SIFF Advance: VERA DREAMS OF THE SEA

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

Vera Dreams of the Sea is currently making the rounds at film festivals, having first premiered at Venice in September 2021, now playing at the Seattle International Film Festival, and in these post-pandemic times, I fear for its potential to reach the number of eyeballs it really deserves. This is an accomplished feature debut from Kosovo, by director Kaltrina Krasniqi and writer Doruntina Basha. Krasniqi was at the screening I attended, and she noted that this film, running at a tight 87 minutes, too her seven years to make. The result is imperfect yet worthy of that effort, and all I can think about is what potential it has for limited theatrical runs. Even on eventual VOD or streamers, will this film always just be a hidden gem?

It’s potent fodder for discussion a cross section between film studies and gender studies, in any case. The title character is a middle-aged woman whose husband has just committed suicide. His death brings out secrets regarding his gambling habits, and unpaid gambling debts, which are linked to a house in a village Vera hopes to sell in order to secure a better future for her daughter and granddaughter.

Krasniqi is working within the framework of a society and culture that still has deeply embedded gender norms, which dictate that the word of men always takes precedence over even legal leverage of women. But Vera, as played by the wonderful Teuta Ajdini, is kind of a quiet badass. She’s managed to secure an unusual level of independence due to a unique skill: sign language, learned from her late, deaf mother. She now works as a sign language interpreter, a fact which plays a subtle but pivotal role in the plot.

Granted, everything that happens in Vera Dreams of the Sea is subtle, and while watching it, the story seems deceptively simple—until you try to explain it. There isn’t a lot of complex plot twists, and the pacing is relatively slow. But the editing is arguably the best thing about this film, only ever showing us exactly what we need to know at any given moment. This is a quiet film, with broad implications.

As pressure mounts for Vera to sign a contract handing over the village house to a man claiming it was promised to him, Vera consistently pushes back with steady resolve. Pressure turns to threats which escalate to a bit of violence, and it begins to feel like she’s being defeated. In a way, she is, which left me spending a lot of time eager to see her put one over on her oppressors. Whether or not Vera gets what she wants, exactly, the way her story ends is nice and satisfying.

This is a movie that rewards patience. I’m glad I saw it, and if more people seek it out, they will be too.

A highway to revenge?

Overall: B+

SIFF Advance: CAT DADDIES

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

Move over, “cat ladies.” This is a documentary about Cat Daddies, and boy, does it know its target audience. If you are a cat person, you will love this movie, which is often so sweet it’s almost unbearable. Granted, I am a cat person. I am so much a sucker for this kind of thing, it’s ridiculous.

To be fair, there is an argument to be made, still, that Cat Daddies is a documentary a step above other documentary feature films that focus in one way or another on cats. This is hardly even the first “cat documentary” I have seen at the Seattle International Film Festival—do I have a problem?—from Kedi (2016), about the feline population of Istanbul, to Catwalk: Tales from the Cat Show Circuit (2018). There was something different about the focus of those other films, though, a certain distance kept between their subjects and the true depth of meaning cats can have in people’s lives.

Cat Daddies is a different . . . uh, animal. Director Mye Hoang clearly aims to subvert the stereotype of the “crazy cat lady” as an old spinster woman obsessed with cats to at the expense of her own health and hygiene. That was a cliche that was never fair to women to begin with, but the flip side of it is this idea that cats are somehow not masculine and of little interest to men. There are, of course, men who do buy into this idea. But it’s never hard to find a man who once felt that way but had his heart melted by the introduction to a cat.

There’s something to be said for the mental health benefits of taking care of a pet, including cats, which Cat Daddies briefly touches on, though it doesn’t dwell on it much. Instead, it presents visual profiles of several men around the United States with a deep love, either for cats in general, or one particular cat. There’s a fire station that adopted an orange and white stray, named him “Flame,” and even built a mini fire station for him. There’s the professional stunt double in Atlanta who fell in love with a cat before discovering it to be a Maine Coon. There’s the Brooklyn activist who captures neighborhood cats to have they spayed or neutered and then rereleases them. Most bittersweet is the homeless man with early-stage Parkinson’s Disease and a cat named Lucky who is the one thing he finds to keep living for—an effective lesson in not judging homeless people who keep dogs or cats as pets.

A few of those profiled are already enjoying some amount of internet fame. The opening scenes focus on a guy named Nathan, who uses the handle NathanTheCatLady, and who I immediately recognized as someone I have been following on TikTok for more than a year. A couple I had not yet heard of: “GoalKitty,” a cat trained to stand on its hind legs and stretch its front paws straight up into the air; and Tora the Trucker Cat, who has now traveled through 45 states. It’s too bad that accomplishment is totally lost on the cat, who attracts people from sometimes hundreds of miles away for meetups.

I have mixed feelings about Hoang’s decision to feature “celebrity cats,” their being cared for by men notwithstanding. GoalKitty in particular has been trademarked and we are treated to a display of branded merchandise. A person’s got to make a living, I get it, but this is the least compelling thing in a movie like this. Maybe Hoang is going for some measure of “star power,” but, surely she could find plenty of other far more fascinating men whose beloved cats are not simply the subjects of viral videos.

Indeed, the most interesting subject in Cat Daddies is the homeless man, David, and the NYPD cop who befriended him, with a very similar looking cat of his own. This movie uses gendered stereotypes as its hook, but it succeeds at illustrating the objectively healthy connection that can form between human beings and their pets—and particularly cats, which really aren’t always as aloof and moody as they are made out to be.

Notably, Cat Daddies is also skillfully and lovingly shot, by cinematographer Robert Bennet, giving it a far more polished and professional look than the average documentary, let alone other documentaries about cats. A lot of the imagery is quite beautiful, especially of the cats themselves in soft light and slight slow motion. It’s nearly hypnotic in how it just makes you want to reach through the screen and hug these animals—and also the people who love them. This is a move that succeeds better than most at painting moving portraits of people who are not eccentric but just earnest in their assertion that cats enrich their lives.

As such, Cat Daddies has greater potential than other similar films to be compelling even to those who are otherwise indifferent to cats, but are interested in well made films. Of course, it’s still the people who love cats who will really love this movie.

I guess “Cat Gentlemen” wasn’t as catchy.

Overall: B+

THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT

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

I have to admit, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is not quite as self-referential as I expected, or perhaps even that I wanted. It would be a mistake to expect a movie in which Nicolas Cage plays himself as an overly self-absorbed and ambitious actor to go to far into a surreal dimension. Being John Malkovich, this is not, and I learned the hard way that it’s a mistake to expect anything even close to that.

In fact, that is arguably the oddest thing about The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent—how straightforward, at times almost earnest, it is. Cage is known for making crazy acting choices, particularly late in his career, and the craziest thing about this is how not crazy it is. It’s relatively clever, to be fair, although its title is easily the most clever thing about it. And that alone sets an expectation that the film does not meet.

The script, co-written by director Tom Gormican, barely manages a handful of passing references to Cage’s past movie titles, out of a filmography of well over a hundred films. It’s gotten to the point that it feels like Nicolas Cage will just take any acting role that gets offered him. Given that Gormican has only one other motion picture to his credit (some terribly reviewed 2014 movie called That Awkward Moment), even this role, in spite of a premise that makes it sound exceptional, fits into that mold.

None of this is to say that I did not enjoy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. I did. It just doesn’t feature anything close to unbearable weight or showcase anything remotely close to massive talent. It’s just a silly diversion, which may not meet its massive potential, but is still fine. I had a good time and got a few good laughs.

There’s not even as many cameos as you might expect. In the trailer, in which Neil Patrick Harris is prominently featured, it was easy to assume Harris was playing himself. He’s actually playing Cage’s talent agent. Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz play CIA agents Vivian and Martin, who throw a wrench into the plot by telling Cage the rich Spanish bachelor (Pedro Pascal) whose birthday party he’s been hired to attend is a dangerous mob criminal, and ask him to spy on him. This element of the film is what makes the plot wildly contrived, which I suppose is the point. Unfortunately, Haddish in particular gets saddled with a ton of expositional dialogue, and she is given no opportunity to let her well-known comedic talents shine.

Aside from Cage himself, who commits to this role with as much vigor as he does any, my favorite casting choice is actually that of his fictionalized ex-wife, Olivia, played by Sharon Horgan. Horgan is a reliable source for elevating whatever material she is given, and in this part, even though it constraints her talents as well, she still doesn’t disappoint.

The sort of full circle irony is that Nicolas Cage himself is what makes The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent worth watching. He forges a friendship with Pascal’s character, Javi, and the plot revolves around their relationship—while they also work on a movie together, about a friendship between two men, in which they feel compelled to add action sequences in order to “get people into theaters.” Cage and Pascal have an unusually wholesome chemistry, and they are a big part of how this movie is, if not quite as hilarious as I hoped, surprisingly sweet.

Cage also regularly talks to an imagined, younger version of himself, with a CGI de-aged face I could have lived without. On the upside, it’s a kick to see Nicolas Cage give himself a giant kiss.

I just wish there were more moments like that. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent suffers from an almost shocking aversion to risk. That seems to be partly what the film itself is meant to be commenting on, except that every single thing this movie tries to do, Adaptation did better, precisely twenty years ago. That includes the movie itself veering into the very kind of storytelling on which it’s commenting. It’s no accident that Adaptation had been co-written by the brilliant Charlie Kaufman, of which this movie is a cheap imitation.

Maybe just try not to think too much about that, or that it could be argued Adaptation was Cage’s last truly great performance (seriously, just go rewatch that movie). It’s not fair to compare The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent to an actual masterpiece. In a vacuum, this movie is entertaining enough, if not great enough to justify the money and effort to see it in a theater. Fake-Cage and Javi would be so disappointed to fall short in that ambition. But then, they would also be convinced their movie is better than it is.

“It’s . . . grotesque,” says Nicolas Cage, in a movie that should have been more grotesque.

Overall: B-

MOTHERING SUNDAY

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

I love me a good British period drama, and Mothering Sunday effectively scratches that itch, without particularly standing out from the crowd of British period dramas, this year or any other year. And unless you have the sane affinity for these sorts of films, I hesitate to recommend it, particularly given how long it takes to make clear how all its multiple narrative threads and timelines fit together. If you have the patience for it, though, sticking it out does come with its rewards.

Admittedly, this film did have to take some time to prove itself to me. The very opening shots include an intense, crystal clear close-up of Josh O’Connor’s lips. This is the young man who played Prince Charles in the last two season of Netflix’s The Crown. He’s a beautiful man, and incidentally, we are treated to several full-frontal shots of him in this movie. Director Eva Husson shoots a whole lot of the film in an incredibly sensual manner, and I have no complaints about that. But, this close-up of O’Connor’s lips, while he talks about something not particularly sensual at all, was a little much.

After that, however, Mothering Sunday is shot beautifully, by cinematography Jamie Ramsay. It might be the best thing about the film, how pretty it is to look at. The real problem, at least in the first half, is the editing, which often left me very confused. It’s only after some time that it becomes clear we are seeing the same character, Jane (Odessa Young), at different ages, intercut with each other. The primary timeline is a Mother’s Day (hence the title) shortly after the first World War, during which two families are meeting for lunch: between the two couples, only one of their children, Paul (O’Conner), has survived the war. Jane, here working as a maid for the now-childless Nivens (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman), is having an affair with Paul, and has met him at his home just before the aforementioned lunch, for which this meeting is making him late.

Intercut with this is Jane and Paul, in a casual relationship at a presumably earlier time; Jane and a later boyfriend, Donald (Sope Dirisu, his being black, fascinatingly, only once subtly alluded to); and in just a couple of scenes, Jane as a very old woman, having won all the literary awards.

For a while, I honestly wondered what the point of this story even was. Elements of class differences begin to creep into the narrative, and that makes things a little more compelling—as well as Jane’s backstory as a young woman with no family, raised in an orphanage. In the end, though, fair warning (and I suppose, mild spoiler alert): Mothering Sunday becomes a tragedy. It’s not a tear jerker per se; movies can easily make me cry when barely trying, but I needed no tissues here. It’s a little more like Eva Husson is presenting “tragedy as art.” Honestly, Mothering Sunday seems to aspire to more of an “artistic” vision than it quite achieves, beautiful cinematography notwithstanding.

Still, it held my attention, and I’ll grant it that much. I have no harsh criticisms of this film, aside from that off-putting closeup of lips. There’s also a sequence in which Jane wanders around Paul’s empty house, after he has finally left for the lunch, completely naked. It’s an oddly dreamy sequence, and adds to this movie’s pretty extensive amount of nudity. Nudity is fine, so long as there’s a point to it. Mothering Sunday might come more recommended if I came away from it remembering the story more vividly than I did the nudity. But, as I said, if you have a thing for British period dramas, it still fits the bill.

A feast for the eyes with a few empty calories.

Overall: B

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

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

There’s an infinite number of reasons to love Everything Everywhere All at Once, which means I cannot count them all.

In the absence of such an option, I can start with Michelle Yeoh, the 59-year-old woman, also an international movie star, who serves as the action heroine at the center of this beautiful mess of a story. I can continue with the choice itself, of casting someone so unusual for a central role of this sort. Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang is the Chinese-American wife and mother, struggling to cope with being audited at the laundromat she owns and runs with her husband, barely managing to acknowledge the fact that her daughter is bringing her girlfriend to a planned party for Evelyn’s father.

And once the multiverse figures into the plot, each one of these four family members winds up playing a uniquely pivotal role, all of them delightful and surprising. And, sure, you could say co-directors and co-writers Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are jumping on a “multiverse bandwagon” with this movie, but to their eternal credit, they manage to put an unparalleled spin on the concept. It’s repeatedly inventive, wildly imaginative, consistently clever, often hilarious, and most crucially, ultimately moving in a way that reveals the multiversal element supports a greater storytelling purpose rather than the other way around.

Kwan and Scheinert’s previous collaborative feature film project was Swiss Army Man (2016), starring Daniel Radcliffe as a corpse companion to a marooned Paul Dano. That movie was fine, its greatest asset being that it was not just unlike any other movie ever made, but in a bonkers way. Everything Everywhere All at Once is also both utterly unique and bonkers—there’s a particularly memorable scene in which office trophies are used as butt plugs as a means of accessing other universes—but is far more than just a fun gimmick. This movie has layers, broad metaphors, and subtly constructed themes. They all have to do with family relationships: father and daughter; wife and husband; most significantly, mother and daughter. There is a lot more to this movie than its uniquely clever construction.

It just happens also to be a wild ride, a skilled portrait of universal chaos, an action fantasy that is thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. There was a film adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 2005 that featured a hilarious sequence with the “infinite probability drive.” Everything Everywhere All at Once is like a full film adaptation of just that sequence, only with a stunningly coherent narrative thread. In the universe of this film, there are infinite universes, including one in which everyone has hot dogs for fingers. Kwan and Scheinert must really love that one, because they keep returning to it. Or, Evelyn does. At the behest of Kwan and Scheinert, really. You get it. There’s another one in which Evelyn and her daughter, Joy, are literally just rocks. This is the only universe, in fact, in which Joy is not played by Stephanie Hsu.

The inspired casting of supporting parts around Yeoh cannot go unmentioned. Also high on the list of reasons to love Everything Everywhere All at Once is Jamie Lee Curtis, a bona fide movie star in her own right, takiing on a role that would normally go to a usually-unrecognizable character actor. (To be fair, Margo Martindale would have been just as delightful in the part.) She plays Deirdre, the frumpy woman from the IRS performing the audit. But, as happens with all the other characters, she also gets overtaken by a more sinister version of herself from parallel universes. It’s complicated, you need to watch the movie. Suffice it to say, Curtis is wonderful.

Maybe the most fun surprise is Evelyn’s husband Waymond Wang, played by Ke Huy Quan. Now fifty years old, Quan stopped acting after 2002, only returned to it with a Netflix release in 2021, and Everything Everywhere All at Once is his first role in a theatrical release in twenty years. He had previously been a child actor, best known for his roles as Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Data in The Goonies (1985). As an older man now, he has a peculiar mixture of both confident skill and vulnerable sensitivity that makes him perfect for the part, particularly for a docile and good-natured man sometimes overtaken by a combat-ready version of himself from alternate dimensions.

I have to admit, I had somewhat mixed feelings about the performance of Stephanie Hsu, as Evelyn’s daughter Joy, who winds up being important to the story in a way I can’t spoil here. She also gets a wide range of versions of Joy to portray, some of them vulnerable and sad, some of them over the top to the point of campy. When I realized she also plays Mei, Joel’s Chinese girlfriend on the Prime Video series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, it hit me how impressive her range actually is.

All that said, it still all comes back to Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn, the most emotionally defeated of all multiversal versions of herself. This turns out to be key to her role in bringing “balance” back to the infinite cross section of dimensions. Kwan and Scheinert take this exceptionally well edited representation of all possible versions of all things, and brings it back to pretty simple notions of familial love and how it can bring meaning to an otherwise meaningless and inconsequential existence. It’s ultimately pretty typical in terms of Hollywood movie concepts, but that seems to be part of the point. And if nothing else, it’s fantastic to see such things couched in the context of a relationship between an older woman and her daughter. The successful integration of thematic substance into a movie that is so inventive and so much fun can’t really be overstated. Everything Everywhere All at Once is ironically a singular experience, or at least it is in this universe.

There’s so much more going on than you even know.

Overall: A-

YOU WON'T BE ALONE

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

Mable all the other critics and I are finally just diverting paths, because for the second time in a row, I’ve seen a movie widely praised that I left just thinking . . . Well, I don’t get it.

The best I can say about You Won’t Be Alone is it’s beautifully shot. It has a visual tone like a deeply disturbed, grotesque and fucked up horror version of a Terrence Malick movie. This is like Tree of Life if they replaced Brad Pitt with a profoundly scarred and bloodthirsty witch woman.

If that sounds like your bag, well, have a good time, I guess. I found it largely mystifying. At least, the second best thing I can say about this movie is that it’s better than the last one I went to see, Memoria, which bored me to death. I’ll grant You Won’t Be Alone this much: I wasn’t bored, even though it’s pacing is fairly measured. Its problem is that it’s not all that coherent.

I think I kind of get what writer-director Goran Stolevski is getting at with this story. A teenage girl is kidnapped by an ancient witch, who turns the girl into a witch. These witches have this nifty trick they can do, where after they kill a person, they open a hole into their chest, maybe where their heart is supposed to be, and fill it with a few handfuls of the victim’s innards. This allows them to shape-shift into the form of their victim. They can do this with all species, by the way; the opening shot is of a cat you only later realize was the old witch.

Anyway, once the young witch figures out how to shape shift, the movie becomes a succession of sequences in which she not only shape shifts but takes on the identify of the victim. The fact that, on average, the victim’s families and communities just accept them with a wildly different (and literally wild) personality, and having evidently become mute, doesn’t really make sense. Nor does the sequence in which the young witch discovers carnal desire and is surrounded by shirtless farmer men who are somehow all always pristine and clean. But, whatever. I guess that’s not the point, and the point is that this girl, who was raised to the age of sixteen hidden in a cave for fear of the old witch returning to her (which, of course, she does), is learning through immersion what it means to be “human.”

I’m not sure the horror genre always needs such high minded concepts. At first one might wonder why it even needed to be set in 19th century Macedonia, until you learn that Goran Stolevski, now Australian, was born in Macedonia and lived there through his teenage years. Maybe he chose the 19th century as a means of honoring his ancestors. With savage witches. Whatever.

In any case, I could follow You Won’t Be Alone fairly well until about halfway through. There’s a sequence in which a local villager girl, maybe nine or ten, has fallen off a cliff and died. The young witch takes on her form, and this was where the movie completely lost me. I don’t know if I blinked, or briefly nodded off, or what, but suddenly I had no idea what the hell was going on. I think there was a point at which it flashed back to when the old witch was burned at the stake and that explained her full body of burn scars, except the editing never made that clear at all. For some time I thought we had still been watching the young witch continue to shape shift and at some point she was the one who got caught and burned. Except then suddenly we’re back to other young people who are clearly the young witch, and without burns. I lost the thread of the movie there, and never managed to pick it up again. Mentally I threw my hands up, and just waited for it to be over.

I will say, though, that there is some incredible, layered, nuanced acting in this movie, particularly among the people playing those the young witch has shape shifted into. Probably the most famous person in this movie is Noomi Rapace, who shows up as one of the early people overtaken by the young witch (herself played excellently by Sara Klimoska). I was most impressed, though, by Carloto Cotta (Diamantino), who plays the first young man whose body the young witch takes over. The young witch uses him to experience sex as a man, but it’s the performance of the actor in that sex scene that is burned into my brain: his expressions of confusion, passion, pleasure, and surprise, all conveying a woman only just discovering truly human experiences, now experiencing them with a man’s body. Fascinating stuff . . . potentially, anyway.

The old witch is a bit of a sticking point for me. A lot of prosthetics and makeup going on there, with a clearly limited budget. Too many close-ups of her face, with somehow unblemished eyes and, particularly, eyelashes. Anamaria Marinca plays her as very strangely petty, with little revealed as to her motivations. I guess we just take it on faith that witches are grotesque and evil. A lot of the acting in the film otherwise is pretty stoic and forgettable, which largely neutralizes some of the incredible performances of a few supporting players.

Once again, though, I don’t have any idea who this movie is for. Pretentious intellectuals starved for cerebral analysys, I guess. Film critics eager for anything that stands out from the monotony of mainstream entertainment, who will sing its praises to readers who will mostly pass on the experience. I found the concept compelling, yet found it ultimately fell apart in the execution.

You won’t believe what happens next.

Overall: B-

MEMORIA

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

“I think I’m going crazy,” says Tilda Swinton’s character, Jessica, in the middle of Memoria, and I felt like she’d read my mind. It was a subtle moment of realization, as literally everything in this movie is so subtle that, until the very end, it’s as though literally nothing is happening, which means this moment was also one of the most exciting things to happen during it. Given what happens at the end, which I guess I won’t spoil even though it hardly matters for multiple reasons (I’ll get to that), I suppose it qualifies as the second-most exciting thing to happen in the movie. I can’t say that reflects on it all that positively.

I’m sure the writer and director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a Thai filmmaker directing a British star in a movie set in Colombia, did not have any intention for Jessica to have read my mind the way he did. Jessica thinks she’s going crazy because she keeps hearing a deep, resonant, metallic thud that sounds like it’s coming from “the core of the Earth,” and no one else can hear it. I think I’m going crazy because I sat through that whole movie wondering how the hell it garnered universal critical acclaim. I’m talking a score of 91 on Metacritic, where the “worst” review still got assigned a score of 70. At least the average user score there was a little more mixed, at 6.9, which—and this is rare—did make me feel better. At least I knew I wasn’t the only one baffled by this movie.

I took a look over at Rotten Tomatoes. “88% Fresh,” which in that case means 88% of reviewers liked it. Unlike MetaCritic, they don’t gauage how much they liked it, only that they liked it. It does also mean, though, that 12% of reviewers didn’t like it. Kurt Loder calls it “Virtually a parody of an awful art house movie.” Whew! I am not alone!

I debated whether to review this movie at all myself, actually. Why bother, if I am not going to recommend it to anyone? Plus, Weerasethakul is taking a compelling approach to this film’s release, which honestly is the most interesting thing about it: it’s only being released one city at a time, one scren at a time, so that at any given moment of it playing, it has only one single audience. It happens to be playing in Seattle this week, at the Egyptian Theater. It appears it will still be there next week. But, there is no plan to release it later in any way for home viewing. I don’t care. Don’t go see it. In the meantime, I still want to complain about it.

More specifically, and this is a new move for me, I want to respond to some of the many good things critics are saying about Memoria. Consider Mike D’Angelo, in his review for The AV Club, in which he writes, in part:

There’s something uniquely intense about hearing an entire audience remain utterly still during a movie’s transporting final minutes, afraid to cough or squeak their seat’s rusty springs or even breathe too loud, for fear of breaking the spell. Memoria inspires that kind of rapture.

The thing is, that for the most part quite accurately described my theatrical experience as well. Memoria is quite intentional in its deeply measured, literal quietness. In fact, it is preceded by a ten-minute “silent pre-show,” a slide show of sorts, of location photos intermittently overlaid with what look like doodle versions of concept art in white lines. The opening title cards of this "pre-show” indicate it to be a way for us to “transition” into the tone of the film itself, and then read, Enjoy our silence. I have to admit: the rather slow slide show proved to be effectively hypnotic—on the whole theater. It wasn’t quite as effective at holding that feeling of hypnosis through the entire film itself, at least for me. One guy got up about three quarters of the way through the film, and I wondered if he was just going to the bathroom or if he’d had enough of this movie in which almost nothing happens. Just because he was leaving, for whatever reason, I envied him. I wonder if I was truly somehow the only person in the theater who, in the last act, suddenly thought to myself, Oh my god, I am SO BORED.

Here’s Caroline Tsai from The Playlist, reviewing from its screening at Cannes:

A master of slow cinema, Weerasethakul takes his time with every shot; long stretches of time pass without any dialogue or movement. In so doing, the film inculcates a kind of hypersensitivity in its viewers, who become suddenly attuned to each flitting blade of grass or buzzing fly that enters the shot—as well as to their own posture and breathing.

Again: I can’t argue with any of that. What I don’t get is the idea that this is somehow a great cinema experience. The cinematography is one of my greatest criticisms of Memoria, actually, because those long shots are done with the camera usually stationery, or in rare cases, moving so slowly as to be barely perceptible. Literally, I would have enjoyed Memoria far more if the only change were that the camera moved at all.

Granted, that does give it a certain horror-tinged element, because more than once a scene occurs where that thud sound comes out of nowhere, breaking a long silence—as happens in the very opening scene—and I was so startled I jumped out of my chair. This means that in other scenes, the camera holding a stationery shot for what seems like an eternity, I was terrified of something suddenly scaring the shit out of me again. This happens late in the film with the camera pointing at a man evidently able to die temporarily, lying on his back in grass, his mouth slightly open, his eyes open and blank, for all intents and purposes a corpse. If any image from this movie haunts me, it will be that one.

Apparently, however, I am one of the few people who just doesn’t get it. I feel like something everyone else seems to understand is going over my head. It felt a lot like a truly terrible documentary I saw at the Seattle International Film Festival about seventeen years ago, in which the audience came fully expecting it to be great, so they responded as though it met those expectations, even though it hadn’t. To be fair, Memoria is still a decidedly better film than that one was, but that doesn’t mean Memoria is without its own frustrating pretentions.

And I found Memoria to be deeply frustrating. I was even fully on board, until maybe two thirds or so of the way into it. I’d be a lot happier with this movie if what was supposed to be going on actually came together in the end in a more coherent way. Instead, as Jessica seems to be getting closer to answers regarding this mysterious thud sounds she keeps hearing at very erratic intervals (it’s usually once in a given day, or between long periods; then, during a dinner scene with her sister’s family, she hears it several times during a single conversation—and I struggled to glean whether it was related to the conversational topic at hand, about a secluded society that does not want to be touched by modern people or inventions; I think maybe it was), I found it only got more confusing. If it’s getting harder, rather than easier, for me to figure out what the hell is going on while a movie is moving toward wrapping up, I struggle to call that a success.

Still, I feel like I kind of get what Apichatpong is going for, which is a deeply immersive, sensory experience. By that measure, Memoria succeeds with flying colors. When it comes to the connection he seems to be making between sound and memory (hence the title, presumably), what passes for a plot here really lacks clarity. It felt to me like Apichatpong elevates the importance of the immersive experience over a story, which is what most of us go to the movies for, however innovatively it might be told. I would argue the two are of equal importance, and as such, when the movie finally ended, I felt relief more than anything.

Can you hear it? The sound of my utter boredom?

Overall: C

COMPARTMENT NO. 6

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

Compartment No. 6 is a relatively impressive film on a technical level, if you pull out of the story long enough to think about it, anyway. This feels a little like a backhanded compliment, I admit, since it does mean that, while I generally found the story compelling. I did find time to wonder how successful they were at maintaining continuity. This film is mostly set on a train from Moscow to the far-northwest Russian city of Murmansk, not far from Scandinavia, and it is largely shot legitimately on moving trains.

I’d be interested to know how they accomplished this, but can only assume many scenes were shot far from where the train the story was actually supposed to be running. And, indeed, the cinematography, all with hand-held cameras, is one of the more noticeably accomplished aspects of this film, the camera following characters along incredibly tight train car corridors, to and from a rather small compartment space.

This film, perhaps, also falls victim to world events, in respect to the country in which it is set. Compartment No. 6 is a Finnish film, with a Finnish director (Juho Kuosmanen) and a Finnish actor (Seidi Haarla) playing the Finnish protagonist, named Laura. But, Laura is the only Finnish character in this film; all the others are Russian, as she’s staying in Russia, learning the language, and going on this train trip that had originally been planned with the older Moscow woman she sublets from (and sleeps with) but who had to cancel due to work.

Laura has gone ahead and taken the trip on her own anyway, to see the Kanozero Petroglyphs. The story here isn’t so much about that; it’s just a destination for the train ride that serves as the setting for most of the story. What we are to be more interested in, is her tentative but slowly developing relationship with Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov), her randomly assigned compartment mate.

When Laura first encounters Ljoha in their compartment, he is drunk. A little on the nose for the Russian character, perhaps. But, Borisov imbues him with incredible nuance, slowly revealing the unique nature of his emotional repression.

That said, not a whole lot happens in this movie, really. It’s just a very talky drama, set on a train, with a fair number of very quiet moments. It recalls Richard Linklater, just less brainy (and actually less talky). If you’re looking for any kind of excitement, you won’t find it here, You won’t even find any romantic fireworks, although there is a bit of a near miss with romance. Personally, I kind of liked this aspect of it, as it’s nice to see a movie about a man and a woman that doesn’t focus at all on sex. There is a kissing scene, but then Ljoha retreats from it, seemingly almost involuntarily.

It’s nice that none of the main characters in this movie is a villain, at least. The closest we get to supporting characters is the woman train conductor, and the elderly lady Ljoha brings Laura along to visit during an overnight stay in St. Petersburg. Oh, and the other Finnish passenger who shares the compartment for a brief period. He spends a little too much time softly singing along to his acoustic guitar.

Compartment No. 6 is credited as being “inspired by”—as opposed to based on—a novel by the same name by Finnish writer Rosa Liksom. It was first published in 2011, so both the novel and this movie were made before all this Ukraine bullshit with Russia—one has to wonder whether this movie could even be made were it in production in 2022. Instead, the movie was shot in early 2020, some locations forced to change due to the emerging pandemic. Do current events affect public appetite for even partly Russian stories, I wonder? It didn’t affect mine; Russian people are still people, and this story can exist irrespective of what horrid things the Russian president is doing. Beyond that, there’s not much definitively memorable about it, but Compartment No. 6 has is charms.

She begrudgingly opens up to his friendly overtures, just like I did with this movie.

Overall: B

STRIDING INTO THE WIND

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

As much as it pains me to say it, I really can’t recommend purchasing tickets to watch SIFF Cinema movies streaming online—at least, not without the fastest internet speed in existence, which I can only imagine might make a difference. I generally don’t have a problem with any of the regular streaming platforms, but almost inevitably, when I watch an online movie from SIFF Cinema, at some point the screen freezes. Then it becomes a guessing game, between which will take longer: waiting for the movie to continue, or waiting for the ads and trailers to re-run in their entirety after refreshing the screen. It’s truly crazy making.

There are some movies out there that are worth such troubles, I suppose, but Striding Into the Wind, a movie from China by director Shujun Wei, sure as shit isn’t one of them. I remain baffled as to why this is billed as a “road trip movie,” when the road trip literally doesn’t happen until ninety minutes into the film. And then, we spend very little time with them actually on the road. Most of the rest of the film is a film crew, some of them from a Beijing film school, doing reshoots in Inner Mongolia.

The full run time is 134 minutes, and I spent that entire time—with an extra ten minutes or so waiting either for the damned movie to unfreeze and move on, or get back to it after a browser refresh triggers a replay of all the ads and trailers—wondering why I was supposed to care about the guy who is ostensibly the protagonist. Kun (Zhou You) is an aimless film school student who doesn’t ever take his schooling seriously, and his chubby friend Tong (Tong Linkai) who is even less dedicated.

A huge amount of time is dedicated to the relationship between these two film school students and a used Jeep that Kun buys early on. The thing is, Kun really can’t fully dedicate himself to anything at all—including getting his driver’s license. The opening shot of Striding Into the Wind features Kun angering his driving instructor, who winds up chasing him out of the car and down the street. More than once through the rest of the film, Kun gets caught by the police, either for a DUI or driving with a suspended license, always just making things worse for himself.

That description alone makes it sound like a lot more is actually happening than what we really see in this movie. Striding Into the Wind is relatively quiet, and relentlessly naturalistic, as if Wei had a ton of unusually well-shot home video footage and managed to cut it into something vaguely resembling a narrative. I have to say, I was bored as hell. It’s most disappointing when the movie you want to walk out of is playing inside your home. Why didn’t I just turn it off, then? Well, I was still going to review it, so I had to stay dedicated. Let’s say I watched this so you don’t have to. Not that any of you were going to anyway. Also, as I already noted, I had already purchased an online ticket that I didn’t want to waste. I realize you could say that’s a dumb argument, since that money was wasted either way.

The frustrating thing is that it’s clear there is talent among the people who made this movie. It’s filled with rather pleasant cinematography, from uniquely lit shots inside a car at night to grassy landscapes, although most of the film takes place in the city. The performances are competent. It’s slightly amusing that these young men are attending what they refer to as a “School of Cinematography,” and the cinematography in this movie is the only thing about it that I can truly compliment.

But, I can’t get over that this “road movie” doesn’t even get to the road trip until two thirds of the way through. Kun becomes more than just a sound engineer on the student film production, and winds up being the chauffeur for the film’s director and actor. Kun seems to become slightly more responsible with his work duties as the story goes on, but it happens at a glacial pace, and then he just gets himself into even deeper trouble again.

I’m sure there are nuances I’m missing, particularly with Kun’s detached girlfriend with her own ambitions, his police officer father, and his schoolteacher mother. I was too busy trying to stay awake to retain them as well as I’m sure the director would have liked. I’ll credit Striding Into the Wind with this much: the characters feel quite naturally like real people. It’s just, they feel like definitively average, if authentic, people, which renders them fundamentally uninteresting.

The movie-within-a-movie isn’t all that compelling either.

Overall: C+

THE ADAM PROJECT

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

Watching a Ryan Reynolds action comedy is like the cinematic equivalent of eating an off-brand Hostess cupcake: clearly inferior, but tasty enough in the absence of something better. This is a pretty consistent element of Reynolds’s career, although the quasi-novel thing about The Adam Project is the inspired casting of 11-year-old Walker Scobell as Reynolds’s scrawny, 12-year-old self. This is Scobell’s first acting role, and he nails the signature Reynolds snark, just a preteen version of it.

Indeed, The Adam Project would not have been nearly as fun as it is—and it’s arguably more fun than it deserves to be—of not for the many funny quips in the dialogue, particularly between Reynolds and Scobell. Conceptually, the script of this movie is utter garbage, but I found it relatively to overlook due to the fairly consistent laughs it got out of me.

It does have a bit of a “straight to video” vibe to it. I realize that’s now an outdated phrase, but people who remember what that meant will get what I mean better than if I just call it “straight to streaming,” which is what this is. The thing is, in the streaming age, even Oscar-worthy fare sometimes gets released on streamers at the same time as their theatrical release. This has occurred with everything from Dune to The Power of the Dog. The Adam Project is nowhere near in the same league as those films, nor does it try or even pretend to be. Still I was surprised to discover it did get its own limited theatical release: it’s actually playing at the Cinemark Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue.

I wonder if it plays better in a theater? Perhaps it does. It doesn’t change the definitively low-rent special effects, or the wildly derivative science fiction concepts. The plot involves time travel, an idea always rife with problems no matter how it’s approached in film. And this script, with four credited writers, goes out of its way to make its characters discuss the dangers of breaking “the rules” of time travel, then they openly break them all.

So much for meeting yourself in the past being any kind of problem. Reynolds and Scobell both play the same character, Adam, with older Adam (42, apparently) crash-landing his plane from 2050 in the woods around his childhood home in 2022. When younger Adam meets the older one, there’s about five seconds of shock, and then in practically an instant they’re both just cool with being around each other, knowing who each other is, and getting on with the task of moving the plot forward.

Here’s a curiously convenient plot point: another time jump occurs, when both Adams take the plane back to 2018. (The plane is configured to his DNA signature but won’t let him fly when he’s injured; thus, he needs young Adam’s fingerprints.) This four year gap allows The Adam Project to have its Covid cake and eat it too: it can completely ignore the pandemic without presenting an alternate universe in which it never existed. For now, anyway: the way things are going right now, in March 2022, the maskless 2022 we see in the movie feels plausible. We’ll see how things are going in another six months.

When the time jumps back to 2018, Adam’s father comes into the picture, played by Mark Ruffalo. We see Adam’s mother, played by Jennifer Garner, in both 2022 and 2018. We get a brief glimpse of 8-year-old Adam in 2018 but only long enough to see him playing video games; this movie is evidently not all that interested in Adam at that age. Further convoluting things is Catherine Keener as the villain, Maya Sorian, whose future self has gone back in time to tell her younger self, Biff-in-Back-to-the-Future-style, how to become rich and then harness time travel technology and somehow wind up controlling it all in a deeply dystopian future that is only ever referred to vaguely. “We’ve seen The Terminator, right?” older Adam says to his younger self. “That’s 2050 on a good day.” With the exception of an opening sequence of his plane in space above Earth before the first time jump, that’s all the insight we get about that future.

Speaking of Back to the Future, The Adam Project is rife with references to it. There are also clear visual homages to the fern-covered forest floor seen in E.T.; the obligatory direct references to Star Wars; and clear influences from The Matrix. There really isn’t a single even remotely original idea in this movie. I still feel compelled to give the script credit because of its consistently funny and clever dialogue, which is always just entertaining enough.

There’s also a casual charm to the chemistry between Reynolds and Scobell, if not so much between Reynolds and Zoe Saldana, who plays his wife in a thanklessly small part. It’s also notable that Catherine Keener is usually excellent, at least when cast well, but she feels bizarrely shoehorned into this movie, and to say she’s phoning it in is putting it mildly. In other words, the performances are kind of all over the place, which means they even out to being just a bit better than fine.

I’m trying to imagine someone with genuine scientific knowledge trying to swallow this movie. They’d have to be exceptionally skilled at turning their brain off. I’m no scientist myself, but I’d like to bran a little that I can be quite good at turning my brain off. With a movie like this, it’s more important to relax into the mindless entertainment it is than to pick it apart pointlessly. If you want 2001: A Space Odyssey, go watch that movie. To The Adam Project’s credit, it knows what it is and makes no claims or promises otherwise. Which is to say, it’s a cut-rate action comedy released to a streamer that will fade into the algorithmic ether within a week or two. But for now, it’ll do.

Strap in … to your couch. With a blanket maybe.

Overall: B-