Support the Girls (2018)

Supportthegirls

***/****
starring Regina Hall, Haley Lu Richardson, James Le Gros, Shayna McHale
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

by Angelo Muredda A relaxed, low-stakes counterpart of sorts to Boots Riley's more amped-up Sorry To Bother You, Andrew Bujalski's Support the Girls is about as good as movies about labour, power, and empathy for one's fellow worker get. The marketing materials have emphasized the ostensible hijinks wrought by the film's Hooters knockoff setting, pitching Support the Girls as a more conventionally satisfying ensemble comedy than the rambling micro-budget indies with which Bujalski made his mark–a natural next step, after Results, in his post-Computer Chess evolution into the mid-budget range. Its uncharacteristically glossier colour palette and hooky premise aside, though, Support the Girls is a refreshingly rumpled affair that's squarely in the Bujalski tradition, more than earning its cathartic closing moments of a trio of exploited bar workers' collective rooftop scream into the abyss by taking every opportunity available to be the anti-Garden State: a film that prizes character over manufactured quirk and genuine workaday ennui over dopey existentialism.

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018)

Dontworryhewontgetfar

**½/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Kathy Driscoll-Mohler
screenplay by Gus Van Sant, based on the book by John Callahan
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Angelo Muredda "I'm a sucker for quadriplegic movies," VARIETY critic Peter Debruge wrote of Gus Van Sant's Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot from Sundance, before criticism from disabled activists apparently inspired his editors to do some quiet and uncredited post-publication editing. Whatever its merits as a biopic of an outsider artist–dubious, given the cuddliness offensive of Danny Elfman's insistent score–or a "quadriplegic movie" (minimal, given that its subject, Oregon cartoonist John Callahan, was actually a paraplegic), Van Sant's return to movies people might conceivably care about is at least not so homogenous and tired as that backhanded praise suggests. It's hard to shake the feeling that the film is the belated two-birds-with-one-stone fulfilment of a business deal with Callahan, who died in 2010, and Robin Williams, who first optioned the story and once intended to play Callahan himself. Despite the whiff of old Tupperware leftovers that hangs about it, the film is pleasantly rumpled in the tradition of Van Sant's more interesting work–predictably boring in its rehashing of disability clichés, from casting to writing, yes, but formally unusual, and committed to the repetitive and potentially un-cinematic bootstrap work of self-improvement and forgiveness that movies about addicts and accident survivors tend to sail through.

Let the Sunshine In (2017)

Letthesunshinein

Un beau soleil intérieur
***½/****
starring Juliette Binoche, Xavier Beauvois, Josiane Balasko, Sandrine Dumas
screenplay by Claire Denis and Christine Angot, based on the book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda Improbable as it might seem for a filmmaker who once wrestled with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s elliptical and uncanny autobiographical essay on his heart transplant, Claire Denis sets her sights on the ostensibly lower-hanging fruit of the romantic comedy in Let the Sunshine In. This play with formal conventions has some precedent, to be sure, in the near-magical coincidences of Vendredi soir and the table-setting musical centrepiece that drives the final act of 35 Shots of Rum. As with L’Intrus, the film also stands as an idiosyncratic adaptation of a French philosopher’s non-narrative work–this time Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, whose musings on how lovers talk to each other aren’t loaded in the characters’ mouths here so much as they are allowed to steep into the ambience like a strong tea. If the genre of happy endings and restored cosmic imbalances seems on paper to be an odd fit for Denis’s predilections for delicate wordless gestures, in practice, Let the Sunshine In is nevertheless as singular as Denis’s ostensibly less categorizable work: a mercurial and rather lovely portrait of a lonely woman’s attempt to replenish herself and secure her future without closing any doors, which is ultimately as open to possibility as its heroine.

Hot Docs ’18: The End of Fear

End_of_Fear_1

***/****
directed by Barbara Visser

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Barnett Newman’s divisive abstract painting “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III” becomes both a forensic site and a compelling structural absence in Dutch conceptual artist Barbara Visser’s debut feature The End of Fear. What might have been an annoyingly palatable art doc about Gerard Jan van Bladeren’s vandalism of the painting in 1986 (van Bladeren was so outraged by the work’s abrasive shock of red, dramatic asymmetry, and obstinate refusal of representationalism that he decided he had to slash it) and subsequent failed restoration becomes something more slippery and interesting care of Visser’s puckishness as not only a filmmaker but also a presence on screen, where we see her coolly hiring a hungry grad student to create a close reproduction of her own, apparently in the filmmaker’s name. Though the project suffers at times from the preciousness of its noncommittal form–spanning everything from the expected talking heads lecturing about the painting’s mixed critical reception and tabloid history to process-based interludes of Visser’s hired gun hard at work, to abstract top-down tableaux of unnamed, black-clad gallery workers mapping out the painting’s history on the jet-black floor with masking tape and archival photos–for the most part its free-roaming approach to questions of valuation, ownership, and work in contemporary art feels playful in the right way, opening up a number of avenues for discussion out of what feels like genuine curiosity.

Hot Docs ’18: McQueen

Hotdocs18mcqueen

**½/****
directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s McQueen opens, as any look at Alexander McQueen, the queer, working-class, Stratford-raised ruffian turned couturier might well be expected to, with an aesthetic contradiction. The opening credit sequence, which unfolds as a series of smooth pans and tilts across extreme close-ups of baroque, CG-kissed headgear and flower-enmeshed skulls, soon gives way to ratty old videotape of the designer in his pre-Givenchy days, punning on “haute couture” and looking more like a hired hand than like one of the most influential designers of the late twentieth century. The contrast arguably makes for an easy rhetorical move and a reductive treatment of a mercurial man. But in McQueen’s case, the clichéd approach to the departed artist as a divided self–a schlubby guy who made impossible clothes for people who might never have been in his orbit in another life–feels appropriate and true, and marks a fair introduction to the equal attention the filmmakers pay to Lee, the unassuming and devoted family member, friend, learner, and tailor, and McQueen, the image-maker who channelled his own dark history and mental-health struggles into his creations.

Hot Docs ’18: 306 Hollywood

306_Hollywood_2

**/****
directed by Elan Bogarín & Jonathan Bogarín

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Grief becomes an occasion for pontificating about the nature of memory and archives in 306 Hollywood, Elan and Jonathan Bogarín’s surprisingly aloof portrait of their charming grandmother’s trash palace of a home in the months and years after her death. Following an academic talking head’s advice that “Physical evidence helps to preserve a memory”–and a less convincing authority’s insistence that a dead person’s soul lingers in their newly-vacated home for about eleven months after their death–the filmmakers take it upon themselves to turn their grandmother’s house inside-out, the better to immortalize her through the spectral traces they log on camera. The Bogaríns, who appear onscreen in both archival and present-day footage and who take turns narrating the more essayistic stretches of the film, insist upon framing their project as a work of archaeology, library science, and grief work at various points. Too often, though, the result feels like a pair of talented visual and film artists’ distant elevator pitch for a feature, a portfolio of their respective aesthetic inclinations and intellectual influences rather than a cohesive text with something pressing to say about loss and detritus.

Hot Docs ’18: Transformer

Transfomer_1

***/****
directed by Michael Del Monte

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Bodybuilder and ex-marine Janae Marie Kroczaleski’s negotiation of the gender-fraught world of weightlifting after coming out as trans is given a refreshingly straightforward, fly-on-the-wall treatment in Michael Del Monte’s Transformer. The story of a world-championship-winning power builder, affectionately nicknamed “Kroc,” taking some critical early steps in presenting herself socially and professionally as a woman after a long and successful career in two of the most masculinist professions possible reads on paper like the stuff of an exploitative human-interest story. But Del Monte resists the temptation to amp up the inherent drama of a perfectly well-adjusted and engaging person’s life, or to linger, as other woke cis appropriators of trans stories have done, on the metaphorical dimensions of his subject’s transformation by fixating on either her past or the moment of transition. Instead, he recruits Janae as a collaborator in her story in the present, allowing her frank voice and the particular issues she faces today–about whether to maintain or tweak her muscular frame through clothes and exercise regimes, for instance, or whether to undergo vocal-cord surgery–to steer him in more fruitful directions.

Hot Docs ’18: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Wont_You_Neighbour_2

**/****
directed by Morgan Neville

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda It says a lot about the ideological thinness of the Resistance™ against the current American administration that the basic dignity of a lifelong conservative-values Republican gets elevated to the most rarefied heights in Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor?. Though nominally a celebration of the life and storied career of children’s broadcaster Fred Rogers, anchored in present-day talking-head interviews with collaborators and friends that threaten at times to bludgeon the delicate and achingly sincere archival footage of Rogers’s show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood”, Neville’s film has a bit more teeth as a manifesto for how children’s educational programming that resists the trends of busyness, noise, and violence can function as a form of public service, instilling values like neighbourly stewardship and mutual respect.

Before We Vanish (2017)

Beforewevanish

***/****
starring Masami Nagasawa, Ryuhei Matsuda, Mahiro Takasugi, Hiroki Hasegawa

screenplay by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Sachiko Tanaka, based on the play by Tomohiro Maekawa
directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Angelo Muredda The apocalypse becomes an occasion for everything from learning what makes humans tick to getting to know the distant alien who is your significant other in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s genre-defying twentieth feature Before We Vanish, which might be most firmly characterized as a black comedy if it weren’t so puckishly sunny. A return to form of sorts after Creepy and Daguerreotype, neither of which were without their charms but did feel at times like a master’s idle wheel-spinning, Before We Vanish works best as a high-concept sampler platter of the wildly divergent tones Kurosawa is uncommonly good at mixing up. That isn’t to say the alien-invasion framework and neatly bifurcated dystopian road movie/romcom structure are purely excuses to see how much mileage Kurosawa can get out of his generic indeterminacy. Still, one would be hard-pressed to deny that half the fun lies in taking the film in as the strange sum of its many seemingly ill-fitting parts.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017) – Netflix

Meyerowitzstories

***½/****
starring Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Elizabeth Marvel, Emma Thompson
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda Late in Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), one-time piano protégé turned arrested adult Danny Meyerowitz (Adam Sandler) bemoans the fact that his father’s casual abuse over the years never culminated in that one unforgivable thing he or his sister Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) could point to as a deal-breaker, beyond which no love or mercy could be extended. Instead, he says, Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Huffman)–a decently gifted sculptor and by most accounts better college professor whose work is now worth less than the attic it’s stored in–hit them with “tiny things every day. Drip, drip, drip.” With Kicking and Screaming and The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach carved out an impressive niche for himself as a chronicler of how parents’ micro-aggressions, that steady drip of petty criticisms and unnecessarily cutting observations, leave a mark on their hyper-literate upper-middle-class American children. But he’s never found so clear a voice to get across both the anguish and the humour of that condition as he has in his newest, a fussily-constructed but involving and at times impossibly sad family drama about the existential terror of being just smart enough and talented enough to know you’re nothing special.

TIFF ’17: Brad’s Status

Tiff17bradsstatus

**½/****
starring Ben Stiller, Austin Abrams, Jenna Fischer, Michael Sheen
written and directed by Mike White

by Angelo Muredda Nobody captures the insidiousness and pervasiveness of depressive thinking quite like Mike White, who returns to the middle-aged professional anxiety and panic-inducing Impostor Syndrome of “Enlightened” with Brad’s Status, a quiet, obstinately minor film that largely unfolds through the emotionally-stunted protagonist’s daydreaming voiceover critiques of his own minimal actions onscreen. Brad’s Status positions itself as a lower-middle-class American B-side to Éric Rohmer in its focus on one man’s interrogation of his own moral failings, a modest goal it mostly pulls off.

TIFF ’17: The Florida Project

Tiff17floridaproject

***/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, Bria Vinaite, Caleb Landry Jones
written by Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
directed by Sean Baker

by Angelo Muredda “Stay in the future today,” a motel sign ironically beams early in The Florida Project, Sean Baker’s gorgeous, ebullient, and, as the kids say, problematic follow-up to his profile-raising Tangerine. The film is a contemporary fable about a cast of poor people, mostly kids, whose transient lives are lived in Kissimmee, Florida against the looming backdrop of Disney World. Their cheap motel rooms, hosted in a purple monstrosity semi-teasingly named The Magic Castle and negotiated week-to-week at best, serve as a temporary respite from homelessness, their inability to invest in a more permanent future rubbed in their faces daily by the tourists just passing through on their way to somewhere better. Dire as that might seem, Baker turns this downbeat ‘America today’ premise into the stuff of everyday beauty and wonder by lining up his brightly-lit but cool pastel aesthetic with the way his 6-year-old protagonist, Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince), sees the run-down souvenir shops, ice-cream parlours, and rival motels around her as a kind of raggedy jungle gym.

TIFF ’17: Molly’s Game

Tiff17mollysgame

*½/****
starring Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Michael Cera, Kevin Costner
screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the memoir by Molly Bloom
directed by Aaron Sorkin

by Angelo Muredda You can thank anyone who came out of Steve Jobs yearning for Aaron Sorkin’s take on a sociopathic female protagonist with quixotic interests for Molly’s Game, the loquacious screenwriter/producer/playwright’s rancid directorial debut. Apart from some questionable onscreen graphics and stats that turn the film’s opening set-piece–a breakneck tour through the early history of subject Molly Bloom (not the one you’re probably thinking of)–into a gaudy arcade game, Sorkin the director shows some rare restraint, playing some seriously-overwritten material straight. That isn’t to say he’s an especially promising filmmaker, only that he mostly stays out of his cast’s way as actors like Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba stomp through mic-drop punchlines about money–Wall Street bro fist-pumpers like “I had just made three thousand dollars in one night”–and hyper-stylized speeches that tell us what their maestro really thinks about feminism, gossip, and overcharging prosecutors.

Logan Lucky (2017)

Loganlucky

***/****
starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Seth MacFarlane, Daniel Craig
written by Rebecca Blunt
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Steven Soderbergh returns from a self-imposed retirement of all of four years with Logan Lucky, a heist movie so steeped in its maker’s creative and commercial history that it casually makes time in its climactic moments for a newscaster to dub its working-class heroes’ shenanigans “Ocean’s 7/11.” Begging to be read as an unnecessary but enjoyable victory lap from a filmmaker who hasn’t gone away so much as temporarily opted out of the rat race of alternating between formalist exercises, crowd-pleasers, and prestige pictures, Logan Lucky sees Soderbergh working in his most amiable register–and for the most part doffing his aesthetic predilection for piss-yellow lighting–while still cycling through his pet interests of late. A polymath by nature, as evidenced by his annual viewing logs, Soderbergh more or less successfully wields Logan Lucky into a charming sampler platter of his tastes, from hitting genre story beats faithfully to realizing the smallest procedural details and celebrating sincere Americana while bemoaning its toxic corporatization.

Café Society (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Cafesociety1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras F
starring Jeannie Berlin, Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda Woody Allen can’t seem to make two consecutive films worth thinking about. Despite an abysmal trailer, pre-emptively dismantled online as insensitive or worse amidst revelations about his personal crimes, 2015’s Irrational Man proved a surprisingly gritty respite from Allen’s nostalgic euro-tourist cinema of the Aughts. True to its maker’s aversion to progress, though, its follow-up Café Society is practically a jukebox-musical treatment of Allen’s old (which is to say tired) hits, from the ennui L.A. inspires in native (which is to say white) New Yorkers to the beauty of other periods that aren’t the present to romances strained under the weight of vast age discrepancies. Beautifully lensed and defiantly dumb, it’s another testament to Allen’s surprisingly incremental growth as a filmmaker in his seventies, at the same time as he continues to atrophy as a writer.

Café Society (2016)

Cafesociety

**/****
starring Jeannie Berlin, Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda Woody Allen can’t seem to make two consecutive films worth thinking about. Despite an abysmal trailer, pre-emptively dismantled online as insensitive or worse amidst revelations about his personal crimes, 2015’s Irrational Man proved a surprisingly gritty respite from Allen’s nostalgic euro-tourist cinema of the Aughts. True to its maker’s aversion to progress, though, its follow-up Café Society is practically a jukebox-musical treatment of Allen’s old (which is to say tired) hits, from the ennui L.A. inspires in native (which is to say white) New Yorkers to the beauty of other periods that aren’t the present to romances strained under the weight of vast age discrepancies. Beautifully lensed and defiantly dumb, it’s another testament to Allen’s surprisingly incremental growth as a filmmaker in his seventies, at the same time as he continues to atrophy as a writer.

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

Everybodywantssome

**/****
starring Will Brittain, Zoey Deutch, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda It’s easy to underestimate Richard Linklater, America’s nice-guy filmmaker par excellence. If his chill aura more or less kept him out of the prestige-film sweepstakes until Boyhood, it also made the formal dice rolls of Waking Life and the Before trilogy land more impressively–and contrary to expectations–than they might have coming from a more bullish director. But Linklater’s genial Texas cool proves a liability in Everybody Wants Some!!, a calculated, unambitious return to the rhythms of Dazed and Confused that picks up with a new crew in the next decade. Riding a wave of good vibes from cinephiles clamouring for another shaggy-dog hangout movie, Everybody Wants Some!! never quite earns either its Van Halen-cribbed exclamation or its status as a presumptive critical and audience favourite, settling for aw-shucks likeability and shopworn familiarity where Linklater’s best work sneaks anthropology in through the backdoor.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)

Diaryofateenagegirl

***/****
starring Bel Powley, Alexander Skarsgård, Christopher Meloni, Kristen Wiig
screenplay by Marielle Heller, based on the book by Phoebe Gloeckner
directed by Marielle Heller

by Angelo Muredda “Everything looks totally different to me now,” announces brand-new, card-carrying adult Minnie (Bel Powley) towards the end of Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl, based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel about her coming-of-age in 1970s San Francisco. It’s an old sentiment, practically a requirement of the bildungsroman, but credit ought to go to both Heller and Powley (in their respective feature debuts) for making it seem relatively new in the context of Minnie’s story. Deservedly lauded at Sundance for its frankness and non-judgemental approach to female and young-adult sexuality, the film impresses on its own terms as a solidly constructed character study of a mercurial, still-forming artist, told with a straight face despite the period eccentricities.

Irrational Man (2015)

Irrationalman

***/****
starring Jamie Blackley, Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Parker Posey
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There’s an odd, mean little movie kicking around in Irrational Man, if you can sift past the tired bromides about love and continental philosophy to find it. The fifty-first feature from the not-so-venerable Woody Allen reads like a work of sloppy automatic writing given some surprisingly rich shading by an alert, unpredictable performance from Joaquin Phoenix and the steady hand of Allen the director, who once again proves he’s as efficient at handling the near-screwball mechanics and black pitch of crime pictures as he is inept at romantic comedies. A nominal May-December romance about an aging fusspot granted a new lease on life by a twentysomething sunflower, Irrational Man is a far more disquieting film than its marketing would suggest–if not a confession of the director’s real-life pathologies, then one of the most incisive profiles of a sociopath ever tucked into the back of a dark comedy.

Aloha (2015)

Aloha

**/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Angelo Muredda Few films have predicted their own failure as adroitly as Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, where Orlando Bloom’s wayward shoe designer foresees his imminent sacking by dubbing his new DOA product–a billion-dollar boondoggle–a “fiasco.” Elizabethtown is a fiasco, all right, but it has little on Aloha, which has to be the quintessential Cameron Crowe film, the one for the time capsule, in its baffling configuration of good intentions and bad execution–and its near-radioactive warmth in spite of it all. Like Elizabethtown, Aloha does us the courtesy of signposting its total structural collapse right in the text; and like Elizabethtown, it’s so earnest that it’s hard to look away even after the warning. This time the tell is in a sloppily-engineered climactic scene that sees the hero hacking into the satellite he’s just helped launch from the Hawaiian base he’s secured for the military, destroying the thing he’s put up in the air himself, for reasons barely known, by blasting it with a sonic cannon composed of all recorded sound in history. (This being a Cameron Crowe film, “all recorded sound in history” consists of sentimental movie moments from Crowe’s youth and snippets of Bob Dylan’s discography.) What better metaphor could there be for Aloha, a bad-idea cannon indiscriminately blasting mawkish sentiment and choice soundbites, and compromising its own structural integrity at every turn?