Controversies

Controversy One. The Netflix film Cuties. It’s been condemned by a number of public figures including politicians. And there’s been a call, several weeks now, for its removal from the streaming service. But as of today, it’s still there and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. I didn’t want to watch this film. Everything I’d heard about it repulsed me. But, you know, in the interest of fair criticism, I wanted to make up my mind for myself. Now having watched it, perhaps it’s because I’ve been influenced by the naysayers, I still am shaking my head about Cuties’ content. But I think I would have come to a similar conclusion anyway. The film, by first time director Maïmouna Doucouré, is supposed to be an indictment of how society sexualizes pre-teens. I would like to do a survey of 100 people who attend a screening of Cuties – without them having known anything about the movie or the controversy – and ask their opinion when they left. My guess is most would say the film itself exploits tweens. In the 96-minute movie there are numerous close ups of these 11-year-olds twerking, swinging their legs and showing, yes, their crotches. There is even one scene where the lead actor, Amy (Fathia Youssant) pulls down her panties and takes a photo of herself. (Sorry I had to tell you this.) The film could be a pedophile’s delight, regardless of its intentions. It’s one of those movies you feel dirty after having watched it. I know, it’s all about art. But there has to be a line drawn somewhere, and it should have been drawn before this picture was made.

Controversy two. Disney film Mulan (Niki Caro). I have never had any interest in this franchise but the fact this latest live action version was filmed with the aid of some of the worst elements of the Communist Chinese government is disgusting and definitely worth boycotting. The film’s end credits give “special thanks” to the “public security bureau” in Xinjiang, the region where the Chinese government has locked away hundreds of thousands of China’s Uighur Muslim minority in concentration camps. There is some suggestion the movie’s theme is also racist with the dominant Han Chinese vanquishing what is coded as Muslim villains. Finally, there is the star herself, Liu Yifel, who last year denounced Hong Kong pro-democracy demonstrators.

Controversy three. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ new diversity standards. To be eligible for the 2024 Oscars to win Best Picture a film must meet two of four standards, in other words employing members of various racial or ethnic minorities.  One is onscreen representation, themes and narratives. The second is creative leadership and the project team. The third is industry access and opportunities (such as internships and apprenticeships). The fourth is audience development (marketing, publicity and distribution). The problem, of course, is that whenever one mandates anything, especially for an art form, that takes away the essential creativity of the production and negates what art is all about. Of course, pne always hopes for an integrated industry free of bias. But mandating strictures will turn art into political propaganda or agit prop, or in the corrupt tradition of Communist governments far and wide, state-sanctioned Socialist Realism.

Bonfire of the Yuppies

 

Sean Durkin’s The Nest, opening in selected theatres today and on video on demand November 17, follows Rory (Jude Law) and Allison (Carrie Coon) as they move from a comfortable suburban American life to an ambitious one in Britain. The film has elements of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella 1999) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), and there are even aspects of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (Brian De Palma 1990). But really this is a psychological drama. The story is set in 1986. Rory O’Hara is an ambitious but fickle stock trader and gets an opportunity to move home to Britain to work for his old boss Arthur Davis (Michael Culkin). Allison, a horse trainer, is perfectly happy in the US. When Rory tells her he wants to move to London she replies, “Go fuck yourself.” Move they do, and into an opulent, centuries old, if a bit creepy, Sussex mansion. Rory commutes to an office tower in London’s financial district. All goes well until it doesn’t. Rory can’t support this opulent lifestyle and Allison has to pay contractors from her secret stash after the checks bounce. It all goes downhill from there. Rory plots a merger with Davis’s company but the details don’t work out. His win-around-the-next-corner aspirations keep turning sour. He ends up trying to coopt a colleague, Steve’s (Adeel Akhtar) Norwegian fish farms acquisition but is embarrassed by an increasingly disgruntled Allison at a formal clients’ dinner. The physical displacement from America to Britain mirrors the financial dislocation as the couple spirals into debt and increasingly becomes estranged from one another. While the ever-ambitious Rory keeps coming up short in the financial world Allison starts to psychologically unravel and at one point tries to dig up her beloved horse, Richmond’s, grave. Law is perfect as the social climbing almost amoral stock trader consumed with material success in the go-go 1980s fueled by massive government deregulation. And Coon is amazing as his strong skeptical wife who is as distraught by the family’s (they have two kids) predicaments as she is enraged at her husband. Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry’s fraught score underlines the gathering tension. The Nest is an adult film that examines the exterior and interior worlds that can strain married couples, regardless of what social class they may be in.  

Treasure or trash: you be the judge

 Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things (on Netflix), is the latest mind bender from perhaps the most eccentric director working in Hollywood, Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, 1999; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Synecdoche, New York 2008)). Based on Canadian novelist Iain Reid’s novel, the story, on its surface, is simple. A couple, new in their romance, is driving along a country road to a farmhouse where she (Jessie Buckley) will meet his - Jake’s (Jesse Plemons) - parents. It’s winter and a snowstorm is brewing. The film’s title refers to the main character, the woman – who goes by various names – seeking an end to their still newish relationship. But she tells herself it’s easier to just go along. This is one of several oblique commentaries throughout the film on the compromises one makes in conventional life. As the drive continues the two people strain at conversation. Various topics, like Hollywood musicals and poetry, spark an outpouring of knowledge from Jake. And then she recites one of her brilliant poems, a deep esoteric dive. Arriving at the farmhouse, several oddities occur. There are frozen dead animals. And the couple suffer a prolonged wait for Jake’s parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis). Now we’ve entered Stephen King territory. Mom and dad, with bizarre facial expressions and awkward poses, talk in abrupt or extended sentences. As the night wares on - no, your eyes aren’t deceiving you – we start seeing mom and dad at different ages. These dissociated images match the young woman’s questionable identity – is she a poet, a student of quantum physics, an amazing surrealistic painter? The couple then drive home. They stop, bizarrely, at an ice cream parlor, located in the frozen tundra. Then they pull up at Jake’s old high school. There, the janitor, an aged version of Jake, eventually doffs his clothes and ends up following an erudite-speaking pig down a hallway. At this point - or actually some time before – you might ask: has the filmmaker lost his mind or am I losing mine? This is the kind of film, folks, you’re either going to love or hate. Or, charitably – which is how I view it - at least think worth dissecting for symbol and thought associations, dreams, aging, and the nature of life itself.   

Playing hooky: A mélange of Hitchcock

 

I played hooky from my day job this week - yes, even when you  work for yourself you can feel a twinge of guilt taking the day off – because TCM’s Summer Under the Stars (it’s still summer, folks) featured an entire day of Alfred Hitchcock. The five movies I caught were early and mid-Hitchcock of which I’d only seen snippets or not seen at all. The first was The Lady Vanishes (1938). This is a classic “train” whodunit – like Murder on the Orient Express – and from the same era. A group of tourists are in the fictional European country of Bandrika (think Lichtenstein) with even an apparently made up language! One, Iris (Margaret Lockwood), is taking the train home. Across from her is Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), a governess. Iris falls asleep and when she awakes Froy is gone. And no one on the train knows her whereabouts or even doubt she was on the train in the first place. The real theme of the movie is, like George Cukor’s 1944 Gaslight, whether the central character believes her own mind or thinks she's losing it. The second movie was Foreign Correspondent (1940). The title is a joke and a poke at journalism. Joel McCrae plays John Jones, a bored New York reporter summoned by his publisher to be a “foreign correspondent” – a haughty term that Jones makes fun of. But he’s chosen because he has no pretenses and doesn’t even know a lot about international politics. But one thing he’s good at, he’s got a reporter’s nose for news and knows how to break a story. Merriment, drama – and of course romance - ensue as Jones attends galas in various European capitals and meets the corrupt grandees colluding with the enemy, fomenting a soon to be dastardly war.   The next film was Suspicion (1941), a psychological drama where a wallflower, Lina (Joan Fontaine) marries a playboy and bon vivant, Johnnie (Cary Grant). All starts well until Lina has, uh, suspicions, about where the money is coming from to finance their high-flying life. Here, Hitchcock probes the complexities of the mind and human behavior in tracing Johnnie’s amorality and sociopathology. The fourth film was Stage Fright (1950), with a complex plot starring Marlene Dietrich and Jane Wyman that plays on guile, manipulation and identity.  It’s a type of whodunit where the central character Eve (Wyman) is as fooled as we are trying to flush out the real murderer. The fifth film was The Wrong Man (1956), which had the strongest impact on me. Based on a true story, Henry Fonda is Chris Balestrero, a jazz musician. One day he’s picked up by the police because he looks like the same person who has been pulling a series of neighborhood holdups. Of course, in real life, there are countless of these cases, where someone – and it could be you or me – is arrested because of mistaken identity. Some are even convicted and spend decades in jail.  What’s powerful in the film is the realism generated by a superb supporting cast (the police detectives) and Fonda as Balestrero who finds himself in the Kafkaesque throes of the criminal justice system.

Faith a test even for the religious

You believe or you don’t believe. And while there will always be believers – some true believers – there will also be doubters. And it’s no different now than it was in 1917. That’s when a series of apparitions of the Blessed Virgin appeared to three children in a sheep meadow in impoverished central Portugal. Of course, Catholics have long had a place in their hearts for “Our Lady of Fatima” and numerous churches have been named after the event, a theological miracle. But while all is taken for granted now and a huge shrine has been erected at the site, Fatima, the children’s sightings were highly controversial in their day and provoked huge disruptions in Portugal’s social and religious fabric. And all because few people – aka adults - believed the three little children. The film Fatima (Marco Pontecorvo) (opening in various Michigan theatres and on-demand Friday) puts us right in the middle of this fraught environment not just between the two girls and boy’s parents and their family’s neighbors. But it pits religion – and faith – against an increasingly secular world even in the early 20th century.  Early on in the film, the children witness the original Virgin apparition in May 1917 when World War I was still ongoing. Almost immediately the three children – Lucia (Stephanie Gil), the oldest, and her siblings Jacinta and Francisco – are scorned by their mother (Lúcia Moniz). “Why would the Mother of God choose you of all people?” Of course, since the kids actually saw the Virgin, attempts by their parents, the local priest and the town’s very secular mayor (Marco d’Almeida), can’t make them change their story. It all adds up to turmoil for the family, as they’re accused of harboring delinquent kids. And clergy and government officials are embarrassed their church and town are becoming laughing stocks. Eventually, word gets out and more and more people traipse to the sheep meadow. The children kneel before Virgin visions while those gathered behind of course can’t see anything. Nevertheless, one day a miracle is performed when a paralyzed boy starts walking. Lots of “rational” explanations are offered and why wouldn’t there be? Think how this kind of thing would go over nowadays. The disconnect between the children and adults eventually leads to cruelty as Lucia is temporarily jailed pending psychiatrist interview, who gives her a clean bill of mental health. The film’s narrative is a series of flashbacks from a more contemporary interview between an academic (Harvey Keitel) and a  now aged Lúcia dos Santos (Sônia Braga) a nun. (Lúcia died in 2005.) They two mildly spar. “What is faith if not the search for truth?” she asks. “An inexplicable truth which breeds irrational hope,” he replies. But even the professor can’t answer why Jacinta’s recently exhumed body is fully intact. And, to add credence to the Fatima story, hundreds of people have testified to the Oct. 13, 1917 “Miracle of the Sun” when the Virgin’s appearance seemed to trigger the celestial star's plummeting to the Earth. I liked the fact this film presents religion in a positive light against a typically condescending secular view. And it therefore should attract religious and especially Catholic audiences. However, I somehow wished the direction was less straightforward. For example, there could have been more use of surreal images – even magical realism – to show the juxtapositions between the children’s immersion in the spiritual or transcendent and the adults’ unimaginative, coarse every day.

Through awesome remote Greenland

Through Greenland (Eric Engesgaard) is a five part documentary featuring Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) that will take you to a place you’ve probably always wondered about but was too awesome remote to explore further. (It premieres Thursday, Aug. 27 on Topic.)  Sure, nearby Iceland is the trendy spot in which to vacation – at least prior to Covid-19 – so will Greenland be next? Maybe this series will put that idea into people’s heads. The world’s largest island at 836,000 square miles is simply one of those places that seems so forbidding - three quarters of it is covered by the only permanent ice sheet outside Antarctica – that a documentary about it can be is irresistible. The first episode whets the appetite, starting in the remotest far northwest. Coster-Waldau and crew are on an initial two-stop tour. The first is to the Thule air base, 1200 km north of the Arctic Circle. Though governed by Demark the base might well have been in Kansas. Coster-Waldau is thoroughly disoriented finding bright eyed US twenty-somethings running one of the most critical missile tracking stations on Earth. But while he’s treated like royalty the film’s sub theme is about how the Americans and their Danish overlords brutally kicked out the townsfolk several decades ago. Given three days to pack their worldly belongings the folk in the town of Dundas - incidentally founded as a trading post by Canadians – had to trek three days to their new home of Qaanaaq. They had to sleep in tents during the brutal winter until their houses were built. The fact they had to evacuate into an even more remote part of the “Arctic desert” with few vital supplies is something Coster-Waldau, and you and I, might find “incomprehensible.” In Qaanaaq the actor meets Innuit and indulges in eating raw whale meat, a delicacy. Through Greenland will likely be fascinating, not just for Game of Thrones fans, but because, just like Coster-Waldau, for the first time we’re immersed in an environment we’ve never seen before. Besides watching Coster-Waldau’s interactions with the natives there is always the brooding vistas of the elongated blackened islands topped with snow, creating a serene remoteness. Nevertheless, it's still surprising that even in these austere conditions there is an underlying modernity, with villagers having wi-fi and flat screen TVs and Greenland settlements invariably linked by the country's very contemporary airline. It’s all a tableau that likely will pique the viewer’s interest for episodes to come.

(The original review erroneously was based on an understanding this film was one episode, and not five. I apologize for the error.)

The adventure of watching L’avventura

I had never seen the perhaps most famous and first of Michelangelo Antonioni’s early 1960s trilogy of films, L’avventura, until recently (on the Criterion Channel). L’avventura, released in 1960, predated the other films in the series, La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962), and was the breakout movie for the esteemed Italian actress Monica Vitti. All three films deal with human alienation and the existential quest for connection, a rarity – perhaps outside of Ingmar Bergman’s films – at that time. Yet, for me, L’avventura is the most inaccessible of the three films. Clocking in at almost two and a half hours, it’s slow and plodding. Nothing necessarily wrong with that but there seems very little going on in it. A group of friends set sail for an island off Sicily and one, Anna (Lea Massari) disappears. The rest of the movie isn’t so much about trying to find her as it is the evolving romantic relationship between Claudia (Vitti) and Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), Anna’s lover. In fact, so little goes on in the film it was famously booed and mocked during its premier at the Cannes Film Festival, though it did win the Jury Prize. So inaccessible is the movie that I had to turn to a companion documentary by critic Gene Youngblood (also on Criterion) which does a scene by scene narration of the film. That was worth it. Now, I started to understand. Sure, I originally got the fact there were two people having a hard time connecting as they roam in various austere environments but I totally missed the extravagant symbolism throughout. And I’m sure those people booing at Cannes did too! In fact, the film is the celluloid counterpart to looking at a piece of abstract art – say, a Mark Rothko painting. Youngblood, who says he watched the film 11 times (in a row, I believe) and “passionately” loves it, explains how the scenes were framed and the symbolism of everything from natural topography to the characters’ physical expressions, placement to one another, use of body parts and extraneous elements like bell towers and urban squares. The movie, by any standard, did break ground in the way scenes were framed. Folks, it’s stuff you and I (okay I’ll speak for myself) probably never would have guessed – and I like these kinds of movies. So, should you embark on watching L’aventurra, do yourself a favor and watch the Gene Youngblood voice over narration as well. But, truth to tell, even with Youngblood’s analysis I still found myself straining that L’aventurra all adds up to what it’s supposed to be.