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-

AFTER YANG

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

After Yang is set in a supposed “near future,” although that phrase always makes me want to ask for their definition of “near.” The world presented here is largely recognizable to our own, just with a few details fairly expected of a future we’re likely to see in our lifetimes: self-driving cars being commonplace, or all clothing being made of exclusively natural materials. The premise involves the breaking down of an android “older brother” for an adopted Chinese daughter, though, and I’m not convinced that sort of thing will be commonplace within our lifetimes. At least, not where the “virtual assistant” is indistinguishable from flesh and blood humans, and, as ultimately discovered by the plot here, capable of sentimentality.

There was a lot more I wanted to know about the world of this movie, which writer-director Kogonada seems pointedly uninterested in revealing. There’s a moment when a character refers to a documentary “from the twentieth century,” a kind of phrasing we’re still not really hearing, more than two decades into the 21st. Maybe this is meant to be set in the latter half of the 21s century? This is never made clear. There are occasional backdrops of a cityscape that slightly suggests San Francisco but is otherwise unrecognizable.

When it comes to plausibility, admittedly I sometimes get stuck on details probably most people don’t much care about. For instance, setting this in the latter half of the 21st century seems plausible enough, until we learn that these robots basically used as nannies—and, in the case of this child, cultural heritage education—have clearly already been in use for decades. That’s when it starts to make less sense, unless we are to think of this as the 22nd century. In which case, “near future” doesn’t quite make sense.

I’m nitpicking, I know. It’s what I do! What’s the state of the environment in this future universe? Why is the purchase of a “techno” (the word used here; the script never includes words like “robot” or “android”) older brother, specifically for adopted Chinese children, evidently a common thing? Are parents Jake and Kyra (Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith) incapable of having children, while China is overflowing with orphans? To a degree, that is the case already. But After Yang examines none of the geopolitical implications of the world being presented.

Instead, After Yang uses the “techno” older brother, Yang—played with precision by Justin H. Min—as a catalyst for processing grief and loss. Jake and Kyra have taken Yang’s help a little too much for granted, using him for more parenting duties than just as his intended purpose as a “Chinese older brother.” When shuts down unexpectedly and can never be rebooted, Jake spends a large amount of time finding people who might find a way to repair him. The adoped little girl, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), goes through separate stages of grief in this process, including denial and, ultimately, acceptance.

In Jake’s pursuits, he uncovers some surprising facts about Yang, which are either fascinating or sort of heartbreaking, depending on the observer’s point of view. All of this is done in a beautifully shot, quiet tone. As such, After Yang feels a little like Showtime’s direct-to-streaming answer to Apple TV+’s Swan Song, which is set in a similarly slickly designed “near future,” is similarly quiet in tone with mostly hushed-voice line deliveries, and has some thematic parallels with cloning, something that also exists in After Yang as part of a pertinent subplot.

I enjoyed both of these movies about the same. I signed up for a free trial of Showtime’s streaming service just to watch After Yang, though—it had limited theatrical release the same date it debuted on Showtime March 4, but not in any theaters near me—and I’m not sure it was necessary. After Yang is never boring, and it has some subtly provocative ideas, and a 96-minute run time is very much in its favor. I could easily recommend both this and Swan Song, but they are so similar in execution, you don’t need to sign up for two streaming services just to see them both. Just one of them is sufficient.

The family of the near future.

TURNING RED

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

Turning Red is simultaneously about adolescent friendship and about mother-daughter relationships, and it handles both fantastically. The premise seems simple, in which a 13-year-old discovers she transforms into a giant red panda whenver she gets too emotionally excited, but it winds up being a great allegory for multiple shared experiences at once. There’s the idea of “harnessing your inner beast.” There’s acknowledging your “messy side.” There’s the literalness of the title, when an adolescent goes beet red with embarrassment. There’s even a brief sequence in which it effectively stands in as a symbol for when a girl has her period for the first time: “I’m a gross red monster!” One might thing I’m reaching with that one—except it literally happens when Mei’s mother, not yet understanding the true nature of the situation, is trying to offer her pads.

Things like this are surely why Turning Red is rated PG. It’s also the third Pixar movie to be released directly to Disney+, although it’s arguably the first not to be done out of necessity. That said, after having watched it, this film feels right for an at-home streamer. Perhaps we’ve just been spoiled by 27 years of Pixar Animation’s visual excellence, where in many cases the animation largely made up for somewhat waning story quality. Turning Red flips the script, so to speak, and offers animation that is . . . fine. It’s the story that truly elevates it, and makes for a wonderfully cozy, adorable, funny and moving at-home watch.

This movie happens to be the second Pixar film directed by a woman (the first was Brenda Chapman, though she co-directed Brave in 2012 with two men), the first to be solo directed by a woman, and the first to be directed by a woman of color. Domee Shi, who also co-wrote this delightful script, was born in China but grew up in Toronto, and having written largely based on her own family experience, thus provides the explanation for the film’s Toronto setting. Characters mention the city of Toronto regularly, and there are many establishing shots of the Toronto skyline, always with the CN Tower figuring prominently. I just found myself wishing those shots were rendered with a little more depth and personality; instead, they sometimes feel a little like a cartoon version of old movie matte painting backdrops.

Admittedly, this sort of thing was why it took a few minutes for me to really feel hooked into the story of Turning Red. The visual design of the characters themselves are a little “cartoonier” than normal for Pixar, and for the first several minutes we see the establishment of setting and the introduction of characters, particularly Meilin (voiced by 16-year-old newcomer Rosalie Chang) and her diverse group of three best friends (voiced by Ava Morse, Hyein Park and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). We see them quite pointedly and realistically acting like giddy, sometimes shrill, 13-year-old girls, and for a moment there I wondered if I would be able to tolerate this movie.

But, then we get introduced to Mei’s perfectionist mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), and we understand the central conflict of the story, which is a tension between Mei’s love for her mother and her love for her friends. Domee Shi and her two co-writers, Julia Cho and Sarah Streicher, write about these relationships exceedingly well, never painting anyone involved as inherently malicious. They are just people who make mistakes, who sometimes make misguided decisions in the service of the people they love.

By the time Meilin’s red panda is unleashed, Turning Red takes a quick turn, becoming equal parts entertaining and surprisingly layered, both with thematic meaning and cultural tradition. I love the diversity of both the characters and the voice cast here, not just for its own sake, but more importantly, because it accurately reflects the city in which it’s set: Toronto is one of the most multicultural and cosmopolitan cities in the world, more than half its residents belonging to a visible minority group, and just under half being immigrants born outside the country.

Mei’s family is well established, though, both her and her mother speaking with American accents; only Mei’s grandmother, Wu (voiced by Wai Ching Ho), speaks with a Chinese accent. Cantonese is regularly spoken, particularly when Grandma Wu arrived with reinforcements—both herself and other family members, presumably aunts, who have all at one point participated in a ritual that breaks the family spell of the red panda.

I also love how centered this story is on women and girls. Turning Red is written and directed by a woman, largely based on her childhood experience with several girl friends, and nearly the entire principal cast is girls or women. The most notable male character is Ming’s husband and Mei’s father, Jin (Orion Lee), and even he is written with more dimension than typically found with a part of that size. Which is to say, he doesn’t get a huge amount of screen time, but he is well woven into the fabric of the story.

The focus here, though, is on Mei’s relationship with the girls and the women in her life: her three best friends; her mother; her grandmother. The story even gets into how that mother-daughter relationship is informed by Ming’s relationship with her own mother—an idea relatable to a great many daughters and mothers, regardless of ethnic or cultural background. Were Turning Red made in an earlier cinematic era, most of the story would have revolved around Mei trying to keep her red panda spell a secret. Instead, Mei’s mother, her friends, and most of her classmates learn about it surprisingly early on. What follows is a struggle for Mei to control it, and her mother’s insistence that it needs to be locked away completely. There’s a lot to unpack here in terms of accepting ourselves—and our children—as who they really are, and not so much taming but learning to live with the beast within.

There is a climactic sequence in which an even more giant panda terrorizes a stadium during a boy-band concert, and it’s a little like a red panda version of Godzilla. If that were all it was, I might have rolled my eyes at it. But there is so much depth to this story, even a showy sequence like that works really well. Given Pixar Animation Studio’s increasingly spotty record in recent years, and the somewhat surprising choice to release straight to streaming, Turning Red exceeds expectations on nearly every level . . . except the animation itself. But, as with our relationships with our children and our parents, we can’t always expect perfection.

This is so embarrassing!

Overall: B+

A SONG CALLED HATE

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

If ever there were a representation of the wide cultural differences between Europe and the deeply puritanical roots of the United States, it’s the documentary A Song Called Hate, about an Icelandic band that succeeded in pulling an anti-Israeli political stunt during their participation on the 2019 Eurovision contest, held in Tel Aviv, Israel. The film is made by an Icelander, who treats the band’s history of fetishistic theatrics as entirely incidental.

Conversely, half of America would be truly triggered by this movie, for reasons that have nothing to do with the issue at the forefront of the story—which is, ostensibly at least, the Israeli occupation of Palestine. This is why I, as an American, really want to say a few things about the cultural context from which this band comes. It can be jarring for us to see two straight men playing “characters” in their purportedly “anticapitalist,” BDSM-inspired band, adopting an aesthetic I typically only see at American Pride Parades.

The two singers in the band, Klemens Hannigan and Matthías Haraldsson, are cousins, who wear often very revealing leather outfits and heavy eye makeup (“Chilren and vegans should look away,” says one Eurovision announcer), and who occasionally hold hands. They walk around clearly very secure in their sexualities, as is evidently everyone around them, and they adopt ironic catchphrases that would easily be misinterpreted and taken wildly out of context in the U.S., such as “hatred will prevail.” The catchphrase is meant as a warning, an illustration of what will be the consequence later if we don’t do what’s right today.

As shown in A Song Called Hate, the band Hatari have an established history of using their art to make political statements. They won the Eurovision competition in Iceland that year, but Iceland overall being very supportive of a movement to boycott Eurovision due to it being held that year in Israel, Hatari’s decision to go there to compete was met with great resistance at home. A petition to keep them from going garnered over 30,000 signatures, which was about 8% of the country’s population.

Hatari amuses themselves with their own contradictions, holding anticapitalist principals while participating in a deeply capitalist enterprise like Eurovision. They go to Israel, cameras in tow, meet up with Palestinian artists (including a fashion designer and a musician), and spend some time getting guided tours of parts of the West Bank. There’s a lot of talk about how they can use this platform to make a statement about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which culminates in a moment barely given a second of air time, but still enough to anger many of the show’s worldwide 200 million viewers, and please a large number of Palestinians.

Much is made of event organizers insisting that the show is apolitical, and no participant is allowed to make political statements. This idea is preposterous on its face, as the very decision to hold the event in Tel Aviv is inherently political, as is something—as noted by a local Israeli—as simple as where someone buys bread on what day of the week.

There’s a great deal of food for thought here, but there’s also an odd sort of distancing in the watching of A Song Called Hate. (Side note: “Hatari” liteally means “Hater,” and the song they sing at Eurovision translates to “Hatred Will Prevail,” so I’m slightly confused by the film’s title being A Song Called Hate rather than either A Song Called Hatred Will Prevail or A Band Called Hater. I guess neither of those have quite the same ring to them.) Sometimes the story of the band’s small act of protest—but with a gargantuan audience—feels exaggerated in impact or import. Furthermore, there’s a slight uneasiness felt in the centering of a frankly privileged bunch of white people from Iceland doing this supposedly heroic act for the helpless brown people in the Middle East.

But here, again, we get back to my very biased point of view as an American, someone with not near enough exposure to the worldviews of other societies. The several interview subjects in this film include Iceland’s Prime Minister, a woman named Katrín Jakobsdóttir. It’s endlessly fascinating to me that someone like her, along with everyone else interviewed for this film, can speak seriously about Hatari’s art, its impact and its symbolism while hardly addressing their pointedly BDSM-inspired aesthetic. This film ends with clips of young children adopting their leather-and-chains look, as though that’s perfectly normal—and to be fair, in context, it seems to be; conservative Americans would never think so, but the children aren’t being sexualized, and their outfits aren’t revealing. It’s still unusual.

To be fair, in the many clips of Hatari’s live performances, they don’t seem all that sexualized either, somehow. As they scream-sing about the risks of allowing hatred to prevail, their fetishistic adornments take on a decidedly asexual tone. I suppose it’s one of the many tricks this globally unique band manages to pull off. That said, once we finally see their Eurovision stunt, it’s hard to decipher how much attention it deserves, such as in a feature length documentary film, which sometimes feels padded with filler. I enjoyed A Song Called Hate, but likely would have enjoyed it a lot more as a documentary short.

Someone got a very brief shot of the messengers.

Overall: B

2022 Oscar Nomination Shorts: Documentary

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

CYRANO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’ll reach the romantic in you.

Overall: B

RED ROCKET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B+

THE BATMAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B+