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Non-Review Review: It Must Be Heaven

Posted on March 4, 2020 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival 2020. Given the high volumes of films being shown and the number of reviews to be written, these may end up being a bit shorter than usual reviews.

It Must Be Heaven offers a Chaplin-esque meditation on what it means to be “a citizen of the world,”, albeit filtered through a Palestinian lens.

Writer and director Elia Suleiman neatly divides his comedy into three acts. Playing himself, the veteran Palestian director journeys from Palestine in a bid to finance his latest movie. First, he visits Paris. Then, he visits New York. Along the way, he acts a silent and deadpan observers of the chaos of the world around him. Over the course of the film Suleiman only talks on a handful of occasions. Indeed, it would be handy enough to exorcise those sequences and reduce him to a classic silent film protagonist. However, the world buzzes around him.

So much of It Must Be Heaven is a purely observational film. Suleiman drifts idly from one scene to the next, always watching with mild bemusement as he steps into another story that is already in progress, often without any larger context: a father and son squabble across the balconies of their shared home, two brothers threaten a restaurant owner for serving wine in their sister’s food, a woman marches slowly and certainly from a well carrying two containers of water in a rather relaxed relay. Sometimes narratives reveal themselves through the act of looking, and sometimes they don’t. Such is life.

It Must Be Heaven seems more like a resigned sigh than a profound statement, a candid acknowledgement of how people are strange all over, even if some places offer their own unique brands of eccentricity.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: dublin international film festival, elia suleiman, film, it must be heaven, Movie, non-review review, palestine, review | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: True History of the Kelly Gang

Posted on March 4, 2020 by Darren

“It’s very lucid,” notes a supporting character of the eponymous text.

The young teacher has just read the introductory paragraph of a letter that outlaw Ned Kelly has prepared for his son, a way of sharing the truth of events with his heir. Kelly will subsequently bind the paper to himself, wrapping it to his midsection beneath plates of metal armour. That same teacher will later ruminate on the blood-stained documents, dismissing Kelly’s story as nothing more than “the ravings of a madman.” Perhaps both statements are true. Perhaps the letter is more true for the fact that it is incoherent and existential poetry.

True History of the Kelly Gang prefaces its title with a warning to the audience that “nothing you’re about to see is true.” The word “true” then serves as a bridge from that preamble into the movie itself, lingering on the screen long enough to be incorporated into the no-frills titlecard for True History of the Kelly Gang. Truth and fiction linger and intersect, contradictions rippling through the finished film. Watching True History of the Kelly Gang, one gets a sense of how these contradictory statements can each be accurate in their own way.

True History of the Kelly Gang is both a vivid waking dream and a complete narrative mess, simultaneously.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Australia, film, george mackay, justin kurzel, masculinity, Movie, non-review review, outback, review, true history of the kelly gang, western | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Military Wives

Posted on March 3, 2020 by Darren

Military Wives is illustrates the appeal in hitting the right notes off the sheet music.

Military Wives is the latest entry in a particularly popular subgenre of midbudget film, the type of movie about a quirky hobby against the backdrop of everyday British life. There are any number of examples, from Swimming With Men to Finding Your Feet to Calendar Girls, arguably extending out to more class-conscious examples like Billy Elliot and Brassed Off. Perhaps the most iconic and successful example, the film which proved the international viability of the format, remains The Full Monty. These are films that largely hinge on an appealing juxtaposition between perceived British stoicism and enjoyable eccentricity.

Military Wives is loosely based on a true story of the military wives choir that became a minor national sensation when it played the Festival of Remembrance in 2011. Indeed, they went on to have a Christmas number one with their song Wherever You Are. However, Military Wives hews very closely to the established template. Once again, there is a conflict between stoicism and whimsy. The stoicism is of the most sombre sort, with the story focusing on the wives of soldiers deployed to Afghanistan, waiting to hear word home. The whimsy arises from the juxtaposition of having those wives sing Yazoo and Tears For Fears.

Military Wives never deviates too far from the template, but it doesn’t have to. Rachel Tunnard and Rosanne Flynn’s script understands why this sort of story works, and director Peter Cattaneo (a veteran of The Full Monty) is smart enough to trust actors Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan to carry the film. There is occasionally a sense that Military Waves is working from a rough sketch rather than a finished plan, but it is mostly built to specifications.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, kristen scott thomas, military wives, Movies, non-review review, review, sharon horgan | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Saint Maud

Posted on March 3, 2020 by Darren

“Pain is precious,” intones the title character towards the third act of Saint Maud. “You shouldn’t waste it.”

Rose Glass’ debut feature is a delightfully weird genre hybrid, existing at some strange intersection of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Exorcist that just happens to unfold in Scarborough. It is hard to summarise exactly what Saint Maud is, in terms of genre. At times, it plays like that most maligned of genres, the “elevated horror” that favours slow-mounted dread over cheap thrills. At other points, it is an intensely intimate psychological thriller and character study. Occasionally, it pivots sharply into surreal black comedy. It is never one or the other, and the film’s deft balance is a credit to Glass as writer and director.

Still, at its core, Saint Maud is ultimately a tale of repression and rapture, religious devotion wrestling with carnal desire. It is a film in which the contortions of the flesh associated with divine position are juxtaposed with the use of the body as an instrument by dancers. Over the course of Saint Maud, bodies writhe in pleasure that emanates from sources both spiritual and physical. Indeed, the spiritual and physical often collapse into one another over the course of the film, inviting the audience to try to draw a clean line of separation between two ideas that are so closely intertwined.

Saint Maud is an unsettling, warped and clever little film that is worth seeking out. It is also worth seeing blind, in so much as that might be possible.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: a24, film, horror, Movie, non-review review, review, rose glass, saint maud | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Onward

Posted on March 2, 2020 by Darren

Onward fits comfortably in the upper middle range of the Pixar canon.

To be fair, at least part of this is structural. Onward is transparently a road trip adventure. There have been a couple of truly great Pixar movies built around that rough template – Toy Story 2, Up and Inside Out all come to mind. However, Onward does little to disguise its genre elements. Onward is transparently a story about two teenagers who embark on a long journey with a tight schedule that takes them through a series of episodic adventures featuring a host of memorable side characters. There is something very standard about the premise, even against the film’s fantastical backdrop.

To be fair, at least some of that mundanity is intentional. After all, the central hook of Onward is that it unfolds in a magic kingdom (“Mushroomton”) that has eschewed the art of wizardry for the utility of science. So much of Onward derives from the juxtaposition of the mundane and the sublime that it makes sense that the film should be a fairly standard genre template that just happens to follow two magical creatures driving a van with a rock-album-artwork unicorn on the side on a mission to reunite with their resurrected father. However, the plotting is a little too haphazard and too episodic to completely elevate the film.

That said, Onward is consistently charming throughout. Its world and characters always feel well-drawn. More than that, the film coheres marvellously in its third act, when it pushes past that familiar road movie template into the more emotionally astute and mature sort of storytelling that audiences have come to expect from the studio. While Onward doesn’t rank among the studio’s very best, it is well worth seeking out.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: disney, film, Movie, non-review review, onward, pixar, review | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Toni Morrison – The Pieces I Am

Posted on February 28, 2020 by Darren

Toni Morrison – The Pieces I Am feels like a really pleasant dinner party with very engaging guests, which is both high praise and faint criticism.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ documentary is a decidedly unfussy affair. Although it uses stock footage and inserts to provide a sense of context for its conversations, The Pieces I Am largely focuses on direct interviews with its subjects. People like Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, Fran Lebowitz and Walter Mosley directly address the camera and the audience. There’s an endearing sense of camaraderie and friendship in all of this. There’s a wonderful warmth to the documentary, most of which radiates from Morrison herself.

The Pieces I Am is never especially incisive or combative, even when discussing thorny issues around systemic injustice and a longstanding history of cultural violence. These elements are never ignored or brushed aside, but they are never allowed to lower the tone of the discussion or shift the mood of the debate. Instead, The Pieces I Am remains focused on providing a space where artists can talk at length – and very much in their own distinctive way – about what Toni Morrison means to them.

The result is an immensely charming and affectionate study of one of the great American writers, which only occasionally feels little over-indulgent.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Author, documentary, film, non-review review, review, toni morrison | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Vivarium

Posted on February 27, 2020 by Darren

Vivarium is an abrasive and aggressive work of surrealism.

It is very much of a piece with director Lorcan Finnegan’s earlier work, feeling like a clear descendant of his “ghost estate” short Foxes and his “land will swallow you whole” horror of Without Name. Indeed, Vivarium taps into many of those same fears, essentially beginning as a horror story about a young couple going house hunting and ending up lost in a monstrous and seemingly unending estate. It morphs from that into an exploration of a broader set of anxieties about the very idea of “adulthood”, of what young people expect from their adult life and what it in turn it expects from them.

Vivarium often feels like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone. It features a small core cast. Although shot on an actual housing estate, Finnegan pushes the production design into the realm of the uncanny so that it looks like a gigantic creepy sound stage. The script consciously pushes its narrative into the realm of the absurd. However, throughout it all, the film remains keenly focused on a simple and strong central metaphor. Although Vivarium operates at an unsettlingly heightened level of reality, and although its populated by a mess of signifiers it never entirely explains, it remains firmly anchored in relatable ideas.

Vivarium is perhaps a little over-extended and little heavy-handed in articulating its central themes and ideas, but it is consistently interesting and ambitious. It’s well worth the time.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: abstract, dublin international film festival, film, horror, Imogen Poots, jesse eisenberg, lorcan finnegan, Movie, nightmare, non-review review, review, suburbia, surrealism, virgin media dublin international film festival, vivarium | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: The Invisible Man (2020)

Posted on February 26, 2020 by Darren

The Invisible Man makes his victims visible.

Freed from the confines of the ill-fated blockbuster “Dark Universe”, writer and director Leigh Whannell is able to craft a version of the iconic H.G. Wells story that speaks to the modern moment and which taps into a set of fears that are a lot easier to acknowledge these days. Horror stories have always worked best as allegories for the things that unsettle a society – even back to the sexual anxieties of Dracula and the monstrous procreation of Frankenstein – as so Whannell reconfigures The Invisible Man to speak to a terror that was largely invisible until recently.

Ringing true.

The central protagonist of The Invisible Man is not the eponymous translucent figure. Appropriately enough, the man who turns himself invisible is largely marginalised by the narrative. In the opening ten minutes, he’s glimpsed lying in bed and then through a car window, but his face is consciously obscured. Through the rest of the film, he is largely present in a few photographs and acting through his brother as a proxy. His absence is both clever and effective, underscoring the extent to which he dominates and haunts the film even when he is off-screen.

Instead, The Invisible Man is built around Cecilia Kass. It remains tightly focused on her efforts to escape her abusive ex-boyfriend, even after his apparent suicide. The Invisible Man suggests that such trauma cannot easily be evaded and eluded. “Adrian will haunt you, if you let him,” one of Cecilia’s friends warns her. The Invisible Man argues that he’ll haunt her either way.

Interrogating assumptions.

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Non-Review Review: Lost Girls

Posted on February 19, 2020 by Darren

Lost Girls is a solid and unfussy true crime drama, anchored in a strong central performance from Amy Ryan.

There are interesting ideas simmering in the background of Lost Girls. Director Liz Garbus is best known as a documentarian, and there are certainly aspects of Lost Girls that feel like they belong more comfortably in a documentary than a narrative feature. Michael Werwie’s script is adapted from Robert Kolker’s book of the same name, looking at the case of the Long Island Serial Killer. The killer was never caught, with some speculation as to whether his last documented murder occurred in 2010 or 2013. The investigation is currently ongoing, which gives the film a certain edge and rawness.

However, Garbus works hard to keep things tasteful and restrained. In actual narrative terms, Lost Girls is fairly conventional. It often feels assembled from a list of scenes that audiences expect to see in a drama like this. There are plenty of scenes of concerned mother Mari Gilbert yelling at impotent authority figures, countless scenes dictating the indifference or ineptitude of the authority figures tasked with protecting these young women, lots of emotional scenes in which Mari comes to terms with her own imperfections as a mother following her daughter’s disappearance.

However, the most interesting aspects of this “unsolved American mystery” lurk at the edge of the frame, recalling the quiet tweaks that Just Mercy made to the death penalty drama this past awards season. Lost Girls is a serial killer film that is much more interested in systemic injustice than it is in the sensationalist actions of a single monstrous villain. Lost Girls never quite manages to convincingly restructure the serial killer investigation movie template to the extent of something like Zodiac, but perhaps it doesn’t have to. It is more interesting for subtle shifts in emphasis within a familiar formula.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Amy Ryan, film, gabriel byrne, Liz Garbus, lost girls, Movie, non-review review, review, serial killer | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Sergio

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Darren

Sergio belongs to the same school of earnest, overwrought, tonally misjudged, narratively unfocused, clumsily paced biopics that includes Noble, The Price of Desire and A Girl from Mogadishu.

This films offer heartwarming stories about truly exceptional individuals. There is undoubtedly value in that. However, the genre often confuses subject for substance. These biographies assume that the story they are telling is so compelling and so engaging that the actual art of storytelling doesn’t matter, that the basic mechanics of constructing a satisfying narrative or balancing a consistent tone or finding an interesting hooks are fundamentally less important than the simple fact that they are about something that makes them inherently “worthy.” Worthy of attention, worthy of praise, worthy of time.

“You can’t spell U.N. with U.”

Sergio certainly tells a story that is worth telling. It is an adaptation of the life of Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations diplomat. By all accounts, de Mello was a genuinely exceptional person who made a very real and very tangible difference to the world. There is a compelling story to be told here, a life that is worthy of study and discussion. Indeed, director Greg Barker seems to think so. Sergio is Barker’s first narrative feature, and it serves as a companion piece to his 2009 documentary of the same title. It’s easy to understand why Barker was so drawn to the subject.

Unfortunately, Sergio is a complete misfire. It is a disaster. It is a clumsily constructed film with no strong sense of identity or purpose, with little to say about its central character or his circumstances beyond “this was a remarkable person.” However, even that is communicated through exposition and information dumps rather than through actual storytelling.