By: Henry J. Fromage –
This week I pursued my lately customary mix of releases I missed in theaters and documentary short films.
446. The Sheep Detectives
Leave it to the Brits to make a wholesome, feel-good murder mystery in which center-poster star Hugh Jackman gets offed after like 15 minutes of screentime. There’s no reason that centering such a story on the CGI talking sheep that set out to solve his murder (or help the bumbling humans trying to) should work at all, really, and yet this is a rather delightful and surprisingly heartfelt entertainment nonetheless. Perhaps a bit obvious here or there, but hard to nitpick all too much. Two Beers.
447. Wardriver
Dane DeHaan’s leading man vehicles seem to have dried up after the doubletap of A Cure for Wellness (undeserved) and Valerian and the too long title… (somewhat deserved). This Paramount + exclusive may be a bit under the radar still, but its reviews are pretty good and he’s paired with on the rise talent like Mamoudou Athie and Sasha Calle. He plays a small-scale hacker who gets muscled by a bouncer (Athie) into stealing 800k from a young woman (Calle) flaunting her cash in front of the wrong people. The problem is, it actually belongs to a very bad man (a suitably reptilian Jeffrey Donovan) and he decides he’ll replace it to save her from him, which may not be the best of ideas, especially when he gets roped into an even larger, much more dangerous scheme. A well-acted, muscular crime thriller, if a bit perhaps appropriately humorless. Three Beers.
448. Gangland
This hard-boiled crime drama stars Lou Diamond Phillips and Dana Namerode as a grizzled veteran tribal cop and his new transfer partner as they try to keep the peace between warring gangs and corrupt county police using tactics both by the book and decidedly not. It’s as hard-boiled and unsentimental a depiction of the layers of desperation in such a place as it comes, with bravura performances pretty much all around. Two Beers.
449. Core Dump
Epic Games’ Unreal Engine has been used to create a shockingly diverse range of art even outside its original medium of video games, and here is the canvas for this Annecy Film Festival award-winner. In it, a mass of drones flies over a massive landfill of discarded technology liek so many flies buzzing around spoiled meat, before diving down inside the labyrinth that underlies it. It’s incredibly textured and realistic, if not exactly narrative. Three Beers.
450. My Orange Garden
This New Yorker documentary short is a bit more on the artsy side, but it’s art that has been denied women like Faravaz Farvardin in her home country for too long. She was imprisoned for singing in public in Iran, but here gets to defiantly do exactly that, baring her soul (and other things she’d never be able to in the name of art in Iran). Three Beers.
451. Beeps
The next documentary short on tap here is about a couple who move into a bit more rough and tumble Los Angeles neighborhood, then one who’s particularly sensitive to loud noises notices and infernal beeping coming from somewhere in the surrounding houses and apartment building. So begins a quest to find the smoke detector that clearly needs a new battery, with language and culture providing both barriers and opportunities. All in 15 minutes- quite the odyssey. Two Beers.
452. The Last of the Nightingales
This doc short shows us the world through the eyes, or perhaps rather the ears, of Bernie Krause, a pioneering synthesizer artist who is now an “acoustic ecologist”- someone who takes meticulous sonic maps of different environments over time to striking effect. This is especially the case for the nature around his home after a forest fire wipes everything out in its path. An extremely interesting both sonic and visual journey. Two Beers.
