Tag: American

The Song of Sway Lake

Posted on by victorfraga

Music collector Ollie (Rory Culkin) and his boisterous Russian friend/partner-in-crime Nikolai (Robert Sheehan) travel to the Ollie’s family estate in order to steal a valuable jazz record. Their plans go awry when Ollie’s estranged grandmother Charlie (Mary Beth Peil) unexpectedly arrives at the estate accompanied by her neighbour Marlena (Elizabeth Peña). It turns out that the old lady is searching for the same record herself.

The titular lake plays a role as significant as the human characters. It represents the memories from Charlie’s married life, as well as the place where Ollie’s father committed suicide. There is a flurry of unresolved issues, sadness and melancholy in the air. Plus the urge to bring back the good ol’ times, or to simply stop the clock. Charlie has prevented the building of a public dock near the building in an effort to preserve the lake, to leave it untouched by time. Her husband Al wrote in a letter dating back to WW2: “Now that you’re a Sway, you and I we’re in cahoots to ensure that the lake remains a place where time can stop”.

While Ollie and Nikolai look through the records collection in the estate and listen to vinyls and discuss Harry Belafonte, Julio Iglesias there is a feeling of nostalgia for a bygone era. Somehow the past sounds more appealing than the present, particularly when you are listening to Fred Astaire.

Nikolai reads Al’s correspondence and becomes increasingly fascinated by his surviving spouse Charlie. He builds a small shrine in her honour, with pictures of her youth. He wears Al’s Navy Commander hat. He moves a desk outside the estate in order to attract her attention. Gradually, this strange attraction creates friction between the two young friends. Meanwhile, Ollie pursues the young and beautiful Isadora (Isabelle McNally).

Gradually, two feuding duos emerge in the quest for the record. On one side, Charlie and Nikolai. On the other side, Ollie and Marlena. Isadora is caught in the middle. This is about as much as I can tell you without spoiling the plot. Ultimately, this is a film about regret, repressed feeling and untimely outbursts of emotion. It boasts a very unconventional plot combined a sumptuous soundtrack. This is a melancholic and odd cinema hit, and one that you shouldn’t miss out!

The Song of Sway Lake is available on demand from Monday, January 21st.

Blindspotting

Posted on by victorfraga

This a film that has a lot to say, with detail, subtlety and poetic wit. It made me laugh out loud and also flinch with alarm. The central spine is the relationship between best friends since childhood Colin (Daveed Diggs) and Miles (Rafael Casal). This relationship sits within a story of the changing neighbourhood of Oakland, California and the lethal relationship the police have with black men in America.

The first thing that draws you into this story is the visual and vocal panache of a style that realises this tightly wound genius of a script (Daveed Diggs/Rafael Casal). The editor (Gabriel Fleming) deserves a special mention here. Scenes are beautifully cut through with tight cut away shots of doors slamming, feet on truck pedals, faces on wall murals and the juxtaposition of regular and ‘hipster gentrified’ housing.

It is impossible to define a ‘type’ for this movie, we have a touch of’ buddy movie’ with a generous helping of ‘right of passage’, via social commentary that happens without us being aware of it.

The action is framed around the final three days that Colin has on probation, in a bail hostel and confined inside a postcode and a curfew. We watch a long poem akin to Greek mythology, where the hero must overcome obstacles and challenges in order to make it out of the Labyrinth. Miles is Theseus. The everyday conversations had by the two friends in rhyming ‘bars’ are wonderful and fit into the flow of the story succinctly. The jump cuts and visual effects during Miles’ morning runs give us a deep down picture of his internal battles.

His first personal battle relates to the fear of authorities that prevents him from interfering when a police officer murders a running unarmed man. The macro battle of black men facing the daily possibility of being gunned down by an officer of the ‘law’ while going about their regular business. This second struggle is highlighted as Miles partner Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones) watches her small son Sean (Ziggy Baitinger) on the couch while the newsreel of the same police murder plays on TV and the horror of the moment when Sean picks up something his father thought was hidden.

Colin’s realisation that although Miles has always been there for him, his friend’s violent tendencies are also a barrier to him moving forward in his life. Miles and Val (Janina Gavankar) still love each other deeply and their rift remains while he continues to make wrong choices. The normal family life of Miles, Ashley and Sean and how Colin’s place within this family are a joy to watch. The wisdom and beauty of Colin’s Mama Liz (Tisha Campbell-Martin) and the banter of the workers at the removal firm are all things we want to see on-screen. A regular urban community getting along in the way that all city dwellers understand, where difference rubs along together in the daily grind. The scene where Miles and Colin box up art dealer Wayne Knight’s (Patrick) pictures is a joy.

Colin’s final dilemma is told in a tour de force rap speech which has the viewer on the edge of their seat. We (viewers) want justice but not at the expense of the freedom of our hero. The struggle in this scene is real here: we see it on Colin’s face and we experience it viscerally through his poetry. As he explains to Officer Molina (Ethan Embry) ‘You used to hearing a nigger rapping’. This film has brought us right up and personal with a struggle that is real for people on this planet each day of their lives. Our ‘blindspotting’ as an audience is challenged. Should we remain instinctively blind or should we challenge our preconceptions of the world and the people we meet?

Blindspotting is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, October 5th. Out on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday, February 4th (2019)

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Posted on by victorfraga

Hitting somewhere between the picaresque brilliance of Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2018) and the corny idealism of Love, Simon (Greg Berlanti, 2018), Desiree Akhavan won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance for her second feature, which takes the personally revealing, post-mumble aspects of her first feature film Appropriate Behaviour (2015) and places them within a YA adaptation that retains her touch but is more accessible, simplistic, and perfect for its teenage target audience.

Chloe Grace Moretz plays Cameron Post, who in 1993 is caught with another girl on prom night and shipped off to a gay conversion camp in Montana. There, she finds herself stuck in a ritual of self-blame, repression and increasing hostility as she and the other teenage inmates attempt to quietly subvert the system and survive their miseducation.

Its most interesting aspect is the tactic used by the councillors, of controlling language used by the camp inmates as a suppression tool. S.S.A. or ‘Same Sex Attraction’ becomes the rather chaste term used by inhabitants about their experience, while a ‘tip of the iceberg’ chart designed to find blame for that S.S.A continually haunts them. John Gallagher Jr. is cast well as the moustached on-site reverend who brags about being saved from a gay bar by pastors from his church who noticed his car outside. His sister Lydia (Jennifer Ehle) is the chief therapist; she’s formidable and terrifying to watch.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is consistently funny, but much of the humour is derived from the ignorance of the characters to their situation, and to the realities of queer identity. There’s something cheap about this – a smirking audience can laugh at the ridiculousness of the scenario, but this never translates into any stakes about Cameron’s well being. She’s a somewhat inert observer, with whom the audience can all too easily identify as above her awful situation. Sasha Lane and Forrest Goodluck play two of the friends Cameron makes, a one-legged girl from a commune and a Native American Christian. They are both established as fairly interesting Sundance-kooks but never develop far beyond a Janis/Damien from Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004) dynamic.

Moretz is an actor who, since her breakout roles as sassy children in Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn, 201) and 500 Days of Summer (Mark Webb, 2009) audiences seem to have turned against. She’s precocious; a Taylor Swift groupie, perhaps. Maybe this has led folks to associate her with trash, despite her roles in Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)and Louis CK’s vile I Love You Daddy (2017) which enabled her to capture the social climate, exploring how she is seen by people around her. And in Kimberley Peirce’s Carrie (2013) she at least used her star power to promote an unsung auteur. Here Moretz brings a puppy-ish energy that carries the film, breaking halfway out of her comfort zone by playing a more vulnerable character than we are used to. A note perfect scene where she calls home to find an utter lack of sympathy for her position is wrenching, an underplayed showcase of what she can do when stripped of her neurotic style.

The climactic event of the film – which really happens to a peripheral character – is edited to make a grandstanding speech collide visually with a shocking discovery which takes place hours later. Its an elliptical style Akhavan employs throughout the film for flashbacks, that never enhances these unfinished feeling scenes. It deadens the impact of that shocking moment, makes it seem only as consequential as the games or therapy sessions we see for much of Cameron Post’s run time.

It is this moment which sparks the final choice of the film, a transgression by the leads that inconclusively rounds out Cameron Post’s argument. Are these characters free to roam a new America, or inevitably trapped in a larger version of the camp’s microcosm? The film doesn’t quite know how to balance these ideas within its simplified framework, and so becomes a roaring push against a system without a direction or end goal. Akhavan’s film is fast, funny, and memorable, but not quite the call to arms that it hopes.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, September 7th. On BFI Player on Monday, June 6th (2022). Also available on other platforms.

Hearts Beat Loud

Posted on by victorfraga

Pleasant and breezy. Lighthearted and innocuous. But also a little colourless. Hearts Beat Loud is the latest American indie to hit UK cinemas. It’s refreshing and cool enough to keep you in the cinema for 95 minutes, away from the oppressive heatwave castigating the country outside. But it will pass through you immediately. Just like a Summer breeze.

Frank Fisher (Nick Offerman) is an avuncular, middle-aged and heavily-bearded widower who runs a struggling record shop in Brooklyn. His wife passed away to a tragic bicycle accident, and he was left to bring up their adolescent daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons). The beautiful teen has been accepted into medical school. Frank attempts to strike a music partnership with Sam before she departs for her freshman year. Daddy wants to connect to his daughter through music. She finds that very uncool. Daddy sulks. Despite their differences, Frank and Sam record a song and it somehow ends up on Spotify. Sam’s hesitation to endorse the work is reflected in the very name that Frank chooses for the band: We’re Not a Band.

Daddy is the audience surrogate. He needs get his daughter to believe in the band, just like the filmmaker Brett Haley needs viewers to connect with his film. Frank is a dreamer. Sam is far more pragmatic, and she frowns upon her father’s capricious whims. She does not believe that she can make a living of music, despite a very beautiful voice vaguely reminiscent of Beyoncé if the Texas singer was an indie guitar artist. It’s down to Frank’s puerile vim to persuade his daughter to delay her studies for a year so that they can embark on this musical adventure.

Hearts Beat Loud is feelgood American indie that also looks a lot like an extended music video with loads of jamming and behind-the-scenes. It ticks the boxes of diversity: Sam is mixed raced and also in a same-sex relationship with Rose (Sasha Lane, a young and talented Afro-American actress who you will see in yet another Lesbian role in Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, out in just a few weeks). It uses music and comedy devices in an attempt to come across as sweet and appealing to a liberal audience as broad as possible. But it also feels a little contrived and formulaic in its attempt to please everyone.

The movie includes a few pearls of knowledge: “You don’t always get to do what you love, so you gotta learn to love what you do” and “Every song is a love song”. They are as flaky and airy as the emotions and lessons that the movie tries to convey. Still, this breezy film will likely touch your heart. Just don’t expect it to beat very loud!

Hearts Beat Loud is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 3rd.

Dayveon

Posted on by victorfraga

The film’s titular character (Devin Blackmon) finds amusement through the barrel of a gun, aware that a similar weapon robbed him of his brother’s life. Blackmon heads an all-black cast and delivers a strong performance for such a young actor. Playing a perturbed teenager, Blackmon is solemn at moments of mourning, charismatic at moments of elation, angered at his circumstances and confused at his space in life. He rejects the comfort of his sister’s boyfriend (and surrogate father figure) Brian (Dontrell Bright), for affinity with a local Arkansian gang, The Bloods.

Through this gang, Dayveon sees the actions of the guns he so obsessively longs for and the damages they cause. While the script is guilty of deviating from place to place (character arcs are started and ended in minutes, plus the film ending is a bit disjointed), it’s an arresting look at an America that currently talks of artillery on a daily basis. Director Amman Abbasi is passively anti-gun, as characters point to the life-held wounds they receive from fire-arms and as Davyeon comes to the realisation that vengeance and killing will not bring his brother back.

There is a continuous strain of scorching sun setting on the camera, rare a scene in which characters don’t sweat audibly and visibly. There is something real here, the actors speaking in an audible untrained local accent, which – despite sometimes being difficult to follow – still gives the sense that this is reality unfolding on the screen; Davyeon’s life could be anyone’s life.

The film doesn’t shy away from the seedy underbelly of crime. Davyeon, a 13-year-old, leisures uncomfortably in strip joints, partaking in liquor store robberies and watches bare knuckle boxing matches. All of this is shown as naturally as possible; the carefully calibrated realism is shot by DP Dustin Lane in a mannered handheld 4:3 angle. But there is a beauty at play here; a common motif seen throughout the film concerns Davyeon cycling throughout the Arkansas countryside, however stupid he feels his bike is (as he tells his audience during the opening voiceover), it’s a sense of freedom for him, speedways and greenways, a timely reminder for audiences (and for him) that for all the grief and paraphernalia he is what he is: a kid.

Dayveon is showing at the Glasgow Film Festival taking place right now!