say, I found it very funny. There were several moments when I really laughed pretty hard.

The Mitchells vs the Machines also has a massive lineup of famous talent among its voice actors: Danny McBride and Maya Rudolph as Rick and Linda Mitchell; John Legend and Chrissy Teigen as their social media-perfect neighbors John and Hailey Posey; Eric André as Zuckerberg-esque tech mogul Mark Bowman; Fred Armisen and Conan O’Brien as different robot voices. They are all fine; truth be told, they could have cast complete unknowns in these roles and it would have made no difference. The one possible exception is the inspired casting of Oliva Colman as the villain, the “personal assistant” program who refuses to accept becoming obsolete and takes over all the world’s computers. She never changes from being a simple face on a smart phone screen, which allows for a lot of great sight gags.

I wonder what kind of licensing deals they got for product placement in this film? There’s an entire sequence in which the Mitchell family battles an army of Furbys. Did Hasbro get money for that? Does the fact that the product’s inclusion trades on nostalgia more than anything else make any difference? I did enjoy the sequence, in any case. In the same sequence, the Mitchells are met with another army of kitchen appliances that all have “PAL” microchips in them.

It really should be noted that, my many criticisms aside, The Mitchells vs the Machines succeeds at a kind of casual inclusiveness rarely seen in any movie, but especially in an animated feature. Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson), the aforementioned queer protagonist, looks white on first glance but is still clearly a multi-racial character: all characters are rendered as the race of their voice actors, so her mother (Maya Rudolph) is a person of color. Their neighbors, the Poseys, as a Black family. There are even subtle hints to Katie’s queerness throughout the movie; I kept wondering about the rainbows in the quasi-fantasy sequences about her (which are references to her interest in digital art) and whether or not they signified anything. A single line near the end of the film pulls it all together, the kind of line that in any other movie would have felt shoehorned in, but here was what tied together a bunch of details already seen.

In short, the writing in this movie is unusually skilled and nuanced, not to mention frequently hilarious. I just felt the movie got bogged down a bit by throwing way too much onscreen at once too much of the time, but maybe that’s just me.

Spoiler alert! The Mitchells adopt a couple of robots.

Overall: B

NOBODY

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Here is a movie that is absolutely everything it promises to be. No more, no less. That basically makes it impervious to criticism, because the people who aren’t interested in this kind of movie won’t bother, and the people who are, will be thoroughly satisfied.

Or perhaps, like me, they simply like the actors in it. Bob Odenkirk is on the scene with Liam-Neeson-in-Taken vibes—Neeson was 56 when the first film in that franchise was released in 2008, creating a surprising comeback as an “aged” action star. Odenkirk is 10 years younger than Neeson, born in 1962, and thus 58 in this movie. Well, actually 57, given it was filmed in the fall of 2019. Ah, those innocent times.

Anyway, Nobody isn’t exactly covering new ground here. Taken aside, Nobody might also not exist if not for the John Wick films, released in 2014, 2017 and 2019 (when Keanu Reeves was 50, 53 and 55). It seems Odenkirk is coming along just when it’s clear we have an appetite for movies about middle-aged men who can take a severe beating but can still kick ass themselves.

And I won’t deny it: I have that appetite. Honestly, among these three men, Neeson is the least compelling as an action hero. Reeves plays the part of John Wick with the stony stoicism the role calls for, but there’s something about Bob Odenkirk that makes this kind of role just a little more fun. This is a guy who is very much playing against type, as we’re used to seeing him as a bit of a weasel. In Nobody, he has a vaguely defined sleeper-agent kind of past, has been living a humdrum and routine family life for a couple of decades, and has his passion for the work he used to do unlocked again.

To be fair, this is a guy who still exercises. When we first meet him, he’s doing regular pull-ups, usually while facing a bus stop advertisement for the real estate agent that is his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen). He jogs. For your average 57-year-old, he’s very much in shape. He’s also kind of a schlub, an everyday joe who goes to his job where each day just blends into the next.

So now let’s get into the several things I do love about Nobody, which takes several turns just to the left of where you would typically expect a movie like this to go. Hutch’s home is victim to an attempted burglary in the middle of the night, a desperate Latino couple in over their heads. Even when Hutch has the upper hand he reacts to the situation with such shocking restraint, his neighbors and coworkers think of him as weak. But, then he discovers one of the few things they stole was his young daughter’s “kitty cat bracelet,” and that sets him off to get it back. (Sound familiar? Back to John Wick and its revenge-for-his-dead-dog territory.)

What’s to love about that, you may wonder? Actually, that the Latino couple are a bit of a misdirect, as they have nothing to do with the rest of the movie. It’s when Hutch is taking the bus home itching for a fight that things really get set into motion. A group of rowdy young men climb onto the bus looking for trouble, and Hutch welcomes it with open arms, ultimately getting himself in the sights of the Russian mob.

And even at a tight 92 minutes, Nobody takes maybe a third of the movie before things get exciting—and quite violent—which gives the story setup some time to breathe. There’s no denying this is a hokey movie, but at least it has some character development. I am so tired of movies that jump right into rapid-fire action at the expense of story, and this is an antidote to that.

Also, it’s truly delightful to see Christopher Lloyd—now 82 years old—in a supporting role, as Hutch’s dad. It’s great fun when much older actors still have the strength for roles like this, because they can move seamlessly from “old and frail” to badass, which is exactly what Lloyd does in this movie, joining in the fun for an elaborately choreographed gun fight in the last act. You like watching middle-aged men kick ass? Well, Nobody throws in the elderly for good measure!

We’re also treated to RZA in that last act, after he appears only as a voice over a CB radio in a couple of earlier scenes, apparently in hiding after whatever kind of lethal partnership these three had far in the past. This shared background of theirs is never really given clarity, and if RZA is to play a key character, I rather wish he had a more substantial—and more easily decipherable—part in the film.

I do love the everyday-person looks of the characters, though. Even Connie Nielsen, while still beautiful, actually looks the age of her character. Hell, Christopher Lloyd is so old and bald now he kind of looks goofy. All of this adds to the ample charms of Nobody, which really doesn’t have a shred of originality to its plot, but easily sails into our hearts thanks to the boundless charisma of its cast. It’s incredibly violent and bloody and panders to America’s fetishization of guns, and still everyone involved seems effortlessly to make it a blast.

This movie is both exactly as corny as it looks, and better than it looks.

Overall: B+

THE MOLE AGENT

Directing: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

It’s easy to have mixed feelings about The Mole Agent, especially once you discover that it’s billed as a “documentary,” but much of it takes a stylized, film noir aesthetic, some of the scenes clearly staged. It’s a skillful blend of fact and fiction, but is it really enough fact to be lauded as one of the year’s best documentaries? Evidently many people think so: it landed a a nomination for this year’s Best Documentary Feature award at the Oscars. (My Octopus Teacher is the likely winner. Time is the deserving winner.)

The title The Mole Agent gives away its pretty straightforward premise: it’s about a spy. The often-delightful twist is that the “mole” in question is elderly man Sergio Chamy, hired by a private investigator to go undercover in a retirement home in the outskirts of Santiago, Chile, to find out whether the staff is mistreating another one of its residents, due to the suspicions of her daughter.

I got a bit confused about the setting at first, as the home is called San Francisco Retirement Home. When Sergio is first told he’ll be going to “San Francisco,” I pondered the fact that everyone onscreen was speaking Spanish. I thought, well, California has a large Spanish-speaking population, maybe it just happens to be Latino people in this story. I finally figured out that this is a Chilean film.

The language difference aside, the themes on display in The Mole Agent are effectively universal, as it winds up being a bit of a meditation on growing old. The early scenes, in which several men answer a want ad for a man “between the ages of 80 and 90” who is proficient in technology, are hilarious. None of them are that comfortable with the nuances of smart phones, of course. This early sequence created a great sense of promise for this film, and an expectation that it might be a surprisingly delightful experience.

And, a lot of it is. But, a lot of it is also rather melancholy, as Sergio gradually comes to the realization that the woman he’s meant to be observing isn’t being much mistreated, she’s just lonely—as are most of the people in the home. Another woman, who has been in there 25 years, develops an unrequited crush on him, which he rejects in a very gentlemanly way as he explains he is still grieving the loss of his wife only a few months before. In one particularly heartbreaking scene, Sergio sits across from a woman who openly expresses fear because she doesn’t know where she is, and when he tells her she’ll feel some relief if she just allows herself to cry, she does exactly that.

Knowing that some of this film is invented, it can be difficult to gauge what is real and what isn’t, which is frustrating. Presumably an emotionally raw moment like that is authentic. To this film’s credit, in spite of its somewhat gimmicky presentation, it never comes across as insincere. It starts off surprisingly comic, and then morphs into a portrait of all of our possible futures. I found myself thinking about when some of my close friends, very smart people, might see their minds slip in old age, and how I could find myself bearing witness to it. What a horrifying thought. We won’t even get into the scenario of the roles being reversed.

It’s fascinating to see Sergio walking around these other elderly people, him being one of the few who still mostly has his wits about him. His stumbling errors with an iPhone aren’t a reflection of his mental acuity but just a lack of experience. One wonders how comfortable he is with viewers of this film just finding him adorable.

In the conceit of the story being told here, the retirement home is fully aware of the film’s camera crew, under the impression that they are just making a more general documentary about Sergio. What logical reason they would have for that, I don’t know, but since Sergio doesn’t find any real evidence of mistreatment, it makes sense they would sign off on the use of footage from inside their facility. That is, assuming none of that was staged, and who’s to say? To be fair, everything from inside the home feels authentic—it’s the scenes in the private investigator’s office that feel contrived. That doesn’t make them any less fun, though, and at least in those parts we’re not being reminded of our imminent mortality.

Sergio, the undercover mole.

Overall: B

BETTER DAYS

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

Better Days tackles worthy subjects, namely suicide and particularly bullying, but I’m not convinced it needs 135 minutes to do it. This film could have strengthened its impact significantly just by shaving off about half an hour—and, indeed, at about that far from its actual end, the film feels like it’s reaching its natural conclusion. Then, it keeps going, until reaching another presumably natural conclusion. And then it happens again.

This film, while not widely reviewed, is getting very positive reactions from its comparatively limited critical exposure. If people really cared what I thought (most don’t), then this review would take the averages down a bit. I didn’t hate this movie. I just felt done with it before it was done with me.

Besides, its intended messaging regarding bullying loses its focus, and turns into a bit of a fairy tale love story, with seemingly hopeless circumstances as its backdrop. Before we even see the opening title, text appears declaring hope that this movie will encourage dialogue about bullying. One wonders how prevalent bullying is in this film’s native China, and how it compares to the experiences of teenagers in the U.S.

And, to be sure, in the first two-thirds or so of Better Days, its main character, Chen Nian (Dongyu Zhou, who is excellent), endures a great deal of relentless, humiliating, sometimes violent bullying. If you endured a great deal of bullying as a child in school, this movie might be triggering. It really captures the sociopathic remorselessness of kids who bully for no discernible reason other than sport. Some of the adult characters, some of them police officers ineffectively investigating reported harassment, discuss how kids tend to fall into one group or the other: you’re either the bullied, or you’re a bully. I’m not sure there’s a strict duality there, although there are plenty of kids out there with no means of seeing it any other way.

Better Days plays out Chen Nian’s story within the context of not just everyday school life, but the pressures of high-stakes exams which will determine her educational opportunities, and by extension, the direction of the rest of her life. Her mother is barely scraping by, getting into dubious work and actively avoiding debtors. Near the beginning of the film, a fellow classmate commits suicide after being the target of the meanest girls in the school. Chen Nian makes the mistake of covering the body with her jacket, calling attention to herself, and thus becoming the next bullying target.

And then, director Derek Tsang kind of shoehorns in the relationship part of the movie: Chen Nian passes by a somewhat older boy getting beaten the street, and when she tries to call the police to report the violence, the attackers drag her into it. This is how she meets Xiao Bei (Jackson Yee), who eventually volunteers to protect her from the school bullies.

As this relationship blossoms, at first and for quite some time as just a platonic yet intimate friendship, the bullying aspect remains a pretty integral part of the story. But then, once one of the bullies winds up dead, Better Days takes a curious turn toward burgeoning romance, in the midst of Chen Nian being the prime suspect. Some time is still taken on the issue of bullying, but comparatively very little, as Chen Nian and Xiao Bei dedicate themselves to protecting each other.

I could never quite figure out what we were supposed to get out of their love story, after so much time was spent on Chen Nian being the victim of bullying. Maybe Tsang just wants us to root for a happy ending for them? Better Days can’t quite figure out whether it’s a movie about one of the important issues of our time, or a dark, fairy tale romance; it seems to want to combine the two but it only ever particularly feels like one or the other. One of the police officers becomes obsessed with preventing Chen Nian from allowing Xiao Bei from taking the fall for her, convinced she would never be able to live with herself.

It’s not even quite clear, in the end, whether that’s even what happens. The movie tells us what really happened, who did what to whom and why, when it comes to the dead girl. But then we see these two naive young lovers sitting on opposite sides of glass, crying at each other. I was engaged enough with all of this, but when it was done I was happy it was over. At least once I knew it was time to go write this review, I had a clear idea of direction than I had when still inside the world of this film.

Some mean girls are straight up sociopaths.

Overall: B-

THE MAN WHO SOLD HIS SKIN

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

The Man Who Sold His Skin is nothing if not a great—if imperfect—conversation piece, an examination of exploitation and art that itself becomes a work of art. Is the movie itself exploitative? Maybe, though certainly not to the same degree as the “art” within the film.

This is a movie ripe for discussion, from coffee shops to college classrooms, which is both its strength and its weakness. It might have far greater strength overall if not or its script, which seems ironically unaware of its own pretensions, making thematic declarations that are sometimes amusingly obvious. But, between its pacing and its often beautiful cinematography, particularly in its art gallery settings, I must admit for the majority of its run time I enjoyed this movie more than I ultimately feel it deserves. How do you parse such a point of view? If you enjoy a film, how does it not deserve such enjoyment?

I don’t know, maybe I feel too easily sucked in—dare I say duped?—by such superficiality. This film is not nearly as “deep” as writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania thinks it is. Still, there ‘s a lot of detail regarding its production to consider. This is the seventh film ever submitted by Tunisia for consideration of the Academy Award for Best International Feature, and the first one actually to get nominated. It’s an accomplishment to be proud of, even if it has no chance of winning.

The story is inspired by a real-life example of a live person being converted into a work of art, contractually obligated to sit on display in exhibits. Here Ben Hania grafts that concept onto the ongoing war in Syria, starting the story in 2011, around the start of conflict there that continues to this day. Sam Ali (an excellent Yahya Mahayni) gets arrested for using revolutionary talk as part of a marriage proposal on a train, and then has to leave Syria to avoid jail time, leaving his beloved, Abeer (Dea Liane), behind to marry another man in the absence of other options. When Sam is discovered in Beirut crashing art exhibits for the free food, a renowned artist makes him a proposition: offer up his back as a canvas, and he can get a visa that will allow him to travel freely through multiple countries as a legal immigrant.

The Man Who Sold His Skin thus has a lot to say about art and exploitation, depicting artist Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw) as a soulless capitalist. The same goes for his assistant, Soraya (Monica Bellucci), who seems to serve as both a sort of broker and a handler. Many scenes depict the world of high art with millions of dollars being exchanged, and I would be curious to know how accurate the depiction is. What this film is saying about it is never in question, but the artist characters lack dimension.

I suppose that’s the crux of my issue with this film: it has no real insight into the world it’s depicting, serving as observation more than commentary with any true clarity. As cinematic empty calories go, however, this is a film that is hard to resist, thanks to great performances and intermittent gallery sequences that feel like something halfway between a music video and a dream. A bit of Paolo Sorrentino influence can be detected, giving this movie a distinct sensibility that may speak to some more than others. It spoke to me.

Predictably, Sam finds this whole scenario to be much more than he bargained for. And then the end brings two twists in quick succession, the first being an attempt at boldness that just comes across as thematically gross, the second being a kind of about-face that doesn’t quite make up for the grossness, much as it is clearly trying. This could be where the layered questions of exploitation come in. If this film’s overall point lacks clarity, is it exploiting the Syrian war for the sake of its own art, the same way Jeffrey Godefroi is exploiting Sam Ali? I suppose you could just pay to see it VOD and then discuss.

But is it art?

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: STREET GANG: HOW WE GOT TO SESAME STREET

Directing: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: A-

Street Gang is all about the origins of what might be called a revolutionary children’s television show—hence, the “How We Got to” in the subtitle. Keeping the entirety of the story told here focused on the show’s early years perhaps makes sense, given the complications of their deal with HBO since 2015. I’d sure have liked to learn more about the arc of Sesame Street’s story over its history spanning more than fifty years, but, maybe that’s better for a different documentary? I regularly complain about films attempting to cram decades’ worth of stories into just two hours, after all.

Thus, Street Gang is all about how it happened from the start, with its first episodes airing on PBS in 1969. This is going to give it massive appeal to older viewers who remember watching it as a kid when it debuted—but also, any adult who remembered watching and loving it as a child. At this point, that could include memories from as recent as 2008. Yikes, that’s depressing. I don’t suppose it is for an 18-year-old.

Director Marilyn Agrelo contextualizes Sesame Street is a program intended to harness the power of television to educate small children, and get them more prepared for entering public school. Its target audience is 3- to 5-year-old kids, but from the beginning, particularly inner city kids. It’s fascinating to see something like this, a program developed in the 1960s particularly with children of color in mind. It’s a good reminder that gets to two sides of the same coin: activism for people of color is nothing new (people forget that the 1939 film Gone with the Wind was met with Black protesters), and the difference it makes is slow-going, a never-ending, ongoing process.

All the “Black Lives Matter” sentiments of recent years are hardly new, and the spirit of that very phrase is woven into the fabric of Sesame Street’s intentions. This being from the late sixties and early seventies, though, the intentionality there was much more subtle than perhaps we are used to today. Just showing an inner city neighborhood with a fully integrated, multi-racial cast, particularly focused on children, is something we see early show writer Jon Stone state in an archival interview say “speaks for itself.” The impact on its child viewers—white or not—is likely something that cannot be overstated.

More importantly, though, Sesame Street was made as an educational tool, and its positive impact was swift and massive. Jim Henson’s muppet creations clearly made all the difference in the world, and were every bit as successful as cartoons at catching and maintaining their attention. They did a lot of research on what worked and what didn’t: one fascinating bit was that the kids retained what they learned better if their parents watched with them. And Sesame Street included a lot of cultural references that adults would get but children would still enjoy even if they didn’t get it.

Best of all, Street Gang includes a whole lot of little-seen (probably much of it never-seen) behind-the-scenes footage, showing how the sets were constructed, how the puppeteers handled the puppets, and how they integrated muppets with human actors on the show. And in addition to teaching kids the alphabet and how to count, they tackled a wide diversity of subjects, even including how to deal with death, after one of the human character actors passed away.

I have no memory of watching Sesame Street, myself; I’m 44 years old and only know it from its nostalgic place in the zeitgeist, and the many clips that have been seen in countless contexts for decades. Still, even I found this film a moving experience, as it really cultivates a sense of appreciation for the ways a medium largely seen as harmful—in this case, television—can be used as an effective took for education, or even for spreading love and support. Or, teaching how to spread those things. The movie doesn’t mention the internet or social media at all, but it’s easy for such things to come to mind. All we need is the right band of good-hearted people to come along and shift the paradigm created by the latest technology.

A time capsule of influence that still goes on to this day.

Overall: B+

MY OCTOPUS TEACHER

Directing: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

I have somewhat mixed feelings about My Octopus Teacher. It’s one of the five films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and while it’s a perfectly pleasant movie, it also could be argued it’s the least deserving of the award. It’s also by far the most populist choice of the nominees, however, and has by far the best odds of winning. Between its broad availability to stream on Netflix, and its easily consumable subject matter, in all likelihood it will have the largest audience by a long shot, and that translates to the potential for the most votes by a wide margin. The other films tackle subject matter with more gravity, from racism to disability activism to health care fraud. All three of the other nominees that I have seen (Crip Camp, Collective, and the best film of 2020, Time) are better films, but to varying degrees they are also difficult to watch.

My Octopus Teacher, on the other hand, is the very definition of inviting: it frames its narrative around the daily relationship between a South African snorkeler-photographer, Craig Foster, and a common octopus. Foster is the only person seen as an interview subject; he’s the only one telling the story. Given how much intelligence we ascribe to octopuses, I kind of wish we could have gotten interviews with the octopus telling her side of the story. It’d probably be something along the lines of, “This guy? Yeah, whatever.” We can’t get her side of the story though because she’s dead now.

I say these things partly in jest, because My Octopus Teacher walks right up to the line, stopping just short of anthropomorphism. And when we’re framing nature documentaries in such a way, we have to be very careful. Co-directors Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed make the film very much about Foster’s “journey” with the octopus, and how what they went through together made him feel. On an emotional level, this film tries hard to tug at audience heartstrings, very much from a human point of view.

And we have to remember: Foster might say that the octopus’s intelligence could be likened to that of a cat or a dog, but this is not a domesticated animal. This is straight up wildlife, part of a complex ecosystem, with no moral or emotional components. We are meant to be terrified on the octopus’s behalf when a shark comes along, which happens more than once over the course of a year or so that Foster visits the octopus every single day. I just found myself thinking, who is “teaching” whom here, and how much of value can be learned when the wildlife is being interacted with directly, particularly on such an ongoing basis?

Thats not to say there’s nothing of value here. It may be true that My Octopus Teacher doesn’t reveal any major secrets about the lives of octopuses that are not already known, but documentaries can serve as a bridge to educating wider audiences. And this cinematography, a whole lot of it using underwater cameras and footage, is particularly beautiful, especially by documentary standards. Make no mistake: this movie is beautiful to look at. It’s just that this movie is nowhere near as “profound” as it pretends to be.

I still enjoyed it. Craig Foster has a singularly chill vibe, an even-keeled way of speaking as he talks about all these experiences with the octopus, that is genuinely soothing. Be careful or this movie might even lull you into a nap—and not because it’s boring, which it isn’t at all. And we do get to see some very cool and amazing things about octopus behavior and their bodies, how they can modify themselves from color and texture changes to even growing back a severed arm. They’re like eight-legged lizards of the sea. All of this is to say that My Octopus Teach is easy to find and easy to watch: in terms of viewing, it’s the easy choice. I just don’t want it to be the easy choice for Oscar voters.

Craig Foster makes contact. But should he, really?

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: SUMMER OF 85

Directing: C+
Acting: B
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

I suppose it’s refreshing to see a movie about young gay men in the 1980s that doesn’t focus on AIDS, or even mention it. We’ve all had more than our fair share of that. Whether we need what Summer of 85 offers up instead is a different question.

This is a gay love story, and still a sad one, but also sweet, and then, just plain odd. Young Alexis and David (Félix Lefebvre and Benjamin Voisin) are teenagers falling in love as they contemplate whether to finish school or move into the work force. And, as the narrative cuts back and forth between the present-day legal trouble Alexis is in, and the back story of their affair, it becomes clear why Alexis is in trouble. It has to do with a promise David made him make.

This promise is the crux of the whole plot in Summer of 85, and it is also the film’s central problem, the reason it falls apart upon even the slightest inspection. Even though I would not recommend anyone watch this movie, I still won’t spoil it—maybe you still want to find out for yourself. Suffice it to say that the promise is utterly ridiculous. To be fair, that is clearly David’s intent: something he wants Alexis to do should he ever die. After tragedy strikes, Alexis takes the promise seriously, and director François Ozon, adapting from a novel by Aidan Chambers (you can look it up; the title of the novel is the spoiler) plays it for serious, dramatic effect. It doesn’t work, however: playing the scene as a moving fulfillment of a young lover’s promise doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.

Until that happens, the development of a romantic and physical relationship between these two young, cute gay men is genuinely sweet. But, then it takes some bizarre turns—even before the “promise” is carried out (which, by the way, gets Alexis arrested). Suddenly Alexis is visiting a morgue disguised as a young woman. Wait, what? This left-field bit of cross-dressing is something I would hesitate to judge as “insensitive,” but it’s still a weird choice. When it comes to the writing and direction, it might still qualify as clueless.

There are other odd moments early on, which perhaps should serve as warning signs of strange turns to come. When Alexis’s sailboat capsizes and David rescues him—this is how they meet—David takes him home. This is where Alexis meets David’s widowed mother, who not only insists Alexis take a hot bath, but even insists on undressing him herself. She pulls his pants down, the camera behind him so we see his bare ass, and she is knelt in front of him so that she is suddenly gawking at his penis. “Your mother can be proud,” she says. There is nothing sexual suggested beyond this, and it seems as though it’s just meant to be a throwaway gag. And I . . . just don’t get it. Granted, this is a French film and the French have a different and more open sensibility, but, I have to wonder if even the French would think this scene in any way moves the story forward. (It doesn’t.)

I was willing to overlook this scene in the first half of the film because, at first, it seemed to be an anomaly in an otherwise sweet movie. Then a mutual young lady friend of Alexis and David, who becomes in essence part of a love triangle between them, helps him dress up as a girl in disguise to visit David’s body in a morgue. Wait, what? Alexis’s grief causes him to behave in very strange ways, which is a normal part of grief to be sure, but Summer of 85 takes it to unusual extremes.

Then, he’s researching Jewish burial traditions—this is how we learn David’s family is Jewish—and things just get more uncomfortable from there. By the time Alexis is delivering on David’s deliberately ridiculous promise, I found myself laughing out loud. Not because the scene is funny, as it is absolutely not intended to be, but because it is utterly preposterous. I have not read the novel on which this is based, but it’s easy to imagine this playing out in a more successfully moving way in written prose. Actually watching it, there’s just no way to avoid being taken right out of the movie. Like: why the hell am I watching this?

The two main actors are decent performers, doing what they can with this script that takes a while to reveal its own insanity. I suppose it might have been better if, for instance, Félix Lefebvre had some other talents. Summer of 85 might have been at least somewhat improved if he were—spoiler alert!—a better dancer.

All of this could have been avoided if he had just worn a helmet!

Overall: C+