Cut Throat City (2020) ☆☆1/2(2.5/4): Colorful but jumbled

Posted on November 2, 2020 by kaist455

“Cut Throat City” is a colorful but uneven crime drama which alternatively engaged and frustrated me. While it is mostly watchable thanks to its diverse array of cast members and a palpable sense of locations and people, it is frequently hampered by thin characterization and unfocused storytelling, and it is also often distracting due to several heavy-handed moments which do not fit that well with its overall result.

The movie, which is set in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2006, mainly revolves around four different young residents of a poor neighborhood of the 9th ward in New Orleans: Blink (Shameik Moore), Miracle (Demetrius Shipp Jr.), Andre (Denzel Whitaker), and Junior (Keean Johnson). During the prologue part in early 2005, Blink is about to become the husband of his longtime girlfriend Demyra (Kat Graham), and their following wedding ceremony is cheerfully blessed by his three close friends. As Blink and his friends enjoy the party right after the wedding ceremony, everything feels fine and well to them, and it looks like nothing bad will happen to them in the upcoming future.

However, of course, Hurricane Katrina strikes New Orleans several months later, and we subsequently see how desperate things have been to them and many others in their neighborhood. Blink, who once studied art in a local college and has aspired to be a professional comic book writer someday as reflected by the opening animation sequence, has tried to find any possible breakthrough for his artistic talent, but his latest attempt is flatly rejected to his frustration, and it seems he and Demyra will have to try to get some help from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), though he is skeptical about whether they will get real help for them and their little son.

In case of his friends, they are all in each own difficult financial circumstance. While Miracle has struggled a lot in his small-time drug business which was considerably damaged by the hurricane, Andre, who wants to be a successful jazz musician someday, has mostly depended on his hard-working mother without earning that much for him and his mother, and Junior, who is incidentally the only Caucasian in the bunch, has trained a dog to be used for those underground dog fights.

As they talk about their hopeless economic situations, Blink and his three friends are reminded again of how much they and many others in the 9th ward have been disregarded and discriminated by their society and its corrupt system, so they decide to come to Lorenzo “Cousin” Bass (Tip “T.I.” Harris), a powerful local drug lord who will gladly give them a certain quick job. He instructs them to rob a certain big casino in their neighborhood, and it seems that all they have to do is breaking into that casino and then snatching enough cash for them besides what they should pay to Bass later.

Not so surprisingly, Blink and his friends’ amateurish attempt to rob that casino leads to a devastating consequence, and the circumstance becomes a lot more complicated as some other characters enter the picture. When she is instructed to handle the case by a local councilman played by Ethan Hawke, Detective Lucinda Benoit (Eiza González) senses something fishy about the case, and her suspicion is increased more after she meets a corrupt local cop named Courtney (Rob Morgan), who has been blatantly getting away with numerous illegal activities including his close connection with Bass and another infamous local criminal figure nicknamed “The Saint” (Terrence Howard).

Now chased by not only the local police but also Bass and his criminal associates, Blink and his friends try to find any possible way out, and they naturally become driven to some desperate measures, but the movie fails to generate enough tension to engage us as trying to juggle a little too many elements together. In several scenes involved with Blink’s estranged father played by Wesley Snipes, the movie brings some extra local flavor via his shabby residence located in a remote rural area, but it only comes to stumble in its predictable depiction of their strained relationship. During its last act, the screenplay by Paul Cuschieri, who also served as one of the executive producers of the film, attempts a rather jarring left turn, but the result feels so highly stylized that we are not so surprised by what follows next while not caring much about its main characters.

Anyway, director/co-producer RZA and his crew members including cinematographer Brandon Cox did a fairly good job of establishing the distinctively realistic local atmosphere on the screen. Though most of the characters in the film are more or less than broad archetypes in the need of more character development, the main cast members are mostly convincing while really looking like they have inhabited their neighborhood for years, and Tip “T.I.” Harris, Terrence Howard, Rob Morgan, and Ethan Hawke get the most fun in each own way as we can expect from their colorfully shady supporting roles.

On the whole, “Cut Throat City” is disappointing for a number of glaring weak points, but it is at least two or three steps up from RZA’s first feature film “The Man with the Iron Fists” (2012), which has some amusingly campy moments but ultimately lets itself mired in mediocre self-indulgence without much control or consideration on story and characters. He demonstrates more skill and competence than before here in this film, so I guess he will probably show progress and improvement in next time.

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David Byrne’s American Utopia (2020) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4): An exuberant concert film presented by Byrne and Lee

Posted on November 1, 2020 by kaist455

“David Byrne’s American Utopia”, which was released on HBO in last month, gave me one of the most exuberant experiences I ever had during this year. Although I must tell you first that I am not that familiar with the works of David Byrne, I was delighted and excited many times during several highlight moments in this exceptional concert film, and its brimming aura of hope and optimism accompanied with the wholesome messages on human connection certainly soothed my cranky mind a lot.

As many of you know, the film is a live recording of Byrne’s successful Broadway concert in 2019, which features not only several songs of Byrne’s latest album “American Utopia” but also a number of notable songs in his music career including “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” and “Once in a Lifetime”. In case of “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”, it has never left my mind since I happened to encounter it for the first time via Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” (1987), and I also remember well how memorably this catchy song was performed by Byrne himself in Paolo Sorrentino’s offbeat drama film “This Must Be the Place” (2011).

In the beginning of the concert, you will instantly notice the strikingly minimalistic qualities of the square stage where Byrne is going to perform along with a small group of singers and musicians to back him up. Surrounded by long strings of shiny beads on its left, right, and back side, the stage is filled with soft gray mood, and this impression is further accentuated by the attires of Byrne and others on the stage, who all wear almost identical gray suits while also being barefoot.

However, the mood does not feel drab or joyless at all, and Byrne quickly establishes the lightweight mood of the concert with his opening song “Here”. As holding a model of human brain on his left hand, he humorously sings about a certain important part of human brain, and then he effortlessly generates the inviting sense of goodwill and positivity as subsequently giving a playful speech to his amused audiences.

Once Byrne sets the ground for what will follow next, he is promptly joined by his backup singers and musicians, who fluidly move on the stage as joyously performing his songs along with him. I could not help but smile a bit as listening to the cheerful lyrics of “Don’t Worry About the Government”, and I was also quite tickled by the offbeat quality of “I Zimbra”, which impressively begins with a part of Dadaist Hugo Ball’s poem “Gadji beri bimba”.

And I was certainly not disappointed at all with a part where they finally perform “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”. While the performance itself is relatively plainer than the one shown in Sorrentino’s 2011 film, Byrne and his singers and musicians perform this iconic song with lots of spirit and energy. In fact, you may find yourself rocking along with its repetitive background rhythm in addition to being touched by the comforting aspects of its lyric (“Home, is where I want to be/ But I guess I’m already there/ I come home, she lifted up her wings/ I guess that this must be the place”).

After the exhilarating performance of “Once in a Lifetime”, the concert proceeds to less familiar territories for me, but the film kept holding my attention as Byrne and others exude more joy and excitement to be shared along with their audiences, who, as often shown to us later in the film, are all having a ball with the concert. Around the end of the concert, Byrne and his musicians and singers gladly walk down from the stage and then hang around their audiences for a while, and that took me back to when I watched a video clip of Tilda Swinton dancing along with many attendees of the 2013 Ebertfest.

As I enjoyed these and many other entertaining moments in the film, Byrne, who is 68 at present, came to me as not only a passionate talented artist but also a decent guy who really wants to spread more positive vibe around others. He feels sincere in those brief speeches preceding some of the performances during the concert, and he also steps aside for introducing his musicians and singers one by one. During the end credits, we get a little surprise, and that reminds us again of how casual he is with others working along with him.

Director Spike Lee, who also produces the film with Byrne, did a commendable job of presenting Byrne’s concert with considerable vivacity and verisimilitude. While we can easily guess where he put his cameras here and there around the stage, we become less conscious of that as enthralled by what is vividly and deftly presented on the screen thanks to Lee’s crew members including cinematographer Ellen Kuras and editor Adam Gough, and the overall result is another recent highlight in Lee’s filmmaking career after “Da 5 Bloods” (2020), an ambitious drama film which is incidentally one of the most notable films of this year in my inconsequential opinion.

In conclusion, “David Byrne’s American Utopia” is a superlative concert film to be admired and appreciated for not only Byrne’s terrific music but also its fantastic visual presentation. Like other recent superb concert films such as Martin Scorsese’s “Shine a Light” (2008) or Beyoncé’s “Homecoming” (2019), it will surely give you indelible moments to linger on your mind for a long time, and you may also find yourself listening to more of Byrne’s works.

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Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You (2020) ☆☆☆(3/4): As he records with his colleagues

Posted on November 1, 2020 by kaist455

Documentary film “Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You”, which came out shortly before his twentieth studio album of the same name was released in last month, gives us a close look on the artistic process of Springsteen and his regular backing band on the album. Although it will probably not enlighten you that much if you are already familiar with Springsteen’s life and career, the documentary is still enjoyable thanks to not only Springsteen’s music but also several lightweight moments among him and his colleagues, and you will be entertained as much as expected.

At first, the documentary shows Springsteen and the members of the E Street Band gathering together in a small recording studio located in Colts Neck, New Jersey in October 2018. Some of the band members including Steven Van Zandt (You may remember him for playing one of the major supporting roles in acclaimed HBO TV drama series “The Sopranos”), are as old as Springsteen himself, but they are all as lively as the younger members of the band including Jake Clemons, and everyone in the studio is quite ready for beginning the first day of their recording session.

Once the band members hit the first note as Springsteen starts to sing in the separate booth, we see how effortlessly they generate a harmonious musical tone together. While Springsteen and his band members sometimes talk and discuss a lot with each other about what should or can be changed for improving his songs, they never clash or argue with each other as always open to any good suggestion, and Springsteen later tells us how proud he has been of the E Street Band, which has been his primary backing band since 1972 and was deservedly inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.

Shot in black and white, the documentary captures well how comfortable Springsteen and his band members are in each other’s presence even when they are not playing music in front of the camera. While they are in the middle of working on another important point in their respective professional careers, they cannot help but become a bit playful during their frequent casual conversations, which, not so surprisingly, usually revolve around their old days in the past.

Between a number of songs appearing in the film, the documentary muses on Springsteen’s past along with him. Although he already showed more of himself and his life to us in his previous music album documentary film “Western Stars” (2019), Springsteen still has lots of things to tell, and he particularly emphasizes on his longtime artistic need of connecting with many audiences out there. Like any other talented artist, he has always had an urge to express himself for more human connection with others, and he is still driven by that urge although he already passed 70 at present.

He remembers well how young and ambitious he was once more than 40 years ago – and how lucky he has been considering his long and fruitful career during last five decades. Around the time when he released his first studio album “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” in 1973, a certain famous colleague of his expressed understandable concern over Springsteen’s rather overzealous effort, and that still remains as an amusing anecdote for Springsteen. Now, he is a legendary figure admired a lot by his numerous peers and juniors, and he surely has some life lessons he earned hard as going through several ups and downs in his life and career.

These admirable human qualities of his are reflected well in several songs performed in the documentary. They may not be as memorable as his many classic songs such as “Born in the USA” or “Blinded by the Light”, but they are still engaging enough for us on the whole, and they are often elevated by Springsteen’s seemingly plain but undeniably sincere delivery of his lyrics. In addition, the performances of his musicians are mostly top-notch to say the least, and it is a shame that the documentary only briefly glimpses on their performances as busily trying to show small and big aspects of their recording process.

Anyway, under the competent direction of director/editor Thom Zimny, who previously directed “Western Stars”, the documentary smoothly flows from one excellent musical moment to another while occasionally accompanied with the gorgeous shots of wide forest areas on late autumn days. It is also interesting to observe Springsteen’s past via a number of archival materials including an old video clip showing young Springsteen at the early stage of his career, and you can sense that he is still as spirited as before while also becoming wiser than before.

As I told you before in my review on “Western Stars”, I had been vaguely aware of Springsteen’s works only through a few notable songs including his Oscar-winning song for “Philadelphia” (1993) before watching “Western Stars”, and I am still not so familiar with most of Springsteen’s works even at this point, but I found that “Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You” is accessible to me despite that. Although it simply confirms again to me on what I observed and learned from “Western Stars”, the documentary is worthwhile to watch despite that, and you certainly should not miss it if you are one of millions of admirers of the Boss and his music and career out there.

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Vitalina Varela (2019) ☆☆☆(3/4): There is nothing for her here, but…

Posted on November 1, 2020 by kaist455

Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s latest film “Vitalina Varela” is an austerely reticent but strikingly haunting piece of work. I must confess that I checked some other reviews after watching it because I was not so sure about what it was about and how it was about, and I must also admit that I am still not as enthusiastic about it as some other critics, but this is one of more curious arthouse movies I saw during this year.

The movie is mainly set in some poor neighborhood of Lisbon where many immigrant workers from Cape Verde (It is an African island country in the Central Atlantic Ocean, by the way) reside, and its opening scene movie gradually establishes its pensive mood and slow narrative pacing. As the camera calmly watches a long alley sandwiched between two grey concrete walls, a bunch of immigrant workers trudge to us one by one, and then the movie pays some attention to an old dude who seems to have some physical problem while trying to stand up.

Anyway, we later come to learn that these immigrant workers are just coming back from the burial of one of their colleagues, who recently died due to some acute health problem. We see a small shabby place where he has resided alone for years, and the sense of despair and desperation remains palpable although he is gone now. We also see those narrow and stuffy alleys of the neighborhood, and their stark ambience, which is further accentuated by the high contrast between lights and shadows on the screen, makes this area look like somewhere between purgatory and inferno.

The main viewpoint of the movie belongs to that dead man’s wife Vitalina Varela (Vitalina Varela), who arrives at the airport in Lisbon right after the opening part of the movie. After she walks barefoot down from an airplane from Cape Verde, she meets a group of female employees working in the airport, and they console her while emphasizing that there is really nothing left for her here in Lisbon, but she does not change her mind at all on what she is already determined to do. In addition to properly mourning for the husband to which she has not been particularly close, she is going to settle in that shabby residence of her husband although nothing is certain for her yet.

After Vitalina arrives at her husband’s residence, she prepares to meet a number of her husband’s colleagues and friends, who show some condolence to her as expected but do not have many things to tell her. As simply occupying the space of her husband’s residence for a while, they often feel like wraiths paralyzed in eternal damnation, and Vitalina does not say anything kind to them while mired in her growing grief.

Vitalina sometimes talks to herself while she is alone by herself, and we come to gather her and her dead husband’s long history of separation and estrangement. When they built their house in Cape Verde many years ago, they were probably happy together, but they have become quite distant to each other since he left for Lisbon for earning more money, and Vitalina cannot help but feel bitter as often being reminded of how her dead husband has been like a total stranger to her during all these days. Although some of his friends and colleagues tell her about her dead husband bit by bit, she never feels like knowing her dead husband at all, and that fuels her grief more just like his shabby residence, which has been in the dire need of repair.

In the meantime, Vitalina meets the aforementioned old man, who turns out to be the local priest of his neighborhood. Still looking physically unstable and fragile, the priest does not try that much to console Vitalina because, well, he has been sinking in despair and exhaustion just like many others in the neighborhood. His small church looks more like an abandoned place to be demolished sooner or later, and there is a small pitiful moment when he struggles to make a summon on life and death in front of Vitalina, who is incidentally the only person present in his church except him.

Constantly refusing any possibility of going down along a conventional narrative, the movie keeps focusing on whatever is quietly churning behind Vitalina’s reticent appearance, and cinematographer Leonardo Simões lets us delve into these silent and static moments which often feel like expressionist paintings full of stark beauty. While we can clearly see the artificial qualities of these and other key moments in the film, the movie still draws our attention via its skillful utilization of lights and shadows on the screen of 1.33:1 ratio, and we eventually find ourselves immersed in its tangible atmosphere even while observing its heroine from the distance.

Most of the cast members in the film are non-professional performers, but they are effective in their minimalistic acting. Vitalina Valera, who also wrote the screenplay with Costa, is captivating whenever the camera looks closer at her expressive face, and Ventura, who previously collaborated with Costa in “Horse Money” (2014), is also solid as the other crucial part of the movie.

In conclusion, “Vitalina Varela” is a challenging work which will surely frustrate and baffle a lot you for its detached handling of story and characters, but it is still worthwhile to watch for its distinctive style and atmosphere in addition to its strong lead performance to be cherished. It is definitely not something you can casually watch on Sunday afternoon, but you should give it a chance if you are willing to experience something different.

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Slay the Dragon (2019) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4): American citizens against gerrymandering

Posted on October 31, 2020 by kaist455

I remember well when I heard about gerrymandering for the first time. On one day in 1991, I was going through the third year of my elementary school education, and I and other students of my class were studying elementary sociology under our classroom teacher. At one point, we came across a brief section on gerrymandering in our textbook, and the classroom teacher explained a bit on the origin of gerrymandering, which came from a review of Massachusetts’s redistricting maps of 1812 set by Governor Elbridge Gerry.

At that time, gerrymandering merely felt like an old cheap political tactic to me, but I later came to learn that gerrymandering has been pretty alive and well in the American society even at this point, and Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance’s documentary film “Slay the Dragon” powerfully reminds me of that undeniable fact again as closely observing several groups of good American citizens fighting against this deplorable political tactic. Although they surely face many obstacles here and there, they keep fighting nonetheless, and we come to see that there is still lots of hope for American democracy despite what has happened to it during last 10 years due to that orange-faced prick and his deplorable enablers and supporters.

As closely following their righteous political activities, the documentary also presents to us the long history of gerrymandering in US. The American laws demand that electoral district maps are redrawn every 10 years for correctly reflecting how voters are changed decade by decade, but how to redraw an electoral district map is ultimately determined by the members of state legislature, and that means the incumbent members of state legislature can have more chance of winning as willfully readjusting the boundaries of their electoral districts here and there. For example, you can simply pack all the potential voters against your party into one isolated electoral district, or you can just scatter them all over many different electoral districts where they are bound to be a minor faction.

As a consequence, some of newly modified electoral districts look quite funny due to their weird shapes. In case of Governor Gerry, one of the newly redrawn electoral districts in his state actually looked like a big salamander, and that was how his deliberate partisan tactic and numerous following similar cases came to be called gerrymandering. In the 21th century, gerrymandering tactics have become more skillful and sophisticated mainly thanks to the advance of digital technology, but they still result in a number of truly bizarre cases, and the documentary cheerfully presents some of them for our little amusement.

Although it does not deny that gerrymandering has been time-honored bipartisan activities among Democrat and Republican politicians, the documentary sharply points out how the Republican party has gone all the way with gerrymandering for prolonging its political power and influence during last 10 years. When Barak Obama was elected as the new US President with the overwhelming support for not only him but also the Democratic party in 2008, many leading figures of the Republican party came to fear more for the approaching crisis upon their party due to the constantly decreasing number of white conservative voters, and they were willing to do anything for compensating for this irreversible trend. Once they saw that effective tactics of gerrymandering are the only option for getting their political power back, they hired a number of gerrymandering experts, and they were all willing to finance this political project of theirs, called Republican Party’s Redistricting Majority Project, as much as they could.

The documentary gives us the detailed explanation on how they accomplished their aims step by step. First, as happily riding on the Tea Party movement in the early 2010s, they supported lots of hardcore conservative Republican candidates here and there around many different states, and, what do you know, this led to a lot more political success than they expected as most of their candidates actually got elected to join state legislature. Once these Republican politicians entered their respective offices, they focused on redrawing the boundaries of their electoral districts for guaranteeing the stability of their positions for 10 years at least, and they consequently became far less concerned about those millions of citizens they were supposed to serve and represent.

One of such cases was from Scott Walker, a Republican politician who got elected as the new Governor of Wisconsin in 2010. Shortly after he started his 4-year tenure in the following year, he embarked on introducing a legislation proposed to effectively eliminate collective bargaining for most Wisconsin public employees, and that understandably caused lots of protests from many people in Wisconsin, but Walker and his fellow local Republican politicians did not have to worry about that much from the beginning because next several years of their political career were already quite safe thanks to the gerrymandering operation behind their back.

Although Governor Walker eventually got what he wanted, that was at least followed by the local grassroot efforts on stopping his and other Republican politicians’ gerrymandering tactics, and the subsequent legal dispute was eventually brought to the US Supreme Court in 2017. We see how much a bunch of decent lawyers and activists tried and prepared for presenting a good legal argument in front of those justices of the US Supreme Court, and the mood becomes quite suspenseful and frustrating when they are waiting for the following decision of the US Supreme Court on their case.

Meanwhile, the documentary looks into the inspiring efforts of a young activist named Katie Fahey and the fellow members of her grassroot organization in Michigan. Once they miraculously succeeded in collecting more than 350,000 voter signatures for a ballot initiative amending the state constitution to create an independent redistricting commission, they were certainly delighted to say the least, but there were still several blocks to be overcome thanks to their mighty Republican opponents, and you may find yourself becoming quite anxious during the scene where Fahey and her colleagues are cautiously waiting for the confirmation on whether the citizens of Michigan say yes or no on that ballot initiative in question.

Overall, “Slay the Dragon” may depress you at times for its incisive and alarming picture of the ongoing crisis of American democracy, but it is ultimately uplifting as vividly presenting the stubborn efforts of many decent American citizens out there. To be frank with you, I have no idea on what may happen on next Tuesday in US, but I can only hope that they will not be let down by their dear country.

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The Perfect Weapon (2020) ☆☆☆(3/4): It has already been started

Posted on October 31, 2020 by kaist455

HBO documentary film “The Perfect Weapon” gives us a very urgent message on certain very dark sides of our ongoing cyber age. As our digital technology is more advanced day by day, our human society have come to depend more and more on this remarkable technological development, but we have also become quite vulnerable to the increasing dangers behind that technological development, and it is often chilling to see that the virulent applications of digital technology on cyber-warfare have already been started and then entered our reality without any inhibition at all.

In the beginning, the documentary, which is based on David E. Sanger’s nonfiction book “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age”, shows us how the US government came to commit a small but damaging incident of hacking which can be now regarded as the starting point of the new era of cyber-warfare. In 2007, President George W. Bush was searching for any possible option for quickly stopping the ongoing nuclear program of the Iranian government without causing another war. After his high-ranking military officials suggested cyber-attack via malware program, he approved of preparing a covert cyber-attack operation before leaving the White House in 2008, and this covert cyber-attack operation was one of numerous top-secret stuffs briefed to President Barack Obama during his first year at the White House.

Several interviewees in the documentary explain to us how this covert cyber-attack operation was executed not long after being ordered by President Obama. Although the target in question, which is a huge centrifugation facility for enriching uranium-235 for making nuclear bombs, was heavily protected by a number of security measures, all they had to do was developing a malware program and then delivering it to an Israeli intelligence agency, which would then plant that malware program in the computer system of the facility via one of its secret agents.

After some period of hibernation, the malware program, which is now called Stuxnet, caused a substantial amount of damages to the Iranian nuclear program once it was activated. The mission was surely accomplished, but it did not take much time for the Iranian government to discover who was responsible for the incident. The Iranian government subsequently established a secret agency for cyber-warfare just like the US government and other powerful governments already did, and it subsequently gave a very hard lesson to Sheldon Adelson, an influential right-wing American casino billionaire who happened to say in 2013 that he had no problem with bombing Iran with nuclear weapons. Not long after a video clip of him saying that was spread out all over the Internet, the accounting system of his company in Las Vegas was struck down by a hacking attack which was apparently connected with some very displeased people in Iran, and it certainly showed to American people that what happens in Las Vegas sometimes does not stay in Las Vegas at all.

And this hacking incident was followed by a series of more disturbing ones. When Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were about to write and direct comedy film “The Interview” (2014), they thought they were just making a silly satire lampooning the public image of the current leader of North Korea, but then things become quite serious shortly after the trailer of the movie came out. When the North Korea government showed lots of displeasure via their public statement, it looked like just another usual case of petty pique from North Korea, but, what do you know, the Sony Studios, which financed the production of “The Interview”, subsequently got heaps of their internal documents and e-mails hacked and then leaked in public, and, as many of you probably remember, lots of media fuss consequently followed while the movie itself, which is incidentally not very good in my humble opinion, sank down in the US box office as many of American movie theaters did not want to get associated with it at all.

However, this hacking incident looks like a mere farce compared to the massive interference of Vladimir Putin and his Russian government on the 2016 US Presidential Election. Having already tested many different kinds of cyber-attacks on Ukraine, the Russian government was ready to go onto a full-throttle mode at that time, and its extensive operation of misinformation and disinformation on the Internet, which was also accompanied with the hacking on the Democratic National Committee, was one of the major factors contributing to that shocking outcome of the 2016 US Presidential Election.

While knowing well that his 2016 US Presidential campaign was helped a lot by the online interference of the Russian government, President Donald J. Trump did not do much about that, though he approved of accelerating the advance of the US military on the ever-expanding field of cyber-warfare. In 2018, a troll farm belonging to the Russian government received a big cyber-attack, and that was certainly a clear warning message from the US government, which probably led to the relatively less amount of misinformation and disinformation poured upon the 2018 mid-term elections in US.

Meanwhile, the documentary also points out how the Chinese government has also been deeply involved in numerous kinds of cyber-attacks and cyber-espionage for many years. As insidiously extending its online tentacles to here and there around the world, the Chinese government is ready to go for the top by any means necessary, and it is surely alarming to see what may happen sooner or later because of that.

Overall, “The Perfect Weapon” will not surprise you much if you have seen other similar documentaries including Alex Gibney’s “Zero Days” (2016), but it did its job as well as intended at least, and you may be more concerned about what will possibly happen during the upcoming 2020 US Presidential Election, which has been quite susceptible to cyber-attacks during last several months. I cannot help but worry about whether the same thing will happen again to cause more disruption of American democracy, but, like many others around the world, I can only hope for the best.

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Tommaso (2019) ☆☆☆(3/4): A little playful piece by Abel Ferrara

Posted on October 31, 2020 by kaist455

Abel Ferrara’s latest film “Tommaso” is alternatively playful and fascinating as probably reflecting many parts of Ferrara’s life and career. Since he reached to the peak of his filmmaking career during the early 1990s with a series of darkly compelling films such as “Bad Lieutenant” (1992) and criminally underrated SF horror movie “Body Snatchers” (1993), Ferrara has become quite less prominent than before during last three decades, but he demonstrates here that he is still an interesting filmmaker to admire, and the movie is also elevated a lot by another terrific performance from his lead actor.

Willem Dafoe, who previously collaborated with Ferrara in several other films including “Pasolini” (2014) and “Siberia” (2020), plays Tommaso, a middle-aged American filmmaker currently residing in Rome, Italy along with his young Russian wife and their little daughter. At the beginning, we see him trying to learn Italian more from his private Italian teacher, and the mood becomes a bit more cheerful when he gives a little celebration of his teacher’s birthday.

After this scene, the movie calmly observes Tommaso’s family life as well as his daily life routines. He often spends lots of time with his wife for raising their little daughter together at their current residence, and he also teaches acting to a bunch of local young students. While he is usually accompanied with a translator, his English speeches always captivate his students, and one of the most interesting moments in the film comes from when he gets his students more motivated and energized via a group act at one point.

Watching the domestic scenes between Tommaso and his wife, we cannot help but notice a considerable age gap between them. Although a very intimate scene between them early in the movie conveys to us the substantial emotional relationship between them, Tommaso sometimes finds himself uncertain about their relationship with a growing sense of insecurity, and we accordingly get a brief ambiguous moment when he seems to imagine watching his wife having an affair with some younger dude.

In addition, it turns out that there are personal demons Tommaso has managed to dull and suppress during recent years. He routinely attends a local Alcoholic Anonymous (AA) meeting where he and other attendees certainly have each own story to tell, and the camera quietly observes him from the distance as he phlegmatically reminisces about his wild and dark days of drug and alcohol addiction. Dafoe, who is no stranger to the dark sides of human soul as shown from a number of intense performances throughout his long, illustrious acting career, is simply marvelous as subtly expressing his character’s bitter sadness and regret without any ounce of pity or exaggeration, and you may wonder how much of this poignantly personal moment is actually generated from his acting – or Ferrara, who seems to reflect a lot of himself on his troubled hero considering how much they overlap with each other in more than one aspect.

And we keep observing this considerable overlap between fiction and Ferrara’s life and career. While he has lived along with his family in Rome for a long time just like Tommaso, Ferrara also has his real-life wife and daughter play Tommaso’s wife and daughter in the film, and a certain movie project on which Tommaso has been working in the movie is apparently the fictional counterpart of “Siberia”. During his hero’s occasional moments of musing, it is very clear to us that Ferrara is attempting a sort of self-meditation, and this aspect is more accentuated by when their certain shared religious belief is presented to us.

This may feel a bit too self-indulgent from time to time, but Ferrara always compensates for that with a naughty sense of humor. During one scene in the middle of the film, Tommaso happens to have an argument with some drunken guy making lots of noises outside Tommaso’s apartment building at one night, but the tension between them is eventually decreased as they interact more with each other, and their last moment is actually touching to our surprise and amusement.

Moreover, the movie often crosses the boundary between reality and imagination as Tommaso comes to grapple more with his personal demons. There is an odd scene where he is suddenly taken to a local police station and then interrogated by one jaded detective, and their solemn conversation comes to evoke that biblical moment between Jesus and Pontius Pilate. Considering that Dafoe played Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s great religious film “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), this is surely an amusing meta-joke to say the least, and Ferrara goes further with that aspect via two subsequent moments which will surely make you chuckle more.

I must point out that “Tommaso” is not entirely without flaws, and it unfortunately comes to lose its narrative pacing before making a sudden exit in the end, but Dafoe keeps holding our attention as usual. While he has become more prominent than before thanks to his recent two Oscar nominations, he has always been one of the most interesting actors of our time, and his richly nuanced performance here in this film, which is packed with myriad different human details to be noticed and appreciated, deserves more attention in my humble opinion. In short, this is another fruitful collaboration between him and Ferrara, and I sincerely hope that they will continue to work more together in the future.

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Endless Poetry (2016) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4): The wild second chapter of Jodorowsky’s life

Posted on October 30, 2020 by kaist455

“Endless Poetry”, which is supposedly the second part of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film autobiography, is as wild, bold, and weird as you can expect from his work. Like his previous film “The Dance of Reality” (2013), the movie freely mixes his real-life episodes with many surrealistic touches to strike and then impress you, and the result is not only as accessible as its predecessor but also alternatively poignant and compelling, even though it often make you wonder how much of it is actually true.

The movie starts right at where “The Dance of Reality”, which mostly focuses on Jodorowsky’s childhood period in a rural northern Chilean town named Tocopilla, ends its story. Young Jodorowsky, played by Jodorowsky’s grandson Jeremias Herskovits, leaves Tocopilla along with his parents Jaime (Brontis Jodorowsky, who is one of Jodorwosky’s sons and also appeared along with his father in “El Topo” (1970)) and Sara (Paemle Flores), and then they settle in a urban neighborhood of Santiago where Jaime starts to run a small store. Although he had a cathartic moment of penance and redemption in the previous movie, Jaime remains to be mean and abusive as before, and that certainly hurts young Jodorowsky as well as Sara, who still delivers her lines via operatic singing as before.

Although his father strongly expects him to become a respectable doctor someday, young Jodorowsky comes to have more aspiration of being a poet, which is certainly not approved by his father at all. At least, he later encounters someone who can understand his sensitive artistic soul as sharing their common frustration with those cumbersome family expectations and pressures on themselves, but, unfortunately, he cannot respond much to the sexual longing from that person in question due to their very different sexualities.

As young Jodorowsky struggles to follow his artistic passion despite his father’s objection, Jodorowsky often throws a series of weird and crazy moments as expected. There is a grisly moment which reflects how harsh and violent his neighborhood was at that time, and then there is also a painful scene where Jaime cruelly humiliates a couple with disability in front of many others just because they dared to steal from his store.

Anyway, the movie subsequently moves forward to several years later, and now we see Jodorowsky as a young grown man, who is now played by Adán Jodorowsky, who is another son of Jodorowsky and previously played a supporting role in “The Dance of Reality” (He was also young Fenix in “Santa Sangre” (1989), by the way). While yearning to be a great poet more than ever, Jodorowsky is still not sure about himself and his artistic talent, but that does not stop him at all from hanging around a number of offbeat local artists, and he comes to gain confidence on his art after a certain small act of art from him leads to an unexpected good opportunity for fully exploring his potentials.

Meanwhile, like many other young heterosexual male artists around his age, Jodorowsky finds himself madly in love with one woman who happens to draw his attention at one night. She is a real-life poet named Stella Díaz Varín (Pamela Flores, who looks quite different from her other role in the film), and she turns out to be as wild and passionate as she looks on the surface. When Jodorowsky is quite drunk and mad about her at one point, she promptly shows him how much she actually loves him, and then they come to have an odd carnal moment together at her shabby residence, though their relationship subsequently turns out to be not as strong as it seems at first.

The other important person in Jodorowsky’s young and wild years is a fellow poet named Enrique Lihn (Leandro Taub). When Jodorowsky approaches to him, Lihn has some reservation on Jodorowsky, but it does not take much time for them to form a friendship between them, and there is an amusing scene where they cheerfully attempt something to test their artistic integrity but then hilariously fail in the end.

As the movie bounces from one wild episode after another, Jodorowsky holds our attention while supplying more of his richly embellished personal moments including the one where his younger self happens to interact with him during some weirdly spiritual moment. Thanks to his cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who has been mainly known for his acclaimed collaboration with Wong Kar-Wai, many key moments in the film shine with striking color scheme to be appreciated, and we gladly go along with their resulting surrealistic mood even when we are shocked and baffled.

Eventually, the movie culminates to a dramatic moment between Jodorowsky and his father, who still objects to his son’s pursuit of art and poetry even when his son is about to leave for Paris. As admitted to us by Jodorowsky, he would never see his father again after that, but he tries to have a reconciliation with the memories of his father here in this movie, and we come to see that the movie is a therapy session for him just like “The Dance of Reality”.

Overall, “Endless Poetry” is another interesting film from Jodorowsky, and I am glad that I finally watched it, though I recently came to regard him with less admiration than before thanks to his “exaggerated” claim on how he shot the rape scene in “El Topo”. Considering that he is 91 at present, I am not sure whether he will be able to make three more autographic movies as planned, but “The Dance of Reality” and “Endless Poetry” show that he has lost none of his talent yet, and I am ready for what may come from him next.

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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020) ☆☆1/2(2.5/4): Borat returns

Posted on October 26, 2020 by kaist455

“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”, which is also known as “Borat 2”, wants to be as bold, shocking, and outrageous as its predecessor, but the overall result feels rather mildly amusing in comparison. Although there are several uproarious moments in the film as expected, they are not enough to compensate for its weaker parts, and I found myself becoming a bit nostalgic about how much I was jolted and tickled by its predecessor.

As many of you know, its adamantly vulgar and indecent comic hero Borat Sagdiyev is one of those infamous characters created and performed by Sacha Baron Cohen. After the considerable commercial/critical success of Oscar-nominated feature film “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” (2006), Cohen decided to retire Borat, but now he gets Borat back to the screen for exposing and illuminating the absurd and ugly sides of the American society as before, and he surely finds a bunch of various targets to be lampooned here and there in US.

In the beginning, the movie tells us what happened to Borat after his crazy and preposterous journey depicted in the 2006 film. He initially enjoyed lots of success and fame thanks to his movie, but, alas, the people and government of Kazakhstan were not so amused at all, and he was eventually sent to a labor camp where he came to be incarcerated for next 14 years.

And then there comes an unexpected reversal of fortune for Borat on one day. He is released under the order of the Premier of Kazakhstan, and the Premier personally orders Borat to deliver a very special monkey to US because, well, the Premier wants to please US Vice President Mike Pence, who may help the Premier be liked and admired by US President Donald Trump just like many other notorious tyrants around the world such as Kim Jong-un.

This looks like a very easy mission at first, but, unfortunately, things do not go that well for Borat from the beginning. After arriving in Texas, he waits for the arrival of that monkey in question, but the monkey turns out to be dead under a rather suspicious circumstance, and he only ends up being stuck with Tutar Sagdiyev (Maria Bakalova), a 15-year-old girl who is incidentally a daughter whose existence he never knew before.

While Borat is initially at a loss in front of this disastrous situation, an outrageous idea soon comes to him. As reflected by the very long subtitle of the film (“Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”), he decides to deliver Tutar to Pence instead of that monkey, and the first half of the movie mainly revolves around his clumsy attempt to turn Tutar into a woman looking good enough to be the new bride of Pence. First, he takes Tutar to a social influencer willing to give some useful advices, and he also buys some fancy clothes for her before taking her to a local evening event for débutantes. At that evening event, Borat and his daughter surely deliver a deliberately gross moment to remember, and you may laugh a bit as the camera captures the clearly disgusted faces of the attendees watching them.

After that, Cohen keeps finding other targets to be ridiculed on his way, though Borat often has to disguise himself because of his well-known status. At one point, he wears a Donald Trump mask for drawing Pence’s attention at a local conference for hard-core conservatives, but that does not generate much reaction from Pence, who just looks mildly annoyed by this prank.

One of the more effective comic moments in the film comes from when Borat happens to stay in a cabin belonging to two QAnon believers later in the story. Although I am not that sure about whether these two nutty dudes are real or not, I assure you that you will roll eyes as listening to what they say in front of Borat without any ounce of shame at all, and this moment is later developed into a disturbingly absurd scene where Borat performs a song full of racism and xenophobia in front of cheering Trump supporters.

However, the movie remains deficient in surprise, which is always a crucial factor for effective comedy. Because of its predecessor, we all know from the beginning that Borat will do lots of vulgar and outrageous things on the screen, so we are not so surprised at all no matter how much he and the movie try to surpass the level of shock and awe displayed in “Borat”. In the end, we only become more aware of the inherent political incorrectness of his nasty stereotype image.

Anyway, the movie is not entirely a total failure at least thanks to the committed comic acting from not only Cohen but also his co-star Maria Bakalova, a Bulgarian actress who did a good job of holding her own place well besides Cohen while ably demonstrating her considerable comic talent. Like Cohen, she willingly hurls herself into more vulgarity and preposterousness, and she is certainly hilarious when she happens to be with Rudy Giuliani, who has already been getting embarrassed a lot after the movie was released on Amazon Prime in last week.

Overall, “Borat Subsequent MovieFilm”, which is directed by Jason Woliner, is more or less than the repetition of its predecessor, and I simply observed its many moments of outrageousness without enough amusement and entertainment. Considering that I was not as enthusiastic about “Borat” as some other critics, I may not be an ideal audience for the movie, but I will not deny that I had some laughs during my viewing, so I will not stop you from watching it.

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Babyteeth (2019) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4): Her imperfect romance

Posted on October 26, 2020 by kaist455

As a coming-of-age comedy drama film revolving around a sick young heroine and her unlikely lover, Australian movie “Babyteeth” is much more matured than expected. While it will surely remind you of other similar films such as “The Fault in Our Stars” (2014) or “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” (2015), the movie distinguishes itself well as balancing itself well between comedy and drama with considerable humor and sensitivity, and it is certainly a better alternative to the two aforementioned movies.

At the beginning, the movie opens with a Meet Cute scene between its two lead characters. While she is waiting for a train to come into the station along with her two schoolmates, Milla Finlay (Eliza Scanlen), an adolescent high school girl who has been quite ill due to a serious case of cancer, comes across a lad named Moses (Toby Wallace), and something clicks between them as he shows some little kindness to her. Although he is a junkie recently evicted from his family house by his mother, Milla becomes curious about him, and she even invites him to her family residence for a dinner after letting him cut her hair.

Milla’s parents, Henry (Ben Mendelsohn) and Anna (Essie Davis), are understandably perplexed with their daughter bringing a stranger into their house, but they try to maintain their cool composure as much as they can, though they have struggled a lot to process the impending possibility of their daughter’s early death. As a psychiatrist, Henry tries to have frank communications with his wife as reflected by their private session in his office, but Anna prefers to be medicated with various types of drugs to suppress her grief, and she is already high when she and others are going to have a dinner.

While well aware of how much her imperfect but caring parents are concerned about her, Milla cannot help but feel suffocated and frustrated – especially when she has to go through another chemotherapy period. She wants to live her life as fully as possible, and Moses looks like someone to bring fun and excitement into her gloomy status in addition to being a possible boyfriend for her, though, as he admits at one point, he is a little too old for her considering their age difference.

In case of Moses, well, he also seems to be interested in getting closer to Milla, but, of course, drugs usually come first to his addicted mind. Not long after his first meeting with Milla’s parents, he breaks into their house for stealing a bunch of drugs in the house, and that leads to an amusingly embarrassing moment between him and Milla’s parents, who eventually let him sleep in the house for one night.

Anna strongly demands to Moses later that he should not see her daughter again, but Moses comes to the house again. While it is apparent that he needs drug again, Milla does not mind spending more time with him, and their mutual attraction becomes stronger when she later elopes with Moses during one evening just for having a big fun just like any young girl around her age, though the following romantic time between them does not end that well thanks to Moses’ carelessness.

While certainly more worried about what is going on between Milla and Moses, Henry and Anna also come to realize that their daughter really needs Moses, so they let Moses stay in the house after making a deal with him. “This is the worst possible parenting I can imagine”, says Anna, but she and her husband are happy to see their dear daughter brightened up by her growing romance with Moses.

Of course, there later comes an inevitable narrative point where the main characters of the movie come to face the hard truths they have tried to overlook, but the screenplay by Rita Kalnejais, which is adapted from her play of the same name, never resorts to sappy melodrama while clearly recognizing their pain, confusion, and sadness. As a result, they come to us as believable human figures struggling to deal with each own issues, and we come to emphasize more with them even when amused by their human flaws.

The main cast members of the film are all engaging in their respective colorful performances. Eliza Scanlen, who drew our attention with her breakthrough supporting role in HBO TV miniseries “Sharp Objects” and then impressed us again in Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” (2019), is simply marvelous as ably conveying to us her character’s poignant emotional journey along the story, and Toby Wallace, who received the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress when the movie was shown at the Venice International Film Festival in last year, is utterly convincing in a committed performance to remember while also having a palpable chemistry with his co-star on the screen. In case of Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn, their nuanced supporting performances remind me again of why they are two of the best performers from Australia, and Emily Barclay and Eugene Gilfedder are also fine in their small but substantial supporting roles.

“Babyteeth” is directed by director Shannon Murphy, who previously made a few short films before making a feature film debut here. In addition to drawing good performances from her main cast members, she did a competent job of handling mood, story, and characters, and I particularly admire how she skillfully and thoughtfully delivers the expected finale without any excess. In my inconsequential opinion, she is another new talented filmmaker to watch, and I guess I can have some expectation on what will come next from her.

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