Film Festivals Archives - Page 6 of 46

SDAFF ’21: Drive My Car

November 4, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival

ドライブ・マイ・カー
****/****
starring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Masaki Okada, Reika Kirishima, Tôko Miura
screenplay by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi & Takamasa Oe, based on the short story by Haruki Murakami
directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Haruki Murakami’s short story “Drive My Car” is a model of the rich economy that typifies his writing. The prose–inasmuch as I can tell from its English translation–is simple and declarative, and the action, such as it is, is mundane. But that simplicity is akin to the “Drink Me/Eat Me” invitations presented to Alice on the outskirts of Wonderland–the Red Pill/Blue Pill keys to entire landscapes littered with signs and referents pointing to the things Murakami was thinking (of) as he was writing, possibly even to what he was reading immediately before setting pen to paper. Midway through the short story, the protagonist, Kafuku (a homonym for Kafka), a small-time stage actor who has had to hire a driver because of a drunk-driving accident, mentions his love of zoning out to Beethoven–or, on occasion, American soft rock–on the way home from the theatre. On the way in? He listens to a cassette of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”, the play in which he’s playing the lead role. Some days, he’ll close his eyes and try to catch his driver, a young woman called Misaki, shifting gears on his 12-year-old yellow Saab. As Murakami describes it, Misaki is such a good driver that Kafuku can only tell gears are being changed by the engine’s sound, which he compares to an insect flying nearer, then away, then back again.

SDAFF ’21 – Introduction

November 1, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

by Walter Chaw Brian Hu and his ace staff, including programmer Christina Ree, walk the walk. Their work with the Pacific Arts Movement in San Diego is consistently rewarding, revealing the deficiencies in not just the distribution of Asian films in North American theatres but also the paucity of such fare in our mainstream festivals as well. Without the kind of careful curation provided by the San Diego Asian Film Festival (SDAFF), these titles have a tendency to fall through the cracks. What Brian and his team do year upon year is vital for the visibility of Asian film in the United States and, not incidentally, for the cause of Asian-American filmmakers of the diaspora. It’s at this festival that Kogonada, then E. Joong-Eun Park, premiered his underseen debut, Late Summer. (He returned five years later with his breakout, Columbus.) It was one of the first fests to feature Better Luck Tomorrow, I Was a Simple Man, and Minari. It engaged in the discourse while I was still avoiding the discourse. Even as I joined the movement late, I was welcomed as if I’d hopped the train at the first station.

Telluride ’21: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

October 25, 20212021, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, UK

**½/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Andrea Riseborough
screenplay by Simon Stephenson & Will Sharpe
directed by Will Sharpe

by Walter Chaw Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is not quite the sentimental, broadly-appealing quirk-fest you might be fearing, largely because it has a strong sense of its own absurdity and maybe even a respect for how tired we are of this crap. Though it stars Benedict Cumberbatch, the patron saint of biopics about iconoclasts like Louis Wain, its most valuable player is, as is so often the case with her, Claire Foy. She plays Emily Richardson, nanny for the younger Wain sisters and, after a funny courtship, the happily-ever-after’d Mrs. Wain. This is a bit of a scandal, their nuptials, because Louis is a gentleman and Emily is working-class, but they’re happy, and while they remain childless, they do adopt a cat. That’s unusual, since housecats weren’t really a thing in Victorian England. So infatuated are the Wains with their fur-baby that Louis, an inventor and illustrator and maybe a genius, starts drawing cats doing people things, partly to pay the bills and partly to distract himself from the fact that Emily is dying of breast cancer. Another complication? Louis is so hopeless at managing his affairs that he’s neglected to copyright his paintings, and a cottage industry of Wain’s cats springs up without benefiting him in the slightest.

TIFF ’21: Wrap-up

October 6, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Brazil, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Iran, Mexico, Music, Sweden, Thriller, TIFF, UK

by Bill Chambers I’ve been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn’t expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I’m fully vaccinated, I wasn’t about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

Telluride ’21: Encounter

September 30, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Riz Ahmed, Octavia Spencer, Janina Gavankar, Rory Cochrane
screenplay by Joe Barton and Michael Pearce
directed by Michael Pearce

by Walter Chaw It’s possible that Michael Pearce’s Encounter is its own worst enemy. The opening hour or so is remarkable stuff: tetchy, kinetic, terrifying–the honourable sequel in spirit to Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where insects become the vectors of an alien virus that appears to change our DNA and, with it, our behaviour. Such a smart idea for an era in which more and more people are coming around to the idea that fully half of us at any one time are mindless animals powered by the pleasure principle and the selfish cell and little else. They would watch us die without a flicker of recognizable empathy. Nothing is real to them unless it happens directly to them–there is no evidence save that of the flesh, of their flesh, that could compel them to care about the suffering of another human being. Not even care–nothing could compel them to acknowledge that suffering was possible. They are empty of imagination, devoid of personality; they are essentially alien things neither malign nor beneficent. And there is no better explanation for their existence among us than what Encounter at first appears to be getting at: the government is aware that an unknowable influence has taken over half the population, and it’s only a matter of time before the rest of us succumb. Delicious. Pearce’s treatment of it is delicious, too, as uncomfortable and alive as William Friedkin’s Bug, paired beat-for-frantic-beat with an extraordinary performance by Riz Ahmed, who might be incapable of providing any other.

TIFF ’21: You Are Not My Mother

September 28, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Ireland, TIFF

**/****
starring Hazel Doupe, Paul Reid, Carolyn Bracken, Ingrid Craigie
written and directed by Kate Dolan

by Bill Chambers Although I called last year’s iteration of the Festival “the COVID-19 TIFF,” it’s really the 2021 crop of films that have been shaped by the pandemic, formally and, perhaps as a result, conceptually, the way Jørgen Leth wound up with five dissimilar incarnations of his experimental short The Perfect Human when Lars von Trier tasked him with remaking it under different sets of “obstructions.” In a charming pre-taped intro that saw her receiving trick-or-treaters (points for creativity), writer-director Kate Dolan talked about how difficult it was shooting You Are Not My Mother during the second lockdown in Ireland, but there’s a low-key expressionism to the film that might be a happy accident, a bonus stemming from compromise. Our young heroine navigates a near-apocalyptically empty suburbia, which feels not necessarily true, but right, externalizing her feelings of isolation along with her vulnerability. The movie isn’t pushing any envelopes, however, and is, to some extent, modest to a fault.

TIFF ’21: The Guilty (2021)

September 27, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Streaming, Thriller, TIFF

**/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgaard
screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto, based on the original screenplay by Gustav Möller & Emil Nygaard Albertsen
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw Landing midway between Pontypool and Talk Radio, Antoine Fuqua’s The Guilty finds disgraced cop Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal) bumped down to 9-1-1 operator as he awaits trial for something the press is eager to hear his side of the story of. He’s falling apart, though; this much we can tell by the way his superiors in the call station keep him on a short–very short–leash, and by the way he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror like an animal injured and cornered. He calls his estranged wife and begs her to let him say goodnight to his daughter. She begs him to leave her alone. He can’t seem to catch a break. But he gets a call from Emily (voiced by Riley Keough), who’s been abducted by her ex-husband, Henry (Peter Sarsgaard). They’re travelling east on the 10–Joe figures that out because she sees a forest fire raging out the driver’s-side windows. Joe figures out a lot of things while, on a bank of screens in front of him, an apocalypse plays out. It’s a vision of hell. Our hell–we made it. It’s ours. Emily gives Joe one last chance to do a good thing before he vanishes, so he’s going to do it, whether or not it’s too late. It’s been too late for a long time.

TIFF ’21: Mothering Sunday

September 25, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK

**/****
starring Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor, Sope Dirisu, Olivia Colman
screenplay by Alice Birch, based on the novel by Graham Swift
directed by Eva Husson

by Bill Chambers An orphan groomed for servitude, young Jane (Odessa Young) is a maid in the employ of aristocratic couple the Nivens in post-WWI England. Jane is quiet, dutiful, mindful of the cloud of sorrow hanging over her employers, who lost a child to the war. (We infer that it’s left Mrs. Niven (Olivia Colman) catatonic and Mr. Niven (a grizzled Colin Firth) a babbling mess as he tries to fill the silences.) Jane is also, we glean from inserts of word prompts from her notebooks, a listener, hoarding material for some writing project we see her working on years later, boyfriend Donald (Sope Dirisu) close by to serve as a sounding board. Mothering Sunday, the UK version of Mother’s Day, arrives and the Nivens give motherless Jane the day off, which she spends in bed with the neighbours’ son, Paul (Josh O’Connor), who appears to have counted his blessings upon returning from the battlefield and refuses to risk disappointing his parents by breaking off his engagement to a woman of means for a maid, despite his obvious affection for Jane. Eventually, Paul takes off to go meet his fiancee, leaving Jane to explore the big empty house alone. Jane, au naturel, ventures downstairs and becomes particularly taken with the vast library, her lack of clothing critical to breaking down the hermetic seal of the rich and making all this profoundly hers. This show of somewhat transgressive behaviour feels transgressive in itself, partly because the movies have gotten so chaste lately and partly because, through a COVID lens, nudity is an especial act of hubris. It’s mesmerizing, these few minutes of Mothering Sunday.

TIFF ’21: Earwig + Night Raiders

September 23, 20212021, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, TIFF, UK

EARWIG
***½/****
starring Paul Hilton, Romola Garai, Alex Lawther, Romane Hemelaers
written by Lucile Hadžihalilović & Geoff Cox
directed by Lucile Hadžhalilović

NIGHT RAIDERS
***/****
starring Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Brooklyn Letexier-Hart, Gail Maurice, Amanda Plummer
written and directed by Danis Goulet

by Angelo Muredda Parenting and being looked after are the stuff of nightmares in Lucile Hadžhalilović’s genuinely creepy curio Earwig, which is as visually and aurally arresting as it is inscrutable. A cryptic dance between a man named Albert (Paul Hilton) and his ten-year-old charge, Mia (Romane Hemelaers), the film charts their ritualistic and mostly unspoken interactions in a dingy apartment, making us tense witnesses to an unexplained paternal science experiment conducted under the all-seeing eye of a supervisor who phones in his instructions from offscreen, apparently to prepare the girl for whatever is lying in wait for her. That’s about all we know, though Hadžhalilović skillfully hangs this threadbare plot on indelible images while evoking our primitive stirrings of anxiety for the future. No small feat, given how little dialogue there is.

TIFF ’21: Dune

September 21, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, TIFF

Dune Part One
****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw I couldn’t get through the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was a kid, but I devoured Frank Herbert’s Dune in a fever and read it again immediately. I have a tactile memory of it. Mostly, I was haunted by the frequent use of passages from the diaries, histories, and philosophies of one Princess Irulan, inserted throughout the text to give the book’s story a sense of lost time, immense. I wouldn’t experience this feeling reading something again until years later when I finally got into Proust, this thing where you read it in the present, but the text is irretrievably past. You’ve arrived at the dock, but the ferry, impossibly beautiful and decked out with incomprehensible pleasures and mysteries, has left, and it’s not coming back. Princess Irulan opens the book by warning us not to be deceived by its hero, Paul, having spent the first fourteen years of his life on a planet called “Caladan”–that his story is inextricable from the fate of a place called “Arrakis.” It reminds me of the many epitaphs for T.E. Lawrence. Herbert told his son that he left multiple threads unresolved in Dune so its readers would want to revisit it–return obsessively to it to follow different paths, suggestions, prophecies. I think it’s why I’ve read four or five of the subsequent Dune novels only once and retained so little of the stories they tell and the answers they provide. It’s like Arthur C. Clarke’s sequels to his 2001: A Space Odyssey novelization: I don’t actually want to know what’s inside the Monolith.

TIFF ’21: The Good House

September 20, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

*/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney
screenplay by Thomas Bezucha and Maya Forbes & Wally Wolodarsky, based on the novel by Ann Leary
directed by Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky

by Bill Chambers Earlier this year, I revisited 1995's Copycat, in which Sigourney Weaver plays an agoraphobic criminologist assisting the police in their hunt for a serial killer who arranges tableaux in tribute to famous murderers of the past. It's the sort of B-movie in A dress they don't make anymore, an exuberantly tasteless piece of crackerjack filmmaking that made me wistful for medium-budget, middle-class movie-movies that exist for their own sake. But, perhaps because her most iconic roles are so heroic (this is a woman neither gorillas, nor xenomorphs, nor Bill Murray himself could cow), Weaver's brand doesn't bend towards powerlessness without showing the strain. I thought then and still think that Weaver was miscast as a woman who hyperventilates into paper bags in Copycat. Similarly, her character's reluctance to admit she has a problem with alcohol in The Good House seems as much informed by pride and social stigmas as it does by certain firewalls in Weaver's persona. Hildy Good (Weaver) is a real-estate agent in Wendover, Massachusetts (actually Nova Scotia). It's a small coastal town and she worries what her neighbours think of her, especially considering word-of-mouth affects her livelihood. Maybe that's why she's had her struggles with booze, because of the pressure of maintaining a reputation. Booze, of course, never helped anybody's reputation.

TIFF ’21: Flee

September 18, 20212021, Animation, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Norway, Sweden, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen

by Angelo Muredda The past is as fluid as the rotoscoped animation used to bring it to life in Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, a high-concept work of creative nonfiction whose unconventional style promises an immersiveness it can’t really deliver. Rasmussen’s animated documentary profile of his childhood friend, pseudonymously named Amin Nawabi to protect his identity, is intermittently moving and insightful about the horrors, the exhausting subterfuge, and the briefest moments of levity that define his life as a queer Afghan refugee, first in Russia and then in Denmark. But the opacity of its subject–whose story of family suffering, persecution, hiding, and now something like domestic stability, has frequently shifted not just for state officials but also for his friend and biographer–leaves the film as vague as its buzzword title. Moreover, Rasmussen’s inability to do more with those discrepancies besides shrug at the ambiguities of first-person storytelling from far afield places plagued by civil war flattens the closing emotional pitch.

Telluride ’21: The Lost Daughter

September 18, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Greece, Telluride

****/****
starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard, Jessie Buckley
screenplay by Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on the novel by Elena Ferrante
directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

by Walter Chaw Leda (Jessie Buckley) is brilliant. She's translating Auden into Italian and, more than just translating, she's interpreting the work in a way that's exciting to other scholars. She so impresses a hotshot in the field, one Professor Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard), that he seduces her during a conference–or she seduces him, cheating on her milquetoast husband and two young daughters. She abandons all of them eventually. It's a decision that haunts her. At least it should, though she's not so sure it does. But that was a long time ago. Leda (Olivia Colman) is now 48, vacationing by herself on a tiny beachfront in Italy. These days, she's an English teacher of no particular renown looking for a small patch of ocean to float in, a small stretch of sand to lounge on, food when she's hungry, and a bed when she's tired. There's this other family, however, consisting of a young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), who's struggling with a difficult child and a husband, Toni (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who looks like bad news. Though maybe not as bad-news as Toni's sister, Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), who, seven months pregnant, wants to take a swing at Leda when Leda refuses to give up her umbrella for Callie's birthday party. The cabana boy, Will (Paul Mescal), spots this and tells Leda he admires her for it but also warns her against doing it again. "Why?" she asks. "Because those are bad people." When she's walking home that afternoon, a large pine cone falls out of a tree and punches a small hole in Leda's back.

TIFF ’21: Benediction

September 16, 20212021, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK, War

***½/****
starring Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Gemma Jones, Ben Daniels
written and directed by Terence Davies

by Angelo Muredda Queer melancholia and stifled antiwar resistance collide in Terence Davies’s Benediction, a luxurious and achingly blue profile of First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. Ever the personal filmmaker no matter the period he’s recreating nor the artist he’s profiling, whether it should be Emily Dickinson (A Quiet Passion) or himself (Of Time and the City), Davies finds the perfect irascible surrogates in Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi as the younger and elder Sassoon, respectively. The one is vital but in danger of being flattened by military hypocrisy and transient love affairs with a rotating cast of men doomed to early deaths and loveless marriages, while the other has settled into his surly senescence, despite a late-in-life turn to Catholicism in search of some kind of permanence. (“You could get something unchanging from dressage without the guilt of Catholicism,” sniffs his son.)

TIFF ’21: The Humans + Lakewood

September 16, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

THE HUMANS
**½/****
starring Richard Jenkins, Beanie Feldstein, Steven Yeun, Amy Schumer
screenplay by Stephen Karam, based on his play
directed by Stephen Karam

LAKEWOOD
*/****
starring Naomi Watts, Colton Gobbo, Sierra Maltby
written by Chris Sparling
directed by Phillip Noyce

by Bill Chambers Richard Jenkins leads an all-star cast as the nightmare-plagued patriarch of the Blake family, who have gathered for Thanksgiving at the new home of daughter Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and her boyfriend Richard (Steven Yeun): a duplex in the middle of Chinatown that’s falling apart, Polanski-style, in symbiotic echo with the dysfunctional Blakes. Erik (Jenkins) and his wife Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell) have been keeping something from their children that’s bound to sting, while their other daughter, Aimee (a dynamite Amy Schumer, which is the film’s biggest surprise), is intent on protecting the dinner table from the life-altering medical prognosis she’s received. Then there’s Erik’s mother, Momo (June Squibb), who sits in a wheelchair muttering in a secret language between brief periods of lucidity. It’s a long day’s journey into night in which truths are laid bare but none of the characters experience catharsis, since all this TMI does is create space between them–and more room for their personal demons. The Humans is pretty on-brand for distributor A24 in that it dabbles in the syntax of genre, but how scary you find it will probably depend on how much you relate to Erik, a dinosaur who can see the asteroid coming for him now that nobody really depends on him anymore.

TIFF ’21: Scarborough

September 15, 20212021, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/****
starring Liam Diaz, Essence Fox, Anna Claire Beitel, Felix Jedi Ingram Isaac
screenplay by Catherine Hernandez, based on her novel
directed by Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson

by Angelo Muredda “You’re a good boy,” a mother whispers to her bullied preteen son Bing (Liam Diaz) while he sleeps early on in Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson’s Scarborough, a reverent and rambling adaptation of Catherine Hernandez’s buzzy Canadian novel of the same name. While Bing may well need the affirmation in the grips of his abuse at the hands of classmates, it largely underlines one of the festival darling’s more nagging qualities: a tendency to annotate all its emotional beats. An ostentatiously literary cousin to cloying ensemble family dramas like “This Is Us”, given texture mostly by its notes of regional specificity and trio of unaffected child performances, Scarborough goes out of its way to chart the relative goodness of its characters whenever possible, as though its filmmakers think we might not arrive at the right conclusions without moralizing notes.

Telluride ’21: The Power of the Dog

September 14, 2021****/****, 2021, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, New Zealand, Romance, Streaming, Telluride, UK, Western

****/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee
written by Jane Campion, based on the novel by Thomas Savage
directed by Jane Campion

by Walter Chaw There is about Jane Campion’s work the air of the poet, and indeed there may be no better interpreter, translator, or adaptor of poetry than another poet. Her body of work is, to a one, in the thrall of the rapture of language: what words are capable of when arranged properly, powerfully. Campion demonstrates mastery of both what is spoken and what is seen, how words delivered with exquisite, just-so composition and deadly-true execution become, at the moment of their sublimation, images in the mind like witchcraft with no physical intervention in between. Music in the eye. Of all the easy and obvious examples in her work–the imagistic, rapturous biography of John Keats (Bright Star), the voice of the voiceless in The Piano, the shockingly immediate illumination of Kiwi author Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table–the one that springs to mind most easily and often when I’m describing Campion’s work is the reaction of New York City English teacher Frankie, played by Meg Ryan, as she contemplates the words of Lorca printed on a literacy campaign poster in a subway car in Campion’s In the Cut. She looks upon them as a sinner looks upon the gallery of saints illuminated in the coloured windows of old cathedrals. Words are a rapture, a vehicle, and Campion, with her training as a painter, proves through the medium of film to be the premier painter of words. Loathe to make such pronouncements, I nonetheless spend most days thinking of Campion as my favourite living director and other days thinking of her as my favourite of all time. She is an artist.

TIFF ’21: Dash Cam

September 14, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF, UK

Dashcam
*½/****
starring Annie Hardy, Amar Chadha-Patel, Angela Enahoro
written by Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage, Jed Shepherd
directed by Rob Savage

by Bill Chambers Rob Savage's Host dared to suggest our new digital fortresses were inadequate shield against the old insecurities and became a cultural phenomenon as a result. There had been movies like it (Unfriended and its sequel, for instance), but the pandemic subtext gave its core premise–a haunted Zoom call–mass appeal, and having the actors play "themselves" à la Blair Witch added a veneer of documentary credibility. With Dash Cam, his much-anticipated follow-up (and his first film for horror factory Blumhouse), Savage again sets things against the backdrop of COVID and continues the neo-realist conceit of giving the lead the name of the actress playing her, but he's in murkier conceptual territory here, tipped off by the early and frequent abandonment of the titular gimmick. Real-life musician Annie Hardy, from the band Giant Drag, stars as a version of herself, seemingly the worst version of herself (though I gather her online persona is somewhat controversial), an MC who hosts BandCar, "the Internet's #1 Live Improvised Music Show Broadcast from a Moving Vehicle." At the beginning of the film, Annie abandons her L.A. apartment and feline roommate for an extended stay in England with former bandmate Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel). Boarding the plane, she turns out to be the type to let their mask droop below their nose. It's the first real hint of an impulse to troll that is reflexive bordering on pathological and seems to particularly flare up around the socially conscious or anyone who tells her "no." In the case of Stretch, these are one and the same, and after she manages to alienate him completely, she steals his car and looks for trouble in London (which is really as simple as not wearing a mask), broadcasting it all for the amusement of her followers and sometimes their tips.

TIFF ’21: Violet

September 12, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
starring Olivia Munn, Luke Bracey, Erica Ash, Dennis Boutsikaris
written and directed by Justine Bateman

by Bill Chambers In her taped introduction to Violet, actress-turned-filmmaker Justine Bateman describes it as an immersive experience, tantamount to putting on a coat. I would say it’s slightly more akin to having a pillow on your face. Though not explicitly autobiographical, the picture indeed betrays an insider’s grasp of Hollywood politics in its portrait of a production executive plagued by self-doubt and industry sexism, including, fairly, the internalized misogyny of a female underling. Violet (Olivia Munn) has reached a ceiling in her current job that probably can’t be broken. Her passion project is in limbo, the perfect man (Luke Bracey) is Just a Friend, and she’s still shook from a relationship that ended badly when she accidentally burned down their apartment. A scene where her boss (the great Dennis Boutsikaris) gets her pumped up about the book of poetry she dreams of turning into a film only so he can sucker punch her in a meeting with talent, Scorpion-and-the-Frog-style, captures something essential of toxic power dynamics in the entertainment industry that a more straightforward lampoon of a Rudin/Weinstein type probably would not. Another truthful moment, opposite in effect, finds Violet making a move on Bracey’s Red that surprises even her. It’s genuinely swoony. Then she spends the drive back to his place worrying she’ll be judged for dating beneath her station. (Red’s a screenwriter.) The irony of Violet being an eminently relatable mess of insecurities in an Olivia Munn-shaped package fades over the course of the film, perhaps in a way it wouldn’t have before “the great equalizer” of our current pandemic.

Telluride ’21: C’mon C’mon

September 11, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride

***/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scoot McNairy, Gaby Hoffmann, Jaboukie Young-White
written and directed by Mike Mills

by Walter Chaw It takes a certain level of courage to make a movie like Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, in which at least one, possibly two of the three main characters are so profoundly irritating it would be cathartic to see them shocked into compliant conformity. But that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. It’s a film about mining difficult conversations, asking the right questions and listening to the answers, practicing empathy when it’s absolutely the riskiest thing to do, i.e., when the person you’re trying to empathize with is smart, slippery, and able to push all of your buttons. Relationships, in other words–intimate ones with family where between platitudes and comfortable silences, there can erupt withering indictments and unresolved grievances. I love Mills’s Beginners and 20th Century Women because of their essential kindness, how Mills writes dialogue that’s searching without being grating, honest without being cruel. His characters are looking for the right way to do things, the elegant thing to say at the moment of crisis, but they’re thwarted by unexpected developments and circumstances beyond their control. His films are about navigating choppy waters with only the love of your family to guide you, and they’re beautiful.