Colectiv

This Romanian documentary gained Oscar nominations and awards all over the world and is a bit horrifying in the way it depicts the effects of largely political corruption. The name comes from the name of a disco in Bucharest where there was a tragic fire in 2015 with 26 victims on-site and 38 subsequently.  The fire itself and the use of pyrotechnics inside a building resulted in protests that eventually brought down a government but this film focuses on the 38 who died in hospitals.  Despite the government insisting that Romania could cope, too few victims were transferred abroad for treatment and many of those who died did so from bacterial infections caught in hospital and not from their burns.

Here we follow 3 journalists from a Sports newspaper of all things who start to investigate the causes of these deaths.  Initially, the blame is placed on watered down disinfectant sold to many of the hospitals by a company that seems to have bribed the officials.  Apart from delivering disinfectant 10% of the strength it should be, apparently the hospitals diluted it further.  Hence the scenes of maggots on agonizing patients who are actually in hospital.

Then whistle blowers emerge from the hospital system revealing kickbacks and theft on massive scale by managers and bosses appointed politically and completely inept for running such institutions.  

Into this comes a new Minister of Health, Vlad Voiculescu, a young politician who has been part of a patient activist group.  He is determined to be transparent and make things right and is lucky to be in a technocrat`s government (that which took over government. So, he has some room for maneuver and invites director Alexander Nanau to follow him around.  

We get to see some amazing meetings in which more and more drastic revelations about the corruption and negligence in the system emerge and some scenes in press conferences where he cannot give the public the answers they want because the system is rotten, doctors and all.  We also get spliced into the mix, the story of one survivor of the fire who suffered burns to her body and lost part of her hand and how she allows herself to be photographed for art and how her process of curation is slowly progressing.

The heat on the corrupt politicians makes them fight back attacking Voiculescu wherever possible and a sombre ending is when the public in the new elections vote the former corrupt government back into power pretty massively.  Our journalistic team start getting threats to their lives.

Nanau directs all this like an action movie.  The pace is quick and sometimes you have to watch carefully to keep up.  Between this pace and the horrors revealed, you never lose interest.

So, a very competent film with few apparent tricks – just telling it like it is.  One clear message is the need for good journalism that as the cliché goes – speaks truth to power.  

Another is the need for independent judiciaries and legal processes that can really put limits on political decisions which are merely benefiting a few.

We understand not much has changed in Romania (several hospital fires during the pandemic) and one cannot be optimistic for the future.  Yes, there is greater public awareness but this is not compelling politicians to change their behaviour.  Worst of all is the fact that this could be happening in the US, Argentina or other parts of Europe.  In a world with a UN Declaration of Human Rights, with the money to make life better for everyone have we got to a place where the opposite is happening and seemingly condoned by so many.  Something to reflect and act on!

4 stars 2 plusses.

Words on Bathroom Walls

Another young adult film released in 2020 which combines a romantic story with a medical condition.  Adam (Charlie Plummer) is diagnosed as schizophrenic, put on drugs and moved to a strict Catholic school.  The drugs repress the voices and images he sees but cause other side effects like trembling which affect his ability to cook (his dream is to become a chef).  

Meanwhile, he is trying to cope with being the new boy in senior year and with academic subjects he is ill-prepared for.  

Enter Maya (Taylor Reid), the school valedictorian but also from an impoverished background with her single Dad who is of Hispanic origin.  Maya helps Adam with his Maths and the two head towards romance but Adam is scared to tell her what his problem is.  

He is also trying to handle his mother (Molly Parker) and her new boyfriend and pregnancy.  

Some solace comes from Father Patrick (Andy Garcia), who seems to be a bit more grounded than most.

Visions, no visions, pills, no pills, it all has to come to a head and does so quite dramatically but with a happy ending.

I wasn’t so convinced by the story and many of the characters are one dimensional with only Adam and his mother having some really meaty scenes.

Charlie Plummer is excellent as Adam and barely strikes a false note throughout.  He has to deliver many scenes straight to the camera as if talking to his therapist and he does them well.  Parker and Garcia are best of the rest.  What director Thor Freudenthal does effectively, is handle the schizophrenia subject sensitively and he engineers characters and visual images and voices to give us an idea of what Adam must be experiencing.

Apart from that, this is pretty run-of-the-mill teen stuff.

2 stars plus

Night Raiders

The year is 2054 and society is a mess.  Cities are abandoned and all children have been taken by the government to brainwash them and presumably use them as breeders, etc.  

Some people, especially the native people, are living outside the law in illegal camps trying to survive as the powers in charge requisition more and more land for mining, etc.

This Canadian/New Zealand film which is quite low budget still manages to convey a scary scenario like this effectively.   Moreover, the way it is structured and told it functions as a sort of allegory concerning the treatment of 1^st Nations by the state over the years.

The main characters here are Cree Indians and are precisely those people trying to avoid being overtaken by the other world.

Niska (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) is a young mother with a 14 year-old daughter Waseese (Brooklyn Letexier-Hart) who after stepping on an animal trap needs medical attention.  They head to the city and despite help from friends like Roberta (Amanda Plummer), they are found and Niska has to abandon her daughter to the state to ensure she gets help.

Waseese ends up in a reformatory type institution.  Ten months later Niska returns to rescue her and at the same time rescue other Native children in the establishment.

She is helped by Leo (Alex Tarrant), a Maori man who is working with the tribe and two of its leaders Ida (Gail Maurice) and Somonis (Violet Nelson) who speak Cree much of the time.

This debut work by Cree filmmaker Danis Goulet is quite cool in that aspect, we have a film spoken in English, French, Cree and Maori at the same time.  

There are some scary scenes involving drones and the rest is desolately bleak and hopeless as we imagine a post-apocalyptic world to be.  

Tailfeathers shows again what a competent and appealing actress she is – convincing us in her role.  The others fit in well and the overall production is sound enough to take an interesting story and film it without so many resources.  There are plot holes and such but particularly from the middle onwards the film keeps us well-engaged.

3 stars

Till

Another film to record the treatment of blacks in US history.  Emmett Till was a 14 year-old black teenager lynched in Mississippi while visiting his family there.

The year was 1955.  Emmett, or Beau as he was known, was brought up in Chicago and despite warnings from his mother, he did not believe that the treatment of blacks in the Southern State was so bad.  However, in a confused incident, he was at least cheeky towards a white lady store owner and later her family kidnapped him from his family’s house and tortured and killed him.  

This film focuses mostly on his mother, Mamie Till, who after receiving the shocking news decided to make the lynching public, having an open casket funeral and allowing photographers to film the body and publish the photos nationwide.  Then she went to Mississippi to testify in the murder trial of the two men, a courageous step in those days as black people just did not testify against whites in those days.  Predictably, the jury of white men brought in a verdict of not guilty and the white woman who also perjured herself in court and who was an accessory to the murders never faced charges.

Till’s story was researched over the years by Keith Beauchamp and some closure came in 2021, 67 years after the event when a new anti-lynching law was signed into place by Joe Biden.  A shockingly long time with many black deaths in the interim.

Beauchamp is a co-writer here with director Chinonye Chukwu and Michael Reilly and the solid script is one of a number of strong features.  Chukwu is the director of the excellent Clemency and this film is not far behind. Perhaps because it is a biopic, there is a certain looseness at moments as characters are introduced and information given but on the whole Chukwu has an intelligent thoughtful approach.  

One feature here is the number of close-ups on Danielle Deadwyler as Mamie.  We see Mamie in most scenes as she absorbs the terrible news, takes the courage to make a public stand about it and eventually becomes a spokesperson and activist for civil rights.  Fortunately, Deadwyler is more than up to the challenge and produces a superb performance that was scandalously omitted from the Oscar nominees like Alfre Woodard in Clemency.  

She is supported by Jalyn Hall as the young Emmett, Jayme Lawson as the wife of another activist and Whoopi Goldberg making an appearance as her mother as well as being a producer of the film.

Till is a great new addition to the library of films on US treatment of blacks and gives us a clear documentation of one of the seminal incidents in that history.

4 stars plus

Brotherhood

One of the first films I’ve seen from Nigeria and part of the Nollywood industry, Nigeria’s answer to Hollywood and Bollywood.  Brotherhood is an action film and top box-office success in the country in 2022.

My first impression is that technically it is very polished.  Some well-shot heist scenes and for those who want to see blood and guts it’s all there.

Set in Lagos, it is about two brothers, orphaned as kids and growing up to be a policeman and a criminal respectively.

Akin (Tobi Bakre) is coming out of jail at the beginning and ends up joining a new local gang, the Ojuju Boys led by the charismatic Shadow (Basketmouth – what a name for an actor).  Falz plays his brother Wale who is new to a SWAT team of the police and soon into the film he weds the daughter of his boss.  In the middle is an ineffective and emotional aunt (Ronke Oshodi Oke).

For an action film the plot is simple.  We have three heists by the gang and in each case the brothers get closer and closer to confronting each other, leading in the 3^rd heist to that very end.

Acting is good and getting to see something of the life of gangs in Nigeria and of the huge and not entirely welcoming city of Lagos is interesting.

A solid effort.

3 stars

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things

Not much to say about this teen-centred version of Groundhog Day updated and shoved into the teen romance category.  It had good reviews by and large and is based on a short story (always a warning sign about material stretched too far).

Mark is a teen caught in a temporal anomaly (living the same day over and over).  He thinks he’s alone until he meets Margaret who is experiencing the same.  

She is fun and enchanting and he wants her to be his girlfriend but she is reluctant.  

Meanwhile they make a map of perfect moments in their hometown as they figure out how to beat this time blip.  Mark tries to cross the international date line in a plane top Japan but it fails and next day he’s back in bed.

All fantasy stuff, not very convincing or credible at all but it frames the beginning of what we think will be a sweet romance.

I didn’t think much of Lev Grossman’s screenplay or Ian Samuel’s direction though the technical aspects are good enough.

The main salvation here is Kathryn Newton as Margaret, always engaging and worth watching. Kyle Allen is more a typical US teen (the actor is 26 and seems a trifle old for 17) but he just gets by in a personality free role.

That about sums it up.  Anodyne. 

2 stars

Navillera (Series)

12-part Korean drama series. It may not be the greatest series ever but what I did appreciate about it was that it took somewhat unusual themes and wove them into a heartwarming story full of human values.

Deok-chul Shim (In-hwan Park) is a 73 year-old-man who realizes that his life is ending and wants to fulfil a dream he had as a boy – to become a ballet dancer and to be on stage at once in his life.  

This dream is triggered again when he sees a young 23-year-old rehearsing.  He goes to the head of the dance studio and asks about dance classes and ends up being taught by the younger man, Lee Chae-Rok, who is not entirely happy about the arrangement.  

As times goes by, Deok Chul, or Mr Shim as he is known, manages to progress surprisingly well and he and Chae-Rok become friends and companions to each other in their needs.  The older man has his family against him and is later revealed to have been diagnosed with Alzheimer´s. This last condition worsens as the series goes on and the urgency is for Mr Shim to get his day on stage before he forgets his steps.

Chae-Rok (Song Kang) meanwhile has various issues.  He is basically alone as his mother has died and his father is in prison for beating a teenage footballer he was coaching.  

This latter character is now following and threatening Chae-Rok on the basis that his life was ruined by the father.  Chae-Rok is regarded as having immense talent but has not fulfilled it yet due to injury and lack of discipline, in part fueled by his family problems.

We also get an insight into Mr Shim’s family life: his supportive wife Hae-Nam (Moon-hee Na), his three children, a work-obsessed elder son, a daughter unable to have children and a youngest son who has walked away from medicine after a crisis.  And there is a less extensive plotline concerning Seung-Joo Ki, the ballet coach, a once famous dancer whose career was cut short by injury and who finds it hard to adapt to coaching.

So, the film is about following your dreams and the practice and discipline required to do so and placing it in the arena of men’s ballet is indeed novel.  Adding the twist of Alzheimer’s and focusing on the elderly is also a great plus and reflects common issues in society today that are often ignored in the arts. Many other points relating to societal pressures in Korea are raised but they are relevant globally.

The acting is uniformly convincing, the script intelligent and there are some moving scenes but none are milked melodramatically.  

Song Kang is a young Korean Netflix actor and does very well as the young dancer having studied ballet to perform the role.  The older actors – Park and Na are excellent and convey the concerns of their age perfectly.

If I had a criticism it is that 12 episodes of an hour stretched the material a little thin in the end and that 10 episodes would have been tighter.  As it is, once the final issue of the race between Alzheimer’s and the ballet recital is set, there is not much space for any extra storylines and yet it did drag a little in the end.

Apart from that Navillera is a welcome addition to serious drama series and I hope to see more of the same from Korea soon.

4 stars

Are you there, God? It’s me Margaret

Not the sort of film or topic I’d normally watch but this version of the classic Judy Blume novel was a pleasant surprise.  Set in the 70’s, Margaret is an 11-year old girl whose parents are moving away from New York to New Jersey.  A difficult time to make new friends with puberty on the doorstep and the beloved grandmother now far away.  We follow Margaret over the course of the year, her acceptance into a group of friends led by the bossy Nancy, the obsession with growing breasts and when the period will arrive and the subtleties of friendship and discrimination among classmates.  

Alongside that are her mother’s efforts to fit into the local PTA group, especially being an art teacher with a more casual style.  Underpinning all of this is a religious issue.  Margaret is the child of a Jewish father and a Christian mother and there is a family schism based on that.  Margaret herself has been brought up without religion and interestingly her teacher suggests she gets to know more about religion for a school project. 

All of these topics are handled with sensitivity and directness appropriate for the age.  You can see why people might want to ban Blume’s book but the was she deals with these issues is excellent and contrasts with the appalling sex education talk she has which was similar to ones I recall.

Kathy Bates as Sylvia Simon and Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret Simon in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Photo Credit: Dana Hawley

The cast does well. Abby Ryder Fortson is a natural unassuming Margaret, no pretensions at all and the other young cast members are all entirely credible.  Kathy Bates is fun as Grandma,

Bennie Safdie makes a good slightly nerdy Dad and Rachel McAdams nearly steals the whole film as Margaret’s mother, a lovely nuanced portrayal of a liberal woman dealing with the conservative environment of the time.

All in all, a good solid movie from Kelly Fremon Craig.

4 stars

Blonde

Arguably one of the most controversial films this year with the unusual contrast of a lead actress being Oscar nominated and widely hailed for her performance in a film that won the Razzies Worst Film of the Year and had countless poor reviews in Rotten Tomatoes.

I made every effort to have an open mind as I watched this and for the first hour or so I thought the film had some redeeming features.  But it dragged on and on and got increasingly sordid as we witnessed Marilyn Monroe’s decline. 

Director and writer Andrew Dominik took Joyce Carol Oates novel and brings us the Marilyn story bereft of almost all magic and focusing on the way she was exploited and victimised all in the name of Hollywood profits and North American lustful curiosity.  Ana de Armas does create a memorable character and makes us believe that she IS Marilyn/Norma Jeane.  She gets put through the ringer in the film but remains convincing throughout.  

Julianne Nicholson livens up the early scenes as her lunatic mother, at one point driving towards a forest fire in the same way that the mother in The Fabelmans heads for a tornado.  

Bobby Cannevale as the Joe di Maggio character and Adrien Brody as playwright Arthur Miller are also acceptable.

The problem is not with the acting though.  There are four main flaws in my view.  One, it is too long and needs serious editing, especially given the relentless bad news and lack of light and shade.  Secondly, the emphasis on the victimization of Marilyn means that all we see are nasty acts, harassment from the public, sexual abuse, drug taking, forced abortions, etc etc.  We get no sense that anyone is looking after Marilyn at all and surely that was not accurate.  Some of the scenes, even simple ones where her secretaries read her hateful fan mail seem plain cruel.

Thirdly are the director’s choices to have POV shots and dream sequences.  The audience becomes the toilet she vomits into, the uterus her fetus is removed from and even the penis of the President she fellates.  Too much!  Of course, it is meant to shock and it is not so much that it is in very dubious taste but the fact that it is probably unnecessary.  As the movie goes on and Marilyn gets more hysterical we have dream memories of her childhood and parental abuse, the imagined letters and conversations she has with her absent father, etc.

My last qualm is with the focus.  Monroe was noted for being a highly intelligent woman which barely comes through here.  When it does, it is not used for validation of her but to show how she is used and discriminated against.  Marilyn wrote the odd article or essay, had excellent comic timing and despite her sad early demise produced some excellent performances in her films.  Sadly, and to the detriment of this work, we don’t see much here.

5 stars for de Armas. A few points for camerawork and the other actors and a low score for the film overall.  Not something I’d want to sit through again.

1 star plus

Air

A very typically North American film about a business success story.  This was the signing of Michael Jordan to Nike as a young basketballer when he was determined not to sign with that firm due to their poor previous association with basketball shoes.

We follow Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), talent scout for the organization as he attempts to convince the Jordan family and his own firm that the future is Jordan (which of course it was).  He breaks plenty of rules in the meantime but eventually achieves his objective and Jordan is signed in a deal which includes a part of each of the new Air Jordan shoes that have been designed for him.  This is one of the first cases which gave athletes more earnings in these huge sponsorship deals.

For a film with an almost documentary feel about it, Air is enjoyable and watchable.  That is also despite being a massive case of product placement.  Ben Affleck directs but perhaps the two best features are the sharp screenplay written by Alex Convery and the appearance of Viola Davis as Jordan’s mother, a casting request of the great man himself.  

Jordan himself does not really appear in the film, his voice is heard once and a body double plays him in the negotiating scenes.

Generally the acting is good with Davis dominating in her supporting role.

Ben Affleck has another bad hair day as the somewhat weird founder of Nike and Jason Bateman provides solid support. Matt Damon is settling into roles of middle-aged paunch quite convincingly.

Solid entertainment and a good recreation of the period even if there are almost too many songs on the soundtrack.

3 stars plus