BAD RIVER

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

When you hear the name “Bad River Band,” if you have no association or history with Native Americans (like me), you might easily mistake it for a classic rock band. Except this is Bad, not Little River Band, and it’s “Bad River” as in Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Today I learned that a “band” is a smaller group, of varying size, within a tribe—and, there seems to be a whole lot of nuance to this, and how it is defined, that requires a breadth of understanding that certainly surpasses the parameters of a movie review.

Suffice it to say that Bad River Band is a very organized group in Wisconsin, with their own U.S. government website, detailing both their status as a federally recognized tribe of the Ojibwe (as they are mostly known in Canada) or Chippewa (as they are mostly known in the U.S.), and their long fight against “Line 5,” an oil pipeline by Canadian company Enbridge, which runs oil through much of the U.S. around the Great Lakes. This includes Minnesota, both the Lower and Upper Peninsulas of Michigan, and Wisconsin, although “Line 5” specifically refers to its route from Superior, Wisconsin (at the westernmost point of Lake Superior), under the Straits of Mackinac (the narrow waterway separating Lake Michigan and Lake Huron), then through Michigan’s Lower Peninsula to oil refineries in Sarnia, Ontario. Specifically for the purposes of this documentary feature film, Bad River, it runs straight through the Bad River Reservation, which is located in Northern Wisconsin on the southwestern shores of Lake Superior.

There is indeed a literal river of the same name in this location, through which Line 5 runs, threatening an inevitable oil spill, the alteration of the river’s route, and then spilling its contamination into Lake Superior. You can read a three-page handout online about Bad River’s lawsuit against Enbridge over Line 5, which, honestly, might do a better job at spreading awareness of this clearly vital issue, than this serviceable documentary feature about it will. It can be argued that documentaries have greater reach than, say, printed materials, but how many of you have even heard of this film? Well, all of you reading this have now, but that’s not going to put much of a bump in the number of people who watch the movie. It helps spread awareness, at least.

And sometimes there’s just an unfortunate difference in the presentation of urgent information in print versus a visual medium. For much of Bad River the film, I failed to connect, not because of the content but because of its presentation: rapid-fire editing meant to seem “snappy” but coming across as rushed; drone shots of Bad River with quick fast-forward zooms. It felt a little too much like I was watching a standard-issue reality show like The Bachelor or Below Deck, which felt a little incongruous.

Much of Bad River quite rightly focuses on centuries of Native American resistance, but specifically contextualized in the history of Bad River Band, including the all-too common stories of genocide and forced assimilation into Christian culture, including literally stealing children and placing them into Catholic schools, where they were often horribly abused. I’m not proud to admit that I found myself thinking: we know this history already, have been told about it many times, what’s different about this story? But, then I caught myself: the fact that these shameful histories bear repeating never diminishes, and serves as a reminder of the generational trauma that undergirds their resistance today. Side note: this is a great example of how Canada, often lionized as the country with a greater moral compass than the U.S., has a history no better than ours when it comes to this stuff—and they are just a callous in their treatment of Indigenous peoples today, if it serves such interests as a corporation’s bottom line.

A very large number of Bad River Band people are interviewed for this film, which greatly personalizes it, on both a collective and individual level. By the end, I did find myself deeply moved, with this film’s novel approach to closing scenes: we see each person’s answer to the question of what they would say to their descendants, many generations from now. The answers vary greatly but have a common through line of love and hope, and if you look at it from the point of view of those descendants they’re speaking to, it’s a literalization of being spoken to by your ancestors. I can’t deny a pretty cynical outlook, myself—both the U.S. and Canada’s histories of relations with Indigenous people, clear to the present day, doesn’t exactly bode well. But that doesn’t lessen the need for resistance, and if nothing else, this film is but one example of a multi-pronged, years-long strategy.

There’s a lot here worth protecting.

Overall: B

ANSELM

Directing: C+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C+
Music: B

It’s not often that the experience of a film so closely resembles getting a dose of chloroform. I suppose that’s hyperbole, but I was certainly sedated. I truly could not keep myself awake during Anselm.

Art is subjective, right? I hesitate to say this makes Anselm a bad movie. And there were moments, when I managed to stay awake, that I was genuinely astonished and amazed. Anselm Kiefer, a German painter and sculptor who is now 79 years old, is seen in this film working on many of his countless works of art—this guy is incredibly prolific. And makes tactile, three-dimensional pieces on canvases so huge, often twice his height and double again the width, that countless of his pieces are seen, both stored and in progress, in a gigantic warehouse. He gets around the space riding on a bicycle.

In one sequence, Kiefer is seen melting metals down into liquids, then pouring it from a bucket—using a pulley system operated from a safe distance—directly onto a canvas lying flat on the floor. It’s genuinely fascinating, and makes you yearn to find the finished piece, wherever it is now, and touch it. In fact, Kiefer evidently has so many pieces in a quasi-abstract style that is very much my jam, I would be first in line to an exhibit were I to find out there was one near me. Seeing the art in person, I am sure, would be very stimulating indeed, on both visual and tactile levels.

Which is all to say, I don’t think my response to the film Ansel has anything to do with Ansel Kiefer at all. Rather, it has to do with the film’s director Wim Wenders, who once made a name for himself with eighties films like Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire. And, to be fair, the critical consensus with Anselm is very high praise indeed—and I don’t begrudge anyone responding to this film in such a way. Still, I have to speak my truth, and my truth is that this movie literally sedated me.

It’s not like I was operating on lack of sleep or anything. I was perfectly alert before going into the theater, and woke right up when the movie ended (when I was also relieved it was over). There’s something about the smooth, gliding movements of the camera as it passes through Kiefer’s works of art, alternating between a soothing, quiet score, and much longer shots of total silence. It’s the visual equivalent of being rocked to sleep.

The theater where I saw this movie, at 7:30 on a Friday night, was surprisingly full, and I found myself looking around to see if I could get any sense of how the rest of the audience was reacting to it. I couldn’t tell if anyone else was nodding off, but it did strike me that I could not hear anyone eating popcorn. It did feel like, in one way or another, the rest of the audience was also being put under some kind of spell.

It should be noted, also, that Anselm is being presented in 3D. I feel compelled to mention the 2012 documentary Pina, featuring dance tributes to German choreographer Pina Bausch. That film was also presented in 3D, the first documentary feature I had ever seen in that format, and I was truly blown away by it, completely held in its thrall. I actually came to Anselm with Pina very much in mind, thinking: if a documentary must be presented in 3D, an examination of art is the way to do it. How much closer can you get to feeling like you’re in the same room with it, without actually being there?

The stark difference really comes down to tone. Pina was a film of action, a kind of documented series of interpretive dances. Anselm, by contrast, is a visual catalog of stationery objects. I don’t dislike museums, but they do have a tendency to tire me out surprisingly quickly; I get fatigued, as though all that art has tested the limits of my brain function. This was essentially my response to Anselm, just much more severe. I hadn’t been this powerless to sleep since I was anesthetized for a colonoscopy.

My best theory is that it simply had to do with the environmental context: a movie that lulled me to sleep, the 3D format giving it a heightened realism, in a very dark movie theater. I suspect this film, ironically, might be more effective seen in 2D at home. If nothing else, it introduced me to an artist I had never heard of, whose art itself I actually love.

I didn’t actually want to take a nap, I swear!

Overall, what I actually saw: B-

ORLANDO: MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

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

Within the first few minutes of Orlando: My Political Biography, one of the young people sitting in the row behind my said, “This movie is so French.” Indeed,

The person who said it seemed mildly amused, not particularly irritated. I’ll say that this film reached me a bit more successfully as it went on, but also that it regularly lost me, then pulled me back in, then lost me again, then pulled me back in again. Some of this was, perhaps, indeed its very French-ness. I suspect some of it was that I was almost certainly the oldest person in that audience, a gender-nonconforming elder receiving an interpretive lesson on how today’s trans and nonbinary youth approach gender identity.

To call Orlando: My Political Biography “high concept” would be an understatement. Writer-director Paul B. Preciado, who is himself 53 years old (and, importantly, a trans man) assembled 26 trans and nonbinary people to introduce themselves by name on camera, declare that they are “playing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” and wear a ruffled collar while doing so. This is all a riff on Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography, which might work better should you have read the novel recently, or at all. I have never read it, but the film makes many references to how the novel’s namesake protagonist famously suddenly switches genders midway through the story. It does not, however, make any reference to Tilda Swinton playing the role in a 1992 film adaptation.

It should be noted that the 26 subjects featured in the film range from 8 to 70 years old, which would suggest a broad range of ages, but there are only a group of three kids, and one 70-year-old. There’s a couple of clearly middle-aged people, but the majority of them are clearly young, ranging from their teens to their twenties. But there is intention to this as well: the subjects on the edges of this spectrum serve as both contrasts and anchors for the others, who become a collective portrait of contemporary trans and nonbinary experience, of a kind of defiant joy, in the face of persistent societal pressures.

In a sort of parallel to blurring gender lines, Preciado blurs the line between subject and performer, having his subjects recite lines—sometimes directly from the novel; sometimes other written material—as well as having his subjects simply share their thoughts and experiences. The early scenes are perhaps the most avant-garde, which unfortunately makes them the least inviting. At one point, a subject essentially makes out with the trunk of a tree.

This film is garnering rave reviews, but I can’t help but wonder who will be that into it, outside those who are both extensively literate and academically interested in gender. This Orlando features a few funny moments for levity, but is for the most part a very highbrow exercise. I find myself imagining college students in a Gender Studies class patting themselves on the back for how brilliant they think it is, while neglecting more effectively straightforward documentaries about trans history, like Disclosure (2020) or Paris Is Burning (1990).

Don’t get me wrong: I can easily see why some people love Orlando: My Political Biograph, which is genuinely unusual in what it captures in trans pride and trans joy, as well as its cross section of individuals whose very existence transcends the binary, the assumption of shame regarding certain body parts, or the historic insistence that transness necessitates surgery. For all I know, this film is something for contemporary trans and nonbinary people to connect to; I cannot speak for them. All I can say is whether I managed to connect with it, and at its most experimental, I could not.

The film does feature some clips of the earliest post-operation transgender women to speak to the media, and when Orlando connects that history to the present day, and then features a few young trans and nonbinary children as beacons of the future, then it connects with me. For viewers with just the right amount of patience, this film does have its rewards.

A bit esoteric on the approach.

Overall: B

STOP MAKING SENSE 40th Anniversary Rerelease

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

Several times while watching Stop Making Semse, the now-classic, cult favorite Talking Heads concert film, I almost thought I was looking at Cillian Murphy. David Byrne, the lead singer of the Talking Heads—which have not released an album of original music as a band in 35 years—was 32 years old at the time of this concert’s filming, in December 1983. (Hence the “40th anniversary” moniker, I guess, even though the film was originally released in October 1984). Cillian Murphy is 47 now. He’d better get on it if he’s ever going to star in a biopic. I’d be there in a flash, anyway.

I have a curious personal history with this band. In spite of collecting the entire discography of many singers and bands from the seventies and eighties, I have never owned any album by the Talking Heads. And yet, as a lover of film, I have genuinely loved both concert films with David Byrne as lead performer. David Byrne’s American Utopia was my 8th-favorite movie of 2020. Having now seen Stop Making Sense in a theater, I think I am just slightly partial to American Utopia, which is, as a recording of a Broadway performance, is much more of a choreographed stage production.

They do make great companion pieces, I think. In 2020, I marveled at David Byrne as an exceptional live vocalist, particularly at the age of 67. Turns out, this was nothing new. To say Byrne is an odd man is an understatement, but his stage presence is undeniable, and his unique singing style still manages to blend perfectly well with backup singer harmonies.

There must be something to the quality of The Talking Heads’s back catalogue, as well as their power over an audience, considering how much I love watching them perform, in spite of having only cursory familiarity with the material. I know the tunes to “Psycho Killer” and “Burning Down the House” and “Once In a Lifetime,” of course, but Stop Making Sense is full of songs I am unaware of having heard anywhere else, and still I am just as into the next one as I am the last.

The presentation of Stop Making Sense is a simple conceit, but a very effective one. It opens with Byrne alone, performing “Psycho Killer” with nothing but a boom box and an acoustic guitar. For the next song, “Heaven,” he sings only with Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth. And so it goes with the following songs, each with a new instrument added: drums by Chris Frantz; guitar (and later keyboards) by Jerry Harrison; and an expanding number of supporting instrumentalists. Stagehands either carry or roll out their equipment ahead of time, while Byrne continues performing in front of them.

Even at the age of 32, Byrne’s energy and stamina are stunning. Like all the band members, he sweats a good amount, but never shows any signs of tiring, particularly when it comes to his vocals. He sounds incredible from start to finish.

So: is it “the best concert film of all time,” as considered by many critics? Who am I to argue? Granted, this strikes me as wildly objective. If the Talking Heads’s music doesn’t speak to you, would you still align with this perspective? Granted, this film is also known for some technical innovations, as in its digital audio techniques. I suppose that means this could be called “the Citizen Kane of concert films.” Does that make it the best? Well, it’s excellent, anyway.

If nothing else, it certainly holds up, incredibly well. I find myself wondering what it might be like to watch in a house theater full of fans. I watched this at a 4:20 p.m. screening, with one single other person in the theater. I was super into the music, moving a bit to it, in my sleep. The young woman two seats down from me was not so much as tapping her foot.

I’m glad I got to see it in a theater. There’s no question that, nearly empty theater notwithstanding, it was a far more absorbing experience than it would have been watching at home. I had a blast.

You don’t have to be a Talking Heads fan, but it helps.

Overall: A-

EVERY BODY

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

We are informed early on in Every Body, an excellent documentary on intersex people that predictably not nearly enough people are seeing, that in the United States alone, up to 1.7% of the population “has an intersex trait.” That amounts to an estimated 564,000 people. Much more to the point, up to 0.7% of Americans have clinically identifiable sexual or reproductive variations which may at one point warrant surgery. That amounts to about 230,000 people—or, the equivalent of the population of Spokane, Washington.

The idea that the systemic issues faced by any minority group should be ignored precisely because they are supposedly so small in number is preposterous. It’s mathematically illogical. And I should be frank here, in a way that director Julie Cohen does not bother to be: the queer community has been historically problematic on this front as well—just as we have been regarding queer people of color, just as we have been regarding trans people. Anyone complaining about the inclusion of the purple circle on a yellow background in the design of the progress flag clearly doesn’t get it, especially considering the vast overlap of struggles between the trans and intersex communities, in spite of them being two distinct groups. Again: rejecting their inclusion is illogical. (Side note: there are also fair debates about this.)

Small-minded people have a long, sad history of conflating sex with gender, and conflating sexuality with both. The deeply conditioned obsession with binary systems, which provably do not exist within any strict boundaries in nature (human or otherwise), persist with deeply frustrating tenacity. The film Every Body quite economically underscores this notion by opening the film with several clips of “gender reveal” parties, an idea that rivals astrology as the dumbest thing currently known to humankind. We see expectant parents, of both evident genders confined by the binary, getting truly nuts-excited by the news of their baby being a “boy” or a “girl.” All they are doing, really, is jumping up and down at the news of a visible penis, like an obsessive fan at a Beatles concert. Seriously, what are we all doing?

Cohen then introduces us to the three outspoken, out, intersex activists that Every Body almost exclusively focuses on: Sean Saifa Wall, assigned female at birth and now using he/him pronouns; River Gallo, assigned male at birth and now the only known working intersex actor in Los Angeles, using they/them pronouns; and Alicia Roth Weigel, assigned female at birth and now using she/her/they/them pronouns.

These three individuals provide more than enough content, and food for thought, for a feature film running at a brisk 92 minutes, but I would have liked a few more subjects to illustrate the very diverse array of intersex experiences, because the way being intersex manifests itself is extraordinarily diverse. Weigel is a uniquely fascinating case as she was born with internal testes and has XY chromosomes, but was assigned female at birth simply due to a lack of a penis—and she alone disproves any boneheaded arguments about “basic biology” proving any kind of sex binary. She stood as a physical rebuke to the transphobic Texas “bathroom bill” when she testified against it. By mandating that all people use the bathroom of their “biological sex,” Weigel would be legally compelled to use the men’s room, even though she was raised as a girl based on medical practices and laws inconsistent with what is currently being faced. And what sense is there in denying life-saving medical care to one group while forcing it upon another group that doesn’t need it?

The most important concern here, by far, of course, is bodily autonomy: surgeries forced on children, ranging from infancy to puberty, without their consent, which are regularly performed to this day. There are now decades of this practice, all traced back to a study later revealed to have a false conclusion, based on the case of David Reimer. Reimer had a botched circumcision as an infant, then his mother was advised by doctors just to raise him as a girl. We see a large number of clips of him getting interviewed in the late nineties, speaking out about his horrible experience and how the same horrors are being inflicted on other children based on incorrect conclusions about his case—and he wasn’t even intersex. He is not interviewed for this film because he committed suicide in 2004 at the age of 38.

Amnesty International notes that the number of people with intersex traits is comparable to that of people with red hair. Can you imagine forcing some kind of physical “correction” on every person with red hair? Presumably you would find that both preposterous and inhumane. What the film Every Body does best is humanize intersex people, and make the case that it really doesn’t matter how small the number is: barbarism is barbarism.

We clearly have a long way to go in terms of cultural understanding, as the resistance to understanding and accepting intersexuality is rooted in the longstanding, mistaken notion that there are only two sexes, and therefore any aberration is abominable, and worthy only of secrecy, shame, and correction. Anyone with sense can see how wrong-minded such thinking is, and Every Body is a deeply effective tool for directing a spotlight onto that sense.

Ending intersex surgery, one step at a time.

Overall: A-

SIFF Advance: BEING MARY TYLER MOORE

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

I should have done more research on Being Mary Tyler Moore beforehand. This is premiering on HBO a week from today. Why bother wasting a SIFF ticket on it?

I was hardly the only person to do so. I saw this at the Uptown Theater and, of the four SIFF films I have seen thus far, this had by far the largest crowd—more people in this audience than at even any regular-release film I’ve seen since probably last summer. This is a testament to the enduring legacy of Mary Tyler Moore, I suppose.

The woman was an icon, no doubt about it—and in a way that transcended the gross overuse of that word. The irony is that Mary Tyler Moore’s characters, particularly Laura Petrie and Mary Richards, were more interesting than she was. It may be fair to say that the documentary Being Mary Tyler Moore is the definitive record of Moore’s entire life, but far more is to be gained by watching The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966) or The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), both of which hold up shockingly well. The latter remains more forward thinking than about three quarters of any network series on today.

It would seem that Mary Tyler Moore, more than anything, was simply a vessel for a persona. This film suggests the real her is a lot closer to Beth Jarrett, the cold, grieving mother in Ordinary People (1980) for which Moore was nominated for an Academy Award. And Moore did endure far more than her fair share of tragedy, with a sister who died at age 21 from an overdose; a son who died at age 24 from a gun accident (amazingly, only a month after the release of Ordinary People), and a brother who died of kidney cancer at age 47.

On the upside, her third marriage was apparently the charm, with a man 18 years younger than her and who stayed with her 34 years, until her own death at the age of 80 in 2017.

That was six years ago. Why we’re getting this documentary now, as opposed to five years ago, is unclear. Except: this woman’s career and legacy remains as relevant as it ever was. Even all the way back during the Dick Van Dyke Show, Moore ironically played a housewife while pushing boundaries for American women: she was the first woman to wear pants on television, and was herself a working wife and mother offscreen. Nothing, of course, could possibly match the legacy of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which depicted a single woman, totally fulfilled by her personal and professional life, content to find and land a man if she can but comfortable with the outcome if doesn’t. This show aired in the era of Roe v. Wade, a bittersweet memory now if there ever was one.

And I certainly don’t mean to suggest that Mary Tyler Moore herself is uninteresting. She led a life worth examining. It’s just that she herself can never stack up to the characters she played, which is what causes an unfortunately muted effect to this film about her. Of course she was much more than Laura Petrie or Mary Richards: she had ups and downs on both Broadway and in film. She was later diagnosed with diabetes. But are any of these things as interesting as the enduringly groundbreaking TV shows she was an integral part of?

Being Mary Tyler Moore is a pretty standard documentary, about a deeply talented but slightly indecipherable woman, who played a couple of characters who will be (and already have been) remembered for generations. If you’re just a casual fan, then you could take or leave this film. If you really love her, you’ll like the movie. It might be of more interest to know, however, that The Dick Van Dyke Show is now streaming on Peacock and The Mary Tyler Moore Show is streaming on Prime Video.

She was just a bit more than what you saw onscreen.

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: HIDDEN MASTER: THE LEGACY OF GEORGE PLATT LYNES

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

Who the hell is George Platt Lynes? I had no idea, myself, until seeing this documentary film about him listed in this year’s Seattle International Film Festival schedule. It turns out, he was an artist of photography, in his prime in the 1920s and 1930s, who was by all intents and purposes openly gay. More to the point, he was incredibly talented, his work was infused with male sexuality, and that combination is likely the biggest reason his vast and stunning body of work has gone unnoticed for decades.

Anyone who knows anything about the cross section of art history and gay history has heard of Robert Mapplethorpe—who was clearly influenced by George Platt Lynes. Lynes pre-dates even Mapplethorpe by a good five decades.

After seeing Hidden Master, I am dying to see a major exhibition of Lynes’s work. But, as director and co-writer Sam Shahid tells us, no American museum will touch this body of work. Several art historians and curators are interviewed for this film, and Shahid briefly includes some commentary on the “double standard” of art exhibition that plasters the naked female form all over the place, even when sexually evocative—sometimes even provocative—and yet won’t do the same for the naked male form, which by contrast threatens people. There appears to have been multiple books published about him and his work, however, and I just placed a hold on the single one of them apparently carried by the Seattle Public Library.

That book was published in 1994 and evidently focuses on the body of work Lynes left to the Kinsey Institute—one of many fascinating things about George being that he both became good friends with famed sexologist Alfred Kinsey, and was an active participant in his research. Hidden Master, the movie, is a far more contemporary look at Lynes’s life and work, having been finished nearly three decades later.

What’s more, this film, ten years in the making, features interviews with multiple people who knew Lynes personally. In all but one case, the interview subjects passed away shortly after the interview, giving the film a bit of an “under the wire” quality. We’re talking about a photographer who was himself a stunningly beautiful young man a full century ago, after all. Even the interview subjects who knew him would have had to have been young even compared to Lynes when they knew each other—in the forties, or perhaps the early fifties. George Platt Lynes dyed of lung cancer in 1955, at the fairly young age of 47.

The crucial element of Hidden Master, though, is the countless examples of his work featured: a seemingly endless slide show of gorgeously rendered, black and white photos of male nudes, no less beautiful for how unsubtle they often are. The lighting of his subjects is incredible, and the themes of sexual desire are stunning, particularly for the time—people don’t know today how early on there was precedent for art like this, and that’s what makes this film so crucial. I could not stop thinking, as I saw example after example of Lynes’s photography, that I could have easily believed this work had been done today. God knows I never would have assumed these photos were taken between the twenties and the forties, without them being contextualized for me.

A fair bit is made of Lynes’s “physical snobbery,” in that he never chose average looking people as his subjects. His nudes were nearly all young men, and without exception the men were beautiful. Lynes also worked as a fashion photographer, his female subjects also exclusively beautiful. In apparently one exclusive case, he even had a sexual relationship with one of his women subjects. There are nude photos of her as well.

It should be noted, not all of his photos were sexual, although he seemed to have an appreciation for the naked human form whether it was sexualized or not. He even took nude photos of his brother, who was straight, and helped find more models culled from his college friends.

Which is to say, in just about every way you can imagine, George Platt Lynes was so far ahead of his time it’s mind boggling. This was a man fully self-possessed, comfortable in his own skin, casually defiant in his sexuality—all a full hundred years ago. He was himself so beautiful he fit right in with his subjects. He pushed boundaries in more ways than with his sexuality, also sensual, nude photos of Black and White men together. From today’s vantage point, there is an element of privilege there that both cannot be denied and which was about a century away from being even a hint of a part of anyone’s vocabulary. It’s even acknowledged in this film that the racial provocativeness has an element of exploitation to it.

Although not a lot of time is spent on it, there is some acknowledgement in Hidden Master that Lynes was an imperfect man, sometimes a little manipulative, particularly in sexual situations. To me, these details are classic elements of people whose beauty allows to get away with what others can’t. Somewhat on the flip side of this, Lynes was also the third partner in what we now would call a polyamorous relationship, and which itself lasted decades. Even by mainstream queer standards this is incredibly forward-thinking. There is no indication Lynes thought in these terms at all, however. He was only ever just completely and utterly himself.

I do appreciate the sexual frankness of Hidden Master, clearly a positive byproduct of having a queer story told by queer people. Given the nature of virtually all of Lynes’s male nudes, it would make no sense to shy away from it. It turns out Lynes did also take a few sexually explicit photos, just a couple of which do we see, during a brief discussion of the fine line between “art” and pornography, and how it gets applied differently between men and women. In any case, I could not find any indication that Hidden Master has received an MPA rating at all, but this film is definitely not for children.

I feel a deep, abiding appreciation for this film—not just its construction, but its very existence. It’s full of people who lament the lack of Lynes’s presence in any serious look at art history, and the film makes a very strong case for this man to get the kind of appreciation he has long been denied. His personal life at his particular time in history is deeply fascinating in its own right, but nothing comes even close to the vitality of the photography work itself. Whether or not you see this movie, do yourself a favor and just look him up. I am eager to learn more just because of this film.

Both erotically charged and a multi-level challenge to the viewer: George Platt Lynes is worth your time.

Overall: A-

SIFF Advance: AND THE KING SAID, WHAT A FANTASTIC MACHINE

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

And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine is ostensibly a critical, yet beautiful, look at the history of the camera: from still photographs to moving pictures, from an hours-long process to capture one image to a world rife with photographic immersion. We’re meant to learn, I suppose, how the camera over time has influenced and distorted how we see what is in front of our very eyes.

And is is undeniably, deeply fascinating, especially for a film without any overt narrative beyond the very passage of time, from the first-ever photograph, taken in France in 1826, to the mass-media digital world we live in today. I just wish this film had a little more in the way of insight.

And the King Said is of a certain type of documentary film, assembled as a collage meant to convey the “big picture”—no pun intended—on a particular concept, without intercutting to talking heads, or anyone attempting to contextualize for us. This films jumps far back and forth through time, taking select images, or clips from YouTube or TikTok, and then jumping back to certain breakthroughs like the series of photographs proving horses have moments of all four hooves above the ground when they run, or the famous film of a train that was the first motion picture shown to large audiences.

If there’s any problem with And the King Said, it’s that it attempts to convey far too much in far too little time—all of 88 minutes, to be exact, to cover nearly two hundred years of history. And although the instinct on the part of co-directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck to tilt heavily toward coverage of the explosion of digital photography in the 21st century makes sense, the resulting effect is a series of random images that hardly feels like any random deep dive into Flickr or YouTube or Instagram. The film notes how many millions of photos are published every minute, which only makes one wonder how they chose all the images they include in this particular edit. There’s a million other edits that could have had exactly the same effect, and if you think too much about that, it dilutes whatever meaning this film is supposed to have.

I would have liked to see more time spent on watershed moments in the advancement of photography before the 21st century, and how those jumps in technological evolution insidiously infected the public consciousness. The paradigm-shifting advancement of television, for example, gets all but a few minutes of time, even though had a movie of exactly this sort been made in, say, 1995, it likely would have spent most of its time on that.

To be fair, And the King Said has some pretty sobering moments. There’s the award-winning photograph of a dead little girl in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, juxtaposed with a photo of the line of photojournalists all squatting to take her picture. (It could be argued it’s the latter shot that really deserves an award.) There’s the clip of a chimpanzee scrolling through Instagram exactly the same way any of us do, which, for me at least, caused some real cognitive dissonance.

And I have to admit, this film had me thinking about whether I should improve my life by deleting all of my social media. The science used in these apps’ algorithms dates back further than you think, when research was done decades ago to find out what interested people most, and content producers bought the data. Of course, I am far too addicted to TikTok or even online streaming platforms like HBO Max to have any hope of escaping their clutches. And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine offers a window into how we got here, where a company like Netflix can use simple computing to know our interests better than we know them ourselves.

That said, if that is the point of And the King Said, maybe the filmmakers should have been more explicit about that. I went in expecting a history of the camera and its effects on society—and there is some of that; one fascinating sequence shows people’s brains being broken by a demonstration of how cameras work, which is the exact same way our eyesight works, and is both incredibly simple and something I am unable to explain.

I guess you could call this film more of a meditation. If it had a mantra, though, it would be connected far more to very recent years, when we get viral videos of a woman doing sexy poses with a plush hamburger, or a group of amateur idiots get death-defying shots of a young woman being hung over the side of a skyscraper. Don’t even get me started on the guy who is driven crazy by viewers of his constant livestream who are going out of their way to cause chaos in his life, but for some reason he continues to livestream, including a stream of his rant against his viewers. You do have other options, sir.

But, maybe that’s the point: it’s easy to say there are options, and quite another to choose any of the other options, in a world optimized for engagement. It would be easy to get into a bit of an existential funk after watching this movie. Personally, I prefer to complain about its lack of narrative focus.

Apparently all photography roads led to this.

Overall: B

EXPOSURE

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

Depending on the premise, the making of a documentary film can be just as interesting as the film itself. In Exposure, a three-person film crew follows an all-woman expedition to the North Pole—this happened in 2018, and due to a mixture of climate change, regional geopolitics, and global health crises, it is to date the last expedition to the North Pole ever to have occurred. And: as I watched eleven women drag their gear on sleds across ice above the Arctic Ocean toward the North Pole, I found myself dying to know more about the people who recorded all of this. Why aren’t these people also characters or subjects in the film?

Evidently director Holly Morris felt it better to focus on the 11 women, a fascinating mixture of backgrounds from across both Europe and the Arab World. This is a natural instinct, I suppose. I would pose that the three film crew members—also all women, incidentally—were by definition part of the group. The film really leans on the difficulty of making it to the North Pole on foot, or on skis. This film crew did exactly the same thing, while also setting up and executing cinematic shots. The way I see it, it’s those three people who did the most impressive thing—and they don’t even get any screen time.

You might not expect Arctic ice to be beautiful, but it is. Exposure is worth watching just for the scenery alone, which includes a lot of drone footage. The expedition launches from an ice base that includes a runway carved out of the snow and ice every year (or at least it was, until 2018), and we see a brief clip of a couple of Russian guys using their own drone to get footage of the landscape, and one of them explains how drones can go haywire due to being so close to magnetic north. It’s easy to infer that the filmmakers faced the same challenge, and at the screening I attended, Morris attested to as much. What limited drone footage they managed to get, they were able to use to maximum effect.

Exposure, which clocks in at a breezy 89 minutes, covers not just the expedition itself, but much of the two years leading up to it. This included winter training in Iceland two years before the expedition, and endurance training in the desert of Oman one year before the expedition. Cold or hot, these women learn to deal with extremes. But, nothing quite prepares them for the actual expedition itself.

Anyone with any sort of survivalist interest would be right at home watching Exposure. Oddly, the all-women cast and crew are somehow both historic and incidental. The purpose of the somewhat pointed mix of Western and Muslim women is never fully clear, but there’s something compelling about them all being women, and makes for rich storytelling. One woman starts off saying she actually does'n’t much like the company of other women. Although the film doesn’t get very deep into it, there is also a scientific study element, as all of the few studies on physiological responses to environments this harsh prior to this had been done on men.

The best part of Exposure is still the women themselves, the limits them push themselves to, and the ways in which they learn to optimize teamwork in high stakes situations. All eleven of the woman who are seen onscreen in the Arctic are dynamic personalities, and when one of them gets frostbite on her fingers, it’s easy to worry about what will become of her, and to be emotionally affected by the tearful goodbyes when she has to be air lifted out before reaching the North Pole.

I found it particularly nice to watch all this from the cozy comfort of a heated movie theater.

The last North Pole expedition to date gets the drone treatment.

Overall: B+

STILL WORKING 9 TO 5

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

I have a suggestion for Hollywood: I would love to see a contemporary update on 9 to 5. Not just as an attempt at capitalizing on yet another nostalgic revisit to a classic film of the past (though that would unavoidably be part of it), but as an exercise in illustrating how, more than forty years later, so much work is left to be done. A newer film could demonstrate how misogyny in the workplace may not be as blatantly widespread as it was in 1980, but even as women’s presence in management positions has exploded in the ensuing decades, misogyny remains widespread—it’s just a lot subtler and more pernicious these days.

I don’t even care if it’s a reboot or a sequel; either could be fun. Although I don’t usually find this kind of thing necessary, I would actually vote sequel. This way, we could have a story centered on, say, the granddaughters of Violet (Lily Tomlin), who remains close friends with Judy (Jane Fonda) and Doralee (Dolly Parton) in retirement, and we could get a few, super-fun scenes with these three titans of the entertainment industry, dispensing hilarious advise to the young woman professionals about their persistent workplace problems with the men around them.

9 to 5 has already been made into a musical twice (Broadway in 2009 and the West End in 2019). This idea only makes sense! Apparently they came very close to something exactly like this sort of sequel in 2018 but it wound up not working out. Dammit! Because god knows, updating this story to highlight the issues that persist to this day would reach a hell of a lot wider audience than this pleasantly compelling but somewhat forgettable documentary, Still Working 9 to 5.

This documentary film is getting a single showing in local theaters, as part of SIFF’s “Docfest,” tomorrow (Sunday October 10) at 7:00. On the upside, SIFF is also selling virtual tickets all this week (Friday through Thursday) so you can stream the film at home. I cannot find any information on it being available later on streaming services.

So, is it worth the price of paying for a ticket to see this movie? This really depends on your relationship with the original 1980 film. The documentary is much more effective as a companion piece, offering a bit of behind the scenes information but largely contextualizing the film with how it was timed against the history of the women’s liberation movement. The thing is, though, 9 to 5 actually speaks for itself, and if you’ve never seen it, I urge you to find and watch that (currently available on HBO Max). You’ll see how it stands up incredibly well—arguably better now than it did upon its 1980 release, when reviews were decidedly mixed, largely due to most movie critics being, of course, men.

Anyone with a basic understanding of both culture and nuance would watch the original film and already see clearly how far women have come, where they are today in comparison to when women then might have expected to be in another four decades, and how far women still have to go. Plus, that film is wildly entertaining in a way this documentary could never hope to be.

But, for those of us who have already seen 9 to 5 several times and are big fans of it, Still Working 9 to 5 does have its values and insights. I think co-directors Camille Hardman and Gary Lane lean a little heavily on the film’s enduring cultural impact beyond just being a smash success (and to be clear, being the #2 movie of 1980, behind only The Empire Strikes Back, and one of only three movies to earn more than $100 million domestic that year, is deeply impressive). This documentary is kind of two films in one: a film about 9 to 5 and its unprecedented success as a film with women as the three lead roles; and a film about where women’s rights have gone in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

It’s undeniably fun to see Fonda, Tomlin and Parton in present-day interviews discussing what the movie meant both to them personally and to audiences, both then and now, alongside Dabney Coleman (who played the chauvinist boss) , producers and writers of the film, and even original members of the “9to5” activist organization of working women from whom the film got both its title and its inspiration (that being one of the several fascinating details you actually might learn from this film alone). For those unfamiliar with the original film, Still Working 9 to 5 will either just hold moderate interest or inspire a look at the movie. For the rest of us, it’s a fairly affecting companion piece.

Revisiting old friends is always a comfort, even if they tell us how much work is left to do.

Overall: B