Month: January 2019

Green Book

Posted on by victorfraga

It all begins as the Copacabana night club where Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) works in New York closes down during two months for renovations. The bouncer has to find another job in order to make ends meet for his family. He is invited to an interview with “Doctor” Shirley (Mahershala Ali), who happens to live on top of the Carnegie Hall. In reality, he is no doctor. Donald Shirley is a very famous, talented and wealthy pianist. He has played twice in the White House in the past 12 months, and he’s a close friend of the Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. And he’s black.

Tony becomes Don’s driver as they tour downs the country, starting in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) all the way down to the Deep South, where segregation laws still prevail. Tony is given a copy of the titular Green Book in order to find accommodation and food for his “coloured” boss. The Negro Motorist Green Book was an annual guidebook for African-American roadtrippers, which listed places where people of Don’s colour would be welcomed. This is 1962, and the civil rights movement still had much to achieve.

Donald Shirley is the ultimate impersonation of the “twoness” described by writer W.E.B. du Bois (and often addressed by Spike Lee): how can you be both American and Black? Don struggles to reconcile his class privilege (obtained through his sheer talent and determination) with his race underprivilege. This conflict surfaces often as the two men tour states such North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Mississippi. Tony challenges Don’s blackness because he doesn’t know Little Richard and Aretha Franklin, and also because he doesn’t eat fried chicken. “I’m blacker than you”, he ascertains. Don was also a homosexual (something he never admitted until he died in 2013), making his identity far more complex.

Southerners also confronted Don with his “twoness”. Despite being dandy, elegant, well-mannered and extremely intelligent (he could speak several languages, including Russian and Italian), racist Americans still perceived him as a subspecies. He has to sleep in shabby accommodation, he’s arrested without any reason and he’s prevented from eating in the dining room of the venue where he’s performing. Blacks are good for entertainment, but not to mingle with, both the guests and hosts seem to think. The film climaxes in Birmingham (Alabama), when Don storms out of the restaurant where he’s not allowed to eat and heads to a roadside blues club, where he mingles and also performs an impromptu jam session with the local musicians. But there too his “twoness” is an obstacle, and Tony has to come for his rescue.

It is the friendship between Tony and Don, however, that drives the narrative. Tony is the perfect blend of avuncular and rough. He’s from an Italian immigrant family in New York (the actor Mortensen being from a Danish immigrant family, also from New York). He shouts out profanities, pilfers a little souvenir from the roadside shop and is never afraid to use violence as a currency. Don is the other extreme: ultra-polite, honest and anti-violence. Yet somehow they complement each other, and you too will be absorbed as the relationship veers from subtle hostility to a profound friendship in the course of this 120-minute movie.

Viggo Mortensen has been nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award, while Mahershala Ali has been nominated for Best Supporting Actor. They both deserve the nomination. But I find it a little strange that the film director Peter Farrelly opted to shine the spotlight on Mortensen instead of Ali. Ali’s character is far more complex and fascinating, and it did not deserve a supporting role (particularly in a film that challenges blacks being made secondary).

All in all, Green Book is a feelgood tearjerker with an upbeat ending. It’s guaranteed to leave a broad smile glued to your face as you leave the cinema, feeling glad that times have changed and such rabid racism is no longer acceptable. Or is it?

Green Book is in cinemas across the UK from Friday, January 25th. It won the Best Picture Academy Award. Out on VoD on Monday, June 10th.

Love Sonia

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Inseparable rural Indian sisters Sonia (Mrunal Thakur) and Preeti (Riya Sisodiya) work the land with their father Shiva (Adil Hussain). He wishes that his daughters were boys because he thinks that males have greater strength and stamina. Seeing Preeti as not pulling her weight, Shiva sells her to local businessman Baldev Singh (Anupam Kher) for employment in Mumbai. Horrified at her beloved sister’s disappearance, Sonia sneaks off to the local businessman and offers to work in Mumbai so she can be close to her sister.

Singh’s trusted associate Anjali (Sai Tamhankar) takes Sonia across the country by bus. Sonia’s enthralment at Mumbai’s bustling metropolis soon gives way to horror as she discovers what her work entails: she’s locked in a brothel with no obvious way out. Worse still, her sister is nowhere to be seen.

Thrown in with the more experienced and cynical Rashmi (Freida Pinto), Sonia is manipulated by brothel manager Faizal (Manoj Bajpayee) who talks with her as if he had her and all the other girls’ best interests at heart but elsewhere is shown on his mobile touting her as an innocent village virgin.

For its final 20 minutes, the narrative goes international with Sonia and Rashmi transported by computer-trackable shipping container to first Hong Kong where her hymen is resealed by Chinese medics, then L.A. where she services a wealthy client (Mark Duplass).

The opening countryside sequences impress, not only for showing very effectively the two young girls’ carefree, sisterly innocence and the very sweet boy from school who wants to be Sonia’s boyfriend and hold her hand but also for its quite chilling sexist undercurrents. Girls are perceived to be less physically able, so they’re less valued. Simple as that. And as the film progresses, at least until it leaves India, this feeling that women are worth less than men permeates everything.

Even Anjali, the woman who pretends to be kindly and helpful even as she’s transporting Sonia towards brothel incarceration in Mumbai, is trapped by a system that favours men over women. A survivor who’s taken matters into her own hands and doing alright out of it, Anjali has been reduced to betraying her fellow women.

Staying overnight in a hotel en route to Mumbai with Anjali, Sonia is warned by the hotel owner (Ankur Vikal), who clearly has more respect for women than do most of his fellow countrymen, to get away from that poisonous woman. And in Sonia’s brief escape attempt from the Mumbai brothel – before being caught and returned to Faizal’s establishment by the (male) police – a small boy (Sunny Pawar) on a market stall cheerfully describes her as a “Bang-Bang” with crude, expressive hand gestures to match.

The most harrowing scene is Sonia’s accompanied entry into the brothel – the locking of a grille at the entrance after she’s gone inside, the walks down lengthy corridors, the brief glimpses of thrusting male buttocks atop prostrate female bodies revealing exactly the sort of work into which Priiti has been sold. Thereafter, however, the focus is on the psychological manipulation of Sonia by her captors and while this is conveyed very well, you can’t help but feel the film makers have gone out of their way to keep further sexually explicit content to a minimum after this sole, highly effective, almost no holds barred scene.

On the one hand, that may not only allow the film to be watched by viewers who might otherwise find it too harrowing but also spare the actors and actors from portraying acts of a sexual nature which perhaps they shouldn’t be asked to perform. On the other, it perhaps overly sanitises Sonia’s experience, reducing her trauma’s potential power. That said, a couple of sex scenes involve Sonia, including a pretty unpleasant rape, albeit fairly discretely filmed.

Seeming brothel client Manish (Rajkummar Rao) tells Sonia he works for a charity that rescues girls tricked into prostitution. His later attempt to rescue her fails when she won’t come out, possibly because of Stockholm Syndrome, and the police quickly usher him off the premises with the one girl he’s already rescued. This incident makes her captors move Sonia to Hong Kong so she can’t be traced. Hollywood’s Demi Moore later turns up as an anti-sex trafficking charity worker in L.A.

The exposé of enforced prostitution and international sex trafficking, a form of slavery, is to be welcomed, as is the timely portray of widespread Indian male prejudice against women. For this writer, though, Love Sonia would have been more effective still had it not tried to tone down its physical, sexual content. But it’s still worth seeing.

The UK premiere of Love Sonia is on January 23rd at Curzon Bloomsbury – book here.

Love Sonia is out in the UK on Friday, January 25th. Watch the film trailer below:

On Her Shoulders

Posted on by victorfraga

Many people have never heard of the Yazidis, a ethno-religious minority mostly based in Iraq and Syria. Yazidism is one of the oldest religions in the world, combining elements and Christianity, Judaism and Islam. There are roughly one million Yazidis in the world, mostly in Iraq and Syria, and they are being fiercely persecuted by Isis. Young women, female teens and girls as young as nine as being used as sex slaves, while others simply exterminated.

Twenty-three-year-old Nadia Murad has experienced the horrors of Daesh/Isis firsthand. She was born in the village of Kocho in the Sinjar District of Iraq. In 2014 was held captive as a sex slave, repeatedly raped by hordes of men, beaten and burnt with cigarettes. In 2015, she began touring the world denouncing the predicament of her people. We learn that she visited 17 countries in just a few months (talking about her ordeal in each one of them) until she finally addressed the United Nations Security Council on the issue of human trafficking and conflict in December the same year.

On Her Shoulder investigates – as the film title suggests – the heavy burden that Nadia has to carry, being virtually the only Yazidi to receive widespread media attention and international solidarity. She has to represent her entire people almost entirely on her own. She’s not particularly outspoken. She’s camera-shy, timid and demure. She’s a far cry from the far more feisty Yazidi girls of Girls of the Sun (Eva Hussan, 2018). Murad is not Malala Yousafzai either; we’re told “she does not want to be an activist, a politician, in fact anything, she just wants to be a girl from the village”. This might explain why she’s distant and impenetrable. She did not know what female empowerment meant until 2015, when she learnt about progressive values and human rights.

She clarifies that she lost 18 relatives to murder and sexual slavery, and that she did not even have the chance to say goodbye to her mother. Living with the memories and the humiliation has made her a very introspective human being. Having to tell and retell her tragic story, and juggling with an incessant flurry of questions (“how did it happen?”, “how many men?”, “what did you do?”, ” what happened to other girls?”, etc) is extremely painful, and her continuous struggle is entirely palpable.

Nadia’s experience is shocking, and her fight to raise awareness of her people despite her introspective personality is touching and commendable. On Her Shoulders, however, is far less moving as a cinematic experience. The director’s fly-on-the-wall approach combined with Nadia’s monotonous speech make the film a little tedious. While the director deserves credit for being respectful and non-exploitative, the film lacks a little ingeniousness and imagination. It consists almost entirely of Nadia being followed around the UN and other places. There is hardly any archive footage, graphics and talking heads. The outcome is somewhat impersonal. You you feel like you are sitting on a table, in a room, or walking down the street with a bunch of strangers.

The film culminates with human rights lawyer Amal Clooney (George Clooney’s wife) representing Murad in the United Nations. The young Yazidi woman becomes Goodwill Ambassador for Survivors of Human Trafficking. It ends up with a heartbreaking confession: no matter how much the world celebrates her, Nadia still sees herself as “worthless”, as a result of the rape ordeal.

On Her Shoulders is in selected cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 25th. It’s out on VoD on Friday, February 1st.

Rosa Luxemburg

Posted on by victorfraga

On the eve of the centenary of the shocking assassination of Rosa Luxemburg just a week ago, the Guardian described Rosa and her followers as “radicals” (the no longer visible original headline on the website’s front page described her as a “German radical”). Since when is a pacifist “radical”? Only in a world where violence is the norm. The Guardian is quietly implying that conflict is the status quo and demanding peace is absurd. A little bit like they do to Jeremy Corbyn. A profoundly twisted perversion of values. Thankfully Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic of Rosa Luxemberg is now being released in order to reveal/remind us that she wasn’t a “radical” politician, but instead a very balanced, ethical and passionate human being.

The 121-minute drama featuring a stunning Barbara Sukowa (best remembered for Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1981, and Lola, 1981) zigzags back and forth in time between Rosa’s youth in Poland up until her untimely. murder on January 15th, 2019. She was assassinated in Berlin, her body dumped in a local canal. Sukowa won the Palme d’Or for Best Actress. She’s profoundly convincing as she passionately delivers her “deeply subversive” speeches about working class revolution, “war against war”, “living together in piece with our French brothers”, and paving the way for a general strike. Her helplessness at Reichstag voting unanimously for war is entirely palpable. Her view is that the proletariat must stand up and fight against their bosses (and not against the proletariat in other countries). The proletariat must stop production in order to thwart the ambitions of the ruling class, in simple Marxist terms.

Rosa Luxembourg is a generally simplified view of a very complex succession of political events. So convoluted that those unfamiliar with German politics 100 years ago might struggle to follow the story, despite the director’s nearly didactic approach (the speeches are simple and direct enough for anyone to grasp). Rosa Luxembourg and her comrades Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin founded the German Communist Party (KPD), which competed against the socialists of the SPD (which presently govern Germany in a coalition with Angela Merkel’s CDU). Both parties claimed to be Marxists, but there is very little doubt that the former was far more committed to the communist ideals. She grudgingly agreed to the Spartacist uprising in January 1915 in an attempt to seize power. Upon realising their defeat, Rosa expected to be imprisoned, but was instead summarily executed.

The German filmmaker and feminist Margarethe von Trotta focuses on Rosa’s pacifist credentials, demonstrating that she encountered resistance even within the party. She met with dismay the news that her associated Liebknecht encouraged workers “to beat their bosses to death”, at least according to a local newspaper. She believed that the class struggle consisted of striking and political manoeuvring, and that a bloodshed should be avoided at all costs. Her views put her at odds with Lenin, who believed that war was justifiable as long as it was for “national liberation” instead of imperialistic purposes – a fact strangely neglected in the movie.

Rosa’s duality as a female and a revolutionary is a addressed throughout the film. She was advised that motherhood makes one fearful, and urged to choose between having babies and the revolution (“Who are your real children?”, she was asked). At one point, Rosa is described by her male comrades as “argumentative” instead of “courageous”, a tactic familiar to all women who have been a victim of misogyny and gender bias.

Some of the most powerful sequences in the movie include Rosa’s nighmares of war. Real black and white, somber and grainy war footage are used in order to illustrate Rosa’s fear of conflict. She’s painted as a selfless individual who suffers enormous pain when others become a victim of violence and injustice. Her letters to Sonitschka (Karl Liebknecht’s wife) while in prison are also central pillar of the film, when Rosa’s talent and eloquence become most conspicuous. Overall, Rosa Luxemburg is a powerful historical drama, with excellent performances, photography and an invigorating music score to support the events. The topics of pacifism and class struggle remain as pertinent as ever.

Rosa Luxemburg is available on DVD, Blu-ray and also for digital download from Monday, February 4th. The new release commemorates the centenary of the revolutionary’s assassination.

Buffalo Boys

Posted on by victorfraga

This is the story of two brothers Suwo (Yoshi Sudarso ) and Jamar (Ario bayu) and their uncle Arana (Tio Pakusadewo) who left Java in order to live in exile in the US. They fled a brutal massacre carried out by Dutch Captain Van Trach (Reinout Bussemaker) and his soldiers, which culminated in the assassination of their father Sultan Hamza. The action takes place in 1860.

The two men work on the railways and they have learnt the cowboy way of life. In the beginning of the film, we see them win a very realistic fight on board of a speeding train in California. Their uncle informs them that it is finally time to return to their homeland and get the revenge that they have been waiting for their entire lives.

Upon arriving in Indonesia, the trio encounter a country devastated by an authoritarian regime led by Van Trach and his henchmen. Villagers are routinely tortured and executed. There is also a good amount of fighting, and the martial arts scenes are very well-crafted. Yet, I wish there were more fighting and less torture scenes. At times, it reminded me a of Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975). I felt that the exploitation element was a little too prominent.

The narrative arc is quite conventional, and Westerns fans will work that it’s just a question of final before the final duel between the two brother and Captain Van Trach takes place.

Indonesia has produced quite a few martial arts and fight films in the past decade or so, including The Raid (Gareth Evans, 2011) and Headshot (Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto, 2016). The director of Buffalo Boys Mike Wiluan is no stranger to the genre: he was one of the producers of last year’s The Night Comes for Us (Tjahjanto) – a real wild wild ride of a movie. The Thai film Tears of the Black Tiger (Wisit Sasanatieng, 2001) is a fine example of a Western taking place in Asia, balancing action and visuals, Eastern and Western themes, and hitting all the right buttons. Buffalo Boys just about scratches the surface.

Still worth a watch, particularly for the magnificent Indonesian scenery and top-notch acting. Buffalo Boys is out on most VoD platforms from Friday, January 18th.

Glass

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

There’s an arguably gratuitous sequence at the end of Split (M. Night Shyamalan, 2016) linking it to the seemingly unrelated Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000). Split is about Kevin Wendell Crumb a.k.a. the Horde (James McAvoy), a man with multiple personalities who abducts and kills teenage girls. Unbreakable is about David Dunn (Bruce Willis), sole survivor of a train crash, and obsessive comic books fan with brittle as glass bones Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) who engineered the crash to unearth a superhero. Dunn, it transpires, has superhuman strength and the ability to read people’s thoughts by bumping into them.

Glass makes considerably more sense if viewed as a third film of a trilogy. It relates to Split and Unbreakable in different ways. It starts off with split personality Crumb tormenting four kidnapped girls (from Split) while Dunn (from Unbreakable) goes out walking every day, hoping to bump into the kidnapper and save the girls. Well-meaning psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) catches the pair fighting and incarcerates them in a maximum security, psychiatric facility where Price, the self-styled Mr. Glass (again from Unbreakable), is also held.

The stage is now set for Mr. Glass to engineer a confrontation between superhero Dunn and supervillain Crumb. But for the fact that he’s constantly being administered medicine to keep his highly active and brilliant mind out of mischief.

SAMUEL L. JACKSON in Glass. M. Night Shyamalan brings together the narratives of two of his standout originals—2000’s Unbreakable, from Touchstone, and 2016’s Split, from Universal—in one explosive, all-new comic-book thriller.

Jackson is nothing less than superb at keeping you guessing: is this patient really sedated? Or is he playing some kind of trick and just faking it? Similarly, there’s a pleasure watching Willis reprise one of his classic roles from the period of the nineties and early two thousands when from Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988) onwards, he seemed to be in every other Hollywood action movie on the screen.

McAvoy, although of a much younger generation, is by no means second fiddle to these two. As with Split, his performance, traversing many of Crumb’s 23 alternate personalities including the terrifying, wall-climbing Beast, is breathtaking. This time round, the Beast gets considerably more onscreen time than he did in Split.

Writer Shyamalan throws in lots of highly effective plot devices to keep the audience on the edge of its seat. It’s very much a ‘dangerous characters contained in a holding environment’ type of movie, with each of the three main protagonists restrained in different ways. Glass is sedated and locked up in a building with almost as many security cameras as you find in the average high street in Britain. Dunn’s room can be quickly flooded with water which robs him of his immense strength. And Crumb’s cell is equipped with flashbulbs triggered whenever one of his more violent and threatening comes out, instantly transforming it into another of his inner personalities.

As producer/director, Shyamalan brings back a host of characters (played by the same actors) from the two earlier films. While Anya Taylor-Joy again does an excellent job pretty much taking up where she left off in Split as the final girl who survived the monster, there’s an even greater pleasure in seeing not only Charlayne Woodard play Jackson/Mr.Glass’ mother 19 years after she played the role in Unbreakable, but also and arguably more significantly the 28-year-old Spencer Treat Clark revisit the role of Willis/David Dunn’s son Joshua which he last played as a nine-year-old, complete with flashbacks to Joshua and his dad made up from outtakes that were never used in Unbreakable.

When the nerdy Mr. Glass starts explaining the twists and terms of the plot in terms of comic book narrative and lore, you’d be forgiven for wondering if the world really needs another movie on the subject after the quantity of superhero movies from Marvel and D.C. in recent years. That said, this is more inventive than most superhero movies although you’ll like it more if you watch the two movies which spawned it beforehand. It works well enough as either a third instalment of a trilogy or a post-modern take on the superhero genre.

Glass is out in the UK on Friday, January 18th. Watch the film trailer below:

Backtrace

Posted on by victorfraga

Macdonald (Matthew Modine) attempts to rob a bank, but it goes terribly wrong. He’s left as the only surviving robber, with full-blown amnesia and a $20m stash hidden somewhere in an abandoned concrete factory. A group of young criminals release him from prison and attempt to restore his memory, whilst the police, led by Sykes (Sylvester Stallone), chase them down. The 72-year-old New York actor, despite being top-billed, doesn’t do much here other than just wander around as a gruff detective, as stiff as the abundant botox on his face.

Modine, on the other hand, is one of the film’s few saving graces. He throws himself into the role with relish, taking what is a relatively thin concept and giving it plenty of flavour and also a touch of pathos. It’s soon revealed that he’s no hardened bank robber, but a blue-collar worker forced by financial desperation to take on the role of a criminal. Macdonald and his accomplices used to work in a concrete factory, where bosses have siphoned off pension funds in order to get big loans from the bank, bankrupting the company from the inside. The robbery is some form of revenge.

Vulture capitalism as the culprit behind criminal activity is a recurring theme in heist films (such as Zach Braff’s Going in Style, 2017). In Backtrace, it gives Modine an extra layer of depth to play with. The locations – a world of foreclosed homes, abandoned factories and decaying lots – give the film a creepy feel and also a certain edge.

Despite these effective elements, Backtrace is a mostly drab experience. The dialogue is almost exclusively descriptive. Lines are often repeated, lest audiences too are afflicted from amnesia. The action scenes are hamstrung by a limited budget blown on hiring Stallone and Modine. It’s often the sheer lack of imagination of the filmmaker that shines the most. The gunfights at the opening and the closing of the film consist mostly of men firing at each other from behind a shelter. The camerawork is also quite repetitive and unimaginative. The camera is constantly moving and spinning around, even in the very basic shot/reverse shot sequences. It gets a little nauseating and dizzying after a while.

Ultimately, Backtrace isn’t a disaster. Modine’s performance is strong enough to keep you going. It’s a pity that the director’s hands aren’t as talented and skilled. It’s available on VoD in January 2018.

Revenger

Posted on by victorfraga

After the release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (Yuen Woo-ping) back in 2016, Netflix has produced or distributed just a handful of martial arts-driven action-adventure original films, and fewer still in their country of origin’s native language. Looking through Netflix’s back catalogue of original releases it seems only Timo Tjahjanto’s Indonesian crime-thriller The Night Comes for Us (Timo Tjahjanto, 2018) and, now, Seung-Won Lee’s South Korean action flick Revenger are categorised as both ‘international’ (read ‘foreign-language’) and ‘martial arts’. Though its recent release doubles this narrow on-demand subgenre, Revenger also dilutes its already middling quality.

Lee adopts Tjahjanto’s approach to narrative, using what little there is of a plot as a framework to exhibit highly-choreographed action sequences. Indeed, Lee opens his film in an almost identical manner to Tjahjanto, a mother and daughter at the mercy of criminal goons before they are saved by each film’s respective protagonist. (Come to think of it, the beach on which this opening scene takes place looks suspiciously like that of the opening scene to The Night Comes for Us).

However, the action sequences are progressively undermined by the continual lack of character development: Bruce Khan’s Yul Kim – a former police detective looking to avenge his murdered wife and daughter, introduced wearing a straightjacket and Hannibal Lecter-type bite mask – remains mute and passive for much of the film, his character defined almost entirely by a desire for revenge. This lack of a personality makes it difficult to invest in the outcome of Yul Kim’s many fights, a shame given Khan’s exceptional martial arts skills.

But it’s difficult even to appreciate Khan’s phenomenally-fast handwork and gravity-defying kicks on an aesthetic level given the intermittently shaky camerawork and distracting CG blood splatter. Lee’s camera is repeatedly intrusive, moving to within such an intimate distance of his actors or cutting at certain moments as to miss parts of the action. Even when employing a simple two-shot, Lee finds it necessary to add superfluous zooms every couple of seconds.

With no main character to invest in and the martial arts spectacle often spoiled by stylistic choices, all that’s left of Revenger to engage with is its barebones story – a combination of elements from Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2001) and John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) with a supplementary revenge angle. One early scene, in which Yoon Jin-seo’s Maly recognises Yul Kim as the unscrupulous police officer who sent her to the prison island on which they both now find themselves, promises to elevate the narrative beyond mere framework, though any potential future conflict and self-reflection fails to materialise.

Likewise, a post-credits sequence, in which Yul Kim braves an unfinished-CG sandstorm as an incongruously spirited score builds, promises Yul Kim’s return. Given the success of other foreign-language martial arts series like The Raid (Gareth Evans 2011) and Ip Man (Wilson Yip, 2008), a sequel to Revenger isn’t an impossibility. In fact, if Netflix can convince Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim to join Bruce Khan for Revenger 2 (maybe snag Donnie Yen for Revenger 3), they’ll quickly expand their foreign-language action repertoire. Better yet, retcon The Night Comes for Us as a Revenger prequel and Netflix could start their very own on-demand martial arts extended universe – Netflix Revengers Assemble!

Revenger is available on Netflix from Wednesday, January 15th.

Monsters and Men

Posted on by victorfraga

Darius Larson (Samel Edwards), a very friendly Afro-American dealer of illegal cigarettes, stands outside a small shop in the Bed-Stuy area of Brooklyn and meets all the local dudes. One of them is Manny (Anthony Ramos) who gets a bit of cash off him and then goes home to his wife and little daughter. Later, while out walking in the street in the evening, Manny comes across Darius, who police are trying to arrest outside the shop. Manny whips out his mobile and starts filming. Manny is not particularly interested in filming anything significant, but suddenly Darius is shot dead and Manny realises that he has recorded the full details of Darius’s death.

The recorded footage on the mobile is the central theme of the film as it reveals that Darius was shot dead without justification. All three characters who look at it closely realise that they should act on what they see. Manny acts and is viciously compromised by the cops. Dennis Williams, (acted with great nuance by John David Washington), an honest Afro-American cop who works in the same precinct as the bad cops reports it but is thwarted by the response to his report.

Zyrick Jr., a promising young African-American baseball star realise that he must act up after the cops plant incriminating material. This is to his father’s overwhelming disappointment. He is desperate for his son to succeed at baseball and, as a cop himself, does not want to rock any boats.

The film quietly but insistently emphasises how trapped people are in the machinations of power. The response to Dennis’s report is typical of the methods of power. He is interviewed with great courtesy and correctness by an investigator (an Afro-American woman) and invited to say what he knows about the bad cops (about who complaints on other matters have been made). He cannot, however, really do so as he has not worked closely with them. As the investigator leaves, she looks at him as if he is a tremendous waster of time. Dennis is not a waster of time.

The main fact is that Darius was shot dead without any justification. The establishment always makes a show of investigating criminal matters in the periphery, while carefully avoiding the root causes of the problem. Even if police forces have “rotten apples” in their midst, which their superiors deplore, not too much bad publicity is allowed to get out. This is not just an American phenomenon. It featured at the Hillsborough football stadium investigation, the shootings in Derry on Bloody Sunday and the Guildford Four.

The situation of Zyrick’s father is particularly sad. He is a loyal cop and like many Afro-American is desperate for his son to escape the obscurity of his birth by succeeding at sport. He accepts, however, that “these things happen” and it is better to leave matters as they are.

This emphasises the slogan “Black Lives Matter”. The fact is that in American society Afrp-Americans count for less, as did Irish peasants in the United Kingdom in the 19th century, East Enders in London, the tenants of Grenfell Tower, the inhabitants of favelas in Brazil, poor African peasants in the hand of ruthless dictators and so the list can go on. The film quietly and insistently demonstrates how good people are caught up in the processes of power and find it hard to escape. This is done without an undue amount of Hollywood special effects or plangent script-writing although touching scenes of children playing with the protagonists (for instance, Manny and his little daughter sending a paper dart over the Brooklyn roof-tops) tells us in a thoroughly clunky Hollywood manner that these are, after all, very decent people.

Monsters and Men isn’t just an angry movie about “Black Lives Matter” pushing all the right emotional buttons. It goes much deeper than that in its concerns, covering the experience of virtually anyone who speaks “truth to power”. The film premiered in Sundance 2018, where it was described as a “hit”. It is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 18th and then on VoD on Monday, January 21st.

The Raft

Posted on by victorfraga

You can take a human out of civilisation, but can you take civilisation out of a human? This was the key question anthropologist Santiago Genovés asked himself during his work as a professor and scientist of human nature. He was on a plane to Mexico City in the early ’70s when terrorists hijacked the controls and landed in Cuba. Most people would be terrified by the experience. Instead, these optimum conditions gave him the idea for a radical experiment. What would happen if you put a bunch of people together completely removed from the rest of humanity?

His idea sounds like a mix between reality TV and Werner Herzog. He put out a call in international newspapers for 10 people to join him on a motor-less raft sailing from the Canary Islands to Mexico. The key question he wanted to answer: “How do we achieve peace on earth?” To simulate the world, he ensured gender balance (five men and six women) and a mixture of religion and ethnicities, with participants spanning from Uruguay to Angola to Japan. This very unorthodox initiative took place in 1973, and it was called the Acali Experiment.

The Raft looks back at this bizarre social experiment, which inquired into the very heart of human nature and found some startling results. Mixing silent film footage of the expedition with the surviving members recreating key moments on a life-size reconstruction of the boat, it’s a fascinating look into human nature, and not in the ways one would conventionally expect.

He flipped patriarchal norms by giving all the important jobs to women. He found the only female sailor in Sweden to helm the ship. Men were left to scrub and clean. He wanted to see if the world would be a more peaceful place if women were in charge. It seems to be so, but not in the way the domineering scientist expected – who is smartly revealed to be a character of exceptional hubris. Sadly, with the exception of Japanese participant Eisuke (who boldly claims he would’ve gladly dated all the women) all the men have died – so we don’t get to hear their side of the story.

Santiago’s writings, long dead, serves as narration, read by Daniel Giménez Cacho (the star of Lucrecia Martel’s 2017 Zama). He makes observations on every aspect of the trip; spanning from participant’s moods to their sex lives and menstrual patterns, analysing if the environment, including the weather, wind speed and lunar movement, has an impact on their activities. He waits and waits for violence to break out, and when it doesn’t, he finds novel ways to ramp up the tension.

In many ways the experiment predates modern reality TV, shows such as Big Brother which put people together in an isolated situation to see how they interact. Like Big Brother, which at first started as a fairly innocuous human experiment before ramping up the competitive aspect, Santiago quickly realises that he has to manufacture conflict in order to get the result he wants – including revealing everyone’s worst secrets and true thoughts about each other. He identifies sex as one of the main things men fight over, but sex is treated on the boat as a fun dalliance rather than anything worth getting stressed about. Most memorably, an Israeli doctor claims she slept with two of the men for “friendship” rather than anything else. The whole thing would work brilliantly as a movie directed by Swedish filmmaker Lukas Moodysson.

Between recreations, director Marcus Lindeen (who’s also Swedish) has his subjects talk to each other instead of asking them questions himself. This effective approach allows them to really open up and share their feelings about the experiment. Their experiences all differ and are informed as much by character, religion and ethnicity as much as anything else, proving that optimum testing conditions can never truly exist. My sneaky feeling is if you put 10 completely different people on the same raft, an entirely different story would emerge. I just hope someone at Channel 4 has seen this.

The Raft is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 18th. On VoD Monday, May 13th.

Beautiful Boy

Posted on by victorfraga

Nic Sheff (Timothée Chalamet) is just 18 and he has has been missing for two days. New York Times writer David Sheff (Steve Carell) is frantically looking for his teenage son. He reappears with clear signs of drug use. He has just tried crystal meth for the first time, he claims. The reality, however, is much darker. We soon find out that Nic has been using various drugs (marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy). Plus, he has been a heavy crystal meth user for at least two months. Eventually, his brain to become rewired and the addiction takes over his life. Recovery at such stage is at single-digit figures, we learn.

Nic’s mother Vicki (who’s separated and living on the other coast of the US), David’s current wife Karen and their two younger children are all affected by Nic’s drug use. He spends time with both of his parents and also in rehab clinics in various parts of the country. At one point he disappears from one of the clinics and breaks into his own house in search of money to feed his drug use. He runs away with a girlfriend whom he introduced to crystal meth and who has also become addicted. He does not wish to be contacted. Until something happens.

David’s pain and helplessness are extremely palpable. Carell does an outstanding job at conveying parental anguish and desperation. This is not the first time that the American actor interprets a father facing a major loss. In Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying (2018), his character deals with his son’s literal death. He’s equally convincing. His predicament here is no less tragic. Nic is not dead, but he’s gone in more ways than one. At times it looks like the only solution is to allow Nic to grapple with his tragedy on his own. It’s not an easy decision.

It is Chalamet, however, who delivers the strongest performance of the movie. The young French-American actor (who you will recognise from Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 Call Me By Your Name) depicts with accuracy his character’s stormy ride with plenty of relapses and a shocking ending with a double twist. We see a kind, sensitive and balanced Nic when he’s sober and a completely dysfunctional human being every time he falls into the drug pit. The euphoric highs are very credible, almost as if Chalamet had indeed injected crystal meth (I’m not suggesting he did, I’m just complimenting his acting!).

The Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen opts to show both sides of drug usage. The two strongest sequences of the movie complement each other. At one point, Nic and his girlfriend Julia inject crystal meth. It’s seemingly her first time, and his first time after being clean for a long break, so the high is particularly good. The sex that ensues is beautiful and passionate. On the other hand, we soon see Julia have an overdose and nearly die, in a very jarring, graphic and realistic sequence.

Beautiful Boy, however, is not a perfect movie. Firstly, its soundtrack is too pervasive, and also a little disjointed. You will listen to Jeff Buckley’s Song for the Siren, David Bowie’s Sound and Vision, Massive Attack’s Protection, John Lennon’s titular Beautiful Boy and almost the entire 10 minutes of Sigur Ros’s Svefn-g-Englar. These are all extremely powerful classics, and throwing them all together in the same movie can dilute their potential.

This is an important film with its heart at the right place. We learn that drug use is the number one death cause for Americans under 50. It’s very important that young people understand the consequences of crystal meth addiction, and how the use of lighter drugs can trampoline them into a downward spiral of heavier chemicals. But Beautiful Boy lacks the raw and unforgiving realism of Christiane F (Uli Edel, 1981): while some sequences are very convincing, other parts are laced with saccharine (particularly the musical bits). Overall, a good film with quite a few redundant elements

Beautiful Boy is out in cinemas across the UK from Friday, January 18th. On VoD on Monday, May 20th.