Bros

Gay rom-com by gays for gays and with gays, and it comes from a major studio.  Without being stunning, it does an honourable job at following rom-com rules and is an enjoyable and perceptive reflection on where we are at today, or at least in New York.  

Bobby (Billy Eichner) is a podcaster, cultural commentator and soon to be LGBTQ museum curator who is strong and ‘happily single’ at 40.  That is until he meets a jock type (Luke MacFarlane) who he falls into an on-again off-again romance.  

The two men keep stepping on each other’s toes and then try to reaccommodate each other and this gives us much of the comedy as well as some of the scenes in the museum committee as they plan for the official opening.

There are many references to cultural handlings of the gay issue including a running gag on a TV channel that alludes to Hallmark.  

Eichner also wrote the script with director Nicholas Stoller and while he can get a bit wordy, he does ensure the pace moves along well.  Debra Messing from Will and Grace makes an amusing cameo. An appropriate soundtrack will also have the audience sighing.

Light and enjoyable but plenty to think about if you pause for a moment.

4 stars

Endings Beginnings

Decided to try a recent romantic film.  Not a great success.  Shailene Woodley plays Daphne, recently broken up from her long-term boyfriend and now shacked up at her sister’s looking for a job and a new start in life.  

This comes when she meets not one but two men at a party and ends up pinging between the two. All very heavy and in the end we suppose Daphne has learnt a little but not too much.

The first major problem with the movie is stylistic.  It seems to be shot mainly in the dark with most characters shot from the side or the back and some irritating little tricks like scenes when the dialogue or soundtrack of a conversation keeps going but suddenly the character is elsewhere inside her head either remembering or projecting into the future.  It doesn’t help.  Then the pace of the film is funereal, it drifts along in a dream for far too long and the storyline is pretty bare.

Woodley does what she can to convey the inner confusion and loss of direction of her character and actually comes out of it quite well but Daphne is a personality free zone for the most part.  It even makes you wonder what men see in her.  

Jack, played by Jamie Dorman also tries his best and has something more to hook onto while Sebastian Stan as bad-boy lover starts promisingly and then just fades away.

There is some growth towards the very end but it is not enough to save this very pedestrian work by Drake Doremus pretending to be something much more than it is.

1 star plus

The French Dispatch

Wes Anderson is back.  This director who is an acquired taste produces an ingenious and very creative work ´honouring´ a Kansas newspaper which had a columnist sending dispatches from France for 50 years.

  In the last edition they decide to tell 3 main stories,

one related to a prisoner who does abstract art, another about student protests and the third blending cooking, the police and a kidnapping.

  These are set in the imaginary town of Ennui-sur-Blasé and we get to see a world that is both a recreation of France and a satire of it with many references to French things – such as the names.

The production design is superb and incredibly detailed and compensates for the fairly mundane stories.  It´s as if Anderson wants us to focus on these and the parade of star actors more than in the story.  Some critics complain about a lack of emotional engagement.  Its true.  But the point seems to be more a question of producing an imaginative reproduction of things French or mimicking France than to involve us in real characters and stories.

The cast list is a delight.  

Old Anderson regulars like Bill Murray and Owen Wilson are joined by Frances McDormand

Benicio del Toro,

Adrian Brody, Timothée Chalamet,

Saoirse Ronan,

Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton,

Lois Smith, Christoph Waltz, Lea Seydoux  and Cecile de France to name a few.

I liked this film but I didn’t love it and Anderson’s style does tend to preclude a degree of engagement. It is a very clever well produced exercise and probably merits a second watch to pick up on all the references but on the other hand the lack of a really gripping story tells in the end.

3 stars plus

Papicha

I’m in two minds about this film by new director Mounia Meddour.  Set in Algeria during the Civil War during the 90´s when the country entered a period of violent Islamic backlashes, it tells the story of Nedjma, a young university literature student who dreams of becoming a fashion designer.

At the start of the film she and her best friend Wassila sneak out to discos and sell Nedjma’s creations in the bathroom but things quickly become fraught with danger. University lecturers are roughed up by marauding zealots in black headscarves and hijabs and most men take the climate as licence to be even more misogynist than usual.

Nedjma presses on with a fashion show of hijabs coloured with local dyes and draped in creative ways to be held for women only at the local university but even this is threatened.  On the way different tragedies occur and the ending is really quite strong. The story is loosely based on Meddour’s own experiences before she left for France but she has added in plot twists.

What I liked about the film was the fresh female energy with Lyna Khoudri and Shirine Boutella, the main protagonists coming across as credible young adults stuck in a world that is changing in a bad way.  

The first half moves along well and Meddour has some style in her filming though this is somewhat uneven.  I also liked the social conscience factor of depicting a black period in Algeria that governments and people do not want to revisit but needs to be recorded.

However, there are some plot weaknesses and some rather loose editing that could have been handled better, not to mention some very stereotypical portrayal of men.  Apart from the university professor not one other man shows any real compassion and support for women.

In the end, it is an enthusiastic work shedding light on a dark time but does not come across as a great piece of cinema.  Nonetheless, Meddour is a director to follow.

3 stars

Tommaso

To be charitably described as a character study, Tommaso is in fact a fairly close reflection of the life of veteran US film maker Abel Ferrara.  Living in Rome for 20 years with a much younger foreigh wife and very young daughter, Tommaso is a film maker, yoga student, drama teacher and reformed alcoholic.  Much like the director and writer we gather.

Cristina Chiriac, his real-life wife plays Tommaso’s wife and his daughter plays his daughter.  His fetish actor Willem Dafoe plays Tommaso.  

The film starts slowly and as Tommaso is a difficult irritating self-centred character, things seem to drag.  But slowly I got to appreciate some positive features about this movie.

Firstly, Willem Dafoe is complete and generous in the lead role.  His is a memorable character with a distinct gait and body language.  His unique face also conveys the troubles of a neurotic person who while trying to do right in his newish relationship keeps committing all the old mistakes.

Dotted about the film are some deeper, memorable scenes as insights appear and the director’s vision of Rome particularly by night adds to the movie.

The ambiguity of what is real and what is imagined in Tommaso’s head is also interesting and left up to the spectator to fathom, especially a rather abrupt twist at the end.

On balance, it is not a great movie but there is plenty to think about here.

3 stars (largely for Dafoe!)

Boys State

More than interesting documentary on the American legion project to teach young people democracy, an activity that has been going for decades and has seen future Presidents and leaders of branches of the government pass through its ranks.

This particular film features the 2018 version for boys (girls have a separate event) in Texas.  We follow the boys over a week organize themselves into parties, campaign for positions and debate proposals.  A sort of UN model for the USA with one held annually in virtually every state.

The directors Amanda McBaines and Jesse Moss choose 4 boys to follow and there seems to be some prior selection here as Steven Garza,

a part Mexican ends up being a candidate for Governor, Ben and René end up being party chairs and Robert was also in the governor’s race.  

René is black and originally from Chicago so he is met with some resistance in this strongly white State, Ben is a double amputee and go-getter with an acute political nose and Robert seems like a jock off to officer school but has his shades.

While some of the content, eg, proposals reflect teenage boys of 16-17, much of what we see is a microcosm of adult politics with the same issues of abortion and gun control looming large.  

It is very interesting to see how the boys go about discussing these and constructing a platform between the ones who listen and try to blend personal convictions with the party line and others that say whatever they feel will get them the vote.  Towards the end, the issues get lost as political point scoring takes over and the boys show they have learnt from Trump and co.

It is not as depressing as it could be, though it shows how vast swathes can get swayed by emotional voting and simplification of issues.  There were at least some decent boys with their hearts in the right place to keep democracy alive (notably Steven and René) but many who see it as a race to power.

4 stars

Je Suis á toi (All Yours)

Slightly older Belgian-Canadian film set in Liege.  

Lucas (Nahuel Perez-Biscayarte) plays an Argentine escort who ends up in the home of a sugar daddy. Said Henry (Jean-Michel Balthasar) is a severely overweight baker and soon puts Lucas to work as a virtual slave, something that the young man cannot accept.  

The relationship soon becomes very angry.  Meanwhile, Audrey (Monia Chokri) who works in the shop takes a fancy to Lucas and gets him to babysit her young son, even though she knows he is gay.

In a film of unexpected twists and a slice of Belgian life, we actually witness three characters who are somewhat lost and lonely looking for a companion in all the wrong places. 

 Perez-Biscayarte in a role before his performance in 120BPM shows that he is an excellent actor and makes a rather unlovable character believable and poignant.  

Balthasar is also good in a tricky part.  Some graphic sex scenes and a rather grey Belgian background may put some off but this small movie by David Lambert has its good features.

2 stars plus

Stillwater

Directed by Tom McCarthy of Spotlight fame, this film premiered at Cannes and promised good things but has been largely ignored by both critics and the public.  

Loosely based on the Amanda Knox case of an American who killed her flatmate in Italy and was later found not guilty after serving some of her sentence, the action here translates to Marseilles.  Allison (Abigail Breslin) is in prison for murdering her flatmate and lover but believes there is a man who is responsible that the police can’t or won’t find as the judge refuses to re-open the case.  

Cue Bill, her father, an Oklahoman oil rig worker who decides to stay on during one of his periodic visits to investigate the case on his own.  He has practically no French and is culturally lost but still manages to make some headway partly thanks to Virginie, an actress whose daughter he befriends in the hotel he is staying in.

  The film is basically his search for this potential killer interspersed with scenes of his somewhat testy relationship with his daughter, his much better relationship with Maya, the young French girl and the burgeoning friendship with Virginie.

The two main minuses of the film are that it is quite slow-moving and long and while some scenes add interesting details to the movie, you wonder if they were necessary.   

Secondly and connected to this is the fact that thriller and relationship themes sit uneasily side by side at times and produce uneven pacing.

Having said that, I think this is a better film than is given credit for.  Good photography and music, it’s big plus is the acting.  

Matt Damon produces one of his best ever performances as a gruff and silent oil man, trying to get by in the world.  Camille Cottin, apparently famous in French TV is a delight as Virginie, a very intelligent performance and Breslin does well in a character very different to her Little Miss Sunshine days.

  These all lift this film immensely as does a portrayal of Marseilles in both its dingy and more elegant sides.

3 stars plus

Lemonade

Independent film by Romanian filmmaker Ioana Uricaru about the trials faced by a young Romanian mother Mara (Malina Manovici) as she tries to get a Green Card to stay in the US.  

Mara came to work for 6 months as a nurse and shortly before the end of this period gets married to a patient (Dylan Scott Smith) who needs her caring and is willing to get married to help Mara bring her son Dragos to the States and to start a new life.  

Dragos comes and Mara is more determined than ever to find a way in.  The stumbling block is the Migration agent in charge of her case (Steve Bacic) who finds every way to prevent her from being approved and in turn abuses the limits of his power.  This forces Mara to use new strategies.  

The main point of the story would seem to be to show how badly potential migrants are treated – the assumption being that all want to cheat their way in.  And that the Homeland Department or whoever is responsible for filtering these migrants is a cavalier and not very correct organisation either.

This is a human story of people seeking a better life and is effective as such although perhaps a little bit simplistic.  Manovici in particular convinces as the innocent but not so innocent Mara.

Perhaps the real message is “Beware of trying to migrate to the US, you may find it isn’t a walk in the park.”

Quiet and watchable.

3 stars

Another Self (series)

From Turkey comes this series which takes as its central theme the fact that the actions of our ancestors live on in our own genes and need to be faced so as to overcome challenges in this reincarnation.  The method to do this is a form of family constellations which is not mentioned by name in the series but plays out as such.

Ada, Leyla and Sevgi are three thirty-something friends who all have issues.  

Sevgi is suffering from cancer and goes to visit Zeman, who organizes constellations in his place in Ayvalik, a beautiful coastal area south of Istanbul and facing Lesbos.  As a result of Sevgi’s experience and success the women visit again with varying degrees of success and willingness to sort out their lives issues:

Leyla with a husband who has financial issues and Ada with love and professional problems.  

A love interest emerges for Sevgi and various other characters and stories appear.

It’s pretty much soap opera fare with a few differences.  

Beautifully photographed and generally well-acted, some of the characterisations are somewhat vague, perhaps awaiting a second series.  

Tuba Büyüküstün as Ada, Murat Boz as bohemian musician Toprak head the cast,

Seda Bakan and Boncuk Yilmaz as Sevgi give good support.

Enjoyable enough with rather a rushed ending.

3 stars plus