February 19: La La Land (2016 – Damien Chazelle)

★★★★★

February 18: Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts (2017 -- Various)

There are several interesting projects in this year's collection of Oscar-nominated short animated films.  Of the eight shorts in this collection, it's a pity that some of these have to be out of competition because of the limited number of nominations, but there is some interesting creativity at work here.

★★ Borrowed Time  (Lou Hamou-Lhadj & Andrew Coats)
Borrowed Time has something of an underground comic vibe with the exaggerated psychological state and action of its hero.  Rather than the contemporary setting we usually see for these depictions, Hamou-Lhadj and Coats have chosen to use a Western, and their design here is admirable if not outstanding.  However, Borrowed Time doesn’t do much new with its angst, and it feels longer than its 7 minutes.

★★★★ Pearl (Patrick Osborne)
Patrick Osborne’s short is one of the more compelling of this year’s collection.  It’s a slightly-predictable story of a father and his daughter as she grows up, a refreshing take on a story that is often told of a father and son or mother and daughter.  Osborne gives us some nice period touches here, the outcome of the film is in doubt for much of its run, and the animation is interesting to look at.  In fact, it’s worth catching the VR version of this short.  But the strength of Pearl is its heart more than its technical innovation.

★★ Piper (Alan Barillaro)
This film points to where Pixar is going – increasingly wonderful technique accompanied by a loss of insight and imagination.  An incredibly cute baby sandpiper must learn how to forage and win the approval of his mother and the other sandpipers.  All the marvelous water animation in the world can’t make such a trite project interesting.

★★★★★ Blind Vaysha (Theodore Ushev)

Animated in a style that looks like wood-block etching, Blind Vaysha is a philosophical folktale.  With its voiceover narration, the short introduces us to Vaysha, who sees the future with one eye and the past with the other.  Ushev’s dramatic animation style shows how neither view is satisfying, and as Vaysha contemplates blinding one eye so she doesn’t have both views, we’re left like her, not sure if we want to live looking at the past or the future.

★★★★ Pear Cider and Cigarettes (Robert Valley)

Robert Valley’s graphic novel style informs this short.  With visual touches of noir, the film opens at the end of its story, and the narrator takes us back to tell us the story of a kid he admired in high school but who had a checkered life afterwards.  At 35 minutes, the film is too long and too flat in tone, but the compelling nature of the visuals keep us watching.

★ Asteria (Alexandre Arpentinier, Mathieu Blanchys, Lola Grand, Tristan Lamarca, Thomas Lemaille, & Jean-Charles Lusseau)

It’s not clear why the collection includes this dumb little short that features a bullying American astronaut shooting multi-eyed aliens to lay claim to a new planet.  It may be trying for whimsy, but it’s as predictable as it is stupid.

★★★★★ The Head Vanishes (Frank Dion)

This effective, touching short is a graphic portrayal of how an elderly woman with dementia experiences her trip to the seashore.  Sometimes Jacqueline is confused, and sometimes she wanders off on flights of fancy about things like fish, which she loves eating on these trips.  There’s a heavy -handed moment when she wonders who the woman is that calls her “mother,” but the rest of the film is pure fascination as we try to understand what’s actually going on by seeing what Jacqueline experiences.  The ending is deeply touching.  It’s disappointing that the Academy didn’t choose to give this excellent project a nomination.

★★★★ Once Upon a Line (Alicja Jasina)

The charm of this short lies in the cleverness of its animation.  A line runs across the screen forming shapes describing the daily life of a man.  His black-and-white life is fine until he encounters a red-haired woman who brings that color and a lot more shapes into his line.  Jasina’s simple, graphic telling is a smart joy.

February 17: Oscar Nominated Live-Action Shorts (2017 -- Various)

This year's films nominated for the live-action Academy Award come from many countries and have a wide range of quality.

★★★★★ Sing (Kristof Deák & Anna Udvardy) -- Hungary
 There’s much to recommend this small Hungarian movie about an elementary school choir.  The film has several surprises, from its shift in focus from one main character to another as the movie progresses to its surprising conclusion.  Along the way, Deák and Udvardy take us into the lives of two young girls and flesh out their friendship.  The directors accomplish all this with outstanding cinematography and editing.  The scenes in the children’s playground particularly stand out in this regard as they’re cut to the rhythms of children’s play songs.  In addition to all this achievement, Sing is clearly pointing to moral about the importance of group solidarity when confronting unjust authority.  It's is a real gem of a short film and shows what remarkable results can be achieved in this format.

★ Silent Nights (Aske Bang & Kim Magnusson) -- Denmark
Good intentions aside, Silent Nights is not a very successful short film.  Bang and Magnusson can’t shoehorn their sprawling script into this format, so while they want to explore the relationship of a woman and her mother, the difficulties of being an immigrant in Denmark and the arc of a love relationship, they produce a choppy, unbelievable film that jumps from one melodramatic scene to the next with serious continuity issues.  Addressing the plight of refugee immigrants is a worthy goal, but Silent Nights falls short of its ambitions.

★★★★★ Timecode 
(Juanjo Giménez) -- Spain
There’s a contrivance at the center of this film that approaches being overly clever, but the whimsy and joy here make you forget that.  Juanjo Giménez’s extremely short, low-budget project takes us into as dehumanizing an environment as can be imagined and shows us how art can take root and redeem it and those who work in it.   And all the while, this short plays with the medium of film and video.  Giménez manages an especially effective story shift late in Timecode, and the ending is priceless.  Although a very short movie, this is a film you’ll think about afterwards, and a warm smile will come to your face because of the humanity it shows us.

★★★★ 
Enemies Within (Sélim Azzazi) -- France
Enemies Within is another European short that deals with immigration.  Azzazi takes us into a Kafkaesque world where a menacing government official bullies a man of Algerian extraction while creating terrorist conspiracies by innuendo.  We see so much is lost in this film, not the least of which is the self-respect of the interviewee.   It’s a talkie movie, perhaps based on a one-act play, but the acting is terrific and Azzazi uses cinematography and editing to intensify the psychological abuse we’re watching.  It’s a timely warning about where the excesses of national security can take us.

★★★ La Femme et le TGV (Timo von Gunten & Giacun Caduff) -- Switzerland
Europeans excel at films that make you feel good, at films that are trite and clichéd but don’t seem like it.  La Femme et le TGV is exactly this type of movie, only in the short genre.  Jane Birkin, who is superb here, is a lonely, isolated older woman who gradually comes out of her loneliness through the film.  In showing us this process, Von Gunten and Caduff do an expert cinematic job with a tight script and visuals that engage us throughout.  You know how this film is going to end shortly after it starts, but it’s a pleasure getting there.

February 15: John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017 – Chad Stahelski)

★★★

Chapter 2 of John Wick spins in place rather than move the saga forward.  But if you liked the first one, you’ll like this one.

It has the same cool, choreographed, over-the-top violence that the first one had, and director Chad Stahelski again throws everything at the screen to keep us looking.  We get some pretty images of Italy, but it’s the sequence at a huge dance party on the edge of catacombs that’s the money moment as John fights not only through the strobes of the party but also the spotlit catacombs themselves.  The sequence echoes that at the Red Circle nightclub in the first John Wick, but the editing and action isn’t quite as crisp here.  The hall of mirrors sequence also keeps us attentive as John battles through a reflective environment that is someplace between Bruce Lee and the Lady from Shanghai.  In addition to the stylized gun-fu, some visuals are just arresting in themselves.  The office that processes bounty contracts is sepia-toned and populated by women dressed in pencil skirts and sleeveless blouses.  They're wearing their hair in a bun, and they’re tattooed. Their office is old-style operator switchboards, but vacuum tubes get paper notes from one office to the next while old computer displays distribute the messages widely.  It’s a fascinating, steampunk set.  Stahelski also keeps us attentive because we never sure who will be the next person to attack John Wick.  In keeping with the film’s exaggeration aesthetic, it begins to seem that everyone in NYC is a bounty hunter.

But there are differences here that make this John Wick slightly less compelling that the first.  While the fan service here is generally integrated well into film, writer Derek Kolstad opts for lots more exposition in the first part of this film than he did in the last.  Not only does this leave Keanu Reeves to try to hit a sweet spot of acting that explains information but maintains his artificial reticence, but this choice also diminishes the stylization that made the first outing such unique fun.  There was nothing of reality in John’s character in the first installment, but the script moves Reeves close to that at places here.  The cinematography, too, is weaker here than before.  Dan Laustsen’s  lighting is more garish and edgy than Jonathan Sela’s rich screen was, and the camera here is less fluid than in the first.

For all this, John Wick: Chapter 2 has some outrageously fun sequences, and this sequel largely avoids the sophomore slump.  Here’s hoping that the hinted-at third installment doesn’t see the series falter and ossify into a formula.

February 14: John Wick (2014 – Chad Stahelski [& David Leitch])

★★★

John Wick starts like Sunset Boulevard – a beat-up John tumbles out of a car and looks at cellphone image of his wife.  Flashback, we’re at his house. Flashback further, he’s in a hospital with her ill.  Flashback further, she admires an anniversary bracelet.  Within seconds, the film has taken us into four different times and told us where it’s going.  This fast information dump pulls us into the film and has us quickly engaged in puzzling out the links between all these facts.   The rapid opening also points to the film’s major goal, keeping the audience engaged.

It’s a smart move to use a narrative device in the opening because the film is all engagement through visuals and action from this point forward.  John Woo is much in the background, from direct references like a canted, low-angle shot looking up the barrel of Wick’s pistol to the exaggerated violence, which is excessive, stylized and choreographed until it's no longer violence but elegant performance.  The cinematography keeps our eyes busy, too.  The camera glides through long action sequences that can occur in neo-noir exteriors or in interiors filled with reflecting or opaque surfaces that distort what we see.  As dies the heavily-tinted lighting.  In one tour de force segment, Wick goes to a dance club to kill Iosef Tarasov, and the body count mounts as Wick and his enemies pirouette though the fight, shooting and hitting each other to the rhythm of the music.  It’s a bravura moment of film-making.

John Wick keeps us off-balance in several ways, too, which also holds our attention.  The violence here can be sudden and intense, like the fight that includes a puppy being killed, and we stay riven lest we miss something that might come at us suddenly.  There’s harsh, bloody one-one-violence, sudden fights, and a bit of suspense as we try to figure out Marcus’ role.  Stahelski varies the pace of the film, too, which breaks us out of the complacency of our expectations and makes us watch what’s going on.  After the several long action sequences that precede it, we expect Wick’s final attack on Iosef’s safe house to follow the same pattern.  Instead, Stahelski edits the entire sequence into a matter of seconds, and we see Wick’s quick revenge from long distance.

As is typical of this type of film, the hyper-stylization and focus on surface doesn’t allow for heart. Any psychology here is decoration, and John Wick presents its characters as figures for the action. The performances in the film create ironic distance with actors delivering their stilted lines in a deadpan manner.  In a conversation at the funeral for Wick’s wife, for example, the newly-widowed husband talks briefly with his friend Marcus in several short lines delivered in a monotone.  Even the humor, like Avi’s constantly asking his clients to speak English, is mostly ironic and distances the viewer.

John Wick is indeed all flash and no soul, but its flash is terrifically engaging.  This is a fun film to spend time with and marvel at the art and creativity behind its dazzling surface.

February 10: I Am Not Your Negro (2016 – Raoul Peck)

★★★

Raoul Peck has a great idea for I Am Not Your Negro.  He takes a largely unfinished, late manuscript by James Baldwin, Remember This House, and uses it to structure the film.  To flesh out the structure, he uses Baldwin’s own language from writings and TV appearances, having Samuel Jackson read from Baldwin’s works.  The film is therefore Baldwin’s ideas and Baldwin’s expression.  I Am Not Your Negro also shows how relevant many of Baldwin’s concerns are even today.  To Baldwin’s comments on the violence and fear that an African -American faces, Peck intercuts images of racial violence from the 60s with contemporary images of similar violence.  And Peck dwells on Baldwin’s analysis of the role of American cinema in creating black stereotypes.  “Because Uncle Tom refuses to take vengeance in his own hands,” we hear Jackson read, “he was not a hero for me.  Heroes, as far as I could see, were white, and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection.”  The film clips Peck shows us of the portrayals of African Americans are compelling.

But the problems in I Am Not Your Negro are already present in this initial conception.  Peck adopts a chronological structure here based on Baldwin’s intention to progressively discuss the assassinations of Medgar Evans, Malcolm X and then Martin Luther King in his manuscript.  In the film, however, this chronological structure leaves us with a choppy discussion of Baldwin’s ideas.  We get one idea, then another idea, and then another idea, but the chronological structure doesn’t give the filmmaker the opportunity to draw Baldwin's ideas into a cohesive pattern.  The viewer finishes the film understanding several of Baldwin’s notions but not having a sense of his vision.  And Peck doesn’t go into depth on some of Baldwin’s most incisive ideas, like the destructive nature of whites’ construct of African-Americans.

Another problem that starts from Peck’s earliest decisions is his exclusive use of Baldwin’s writings.  Baldwin was an elegant, articulate writer, and his sentences are filled with parallels, qualifiers and extensive digressive phrases.  The language is beautiful and powerful to read, but it does not communicate well in speech.  Jackson delivers Baldwin’s sentences as clearly as they could be read, but the language doesn’t work well in a film that has viewers simultaneously trying to understand the complex sentences, put together Baldwin’s thoughts and integrate the film’s images to the words.  We lose a great deal because of this directorial decision.

A last issue with the film is why Peck decided to suppress the homosexuality of one of America’s most prominent gay authors.  Baldwin was open about his sexual orientation and his Giovanni’s Room is a critically important work in gay fiction, but Peck leaves it to an FBI comment and a very indirect mention later in the film to even hint at Baldwin’s being gay.  That omission diminishes the achievement of the feisty Baldwin, who not only had to deal with racial discrimination but discrimination against homosexuals.   And it puts Peck in the role of creating an identity for Baldwin rather than seeing the man’s own reality, the same gesture that Baldwin condemns whites for doing to blacks. 

I Am Not Your Negro brings to light many of the parts of Baldwin’s incisive analysis and condemnation of race relations in the US.  For that, the film is worthwhile.  In his concept of the film, though, some of Peck’s decisions weaken its effectiveness.  We’re still waiting for a film that can successfully communicate the intelligence, complexity and passion of Baldwin’s thought, but this one is a good enough start in that direction.  

January 31: Moonlight (2016 – Barry Jenkins)

★★★★★

Director Barry Jenkins accomplishes an unusual feat in Moonlight.  He’s created a film whose every frame highlights form and reminds us that we’re watching a movie and not a realistic presentation of life.  But at the same time, Moonlight hits us in the gut with such heart and honesty that we’re left deeply moved by the experience of watching it.  It’s a rare combination of two elements that often work at cross purposes.

From the opening sequence of the film, we’re struck by the artifice.  As the drug dealer Juan walks from his car to one of his sellers, the camera swirls quickly around him, the background almost blurring and calling attention to the camera and its movement.  This same motion continues as the seller talks with a customer.  The effect of this intrusion of artifice is not only one of striking beauty, but the gesture also signals us early that we’re watching a work of contrivance and not a documentary-style reportage.  The focus on form continues throughout.  Jenkins uses a lot of handheld camera, often with excessive motion.  In one of the film’s most effective scenes, the camera rolls with the ocean, occasionally submerging and resurfacing as Juan teaches Little how to swim.  This technique foregrounds the camera in a way that also complements the action.  A similar foregrounding occurs in the lighting.  Each of the three parts of Moonlight has its own distinct tonal palette, veering from greens and blues to browns and reds.  And the dialog here, while using a lot of the vocabulary and syntax of normal speech, also swings toward the theatrical at times.  In part two, for example, the two teenagers Kevin and Chiron sit by the ocean and talk about how a cool breeze from the sea can cause everyone in their neighborhood to pause from their hard lives for just a moment in order to experience it.  That’s a poetic thought and expression for a couple of teens smoking weed on a beach.   

Moonlight also has entire sequences that depart from a representational aesthetic.  Some of Juan’s scenes with Little work in an artful realm.  The bulked-up drug dealer holds Little and says to trust him during their swimming lesson, and he tells Little to feel the freedom that the water will give him.  This abstract vocabulary points eloquently to one of the central concerns of the film, individual autonomy.  And as Little begins to swim on his own, it feels like the boy’s taking control in the water also has a larger significance than his simply learning how to swim.  This entire stylized sequence works outside conventions of realistic storytelling.  And not only do sequences take on a poetic quality, but a network of imagery informs the film.  The color blue permeates Moonlight, for example, and water has a particular resilience in all three parts of the movie.  Such artifice is an important part of the aesthetic of the film.

Despite the distancing that could occur with so much attention to artifice, Moonlight touches the heart of viewers in a powerful way.  The film presents us with a series of dramatic scenes that resonate with an audience in a very human way.  It’s sad to see thin Little bullied at school and screamed at when home, and there’s a painful innocence when he asks Juan what a faggot is and whether the man is a drug dealer, a raw moment of self-acknowledgement for the older man.  It’s just as sad when Chiron, who has let his guard down with Kevin, experiences his friend turning on him for the approval of his peers and when we realize that Chiron sees only one way out of his situation.  Even when we meet Black, the bulked-up adult, we can see that his muscle, car and grillz are defenses, and we follow him though some very emotional conversations, first with his mother and later with Kevin, that are deeply moving despite their artifice.  The script here identifies emotional touchstone moments and presents them to us honestly that pushes the film’s self-awareness into the background.

The casting and acting add to the emotional effect.  Alex Hibbert is a thin, stooped-shouldered Little whose big eyes only occasionally turn up, and the lanky Ashton Sanders looks like an uncertain teenager susceptible to bullying.  His generally limited range of body language gives us an emotionally repressed kid, which makes the times he must be expressive all the more powerful.  Finally, Trevante Rhodes’ body tells us more about the character of Black than pages of dialog would.  His jacked build and tough accessories say this is a mean guy not to be messed with, but like his earlier mentor, Black has a deep vulnerability inside.  Locked into his intimidating body, Rhodes communicates his uncertainty and love through his eyes.  When this big actor lets a tear go, it’s deeply moving.

Barry Jenkin’s skill in Moonlight is to have rejected the realist aesthetic but simultaneously created characters whose emotions are human and genuine.  Watching this film is an exceptional experience of the power of cinematic art.