Film Festivals Archives - Page 8 of 46

Sundance ’21: The Pink Cloud

February 1, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Sundance

A Nuvem Rosa
***½/****
starring Renata de Lélis, Eduardo Mendonça, Helena Becker, Girley Paes
written and directed by Iuli Gerbase

by Walter Chaw Iuli Gerbase’s stunning feature debut The Pink Cloud owes a great deal to the insular psychodramas of J.G. Ballard, landing somewhere in the vicinity of a more specific High Rise in which the fall of society is focused through the decay of a relationship forged in quarantine. It works best as allegory, allying itself with something like Lorcan Finnegan’s recent and similarly-pre-pandemic Vivarium, using science-fiction as a launch point to test the tensile strength of the tenterhooks tethering us to one another. The details of the corruption matter less than how we change when our environment changes–or, more specifically, how we fail to.

Sundance ’21 – An Introduction

February 1, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Sundance

by Walter Chaw I think there are so many film festivals now that it’s never not festival season. As a consequence, no one festival is more important than any other festival. They’re each a different tentacle of the distribution/exhibition octopus, an appendage of chthonic horror. If any distributor happens to show some apparent innovation, call it a novel mutation: temporary and vestigial on the body impolitic. Celebrate A24 and NEON, in other words–but I have an idea that everyone is connected to the same profit motive. Meanwhile, the festival clockwork churns on unimpeded.

Into the Wildland: FFC Interviews Jeanette Nordahl

September 27, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Interviews

Jeanette Nordahl’s Wildland (a.k.a. Kød & blod) doesn’t feel like somebody’s directorial debut at all. Where so many first features are packed to the gills with every idea the director’s ever had for fear they’ll never get another opportunity to make a movie, this one is indicated by an extraordinary reserve, a sense that for as much as made it into the film, there was more left on the table. Its connective tissue is diaphanous and reliant on the experience the viewer brings to it. Some veteran filmmakers could stand to learn from this–that an active viewership is a state to which one should aspire in art, not actively avoid. Wildland is a mature piece done by a filmmaker with a gratifying faith in both herself and her audience.

TIFF ’20 ‘Quibi’: Another Round; Falling; Spring Blossom

September 22, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF, UK

by Bill Chambers To wrap up our TIFF coverage, some ‘quick bites’ in honour of the fallen streaming service, Quibi. Movies about alcoholism always make me want to drink, so maybe it’s true that there’s no such thing as an antiwar movie. Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (***/****), to be fair, makes drinking inviting because it depicts it almost exclusively as a social activity, when few us have socialized in months. Mads Mikkelsen stars as Martin, a high-school teacher in the throes of a mid-life crisis that’s jeopardizing his career and putting a strain on his marriage. After confiding his gloomy outlook to three of his colleagues–Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), and Peter (Lars Ranthe)–while out celebrating Nikolaj’s 40^th birthday, they get to talking about Norwegian philosopher Finn Skårderud, who allegedly believes that human beings would function better with a Blood Alcohol Content of 0.05%. Thus begins an experiment among the foursome to secretly maintain a constant state of tipsiness, which, lo, does yield some positive results, including the adorable runt of Tommy’s soccer team, Specs, becoming champ for a day. The first half of Another Round (whose Danish title, Druk, means “binge-drinking”) is a bit like watching X-Men discover their superpowers–but, y’know, it’s booze, and the four men eventually can’t resist drinking past the point of “ignition,” leading to domestic strife and even tragedy. For all that, the film is more realistic than moralistic, a feature-length expansion of Reese Witherspoon’s credo from James L. Brooks’s How Do You Know: “Don’t drink to feel better. Drink to feel even better.” Mikkelsen is touchingly wistful in a role that’s 180° removed from Hannibal Lecter but still counts on his innate combustibility, and the film engages in some hilarious internal debate over whether drinking is good or bad for politics.

TIFF ’20: Still Processing + Every Day’s Like This

September 21, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

STILL PROCESSING
***½/****
written and directed by Sophy Romvari

EVERY DAY’S LIKE THIS
***½/****
starring Kacey Rohl, Daniel Kash, Francis Melling, Krystina Bojanowski
written and directed by Lev Lewis

by Angelo Muredda Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari mourns and preserves the past in her wrenching new nonfiction short, Still Processing, whose title puns on the intricate work of processing photographic images along with the spectral traces of those they depict. Evoking a tradition of poetic but philosophically robust memorial essay films and literary texts about engaging with the material record of the dead, from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil to W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the film is nevertheless shot through with Romvari’s modest sensibility. Though Romvari herself is front and centre throughout, the film is a quiet affair, shot in the loneliness of archives, darkrooms, and bedrooms, frequently lit by faint glowing lights and punctuated by a running subtitle track that elucidates the filmmaker’s emotional state. A compelling marriage of form and theme, the film is also gorgeously photographed. Particularly striking is a sequence that finds Romvari working solo among the cold brutalist architecture of York University, taking old photos of her deceased brothers David and Jonathan out of the humble archive of the box they’ve been housed in for the first time. She delicately arranges their faces on a nondescript table that soon becomes a kind of installation, effectively massaging her siblings back to life through her hands in real-time, as if gesturing to the labour and art of processing grief that only filmmaking can accomplish.

TIFF ’20: Penguin Bloom

September 20, 20202020, Australia, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

*/****
starring Naomi Watts, Andrew Lincoln, Rachel House, Jacki Weaver
screenplay by Harry Cripps & Shaun Grant, based on the book by Cameron Bloom & Bradley Trevor Greive
directed by Glendyn Ivin

by Angelo Muredda Naomi Watts should stop vacationing in Thailand. That’s just about the only lesson worth heeding in the faux-inspirational, would-be edifying Penguin Bloom, which plays out like an unofficial remake of J.A. Bayona’s otherwise forgettable The Impossible, the last time Watts played a wealthy Westerner with a pack of sandy-haired boys getting gored on holiday in Southeast Asia. Glendyn Ivin’s anonymously directed and bone-tired disability melodrama stars Watts (also a producer) as real-life well-to-do Australian mom turned ParaCanoe athlete Sam Bloom, who experiences a life-changing spinal-cord injury after a rooftop railing gives way under her. (As in The Impossible, we see the traumatic injury several times, including in uncanny nightmare sequences that mark the only time either film could be called stylish.) Newly disabled and deflated as she wheels around her spacious home, Sam finds her way back to life–which in Ivin’s limited imagination appears to consist of being a good mom even though she might not be able to reach over and put bandaids on her kids’ scraped knees like before–by nursing an injured magpie the family dubs Penguin. Meanwhile, Sam’s eldest son, Noah (Griffin Murray-Johnston), makes a video essay celebrating his mother’s resilience and mourning for the charmed life the family has lost, which conveniently doubles as a thematic narration track, in case any of the messages (presumably ported wholesale from the Cameron Bloom/Bradley Trevor Greive book on which the film is based) pass us by.

TIFF ’20: I Am Greta

September 20, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sweden, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Nathan Grossman

by Bill Chambers A deceptively stock rise-to-influence documentary, I Am Greta has haunted me like nothing that begins with “Hulu Presents” reasonably should. The film is, of course, about teen activist Greta Thunberg, who went on a school strike in her native Stockholm to bring awareness to climate change and became a global phenomenon. It begins at the beginning, in 2018, as Thunberg takes a seat outside the Swedish parliament building with a simple sign that reads “Skolstrejk för klimatet.” One older woman stops to scold her, more or less, for risking her future by skipping school. Thunberg counters that at the rate we’re destroying the planet, she has no future to risk. The woman walks away in a huff: kids, right? This fearless interaction not only establishes a key theme of I Am Greta–Thunberg’s ability to make Boomer heads explode, Scanners-style–but is also something of a miracle, given that Thunberg, who has Asperger’s, once went three years without speaking to another living soul except her parents. What triggered this mutism was her horrified reaction to an educational video about the impact of climate change on polar bears; what snapped her out of it was her realization that she could change her ways (going vegetarian, unplugging power cords, etc.)–and potentially those of others, by drawing as much attention to our environmental crisis, the looming Sixth Extinction, as possible.

TIFF ’20: City Hall

September 19, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Frederick Wiseman

by Angelo Muredda Frederick Wiseman brings his penchant for humanist sketches of bureaucracy, policy-making, and the mundanity of board meetings with communal water jugs and bad air conditioning to Boston municipal government in City Hall. Though it clocks in at a hefty 275 minutes, City Hall is never a slog, unfurling as a series of fleet, wry vignettes that guide us in and out of different chambers of the titular institution. These range from a communal workspace full of tech-support agents on headsets, politely asking their clients not to yell at them, to chaotic strategic-planning jam sessions led by earnest people in ill-fitting suits, to holiday food-bank events where a procession of Butterball turkeys get choreographed for kitschy photo shoots.

TIFF ’20: New Order + Fauna

September 18, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Thriller, TIFF

Nuevo orden
*½/****
starring Naian Gonzaléz Norvind, Dario Yazbek Bernal, Mónica Del Carmen, Sebastian Silveti
written and directed by Michel Franco

FAUNA
***½/****
starring Francisco Barreiro, Luisa Pardo, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, Teresa Sánchez
directed by Nicolás Pereda

by Bill Chambers I’d heard that Michel Franco’s New Order was the new Parasite but from the rich people’s P.O.V., and I’m here to tell you that Parasite from the rich people’s P.O.V. wouldn’t be Parasite. Still, I did find the basic premise of New Order quite promising as social commentary: In Mexico City, mounting class resentments spark an uprising against aristocracy on the same day a local heiress is due to be married. I imagined a modern-day storming of the Bastille, but this is a film, for better or worse, of 21^st-century ideas, and it introduces a wrinkle into our eat-the-rich fantasies–military intervention–that becomes a tsunami. An elderly man (Eligio Meléndez) who used to work for the family of the bride, Marianne (Naian Gonzaléz Norvind), shows up at the wedding claiming his sick wife needs money for an operation. (If you watch HBO’s “Succession”, you know the kind of territory he’s wading into.) The mother (Lisa Owen) wants to help but is cowed by the guests’ stinginess, while Marianne’s brother (Diego Boneta) tips him like a bellhop and expects him to shoo. They’re unwittingly justifying the fury of the vandals and looters advancing on their home; only Marianne is truly sympathetic to the old man’s plight, going so far as to leave her own wedding (with one of the help in tow) to pick up his wife and drive her to the hospital. But during her absence, the military hatches a diabolical plan to manipulate the situation so as to solidify the caste system rather than see it evolve: they will abduct any wealthy citizens who’ve strayed from home–mostly the younger set, which leads to a lot of youthful flesh being exploitatively displayed as hostages are stripped naked and hosed down–and ransom them back to family members, pinning the responsibility for these kidnappings on the protestors.

TIFF ’20: MLK/FBI

September 17, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

***/****
directed by Sam Pollard

by Angelo Muredda Documentarian and editor Sam Pollard peers into the recently declassified files on the FBI’s aggressive counter-intelligence operation against Martin Luther King, Jr. in MLK/FBI. Pollard’s nonfiction essay is an infuriating and timely document undermined at times by its glossy, cinema-of-quality treatment. It is at once a sobering work of public significance and a slickly produced project that risks overly flattering its hypothetical spectators with too many ironic vignettes, zooming in to an old television set at one point to marvel at Ronald Reagan droning on about heroes and villains in the movies. In its first hour alone, it comes replete with black-and-white animations of vintage tape recorders, microfiche, and superimposed text and solemn voiceovers from a who’s-who of historians, activists, and former agents (whose faces are not revealed until the last act). More curiously, it concedes surprisingly long stretches to Resistance Democratic favourite James Comey, a career agent and former director who offers up nothing more insightful than his recognition that, sure, the Bureau might have been a bit heavy-handed when it came to King.

TIFF ’20: Shiva Baby

September 15, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF

***/****
starring Rachel Sennott, Polly Draper, Fred Melamed, Dianna Agron
written and directed by Emma Seligman

by Angelo Muredda Hell is other people waiting in line outside the bathroom at a function where you hate everyone in Emma Seligman's cringe comedy debut Shiva Baby, which impressively sustains something of the fever pitch of the Satanic ritual in the Castevets' apartment from Rosemary's Baby for most of its 77-minute runtime. More proof of concept for future films than a proper knockout, Shiva Baby is at least a nimble showcase for star Rachel Sennott, reprising her role as Danielle, the sullen and pleasantly inscrutable protagonist from Seligman's earlier short of the same name.

TIFF ’20: Notturno

September 15, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Italy, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Gianfranco Rosi

by Bill Chambers Notturno, meaning “nocturne” or simply “night” in the original Italian, opens with an epigraph stating that the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the end of WWI left the Middle East vulnerable to violent power-grabs in the decades that followed. What we’re about to see, we are told, was shot over a period of three years in Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon, during the recent campaign of terror by ISIS forces, and one of the bones I have to pick with Gianfranco Rosi’s latest observational documentary is the unresolved friction between this pithy summary of how the Middle East became a global blind spot and Notturno‘s conflation of those four Islamic countries on screen into one endless desert. Hypocritical might be too histrionic a word for it, but I can’t think of anything better in that ballpark. The film begins with a cluster of older women garbed in jilbaabs, I believe they’re called, filing into an abandoned, cavernous building and snaking up the stairs in a way that feels ceremonial. Is it a place of worship? The surroundings are difficult to parse. The women reach a small, cell-like room, and one of them cries out for her son, who died there while being held prisoner. Her anguish echoes across the next few passages, including cryptic shots of a guy staked out in the wilderness with a rifle, scenes of soldiers perhaps running drills, and rehearsals for some kind of play that the movie soon adopts as a framing device.

TIFF ’20: Get the Hell Out; Nomadland; David Byrne’s American Utopia

September 13, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Concert Doc, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, Film Festivals, Taiwan, TIFF, Zombie

GET THE HELL OUT
**/****
starring Bruce Hung, Megan Lai, Tsung-Hua To, Chung-wang Wang
screenplay by I-Fan Wang, Shih-Keng Chien, Wan-Ju Yang
directed by I-Fan Wang

NOMADLAND
***/****
starring Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linday May, Swankie
written for the screen and directed by Chloé Zhao

American Utopia
***/****
directed by Spike Lee

by Bill Chambers Have the ticking time bombs the world is sitting on and TIFF’s significantly reduced slate resulted in the 2020 iteration of the festival–the COVID-19 TIFF, the pre-election TIFF, the world’s-on-fire TIFF–being programmed with increased political fervour? Three of the four films I’ve watched at TIFF 2020 suggest that’s the case in their topicality, though I will allow that the silliest of these, Taiwan’s Get the Hell Out, would not resonate nearly as much as it does were it not for these unremovable pandemic goggles I wear now, which transform everything old and new into ironic commentary on this moment in history. Get the Hell Out begins in medias res after a (sigh/jerk-off motion) zombie outbreak in parliament, then backtracks to show how the headstrong Hsiung (Megan Lai) was literally muscled out of office for refusing to endorse a chemical plant that will contaminate the environment with the rabies virus. She manipulates a lovestruck security guard with chronic–and portentous–nosebleeds named Wang (Bruce Ho) into running in her place, hoping to use him as a sock-puppet against her misogynistic former colleagues. Alas, he has his own cock-eyed agenda, and so the plague proceeds apace. Trapped in the parliament building, Hsiung and Wang are forced to fend off hordes of cannibalistic MPs as well as their nefarious rival, Li (Chung-wang Wang), the movie’s nominal Trump stand-in.

TIFF ’20: Inconvenient Indian

September 13, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Michelle Latimer

by Angelo Muredda “You have to watch out for the stories you’re told,” Thomas King dryly intones early in Michelle Latimer’s Inconvenient Indian as he ambles through a repertory-cinema lobby and sits down in his chair in Toronto’s Fox Theatre to take in the film we’re ostensibly watching. Latimer’s unorthodox essay film, which doubles as a curatorial programme on the futures of Indigenous art and life emerging from a history of settler colonialism, is energized by that cautionary note about the high stakes of storytelling, a seemingly benign activity that’s charged with both generative and destructive power. It cuts through the blizzard of whitewashed, endlessly recirculated images of Indigenous people as cultural throwbacks, from Nanook of the North onward, to anchor itself in Indigenous work of the present.

Fantasia Festival ’20: The Five Rules of Success

September 1, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Thriller

***/****
starring Santiago Segura, Jonathan Howard, Isidora Goreshter, Roger Guenveur Smith
written and directed by Orson Oblowitz

by Walter Chaw X (Santiago Segura) is just out of jail, looking for a fresh start and finding an “essential” entry-level job in the service industry in the employ of restaurant owner Avakian (Jon Skarloff) instead. He cleans up, shows up, refuses drink and drugs, and does his best to steer clear of the malign influence of Avakian’s wayward kid, Danny (Jonathan Howard). Though he’s successful for a while, the system is wired for him to fail. His parole officer (Isidora Goreshter) is corrupt and opportunistic, sure, yet the real problem facing X is that this culture promises happiness in the form of material acquisition and public adulation and nowhere else. So X wants more and goes about getting it the way he’s been conditioned to: by any means necessary.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Wildland

August 30, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Thriller

Kød & blod
***½/****
starring Sidse Babett Knudsen, Sandra Guldberg Kampp, Elliott Crosset Hove, Besir Zeciri
written by Ingeborg Topsøe
directed by Jeanette Nordahl

by Walter Chaw Opening like a film from the New French Extremity, what with its phantom images of a deadly car accident set as a framing event for everything to follow, Danish director Jeanette Nordahl's Wildland (originally Kød & blod, or "flesh and blood") resolves as a domestic implosion in the vein of David Michôd's Animal Kingdom. The accident has claimed the mother of pretty, taciturn 17-year-old Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp), leaving her at the mercy of social services, who deem in their wisdom to place Ida with her Aunt Bodil (Sidse Babett Knudsen). Bodil has three grown sons who, at her direction, are involved in a criminal enterprise of sorts, and Wildland's MacGuffin is the collection of a debt from a recalcitrant client. What the game is is never terribly clear, but it's obvious that this is not an ideal environment for Ida following her recent trauma. Neither is it clear whether Ida was complicit in the fatal accident, though her dreams and fantasies–and the claustrophobic way Nordahl shoots her film in general (and Ida in particular) in long, unbroken closeups–certainly suggest Ida feels guilty about something. I don't mention these opacities as a detriment: far from it. Nordahl's picture isn't interested in the sundry details of its MacGuffins because they are MacGuffins.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Lucky

August 27, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

*½/****
starring Brea Grant, Hunter C. Smith, Yasmine Al-Bustami, Kristina Klebe
written by Brea Grant
directed by Natasha Kermani

by Walter Chaw When you make the subtext the text, you have text and no subtext. I’m uncomfortable saying that things like Natasha Kermani’s Lucky (from a script by star Brea Grant) are not good, because sometimes that’s taken as a comment on the text rather than the execution of the text. More often, and I’m not even sure this isn’t fair to say, it’s taken as evidence that men can only review films made by women as men would see films made by women. That’s literally true. When I watch something like Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas, the second reboot of Bob Clark’s seminal slasher, I’m starkly confronted by the divorce between what I’m watching and my knowledge of what its messages mean to so many. I think it’s imperative that women speak out about men and have the means to do so. That said, Black Christmas, the reboot of Rabid, and now Lucky move me only as intellectual exercises and not as calls to action. They’re rally speeches, not poetry. At least, they’re not poetry I can understand.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Fried Barry

August 25, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, South Africa

***½/****
starring Gary Green, Chanelle De Jager, Bianka Hartenstein, Sean Cameron Michael
written and directed by Ryan Kruger

by Walter Chaw South African hyphenate Ryan Kruger’s debut Fried Barry is just really fucking delightful, an amalgamation of The Greasy Strangler and John McNaughton’s unfairly-forgotten The Borrower. The glue that seals the grimy, appalling parts together is, of all things, E.T.. It’s in that juncture between the obscene and the profound where Fried Barry finds its singular genius as a creature so foul that when it suddenly, briefly, becomes Save the Green Planet! but with the victim/protagonist/antihero the saviour of a group of girls held in a pedophile’s torture dungeon, what already defied description suddenly becomes… Is it art? At least it’s useful, cogent, maybe brilliant surrealism in that by turning into something familiar, all of the bizarreness racks into focus as a critique of the conventions of our popular entertainments. Why, for instance, is E.T., a film about an alien symbiote attached to a child nearly to the point of killing the child, so beloved a family classic? Look, you’re either with it, or you’re decidedly not. But if you’re in, so is Fried Barry. Oh, mate, Fried Barry is emphatically in.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Crazy Samurai Musashi

August 24, 20202020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan

*/****
starring Tak Sakaguchi, Kento Yamazaki
written by Sion Sono
directed by Yuji Shimomura

by Walter Chaw I’m going to be indelicate here in a second; I hope you’ll bear with me. It isn’t when I say that Yuji Shimomura’s Crazy Samurai Musashi is terrible, but when I say that Crazy Samurai Musashi is terrible like those world-record-setting gangbang pornos are terrible. It’s tedious, repetitive, boring almost immediately, and its only purpose as a venal spectacle demeans the participants as it eventually demeans the viewer. When an act is repeated until ground into a quintessence of dust, the act, whatever the act, is demystified utterly. I get it: sex is literally just mechanical pistoning. I would stop short of saying Crazy Samurai Musashi is exploitative in the same way, though it’s perhaps exploitative in maybe not so different a way as you would think. The draw of it is to present, as the bulk of a 90-minute feature, a 77-minute “one take” action sequence featuring legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (Tak Sakaguchi) murdering 488 not-legendary swordsmen in the middle of one of those Japanese woods where things like this happen in their 17^th-century video game way. That sounds amazing, doesn’t it? It does. A lot of things sound amazing. Very few of them are amazing in practice.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Climate of the Hunter

August 23, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Vampire

***/****
starring Mary Buss, Laurie Cummings, Ginger Gilmartin, Ben Hall
written by Mickey Reece and John Selvidge
directed by Mickey Reece

Fantasia Festival runs from August 20 to September 2, 2020. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Micky Reece’s Climate of the Hunter is a delightful riff on ’70s no-budget grindhouse psychedelia–a take on Stephanie Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire that unlike, say, The Love Witch, understands The Velvet Vampire as something other than just aesthetics to be aped. Which is not to say Climate of the Hunter isn’t aesthetically spot-on, even beautiful at times, in its filmic, weathered, period-appropriate way, but rather that it additionally captures that specific air of griminess attendant to artifacts like Rothman’s picture: the feeling that it’s not operating under any rules, so all bets are off. There’s a maverick quality to it, and a sly sense of self-knowing humour that stops short of being self-satisfied.