I saw Miranda July’s first film some years ago and thought it was suitably creative and weird and after a relatively long break she is back with her third, the excitingly named Kajillionaire.
The film is about a family of grifters who lives in a sort of fringe-gap world. Their house is an office next to a company that makes bubbles, which spill over and down their wall at given hours.
They don’t work but earn a living through scams and small robberies, post office frauds and illegal cheque writing. The Dynes are a queer lot: father is creepy but the clear leader played by Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger is unrecognizable as the limping and cynical mother and their daughter Old Dolio is their 3rd partner-in-crime.
She doesn’t know it yet but she has been bereft of real love and affection. When a new scam brings Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) into their lives,
Old Dolio’s world starts to change as scarily as the frequent Californian tremors that punctuate the movie. Evan Rachel Wood is also unrecognizable as this emotionally stunted bud about to bloom and pulls off a difficult role convincingly.
July is an unpredictable director and scenes and plot developments that shouldn’t work (filming entire scenes in the dark) actually do come off.
There are some great moments in the film but having said that I also found it had a mood that started to wear on me a little towards the end. Full marks for imagination and for the guts to create this world! But perhaps July is a taste that I need more time to fully acquire.
Winner of two Oscars and much praised especially for the performance of Riz Ahmed in the lead role, it has taken me some time to get round to this movie. The film is about Ruben Stone, a drummer in a rock band who has a sudden deterioration in his hearing thanks to the abuse he has been subjecting his ears to over the years.
Initially scared and in denial, he finally agrees to go into a programme where (newly) deaf people are trained to come to terms with their new condition and to work with others such as young deaf children to discover new ways of connecting with the world.
Meanwhile, Lou, Ruben’s girlfriend returns to Belgium and her fragmented family.
The film is basically about the internal mental journey Ruben undertakes to deal with his new condition and the decisions he has to take on the way.
He chooses to have implants and while they restore some hearing, they bring other issues and the end of the film also looks at how Ruben and Lou’s relationship has been affected.
In the end, the film is quite straightforward and less innovative than I expected – the main new feature is a soundtrack that plunges us into Ruben’s deafness at times or the moments when what he hears is a distorted blur.
Riz Ahmed is indeed commanding in the lead role. Maybe not Best Actor but in the top rank of this year’s performances.
Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci
and a somewhat calmed down Mathieu Amalric give support. This is a film to open our minds and remind us of those who struggle to hear in our world today.
An Israeli – French production, directed by Nadav Lapid, of the Kindergarten Teacher fame, this movie had critical acclaim and not so much success at the box office. I really liked it and found it a breath of fresh air. The story is about a young Israeli man, Yoav, who moves to Paris and decides to become French as he seeks to shake off his Israeli past.
He is hurt by the anger and aggression of his society, which he himself possesses too and yet at the same time we are led to believe that he was a successful soldier during the compulsory military service all Israelis must perform.
At the beginning of the film we see him arrive in Paris, take a bath in the flat he is squatting in and have all his possessions stolen. This obliges him to seek help from his neighbours and the couple Emile and Caroline
take him in and give him clothes food and shelter until he can set out on his own (moving into a box like flat where he cooks the same pasta and tomato meal everyday). He buys a French dictionary and studies it voraciously trying to learn new words and synonyms to add to his vocabulary and to fast track his Frenchness.
As Caroline says, sometimes the words he uses are quaint and uncommon. Israel comes back to haunt him, in the form of work as a security guard at the Embassy and other encounters including one with Yaron an extreme Jew who is very much in your face about his religion and origin.
The film is roughly autobiographical but one senses that Lapid took events that happened to him and transformed them somewhat into almost fantasy events with sharp doses of humour such as the scenes in the classes where he goes to obtain French citizenship. This magic reality approach coupled with the use of symbols and metaphors to discuss identity and origin make it a very rich work. Shai Goldman uses the camera often in hand-held mode and often focusing on just one part of the body to great effect. And with Paris as the background, seen in a very different way to the way French photographers portray it, there is plenty to think about.
Tom Mercier, who is Franco-Israeli, debuts in the film and is magnetic in his performance. His future augurs well as does that of this creative director.
I wanted to like this movie. It has a solid theme, that of the fight against a company polluting a Japanese village with mercury poisoning.
It represents the return of Johnny Depp to more serious roles and possibly some sort of rehabilitation. Where there is smoke there is fire regarding his private life but there is something almost exaggerated about the hate he seems to inspire.
Here, he gives a competent almost understated performance. We also have Benoit Delhomme behind the camera and the great Ryuichi Sakamoto in charge of the soundtrack. And a film with Bill Nighy in it can’t be all bad. But when the most moving moments are the credits passing with images of the huge number of cases of industrial pollution worldwide, it doesn’t speak so well of the film itself.
Minamata is somewhat messy and maybe focusing it on Gene Smith, the cranky grizzly drunk photojournalist whose images of the local people suffering reached the cover of Life magazine and from there to the world was not the best approach.
The grainy photography and hand-held shots give the film authenticity but also distance it and while we all felt that we were being felled by the tear gas used to dispel protestors I am not sure if this is an audience winner.
Sure, the re-creation of the time seems pretty accurate but it took away from the immediacy the topic called for. Strangely, the photography gets lost ad yet it is at the centre of the story. Well- meaning but director Andrew Levitas should be able to improve on this.
French rom-com about a young successful writer (what again?) who wakes up one day to find that he is no longer married to the love of his life and that she has become a successful pianist. After trying to make sense of his new surroundings and work, he sets out with the aid of his best friend to regain his lost love posing among other things as a biographer keen to write her story.
This film mixes Groundhog Day and other concepts used before in the cinema. It demands a certain patience and acceptance of the rather unlikely circumstances and needs more humour than merely the time warp.
While I found this quite pacy at the start I soon got quite tired and struggled to see the film out, not helped by the subtitling.
Francois Civil as Raphael and Josephine Japy as Olivia
make a credible lead couple and Civil has a comic zest about him. But much more amusing is his friend Felix, played by Benjamin Lavernhe.
He scored a Cesar nomination for this role and has a real comic ability. He and some scenes of the Camargue kept me going
but sadly Hugo Gélin’s comedy doesn’t have enough to sustain my interest.
The follow-up to series 1 and 2 seen earlier this year. 12 episodes which did not disappoint. Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) and Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries)
return to fight crime in the Berlin Police Department but also struggle to keep their lives intact with an ever-increasing appreciation for each other.
Corruption inside the police is a big topic here as 1929 hurtles on.
We see how Wendt, a police councilor and Ulrich a forensic scientist are heavily involved.
A major plot line involves a war in the underground with Armenian nightclub owner and film producer Kasabian
producing a film which loses a number of its cast and crew to murder.
The film has an amazing fantasy look from these days of early talkies and provides much of the musical numbers.
Finally, among the main themes is the impending Wall Street Crash and the efforts of those to anticipate it and take advantage.
All of these strands are intriguingly handled and well blended to give us a fascinating look at the times and the place.
If I had one quibble, it would be that the quota of violence seems to be increasing.
On the other hand, issues like gay love, quack medicine and abortions also find a place.
Sufficiently entertaining to allow me to binge, this is a considerable achievement by German TV.
This documentary starts relatively small and quietly as new mother Nanfu Wang reflects on being a mother in her family and connects back to her grandmother and aunt.
Nanfu was born in a time in China when the law prohibited women from having more than one child. Nanfu’s mother managed to have two but this was the exception and everything was done in favour of her younger brother and not her.
Her aunt abandoned a baby to die at the local market.
Little by little the protagonist and her co-director Jialing Zhang piece together details of life in China between the 1980’s and 2015 when this law was replaced by a new one urging mothers to have two children.
They visit state employees who worked as family planners and abortionists in the period, they speak to families who either abandoned children or had them removed from their care, they discover intricate systems of baby trafficking, including ones which sold children overseas, especially to the US, complete with a story about the child’s origins which had probably been a fabrication of the truth.
Among the more interesting subjects are an artist who upon discovering abandoned children in rubbish dumps decided to paint fetuses on every page of Mao’s Little Red Book, an American couple who manage a database full of adopted children and their DNA in the hope of tracing them back to their Chinese families
and a journalist who wrote a book about all these practices and has been forced to go undercover in Hong Kong. In a very quiet way, the build up of anecdotes is horrifying. We get a sense of how an entire nation was obliged to follow a policy that threatened to punish them if they disobeyed. The propaganda machine is constant, relentless and surprisingly naïve in its effectiveness.
As Nanfu says late in the film, whether it be Chinese obliging women to have abortions and the US preventing women from having them, they are two sides of the same coin – governments deciding what women can do with their bodies. The sheer arrogance of male superiority in China is stated so clearly and softly here – men matter, women are disposable.
Nanfu makes this and other points extremely well in this shocking and at times harrowing documentary, once again pointing out the harm that politicians can do to a nation. Maybe it saved China from economic chaos and set them on the road to their present prosperity but the spiritual and mental damage caused, and largely still repressed and denied looks to be immense.
Abdellatif Kechiche won the Golden Palm for Blue is the Warmest Colour only to become embroiled in controversy relating to the treatment of the actors in that film. He has been accused of misogyny and of disguising what is closer to soft porn in the form of art. So, this is his long-awaited follow-up and part of a trilogy. The second part has been released to poor reviews and the third is nowhere to be seen for now. As he often does, Kechiche sets this film in the community of Tunisian born French living in the south of France, namely Sete, one of the ferry ports to North Africa. The film itself is a very free adaptation of a novel set in the countryside.
Basically, it concerns Amin, a young man who has suspended his studies to be a doctor, come back from Paris to spend summer with the family as he decides if he wants to be a film scriptwriter. Same old trick of casting the main character as an alter ego of the director, or perhaps not. What happens during the film is not much. Amin follows his friends and family around to the beach, the family restaurant and to bars and nightclubs. He is very much the voyeur and attention is on the bevy of nubile young women who get drunk and dance seemingly every night. To this extent the film is a sort of homage to hedonism and long remembered summers and is beautifully photographed by Marco Grazoplena.
But apart from appearing to recommend that the young people get their rocks off and have fun dancing and drinking and flirting it is not sure what else is the point here.
His cousin Toni (Salim Kechiouche) is a playboy and flits from woman to woman as do a number of other men in the family group including a rather heavy type called Kemal.
The women seem to tolerate this and one of the two best scenes includes a group of women both older and younger on the beach discussing the merits of marriage. Delinda Kechiche, sister of the director plays Amin’s mother in this scene and seems more liberal than her son and we also have Hafsia Herzi,
who has starred in the director’s films before is a suitably swinging aunt with a foreign fiancé. These long chatty scenes often seem improvised and are enjoyable for their naturalness and the camerawork on the faces of the characters. The main female role is played by Ophélie Bau, a woman with a spectacular behind that Kechiche focuses longingly on.
Ophélie is engaged to a military man who is absent and is busy having an affair with Toni, thereby stirring up jealousy among other girls. She is a pretty constant flirt and Amin seems caught in her magnetic field. But theirs is a friendship, nothing more and apart from long peripatetic talks, the other main scene is when she takes him to photograph her herd of goats at the time when one nanny goat is about to give birth. Quite what this scene, when Amin is left alone with the goats, means in the grand scheme of things is unclear but it is one of the most beautiful sequences in the film. Does Amin get his rocks off in this flirty summer? Apparently not. He is either very shy, very good at repressing his feelings or maybe gay as he is not short of opportunities. Which is another enigma of the movie.
Shaim Boumedine, who is very good looking indeed handles this elusive character well but we clearly needed to know more about what makes this boy tick.
In terms of a movie that washed over me pleasantly and had me yearning for summer, Mektoub works on one level but apart from that I found it hard to decide what I was supposed to take from it. The new liberation of French Arabs? A nostalgic look at the 90’s and the top dance music of the era? Long conversations before mobiles became ubiquitous?
Hollywood keeps chipping away at the issue of racial injustice and this film was released not long before the George Floyd incident and Black Lives Matter.
Bryan Stevenson is a young black Harvard graduate who heads down to Alabama with the mission of bringing equal justice to society, especially the largely African-American inmates on Death Row.
He founds a legal centre and takes on the defence of such prisoners with a figure of 140 saved from Death Row to date.
This film is largely the story of one case, that of Johnnie Dee aka Walter Mc Millan who’s arrest and charging has clearly been engineered to get a quick and convenient solution to a crime.
The film itself is fairly low-key and predictable ending in the usual courtroom scene.
But for that it seems authentic. The drama comes from the fact that this story is true and that the manouevres here are repeated in many cases underlining what we already know: that the US is far from a fair democracy for so many of its citizens.
Michael B Jordan is effective as Stevenson but it is Jamie Foxx as Johnny D who brings weight and sensibility to the film in one of his best performances for years.
Brie Larson as the co-founder of the legal office adds her ability to the cast. This film by Destin Daniel Cresson is important for its message but is rather less inspiring cinematographically which may have been the intention – let the facts speak for themselves. Nevertheless, it is a good watch and a necessary addition to the collection of films on this topic.
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