2022 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Animation

Robin Robin: B+
Boxballet: B-
Affairs of the Art: B
Bestia: C-
The Windshield Wiper: B Most years, the theatrical presentation of the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts includes three or four "highly commended" shorts, sort of like runners-up to the five nominees, just to pad out the total run time. This is usually because some of the nominees are kids' cartoons as short as five minutes, but this year the shortest of the nominees is about fifteen minutes. Only one of them is truly for children, and it's the opener, Robin Robin, a perfectly charming film from Aardman studios in the UK that runs a good 32 minutes. Aardman is a studio of reliable quality, previously producing many Wallace & Gromit and Shawn the Sheep titles. In the case of Robin Robin, it not only features a charming story about a robin raised by a family of mice, and the voice talents of Gillian Anderson (as a hungry cat) and Richard E. Grant (as a magpie with a mending broken wing), but the uniquely textured stop motion animation is impressive. Robin Robin is a perfect candidate for a television special for the family. Or, you can just head over to Netflix and watch this right now. Others of the nominees may or may not be available online, but honestly Robin Robin is the only one of them I would tell you to bother with. Because this year's other nominees are mostly not for children, the theatrical presentation splits them, and even puts a title card up onscreen to give parents the time to take their children out of the theater, because what's coming up is not suitable for children. The thing that mystifies me is that this title card comes up after, rather than before Boxballet, a 15-minute film from Russia that I would argue is also not for children. This tells the story of the crossing paths of a beat up boxer and a ballerina, and much of the stuff with the boxer is fairly violent. It's slightly cartoony in its presentation, but it's still within the context of a story for adults rather than children—not to mention the handsy dance instructor who borders on molestation. Boxballet has a unique artistic visual style, which I suppose might hold the attention of much younger children who are fascinated with the lines and colors of cartoons, but even for adults, the story here didn't quite land for me. At times I found it hard to follow. Affairs of the Art, a 16-minute film from the UK and Canada but featuring voice talent with British accents, definitively lacks cohesion but still skirted with my own darkly comic sensibility. It's hard for me not to have affection for a film featuring a book called Home Taxidermy for Children. This film is otherwise narrated by a plump, middle-aged woman obsessed with making abstract art, and reminiscing about her morbid little sister who eventually moves to California and uses her own body as art with extensive plastic surgery. The animation style here is wholly appropriate, all of it rendered as pencil drawings with constantly shifting lines, the narrator all the while chatting nonchalantly away about her approach to art. There's not much of a story arc here, but I found it relatively entertaining. Bestia, which is Spanish for Beast and is a 16-minute short from Chile, is the only one of the nominees that I would urge you actively to avoid. I'm astonished this even garnered an Oscar nomination, unless it was just because of the skilled animation of what looks genuinely like well-lit porcelain figurines. The problem is that this quickly moves into "What the fuck?" territory, a woman with a dog either fantasizing or living her dream (I could not tell which) of training her dog to attack—and even sexually molest—people held captive in a basement somewhere. If this film has something to say, I don't have a clue what it is. If it even has a story to tell, I have no idea what it is. Well, wait, so far as I can gather from a bit of online research is that it's an allegory for Chile's deeply sordid history. Maybe I need to have a better working knowledge of world history to appreciate this. All I can think about is the scene in which this lady's dog is eating her out. No thank you, next! Finally, The Windshield Wiper, a 15-minute film from Spain in which the dialogue is curiously spoken in English with American accents, is largely mystifying in its own right, but deliberately so—and is arguable the most visually beautiful of all the nominees, a parade of beautifully rendered portraits. It starts in a cafe, a man posing the simple question, "What is love?" What follows is a series of vignettes, wildly varying in tone but all of them beautiful, that collectively set out to answer that question. We get the answer stated quite simply and directly in the end. It took me a while even to figure out what was going on here, but I still enjoyed the journey. My vote for the Oscar goes to Robin Robin, in spite of it being kind of an obvious choice, but The Windshield Wiper would not be a bad choice either. Even though I still don't have the foggiest idea why it has that title. Overall: B-

2022 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Live Action

On My Mind: B
Please Hold: B
The Dress: B-
The Long Goodbye: C+
Ala Kachuu - Take and Run: B+ This year's crop of live action shorts, as seen in the program in theaters, is well sequenced, I'll give it that: it opens quietly with one of the shortest of the offerings, an 18-minute Danish film called On My Mind, about a guy who comes into an empty bar on the weekend and is dead set on getting a recording of himself singing Elvis Presley's "Always On My Mind" on their karaoke machine. Most of the film consists of just three characters; the aforementioned man, the bar's owner trying to do his taxes uninterrupted, and the empathetic, middle-aged bartender lady. Film shorts have a tendency to hinge on some kind of twist, however subtle it might be, and this one is no exception: we eventually learn the reason for the obsession with getting a recording of this man singing the song. It's both sweet and sad, if a little slight in the end.

Such is the case with the average of this year's five live-action shorts nominated for Oscars, honestly. At least we have the chance to see the nominated shorts in theaters again; last year there was no such chance thanks to the closure of movie theaters due to the pandemic. And if these films prove anything, it's that not even a pandemic can kill a particular, or peculiar, cinematic vibe.

Please Hold, a 19-minute film that is the only one of the live action shorts from the United States, has a compelling concept, even if it plays a little like a second-rate episode of Black Mirror—something none of us have had the stomach for in a couple of years. Set in Los Angeles, it's at least, somewhat ironically, more representative of diversity than a couple of the foreign shorts: directed and co-written by a Latina woman, KD Davila, and starring Latino actor Erick Lopez. Lopez plays Mateo, a young man arrested by automated drones in a relatively plausible near-future, but for one thing in this film that I really could not get past. When Mateo is ordered by automated voices to change into the provided orange jail outfit, he has handcuffs on. Cut to him in his change of clothes, and he still has them on? Maybe the automated booking area somehow uncuffed him temporarily, I don't know. In any case, the whole point of this story is that Mateo never has any idea what he's been charged for, but he can't get ahold of any live human to explain it to him. A majority of this film's run time shows Mateo in his jail cell, frustratingly trying to communicate with an AI-powered screen in the wall, rife with glitches similar to when you're stuck on hold with an automated system. Please Hold touches on the injustices of our criminal justice system, and never even reveals what Mateo's supposed crime was—only that his time in jail has cost him his job and his future. I'm having real difficulty figuring out what to make of The Dress, a 30-minute Polish Film about a dwarf woman working as a maid in a drabby motel. When it comes to the acting and the cinematography, this film is the best of this crop without question. The trickier part is the content, which I think means to humanize little people. Whether it succeeds at that is likely dependent on the audience, and I would sure love to know what little people think of it. Maybe I'm off base—I kind of have no idea—but the fact that this film only depicts the miserable, tormented life of Julka (a truly excellent Anna Dzieduszycka; I want to see her in more self-actualizing parts) strikes me as something pitying and patronizing to little people. "The Dress" refers to the dress she spends a few days trying to find to wear going out for beers with a transient truck driver who has shown some interest and said he will return in a few days. The Dress gets surprisingly frank about Julka's life and this relationship, and spoiler alert: things don't turn out well. I just want to know, why can't we see a movie where Julka actually catches a break? It feels a little like The Dress would have us believe little people face an impossible task of finding happiness in a cruel world, and while that may be the case for some, it feels regressive to be depicting it so vividly onscreen in 2022.  The Long Goodbye, a 13-minute British film starring Riz Ahmed, is my least favorite of this year's crop, while feeling like the one of those with the most potential to win the Oscar. I don't hate the message, which is a very pointed—and violent—depiction of xenophobic paranoia in the UK. I just didn't like how chaotic it was, in its very filming, with wildly shaky handheld camera work even when we follow Ahmed's character around a crowded home as he roughhouses with his large family. A far-right march is shown on the news on television, until said marchers arrive in their neighborhood, and basically attack everyone in the neighborhood, grabbing people in their homes and dragging them out into the streets. After a particularly tragic turn of events, at which nearby police officers look on dispassionately, the soundtrack goes quiet, and Ahmed launches into an acapella rap number, about anti-immigrant sentiment. The rap is very good, what I could make out of the words anyway, but the film on the whole just didn't quick work or click for me. Ala Kachuu - Take and Run, a 38-minute Swiss and Kyrgyz co-production, is both the longest and the best of the live action shorts this year. I usually run out of patience for the longer films that are supposed to be "short," but Take and Run held my attention from start to finish. This is the story of a young woman who is kidnapped and forced into marriage, as part of the local tradition of her people. This isn't a period piece, either; it's set in the present day, with the woman briefly escaping to the city to live with another young woman who made it out of her village, shaming her mother in the eyes of their community in the process. The film ends with a note about how often this kind of kidnapping still goes on, driving home the point of the very well-executed fictionalization of one such story that just unfolded. Thankfully, this one ends with far more hope for its main character than The Dress does, and makes for a nice end to this entire presentation of all five films. It should be noted that not all such women find an escape, but this one makes many failed attempts and also spends a fair amount of time in emotional distress, particularly on her wedding night. Overall, all of these films are worth at least considering, and most are worthy of close attention. But, i>Ala Kachuu - Tale and Run is the one I hope wins the Academy Award.
Overall: B

FEBRUARY

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

I suppose February, a Bulgarian film about a man at three different stages of his life, just isn’t for me. For some reason I watched the whole thing anyway, so I can sit down here and tell you why I didn’t like it all that much. And that I didn’t hate it either. It’s just very, very slow—to say February is pastoral and meditative is an understatement. Or more accurately, it is the statement.

Maybe another thing meant to be conveyed by director Kamen Kalev, who also wrote and directed, is a fundamental lack of ambition, on the part of the central character, Petar. February has a concept that is fairly compelling on its own merits: Kalev splits it into three parts, each of them roughly forty minutes long, with a different actor playing Petar in each of them, at age eight, eighteen, and eighty-two. That’s what the synopsis of the film at siff.net says, anyway; his age is never stated during the film.

When we first meet Petar, as a little boy, he’s spending his days with his grandfather, who is a sheep farmer. When we meet Petar as an old man, he is himself a sheep farmer. The only time we truly gain any insight into the psyche of Peter as a character is in the middle section, when he is eighteen, just married, and joined the military. Indeed, the three parts have their own titles: Part I is The Past; Part II is Military Service; and Part III is February.

It is during Military Service that we learn, when a superior officer inquires as to why Petar spends all of his time walking around the island in contemplative silence, that Petar’s father and grandfather were both sheep farmers, and he fully expects and intends to be one himself as well. The superior officer has offered him a higher rank and is aghast at Petar’s disinclination to take him up on it: “You stupid peasant!” To be clear, that little outburst is definitively the most exciting moment in the film.

This film is only available locally in Seattle as a streaming ticket purchase at SIFF.net, and I can’t decide whether it’s better there or if I would have liked it better in a theater. Anyone with low tolerance for movies in which virtually nothing actually happens will be bored to death, but there is also something about the theater experience that makes it easier to lose oneself in a film, even one like this one. As it stands as a streaming option, I found it very easy to get distracted, look stuff up on my phone. Believe me when I say it’s easy to do that and not miss anything.

I kind of wish the whole movie were about 18-year-old Petar, or that his section was longer, and the other two shorter, as something more like a prologue and an epilogue. And not just because when a shirtless 18-year-old Petar did some astonishing handstand pushups I truly snapped to attention. Giving all three moments in his life equal time doesn’t work that well. As both a little boy and an old man, we spend an inordinate amount of time just watching him tending sheep. Or, in one case occasionally speaking to his grandfather, and in the other occasionally speaking to his sister on the phone. One very strange thing is that we don’t even learn he has a sister until Part III; in Part I he makes a single reference to a brother, who is never mentioned again. Unless someone mistranslated the subtitles, which are all I can go on.

In any case, Petar as a young man is by far the most interesting. When Part II begins, it’s his wedding, to a woman we see briefly and, again, we never see again—even though we later learn she bore his child. There’s a telling scene just after the wedding, one of the most sexless sex scenes I have ever seen, these two young people, who really should be quite horny, just going through the motions, fulfilling an obligation. I kept wondering about Petar’s sexuality. Not that I thought he was gay; in fact by all accounts he’s just not interested in sex. When he volunteers to be stationed on the remote Saint Ivan Island, he spends all of his time looking at the countless seagulls (this makes for a lot of this film’s extensively pleasant cinematography, which is the most consistent thing between all three parts) or chasing rabbits.

In Part III, we do see old photos of him with people in his past, people he’s not with now, the story behind which Kamen Kalev denies us. Petar is content, evidently his entire life, to live in quiet solitude, among the pretty rural countrysides of Bulgaria. I suspect the most ideal person for viewing this movie itself is someone with a similar disposition.

Petar doesn’t regard his human companions much, but gets plenty from the company of seagulls.

Overall: B-

GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B+

Sometimes the English translations of international film titles is a bit unfortunate, because the title Games People Play is definitely misleading. Who makes these decisions, I wonder? The original title, in Finnish, is Seurapeli, and to be fair, direct translations between languages that capture full meaning and nuance can be hard to come by. I know nothing of the Finnish language, but if you plug Seurapeli into Google Translate, it says the translation is Board Game, or Parlor Game. Those options, particularly the second, make more sense than Games People Play, but don’t necessarily fully fit either.

Suffice it to say that this movie isn’t about people who are manipulative or have tricks up their sleeves, as the title might suggest. It’s an ensemble film about a group of friends who have known each other for decades, have long histories of interconnecting emotional baggage, and have met for a weekend on a remote island for a surprise birthday party. It might be more accurate to say the so-called “games” are those people play with themselves, until they either reckon with mistakes made in the past or wake up to the realities of their present.

Really, this is just a highly engaging drama, to a degree about relationships between siblings, but much more so about friendship. After I got past the somewhat excessive use of shaky, handheld camera cinematography, I quit enjoyed it. The proceedings never moves to melodrama or histrionics, but by the end there have been multiple scenes of deep tension or emotional release. I found the film to be good enough that I’m almost mystified as to why it’s not being released theatrically in the Seattle market, but rather is merely available streaming at SIFF.net. Arguably that makes it more accessible, but the irony is that it also likely means fewer people even know about it. Whether it will actually get seen by more people this way than it would in theaters, I have no idea. I just know it’s worth the streaming purchase (granted, I got a discount as a SIFF member, so for me it came to $8.50).

It should be noted, though, that for some reason this movie is being presented as a comedy. Maybe Finnish (and Swedish) people think this is funnier than I realize, but I doubt it. There are three or four chuckles, but it is otherwise a pretty straightforward drama—and a very well executed one at that.

I’m trying to think of any other movie that is quite like it. Countless movies have been made about friendship, of course, but they either tend to be about the deep friendship between only two people, or if it’s about a friend group, it’s typically a group of all or mostly the same gender. Games People Play is a lot more like the typical dramas you see with an ensemble cast about someone’s family—and, in a way, that’s what it actually is: about chosen family. There are some siblings in the mix here, but nobody’s parents are in the mix with this story. And, specifically, this is a very coed ensemble cast, with four women and four men.

And they have entangled romances in their pasts. One couple, a writer and the woman he met at his publishing house, includes a man who once had a relationship with the birthday girl, who is best friends with an older sister to a woman who is having a secret affair with the youngest man in the group. He’s later identified as thirty, so I never quite got why their relationship had to be secret, except I suppose that several characters remark on how much trouble they have thinking of the young man as an adult. The writer is still in love with the birthday girl. The older sister has brought her new movie star boyfriend to the getaway, and is also the longtime subject of unrequited love from yet another friend.

All of this gets revealed, or new subtle consequences unfold, in a very organic way. The performances are solid across the board, making it easy to believe these people as longtime friends, family members, and lovers. A lot of what engaged me with this film was simply nuances of cultural differences: a lip kiss between two women that is clearly platonic; the casual way in which straight men sit in a sauna or swim together totally naked. It’s fascinating to see how these things are just incidental details, never directly tied to any of the bagged shared by this group of people. There’s even a bit of cultural tension between the Fins who make up the bulk of the characters, and the movie star who is actually from Stockholm, in neighboring Sweden. It’s easy to think of Europe as some kind of monolith of whiteness, but evidently there are weird prejudices even between Scandinavian countries. I don’t know why that should be surprising.

A lot of these things are just details. The story, as written by director Jenni Toivoniemi, is progressively compelling, as the subtle complexities of these characters’ shared histories come to light. It’s about as good as any family drama you could ask for.

Whatever they’re playing it’s not so much a game as each other’s heartstrings.

Overall: B+

LINGUI, THE SACRED BONDS

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-

Movies like Lingui, the Sacred Bonds have a deep, unique international value, just in terms of encapsulating a local area and culture—even on an unusually micro level, right down to a single neighborhood, in this case on the outskirts of N'Djamena, the capital and largest city in Chad. This is the story of “the sacred bonds” of family, in this instance between a mother, Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), and her 15-year-old daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio). Amina is a devout Muslim, as is everyone else in her community, but her convictions are put to the test when Maria is revealed to be pregnant and cannot bear to have the child. This is the story of a mother taking increasingly desperate measures to get her daughter an abortion.

It should be noted that it’s naive to think only places as “exotic” (to Americans) as Chad make such things so difficult. I am reminded of the excellent and under-watched 2020 film, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, about a teenage girl and her best friend traveling alone together from Pennsyvania to New York so she can get an abortion without her parents’ consent. That film is heartbreaking in its own right, but it does also focus on white Americans, and it says nothing about how the United States makes things far harder yet for Black people in the same situation.

In Lingui, the characters aren’t just all Black, but they are literally African, and Muslim as well. To say this film is packed with layered nuance and subtext would be an understatement. There were scenes in which I knew there was subtext I was missing, some of it connected to Chad’s French colonial past. (Most of the film is spoken in French.) There is only one scene in the entire film in which we see white characters, and they are just two young white girls at the birthday party of Maria’s friend. Even there, they are merely extras.

Lingui, the Sacred Bonds read, to me at least, as a deeply feminist text. Usually I really hope a film like this is written and directed by a woman, but in this context, given the evident culture on display in the film, I’m rather impressed that it was written and directed by a man, by the name of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun—himself a native of Chad. I know truly nothing about what kind of film industry exists in that country, but Haroun elicits incredible performances from his two leads; his cinematographer Mathieu Giombini—a white Frenchman—has a natural eye for eliciting a specific setting; and this was Chad’s official submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. Unfortunately, it did not secure a nomination, although a strong case could be made that it should have. It’s far more deserving than The Hand of God, in any case.

The story, in retrospect, is more about the emotional journey of Amina, the mother, than that of Maria, the daughter. The daughter knows who she is and what she wants from the start, and doesn’t change beyond obvious effects of the trauma surrounding however she got pregnant. It’s Amina who is a different person by the end of the story than she was at the start, although her deep love for and fierce protection of her daughter is never in doubt. Lingui is also a great movie about a mother-daughter bond, the kind that gets more healthy as the story goes on.

I do kind of wish we didn’t have to find out who the father of Maria’s unborn child is. For most of the film, it’s something we do not know, and I would have preferred it to stay that way. The obvious trauma makes it easier for many to empathize with her situation, but objectively speaking, if Maria needs, or even wants, an abortion, the reason for it doesn’t matter. It’s no one else’s fucking business but hers, and perhaps her mother’s since Maria is still a minor. The revelation of this detail is ultimately a plot device, but, I suppose I should hesitate to jump to judgment, given how little I know about Chad’s government and culture (which is, basically, nothing at all, beyond what’s revealed by this film). Presumably the primary target audience for this film is other Chadians, after all.

I cannot stress enough, however, that this film is perfect for audiences the world over, as it doesn’t matter the background of the mother(s) in question, every woman in this situation deserves empathy and understanding, and more importantly, the autonomy to make her own decisions about it. Lingui touches on other barbaric practices of the region, most notably the truly disturbing practice of female circumcision, but at least it’s contextualized here with a small dose of hope. This gets to the layered themes already mentioned, and makes the film that much more impressive to process and contemplate. This is a movie with so much food for thought, you’ll be chewing on a lot of long after the credits roll.

A fierce bond between mother and daughter.

Overall: A-

DEATH ON THE NILE

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B-

Sorry to be a killjoy here, but it really should be noted that the 2022 version of Death on the Nile, which is set mostly in Egypt, was only shot in a studio in England. The Egytpian Pyramids are simply rendered with CGI. I will admit that a lot of the exterior shots are pretty impressive CGI work, but it’s still often identifiably visual effects work—which robs the visuals of their genuine majesty. What’s the point of “seeing” one of the great wonders of the world if it’s not actually what you’re looking at? That feels a little like saying you’ve “been” somewhere just because you saw it online. What’s more, several wide exterior shots are seen from far above the Nile river, with the camera swooping in an arc down toward the setting, such as an opulent hotel. The end result is less majestic than it is just like watching a computer simulation.

Did I mention Death on the Nile is a whodunnit? The central mystery of the story should always be the focus, but Kenneth Branagh, who directed this movie as well as its similarly mediocre predecessor, Murder on the Orient Express (2017), spends an oddly excessive amount of time distracting the viewer with obvious visual effects in a movie that should not necessitate such things. This movie was actually shot in 2019, and apparently there was intent to shoot on location in Egypt, but that “proved too difficult.” How or why, I couldn’t say—except that 2019 was before Covid-19, so that obviously wasn’t the reason.

Maybe shooting on location in Egypt is more complicated and difficult now than it was in 1978, when John Guillermin made his earlier version, starring Angela Lansbury, Maggie Smith, Mia Farrow, George Kennedy, Mia Farrow, and more. Honestly, my recommendation is just to find that earlier version and watch it instead. It doesn’t appear to be available anywhere streaming or even VOD right now; I found it on DVD at my local library and look forward to seeing a version that is by all accounts better. The story may be basically the same, but greater authenticity in locations can make a huge difference. Plus there’s that cast.

Granted, this 2022 version has a pretty star studded cast itself: Kenneth Branagh once again as Detective Hercule Poirot, with an ensemble cast including Armie Hammer, Gal Godot, Annette Bening, Black Panther’s Letitia Wright, and largely unrecognizable turns by Jennifer Saunders (using an American accent) and Russel Brand (as the boat’s resident doctor). Most of these people, I usually enjoy watching, although I will say Death on the Nile does suffer from the common problem of a star-studded ensemble cast watering down the star power of any one individual.

More than anything, this is Branagh’s movie, as expected given he’s both the director and plays the most famous character from Agatha Christie novels. This film does include a prologue before the opening credits that borders on camp, offering a totally unnecessary backstory for what, I guess, we are supposed to think of as his iconic mustache. I’ve heard debate as to whether audiences are supposed to take this at face value or if it’s meant to be funny. This did not come across as tongue-in-cheek to me at all. Not only that, but the severe war injury the mustache is supposed to have covered up doesn’t even make sense. We don’t see any scars at all around his ridiculous mustache. but based on the injury we are shown onscreen, we really should see scars, mustache or not. The scars do make an appearance at the end of the film and they don’t even match the facial real estate covered by the injury shown at the beginning of the film. So I was like: what?

None of this sounds like I enjoyed the movie very much, does it? I actually did have a relatively good time. But how much fun you have watching a movie and how good it actually is are not always directly correlated. My biggest issue with this Death on the Nile is how good it could have been, but then it just doesn’t bother to be. And yet, I still liked it better than Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express, albeit not by a wide margin. A chief complaint would be its 127-minute run time, which is wholly unnecessary, given the number of times Branagh cut away to totally unnecessary visual interludes. More than once he takes the camera either to the shores of the Nile or to the river floor, so we can see CGI-rendered wildlife feeding on prey. There’s a shot with a crocodile that cracked me up, but in most cases it just feels like filler, which is never needed in a movie that runs longe than two hours. Death on the Nile would have been noticeably improved were it, say, fifteen minutes shorter.

All of that aside, it’s still fun to see so many great actors just having a good time, chewing scenery. I did keep thinking about Ryan Johnson’s 2019 film Knives Out, a far superior film much better suited to 21sr-century audiences. Both movies are very much in the same genre, but Knives Out spends far less time taking itself seriously, and contains a lot more clever humor. Death on the Nile feels comparatively like a throwback to another time, in which case, why not just watch the movie that was already made in the seventies? In other words, Death on the Nile is fundamentally pointless and useless, with the sole exception of seeing current actors we love perform again what was already seen before. This movie does feature a few modernized twists, beyond a fairly noticeable racial diversification of the cast, but the overall plot still feels decidedly old-school. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—I was more entertained by this film than I expected, its obvious flaws notwithstanding—it just means there remain better offerings out there.

Famous fantasy cannibal and “Imagine” performer in Death on the Nile.

BIG BUG

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C+
Special Effects: B-

Big Bug is a deceptively clever production in the age of Covid. Set somewhere in the latter half of the twenty-first century, it involves an android revolt, as well as android allies to humans, and still the entire film takes place in a single location—a futuristic, cookie-cutter home in which seven humans and their four robots are locked, by an overridden mechanized security system.

It didn’t even register to me how scaled down the production was until well into the film. There are brief cutaways to a few other actors, typically a news anchor relaying the news, first of a citywide “smart car” traffic jam, and then of adanced-AI humnoid soldier bots (called “Yonyx”) evidently taking over the world. A couple of actors do eventually appear as additions to the cast that exists inside this home, first a male pleasure model coming from an attack across the street; then a Yonyx model come to charge and convict the humans of supposedly terrorist crimes as they attempt to override the security system.

There are actually about eighteen credited cast members in Big Bug, but only ten of any notable significance. In addition to the seven humans in the house (the woman who owns it; her boyfriend and his teenage son; her adopted daughter; her ex-husband and her new girlfriend; and a neighbor lady), three of the robots are played in person by actors: the lady who basically exists as a house servant; the aforementioned pleasure model who later manages to get inside from a neighboring house; and the Yonyx military android.

Much of Big Bug is wildly uneven, but I found myself enjoying it a lot of the time in spite of its clear inferiority, particularly compared to previous works by its director and co-writer, long my personal favorite of international film directors: Jean-Pierre Jeunet. This is the man who gave us the eternally charming Amelie (2001) in addition to the earlier cult classics Delicatessen (1991) and City of the Lost Children (1995). He also made an ultimately failed bid to become successful in hollywood, with the flawed but delightfully weird Alien: Resurrection (1997) and A Very Long Engagement (2004). To me, he is somewhat like the French version of Tim Burton, with a career front loaded with timeless dark comedies and later output with diminishing returns. On average, Jeunet has been less disappointing in his later years, but that doesn’t make the more recent output better by a very wide margin.

The difference, I suppose, is that a movie like Big Bug manages to be fun and weirdly compelling even as its story beats fundamentally lack in originality. Watching this movie, I felt like I was seeing a zany blend of War of the Worlds’s plot twist and Mars Attacks!’s visual palette. The plot has very little new to offer, at least when examined closely. The rewards here are in the details, always the area where Jean-Pierre Jeunet excels. Big Bug is filled with a healthy sprinkling of genuinely funny sight gags; I found myself laughing a lot more than I could convince myself this movie really deserved. But who’s to say what it “deserves,” anyway? Is it not relevant just that it consistently got me to laugh?

It is a little on the nose at times. Once the Covid angle finally registered to me—probably later than it will for most viewers—I realized how many ways Jeunet made obvious gags of the current pandemic itself. It’s about a family forced to isolate together. There’s even a reference to “COVID-50” at one point. That’s not even to mention a title like Big Bug for a movie produced during a pandemic the likes of which has not seen in a century.

The very fact that this film was released as a Netflix movie last Friday is a clear byproduct of the current state of the film industry—a state hastened, again, by the pandemic. Three years ago, Big Bug would have been released in theaters, seen by few. Now, pandemic or not, it has the potential to reach a far greater viewership on a streamer. The overall quality of the film makes this feel appropriate anyway. The neon-bright visual effects might have impressed slightly more on the big screen, but not enough to make it worth the price and effort. On Netflix, all you have to do is press a button. When the stakes are this low, home viewing makes Big Bug just a bit of silly fun that’s not a total waste of time. I really didn’t like its belabored editing, with overuse of fade-outs at odd moments, and it could have benefitted hugely from shaving about twenty minutes off the run time. All of that notwithstanding, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s singular sensibility continues to speak to me, and I had a good time,

You won’t miss too much if you sleep on this movie … but if you open your eyes to it, you might still have a little fun.

Overall: B-

WHO WE ARE: A CHRONICLE OF RACISM IN AMERICA

Directing: A-
Writing: A
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A

More than once as I watched Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, I thought about the many Black creators I follow on social media, particularly on TikTok, who put in the work to educate white Americans—and white people around the world, really—and regularly note that they accept donations for their labor. They are certainly well within their rights to accept compensation for offering education for people who are perfectly capable of finding the information themselves. And so, I wonder: how much was writer, activist and lawyer Jeffery Robinson—who is also Deputy Legal Director and Director of the Trone Center for Justice & Equality at the ACLU—compensated, both for the TED Talk-like presentation he gave in New York City on Juneteenth 2018, and for the adapted film, largely consisting of footage from that talk, now in theaters? I certainly don’t personally need to know exactly how much he was paid. I’m only saying I sure hope he was compensated handsomely for this work.

Because it isn’t work he has to do, or even that he should have to do. Lucky for all of us, somehow, he still feels compelled to do it. Who We Are does not spend very much time with Robinson’s interactions with those who disagree with him, but early on in the film, there is a sequence in which he has a brief debate with a man in Charlotte, North Carolina, who is waving the Confederate flag and insisting the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery. Robinson quickly has enough of it, but walks away on cordial and friendly terms with the guy—later reflecting on how he doesn’t know if he can ever get through to such people, but if he doesn’t try, “he’ll definitely never change.” And my immediate thought was: why should you have to try? Other white people should be putting in the work to change that Southern white man’s mind.

Evidently, Robinson doesn’t have to do this work; he wants to. And it’s clear throughout this incredible and enlightening film, he’s really never talking to any fellow people of color here, or certainly not other Black people. I can’t fathom recommending this movie to any Black people, who, sure, almost certainly will learn specific details about American history that they didn’t already know, but who won’t walk away with any new information about the role of racism in America that they didn’t already know. This is a movie written and presented by a Black man, and made for white people. And they only way America will truly move forward is if more white people pay real attention to things like this.

Robinson talks a lot about symbolism, and how it is either used by white supremacist systems as a means of oppression, or to downplay the impact of such systems. A lot of images are brought up on the screen behind him onstage, which have deep, often disturbing meaning in context: the 1859 Slave Patrol badge, widely seen as a precursor to present-day sheriff badges. In one of the documentary segments away from the stage, when Robinson is traveling to other parts of the country, he presents us with images of the “Steps to Nowhere.” These are the many staircases to houses destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, but which were never rebuilt. They are now just concrete staircases that go up to grass.

It would be easy to assume Who We Are is just preaching to the choir, as happens so often with films like this. It’s striking that this film even got a theatrical release given the current financial climate of the film industry: granted I went to a very early showing just after noon on a Sunday, but I was the only person in the theater I went to. Good for Covid safety; bad for getting this movie in front of more eyeballs. Nothing about this movie demands that it be seen on the big screen, so hopefully it will be available on a streamer soon. Because it is indeed vital viewing, regardless of the size of the screen. And it won’t be preaching to the choir, far from it—Jeffery Robinson takes the Chronicle part of the title pretty literally, tracking the major “tipping points” of possibly moving toward racial justice in this country, from its founding to the present day. You won’t just be hearing things you already know, and you certainly won’t just be told what you want to hear.

That said, Robinson certainly knows who his audience is here—again, it’s white Americans—and he comes to us with a level of understanding and empathy far too seldom afforded Black people in this country. And although this feels very much like his movie, Who We Are is co-directors Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler, who happen to be both white women. While I often openly wish movies that are about people of color were directed and/or written by people of color as well, in this case it feels appropriate, given the very specific conversation happening here—and, again, given that Robinson is the credited writer. These three have clearly collaborated very effectively, without ever falling into the common trap of centering whiteness in conversations about race. Not even when Robinson meets with a close childhood friend from Memphis who is white, or when he learns about white family friends who helped his parents buy a house the realtor would not sell to his Black parents.

Such scenes help illuminate who Jeffery Robinson is as a person, and how he came to where he is today, but they are far from the most impactful scenes in the movie, which is as it should be. The broader message of Who We Are is right there in the title, with example after example of America refusing to reconcile its elevated vision of itself with the darkest parts of its history and legacy—most specifically, slavery. Early on, Robinson tells his audience that the history of slavory is not their responsibility (a particular point that is up for debate among many), “but it is our shared history.” White America isn’t even comfortable with that idea, but Who We Are is a film that will help them take the tiniest of steps closer to it. And tiny or not, every step counts.

Only when we come to terms with how far we haven’t come, do we have any hope of getting much further.

Overall: A

KIMI

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Here we are with Steven Soderbergh again, offering his fourth straight-to-streaming film in as many years. Okay, they weren’t quite all straight-to-streaming, although they’re certainly trending that way: The Laundromat was streaming less than a month after a brief theatrical release in late September 2019; Let Them All Talk was released straight to HBO Max in December 2020; No Sudden Move was released on HBO Max in July 2021; and now we’ve got Kimi, also on HBO Max as of yesterday (February 11). It would be tempting to say Soderbergh is trending this way due to the rippling effects of the pandemic on the film industry—except that the pandemic only accelerated industry changes that began well before it, and considering that 2019 streaming release, it would seem Soderbergh saw the writing on the wall well before any of us had any idea Covid was coming. One wonders whether he’ll make movies for theaters ever again. His next project is Magic Mike’s Last Dance, so, who knows?

Whatever the case, this guy sure as shit keeps busy. He clearly isn’t obsessed with making “great cinema,” either, opting instead for steady work making competent offerings on an annual basis. He just likes making movies.

And, to his credit, he’s capable of adapting. In the case of Kimi, he has finally made a movie that directly acknowledges the pandemic, with its central character, Angela (Zoë Kravitz), being an agoraphobic tech worker who works from home, having had made some progress but noting that the pandemic cause a relapse of sorts. She has an ongoing, very socially distanced relationship with a man in the building across the street (Byron Bowers)—having established a connection during lockdown—as well as a mysterious man on another floor we regularly see looking her way. His very existence in the movie means he will become a key figure in the plot eventually, and when that inevitably happens, it’s in an unexpected way.

A bit of fun for the locals where I live: Kimi is set in Seattle. Interiors mostly shot in Los Angeles, but there are plenty of exterior scenes—especially once Angela is given no choice but to leave her apartment. I got taken out of the story momentarily when Angela takes a light rail train from International District Station to an office building by the grain silos on the waterfront. Light rail doesn’t go there! Of course, no one outside of Seattle will know that or care. And it was still a minor thrill to see Sound Transit get such prominent, onscreen product placement.

Anyway, you might be wondering who the hell Kimi is. It’s more of a what, actually: it’s a virtual assistant, like Amazon’s Alexa or Microsoft’s Siri. Angela works the error logs of voice commands that didn’t work and resolves or corrects them, and then runs across one which sounds as though a murder may have been recorded. Angela looks into it, and peril ensues.

Clearly Kimi shares a lot of its DNA with Alfred Kitchcock’s Rear Window, but it’s just different enough for that not to be to its detriment. The virtual assistant element is a nice twist for the modern age, and Angela’s relapse into agoraphobia provides a logical context wherein the pandemic also exists. Kimi was filmed in the spring of 2021, just after the peak of vaccination drives, when we were headed into a brief period of relaxed mitigation measures. This allows the production to feature characters here and there with masks on, but most of the time people are going around maskless. There’s one scene in downtown Seattle that is unusually crowded, but whatever, it’s a movie. I enjoyed spying Seattle landmarks and locations in these scenes.

One of the bigger surprises is Derek DelGaudio, previously seen as the jaw dropping illusionist in last year’s Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself (that one streaming on Hulu), as Kimi’s villain. He actually only gets a few scenes, and anyone carrying a threat or intent of violence would qualify as his henchman. DelGaudio plays Bradley Hasling, the creator of the Kimi virtual assistant. The well constructed script draws connections between all these characters that, while they are contrivances, are also the hallmarks of effective storytelling. Kimi starts off a bit slow, much of the story confined to Angela’s apartment. But, the world broadens a bit when her need to report what she heard on the recording forces her decision to leave home, and then for the last third or so of the film, things get much more exciting as the action and suspense ramps up.

There’s also a sprinkling of humorous moments here and there that are a nice touch. Kimi frankly feels a little like a movie made for streaming rathe than theatrical release, but it serves its purpose. It’s a mid-level Soderbergh offering, and at a cool 89 minutes in length, it makes for a perfectly good diversion at home over the weekend.

Check it out, Zoë Kravitz at a Seattle bus stop!

Overall: B

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A

I love pretty much everything about The Worst Person in the World. I can think of no real criticisms. No notes!

No, wait! I just thought of one thing. The main character, Julie, is constantly pulling shirts on without pulling her hair out from under it. She’s regularly just walking around with her hair stuck under her shirt, which drove me crazy. Pull your hair out of your shirt, Julie!

Also, I do have a complaint about the marketers of this movie—which is not a criticism of the movie itself, even though it does result in seeing a movie slightly different from what was expected. People are calling this a “romantic comedy,” and that’s really not at all what it is. It’s an alternately charming and moving romantic drama that has two or three chuckles. Don’t go into this movie expecting hilarity.

Once past that, though, it’s hard not to love it. My love for it grew over time, even as Julie progressively came to terms with the aimlessness of her life. But also, I found things to love from the opening shot. As in, I have to mention and compliment cinematographer Kasper Tuxen (who also shot the also-fantastic Riders of Justice), who gives The Worst Person in the World a kind of visual artistry seldom seen in movies of this sort.

It’s easy to go into this film think of it as minor or slight, but director and co-writer Joachim Trier infuses this story with a unique depth and nuance, bucking nearly all the conventions of romantic films. Rather than a story about a woman and a man finding their way to each other, this is about Julie finding a way to herself. She has relationships with two different men in the story, both of equal importance and significance but for different reasons.

I love that this is the woman’s story. I love that it also sidesteps the expected trajectory of “girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets girl back.” I love that the cinematography is noticeably good from the opening shot. I love the sequence (or “chapter,” as this is presented as “twelve chapters with a prologue and an epilogue”) in which Julie meets her second love interest, Eivind, where they talk about and straddle the line they would have to cross before they would consider it “cheating.” It crackles with erotic tension and settles into a casual hang, simultaneously.

I love the performances, particularly of its three leads: Renate Reinsve as Julie; Anders Danielsen Lie (also seen recently in Bergman Island) as Aksel, Julie’s first love interest; and Herbert Nordrum as Eivind. We are given multiple close-ups of the faces of all three of these actors, in every instance offering both subtle and great detail of expression: a nervous smile, the movement of the eyes that betrays a lie.

I love that Joachim Trier gives us the time needed to see how Julie’s relationships organically develop, in very different ways, the second one beginning, as so often happens, before the first one ends. In both cases, these men offers Julie what she needs in some areas but fall short in others. Julie is just turning thirty while Aksel is in his forties and puts undo pressure on her to start a family. Eivind is so environmentally conscious he doesn’t want children, but he is not very well read and cannot provide the kind of intellectually stimulating conversation that Aksel did. I think the breakup scene between Julie and Aksel will be deeply relatable to many, from both sides of that particular exchange. Conversely, a sequence in which Julie runs weaving through citizens of Oslo frozen in time so she can have a clandestine meetup with Eivind is uniquely charming.

Much like Drive My Car, The Worst Person in the World very briefly acknowledges the pandemic in its final sequence, showing people wearing face masks, this time while Julie is on a job as a photographer. I’m not sure what the point of that is, exactly, except perhaps to convey the passage of time: we are now in the present day, when the ubiquity of mitigation measures cannot be avoided or go unacknowledged. I don’t mention this as a complaint, just an observation. The way art deals with the reality of the current world situation is sometimes fascinating, and in this case, it gets fairly quickly gleaned over by—spoiler alert!—what I would consider a happy ending, just not a conventional one.

And that gets to the heart of why I loved The Worst Person in the World: it succeeds on every level, and on every level it does so unconventionally. All of the characters ring true, as do all of their behaviors, offering a fundamentally realistic portrait of romance and humanity, with a subtly artistic visual flair. Hanging out with Julie is an eminently pleasant experience, even though she’s as flawed as anyone—arguably more so even than the men she gets with. Perhaps this film’s most impressive feat is how it never puts on airs of high-minded art and still winds up being a fine specimen of artistic accomplishment.

If Julie can be relied on for anything, it would be getting to know people in uncnoventional ways.

Overall: A