Category Archives: 2021

Fire in the Mountains

Leave a reply

Fire in the Mountains                     4 suns

Although I didn’t fully understand it Fire in the Mountains was one of my favorites of the international films. Set in the Himalayan mountains of India, we follow a couple trying to eek out a living in a poor village. They have a young son who cannot walk and there is no road to their part of the village, so the boy must be carried down a trail for trips to the doctor. The mother pleads with officials to get a road built and listens and trusts in the doctors who use Western medicine. The father however, wants to believe in the local religion as preached by the shaman with its folk remedies involving animal sacrifices and elaborate rituals. Funding both views puts enormous stress on the finances of the family leading to conflict. (There is also the threat of being attacked by a leopard in the woods!) The performances were completely convincing and the expansive mountain views were great to look at. Since this movie deals with a culture I know little about there are aspects about it that made little sense to me, but I still found it to be a fascinating story.

The Blazing World

Leave a reply

The Blazing World            3 suns

Three years ago at my first Sundance I saw a short film program that included a short called The Blazing World. It concerned a young woman who enters a door into an alternate reality. It was a most unusual film with some startling images. Now, three years later, the creator and director, Carlson Young, has returned to Sundance with her full length feature film based on the same idea. Young, who is only 30 has been quite an aficionado of classic horror movies which must have influenced much in her movie. She also stars in the movie as Margaret, a young woman who lost her twin sister in an accident when they were children. She is interested in the idea of alternate dimensions and encounters a strange man who invites her through a door to this new world. She enters with the idea that her sister may exist in this other dimension. What follows are some of the most bizarre sequences I’ve seen in the movies, much of it of a dark and decaying place with alternate versions of her parents. The movie had more form to it than the short on which it was based, but steers away from your more conventional horror movies. I’m glad I saw it, but I would recommend it only for the more hardcore horror fans. Interestingly, it was completely during the pandemic in 2020.

At the Ready

Leave a reply

At the Ready                      5 suns

At the Ready was easily my favorite documentary of the festival. The filmmakers follow three high school students in El Paso, Texas who have signed up for a Border Patrol training program at their high school. This is an extra-curricular activity for students, but instead of playing sports or doing creative writing they are learning how to do drug raids and find illegal aliens. All of the participants are of Mexican descent so there is some internal conflict about what they are learning. The kids even participate in competitions where their team is judged on how well they perform in staged events like drug raids. They handle fake guns so nobody gets hurt, but physically take down the pretend suspects. The kids seem to get support from their families as law enforcement seems to be one of the few viable career opportunities in the community. This is quite a dramatic departure from going to band contest and chess club like I remember from high school! The movie, filmed in 2018 and 2019 finishes with the students’ graduation and with them making plans for the future. In the Q&A session afterwards, the three students were present. When questioned, only one was still planning on a future in law enforcement with life intervening for the other two. President Trump figured in some of the discussions, especially in regard to feelings about the border wall. These high school law enforcement clubs and programs exist in schools throughout the state of Texas. I thoroughly recommend this movie.

Prime Time

Leave a reply

Prime Time         4 suns

The Polish drama Prime Time portrays a fictional hostage situation in a TV studio on live TV om New Years Eve, 1999. A young 20 year-old, Sebastian (Bartosz Bielenia) takes control of the studio with a gun and demands that he be allowed to read his statement to the nation on live TV. The situation becomes a standoff between Sebastian and the television staff and police. The tension between the parties is realistically represented as the police struggle with ways to handle the situation without getting people killed. We also see how the relationship between hostage taker and his two hostages changes as the hours pass by. The actor Bielenia is especially talented with his range of emotions. I saw this same actor only a few months ago in the Polish drama Corpus Christi with his character impersonating a priest in a small village. The producer of Prime Time said he needed to place the film in the nineties to show the importance of television at that time and to avoid the widespread availability of the internet and social media.

Sabaya

Leave a reply

Sabaya                  3 suns

The movie Sabaya was filmed in the Middle East in 2019 and 2020 and follows the efforts of a small group of Kurds who work to free captive young women and girls from a camp called Al-Hol in Syria. The girls that they are after are of the Yazidi religion of the Kurds and have been kidnapped by ISIS or Daesh as they are known in the Middle East. The girls, some captured as little children are forced to marry Daesh men and serve as sex slaves. The group uses women volunteers who infiltrate the camp and search for the girls in the tent city that is filled with hundreds of enslaved girls. After one is found, men from the group enter the camp and secretly smuggle the girl out to safety returning them to their family if they are still alive. The documentary follows the style of letting the filmed experience speak for itself without the use of narration. There is an occasional printed statement on screen but little explanation beyond that. The scenes where the girls relate the horrors they lived through are quite compelling. The film has to be one of the highest degrees of danger to the filmmakers to be imagined. President Trump gets mentioned a couple of times because of his decision to allow Turkey to attack the Kurdish people (a US ally) following the defeat of ISIS.

Strawberry Mansion

Leave a reply

Strawberry Mansion       5 suns

One of the weirdest full length films I have seen at Sundance has to be Strawberry Mansion. It is a most bizarre blend of the world of dreams with a very odd future as envisioned by the filmmakers. A dream tax auditor arrives at an elderly woman’s house for the purpose of reviewing her years of recorded dreams so that the required tax can be levied, since this is what you do in the future. The woman, Bella in alone and lonely so insists that the tax man stay and have treats like a strawberry ice cream and have dinner. The tax man views some of Bella’s dreams that feature her as a young woman. He also has his own dreams that always seem to involve ads for fried chicken and other products. (There is a lot of fried chicken in this movie!) It is only through Bella that the man learns the real reason for the ads as the two of them travel through a bizarre and colorful journey to strange lands and odd creatures (such as sailor rats and a blue demon). The amount of imagination and work that the two filmmakers put in will amaze you. This was a film that has been many years in the making. It’s only about an hour and a half long, but there is quite a story packed in that time. I thought it was one of the best I’ve seen.

The Pink Cloud

Leave a reply

The Pink Cloud                  4 suns

In The Pink Cloud a young couple, Giovana and Yago who have just met are forced to live together in a city apartment in Brazil after the world has suddenly been enveloped by a deadly pink cloud that can kill almost instantly. The two can only communicate with others through their laptops and phones and have to order food and supplies shipped to them through tubes. The circumstances lead them to starting their own family and raising a son which goes on for several years. The interesting thing is how one of them adjusts well to the involuntary confinement and isolation while the other faces a level of anxiety that puts stress on the relationship. There are some interesting games played with neighbors through the apartment windows! The film was written and filmed well before the pandemic so it’s interesting how some of the character’s experiences are the same as what we have been going through. The filmmakers said that the only change they made was in the news casts changing from a cloud covering only Brazil to one covering the whole world. I have to give a big hand to the actors that carried out this job and made the movie believable and realistic.

One for the Road

Leave a reply

One for the Road              4 ½ suns

The road trip romance One for the Road from Thailand was quite a pleasant surprise. Set in New York city and Thailand, Boss, a young Thai bar owner in New York gets a call from his long time friend, Aood who has cancer and doesn’t have long to live. He wants Boss to come back to Thailand to help him see his former girlfriends one last time so he can return something to each one. It then becomes a road trip with the two of them making the journey to each very reluctant girlfriend. Through flashbacks we gradually get more of the story of the past relationships, with each encounter having an American pop song to go along with it. Eventually, the story gets even more interesting as we find out more about the past and the secrets begin to come out. I was very curious about how it would turn out in the end. This is a topnotch romance drama out of director Baz Poonpiriya, who may be new to directing. (Have not heard of him before.) The performances are all excellent as well. See it if you get the chance.

The White Tiger

The White Tiger                4 stars

The White Tiger, written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, and set in modern day India tells the story of a poor villager named Balram who goes from working for his granny in a shack of a tea shop to personal driver for a corrupt rich business family and ultimately to entrepreneur. The film, based on a book by the same name, has an involved plot that shows how Balram’s thinking and view of himself changes from obedient servant who will do anything to please his master to a businessman in charge of his own destiny. There is a great deal of imagery and metaphorical references that explains how people’s position in society is set by the caste system. They are compared to the roosters in a coop that are powerless to alter their own fate. Balram ultimately sees himself as the fabled white tiger, a creature of great rarity and unique features. Much of the movie seems comedic, but about halfway through it takes a very dark turn that was hinted at near the beginning. It uses a nonlinear approach to presenting the plot so that the audience has a sense of where the movie is going. The three main actors, Adarsh Gourav as Balram, Rajkummar Rao and Priyanka Chopra as two of his rich masters are all excellent in their roles. They and the supporting cast help to present a convincing fictional story based in truth. The movie’s contrast of the poverty of the villagers and the corrupt ultrarich that make up the cities is dramatic. We see the rich people that may appear to be kind until their own power and wealth is threatened at which point they turn on those around them to protect themselves. The movie is also illustrative of the rise of India’s position in the modern world. The White Tiger is a nominee of the Academy Award Best Adapted Screenplay.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday

The United States vs. Billie Holiday                           2 stars

There has been quite an abundance lately of films dealing with stories of racial injustice. The latest is Lee Daniels’ The United States vs. Billie Holiday that tells the life story of jazz icon, Billie Holiday, or at least part of it. It stars Andra Day as the legendary singer who was a star in the 1940’s and created a controversy by singing the song, “Strange Fruit”, so much so that the government was determined to get her to stop. I was familiar with the song and its connection to Holiday but was not aware of the story behind it. The song’s lyrics describe in graphic detail the scene of a lynching of black men, something people were aware of in the forties, but mostly would not speak of. The Narcotics Dept. of the FBI in the person of Harry Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund), federal agent is determined to make her stop singing it as the government is more interested in hiding the problem of the lynching of black men than it is in stopping them.  He does so by framing her with drug possession and he is aided by black agent Jimmie Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes of Moonlight) who infiltrates Holiday’s entourage. I found parts of the film hard to follow as some characters appeared for only a short while and others acted in such a way that I could not understand the motives for their actions. It is clear that few of those around the singer really cared for her and most were interested in their own gains. Fletcher is a hard one to understand as he is at first responsible for putting Holiday in jail and then has an affair with her. What a change that was! Two actors bringing comic relief are Miss Lawrence and Da’Vine Joy Randolph as part of Holiday’s entourage. The telling of her background was disjointed using a melodramatic way of showing her upbringing and her connection with a lynching. There is a comical interview scene with Leslie Jordan (whom Will & Grace fans will recognize instantly) as Reginald Lord Devine doing the questioning at a time late in Holiday’s career, inserted into the more chronological story. I felt it wasn’t done very effectively. We don’t get to hear the song Strange Fruit performed until well after the halfway point and though it is quite haunting it only shows up once. What we don’t get is any idea of how Holiday became so attached to it in the first place. Billie Holiday is known as the godmother of the civil rights movement before it was a movement and Andra Day does a remarkable performance portraying her. I just wish she was in a better movie about this historic icon.