Reviews by Zach Dennis
For ten days in September, the Toronto International Film Festival screened over 50 feature films from around the world. Established in 1976, it has been described as the “most important film festival in the world.” Due to the COVID-19 pandemic – and the United States’s response – all of the films featured here were viewed on their virtual platform rather than in person.
Zach was able to “attend” the festival for several days and, during that span, caught 15 features from 6 different countries.
One Night in Miami (2020) by Regina King
One Night in Miami (2020) by Regina King
USA
I’m sure everyone has been posed with this hypothetical thought experiment: if you could have dinner with any group of people, living or dead, who would they be?
To an extent, One Night in Miami is an extension of this exercise and one that is utilized as an effective technique to assess the Civil Rights Movement.
According to this film, the four people to invite would be Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree) – then Cassius Clay and fresh off a victory over Sonny Liston – Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir). While we’re offered a glimpse into that period of their lives briefly ahead of the Clay-Liston fight, the bulk of the action actually takes place in the Miami hotel room of Malcolm X as the four men go back and forth on their individual experiences during the Civil Rights Movement and what they believe should be the next steps to achieve the overall goal of racial equality.
It’s unclear if the four men were anywhere as close in reality as perceived in the film, but the thought exercise itself is what makes it interesting. If it were up to me, however, I would’ve dumped the entire opening 30 minutes of the film where it sets the stage for where each man was in this time period and proceeded immediately to the conversation between the four, planting it in this ethereal plane outside any realm of possibility.
To that effect, the decision to keep in truth to the story’s origins as a play seems to hinder it. Director Regina King blocks the hotel room as if it were a stage set with the actors moving around as we switch between one topic to the next. In this decision, she wants to ground the narrative in truth – these four prominent African-American figures all in one room talking about Civil Rights in the 1960s – when the dream scenario could have been as effective.
It seems like the question I’m asking as an audience member is “what is on display at this moment?” Are we supposed to be enraptured by the actors playing these figures on screen? If that’s the case, it’s hard not to be entranced with the way Kingsley Ben-Adir seems to inhabit the speech patterns of Malcolm X or Eli Goree’s ability to mime the bravado of Ali.
But I also feel like King is wanting us to focus on the actual meat of the conversation, which becomes difficult with the decision to focus on these figures as “real” people. In the dream scenario, we would’ve selected the people we selected in order to spend that allotted time with the personality, sure, but also the ideas. Would you have Charlie Chaplin come to your dinner just to do Tramp impressions or to talk to him about growing up as a poor child in Lambeth and how that informed his filmmaking throughout his career?
One Night in Miami seems much more interested in the personality and the performance rather than the substance. If we’re so focused on the way Goree acts as Muhammad Ali, are we truly listening to what he says?
All four men are well-attuned to using performance to deliver a message. During the time period of the movie, Cassius Clay is getting closer to his decision to join the Nation of Islam and would use his platform to champion that cause. Jim Brown would soon shift from football (where he was one of the sport’s most activist players of all-time) to putting an African-American man on movie screams. Sam Cooke would soon begin lacing his chart-topping hits in activism, and Malcolm X would be killed the next year for his fiery speeches.
The four men speak over and over again in the film about finding that perfect acceptance; how they want to find that ideal place to their absolute selves in this country. To us, the viewer in 2020, this still sits as an idealistic fantasy in many ways.
Shorts Program #1
This is one of the two shorts programs that I caught. Rather than going through each of the film, I wanted to highlight a few that stood out to me. Outside of the following, I would also recommend 4 North A and Marlon Brando as wonderful options as well.
David (2020) by Zach Woods
David (2020) by Zach Woods
USA
The titular David (played by William Jackson Harper, with some residual energy from his neurotic The Good Place role) is contemplating suicide and has visited his therapist (played by Will Ferrell). Over the course of their session, they begin to be interrupted by the therapist’s son (Fred Hechinger) who is also named David. This second David wants his dad to show up for his wrestling match.
Directed by Zach Woods of Silicon Valley and The Office fame, the film seems to be fully aware of the improv-ridden comedy that saturates both the film and television landscape right now. Instead of going through the motions of that , it pillages from that mode and utilizes our expectations to a relatively satisfying degree. Each of the characters and their lines feels a bit spontaneous as if it were under an improv setting, but it seems much more rigid than what has become atypical of comedy, especially in the realm that Woods has been working in.
I think I enjoy Ferrell most when he’s able to play against type, embodying a restrained version of his outlandish tendencies as if he is conscious of them and doing his best to suppress those urges. It’s what makes a lot of the comedy between him and Hechinger so effective in David – you are given bits of the Will Ferrell of Anchorman or Elf, but it’s as if that person is reformed and trying to follow a different path but is unable to control who he is.
It’s nice to see Ferrell doing that and I hope he thinks to follow this tendency for more features and TV shows in the future (outside of just Stranger Than Fiction or Everything Must Go).
In Sudden Darkness (2020) by Taylor Montague
In Sudden Darkness (2020) by Taylor Montague
USA
Depicted against a city-wide blackout in New York, In Sudden Darkness is able to mine so much about its characters and environment within the limits of 13 minutes. Writer/director Taylor Montague’s decision to use the blackout as a catalyst to drop us into the lives of these characters is inspired.
Tatianna (Sienna Rivers) serves as our observer. She lives with her two parents, Erica (Raven Goodwin) and Jerome (Marcus Callender), in a New York apartment. Not much happens outside of the lack of access to electricity. Tatianna interacts with folks around her neighborhood, and later she goes with her dad to take part in some sort of transaction that clearly links her to an entirely different world than she’s accustomed to, but is more of a footnote in a foreign sphere.
The short doesn’t make any particular point about the environment Tatianna is living in or the choices her parents are having to make in order to get by. In Sudden Darkness is about Tatianna’s observation and the memories she has of her family and home. These moments feel like fragmented memories that an older Tatianna is thinking back on later in life. One film connection that it reminded me of was Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday and that film’s shifting between the character’s present day life to the memories of her childhood. Tatianna doesn’t fully understand all of the decisions that her parents have to make, or why they react to things the way they do, but she sees the love in their relationship. Later in the film, Tatianna watches as her parents slowly dance in the living room and it feels like we’re being let in on a private image seared into the mind of the impressionable young girl. While their lives may change drastically in the years to come, there will always be that image of them swaying to the music as the room is lit by candlelight.
If the film was a feature rather than just this moment, it would carry some of the same gifts. But I think we’ll also look back at it fondly as a memory of early Taylor Montague, who clearly has a distinct and definitive voice that we need to value and monitor moving forward.
Still Processing (2020) by Sophy Romvari
Still Processing (2020) by Sophy Romvari
Canada
As if it wasn’t enough for Sophy Romvari to give us one of the most profound and moving films about the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, she had to also make one of the year’s best films in general with her exploration of familial trauma and grief in Still Processing.
Featuring Romvari herself along with her brother Ben, the film shows the two siblings exploring the saved archives of her family which includes two of her older brothers who died tragically young. Among the archives are photos and film reels of their childhood.
Still Processing is able to pack so much weight into its 17-minute runtime that all other films of feature length should feel ashamed.
The motif of the journey – both for the viewer and Romvari – is the key to Still Processing’s effectiveness. We see shots of Romvari on train rides with a handful of the archive boxes in tow, looking out the window in her heavy coat with the cold pressing up the glass as if trying to penetrate the already frozen locks that adorn the boxes.
In the same vein, Romvari is making her way through these memories that have either been forgotten or locked away. The elation at finding them once more – even as they become more and more crushing thinking about what they’re attached to – is palpable and difficult to shake. Her ability as a filmmaker to bring us into these memories as well is unparalleled. A collection of photos and reels set in montage to music to conclude the film is one of the most emotional pieces of filmmaking this year.
It seems perfect, too, to have the physical representation of these memories placed in these secure boxes. It seems like a tangible way for us as the viewer to remember our own moments and memories locked away that we maybe aren’t engaging with anymore. They aren’t lost, but we have made it only possible with a journey ourselves to access them.
If Some Kind of Connection reminds us of the universality of loneliness during the pandemic and how the world changes despite us being stuck in our boxes, then Still Processing reminds us that we all put away memories that might have scarred or hurt us in a way. It’s only by opening them back up once again and engaging with them that we can find any wholeness to move on.
Nomadland (2020) by Chloé Zhao
Nomadland (2020) by Chloé Zhao
USA
It was always probably a thought in the back of people’s heads – one that was most definitely engaged with more often as the pandemic continues to churn on – but most of us would probably like to run away from our current responsibilities and live on the land. While in the modern times it usually means escaping up north to Canada, the sentiment has been around forever; just look at artists running away to South America or to various parts of Asia during the 18th and 19th centuries.
A lot of those visions or dreams are built up like a mini-vacation. We have many of the amenities we are comfortable with, but this escape allows us to dowse the noise and enjoy them on our terms.
But as Nomadland, the latest film from director Chloé Zhao, proposes, this idealistic dream does not always come in that complete package, but is more thrust upon some as a reality of their present environment. The person working three jobs isn’t doing it because they want all these various experiences, they just need to pay rent.
Escape is the luxury of the rich while survival is the reality for everyone else.
Fern (Frances McDormand) had everything taken from her in life — her husband, her home and her job. Some of it can be blamed on the capitalist system, as the Great Recession reaped the town she called home, taking her house and job with it. Cancer was the culprit for her husband.
All three falling apart seems to signal a life change, and Fern decides to pick up a more nomadic lifestyle and live out of a re-purposed van and take to the road around the American West. Along the way are some odd jobs (Fern works at various points for Amazon packing plants, as a busboy at a restaurant and as a manager at an RV park) and sometimes various other nomadic characters re-unite with her as she finds that these tribes of people in similar predicaments move to various pockets in the region throughout the year. These RV-led folks have stories of their own, not dissimilar to Fern, and have found a groove in moving from one area to the other; over and over again.
This facet is probably the most interesting one within Nomadland as there’s that irony of these people choosing to rid themselves of the norms and conformities of society but instead find a different routine in their nomadic lifestyle. Led by a guru of sorts, a lot of the RV followers seem to connect along a path throughout the year, choosing to be in this region for this season, etc., rather than just living the same routine from the comfort of a house in a neighborhood.
It’s ironic, but Zhao isn’t viewing it as an indictment on this lifestyle. Instead, it just feels like a reminder that community can be found wherever and in many different forms. Humans are creatures of habit, and have to have routines by our nature, and these people choose to find their routine different than others.
Where Fern, and Zhao as well, find freedom is in the moments where those others are gone and it is just her and the land. In these moments, it is probably the ideal of the American Dream and what these folks set out to do — the “untamed” land with just you and your horse (or in this case, van) to see it. But there is a tinge of romance gone, because the land is not untamed anymore and this choice is a bit less than just a choice for pure freedom but a reaction to the faults of American capitalism that leaves people in the dust. At the same time, it seems like a freedom completely succinct with what Fern wants. She recounts to one friend that she had this wide open pasture behind her backyard when she and her husband lived at their home, and she always wanted to just walk into it and disappear. The opportunity is now there, and much of Nomadland is about what she wanders into on her journey through the wilderness.
McDormand plays Fern in such a fascinating way as well, crafting her as this very focused person who is absurdly comfortable in her own skin. It meshes well with the communities that she finds as these people have this independent mindset that drives their decision to follow this path in life. But McDormand is much different than what we are used to from her. She is very internal, never trying to show how Fern is processing something but allowing us to feel the churning thoughts happening in her head with this intensity in her eyes and face.
In some ways, she feels more of an observer of this life than someone taking part in it – like a drifter documenting this first hand.
Nomadland is not out to be a searing critique of the capitalist system, but rather another reminder of the pitfalls it instigates. It is deeply unfair to say these people are living lesser lives than those in more atypical arrangement, but it is sad to see that the system failed them so much that they have to follow those small paths to Amazon plants in order to continue to live the life they want.
There is no true freedom in America, despite the wide-ranging vistas and the road in front of you.
Hear an extensive discussion of “Nomadland” by Zach Dennis and Darren Hughes in the first part of the below podcast:
Get the Hell Out (2020) by Wang I Fan
Get the Hell Out (2020) by Wang I Fan
Taiwan
It’s strange to me that Get the Hell Out didn’t seem to latch on with more critics than it did with me.
Based off of the real antics within the Taiwanese Parliament, writer/director Wang I Fan turns those antics up with a shot of zombies and creates a Romero-esque exploitation film that has a more interesting political through line than I think its being given credit for.
While I have seen a lot of people point towards Edgar Wright or even Quentin Tarantino as points of reference for Get the Hell Out, I think it’s way more logical to point to someone like Sion Sono. Get the Hell Out is engaged with popular culture and its machinations, utilizing the different ways we communicate with one another or how we are processing current events through these various methods of media at our fingertips – from a basic YouTube video to a shortened form in TikTok to video games or just the onslaught of a 24/7 news station cycle.
Like Sono, who gets up to similar hijinks in his films, Fan will let the movie drop into moments where it mimics a Mortal Kombat fight or the brevity and short insanity of a TikTok video.
The villains and heroes are as plastic as action heroes, and while they’re probably supposed to have more levity to them, Fan paints them with this faux-honor that seems more true to actual politicians. If anything, the absurdity doesn’t mirror real life as one of the protagonist Parliament members (played by Megan Lai) is forced out of office after she loses her cool during a news telecast and is then replaced by the security guard who she was fighting with – as if some outburst on television would ever end a political official’s career.
I guess in that example, it could be seen that a female politician could be taken down by something like that while the clear villainous character can get by despite all of the misdeeds attributed to him. Either way, the absurdity is placed in how the film edits together these segments rather than the situation themselves.
Fan brings plenty of pop culture-, video game- and just general movie-cliches into the narrative. This is similar to Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, where the story can in one moment play out normally before rapidly shifting into a comic book panel or a video game POV in the next. Get the Hell Out is very similar, but feels like it is ramped up even faster than what you would see in Scott Pilgrim – shifting tones in the matter of seconds, which clearly became off-putting to other viewers.
Get the Hell Out is much the same way as Scott Pilgrim, but does feel like its trying to say more politically than anything in Edgar Wright’s catalogue. In a sense, the reality of politics is pretty absurd, so why should it be portrayed so tamely when you could insert some zombies, Mortal Kombat fights and massive explosions instead?
Wolfwalkers (2020) by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart
Wolfwalkers (2020) by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart
Ireland
The storybook style of Tomm Moore’s work has always been what engages with me most.
Both The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea feel like stories in tune with a much older tradition of storytelling – which seems the point, since both carry aesthetic characteristics of Celtic storybooks.
Wolfwalkers doesn’t ditch that animation style in the least, but where it diverts from Moore’s other two works is in its scope, finally putting a narrative on the level of the other mammoth animation studios. This isn’t a dig at Moore or Cartoon Saloon — if anything, what I loved most about them before was the intimacy of their movies. In the sea of sequels or retreaded, half-baked ideas, they felt like an oasis in the desert of uninspired recent animation.
Taking place in 18th century Ireland, the film follows Robyn, a young apprentice hunter who’s father is tasked with ridding the countryside near their town of a pack of wolves. The wolves are led by Mebh, who along with her mother, are magical creatures known as wolf walkers – appearing as humans during the day and turning into wolves while they sleep.
The immediate connections I made were Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke or Pixar’s Brave, with the former feeling much in line with the human progress vs. nature storyline that is prevalent in Wolfwalkers. Like Mononoke, Moore and Stewart lean into the spiritual aspects of the wolfwalkers and the forest at large. Breaking a bit from their hand-drawn style, the film will dip into these almost wisp-like spirit moments akin to something along the lines of the “Toccata and Fugue” sequence of Fantasia as nondescript lines of color dance through the forest as apparatuses for the magic powers of the wolfwalkers.
Moore and company never lose the traditional storybook narrative feel though, instead finding ways to give it a much broader scope than in the previous two features. Whereas his previous two film hyper-focused on telling stories about these specific characters, there seems to be a much more nuanced curiosity in Wolfwalkers about the effects of colonization – especially from the British – in its main villain character Lord Protecter Cromwell (a relatively obvious connection to Oliver Cromwell) and his overall vision to tame the land.
In that way also, it is akin to Mononoke culminating in a climax that features a fire-ridden forest in the midst of a battle between man and the spiritual beasts.
Like the examples mentioned before, I think Wolfwalkers is effective in its message because it uses the tools of basic folklore to expound its message, ignoring the more heavy-handed approach by American animation and leaning into the traditional techniques. It isn’t revolutionary in any sense, but it is a reminder that these methods still have value today and folklore continues to be a way to express these ideas of encroaching civilization on nature.
Wolfwalkers feels like a massive step for both Moore and Cartoon Saloon and the film’s distribution by Apple should only expand its reach with general audiences. There has always been a bit of complacency with the major non-Disney studios, and the Mouse has begun to retread its old properties again after a period of new exploration when John Lassester moved to the studio from Pixar.
Hopefully this will open up a wider field for Cartoon Saloon, but regardless, Wolfwalkers stands as one of the better, original animated films in years and one of the year’s best overall.
Hear another discussion of “Wolfwalkers” in the first part of the below podcast:
Pieces of a Woman (2020) by Kornél Mundruczó
Pieces of a Woman (2020) by Kornél Mundruczó
USA
In what will surely be an Oscar conversation film for next year, Pieces of a Woman starts with an unflinching 30-minute unbroken take of the at-home birth of Martha (Vanessa Kirby) and Sean’s (Shia LaBeouf) child. As the scene carries on, it becomes clear that something is wrong; their substitute midwife (played by Molly Parker) is out of her depth and waits too long to make the 911 call.
The baby is lost and for the rest of the film, we witness the fallout — both for the family and the subsequent court case.
There’s no denying the power of the film’s opening sequence. The long take can be a tiresome cliche at times, but you understand the decision to implement it here as we become focused on the moments between husband and wife, and the lack of edits keeps us unaware of what is happening with the midwife in the periphery. But the following hour or so of the narrative is where it begins to lose all of the capital it built up in its opening moments.
It’s tough to decry the decision by the film to follow Martha as she tries to return to normal life — both at work and at home — following the traumatic event, but there just seems to be something off about the cinematic pull of the story. We get scenes of Martha and Sean fighting (both Kirby and LaBeouf are giving outstanding performances here) but it seems almost predictable in the path and eventual degradation of their relationship that the story takes – he starts drinking again, even fooling around with another woman, but that all seems almost by the books (other than the fact that the other woman is also their attorney? It’s never addressed again).
At the same time, Martha is pressured by her mother (played expertly by Ellen Burstyn) to pursue legal charges against the midwife and take the massive payout. But it never seems to grab hold as it’s clear that Martha’s mother – and in turn Martha – are exceptionally wealthy and the court case is more of a cause to fight for rather than a need to earn compensation.
It’s no fault of Kirby, who keeps this stoic presence consistently that when she goes off a few times; her performance really does carry some power. But I’m never sure if this movie is trying to say something or just force us to engage in a tragedy for tragedy’s sake. I guess what it wants us to grasp onto is the hopelessness of the situation – how no matter what you try to accomplish in courts or any other path that could be taken, Martha will still be left childless. All of the peripheral issues are just avoiding the fact that the child isn’t there with them, and the movie never seemed to offer you much time to sit in that feeling. In lieu of emotional resonance, we are left to silent scenes of Martha staring in the distance or unable to engage with those around her. The interiority was lacking.
What happens to Martha is tragic, absolutely. Any one of us would be grief-stricken and unable to do anything afterwards, no question. But why is this specific story a movie?
Shorts Program #2
Much the same as the first shorts program, I wanted to highlight two films within this program that stuck out to me.
Pilar (2020) by Yngwie Boley, J.J. Epping and Diana van Houten
Pilar (2020) by Yngwie Boley, J.J. Epping and Diana van Houten
Belgium
Probably the best point of reference in terms of animation style for Pilar is Waltz with Bashir, which also feels otherworldly while also emotionally realistic. Pilar is less evocative than Waltz and features a hand-drawn style instead of that film’s more digital approach, but I think both feel like they’re trying to burst from the storyboard at every moment.
The story is simple: an intruder appears at this compound in a post-apocalyptic world and a wild animal gets loose inside. The woman at the compound ends up having to seek help from this intruder to get rid of the animal.
The style was so basic and charming, almost feeling like warming pencil sketches. I hope this form can find life in more films, and that animation fans will seek out this tiny film, at least for its method of animating.
Point and Line to Plane (2020) by Sofia Bohdanowicz
Point and Line to Plane (2020) by Sofia Bohdanowicz
Canada
In what was a nice dive in the pool due to the lack of Wavelength programming at TIFF this year, Point and Line to Plane felt like the closest I got to the block this year. Bohdanowicz explores grief and trauma through the healing nature of art in a way that feels more true to the process than I’ve seen before.
There never seems to be anything tangible for you to grasp onto, which is much the same feeling that I’m sure the young woman at the center of the film is experiencing. On an intellectual level, we can understand the connections of Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky, but experiencing them through this almost dreamlike malaise is something wholly new.
It’s something I would like to watch and ruminate on again.
Inconvenient Indian (2020) by Michelle Latimer
Inconvenient Indian (2020) by Michelle Latimer
Canada
To sit and name all of the examples of misrepresentation by American pop culture of non-white groups would require hundreds of millions of more words, but thankfully films such as Inconvenient Indian offer an educational look at what media has done to misrepresent Native Americans – and what the current generation is doing to un-install those views in the public’s mind.
Directed by Michelle Latimer and based on the book by Thomas King of the same name, King serves as our guide. We watch him get into a Toronto taxi driven by another Native person wearing a coyote headdress. The thesis is laid out clearly by King: “History is a story we tell of the past.” But as King and Latimer outline through the film, the writing of history is often driven less by factual evidence and more by the biases of history’s victors.
Because white Europeans have been the dominating force in the United States and Canada for hundreds of years, their narrative was the one written as history. And the Native people were erased from it or caricatured into our entertainment.
The film presents two primary examples of Native representation in pop culture: the Indian villains we see in western films at the early part of the 20th century and the depiction of the indigenous Induit people of Canada through the early documentary, Nanook of the North. King explains how Nanook presented an image of these people to Western audiences that was outdated from the time it premiered.
The film then shifts to encompass what the ramifications of those pop culture representations are as multiple generations of Native people have had to overcome what the John Wayne western told audiences about them while also white Christian evangelists began to instill their faith in many of their communities, which saw the disappearance of many traditional customs.
Now, the current generation of Indigenous people in both the United States and Canada have tried to re-claim their customs, which as the film explores, has caused a rift between their generation and their parents’ who see these customs as a way for the white population to continue to see them as lesser.
All throughout the film, Latimer sprinkles in these elements of spirituality that almost add this avant-garde dimension to the narrative. Native figures will engage in traditional dance from behind an almost ethereal filter or the camera will sprawl through a forest as a traditional song is sung.
As someone of Anglo-Saxan descent, I found Inconvenient Indian to be a welcome primer to a lot of problems that we just aren’t made privy to due to how media related to Native Americans is framed as well as the lack of exposure to the everyday lives of those living today. I think in the United States we often (but not often enough) focus on various struggles of those who are marginalized in the history books and media by a system created by white Americans, but those learning this history often lack the proper modern context for what Indigenous people are living and having to work through today.
Inconvenient Indian could have leaned on simply being a primer on anti-Indigenous racism for non-Indigenous audiences, but it is able to transcend that and really explore the inter-generational challenges facing Indigenous people today. Violent protests with the government and police litter the latter half of the film as the current generation picks up the fight to re-claim their lands, and it plays as a prescient point of the systemic oppression not only in the United States but also around North America in terms of how it has treated its Native people.
Hear another discussion of “Inconvenient Indian” and “MLK/FBI” in the first part of the below podcast:
MLK/FBI (2020) by Sam Pollard
MLK/FBI (2020) by Sam Pollard
USA
Considering he is such a well-documented figure, it is sometimes incredible to see the amount of mythology surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr. In the wake of the George Floyd killing, my Facebook feed was littered with people sharing MLK quotes through memes as a megaphone to promote non-violence.
As the new documentary MLK/FBI shows, the narrative of King’s nonviolent approach is only one narrative about King – but it’s the one that has taken hold following his death as a way to allow white Americans the ability to stomach a lot of what transpired during the Civil Rights Movement. The documentary also shows the amount of power the government leveraged in villifying King’s message.
The bulk of the film is made up of archival footage of King and the various historical moments covered throughout the film. At the same time, historians and Civil Rights figures such as Andrew Young provide voiceover and context – so rather than being a long stream of narration (a la Ken Burns), it feels more of a well-researched story being told through multiple voices.
Detailed at length is the “relationship” between King and J. Edgar Hoover, as well as Hoover’s various methods in monitoring and trying to devalue King’s message. Among them was his decision to wiretap nearly everyone near King and the handling of the alleged tape of King having sex with another woman that was sent by the FBI to Coretta Scott King and his family.
The choice to lean on archival footage alongside the voiceover elevates MLK/FBI from being a more basic, Ken Burns-style documentary because it provides context for the media images on screen. While it could be easy in today’s political climate to provide images of MLK and the Civil Rights Movement and link it to current events, this allows you to dig deeper into what the images were saying and what the government’s sway over national media did to perpetuate a narrative to the American public at a time when television was becoming the way many people processed information.
It’s one thing to see King walking through the streets or interacting with these various leaders and members of the Civil Rights Movement, but to hear from those in the room at that time, there’s something poignant about what the archival reel is showing us and what was actually going through King’s mind at the time of the recording.
Having the talking heads appear on screen through the film would also open up an avenue to feature named figures that could take away from the message. I remember earlier this year in the Michael Jordan/Chicago Bulls documentary series, The Last Dance, when someone like President Barack Obama or Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant would appear on screen for a brief moment, and what they were saying was less important than the fact that they were appearing at all.
MLK/FBI is much more interested in the viewer learning about the meaning of these images and their context – while still connecting the past to the current struggle for African-Americans. The focus is on the how the image of King was sensationalized to fit the narrative the U.S. government wanted to present following his death. The writing on the documents on screen, paired with the Civil Rights Movement, displays the lack of a vacuum for these attempts to find racial and social justice. At the core of the documentary, again, is how the image tells one story while the context and intentions of those controlling them tells another.
As America continues to find ways to (mis)interpret the philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., MLK/FBI is a nice reminder of how media and pop culture can fail us. The final question posed by the documentary surrounding MLK’s image concerns the release of the tape sent to his wife in the year 2026 when the FBI documents will be declassified.
In our post-truth world, it seems frightening what could happen to his legacy, but more work like this documentary could provide a counter to the attacks against fact and the leaning on a mythological history.
Summer of 85 (2020) by François Ozon
Summer of 85 (2020) by François Ozon
France
It’s two teens fresh on their way out of high school and into college. It’s set on a seaside resort in Normandy in the 1980s and is filled with period appropriate songs. You would think Call Me By Your Name had its sequel streamlined early.
Too bad Summer of 85 is too aggressively boring and leaning on tired tropes to make anywhere near the impact that film did.
The film follows Alexis (Félix Lefebvre), a 16-year-old who feels outcast with the rest of the folks his age. He strikes up a friendship with the gregarious David (Benjamin Voisin) who gets him a bit out of shell, but also becomes the object of his affections. He gets a job with David and the two spend time together, but then a fight leads to David’s unfortunate death in an accident and we are picking up with Alexis in the aftermath.
I can understand to a degree the reasoning behind trying to replicate the success of Call Me By Your Name, especially with someone like director François Ozon who specialized in those types of LGBT stories prior to the success of CMBYN. But Summer of 85 feels more like a retread of a trope that doesn’t really have much use in modern movies — the tortured gay romance that ends in heartbreak and death.
While LGBT cinema has found itself limited for most of cinematic history, the trope of the tortured gay romance has always found room in the annals of movies. Filed next to similar tropes such as the “psycho lesbian” or the “depraved homosexual,” the trope continues to limit LGBT movies and television, tethering queer stories to only one mode of operation.
While Summer of 85 attempts to unburden itself from this by couching the story as a tale of exploring oneself (in this case Alexis finding the courage he didn’t have at the beginning of the story to be more true to what he wants to be), it still just instills this logic that a LGBT character can only achieve that if another dies.
Outside of just re-hashing old tropes, Summer of 85 is flat and boring. It never seems to utilize the quite beautiful landscape of the Normandy beachside resort (outside of a few shots with Alexis and David on a boat), and it generally feels relegated to confined spaces and rooms rather than letting the characters breathe out in the open — which I’m sure was a decision that was aligned with the trope mentioned above.
LGBT cinema has only recently started to break away from the inclinations that defined it for the better part of cinematic history up to this point, and Summer of 85 feels regressive in every sense of the word. If Ozon wanted to revisit past work, he should’ve just popped in those old movies instead of torturing us with a carbon-copied version.
City Hall (2020) by Frederick Wiseman
City Hall (2020) by Frederick Wiseman
USA
If it were up to me, everyone in the United States would be forced to watch City Hall.
As a first-time Frederick Wiseman viewer, I won’t spend time trying to compare this work with others in his career, but I would be remiss if I didn’t praise the vital portrait it paints for the current system of government that is lost on most Americans.
City Hall follows the city of Boston government over the course of a couple years, looking at how the city is fighting issues such as climate change, homelessness and covering racial justice. It follows members of the government, such as Mayor Marty Walsh, but also goes into the community and sees how engaged members interact with their civic leaders.
If there’s an immediate takeaway for the civic-minded viewer, it is how issues are segmented into various groups and task forces who work out the nuances of something such as homelessness before presenting it to the main seat of power in the city. As with the rest of the film, these meetings are presented by Wiseman without judgement, but left to the viewer to try and glean how the system works and whether or not that is doing enough to solve these problems.
A lot of democracy is relegated to small groups like this, which are tasked with coming up with band-aid solutions to problems deeply affecting a city, state or country. The platonic democratic ideal would be that these people come up with some sort of solution, present it to the mayor, governor or president, and then that person can do with it what they want and attempt to implement it into the community or country.
But as these meetings happen over and over again, and the questions are raised again and again, one has to wonder what good they’re really doing. If homelessness or racial justice or climate change is not a well-acknowledged facet of every decision made by the leader then what good is the city-run group? They present the problems, yes, but if they’re never solved, then what are these group?
More optimism arises from the community organizations, or at least the engaged members that make time to show up at the city forums. The best part of the film comes when a cannabis shop is holding a forum in an economically depressed neighborhood of Boston and presents all of the opportunities this will bring to the community. The members of the company talk about how employees can join and discover over the course of their work there what path they’d like to take. Do they want to just sell the cannabis or maybe help grow it? The possibilities are endless, according to them, and folks around here should be happy that such an opportunity is arising.
But that isn’t how they see it. Instead, the community members present issue one after the other of why this (to be honest, relatively gentrifying) business wouldn’t change much of anything for them, but rather, would create more issues than what they’re already facing now. To them, how is furthering these business owners’ capital interest going to help them pay rent? Keep their sons and daughters out of jail over drug and other petty charges? Keep the crime away? Keep their houses affordable?
To this community, it seems like it’s just adding more headaches on top of all that without offering a solution.
The meeting doesn’t end with a grand moment of acceptance and reconciliation. It is a documentary after all, not a Disney movie. Instead, the owners accept that they’ll have to work with these community members to make sure they’re doing right by the neighborhood and accept regular meetings similar to the one we just witnessed to further the dialogue.
Of course we don’t see what came next — whether any of that came to head or was even addressed again after that meeting. But that’s government.
Many moments of City Hall feature Mayor Walsh speaking directly to the current administration in Washington D.C. — sometimes directly, but other times indirectly. It comes in the form of issuing climate change plans for the city of Boston or attempting to have conversations with African-American leaders to better understand how they can all work together to find racial justice. But like the end of the business meeting, we don’t see what happens next. Are these just empty platitudes of someone running for office or active change being developed in front of the camera?
Viewers have many options for how to interpret City Hall – they can find inspiration in democracy, they can see wheels turning but no forward momentum, or they can see what an engaged community base can do to challenge those with power to do more. With running a city, state or country in a capitalist democratic system, a lot of questions have to come up and not everything can be answered.
If you asked my takeaway from the film, it would be that our institutions’ biggest failing is not engaging with the desires of the people to make things better and rather trying to score points by punching up the ladder. The community can enact more change than Marty Walsh or Donald Trump can, and once more power is given to that community, only then will America reflect any of the values these government officials ruminate on.
Hear another discussion of “City Hall” in the first part of the below podcast:
Concrete Cowboy (2020) by Ricky Staub
Concrete Cowboy (2020) by Ricky Staub
USA
While taking place on the streets of Philadelphia, it could be easy to think of Concrete Cowboy taking place in the vistas of Monument Valley or the barren lands of West Texas. There’s something about the image of Idris Elba in a cowboy get-up that should awaken the corpse of John Ford to make another movie.
It’s not just the setting; you could also see Ford comparisons in its cast of characters, which consists of a group of outcasts and drifters that have found respite in a unique community: a collection of Black horseback riders that keep a stable of horses in a Philadelphia neighborhood.
A lot of Concrete Cowboy is cliche, but there’s something warming about its message – that even though “the American West” is gone (and was never anywhere near Philadelphia) we still have folks who are drifting around attempting to find a semblance of freedom in an increasingly “civilized” world.
In this case, the story follows Cole (Caleb McLaughlin) who is sent to North Philly to live with his father (Idris Elba) after another run-in at school has him kicked out. Cole wants nothing to do with his father – who has clearly not been a part of his life to this point – and is even more disinterested in joining his father’s gang of Black cowboys.
Instead, he turns his eyes to another route offered to young African-Americans in the area, and reconnects with his friend Smush (Jharrel Jerome) who is pushing drugs around the city in order to get out, or as he describes it. Cole’s father Harp knows this path too well and tells Cole he’s kicked out of here as well if he continues to follow Smush down that hole.
Cole half-listens, picking up some duties with the rest of the Fletcher Street riders as they’re called, but not completely dropping Smush from his life. As he learns, Smush participated in the horse-life as much as any of them, and this current hustle is all an attempt to go buy some land out west in Wyoming or North Dakota to have an open space to ride and live.
As I said before, you can guess a lot of the paths Concrete Cowboy takes, but there’s something nice about seeing such a niche way of life for African-Americans and the stark parallels between the two paths presented in the film: the Black cowboy and the drug dealer. It would be all too easy to just follow the latter and explore that kind of story, but there’s something a bit inspiring to see this second path (one that is actually true as a lot of the actual riders are featured in the film) as this unique community alternative.
It’s unfortunate that we don’t provide more incentive or take care of groups such as then Fletcher Street riders more so that young men like Smush can stay the path without having to find more harmful alternatives in order to be able to live or follow their dream.
Rather than ending this western by riding off into the sunset, Concrete Cowboy ends with the actual Fletcher Street riders speaking about why they do what they do and what its meant to them. It’s here that we’re reminded of the mythology of the West, but also of the ways those acts can provide an oasis for folks even today.
The Best is Yet to Come (2020) by Jing Wang
The Best is Yet to Come (2020) by Wang JING
China
The year is 2003 and Han Dong is a high school dropout who aspires to be a journalist. He arrives in Beijing and attracts the attention of a prominent editor with a post he made on an online chat forum.
He’s given a shot, even though it is presented as a long one due to his lack of academic pedigree next to four-year college and master’s degree holders, but he is still offered an internship alongside them. Han has the work ethic and foresight that these other interns just lack.
He also has a valuable journalistic skill: listening. He joins his editor on a trip to a mine where they got word an accident happened but the corporation is attempting to cover it up. They don’t get much of anywhere, but then Han stumbles into a meeting with the wife of one of the victims and a lawyer with the corporation who is forcing her to sign a letter with her compensation. She’s visibly upset and unable to sign the form, so Han lends a hand and helps her.
Afterwards, she speaks with him at length about what happened and what she was asked to do, and he writes it all down. The luck, and good journalism, earns him a job over the other interns and he ends up turning his attention to a story about an illegal ring of forged documents to allow Hepatitis B patients find work, as many employers don’t want them around.
As he digs deeper, the focus of the film becomes more personal and shifts away from the fact that the activity is illegal and more to the fact that companies shouldn’t be discriminating against these people.
There’s a bit of Spotlight or All the President’s Men here, as Han has a confrontation with his editor before the initial story is supposed to run about the morality of running this story that could hurt a 100 million people because they did it wrong that echoes the more well-known sequences from both of them, but The Best is Yet to Come also does a nice job of presenting that just following the facts is not always the course that is going to help the most people with your story – there is sometimes room for a bit of emotion to find its way into the story.
Wang Jing has worked as the first assistant director on a lot of the works of Jia Zhangke, and this one also features a collaboration with Jia’s longtime cinematographer, which opens up comparisons between the visuals. The Best is Yet to Come lacks the broad scope of Jia’s best work, but does feels familiar in the way it explores its character with such insight and curiosity.
Outside of just Han, we are presented many characters stuck in many facets of the socio-political system in Beijing in 2003, who are unable to move from the place that they’re currently in over inability from the system or fear of retribution. It’s easy to connect what this situation looks like, and what the future of our own country looks like in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as fear and indifference to those suffering leads decision-making.
It may not be as inspired as some of Jia’s recent work, but Wang Jing could clearly follow a similar path, and The Best is Yet to Come seems like a welcome starting point.
Fauna (2020) by Nicolás Pereda
Fauna (2020) by Nicolás Pereda
Mexico
A new couple, Luisa and Paco (Luisa Pardo Úrias and Francisco Barreiro), are visiting Luisa’s parents in a remote Mexican town. When they make it to her parents’ house, they’re greeted by her brother Gabino (Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez), but their parents are nowhere to be found.
The rest of the movie plays out as a bone-dry comedy between the visiting boyfriend and the odd family. At their arrival, Paco decides he wants a cigarette, but with Gabino fresh out, he treks to a nearby convenient store to get some. Once there, the patron in front of him buys up what turns out to be the last two cases and Paco has to haggle with him to sell him one of the packs for 100 pesos. Naturally, he tries to offer one to Gabino, who doesn’t understand why he paid so much for the pack and rejects the attempt at good deed, and the patron who overcharged Paco ends up being Luisa’s father.
Both sequences are played straight, and the best connection to be made is the comedy found in a lot of Hong Sang-soo’s work and how the South Korean director mines comedy from mundane interactions. It seems like director Nicolás Pereda is a student of the same school.
It only gets more awkward for Paco as he ends up later that night at a local dive bar alongside Luisa’s father and brother, and is coerced into performing a monologue from the popular show he works on, Narcos (which is also the show that Barreiro himself is most known for). In order to oblige his girlfriend’s parent and brother, Paco (who knows his only scenes in the last season of the show didn’t contain dialogue) performs a totally fabricated scene that is so cliche that it would seemed pulled straight from Narcos.
His girlfriend’s father and brother clap for the effort, but reward him by making the same request again.
At this point, Pereda makes the choice to shift the narrative from what we’ve been watching to a Neo-noir story of a man looking for someone in a small, Mexican mining town much the same as the one Luisa’s family lives in – all taking place inside the mind of Gabino, who is explaining the plot of the book he’s reading to her the next morning.
The Certified Copy-esque move is jarring at first. All three actors re-appear in new roles among the noir story, but instead of following more the path of Barreiro’s character, our new protagonists are Úrias and Rodríguez.
I’ll admit that this completely lost me. I mention Certified Copy because it also is a movie that shifts the narrative halfway through, but also engages with this in-place history that makes it an inspired choice but not one that completely loses you. Fauna is not the same, as it completely drops anything that we saw over its first 40 minutes or so, to complete this 70-minute movie with a wholly different plot.
It seems to be a comment on the narco-obsession in pop culture with Mexico, which is an interesting note that will carry with me on a re-watch. The director’s attempt is to show that no matter what path you take (whether its an awkward relationship comedy or Neo-noir detective story), this obsession with Mexico as this country of drug cartels and drug lords is pervasive.
It’s an interesting path, and one that will stick with me as I re-visit this film at another time because even though I may have been lost in Fauna, I also found it compelling and was lost in both senses of the word.
The Water Man (2020) by David Oyelowo
The Water Man (2020) by David Oyelowo
USA
I could just say that The Water Man is a simple, boring rip-off of The Goonies and move on. Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer much more to discuss outside of that comparison.
The film is the directorial debut of actor David Oyelowo, and it stars Oyelowo alongside Rosario Dawson as a couple living in a small American town with a son. Dawson’s mother character has cancer and is the one in the family that their son Gunner has the best relationship with. Gunner and his father don’t get along – not much is presented there outside of a few run-ins over small things and the fact that Oyelowo’s character is said to have been in the Navy and gone for a long period of time.
In an attempt to help his mother get better, Gunner enlists the help of local outcast Jo and the two set out to find the mythical “Water Man” – a spirit that haunts the neighboring forest and possesses a resurrecting stone that has kept him alive.
What follows is very by-the-book: Gunner and Jo enter the forest, come across mythical objects, face hardships and eventually make it to the lair of the Water Man. On the other side, Oyelowo’s character spends the bulk of his time attempting to track down Gunner with the help of a local mortician (played by Alfred Molina) who was the one who presented the tale of the Water Man to Gunner.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the movie, and maybe that’s what makes it boring. I talked at length earlier in this festival recap about Wolfwalkers and how that film utilizes folklore to create a unique, modern tale, but that’s not something The Water Man is interested in doing.
Every action seems laden with cliche and the eventual climax is forced and resolved without any sort of interesting build. The overall story of the Water Man says nothing of the region in which the story takes place and has no particular message outside of just being a mythical folk tale.
At the end, you kind of have to question what the overall point was when none of these things came together and we ended up where we assumed we would from the start. Instead of being the next Goonies, it seems like The Water Man is destined to be forgotten, or at least find life as one of the hundreds of Netflix offerings no one remembers.
Shadow in the Cloud (2020) by Roseanne Liang
Shadow in the Cloud (2020) by Roseanne Liang
New Zealand
In what could have been made into a nice, one location genre picture, Shadow in the Cloud seems unable to decide what course it wanted to take so instead becomes a muddled mess of weird gender politics and strange “girl power” energy that feels misplaced and misguided.
Taking place for the bulk of the film in a World War II B-17, Maude Garrett (Chloe Grace Moretz) shows up unexpectedly as the plane is taking off with a mysterious package and a letter affirming her place on the airship. The crew (made up of familiar faces such as Nick Robinson and Callan Mulvey) allow her on, but are also skeptical.
The next portion of the film takes place with Maude sitting inside one of the gunners on the ship as her package sits with a crew member. The all-male crew harasses her – talking about the various ways they’d love to have sex with her and dismissing her expertise in piloting – until a strange creature appears on the airship.
Then a strange cacophony of events unfolds: the creature is revealed to be a gremlin that is wreaking havoc onboard the vessel, a group of Japanese planes have emerged in the area and have opened fire on the airship, and the mysterious package Maude was hoarding on the vessel was actually her child and she’s attempting to escape from her abusive ex-husband with her new beau, who is also on this aircraft.
It’s a lot.
It’s unfortunate that all of these problems are presented at once because, honestly, taking any of these paths could have made for an interesting enough genre picture. Think of the movie where a gremlin is running rampant on an airship and the crew has to band together to attempt to fight it off while staying in the air. Or the more basic WWII movie where Maude shows to be an expert pilot and helps these surly men fend off a pair of Japanese planes in a killer dog fight. Or even the whole mother-child storyline about female military workers during the war.
Unfortunately, we get all three, and none of them come together to make something memorable.
It’s also worth mentioning that the script comes from Max Landis, so instead of following one of these paths, we’re inundated with a whole bulk of time including the crew harassing Maude with vulgar remarks about having sex with her, only for her to enact girl power and do a bunch of action movie shit to gain acceptance with them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but after 10 straight minutes of abusive harassment of her, maybe lay off so we can move forward with your three nonsensical plots, Max?
Chloe Grace Moretz is fine in the lead role, and makes the most of it, but Shadow in the Cloud is just a missed opportunity that’s way too obsessed with how it can subvert genre to actually make a singular screenwriting decision, leaving us with a broken down plot and a boring ending.
Another Round (2020) by Thomas Vinterberg
Another Round (2020) by Thomas Vinterberg
Denmark
Four friends decide to follow the lead of an obscure Danish philosopher and bring up their blood-alcohol level by 0.05 percent each day with a few drinks before heading to work. All of this is in service of getting out of the rut that their middle-aged lives have become and maybe live a little more like they did when they were younger.
In what could become a pretty banal, simple plot, director Thomas Vinterberg and his cast (led by Mads Mikkelsen) actually find an insightful tale about aging and change, which is how Another Round turns a story about older men acting up into one of the year’s most pleasant surprises.
The impetus comes from Martin (Mikkelsen), who has become stuck in his home- and work-lives to the point that his students and their parents have an intervention of sorts for him because they don’t feel like he is teaching them up to the level they deserve. At the same time at home, his wife is working night shifts and the two are more roommates than companions at this point in their marriage.
The other friends have issues of their own – one has a newborn child and a wife and family that demand more attention than he seems willing to do while the other two have no one special in their lives and seems more than happy to indulge in these vices to the largest degree.
Rather than just reveling in these men getting incredibly drunk and falling into worrisome situations at times both in public and at work, Vinterberg explores our reluctance to age, as well as how aging allows us to both find different parts of ourselves to be true to while also keeping with us the joys of our youth on a particular scale. There is no reason for these four men to drink to the level they do on a daily basis, but maybe the advice of the philosopher is true that they should inject a little more life in their daily routine than they previously did.
It doesn’t necessarily mean getting sloshed every day – it could mean enjoying a fine dinner with great wine and old friends or experiencing a weekend in the country with the family.
Vinterberg presents this in a way that feels less preachy and more exploratory as a director who has come a ways from his more regressive roots at the top half of his career. Now, he is finding pleasure in the finer things but still keeping a bit of an edge to allow the story to have a breath of reality in it.
I’m not sure the path Another Round could have taken by the end, but its conclusion becomes much more poignant than I anticipated. The other downside to just indulging in this quest to reclaim your youth is that some of the people along the way may be led to depression and darkness that goes unnoticed by the others around them.
Another Round is another recent Vinterberg movie that works despite the perceived limitations of its premise and shows that the Danish director has found himself as he’s gone along. Anchored by a reserved Mikkelson performance, I hope it isn’t one that gets lost in the shuffle and is able to find an audience at some point – if nothing else, for the final sequence where Mads Mikkelson dances while champagne flows all around him.
At least give it that.
David Byrne’s American Utopia (2020) by Spike Lee
David Byrne’s American Utopia (2020) by Spike Lee
USA
This is adapted from a conversation included in the first part of Episode 318 of Cinematary. You can listen to that here.
Andrew Swafford: It's infectious energy. David Byrne performing for an hour and a half, or two hours can never not be fun.
Spike Lee does some really interesting moves with the camera throughout here. At times, it feels a little incongruous with just like the experience of watching the stage show, but there are some really cool like camera tricks that get done here. There are moments where he tilts the camera diagonally to one side, and all the people on stage like fall to one side of the stage as if the whole theater had been tipped on its end. And then they'll do the same thing with the other side. There's also some really cool shadow play with one light right in the front of the stage and the camera right in front of that, and David Byrne is standing in front of the light – and so there's this enormous shadow of David Byrne kind of like towering above all of these other musicians on stage. They get a lot of mileage out of the visuals here despite the fact that it is essentially an empty stage. There's no real effects; there's no cool costumes or anything like that. It is literally like 12 people dressed exactly the same all in barefoot all carrying instruments that are wireless, so they can move around the stage at will. And so like on paper it sounds like the least visually impressive concert doc, because you're just looking at people in gray suits holding instruments, but actually watching it is a very visually dazzling experience.
I don't think that the music is quite on par with Talking Heads at their peak in the Stop Making Sense era – though he does go back to a lot of the songs that are performed in the Stop Making Sense documentary and does them like a surprising amount of justice. But in general, the music is good, the performances are good, the camerawork is good. It is a really fun time. Zach, what do you think of it?
Zach Dennis: I liked it. I go back and forth with filmed theatrical shows. I mean, Stop Making Sense is in a whole different realm on its own. This one seems much more in tune with what the theater space is offering and how to kind of film that. You mentioned the diagonal shots but what I love are the God Shots that Spike Lee would use, where there was a camera perched right in the middle of the ceiling, and we just looked down. And sometimes you would have these band formations, and they would move around and you would see the different shapes and formations the band would configure into.
But overall, I was a little bit of at arm's length, just because it seemed like if you were there, in the theater, experiencing it that way, it would have been something really special and impactful. It just felt a little conflicted between being an engaging filmed product and being an engaging Broadway show.
Listen to the full chat between Andrew and Zach in the first part of the below podcast: