2022 Oscar Nomination Shorts: Documentary

Audible: A-
When We Were Bullies: B
Three Songs for Benazir: B
Lead Me Home: A
The Queen of Basketball: B+ If there's anything reliable about the three sets of Oscar-nominated shorts every year, it's that if you can find a way to watch the Documentary Shorts, they are typically the ones most worth seeing. They are also on average the longest, however, and this year's full set of five combine to a run time of about 160 minutes. Here in Seattle, they can all be seen at SIFF Cinema at the Uptown—and whoever sequenced them did a very good job doing so. The presentation opens with the 39-minute short called Audible, which is beautifully shot and edited, well worth checking out on Netflix, where it is currently available, along with two of the other nominees. This one is about a nearly-undefeated football team at an all-deaf high school in Maryland. This film is so well shot and constructed that it's easy to wonder if parts of it were staged, or if maybe they just got so much great footage that they were able to edit it down to something incredible. Why not make a feature film, then? I would certainly watch a feature film about this diverse group of deaf kids, their current goals as athletes who regularly beat football teams of hearing players, and their aspirations for a far less certain future. When We Were Bullies is a somewhat curious entry, this one set to be available on HBO March 27. It concerns a documentary filmmaker, Jay Rosenblatt, who meats a fifth grade classmate by chance, and they both have vivid memories of a bullying incident they both had participated in. This 36-minute film spends a lot of time talking about the boy they bullied in a particular piling-on incident involving all the kids in the class, and even contemplating the idea of getting an interview with him. Instead, there are interviews with several grownup classmates, and the now-92-year-old teacher (who literally tells Rosenblatt on camera, that people may not want to watch this film because they'll find it "too tedious"). When We Were Bullies would have been much improved by an interview with the boy who was bullied, but I guess Rosenblatt settled for going with what he had to work with. The story remains fairly interesting, just not quite what it could have been. Three Songs for Benazir, a 22-minute short from Afghanistan, also on Netflix, is the only one of these documentary shorts that is not American. That does make it relatively ideal as the piece in the center of the program, as does its run time. There's not a lot in the way of a story arc here, but the cameras follow one young couple, and the fairly uneducated young man's aspirations to join the military. This was before The Taliban retook control of the country last year, which gives this a poignant subtext. It also humanizes regular Afghani citizens in a way seldom seen. It's also much more of a portrait of a couple of average citizens than it is a story. The best of this year's crop of documentary shorts, the one I would vote for winning the Oscar, is the third one available on Netflix, a 39-minute film called Lead Me Home. It does something very similar to Three Songs for Benazir, in that it humanizes its subjects—but it also tells many of their stories, almost uniformly in ways that elicit compassion, hope, and in some cases despair. It was a smart move not to play this one last in this presentation, as Lead Me Home concerns homeless people, particularly those in the west coast cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. The footage was taken between 2017 and 2020, only at the very end getting to points where we see people on what soon became ubiquitous Zoom calls. Admittedly, the film is also sometimes frustrating, as it paints a portrait—often incredibly beautiful, with time-lapse drone shots of sunsets behind skylines—of cities in crisis, but without offering a solution. The end credits do direct us to their website for resources on taking action, but if this film effectively illustrates anything at all, it's that this is a systemic problem that needs systemic solutions, largely legislative. Which is to say, the ways in which this film is frustrating is not a criticism per se: it reflects a problem that commands attention, and everyone should watch this film. Unfortunately, not nearly enough will, but it does underscore why this one most deserves the Oscar. It's a film that is excellently constructed, and sheds light on a societal problem that deserves a wide-reaching platform. It also, crucially, offers several intimate portraits of individuals experiencing homelessness that make it impossible to ignore the fact that these are human beings deserving of all the basic needs that the rest of us spend most of our days taking for granted. The theatrical presentation of this year's documentary shorts thankfully ends on an upbeat note, a 22-minute New York times documentary portrait of women's basketball legend Lusia Harris, the first woman drafted by the NBA and also the first player to score a women's basketball point in the Olympics. I have to admit, because I generally don't care at all about sports, I had never heard of this extraordinary woman, but I was utterly charmed by the present-day interview with her in this short, which is intercut with a whole lot of archival footage from her basketball career. With an infectious giggle, she tells her own story in her own words, without a trace of regret, even after she turned the NBA draft offer down. I did kind of wish there were interviews with other people who knew her; this could easily make an incredibly compelling feature-length documentary. In the meantime, you can view this delightful 22 minutes on YouTube. Overall: B+

CYRANO

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

Here we have yet another victim of unfortunate circumstances, a movie whose release date was postponed seemingly endlessly. “Seemingly” is perhaps the operative word here, as it was originally scheduled for wide release on Christmas Day 2021, and finally got its wide release February 25—exactly two months later, but with two other wide release dates and two limited release dates in between, all of them either scrapped or postponed. This on its own might not have been such a big deal, except that I was sitting through this film’s trailer for months before Christmas, only to wind up having to keep sitting through it for another two months. Getting to see it now, when I don’t have to sit through a trailer I practically have memorized anymore, was a relief.

One might wonder, then: was it worth the wait? For the most part, yes. Granted, it would have been much better to get to see it in December, but the later postponements were clearly brought on in large part by the Omicron variant wave, which are now on the significant decline. That said, while I did enjoy this film and I always love the chance to go to a movie theater, I can’t say this one demands to be seen on the big screen. A few more weeks to see it on a streamer at home will be just as much worth the wait. Unless, I suppose, you’re a massive fan of star Peter Dinklage, and there are certainly those people out there.

Somehow, I did not realize that Cyrano had already been a stage production, written by Dinklage’s wife Erica Schmidt and also starring Dinklage, as well as co-star Haley Bennet as Roxanne. It ran first in Connecticut in 2018 and then off Broadway in 2019. As for Covid, acquisition of the rights to the film wasn’t even announced until August 2020, which means Cyrano as a film was conceived as well as completed in a post-pandemic world. It would seem that only the Omicron variant truly had any affect on its release, so compared to a lot of other movies that died on the vine over the past two years, this one was kind of lucky.

How much audiences like it seems to be somewhat mixed, a reflection of my own personal reaction to it. I’m a little mystified as to why the choice was made to make this a conventional musical, except perhaps that it’s what the stage production was. And while Dinklage’s voice is serviceable and Bennett’s is beautiful, the songs themselves are uniformly forgettable. Adapting this as a straightforward tragic romance, without the breaking into song, likely would have been to its benefit.

A lot of Cyrano is pretty fun otherwise, especially seeing Dinklage as an implausibly accomplished and lethal fencer. I have to admit, I found myself thinking about how unrealistic it was to depict Dinklage as someone who could easily dispatch ten men at a time. But, then I realized that none of the other onscreen depictions of swashbuckling heroes, regardless of their size, has ever been realistic. It’s always a fantasy, so why not let the likes of Peter Dinklage in on it? It’s great to see that, even though Cyrano is deeply insecure about his stature in light of the woman he secretly pines for, he has great agency otherwise—ridiculous amounts of it, in fact,

I suppose some might like to be warned, though, that this is only occasionally lighthearted, and is very much conceived of as a romantic tragedy, very much in the vein of Romeo and Juliet. The love between Cyrano and Roxanne isn’t so much forbidden as misdirected, as Roxanne convinces herself she has fallen in “love at first sight” with Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr., also a very good singer), having made the mistake of not finding out first whether he has the level of intellect she’s also looking for. This is arguably a flaw of the original plot of Cyrano de Bergerac, wherein Roxanne makes some pretty goofy assumptions that could easily have been disproved had she taken some real initiative on her own. But, then we wouldn’t have this classic story, in which Cyrano writes Christian’s love letters for him, seducing Roxanne to fall more deeply in love with both Christian’s beauty and Cyrano’s intellect and, most significantly, poetry.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know the original physical issue with Cyrano was his unusually large nose, but there have been many adaptations since the debut of the original French play in 1897, including ones where Cyrano is simply “ugly.” Playwright Erica Schmidt, under the directorial vision of Joe Wright in the film, offers a new take with Peter Dinklage standing in, his being a dwarf being the source of his romantic insecurity.

One major sticking point in this film is the one usage of the m-word, which Dinklage utters, as Cyrano, in reference to himself. It’s a genuinely shocking moment, and I can’t tell if it was meant to be—except that it’s surprising that an actor who has spoken out against its usage would agree to say it onscreen in 2021, it being a period piece notwithstanding. Miriam-Webster says the first usage of the word dates back to 1816, so it’s not anachronistic, at least from an English perspective. But what about in French? Google translate says the French equivalent is nain, except when you translate that the other way around, French to English, it comes up as “dwarf.” So why the hell doesn’t he just use the word “dwarf” in the movie? I don’t get it. Maybe we’re meant to see it as a reflection of Cyrano’s self-hatred, but if that’s the case, the word is not at all necessary to make that clear.

Once you get past that, Cyrano is a fun, deeply romantic, and relatively moving story, a movie that works in spite of its occasionally inexplicable imperfections.

It’ll reach the romantic in you.

Overall: B

RED ROCKET

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

Sean Baker is a curiously unique director, but at least he’s consistent: his previous two feature films, Tangerine (2015) and The Florida Project (2017), are beautifully shot with noticeably and obviously nonprofessional actors, yet written well enough to transcend any seeming lack of polish. His stories are each quite different from each other, and thus comes along Red Rocket, evidently keeping the traditions of his productions alive. This one is shot on a shoestring budget of barely more than $1 million, in and around Texas City, Texas.

Baker even manages a clever conceit with this one, tying the run down environment of Texas City to the glamor (and seediness) of Southern California without ever taking the production out of Texas. In this case, the constant references to Los Angeles are tied to the porn industry, as the protagonist, Mikey (Simon Rex, the only even remotely recognizable professional actor in the cast), has been in the industry twenty years but is now returning to his home town. We never do find out why, only that he’s broke and beaten up. Eventually it becomes clear that the “why” there hardly matters; it only fits in with the direction Mikey has always taken his life.

It’s interesting to see a movie largely about the porn industry, but focused on a straight male porn actor, and how he is affected by his experience with it. I’d be interested in getting more perspectives on how Red Rocket’s script characterizes the porn industry, and this particular porn actor. This movie doesn’t seem especially interested in looking upon the industry with judgment, but one might wonder if we are to understand that porn work turned Mikey into the objectively awful person he is today. I don’t really think so, though. It feels very much like Mikey is just an innate asshole who happened to get into the porn business.

There is one exchange of dialogue I really liked about it, as it had a kind of subversively feminist subtext to it. Mikey spends a lot of time bragging about his supposed accomplishments in the porn industry, including AVN (“Adult Video News”) Awards such as “Best Oral.” A young woman Mikey is pursuing learns that the only reason he has this award is because the woman who performed the oral sex shares the award with all of the men on whom she did it, and she asks the obvious question: why do any of the men get awards for that? Well, because porn—particularly straight porn—has deeply misogynistic cultural overtones, I guess.

It’s not often a movie about such a terrible person is this entertaining, but Red Rocket, and particularly actor Simon Rex, pulls off something truly rare: Mikey is hard to resist, even as he’s actively screwing over every single person in his life, because even as a 46-year-old man he’s incredibly fit, good looking, and most crucially, charming. This guy has charisma to spare, and Rex, an actor thus far best known for, not even the original, but three of the Scary Movie sequels, is perfectly cast in the role. It’s too bad that this movie did not get more attention from general audiences, because critically speaking, Red Rocket is the role of his career.

Red Rocket, in fact, is another victim of bad timing, largely thanks to the pandemic. It was shot during Covid with strict on-set protocols in the fall of 2020, and then got a limited theatrical release in December 2021—just in time for the Omicron variant wave. This movie did play in theaters briefly in my local market (Seattle), but like many others I avoided movie theaters through at least the month of January, thus missing the window. Only just recently has its online VOD price gone down to the reasonable price of $4.99, which is why I’m reviewing it now.

And, I have to admit, in Red Rocket’s opening scenes, I actually found myself wondering what all the buzz had been about. The supporting actors being non-professional is quite obvious, with line deliveries that feel deeply unrehearsed, particularly when Mikey first shows up at the house of his estranged wife and mother-in-law (the recently passed Brenda Deiss). But, I don’t know if the film was shot in sequence or what, but as the movie goes on, that element steadily fades away, until the gorgeous cinematography, polished writing, and eventually adequate acting makes the movie just as compelling as it could ask for. Plus there’s a great scene with Simon Rex running through town in the night completely nude, full frontal, so I’ve got no complaints there.

Side note: another fun element of this movie is that, although there is both male and female nudity, only this scene with a nude man is gratuitous or borderline exploitative, which feels knowingly deliberate. A separate scene in which Suzanna Son is topless but singing at a keyboard comes across as comparatively wholesome, her incredible singing voice the only thing you find yourself really paying attention to.

There are also uncomfortable elements of the plotting in Red Rocket, not least of which is Mikey’s manipulation of the much younger, 17-year-old Strawberry (Suzanna Son), nudging her progressively toward the idea of working in porn herself. After some time, you realize that what he’s doing is grooming her. But, rest assured, Red Rocket is not quite as sinister as it might sometimes make you fear; the way the plot veers at the end is both funny and satisfying, albeit with a remaining subtext of sadness. Mikey is a guy who has no real self-awareness and can’t see the inevitability of his destiny as a fuckup, which is a surprisingly fun way for us to go on his journey with him.

It gets better for us, while it gets worse for him.

Overall: B+

THE BATMAN

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

The Batman is markedly different from the many other iterations of movies, and movie series, featuring DC Comics’ most iconic superhero character. It’s certainly the longest, at 175 minutes. Too long? Perhaps; a good half an hour could have been shaved off this film and it would not feel as though anything were missing. On the other hand, given the style, tone, and pacing of this film, that run time gives it room to breathe. Some might feel that it has lulls, but those people would not understand the modern noir vibe that director Matt Reeves (War for the Planet of the Apes) was going for.

One could also argue that Reeves, who also co-wrote the script with Peter Craig, throws in too many characters, with Paul Dano, Colin Farrell, and John Turturro all playing villains—two of them iconic ones from Batman lore: The Riddler and The Penguin. This is not to mention Jeffrey Wright as Lt. James Gordon; Andy Serkis as Alfred; Peter Sarsgaard as District Attorney Gil Colson; and notably Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle, the cat burglar who will later become (but is never once referred to here as) Catwoman.

As always, I must reiterate that a film should be judged on its own terms. That proves a unique challenge with The Batman, which qualifies as a third reboot of a Batman film franchise in the past 33 years, and the fourth series of films featuring the same Caped Crusader character within a single film universe, when counting Ben Afleck in the “DC Universe” films that largely flopped with both critics and audiences. In other words, The Batman has to do a huge amount of heavily lifting in order to justify its own existence. What reason is there for yet another Batman?

There isn’t one, truthfully, except to keep raking in box office dollars. Only time will tell whether The Batman proves itself on that front; when I was leaving the theater, other patrons were overheard complaining about how long it was. Some people are finding it a “bland” take on Batman, but I wholeheartedly disagree. I fear I may be in the minority here, but if they had to cram this many significant characters into the story, giving it a three-hour run time actually allows The Batman to do what I have long wished more comic book superhero movies would do: prioritize story over spectacle.

And that’s not to say there isn’t plenty of spectacle to be seen here, which is kind of the point: once we get to its several stunning action set pieces, it works as a payoff few other blockbuster movies in recent years have achieved. The Batman does not open with a blowout action extravaganza, but rather a dark and creepy scene in which we the first in a series of murders by the serial killer we learn soon enough is The Riddler (excellently portrayed by the criminally under-seen Paul Dano). When we’re not watching action scenes, The Batman is unusually quiet, its characters uniformly speaking in hushed tones barely above a whisper.

A lot of this film brought to mind the first of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the underrated Batman Begins (2005). Both films focus on Bruce Wayne’s early days as Batman, and both films feature several characters, some of them less well known, that would qualify as villains. The difference in The Batman is that the title character is still relatively new to Gotham City, yet already established as a known presence. And if I had any complaint about the Nolan films, it’s that he traded in the hyper stylized universe of the Tim Burton films (still the best ones) for a “gritty,” more realistic world much like our own—which doesn’t as effectively present a vigilante dressed as a bat and working with the local police as a plausible idea. It’s clearly a fantasy and should be contextualized in a world that is also fantasy.

Matt Reeves’s Gotham City isn’t anywhere near as stylized as Burton’s was, but it is much more so than Nolan’s was, a bit of a happy medium. Gotham City itself is largely made up in visual renderings, quite well done actually, but still grounded as a city that looks like a city in our world. It’s the film noir cinematography, lighting and coloring that gives The Batman its signature style, very distinct from the many films that came before it. Granted, there have been many Batman films and there have been countless examples of film noir, but Reeves blends them in a way that sets a new kind of mood. It’s a dark mood, with only occasional bits of humor, but it’s a mood that is very much my jam nonetheless. Combine that with an invigorating score by Michael Giacchino, and you’ve got a movie I will happily go see again, its length notwithstanding.

If I had any true complaint about The Batman, it would be that the sexual chemistry between Zoë Kravitz and Robert Pattinson is not well enough explored. In fact, although I must say I liked her better as Catwoman than I did Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Kravitz’s Selina Kyle lacks a certain charisma; there is no bite to her. This is no fault of Kravitz’s, who does exceedingly well with the part she is given; the issue, really is how she is written—much more as a hero than as even a potential villain. And Catwoman works best as a character when she can’t seem to decide which she actually is.

The rest of the characters, however, are well written and very well cast, especially Robert Pattinson as The Batman himself, instantly becoming my second-favorite Batman ever (after the obvious, Michael Keaton). Pattinson is now the sixth actor to play Batman on film since 1989, and he succeeds better than most at the “Batman voice” used while in the bat suit. (Christian Bale, much as I liked him otherwise, really overdid it with his gruff delivery.) Pattinson’s delivery here works well because he speaks fairly low the same way all the characters do, and is hardly distinguishable from how he speaks as just Bruce Wayne.

I want to tell you that I found The Batman thrilling, but for the fact that so much of it is quite subdued in its tone and pacing. What I can say is this: it works. It works better than it even deserves to, perhaps. And it spends just the right amount of time slowly building toward its multiple genuine thrills, particularly a beautifully shot car chase with The Penguin (the impressive makeup for which renders Colin Farrell all but unrecognizable), and a climactic sequence in which a flooding Gotham is taken under siege. It took me a few minutes at the start to decide whether I was going to like The Batman, but then it settled into its noir tone, and I was into it. Then it moved toward its set pieces in an unusually organic way, and I found myself thinking, I love this movie. I can feel that way about it while acknowledging it’s not exactly a masterwork, nor is it even the best Batman movie ever made. But it’s a movie that delivers on its promise, and meets the moment.

Woman! Cat! Why can’t you be naughtier!

Overall: B+

2022 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Animation

Robin Robin: B+
Boxballet: B-
Affairs of the Art: B
Bestia: C-
The Windshield Wiper: B Most years, the theatrical presentation of the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts includes three or four "highly commended" shorts, sort of like runners-up to the five nominees, just to pad out the total run time. This is usually because some of the nominees are kids' cartoons as short as five minutes, but this year the shortest of the nominees is about fifteen minutes. Only one of them is truly for children, and it's the opener, Robin Robin, a perfectly charming film from Aardman studios in the UK that runs a good 32 minutes. Aardman is a studio of reliable quality, previously producing many Wallace & Gromit and Shawn the Sheep titles. In the case of Robin Robin, it not only features a charming story about a robin raised by a family of mice, and the voice talents of Gillian Anderson (as a hungry cat) and Richard E. Grant (as a magpie with a mending broken wing), but the uniquely textured stop motion animation is impressive. Robin Robin is a perfect candidate for a television special for the family. Or, you can just head over to Netflix and watch this right now. Others of the nominees may or may not be available online, but honestly Robin Robin is the only one of them I would tell you to bother with. Because this year's other nominees are mostly not for children, the theatrical presentation splits them, and even puts a title card up onscreen to give parents the time to take their children out of the theater, because what's coming up is not suitable for children. The thing that mystifies me is that this title card comes up after, rather than before Boxballet, a 15-minute film from Russia that I would argue is also not for children. This tells the story of the crossing paths of a beat up boxer and a ballerina, and much of the stuff with the boxer is fairly violent. It's slightly cartoony in its presentation, but it's still within the context of a story for adults rather than children—not to mention the handsy dance instructor who borders on molestation. Boxballet has a unique artistic visual style, which I suppose might hold the attention of much younger children who are fascinated with the lines and colors of cartoons, but even for adults, the story here didn't quite land for me. At times I found it hard to follow. Affairs of the Art, a 16-minute film from the UK and Canada but featuring voice talent with British accents, definitively lacks cohesion but still skirted with my own darkly comic sensibility. It's hard for me not to have affection for a film featuring a book called Home Taxidermy for Children. This film is otherwise narrated by a plump, middle-aged woman obsessed with making abstract art, and reminiscing about her morbid little sister who eventually moves to California and uses her own body as art with extensive plastic surgery. The animation style here is wholly appropriate, all of it rendered as pencil drawings with constantly shifting lines, the narrator all the while chatting nonchalantly away about her approach to art. There's not much of a story arc here, but I found it relatively entertaining. Bestia, which is Spanish for Beast and is a 16-minute short from Chile, is the only one of the nominees that I would urge you actively to avoid. I'm astonished this even garnered an Oscar nomination, unless it was just because of the skilled animation of what looks genuinely like well-lit porcelain figurines. The problem is that this quickly moves into "What the fuck?" territory, a woman with a dog either fantasizing or living her dream (I could not tell which) of training her dog to attack—and even sexually molest—people held captive in a basement somewhere. If this film has something to say, I don't have a clue what it is. If it even has a story to tell, I have no idea what it is. Well, wait, so far as I can gather from a bit of online research is that it's an allegory for Chile's deeply sordid history. Maybe I need to have a better working knowledge of world history to appreciate this. All I can think about is the scene in which this lady's dog is eating her out. No thank you, next! Finally, The Windshield Wiper, a 15-minute film from Spain in which the dialogue is curiously spoken in English with American accents, is largely mystifying in its own right, but deliberately so—and is arguable the most visually beautiful of all the nominees, a parade of beautifully rendered portraits. It starts in a cafe, a man posing the simple question, "What is love?" What follows is a series of vignettes, wildly varying in tone but all of them beautiful, that collectively set out to answer that question. We get the answer stated quite simply and directly in the end. It took me a while even to figure out what was going on here, but I still enjoyed the journey. My vote for the Oscar goes to Robin Robin, in spite of it being kind of an obvious choice, but The Windshield Wiper would not be a bad choice either. Even though I still don't have the foggiest idea why it has that title. Overall: B-

2022 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Live Action

On My Mind: B
Please Hold: B
The Dress: B-
The Long Goodbye: C+
Ala Kachuu - Take and Run: B+ This year's crop of live action shorts, as seen in the program in theaters, is well sequenced, I'll give it that: it opens quietly with one of the shortest of the offerings, an 18-minute Danish film called On My Mind, about a guy who comes into an empty bar on the weekend and is dead set on getting a recording of himself singing Elvis Presley's "Always On My Mind" on their karaoke machine. Most of the film consists of just three characters; the aforementioned man, the bar's owner trying to do his taxes uninterrupted, and the empathetic, middle-aged bartender lady. Film shorts have a tendency to hinge on some kind of twist, however subtle it might be, and this one is no exception: we eventually learn the reason for the obsession with getting a recording of this man singing the song. It's both sweet and sad, if a little slight in the end.

Such is the case with the average of this year's five live-action shorts nominated for Oscars, honestly. At least we have the chance to see the nominated shorts in theaters again; last year there was no such chance thanks to the closure of movie theaters due to the pandemic. And if these films prove anything, it's that not even a pandemic can kill a particular, or peculiar, cinematic vibe.

Please Hold, a 19-minute film that is the only one of the live action shorts from the United States, has a compelling concept, even if it plays a little like a second-rate episode of Black Mirror—something none of us have had the stomach for in a couple of years. Set in Los Angeles, it's at least, somewhat ironically, more representative of diversity than a couple of the foreign shorts: directed and co-written by a Latina woman, KD Davila, and starring Latino actor Erick Lopez. Lopez plays Mateo, a young man arrested by automated drones in a relatively plausible near-future, but for one thing in this film that I really could not get past. When Mateo is ordered by automated voices to change into the provided orange jail outfit, he has handcuffs on. Cut to him in his change of clothes, and he still has them on? Maybe the automated booking area somehow uncuffed him temporarily, I don't know. In any case, the whole point of this story is that Mateo never has any idea what he's been charged for, but he can't get ahold of any live human to explain it to him. A majority of this film's run time shows Mateo in his jail cell, frustratingly trying to communicate with an AI-powered screen in the wall, rife with glitches similar to when you're stuck on hold with an automated system. Please Hold touches on the injustices of our criminal justice system, and never even reveals what Mateo's supposed crime was—only that his time in jail has cost him his job and his future. I'm having real difficulty figuring out what to make of The Dress, a 30-minute Polish Film about a dwarf woman working as a maid in a drabby motel. When it comes to the acting and the cinematography, this film is the best of this crop without question. The trickier part is the content, which I think means to humanize little people. Whether it succeeds at that is likely dependent on the audience, and I would sure love to know what little people think of it. Maybe I'm off base—I kind of have no idea—but the fact that this film only depicts the miserable, tormented life of Julka (a truly excellent Anna Dzieduszycka; I want to see her in more self-actualizing parts) strikes me as something pitying and patronizing to little people. "The Dress" refers to the dress she spends a few days trying to find to wear going out for beers with a transient truck driver who has shown some interest and said he will return in a few days. The Dress gets surprisingly frank about Julka's life and this relationship, and spoiler alert: things don't turn out well. I just want to know, why can't we see a movie where Julka actually catches a break? It feels a little like The Dress would have us believe little people face an impossible task of finding happiness in a cruel world, and while that may be the case for some, it feels regressive to be depicting it so vividly onscreen in 2022.  The Long Goodbye, a 13-minute British film starring Riz Ahmed, is my least favorite of this year's crop, while feeling like the one of those with the most potential to win the Oscar. I don't hate the message, which is a very pointed—and violent—depiction of xenophobic paranoia in the UK. I just didn't like how chaotic it was, in its very filming, with wildly shaky handheld camera work even when we follow Ahmed's character around a crowded home as he roughhouses with his large family. A far-right march is shown on the news on television, until said marchers arrive in their neighborhood, and basically attack everyone in the neighborhood, grabbing people in their homes and dragging them out into the streets. After a particularly tragic turn of events, at which nearby police officers look on dispassionately, the soundtrack goes quiet, and Ahmed launches into an acapella rap number, about anti-immigrant sentiment. The rap is very good, what I could make out of the words anyway, but the film on the whole just didn't quick work or click for me. Ala Kachuu - Take and Run, a 38-minute Swiss and Kyrgyz co-production, is both the longest and the best of the live action shorts this year. I usually run out of patience for the longer films that are supposed to be "short," but Take and Run held my attention from start to finish. This is the story of a young woman who is kidnapped and forced into marriage, as part of the local tradition of her people. This isn't a period piece, either; it's set in the present day, with the woman briefly escaping to the city to live with another young woman who made it out of her village, shaming her mother in the eyes of their community in the process. The film ends with a note about how often this kind of kidnapping still goes on, driving home the point of the very well-executed fictionalization of one such story that just unfolded. Thankfully, this one ends with far more hope for its main character than The Dress does, and makes for a nice end to this entire presentation of all five films. It should be noted that not all such women find an escape, but this one makes many failed attempts and also spends a fair amount of time in emotional distress, particularly on her wedding night. Overall, all of these films are worth at least considering, and most are worthy of close attention. But, i>Ala Kachuu - Tale and Run is the one I hope wins the Academy Award.
Overall: B

FEBRUARY

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

I suppose February, a Bulgarian film about a man at three different stages of his life, just isn’t for me. For some reason I watched the whole thing anyway, so I can sit down here and tell you why I didn’t like it all that much. And that I didn’t hate it either. It’s just very, very slow—to say February is pastoral and meditative is an understatement. Or more accurately, it is the statement.

Maybe another thing meant to be conveyed by director Kamen Kalev, who also wrote and directed, is a fundamental lack of ambition, on the part of the central character, Petar. February has a concept that is fairly compelling on its own merits: Kalev splits it into three parts, each of them roughly forty minutes long, with a different actor playing Petar in each of them, at age eight, eighteen, and eighty-two. That’s what the synopsis of the film at siff.net says, anyway; his age is never stated during the film.

When we first meet Petar, as a little boy, he’s spending his days with his grandfather, who is a sheep farmer. When we meet Petar as an old man, he is himself a sheep farmer. The only time we truly gain any insight into the psyche of Peter as a character is in the middle section, when he is eighteen, just married, and joined the military. Indeed, the three parts have their own titles: Part I is The Past; Part II is Military Service; and Part III is February.

It is during Military Service that we learn, when a superior officer inquires as to why Petar spends all of his time walking around the island in contemplative silence, that Petar’s father and grandfather were both sheep farmers, and he fully expects and intends to be one himself as well. The superior officer has offered him a higher rank and is aghast at Petar’s disinclination to take him up on it: “You stupid peasant!” To be clear, that little outburst is definitively the most exciting moment in the film.

This film is only available locally in Seattle as a streaming ticket purchase at SIFF.net, and I can’t decide whether it’s better there or if I would have liked it better in a theater. Anyone with low tolerance for movies in which virtually nothing actually happens will be bored to death, but there is also something about the theater experience that makes it easier to lose oneself in a film, even one like this one. As it stands as a streaming option, I found it very easy to get distracted, look stuff up on my phone. Believe me when I say it’s easy to do that and not miss anything.

I kind of wish the whole movie were about 18-year-old Petar, or that his section was longer, and the other two shorter, as something more like a prologue and an epilogue. And not just because when a shirtless 18-year-old Petar did some astonishing handstand pushups I truly snapped to attention. Giving all three moments in his life equal time doesn’t work that well. As both a little boy and an old man, we spend an inordinate amount of time just watching him tending sheep. Or, in one case occasionally speaking to his grandfather, and in the other occasionally speaking to his sister on the phone. One very strange thing is that we don’t even learn he has a sister until Part III; in Part I he makes a single reference to a brother, who is never mentioned again. Unless someone mistranslated the subtitles, which are all I can go on.

In any case, Petar as a young man is by far the most interesting. When Part II begins, it’s his wedding, to a woman we see briefly and, again, we never see again—even though we later learn she bore his child. There’s a telling scene just after the wedding, one of the most sexless sex scenes I have ever seen, these two young people, who really should be quite horny, just going through the motions, fulfilling an obligation. I kept wondering about Petar’s sexuality. Not that I thought he was gay; in fact by all accounts he’s just not interested in sex. When he volunteers to be stationed on the remote Saint Ivan Island, he spends all of his time looking at the countless seagulls (this makes for a lot of this film’s extensively pleasant cinematography, which is the most consistent thing between all three parts) or chasing rabbits.

In Part III, we do see old photos of him with people in his past, people he’s not with now, the story behind which Kamen Kalev denies us. Petar is content, evidently his entire life, to live in quiet solitude, among the pretty rural countrysides of Bulgaria. I suspect the most ideal person for viewing this movie itself is someone with a similar disposition.

Petar doesn’t regard his human companions much, but gets plenty from the company of seagulls.

Overall: B-

GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

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

Sometimes the English translations of international film titles is a bit unfortunate, because the title Games People Play is definitely misleading. Who makes these decisions, I wonder? The original title, in Finnish, is Seurapeli, and to be fair, direct translations between languages that capture full meaning and nuance can be hard to come by. I know nothing of the Finnish language, but if you plug Seurapeli into Google Translate, it says the translation is Board Game, or Parlor Game. Those options, particularly the second, make more sense than Games People Play, but don’t necessarily fully fit either.

Suffice it to say that this movie isn’t about people who are manipulative or have tricks up their sleeves, as the title might suggest. It’s an ensemble film about a group of friends who have known each other for decades, have long histories of interconnecting emotional baggage, and have met for a weekend on a remote island for a surprise birthday party. It might be more accurate to say the so-called “games” are those people play with themselves, until they either reckon with mistakes made in the past or wake up to the realities of their present.

Really, this is just a highly engaging drama, to a degree about relationships between siblings, but much more so about friendship. After I got past the somewhat excessive use of shaky, handheld camera cinematography, I quit enjoyed it. The proceedings never moves to melodrama or histrionics, but by the end there have been multiple scenes of deep tension or emotional release. I found the film to be good enough that I’m almost mystified as to why it’s not being released theatrically in the Seattle market, but rather is merely available streaming at SIFF.net. Arguably that makes it more accessible, but the irony is that it also likely means fewer people even know about it. Whether it will actually get seen by more people this way than it would in theaters, I have no idea. I just know it’s worth the streaming purchase (granted, I got a discount as a SIFF member, so for me it came to $8.50).

It should be noted, though, that for some reason this movie is being presented as a comedy. Maybe Finnish (and Swedish) people think this is funnier than I realize, but I doubt it. There are three or four chuckles, but it is otherwise a pretty straightforward drama—and a very well executed one at that.

I’m trying to think of any other movie that is quite like it. Countless movies have been made about friendship, of course, but they either tend to be about the deep friendship between only two people, or if it’s about a friend group, it’s typically a group of all or mostly the same gender. Games People Play is a lot more like the typical dramas you see with an ensemble cast about someone’s family—and, in a way, that’s what it actually is: about chosen family. There are some siblings in the mix here, but nobody’s parents are in the mix with this story. And, specifically, this is a very coed ensemble cast, with four women and four men.

And they have entangled romances in their pasts. One couple, a writer and the woman he met at his publishing house, includes a man who once had a relationship with the birthday girl, who is best friends with an older sister to a woman who is having a secret affair with the youngest man in the group. He’s later identified as thirty, so I never quite got why their relationship had to be secret, except I suppose that several characters remark on how much trouble they have thinking of the young man as an adult. The writer is still in love with the birthday girl. The older sister has brought her new movie star boyfriend to the getaway, and is also the longtime subject of unrequited love from yet another friend.

All of this gets revealed, or new subtle consequences unfold, in a very organic way. The performances are solid across the board, making it easy to believe these people as longtime friends, family members, and lovers. A lot of what engaged me with this film was simply nuances of cultural differences: a lip kiss between two women that is clearly platonic; the casual way in which straight men sit in a sauna or swim together totally naked. It’s fascinating to see how these things are just incidental details, never directly tied to any of the bagged shared by this group of people. There’s even a bit of cultural tension between the Fins who make up the bulk of the characters, and the movie star who is actually from Stockholm, in neighboring Sweden. It’s easy to think of Europe as some kind of monolith of whiteness, but evidently there are weird prejudices even between Scandinavian countries. I don’t know why that should be surprising.

A lot of these things are just details. The story, as written by director Jenni Toivoniemi, is progressively compelling, as the subtle complexities of these characters’ shared histories come to light. It’s about as good as any family drama you could ask for.

Whatever they’re playing it’s not so much a game as each other’s heartstrings.

Overall: B+

LINGUI, THE SACRED BONDS

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

Movies like Lingui, the Sacred Bonds have a deep, unique international value, just in terms of encapsulating a local area and culture—even on an unusually micro level, right down to a single neighborhood, in this case on the outskirts of N'Djamena, the capital and largest city in Chad. This is the story of “the sacred bonds” of family, in this instance between a mother, Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), and her 15-year-old daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio). Amina is a devout Muslim, as is everyone else in her community, but her convictions are put to the test when Maria is revealed to be pregnant and cannot bear to have the child. This is the story of a mother taking increasingly desperate measures to get her daughter an abortion.

It should be noted that it’s naive to think only places as “exotic” (to Americans) as Chad make such things so difficult. I am reminded of the excellent and under-watched 2020 film, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, about a teenage girl and her best friend traveling alone together from Pennsyvania to New York so she can get an abortion without her parents’ consent. That film is heartbreaking in its own right, but it does also focus on white Americans, and it says nothing about how the United States makes things far harder yet for Black people in the same situation.

In Lingui, the characters aren’t just all Black, but they are literally African, and Muslim as well. To say this film is packed with layered nuance and subtext would be an understatement. There were scenes in which I knew there was subtext I was missing, some of it connected to Chad’s French colonial past. (Most of the film is spoken in French.) There is only one scene in the entire film in which we see white characters, and they are just two young white girls at the birthday party of Maria’s friend. Even there, they are merely extras.

Lingui, the Sacred Bonds read, to me at least, as a deeply feminist text. Usually I really hope a film like this is written and directed by a woman, but in this context, given the evident culture on display in the film, I’m rather impressed that it was written and directed by a man, by the name of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun—himself a native of Chad. I know truly nothing about what kind of film industry exists in that country, but Haroun elicits incredible performances from his two leads; his cinematographer Mathieu Giombini—a white Frenchman—has a natural eye for eliciting a specific setting; and this was Chad’s official submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. Unfortunately, it did not secure a nomination, although a strong case could be made that it should have. It’s far more deserving than The Hand of God, in any case.

The story, in retrospect, is more about the emotional journey of Amina, the mother, than that of Maria, the daughter. The daughter knows who she is and what she wants from the start, and doesn’t change beyond obvious effects of the trauma surrounding however she got pregnant. It’s Amina who is a different person by the end of the story than she was at the start, although her deep love for and fierce protection of her daughter is never in doubt. Lingui is also a great movie about a mother-daughter bond, the kind that gets more healthy as the story goes on.

I do kind of wish we didn’t have to find out who the father of Maria’s unborn child is. For most of the film, it’s something we do not know, and I would have preferred it to stay that way. The obvious trauma makes it easier for many to empathize with her situation, but objectively speaking, if Maria needs, or even wants, an abortion, the reason for it doesn’t matter. It’s no one else’s fucking business but hers, and perhaps her mother’s since Maria is still a minor. The revelation of this detail is ultimately a plot device, but, I suppose I should hesitate to jump to judgment, given how little I know about Chad’s government and culture (which is, basically, nothing at all, beyond what’s revealed by this film). Presumably the primary target audience for this film is other Chadians, after all.

I cannot stress enough, however, that this film is perfect for audiences the world over, as it doesn’t matter the background of the mother(s) in question, every woman in this situation deserves empathy and understanding, and more importantly, the autonomy to make her own decisions about it. Lingui touches on other barbaric practices of the region, most notably the truly disturbing practice of female circumcision, but at least it’s contextualized here with a small dose of hope. This gets to the layered themes already mentioned, and makes the film that much more impressive to process and contemplate. This is a movie with so much food for thought, you’ll be chewing on a lot of long after the credits roll.

A fierce bond between mother and daughter.

Overall: A-

DEATH ON THE NILE

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

Sorry to be a killjoy here, but it really should be noted that the 2022 version of Death on the Nile, which is set mostly in Egypt, was only shot in a studio in England. The Egytpian Pyramids are simply rendered with CGI. I will admit that a lot of the exterior shots are pretty impressive CGI work, but it’s still often identifiably visual effects work—which robs the visuals of their genuine majesty. What’s the point of “seeing” one of the great wonders of the world if it’s not actually what you’re looking at? That feels a little like saying you’ve “been” somewhere just because you saw it online. What’s more, several wide exterior shots are seen from far above the Nile river, with the camera swooping in an arc down toward the setting, such as an opulent hotel. The end result is less majestic than it is just like watching a computer simulation.

Did I mention Death on the Nile is a whodunnit? The central mystery of the story should always be the focus, but Kenneth Branagh, who directed this movie as well as its similarly mediocre predecessor, Murder on the Orient Express (2017), spends an oddly excessive amount of time distracting the viewer with obvious visual effects in a movie that should not necessitate such things. This movie was actually shot in 2019, and apparently there was intent to shoot on location in Egypt, but that “proved too difficult.” How or why, I couldn’t say—except that 2019 was before Covid-19, so that obviously wasn’t the reason.

Maybe shooting on location in Egypt is more complicated and difficult now than it was in 1978, when John Guillermin made his earlier version, starring Angela Lansbury, Maggie Smith, Mia Farrow, George Kennedy, Mia Farrow, and more. Honestly, my recommendation is just to find that earlier version and watch it instead. It doesn’t appear to be available anywhere streaming or even VOD right now; I found it on DVD at my local library and look forward to seeing a version that is by all accounts better. The story may be basically the same, but greater authenticity in locations can make a huge difference. Plus there’s that cast.

Granted, this 2022 version has a pretty star studded cast itself: Kenneth Branagh once again as Detective Hercule Poirot, with an ensemble cast including Armie Hammer, Gal Godot, Annette Bening, Black Panther’s Letitia Wright, and largely unrecognizable turns by Jennifer Saunders (using an American accent) and Russel Brand (as the boat’s resident doctor). Most of these people, I usually enjoy watching, although I will say Death on the Nile does suffer from the common problem of a star-studded ensemble cast watering down the star power of any one individual.

More than anything, this is Branagh’s movie, as expected given he’s both the director and plays the most famous character from Agatha Christie novels. This film does include a prologue before the opening credits that borders on camp, offering a totally unnecessary backstory for what, I guess, we are supposed to think of as his iconic mustache. I’ve heard debate as to whether audiences are supposed to take this at face value or if it’s meant to be funny. This did not come across as tongue-in-cheek to me at all. Not only that, but the severe war injury the mustache is supposed to have covered up doesn’t even make sense. We don’t see any scars at all around his ridiculous mustache. but based on the injury we are shown onscreen, we really should see scars, mustache or not. The scars do make an appearance at the end of the film and they don’t even match the facial real estate covered by the injury shown at the beginning of the film. So I was like: what?

None of this sounds like I enjoyed the movie very much, does it? I actually did have a relatively good time. But how much fun you have watching a movie and how good it actually is are not always directly correlated. My biggest issue with this Death on the Nile is how good it could have been, but then it just doesn’t bother to be. And yet, I still liked it better than Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express, albeit not by a wide margin. A chief complaint would be its 127-minute run time, which is wholly unnecessary, given the number of times Branagh cut away to totally unnecessary visual interludes. More than once he takes the camera either to the shores of the Nile or to the river floor, so we can see CGI-rendered wildlife feeding on prey. There’s a shot with a crocodile that cracked me up, but in most cases it just feels like filler, which is never needed in a movie that runs longe than two hours. Death on the Nile would have been noticeably improved were it, say, fifteen minutes shorter.

All of that aside, it’s still fun to see so many great actors just having a good time, chewing scenery. I did keep thinking about Ryan Johnson’s 2019 film Knives Out, a far superior film much better suited to 21sr-century audiences. Both movies are very much in the same genre, but Knives Out spends far less time taking itself seriously, and contains a lot more clever humor. Death on the Nile feels comparatively like a throwback to another time, in which case, why not just watch the movie that was already made in the seventies? In other words, Death on the Nile is fundamentally pointless and useless, with the sole exception of seeing current actors we love perform again what was already seen before. This movie does feature a few modernized twists, beyond a fairly noticeable racial diversification of the cast, but the overall plot still feels decidedly old-school. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—I was more entertained by this film than I expected, its obvious flaws notwithstanding—it just means there remain better offerings out there.

Famous fantasy cannibal and “Imagine” performer in Death on the Nile.