By: Henry J. Fromage –
This week I delved into a couple of Prime channels- Topic and Fandor- with a wealth of smaller films that I’ve been hunting for in recent years.
299. Seaspiracy
Documentarian Ali Fabrizi delves into the sustainability of the fishing industry and surprise, surprise, discovers all kinds of horrendous things about the foodsource that is held up by many as the healthiest and most humane of the meats. Well, it’s a horror-show out there, with labels purporting sustainability, or cruelty or even just simply dolphin-free all being unenforceable. Slave labor? Yep, most of your shrimping and prawn boats take advantage of that. It’s all quite exhausting even before the detours that don’t support the main thesis (like the undeniably bloody but far from commercial Faroe Island whale hunt that’s been shocking from National Geographic covers since the 80s). Still, I suppose you should know- don’t eat fish (that you don’t catch yourself, that is). Three Beers.
300. Horse Money
Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela was a real arthouse eye-opener for me this year. Nobody shoots gorgeously darkness-saturated frames like Costa and longtime DP Leonardo Simoes, and while this doesn’t have quite even the barebones narrative cohesion of Vitalina Varela, you can’t tear your eyes away (plus she shows up in a small role herself!). You need not always been following things to appreciate the remarkable performance of non-actor Ventura, who communicates decades of regret and a miasma of memories, some literalized on screen and some not. Three Beers.
301. Behemoth
This Chinese documentary from 2015 is focused on the mines and miners of Chinese iron mines in Mongolia- massive earth-rending operations fueling the boom in Chinese city-building in anticipation of an influx of city-dwellers that has yet to arrive. Director Zhao Liang directs lyrically instead of narratively, transposing immense landscapes against the nooks and crannies of the soot-lined faces of aged-too-young miners. Three Beers.
302. Once Upon a Time in Venezuela
This is another documentary, from just last year, focused on a small town set on pylons in the water of a remote Venezuelan lake. At first it’s ethnographic, but as the most recent election pitting Chavez successor Maduro against a never stronger opposition becomes the dominant topic, things turn political quickly. It’s clear that the incumbent party has done nothing but break promises to even its most committed party members, and the town is ready for change, something that the entire country was- at least until Maduro’s undemocratic coup against the lawfully elected government occurred. A damning account from the ground’s-eye view. Three Beers.
303. The Day He Arrives
This earlier Hong Sang-soo film (2011) reminded my wife of Ha Ha Ha, which was an early highlight of this steadfast festival director’s career. It does have what’s now a intriguing lack of polish, although all of the standbys (soju, self-examining sexism, a vastly over-attractive female cast considering the minor filmmakers that make up the male half) are here already. He’s also playing with scenic rhyming and structure, effectively here. Three Beers.
304. Spettacolo
This documentary follows the residents of the small Tuscan town of Monticchiello as they prepare for a tradition that they’ve upheld for the last 50 years- a play produced by, starring, and concerned primarily with the residents themselves. There’s some new challenges, as the cast mirrors the aging demographics of the town and they have problems interesting younger inhabitants in taking part, and as political differences have started to rend what was once a uniquely unified community. It’s hard to say whether this play is in its twilight, or on the cusp of a new, tourist-driven, and perhaps even sadder beginning. Three Beers.
305. Nobody
I’m not going to say that this is singularly worth returning to the theaters for, but if you’ve got those double doses… then this is the perfect ball of pure entertainment to ring in a very new year with. Bob Oedenkirk unsurprisingly plays the nebbish well, but he also does a surprisingly spectacular job playing the hidden and spectacularly dangerous badass fighting his way through a horde of Russian mobsters. This is perfectly apiece with the John Wick universe, but also far funnier, and just as hardcore. Just a goddamn blast. Two Beers.
306. Son
This horror from Ian Kavanagh is about a mother with a cultish past who fears that those she escaped from are after her young son, who is hiding some horrifying secrets of his own. The cop she asks to help her out (horrifyingly in its own way, played by Emile Hirsch) is torn between believing her and the evidence of the bloodbath she leaves in her wake. Kavanagh pulls off some Hereditary-level occult horror and delivers a few nasty twists, here making it the first great horror film of the year. Two Beers.
307. Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal
Director Chris Smith (American Movie) takes an interesting approach to this unwieldly title-holding documentary about the college admissions scandal that saw Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin among other less famous yet clearly too rich individuals charged with bribery and fraud for taking Grade A piece of shit Rick Singer’s (he got off by flipping on the very people he coerced into criminal activity) “side door” into college acceptances for their children. He hires actors like Matthew Modine (playing Singer) to act out the transcripts of their actual conversations – which both livens up what could be somewhat dry material, and adds a extra layer of villainy (or at least heightens our ability to understand it). Two Beers.
308. Lucky
Screenwriter/star Bea Grant and Director Natasha Kermani make an unmistakably feminist and really quite stylishly and engrossingly delivered statement here in this story of a wife who is attacked every day, without fail, by a masked man that she always succeeds in killing and yet once more has to contend with when the calendar turns. It’s just a bit hard to parse exactly what exactly that statement is without some slightly intimidating leaps in logic. Three Beers.
309. Dark Days
Marc Singer’s first and to date only documentary film is often mentioned on any list of the greatest of the form, and for good reason. At the turn of the century, Singer befriended and began to follow the homeless inhabitants of Manhattan’s abandoned subway tunnels, who built their very own dingy, often horrifying, yet genuinely impressive city and society down there in the dark. Beyond this, though, and the luck Singer had at encountering this story at the time it was all going to change, it’s the simple humanity of its interviewees and the inescapable feeling of “there but by the grace of God go I” that will stick with you. Two Beers.
310. Western
The Ross Bros jumped a level in arthouse recognition with their superb quasi-documentary Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets this year, but they’ve been superb documenters of life in interesting places for awhile now. This documentary follows the twin towns of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, for centuries separated only by a not-so-wide branch of the Rio Grande, but now increasingly so because of politics neither side agree with. They know the truth of life of the border, and it’s not the intentionally polarizing black and white it may be more convenient to believe it is. Two Beers.
311. Suburban Birds
This Chinese arthouse film is dreamily conceived and shot by Qiu Sheng, possibly too much so. This loosely told story of a successful yet unhappy engineer investigating mysterious sinkholes in Hangzhou and a seemingly unrelated group of children who start to disappear while playing in its dystopian outskirts doesn’t really cohere into anything, but it sure is a good-looking debut. Three Beers.
312. Everyone Else
Maren Ade’s second feature, and the film previous to her international breakout Toni Erdmann, stars Birgit Minichmayr as a young woman hopelessly in love with and suffering from an undeserved inferiority complex (she works at a record label!) to her largely unsuccessful architect boyfriend played by Lars Eidinger. This is the type of movie where we watch the gradual unraveling of a relationship, at least until (MILD SPOILER ALERT) it doesn’t. I suppose that is true to life as well, but pretty damn unsatisfying. Three Beers.
313. Pinocchio
The only reason I watched the glutton for punishment Roberto Benigni take his second ill-fated stab at the same-titled story of Pinocchio was that it was nominated for an Oscar this year (two, in fact). This one apparently hews closer to the original fairytale, and like all original European fairytales, it’s fucked up. Matteo Garrone reprises the grotesque approach he applied to his collection of original fairytales in Tale of Tales, but triples down on and infantilizes it. The result is a mix of shrill voice acting and truly terrifying man/beast hybrids that you should only show your child if you really need to teach that little bastard a lesson. Five Beers.
314. The One and Only Ivan
Besides the Shorts (which I will get to!), this was the only other Oscar nominated film (Special Effects) I hadn’t seen the day after the nominations being announced. Bryan Cranston fares better here than Benigni does in the previous film, but it is entirely fair to wonder why Cranston is in a talking animal movie that went straight to Disney + (and not a voice actor, like Sam Rockwell is here). The CGI is indeed impressive and there’s enough heart here to make it a perfectly serviceable family feature, but that’s about as far as it goes. Four Beers.
315. Amarcord
“Hilarious” is not at all an adjective I’d previously associated with Frederico Fellini, and yet this film of his about the simple lives of the residents of a small Italian town in the 1930s during rise of Mussolini is undeniably so. He is clearly sending up the kind of appeal to the “good old days” that Fascists like to make, both by setting his “good old days” at a time where Fascism was flourishing in Italy, and in depicting the life of these common people in the perverse fashion that real people actually live in- not the golden-hued false memories appeals to nostalgia are based on. A Toast.
316. Immigration Nation
This Netflix series about the evils of US immigration policy and enforcement under the Trump administration starts a bit scattershot but rounds into both a cohesive thesis and series full of often shocking and utterly heart-rending human interest stories. I don’t know how anyone with any political leaning can watch a former Marine but non-citizen (many more of them exist than you’d ever guess) break down in tears because he’s been separated from his wife and deported and not recognize the absurdity of some of our (even under Biden) policy. Two Beers.
317. Cheer Up, Mr. Lee
This is a comedy perhaps only the Koreans would dare to have made. Former model Cha Seung-won a hot, initially unexplained mentally deficient noodle-maker who finds out he has a daughter with cancer who needs a transplant. When she escapes from her hospital on a mysterious errand, he follows. This works far better than it should, but shouldn’t work at all, so… Four Beers.
318. Oasis
Speaking of Korean movies about characters with undiagnosed mental impairment, this early film from Burning‘s Lee Chang-dong stars Sol Kyung-gu as an at least slow and certainly disturbed ex-con who falls for a Moon So-ri, an able-bodied actress who admittedly very committedly portrays a young woman with cerebral palsy. The beginning of the romance is the type of truly awful yet bold scene that the late 90s feted but which would never fly today, and it’s hard for the movie to come back from it despite ably told human interest story at its center. Four Beers.
