October 23: The Handmaiden/Ah-ga-ssi (2016 - Park Chan-wook)

★★★★

Park Chan-wook is simultaneously elegant, clever and passionate in The Handmaiden.  The visuals here have an Edwardian feel with dark interiors, heavy woodwork and period furnishings, but these elements merge seamlessly with an Asian sensibility that includes cherry trees in the landscapes and sliding paper doors.  Park blends the two influences to create a magnificent, English-inspired Japanese mansion set in the countryside of Korea.  The same Edwardian/Asian blend carries through in costumes, which range from simple, high-collared dresses for servants to shimmering gowns for the wealthy women and tight Edwardian suits for the men.  Even the hairstyles reflect this two-world approach with women’s tresses sometimes piled on top of the head, pulled back into a bun,  divided into hemispheres or left to fall in straight cascades.  And all the while, Chung Chung-hoon bathes the settings and figures with a soft glow that takes the edge off of low-key lighting and makes The Handmaiden feel like a film version of an old photo album.  His tight control sometimes brings a figure out of the background with a narrow depth of field, and his color saturation gives hues a special richness.  It’s sumptuous movie to watch.

It’s also a very smart film.  In the long first part, we see the straightforward story of Count Fujiwara’s scheme to use one woman, Sook-hee, to defraud another woman, Lady Hideko.  Perhaps the major surprise in this part is Sook-hee and Hideko falling in love with each other, but Park also draws us into the film by giving us a few visual teases that imply we’re not getting the whole story.  For example, why is the white rope, which was once in a box in Hideko’s closet, hanging in a tree when the two leave the estate?  In a film as controlled as The Handmaiden, such elements engage us and promise that there’s more to the story than we’ve seen.

Park’s narrative whiplash begins in Part II, when we revisit many of the scenes of Part I from a different perspective.  The big reveal is that the Count has been conspiring with Lady Hideko all along to use Sook-hee so Lady Hideko can claim her inheritance.  We learn that Lady Hideko isn’t being kind when she offers to let Sook-hee try on some earrings but rather that she’s following the Count’s suggestion to put Sook-hee at ease.  A similar reversal occurs in the picnic scene as we see it in this part.  In Part I, the couple is snuggling when Sook-hee returns from an errand, but in the same scene in Part II, we find the two pair quarreling until the handmaiden returns.  And Part II shows us that the white rope was hanging in the cherry tree in Part I because Lady Hideko had been in despair over her love for Sook-hee and tried to kill herself.  This section of the film is a smart bit of intertextuality that delights with a series of reversals, flashbacks and changes in perspective before returning to a stable, if different, narrative line in Part III..

Park also amps up the sex between the women in The Handmaiden, though he integrates it well into the film.  These scenes run long and steamy, perhaps overly so, but the genuine passion between the women comes through clearly in them.  Given that this passion ultimately undermines the Count’s initial plans, we have to believe in the intensity of the women’s love, so there’s some justification for Park’s dwelling on it.  And Park uses these scenes to reinforce the characters.  The commoner Sook-hee is more robust and aggressive in the love scenes while the Lady is appropriately tentative and discovering.  Park also uses these scenes to introduce a theme of voyeurism and to call his (male) audience to account.  In one of the longer erotic scenes, Sook-hee puts a thimble on her finger, gently holds Lady Hideko’s head and moves her finger slowly in and out of the lady’s mouth to smooth a rough spot on a tooth.  The scene is laden with erotic overtones, and Park brings the audience directly into it by putting the camera in Sook-hee’s perspective, looking into the eyes of Lady Hideko while her/our finger is in her mouth.  This daring voyeuristic gesture points to more explicit voyeuristic scenes later, when Lady Hideko reads pornography to the room of men and acts out some of the content while the men set enrapt. In this self-reflexive gesture, Park suggests that the male gaze in both settings is focused on sex, a gaze as we see later that ultimately blinds the Count to the reality of the situation he faces with the two women.  The Handmaiden gives us two women who escape exploitation by men even, ironically, with a male impersonation at its end.

With so much to recommend this film, it’s not without its drawbacks.   For all the beauty and deliberateness of Part I, this section of the film is overly long and feels like a movie in itself.  It consists of extended scenes and more than a little repetition.  The sex scenes in the film, too, are unnecessarily frequent, run overly long and risk falling into the very voyeurism they implicitly criticize.  The film doesn’t need so much passion to make its point, and while Park clearly highlights voyeurism, it’s not clear that this emphasis contributes to our experience of the movie or comes to some statement.  The Handmaiden also leaves us wishing that its characters had more depth.  The people we meet here certainly have feelings, but Park leaves us to accept their emotion with too little background or range of experiences among the principals.

The Handmaiden is a fine cinematic experience, bold and beautiful.  If the ideas don’t always hang together well and the characterizations don’t run deep, it still gives us a striking surface of visuals and story to enjoy.

October 12: Birth of a Nation (2016 - Nate Parker)

★★★

Nate Parker’s first feature aims high and hits the mark in several ways.  It gives us a compelling portrait of antebellum slavery, de-glamorized from the nostalgia glaze of Gone with the Wind and its descendants.  The slavery we see here is one of utter brutality, from beatings to hangings to knocking slaves’ teeth out with a hammer.  And the slaveholders themselves are not a refined aristocracy.  Some are educated, but many are scrappy farmers who have to work their slaves hard in order to make ends meet.  They are sweaty, dirty, unshaven and pot-bellied.  Birth of a Nation gives us visceral portrait of slavery as a harsh institution sustained by viciousness.

The cinematography and art direction figure prominently in creating this effect.  Muted hues inform many shots, often blue/grey outdoors and brown indoors, which suppresses any brightness or gaiety of color.  The slave quarters are dark and spare, furnished with handmade items, while the slaveholders’ homes are larger though only slightly more decorated with more ornate appointments.  Sweat glistens on everyone, and everyone has an unkempt look, even when they seem to be trying not to look that way.  Elliot Davis’ camera, for example, often catches Mrs. Turner with strong back or side lighting, which highlights the fuzz growing on her face.  While the camera sometimes uses cliché’s like circling a dance to help us participate in the fun, it more often adds to the film’s material portrait of the era.

Likewise, the script has some clear strengths.  In an inversion of DW Griffith’s film, Parker tells this story from the perspective of the enslaved, so these slaves have names, families and human emotions.  We see Nat’s love for his wife, mother and grandmother, and we see their love for him.  When he visits other plantations to preach, we see the suffering of the other slaves through his eyes.  This perspective draws our sympathy to the slaves and puts us on their side.  And the script ranges beyond the slaves to portray the effect of slavery on the slave-holders, too.  Samuel Turner sees the immorality of slavery.  He’s taken aback at some of the abuse that owners inflict on their slaves, and we see him defend Nat against a white man at one point.  It is implied that he turns increasingly to gin to deal with his inner moral conflict over his participation in the institution of slavery, but he still exploits slaves, in particular using Nat to raise money to get his farm out of debt and restore his family’s name.  The script of Birth of a Nation isn’t one-dimensional in its portrayal of slavery.

There are also interesting historical elements in the film.  We see slaves subjected to every indignity imaginable with the intention of dehumanizing and therefore pacifying them, but Birth of a Nation shows how slaves maintained their humanity.  Their history speaks in religious practices and forbearers’ stories we encounter while ceremonial practices like weddings preserve their culture.  Africa is constantly in the air, whether in cowry shell accessories or in the rhythms of the film’s music, and this provides yet another unifying element among the enslaved.  The movie also shows us how the slaves preserve their own identities.  Cherry, for example, shows Nat a blouse that her mother has sewn her child’s name into lest the child forget it; Nat similarly gives Cherry a family token from Africa.  Such gestures show the persistence of humanity despite the slave owners’ harsh efforts to undermine it.  The film also dramatizes some of the unique ways slaves maintained their own culture right in front of the slave-owning whites.  At one point, we watch Nat use coded biblical references to condemn slavery while slave owners look on obliviously.

Despite the value of the historical portrayal here, the script of Birth of a Nation ultimately undermines the film.  Although the story of Nat Turner and what motivated his rebellion lies at the center of the movie, the script ultimately muddles its portrayal of the central character.  For much of the movie, we see Nat increasingly angered at the treatment of slaves, from the mistreatment at nearby farms to the abuse his own wife suffers.  But in the latter third of the film, Birth of  a Nation suddenly pushes Nat’s religious belief as his primary motive rather than his anger at injustice.  After we’ve watched Nat’s moral growth in secular terms for most of the film, it’s jarring when he’s suddenly willing to incur punishment because he wants to serve god by baptizing the white man.  We’ve seen Nat’s knowledge of god before that, but the film has given us little hint that this knowledge has affected his behavior before this extreme decision.  And shortly afterward this event, Nat is looking for signs from god to begin his insurrection and cloaking himself in the robes of martyrdom.  The script here gives us little indication of a religious motivation for Nat’s uprising and leaves us confused when the central character suddenly starts giving religion as a reason for his rebellion.

The script also has several other distracting elements.  For one, most of the women have little character depth and largely appear as accessory to the need to develop the character of Nat.  When Nat needs a love interest, the script brings in Cherry, and she helps to generate sympathy for Nat at a later point.  The mother and grandmother perform similar functions, developing Nat as a loved, grounded character.  In addition, the script builds Nat’s growing anger at slavery in a series of obvious steps -- visits to different farms, each with an increasingly brutal treatment of the slaves.   And while some of the story’s turns to magical realism work, they can be redundant or distracting.  The vision of Cherry as an angel or the bleeding ear of corn hardly add to the psychology or drama of the moment.

At times, Birth of a Nation can feel like the vanity project of someone with strong talent but who’s not yet in total directorial control. That said, this film gives us a strong insight into one of the worst parts of our national history, and for that alone, it’s a worthwhile contribution the movies.

September 29: Destiny/Der müde Tod (1921 - Fritz Lang)

★★★★

In Destiny, Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou finally give up convoluted storytelling and settle for a plot that starts at the beginning and goes to the end.  They remove confusing references whose explanations await a flashback and instead give us a clear, direct story here.  And rather than engaging us with cleverness, Lang creates a deeply atmospheric film here that touches its audience though mood rather than narrative showmanship.

Much of Destiny’s evocative atmosphere comes from the figure of Death.  Instead of a dark, pitiless, inescapable Grim Reaper, Lang’s Death is a figure who regrets the suffering he presides over but who nonetheless performs his duties.  As created by Bernhard Goetzke, Death is sad about what he does, but as a part of the order of things, it's the only thing he can do.  In this portrayal, Death’s black robes and wide-brimmed hat are as much about his own mourning as the grief he must inflict.  This Death, echoing a similar portrayal in Victor Sjöström’s Phantom Carriage of the same year, gives Destiny an eerie tone, both repulsive and attractive.

Art design contributes to the mood, too.  The Apothecary’s crow, which we initially see standing on a skeleton, is unnerving as it hops among the Apothecary’s bottles while the man is looking for ingredients.  And low-angle expressionist shots distort and disturb, too.  For example, the wall around Death’s domain, which has no door, appears huge when Lang shoots it from below with the Young Woman standing outside it.  Similarly, the figural lamp in the bar takes on a macabre life as our attention is directed up to it and its candles from below.  Grotesque close-ups also bring us too close to people who we don’t want that proximity to, and Lang uses Expressionist low lighting to project threatening shadows when figures pass, as in the Carnival section of this film.  Some of the décor also evokes the darkly mystical.  Death, for example, follows the length of people’s lives in a vast room filled with candles, each candle representing a human life.  It’s a beautiful, if chilling, scene.

Another important element of the atmosphere is Lang’s use of special effects.  One tour de force moment is when Death goes to a candle, opens his hands above it as the candle flickers out, and a baby fades into his hands.  Effective as that moment is, Lang shows greater creativity when the scene dissolves into a mother grieving over the death of her baby.  With that one effects-laden sequence, Lang shows us Death’s terrible job and the burden he carries in doing it.  Lang uses this same dissolve technique effectively elsewhere in Destiny.  Death fades in to meet the coach at a crossroads, establishing his other-worldliness early on, and the Young Woman fades into Death’s lair when she poisons herself and then fades into the Apothecary’s lodgings when Death sends her back among the living.  The otherworldly procession of the dead into Death’s kingdom uses a similar in-camera effect, as does the poignant reunion of the Young Woman and the Young Man as the latter rises to meet her and the two are led off by Death.  Other effects – like the stop-motion moving letter, the flying carpet and the crying statue – also maintain the unnatural tone in the film.

Destiny is the first film to show Lang’s ability to create and maintain such a compelling mood, but even in doing so, he builds on strengths from his preceding work.  Most conspicuously, Lang keeps the frame filled with opulence and décor, and he did as early as Spiders.  From Persia to Carnival to China and the village where Death has taken up habitation, Lang stuffs Destiny full of showy costumes and decoration.  The Third Light, the Middle Kingdom in China, is especially rich in these, climaxing with a pagoda turning into an elephant that has a pagoda on its back.  There are fascinating details throughout the film.  Another carryover from Lang's movie-making include using the same actors to play different roles in the film and Lang’s attraction to showmanship.  The conflagration at the end of Destiny is compelling even today in its size and reality.

While Destiny certainly succeeds, it still has some rough edges.  The frame of Death and the Young Woman works well, but the three interposed stories don’t engage us.  Their small run time barely lets Lang tell the story, much less develop characters.  Five years earlier, DW Griffith had likewise tried to portray one idea as manifest in different eras with Intolerance, and he achieved some success.  But Intolerance runs more than double the time of Destiny.  Another odd Lang choice in Destiny is to make the Chinese section a comedy, thereby misaligning it with the other segments.  After the dark moodiness of the first 2/3 of the film, it’s jarring to have a fat, petulant, immature Emperor as the Son of Heaven with fingernails longer than his hands groping at the heroine.  What problems there are in Destiny arise in the interposed tales.

Destiny shows us a director who has made genuine progress and produced a noteworthy film.  He’s learned to tell a story in a way that the audience can follow, and he can control tone to engage us.  And Destiny points in the direction of Lang’s next project when Death looks at a group of quarreling burghers and apparently uses mind control to calm and manipulate them.  Lang’s next works will demonstrate further consolidation of the silent film language he's most clearly developed here.

September 24: Author: The JT LeRoy Story (2016 - Jeff Feuerzeig)

★★★★★

Among the many surprising delights of Author: The JT LeRoy Story is that Jeff Feuerzeig doesn’t put the title character at the center of the film.  Instead, JT LeRoy is a story, and the film delivers us the author of that story, Laura Albert.  Feuerzeig has produced a fascinating, complex, suspenseful and insightful documentary here that goes beyond the what-happened of the JT LeRoy story  to consider its challenging implications.

People use the word “hoax” to describe Albert’s creation of JT as the author for her work.  When she invents a fictional biography for him and recruits her sister-in-law to play JT in public, it’s easy to see how people might feel that way.  But Feuerzeig undercuts this conclusion very early in the film as Albert describes for the camera the first time she created JT.  She had been feeling down, so despite her age, she called a teen suicide hotline and JT came into being as the voice for her to talk to a phone counselor there.  Part of the excitement of the film is that Albert has preserved a cassette recording of that initial and countless other phone conversations, so we can hear the creation of JT at the moment he comes into being.  And Albert also tells us how this creation felt, how she was able to say things she hadn’t been able to express and how she feared she’d lose him the way many of her other boy characters had gone away.  From this compelling opening, we see right away that Albert has created JT in order to help her understand and navigate the world, the very definition of what art does.  JT is her work of art, a voice that enables Albert to create.

Feuerzeig had access to a veritable treasure trove of documentary artifacts for the film, and he uses them ably.  Albert had recordings of all her conversations with agents, councilors, authors, celebrities and friends, a compulsion that might be related to her effort to establish her own identity and is certainly analogous to her mother’s compulsion to document her daughter.  Albert’s mother had taken many photos and home movies of her daughter, artifacts that Feuerzeig also had access to for this film.  The director makes skillful use of all these materials, and as Albert’s story of JT’s rise and fall proceeds, Feuerzeig draws on the recordings to flesh out the events and the old film clips to develop Albert’s back story.

From what we learn about Albert’s background while we’re watching JT become more and more famous, we come to understand that Albert has had an unusually difficult childhood of sexual abuse, abandonment, bullying, drug use and neglect.  As we learn more of this background, it becomes clear that, while Albert simply made up some elements of JT’s story (she’d never been to a truck stop, for example), she’s also drawn on elements of her harsh life to create not only JT but also his writing.  The voice of JT enables Albert to access her terrible experiences and communicate them.

We even discover roots for Albert’s getting her sister-in-law to play the role of JT in public.  As a child, for example, Albert had used her Barbie dolls to enact her various fantasies, as we hear from Albert and see in some photos.  An even bigger exteriorization of her inner life was her dressing her sister in punk style and sending her out to experience the scene and report back to her.  Despite her love of punk, Albert couldn’t bring herself to go out, so she dressed, coiffed and counseled her sister on what to do, and then she waited at home for her sister’s return with descriptions of the punk experience.  It’s a short step from this behavior to creating JT and sending him out to literary gatherings.

Author: The JT LeRoy Story also documents the celebrity scene that adopted JT and made his unmasking such a scandal.  While some celebrities were outraged when they discovered the real person behind JT, others seemed to recognize the psychology at work in Albert, and they remained supportive of her throughout the exposés and press onslaught that followed.  The first time we see Albert owning up to having created JT is with Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins, and we’re pleasantly surprised when Corgan openly accepts it and remains friends with everyone in her circle.  Later, as revelations about JT mount, Albert is writing for David Milch on Deadwood, and Milch, too, supports her and seems to understand the importance of JT to her writing.  As the story breaks, her therapist, director Gus van Sant, and Tom Waits all call to offer further understanding and support, and if you’ve never had a warm spot for Courtney Love, her recorded response to Albert’s situation will create one.  An unexpected warmth and humanity in celebrity circles is one of the nice surprises Feuerzeig delivers here

This film firmly engages us 0n a technical level, too.  Feuerzeig tells Albert’s story with so much tension that it’s hard for an audience to look away.  From the earliest moments of Albert creating JT in order to talk to a therapist on the phone -- and then visiting the therapist in person as a “friend” of JT’s -- we’re left in uncomfortable disbelief at her actions.  The creation of JT’s public figure amps up the tension even further as JT/Savannah Knoop attend readings of JT’s work, engage celebrities, go to Cannes and participate in a film adaptation.  Through all of these, the audience is expecting that the deception will be uncovered at any moment, but even the several days that JT spends with Asia Argento in Italy leaves the secret intact.  And as Albert creates a network of identities for the people in her circle, the multiple layers of false characters adds to the tension that the film only relaxes when it turns to Albert’s past.

Feuerzeig also uses visual techniques to keep us focused on the screen.  Much of the film is an interview with Albert, and the director has enlivened that visual with a backdrop of two enlarged, written pages, a visual that not only engages but adds signification.  He also breaks up the interview with animated interpretations of what’s being said, and he breaks to cassette recordings of conversations and old home movies of Albert.  One of the more interesting of interruptions is when Albert says that her husband, Geoffrey Knoop, liked to talk music with Billy Corgan and Feuerzeig superimposes the two spindles of a cassette recording over the heads of the two men in a photo precisely while they’re discussing music on the tape.

Author: The JT LeRoy Story is chock-a-block full of compelling elements.  There is celebrity, psychological compulsion, deception, tension and engaging cinematic techniques.  And the story challenges us to consider the strong links between creativity, art and identity itself.  And truth and morality.  This is a lot to pack into one documentary, but Feuerzeig succeeds in doing so, and in making it interesting.  And in perhaps a happy ending to the story, Albert is still writing, but she no longer needs JT or any other identity to do so.  She can claim her story as her own.

September 20: Desert Migration (2015 - Daniel F. Cardone)

★★★

There's a great idea at the heart of Desert Migration.  A description of this community of older gay men who are AIDS survivors from the 1980s reaches out and touches many populations.  One of its major contributions, of course, is to talk about the lingering effects of the horrible AIDS epidemic that swept the gay community in the 80s and what it’s like to have survived that.  The film's concept also gives insight into what it's like to simply be an older gay man.   And for all its focus on the gay community, it deals with things that any older person has to deal with.  It's a great idea that reaches into a number of areas that we don't see represented in film very much

And Desert Migration succeeds in many of these points.    People thought an HIV diagnosis meant almost certain death in the early period of the epidemic, and several of the men here describe how they responded to that.  Michael, for example, went on an alcohol and drug binge until he realized he wasn’t going to die, and several others talk about spending all their money until the same realization came to them.  In these cases, living through the epidemic meant the men faced not only rebuilding their lives, but doing so with compromised health and few resources.  This is a unique aspect of the epidemic, and one rarely addressed.  The men in this film also talk about surviving friends and lovers who were their age or younger, reminiscences which have poignancy in Desert Migration and speak to a lasting legacy of the AIDS epidemic.

Beyond the effects of surviving AIDS, the men also find themselves coping with issues common to both older gay men and to older people in general.  One of the major challenges they face is loneliness and isolation, and Desert Migration shows us how its dozen or so subjects cope.  Joel, for example, volunteers as a clerk in a nonprofit shop, and Juan-Manuel has launched himself as an artist.  A half dozen of them maintain a friendship, and we see them at a dinner.  In a more gay-oriented direction, Erik and Doc have a leather relationship, and Doug dates at a local gay bar while Steve participates in Western dance classes at another.  They all try to cope with being alone by using the resources available to them. However, some of the men don’t break out of their isolation and remain alone and lonely.  Will, showing us the sores on his back, remains unhappily solitary, and Keith philosophically accepts being alone.

In addition to the scope of Cardone’s concerns, he brings several other strengths to this film.  For one, he accepts many elements of gay culture as a given and simply uses them without excuse or explanation.  Doug has a Peter Pan complex, but in the film, he is coping with age and AIDS by flirting and staying as young-acting and feeling as he can.  And he’s happy.  Leather is also an element in several of the men’s lives, but Cardone treats it as blithely as an Appalachian director might show a quilting bee.  And the gym and bars play outsized roles here without getting much explanation.  It’s a directorial approach that normalizes unique aspects of gay culture, showing the world from within those norms.

And Cardone brings several stylistic flourishes to the documentary.  His clips follow something like the pattern of a day, with morning activities among the subjects followed by those of midday and evening.  It’s a documentary structure familiar to people who know the city symphonies or classics like Man with the Movie Camera, but it works here to show how a specific group lives.  And within that structure, other loops connect between events.  For example, we see Erik setting up a sling assembly (late afternoon) and only later see Doc showing up to use it (evening).  These elements give some structure to the many snippets of information we get throughout the film. 

Cardone isn’t afraid to use showier techniques in his documentary either.  He often uses time lapse photography for effect, as in the scene that shows the sunrise progressively illuminating the mountains near Palm Springs or the few cars on the streets of the city.  The technique calls back to Godfrey Reggio, who uses it to great effect in Koyaanisqatsi and subsequent films.  More affective still is the way that Cardone fuses soundtrack with visuals.  We often gaze at clips of the silent subjects, who themselves stare back at us, while we hear the voice track of comments from an interview with the subject that was done at another time.  A technique like this could be tremendously informative, giving us two information feeds at the same time – the visual and the verbal, the present and another time – and freeing up the filmmaker to be able to use only an interview's sound track without the video footage that could be weak or distracting. 

However, in Desert Migration, Cardone often misses the opportunity to use this technique to strengthen his film with the result that the technique soon becomes shallow flash.  It would have been enlightening, for example, to hear the men reflect on the lingering effect of seeing the loss all around them in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, but Cardone doesn’t seem to have pushed such questions;  instead, he leaves us to listen to remarks we might have expected to hear.  This weakness in interviewing is well-illustrated in a comment by Juan-Manuel about excluding negative words from his vocabulary.   Because Cardone doesn’t include elaboration of the remark, Juan-Manuel’s comment is left to hang, sounding almost frivolous, because we don’t understand the background for it.  A disappointing part of this film is that Cardone is content with trite or clichéd comments when a few follow-up questions could have yielded insightful remarks from these men.

There’s an echo of this interviewing weakness in the way Desert Migration looks, too.  Most of the visuals are striking, but they often seem more flashy than purposeful.  When we see the time lapse of sunrise on the purple mountains, it’s an appropriate visual for a voiceover talking about the healing energy of the area.  But most of the time, we watch clouds, palm trees, and sparse traffic that isn’t related to the content at all.  Perhaps more objectionably, some of the footage in the film seems like gratuitous stimulation.  We didn’t need to see the horrible sores on Will’s back to understand that he feels like he’s rejected because of them, and it’s unclear why we watch Doc do a nipple piercing.  It’s a graphic, compelling moment, but one that is more sensational than informative.  We learn nothing of Doc from this footage or the accompanying voiceover.

With so much attractive stylistic veneer in this film, we can almost be forgiven if we don't think much deeper.  For example, many of the men here are strikingly muscular, and working out clearly plays an unusually big role in their lives, but the film hardly addresses the motivations behind it or how it makes the men feel.  A man like Doc, who we first see in full-frontal, multiply-pierced nudity, never talks about his extravagant body art.  And we watch Bill flipping Post-its a couple of times, but we never learn what is behind that action.  Likewise, why do we hear the long discussion of real estate? 

Daniel Cardone has a great idea for a documentary here, but he leaves us with too much of an attractive cinematic surface and fairly shallow observations.  Desert Migration is a contribution to documentary, particularly documentary about gay men and AIDS, but it also leaves us wishing the film-maker had been more rigorous with the film.

September 5: April and the Extraordinary World/ Avril et le monde truqué (2015 - Franck Ekinci & Christian Desmares)

★★★★

April in the Extraordinary World is a smart film that is fun to watch.  Gallic wit and love of history move forward right away in a somewhat elaborate history of how this alternative era came about.  The militant Napoléon III, killed in a lab accident, is succeeded by Napoléon IV, who promptly signs a peace treaty and averts the Franco-Prussian War.  Science stagnates as leading scientists mysteriously go missing, and we soon see a 20th century world with none of the benefits of early modern scientific discovery.  As imagined by Jacques Tardi, an intelligent design reigns in the look of this alternative world.

Without scientific progress, we find the Twin Towers in this world are designed not by Emery Roth but by Charles Eiffel.  In another witty gesture, Pop’s phonograph doesn’t run on electricity, since that hasn't been discovered, but a small steam engine powers the record player.  And with no internal combustion engines, the film casts witty asides about airships and cable cars; an announcer enthuses about a mere 87-hour trip to Berlin and proclaims the opening of a bridge between France and England, tunnel-drilling equipment evidently being un-invented.  And the summit of Montmartre is now a monument to one of the Napoléons rather than Sacre Coeur.  This extraordinary world is one conceived with great wit.

There’s other cleverness at work here, too.  Darwin doesn’t have as much dialog as one might expect from a talking cat in a French movie, but he’s sharp when he appears.  Near death, Darwin describes  how he's looking forward to meeting Charles Perrault, though he says he’ll tell the author of Puss-in-Boots a few things about cats.  And Darwin is a typically aloof cat with his controlled manner, so his sudden lunges every time a rat appears are quite funny, lunges he unapologetically later explains as instinct.  Neither is he above teasing the humans, especially the not-always-sharp Julius.  “You’re in looooove,” he purrs, like a junior high kid teasing another.  And the portrayal of various famous 20th century scientists is also smart.  It’s not hard to recognize them – Einstein, Marconi –but when we see them giving their overlord lizard a massage or playing classical music in a quartet for him, there’s a humorous irony at play, and one related to a theme of the film.

In addition to having so much wit, April and the Extraordinary World is simply a pleasure to watch.  It has wonderful steampunk machines, like the house that turns into a Jules-Verne-style submarine and a walking machine with gangly, mechanically-jointed legs.  And there’s a flying aircraft that carries its legs like a fly.  The lizards have exoskeletons they’ve designed for themselves that let them walk upright on two legs.  In addition to such 19th century fantasy imagery, we see the Petit Palais as a ruin with steam machines and a giant oak growing in the middle, and when the heroes exit Paris underwater via the Seine, there’s a passing shot of a skeleton at the wheel of a sunken vessel.  This film knows its visual strength, and it borrows an idea from Up in telling April’s later story through photos hung on a wall.  There’s always something worth looking at in this film.

For all this, April and the Extraordinary World is still a children’s movie.  It approaches some heavy subjects, but it only gives passing shrift to them.  April has to learn to trust others and reach out, but that theme emerges from three mostly unconnected scenes.  The film also has an anti-authoritarian bias, but it doesn’t dwell on that idea.  There’s also an ethical warning here about science being turned to bad uses, but that idea surfaces at odd times, sometimes in an on-the-nose comment.  There’s an environmental message here, too, about over-exploitation of resources.  But this film isn’t consistently interested in any of these ideas.  It’s mostly an intelligent, visually-engaging romp, and it is very worthwhile for all it has to offer in that realm.

August 26: Anomalisa (2015 - Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson)

★★★★★

The strength of Anomalisa is way Kaufman marries his stop-motion puppet animation to the theme.  The film centers on Michael Stone, a middle-aged man mired in an existential mid-life crisis.  His world is filled with banality and repetition; nothing seems real, vital or unique to him, and the stop-motion world he lives in emphasizes this.

Most of the film is set in a bland city, Cincinnati, and most of the action transpires in a hotel-chain environment.  Everything from Michael’s taxi ride to his check-in procedure and his room décor transpires in the characterless patterns of business travel, and even the dialog sounds scripted by the hospitality industry, a fact especially emphasized when room service repeats Michael’s order back to him in embellished, corporate vocabulary.  The puppet world here is remarkably effective at highlighting the banality of this environment.  The artificial feeling of the sets as reproduced for stop-motion defamiliarizes this familiar corporate look and makes us notice it.  In addition, the puppets Michael encounters all look alike, all have the same seams and joints, and they’re all voiced by the same actor, Tom Noonan.  Even Michael himself is a part of the uniform blandness.  And when he seeks some stimulation to pierce the ennui that envelops him, he finds more of the same.  His call to his family in LA implies an unexciting home life, and when he reaches out to an old girlfriend in Cincinnati, he’s reminded of his communication failure and is again unable to have a real connection with an Other.  And in these episodes, Kaufman again uses the same puppets and the same voice, emphasizing the dullness of the world Michael sees.  Even gender differences succumb to the banality.

The existential prison that Michael has created for himself becomes clear in the episode with Lisa.  At first, her simple vitality and sincerity pierce the sameness around him.  Her voice is different (it’s Jennifer Jason Leigh), and the two ultimately have sex in Michael’s room, an intense, personal experience of the reality of the Other during which their voices merge.  However, even at this point Michael is already turning Lisa into an extension of himself, telling her what to do -- “Say something,” he directs her.  She soon becomes part of the homogeneity around him.  As they talk over breakfast that morning, she mentions the zoo, just as the taxi driver has, and we see Michael wedging her into his category of unexceptional.  Michael tells her not to click her spoon on her teeth when she eats, and soon Kaufman shifts her dialog into reverb, sonically implying her distance from Michael.  In his mind she’s no longer special, and he’s again alone in his unexceptional world.

Although he can’t see it, Michael’s stop-motion world is one of his own making.  Hair flowing as she rides in a car on the way home, Lisa writes him that their time was wonderful and special to her.  And at Michael’s surprise homecoming party, Michael’s exasperated wife tells him, “Do you realize we all love you?”  Michael, however, can’t see the world around him and the love it holds.  His is a world of stop-motion sameness though, as he stares at Anomalisa, the Japanese Goddess of Heaven that he bought for his son in a porn shop, he knows he’s missing something.  And Charley Kaufman's achievement in Anomalisa is a remarkably effective merger of technique and theme.