Minari

This surprise hit in the US starts slow and builds into quite an impressive depiction of life for a Korean family, newly arrived in Arkansas and determined to make a new life on a farm.  Or at least, Jacob, the husband is.  

The family arrive to find a rectangular house on wheels and overgrown land, though beautifully meadow-like, which Jacob sets about ploughing and turning into a market garden for Korean vegetables.  

Meanwhile he and his wife Monica work as chicken sexers at a local factory.  They have two children, responsible Ann and the younger David (Alan S. Kim) who is a curious boy with a heart defect.

  As the work begins to get on top of them, Monica’s mother Soon-ja comes from Korea to look after the children.  David especially doesn’t consider her as a real grandma as he doesn’t know her and the woman does un-grandma things like swear, play cards and watch wrestling.

We follow the family as they try to adapt to a new life, fit into the local community with an evangelical church, suffer the fortunes of the weather and good and bad decisions regarding the farm and the possibility that the property is in some way jinxed.

The main objective here is to explore the tissue that makes up family.  Each one has a different role and some of the relationship dynamics seem negative.  Both children and granny think Jacob and Monica fight too much, David and Granny also fight at the beginning but then realise that they are much alike and Ann is the central serving pillar keeping the whole lot together.  

While it applies to families world over there are also beliefs that appear common to Asian families and the need of the children to serve the family and the men to be the breadwinner.  Something that Monica is not always in agreement with.

MINARI_02964 Yeri Han, Steven Yeun Director: Lee Isaac Chung Credit: Josh Ethan Johnson/A24

Steven Yeun is very solid in the lead role and Yeri Han likewise in a role that perhaps less to work with.

  Will Patton as the local jesus freak farmer and generous help to the family is fine in this 80’s context and Youn Yuh-Jung, a top actress in Korea, shines as the grandmother.

Photography is gorgeously rustic and Emile Mossieri’s music sets the right tone for this semi-biographical work by Lee Isaac Chung.

Maybe not film of the year but a valuable addition to celluloid depictions of what it means to be to be part of a family and part of an American dream.

4 stars plus

The United States vs. Billie Holiday

Long title for a film that is the latest in Hollywood’s sequence of movies about the shadow side of American history, especially when it comes to the treatment of blacks.  Director Lee Daniels says that it is not a biopic of Billie Holiday’s life, which given the lack of material about her youth and the start of her career is probably fair to say.

  Rather, it features her latter years combining the decline from years of drug abuse and the absolutely scandalous harassment she suffered from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who even planted drugs on her and coopted members of her circle to betray her.  

As the picture shows, the zealousness with which they went after her was also due to her insistence on singing “Strange Fruit”, a mournful song that tells of the lynching of blacks in the South of the US.  Subsequently, the song has been named by Time magazine as “Song of the Century” but to the government at that time it was an incitement to violence.

The film itself is a pretty messy affair, at times varying widely in tone and not altogether satisfactorily weaving the strands of her life together.  What we do get though is a superb portrayal of Holiday at the hands of Andra Day, a singer with little experience in film, but who manages to wonderfully convey this complex woman with a pretty horrendous past.  And she sings very well indeed. 

Holiday had every reason to be distrusting and insecure.  Like many famous stars, especially women, she was betrayed constantly and had no family to fall back on. 

 Equally, she did not always treat her entourage well.  Day manages to join these incoherences into a moving and magnetic performance.

Not an awful lot to say about the rest.  There are various telescoped romances and a few hard scenes but somewhere it lacked a magic creative spark.  See it for Andra Day alone.

3 stars

Babylon Berlin (Series 1 and 2)

Series of the month has been this German production that I had heard vague whispers about. Tom Tykwer of Run Lola Run is one of the main figures in this vision of a series.  It is a recreation of Berlin in 1929, focusing specifically on the police force there and the socio-political atmosphere of the time.

It is the Weimar Republic and there is still healing to be done from the First World War, political groups from either end of the spectrum are starting to emerge, namely the Communists and the Nazis, there is a sensitive issue with Russia whose Bolshevik revolution too place not so long ago and has led to Russians escaping to Germany and you have a little of the roaring twenties too, centred here on a nightclub called Moka Efti which has some wonderful stage shows but is also a very high class brothel.

The creators of the show show us all this mostly through the eyes of two main characters: Gereon Rath, (Volker Bruck)

a young detective brought in from Cologne and local woman Charlotte Ritter.   Rath has his issues.  He has the shakes and is addicted to morphine thanks to his time in the war where he lost his brother. His father, a bigshot In Cologne has been involved in dubious deals and to complicate matters worse he is sleeping with his brother’s widow, Helga.

Charlotte (Liv Lisa Fries) comes from a poor family and enters the police as a daily secretary, one that turns up each day to see if they have work to offer.  She volunteers for all the worse jobs and as she has skills in the field quickly becomes valued for her work.  To make ends meet and support her layabout family, she doubles as a fun girl at the Moka Efti and not surprisingly, she is exhausted. 

The two work well together and there is a sexual tension too throughout these shows.  Fries is a particularly interesting and capable actress, while Bruch takes on more of the everyman hero with a shadow side role.

Bruno Volter (Peter Kurth) is Gereon’s boss, a detective chief inspector who seems to be of great help but also has lots of shady deals going on on the side making him a mercurial figure.  

And there are many more rich characters in the series as you’d expect.

Series 1 and 2 consist of 16 episodes and the main stories in these involve: a pornographic film-making ring, a freight train impounded in Berlin from Russia containing gases and a wagon of gold,

political tensions between the left and right (at the end of series 2, the Nazi brown shirts make an appearance), the efforts of the Black Reichswehr to stage a coup and restore the Kaiser to rule, an assassination attempt, the dealings of Russian exiles trying to get revenge on the Bolsheviks,

and corruption inside the police force.

There are a lot of stories to keep track of but we are generally able to. So, this makes it a fascinating document about this time in Germany, that we are fairly ignorant of these days.  The recreation of street scenes, the joie de vivre of the Moka Efti with a couple of dance scenes, a cross-dresser singing the theme song (quite Brechtian) and an appearance by Bryan Ferry all add style and class. Good costume work too. And as the series went on the scenes of danger get more graphic including a scene hanging out of a plane to take spy photos, a gunshot duel on top of a moving freight train and a sequence featuring a sunken car!

So, how good is it?  Apart from some goofs, I appreciated the portrayal of this time and the sheer depth of detail. It is a thoroughly professional show that lingers in the mind.  Waiting now for series 3!

4 stars plus

I Care A Lot

Cornering the market this year on revenge thrillers comes this film by relatively young British film-maker, J Blakeson.  

The movie starts out on a fairly hot current issue concerning elderly people and their affairs being administered by the less than scrupulous.  Which is the grift of Marla Grayson, who has built up a business being a legally appointed guardian to dozens of old people now ensconced in old people’s homes and virtually held as prisoners.  This also means that she can administer their estates and start to sell off their assets taking a cut herself, of course.

At the beginning we get to see how she convinces a court to uphold a restraining order on a patient’s son preventing him from seeing his mother on the grounds that his visits upset her. Heavy stuff and definitely an issue in today’s society where the state, individual operators and the courts conspire against individual rights.  Or at least in the US.

The story proper begins when she frog-marches an old lady called Jennifer Patterson into a home, getting a court ruling that she is demented.  

Jennifer is what Marla and her partner Fran call a “cherry”, an elderly person with no debts, plenty of assets and no heirs.  

Dianne Wiest plays Jennifer beautifully and we wish we could have seen more of her.  

Trouble is that Jennifer does have people who care for her.  They are in the shadows as they are part of the mafia and when her disappearance is noted, they come looking and start to make Marla’s life much more complicated than it was.

From here on, we blend thriller as the two sides seek revenge and retaliation with elements of satire and the pace accelerates nicely. It is an eminently watchable film if you can bear a bit of violence.  Blakeson keeps us guessing right to the end with a few neat twists.

It is probably no classic but a very competent example of the genre.  Most of all, it features an excellent performance by Rosamund Pike, who as Marla becomes one of the screen’s great villains, like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.  Pike blends respectability with a fierce cold strategic determination to win.  It is one of her best turns.  She is ably supported by Peter Dinkage as Roman, the mafia head who has his own ethics and codes. 

Enjoyable and with the issue of the rights of old people there just behind the thriller.

3 stars plus

On Chesil Beach

This adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novella has been scripted by the author himself and acted by Saoirse Ronan, who starred in Atonement.  

It is a polished production with plenty to applaud but the poignancy of the story and something rather unfulfilling about the ending brings it down a little.

Edward (Billy Howle) and Florence (Ronan) are having their honeymoon at a hotel on Chesil Beach in Dorset.  It is 1962 and Britain is still quite bleak. They both have first class degrees but Florence comes from a higher social class.  Her mum hilariously played by Emily Watson is an Oxford don and father (Samuel West) an excessively competitive businessman. Edward has a schoolmaster father in Henley and a mother (Anne-Marie Duff) who is an artist but needs constant watching over after an accident affected her brain.  

Florence is an accomplished violinist with a chamber music group. Despite them feeling they have reached adulthood, they are both quite innocent, especially so in matters of sex.

The film is very much set in a time where Britain was still repressed and this is clearly depicted.  And this repression has major consequences for their wedding night.

While the film is almost a vignette, it also speaks of major social issues: sexuality, openness, class and communication.  McEwan gives us a lot in quite a sparse text and the direction conveys the period well.

The best part of the movie though are the performances of Ronan and Howle who give us very complete portrayals of the feelings both on the surface and deep down that they must be experiencing.  In another time, we may wonder what the fuss was all about but this was a big deal for them.

Even so, the film tails off towards the end in two codas set in 1975 and the present-day and these perhaps detract a little from the main action.

3 stars plus

Wrong Turn

I am not a fan of horror films but on a wet afternoon this one, part of a franchise caught my attention.  It is actually reasonably effective if rather disagreeable as I find these all to be.  

It’s basically the story of 6 friends who go hiking in the Appalachians and despite warnings not to stray off the track, they soon get lost.  

It becomes readily apparent that it is not just a question of carelessness, their cellphones are stolen and a series of “accidents” start happening.  These rapidly escalate in seriousness and gore and soon the group have been captured by a group called The Foundation who have been settled as a secret community in the hills and do not take kindly to strangers getting too close.  

The group who speak a strange Nordic language hold a trial to condemn these young people and in the process of this more excesses occur.  It is interesting to see how the young people with their arrogance of what is right in “civilization” struggle to understand how a group can pretend to be moralistic but are in fact savage.  

And yet that serves to reflect on the fact that western civilization is pretty barbaric at times.

The last part of the movie features the efforts of the father of one of the group to reach the place where they are being held in order to save them.  

In this role we see Matthew Modine who starred in top movies in the 80s like Birdy.  He does a good enough job and in general the acting is sound.  

So, is the direction which keeps the action going with constant surprises.  There may be holes in the plot and in the credibility of no one ever trying to stop this group from an official point of view but that is what fantasy stories are all about.  

Good music from Stephen Lukach.  Aficionados may feel this film is not as tight as many in the genre but for me it was satisfactory and my points reflect more my personal distaste for the genre.

2 stars

Nevrland

Nice to see a film from Austria as we don’t get so many.  Nevrland is the debut film by Gregor Schmidinger and as fitting for a film set in Vienna, it is a deeply psychological work.  The few reviews I have seen online have partly missed the point so I guess that a basic knowledge of psychoanalysis helps.

Jakob is a shy teenager who has finished school and wants to study cosmology, something we suspect he has kept a secret.  Meanwhile, he looks after his ailing grandfather and starts a job in an abattoir with his Dad.

He is repulsed by the slaughter and blood there and this seems to trigger anxiety attacks which the family first think are physical but which scans reveal are psychological.  No wonder.  Jakob’s mother abandoned them when he was 6 and his connection with her is a large scarlet birthmark on his chest. He is also gay, but this too is kept quiet. His masculine home doesn’t give space for him to work through all these issues, although he does start up with an analyst which he finds altogether too frightening.  

It is when he gets up the courage to meet Christian (Paul Forman), a strange man about ten years older than him that he meets on a sex website that things start to move.  Christian takes him dancing and that moves things, so do visits to museums to see art.

The director basically guides us on Jakob’s journey to face his fears and to retrieve parts of his soul that have been lost (like the 6 year-old whose mother walked out), parts of him that he needs to nurture and grow in order to become an adult that he clearly isn’t.  The gay element is secondary to his sanity but is also clear because it too has been repressed in his waking home life.  Likewise, the transition of his grandfather is a reflection of a passing from one stage of life to another and this is something Jakob needs to experience.

There are some quite daring effects with sound, music and strobe lights and some editing blending different horrific images supposedly occurring inside Jakob’s head. These may seem clichéd but are in fact quite effective in giving the audience a sense of what the young man is going through.  

Simon Fruhwirth bears all this on his shoulders and is convincing in the lead role, while Paul Forman plays an enigmatic Christian. The script may also include some fairly obvious hackneyed lines but in truth much of it is the sort of banal talk we all engage in and my feeling here was that the script was secondary to the effects and feelings the film produces in us.  My reaction is that the film is more coherent and successful in achieving its objectives than people may at first realise.  But you need to be willing to dive into the psychology and know what some of the symbols represent.

4 stars

The White Tiger

I read the novel of this book some years ago and found it to be an intense experience.  No less so is the movie version directed by Ramin Bahrani.  The adaptation of the Man Booker Prize winning novel retains that intensity and energy and the strong emotions of anger in the story of Balram.

It is an enthralling story of how a boy from a poor village becomes the driver to a rich family of corrupt business people and rises from that after their bad treatment of him to become his own man and a successful entrepreneur.   In the process, he commits some pretty bad acts, but in a way justifies it from what he has learnt by observing the rich.

Part of the merit of the film is to place us in modern-day India: we see both the very comfortably rich and the huge numbers of poor, the street vendors, the beggars and the drivers. Poverty is one big issue and imposed on that is caste or class, making it difficult for anybody to move out of their perceived station in life.  We know this is largely so but this film shows us clearly.

THE WHITE TIGER – Adarsh Gourav (Balramand) in THE WHITE TIGER​. Cr. Netflix © 2021

Adarsh Gourav is excellent in the lead and convincing in his transformation.  

Priyanka Chopra (Jonas) as Pinky, the North American educated Indian bride who can’t cope with the enduring traditions is also very good, though I found her Rajkummar Rao in the role of her husband, Ashok, rather more monotonous in his portrayal even if he is still quite convincing.

Bahrani as director manages to keep the focus on the story while maintaining the pace and feeding in all the information we need to understand what is going on.  Some reviewers have questioned the voiceovers but I found them acceptable enough.  

Well worth seeing and possibly for a second time to be able to debate all the points about life in India that it throws up.

4 stars plus

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

An amazing 14 years have passed since the first Borat film and now Sacha Baron Cohen returns to the US in election year to “gift” his daughter (originally it was to be a monkey) to the Vice-president and thereby restore his homeland Kazakhstan’s reputation in the world after Borat sank it in 2006.

Sent on this noble mission with his slave-like daughter in tow, the idea is to transform her into a lady like Melania Trump and make her a perfect present for the “pussy loving VP”. 

 The road to do this is complicated largely due to the constant messes Borat creates along the way but the pair get pretty close in the end.

So, on one level there is a sort of slapstick comedy here with Borat’s walk and accent and his donning of constant disguises which not only fit the plot but were also necessary to maintain the element of surprise because Borat is largely made up of either encounters with ordinary citizens or by barging into balls, conventions and other public events.

Another level is the satire, the digs he makes about US cultural beliefs and especially those of the Republicans and the Deep South.

A third level is more scatological with plentiful jokes about vaginas, titties and penises.

That Baron Cohen is able to blend all these given the difficulties under which he made the film is indeed meritworthy.

Now, it is not a laugh a minute and what you find funny depends on your particular taste but there is enough here to have several good guffaws among other moments that you might be more shocked than amused at.  

Baron Cohen manages his disguises well but it is his co-star Maria Balakova, playing his daughter who steals the show not only changing drastically her appearance but also convincingly create a sort of smart bimbo who is capable of seducing Rudy Giuliani.

For all its unevenness and imperfections

(a strangely moving scene in a synagogue is a sort of counterbalance to the anti-semitic jokes and the rest of the film), Borat is the sort of movie the world is desperately in need of in these troubled and often angry times.

3 stars plus

Supernova

Another favourite genre of film at Oscar time is that featuring a person facing death.  This year there are several and at least two on the topic of dementia or Alzheimers as we have seen in the past with the likes of Still Alice with Julianne Moore and Julie Christie in Away from Her. 

This film, Supernova, is a two-hander basically featuring a mature gay couple.  Sam (Colin Firth) is a classical pianist and Tusker (Stanley Tucci) is a writer.  Tusker was diagnosed with the onset of dementia and the effects are now starting to make themselves felt.  

The two of them go on a road trip, largely in Cumbria and we are like spectators along for the ride seeing how they are coping with it all.  Sam is the shy but determined carer and Tusker desperately wants to remain in some sort of control.  They visit Sam’s sister in the old family home and visit a few other places either sleeping in their campervan or going to a sort of air b´n´b.

Not a lot really happens in the film beyond the expression of where they are at in their process of accepting what is happening.  I found it a sincere, authentic work in this respect and there is much to recognize when you have nursed someone through a terminal illness.  There is a rather intrusive metaphor about star gazing (hence the title) that seems heavy handed and the film doesn’t really go anywhere much in the end.  That is realistic but perhaps not great cinema.

What really makes this film reasonable is the excellent work by the protagonists.  Colin Firth is a wonderful mix of compassion, concern and fear, while Stanley Tucci creates a memorable character whose unpredictability and sense of where he is at is second to none despite his illness. 

 Together they make a very credible couple facing the ultimate of life’s challenges, the stoic acceptance of the death of one of them.

4 stars