→ October 6, 2020
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Monos.

Multiple readers recommended Monos, the Colombian submission for last year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (which didn’t make the nine-film shortlist), when I talked about the best films I saw in 2019. Now available on Hulu as part of that service’s deal with Neon, this modern twist on a Lord of the Flies setting is disturbing and grim, casting a dark light on indoctrination and how cults and similar movements take control of malleable young minds.

The”monos” (“monkeys”) of the film are a dozen or so teenage guerrillas fighting the government in an unnamed South American country, although the similarities to the decades-long FARC insurrection in Colombia are obvious. They’re holding an American woman, known only as Doctora (Julianne Nicholson), hostage, and take most of their direction over short-wave radio, visited only twice in the film by The Messenger (Wilson Salazar, himself a former FARC child soldier), who drills them and gives them further orders. When left to their own devices, however, the monos act like teenagers, showing poor judgment, fighting among themselves, pairing off in couples, and doing a rather poor job of monitoring their one prisoner, while it becomes clear most of the kids have no idea why they’re fighting or even taking orders from unseen authorities.

Nearly all of the actors in Monos were making their screen debuts in the film; only Nicholson and Moisés Arias, who plays Bigfoot, had previous credits. You’d never guess by the performances, however, as the actors are entirely credible, perhaps because the script asks them to act like teenagers and because the shoot was so tough on all of the participants. Each has a distinct character and a nickname that sort of fits them, and despite the film’s brisk pace most of them have enough to do to make it clear who at least the key ones are, especially once their discipline begins to break down early in the film and multiple things go wrong.

The heart of the story is the kids, although Nicholson has more screen time than any individual fighter does because so much of the story revolves around their inability to handle any of the tasks they’ve been assigned, including guarding her. None of the child soldiers has a single line in the film that indicates any allegiance to or understanding of the cause for which they’re fighting – the audience never hears it from anyone, in fact. We just know they’re fighting the government, but not which one, or why, or what any of their goals might be. Their participation in this ragtag troop is the end in itself, and with none of them mentioning parents or other family at any point, you might assume they’re either orphans or kids who ran away from something at home, and have tried to replace that with their affiliation with this terrorist group. That leads to an inevitable conflict when interpersonal relationships interfere with their allegiance to the movement, and when obeying the orders from The Messenger and his superiors might mean betraying one’s friends, possibly even to the point of handing one of them a death sentence.

There’s also a political subtext here that I assume resonates more strongly if you know the history of armed insurrections in South America, especially Colombia (FARC, ELN) or even Peru (Sendero Luminoso, MRTA), which endured long, violent conflicts with guerrilla movements on the right and left. I’m not conversant enough with those histories to think I would understand all references within Monos, but at least know that FARC took many hostages during their 43-year terror campaign and conscripted children into their ranks, so I assumed we were watching a proxy for that group. Regardless of the real-world inspiration, this script shows the pointlessness of these guerrilla movements and the futility of the deaths they caused and lives they ruined by stripping the struggle of its ostensible goals, most of which would mean little or nothing to the children handed automatic weapons and a hostage to protect.

Monos is strongest when it focuses on the interactions between the child soldiers, though, getting into themes of homophobia and alienation as well as the sort of squabbling that readers of William Golding’s novel would recognize. They’re still just kids and they act like it, especially when they’re left to their own devices and handed responsibilities no teenager should have. When one of the soldiers realizes they’re no longer on board with the group’s mission or decisions, they try to leave, and then it’s clear that this hasn’t all been some elaborate game. It is that choice, to show what happens when we hand children and their underdeveloped brains adult responsibilities, that gives Monos meaning.

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→ October 2, 2020
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Enola Holmes.

Enola Holmes is utter dreck, a mediocre mystery wrapped in the cloak of a superior writer’s creation and some quality set design, wasting two solid actresses on a script desperate to tell you how clever it is. There have been worthwhile adaptations and continuations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work and iconic character, but this is just plain boring.

Enola Holmes, you see, is Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister, a fabrication by the author Nancy Springer for a series of books that posit that this 14-year-old girl, unmentioned by Doyle, was as quick-witted as her older brothers, with a special talent for cryptography. When her brothers try to send her off to finishing school, she absconds to London and starts a detective agency of her own, specializing in missing persons cases (as, I presume, murder was a bit much for the young adult literature market).

This Netflix adaptation of the series’ first book, The Case of the Missing Marquess, starts with Enola (Millie Bobby Brown, so critical as El on Stranger Things) at home with her mother (Helena Bonham Carter), but when the latter vanishes, Enola’s brothers show up to decide her fate. Mycroft is especially disdainful of her most unladylike ways and thus the stronger advocate of sending her off to a finishing school run by a Miss Harrison (Fiona Shaw, also wasted in a minor role), while Sherlock (Henry Cavill, decidedly un-super here) equivocates and shows a soft spot for his younger sister. Enola takes off and encounters another fugitive, Lord Tewksbury, and the two pair up while on the run, separating in London before circumstances throw them together again – while both are pursued by a mysterious, creepy man named Linthorn who looks too much like a young Willem Dafoe. Enola tries to secure her freedom while figuring out the mystery around Tewksbury’s flight and avoiding her brothers and the interference of Inspector Lestrade.

The story is a convoluted mess, overly reliant on coincidence and failing to give Enola enough of a reason to solve the Tewksbury tangle. Enola’s character is just Sherlock as a teenaged girl, transmuting his disregard for rules and cold manner into a mischievous pixie who breaks the fourth wall with irritating frequency. (And of course she has to say “the game is afoot,” a hackneyedphrase Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes said exactly one time in all of the stories.) She takes off for London with a pile of money her mother presciently left hidden for her in a location she’s disguised with a cipher that Enola cracks, and has little trouble tracking her mother’s movements through the London underground – that’s another preposterous subplot that I won’t spoil because it’s just so stupid. While there, she just bumps into Tewksbury again, because the story needs them to run into each other.

The Sherlock character is a softer and kinder version of the one present in most of the stories and in film versions, which has made the film the subject of a peculiar lawsuit by the Doyle estate. (The character of Sherlock is in the public domain because most of the works that include him have lost their copyright protection; the estate claims that this film uses a later version of Sherlock where he shows emotion, and thus isn’t in the public domain.) This poses two problems: It’s not the Sherlock most of us know from canon or from depictions like Benedict Cumberbatch’s, and it also makes Sherlock really, really boring. There are no pithy observations, no witty ripostes, and none of the charm of watching his brain at work, which is a huge part of the appeal of Doyle’s writing – the same as it is for Agatha Christie’s Poirot or Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Wimsey.

This feels more than anything like an attempt to profit from someone else’s creation, because it’s devoid of anything original or interesting. Brown might play the single most important character in Stranger Things‘ ever-growing ensemble, although I think there are times the script pushes her to overact. She never inhabits this character, however, and the reason is probably that the character itself is two-dimensional and cartoonish. For a movie that’s been heavily hyped and received positive reviews, Enola Holmes is a shocking dud. If you’re a fan of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, you’d do well to stay away.

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→ September 16, 2020
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The Personal History of David Copperfield.

When word came out in mid-2019 that Armando Iannucci (The Death of Stalin, VEEP) was filming an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, I read the book in anticipation of its release, also rectifying a rather large gap in my own reading history. (I’d read five Dickens novels, two in high school and three by choice, but not this one, which Dickens himself called his favourite, and which the Guardian called the third “most Dickensian” of his novels.) The movie came out in the UK last year, but its arrival in the U.S. was delayed by COVID-19, and it just hit theaters earlier this month. It is marvelous, the best 2020 release I’ve seen so far this year, with a mostly faithful script, wonderful casting, and excellent use of the humor in Dickens’ rags-to-riches novel.

If you haven’t read the book, which I had not other than one of those Moby Books’ abridged, illustrated versions back in 1981 or so, it is the life story of its title character, from birth into straitened circumstances, through his widowed mother’s unfortunate choice of a misanthropic, controlling husband, to his indenture at his stepfather’s wine-selling business, and on and on in somewhat picaresque fashion. He encounters a host of eccentric characters, a few of whom, notably the venal Uriah Heep, have gained lasting reputation among the pantheon of literary creations, with several others providing comic relief among David’s series of misfortunes before he finally turns to writing as a vocation and finds success and financial security for the first time.

The first theatrical film version of Dickens’ classic novel in a half-century, The Personal History of David Copperfield might be most notable for the color-blind casting, although I’d argue that this choice is notable for how quickly you’ll stop noticing it. The casting itself is so perfect top to bottom that casting all-white actors couldn’t have produced a comparable result, notably Dev Patel as David himself, handling the pivotal role with aplomb, adapting to David’s changing views of the world and greater understanding of the people around him over the course of the story. Characters who are related by blood don’t share skin tone, and it couldn’t matter any less.

Many of the side characters are superbly cast as well, but none more so than Hugh Laurie as the befuddled Mr. Dick, which sees Laurie at his Woosterian best, and also gives that character a bit more to do than just to serve as comic relief. Mr. Dick’s host, David’s aunt Betsy Trotwood, is played by Tilda Swinton, who can certainly dominate a film in the wrong way when she gets to play a severe character; here, she gives Aunt Betsy more depth than the character has in the novel, making her more sympathetic and thus making it easier to understand why David is so generous to her as her own circumstances decline and he finds their relations reversed. Ben Whishaw delivers an unctuous, loathsome performance as Uriah Heep, complete with bowl-cut and affected speech that Patel later mimics to great comic effect. Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, has a lot of fun with the shifty but good-hearted Mr. Micawber, making him a little less exasperating on the screen than he is on the page.

The movie is brisk at two hours, and spends far more time on the first half of the novel than on the second, with great length given to David’s childhood and early adulthood, including his relationship with Mr. Micawber and time in a boarding school where he meets James Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard). That choice gives us rather more prologue than David requires and rushes some of the resolutions, so that David’s marriage to Agnes is treated almost as an afterthought, and the unmasking of Uriah Heep plays out in a far less satisfying manner, because the audience has so much less time and reason to despise him, and also has less time to appreciate Whishaw’s deft portrayal of Heep’s scheming nature. The first half of the novel is important, but the second half is the payoff. The film gives you all of that payoff in the last thirty minutes, and it’s still fun, just condensed.

Iannucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell play the story extremely straight until close to the very end. The compression of the last half of the book requires a large change to the arc with Dora, which the screenwriters handle in a way that also comments on Dickens’ original story, where David marries Dora, realizes it’s unsuitable because she’s dull and needy, so Dickens has her conveniently die after suffering a miscarriage so that David can marry Agnes. Dora here is even sillier than she is in the book, making her a great comic presence, but rather than kill her off, the writers give her the perspicacity to find her own way off the stage. The Ham/Emily/Steerforth subplot, itself rather tangential to David’s own narrative, also has a rather significant change that I would argue is less successful even though Dickens’ own handling of that arc relied too much on coincidence.

I had no trouble following the plot, because I’d read the novel recently, but I do wonder how well viewers could follow the plot, especially the last half hour or so, if they had no exposure to the book or previous adaptations. It’s the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy problem – a novel of 500+ pages is hard to condense into a two-hour film without losing something, and you’d rather lose details or exposition than plot or character development. Perhaps the Emily subplot could have gone instead, as essential as it is on the page, because so much time is spent on David’s childhood visit to the seaside hovel where she lives, to give us more time with Heep and David at the law firm so we better understand their rivalry and why Heep is so odious. (We do see plenty of Mr. Wickfield, played by Benedict Wong, in various stages of inebriation.) Yet The Personal History of David Copperfield is joyous because of what Iannucci and Blackwell retained – Mr. Dick, Dumb Dora, the Micawbers – and how well Dev Patel brings that title character to life.

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→ August 26, 2020
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Palm Springs.

Palm Springs, available now to stream on Hulu, is a smarter reboot of Groundhog Day, without the cameo from an impossibly young Michael Shannon, but in some ways still falls prey to the flaws of its inspiration. It’s a time-loop story that explicitly rejects the idea that there’s some moral lesson the trapped protagonists have to learn to escape it, and instead forces one of them to confront the fears that have led him to accept his fate rather than fighting it.

Nyles (Andy Samberg) is a guest at the wedding of his girlfriend’s sister, and when we first see the ceremony, he comes to the rescue of another of the bride’s sisters, Sarah (Cristin Millotti), as she’s fumbling through the maid-of-honor speech she didn’t realize she was supposed to deliver. This leads to them hooking up, but that’s interrupted by something else and, long story short, they both end up caught in a time loop where they must repeat the day of the wedding over, and over.

It turns out that Nyles has already been stuck in this time loop for a while, and that itself leads to all sorts of complications, especially once Sarah tires of it after a few trips around the carousel and decides she wants out – with or without Nyles. It turns out that they each have a significant secret that they don’t reveal to the other for quite some time, and while Nyles’ secret infuriates Sarah, Sarah’s secret is the bigger revelation. There’s also one more person stuck in the time loop, Ray (J.K. Simmons), who throws a wrench, or an arrow, into the works, although his role is best left undiscussed.

For a swift movie with a thin, familiar premise, Palm Springs does quite a bit right. It’s often very funny, and it’s a lot more than just Samberg playing the same character he always plays (Nyles is little more than Jake Peralta without a badge). The whole subplot with Roy, including how he got stuck in the time loop in the first place, is frequently hilarious, as are some of the smaller bits in the first half of the film. Millotti displays quite a penchant for comedy, especially when outraged – there’s an art to dropping an F-bomb and making it funny, and she has it – and by about halfway through the film, it’s clear that she is, or at least should be, the main character here. While flawed, she’s the stronger, smarter, and wittier of the two, and she’s ultimately the one who finds a possible exit from their infinite loop.

Which brings up the two major problem with Palm Springs: Why is Sarah romantically interested in Nyles? True, he’s far more into her than she is into him, but she is into him, even though their connection beyond the shared experience of the time loop is thin. She does far more to make their time in the loop more tolerable than he does. She’s also more willing to examine her own misdeeds than he is. She’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, right down to her petite frame and “doe eyes,” and if you couldn’t guess from the fact that she’s into the aimless protagonist who can’t get out of his own way that this script was written by a man, well, it was.

There are some minor technical issues with the way Palm Springs handles its time loop, although that’s true of just about every work of fiction that includes time travel. (I’ll argue forever that Connie Willis does it best in her Oxford series of novels and stories, because she makes time travel itself extremely difficult and limited in scope.) The script is so concerned with getting its two protagonists out of the loop that it sort of forgets everyone else involved, which is understandable Sarah’s secret is left unresolved in the end, even though it affects more characters than just her and Nyles, and, if you’ve seen the movie already, I’d love to know what you thought of Sarah’s grandmother’s last comment to her near the end of the film. But ultimately, it was the unconvincing nature of Sarah’s interest in Nyles that brought Palm Springs down from great to merely good – still very funny, and sometimes thoughtful, just not entirely plausible form any perspective other than Nyles’.

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→ August 18, 2020
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She Dies Tomorrow.

She Dies Tomorrow is the latest film from actress/director Amy Seimetz, her first since 2012’s Sun Don’t Shine, both of which she also wrote. It’s a strange, subtle psychological thriller that doesn’t quite stick its landing but still gives the viewer plenty to ponder beyond the strange behavior on the screen.

The protagonist Amy (Kate Lyn Shiel) wakes up at the start of the film and realizes that she is going to die tomorrow, a fact she repeats regularly through the rest of the film, and she drops steeply into malaise, which scares her friend Jane (Jane Adams), who then breaks into Amy’s house to try to save her. Unfortunately, whatever has convinced Amy that she’s at death’s door is contagious, and Jane begins to say that she is going to die tomorrow, exchanging her fairly cheerful demeanor for a flat affect, eventually leaving her house in her pajamas to go to her brother and sister-in-law’s small cocktail party. She’s not exactly a hit there, telling everyone she’s going to die tomorrow, but when she leaves everyone else who was there has caught the bug too. Each of them devolves in their own way, and the film is deliberately ambiguous about some of what happens, but it doesn’t really go well for anybody.

She Dies Tomorrow is the slowest of burns; there are long passages where it seems like nothing is happening, such as when Amy plays the same classical piece four times in a row without any other action on the screen. It’s dark, but also often quite funny, as in the bizarre dolphin discussion at the cocktail party, or Jane’s reaction when the lights go out, or, depending on your perspective, in Amy’s obsession with having her skin made into leather goods after she dies. But the plot itself is short – not thin, but brief, with the spread of this fear-virus just about the only real thing that happens before the last few scenes. (There’s one brief bit of violence, but it’s off screen, and I think the script leaves it unclear who actually perpetrated it.)

The point of this film isn’t what happens, however, but how the characters react to this intense conviction that their deaths are imminent. Most tumble quickly into a “nothing matters” reaction, giving the entire movie a Camus/Sartre sort of atmosphere, although Jane’s reaction is a more intriguing combination of numbness and hilarity (which is why Adams is the real star of the movie, even if she’s not the one on the poster). Amy decides to joylessly try some dangerous activities, and eventually goes back to the vacation home she’d visited with her then-boyfriend, who may be the person who gave her this contagion. Jane’s brother and sister-in-law understand she gave them the pathogen, and believe she also gave it to their daughter, and discuss this with absurdist nonchalance, even as they consider whether to seek some sort of revenge. Jane eventually wanders into a house occupied by two women who say they also have the fear-virus, and who are confronting their imminent demise with thoughts of what they’ll miss about life, even without really considering whether there would be any ‘them’ to miss it. Jane’s response is to ask to swim in their pool, which produces a tragicomic scene as she does so while the two women sit outside and talk, apparently oblivious to and unperturbed by their visitor.

The ending of She Dies Tomorrow contributes to this terse script’s ambiguity, as we see Amy waking up on the rocks by the sea in a dress, and it seems like at least some of what came before this might have been a dream, which is extremely unsatisfying when it comes to plot; if you’re going to do that, just lean into it and put Bobby Ewing in the shower. The film works much better instead if you view it as an interpolation on several responses we might have to realizations of our own mortality and the finite nature of our lives, to how we might react if the plans we’ve made for the future turn to dust before an empty hourglass. She Dies Tomorrow doesn’t judge its characters or advise us on how to cope with the calamity of so long a life when it may be cut short at any moment. It’s as terrifying as any stock serial killer wearing a mask and wielding a weapon.

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→ August 10, 2020
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The True History of the Kelly Gang (film).

I enjoyed Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang when I read it ten years ago, but the new film adaptation of the book, released briefly to theaters this spring by IFC Films (now available via amazon), is a huge disappointment. It bears little resemblance to the book, revels in pointless violence, and makes use of some confusing camera tricks that left me with the impression that the filmmakers were more impressed by their technical ideas than they were concerned with making the film comprehensible.

Ned Kelly is a real historical figure, a bushranger and outlaw in 1800s Australia who has become a sort of Robin Hood-style folk hero in the century-plus since his capture and execution. He was born to an Irishman who was forcibly transported to Australia as a convict, and fell in with horse thieves before a violent confrontation at his family house with a Constable named Fitzpatrick led to Ned shooting the Constable and taking flight. He stayed on the run for two years with a ‘gang’ of fellow outlaws, gaining sympathizers across the continent due to antipathy towards the English or distrust of the corrupt colonial police, before he was caught and arrested in a shootout and conflagration that led to the death of Ned’s brother, several hostages, and a 13-year-old boy. Ned was tried and hanged for the murder of one of the officers who had been hunting for him, whom Kelly and his comrades ambushed at Stringybark Creek.

Carey’s novel follows the true story of Ned Kelly fairly closely, at least at the level of macro events, but this film goes its own way, inventing new events out of whole cloth, often to try to amp up the violence or depravity of the story. More than half of its two hours pass before Kelly (played by George Mackay) goes on the run, which happens earlier in the book and opens the door to most of the action in the story. The film dwells too long on Kelly’s upbringing, overdramatizing his tutelage under the bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe), then dropping the latter with a one-sentence narration, and jumping ahead in time to show Ned getting out of jail for a crime he committed under Harry’s direction. There’s a lot of underexplanation in this film, and knowing the book or the real story of Ned Kelly isn’t a lot of help because the script deviates so far from both.

The movie has Dan Kelly, Ned’s brother, and his fellow horse-thief Steve wearing fancy dresses on their escapades, a disguise that Ned adopts as well for his gang – something that appears to be pure invention on the part of the screenwriters. The film also implies multiple times that Ned and his friend Joe Byrne were lovers, which doesn’t seem to derive from any historical evidence at all. There’s also a brothel where Ned first meets Fitzpatrick, who later tries to woo his sister; the wooing is true but the house appears to be a fabrication, one that appears multiple times in the story.

The one shining light in the movie is Nicholas Hoult, who plays Fitzpatrick with a sort of disturbing yet genteel charm, although this again doesn’t appear to match the historical record. The real Alexander Fitzpatrick was only a Constable for three years, was a longtime alcoholic, and had a reputation for arresting and charging men on dubious pretenses – such as spiking Ned Kelly’s drink and then arresting him for drunk and disorderly conduct, a probably true story that would actually have made for a good scene in this film. Hoult plays Fitzpatrick less as a lush and more as a proud yet unscrupulous man, one whom you could understand Ned briefly befriending and young women possibly admiring. You might know Hoult as the boy in About a Boy, but he came to my notice more recently in 2018’s The Favourite, where he played the only male character of any substance in the film, a foppish dandy of sorts whom Hoult played to the hilt.

Mackay, unfortunately, plays Ned as a bestial figure, one devoid of nearly all personality or reason; it’s unclear why anyone would follow this madman, let alone why he’d eventually become a folk hero whose legacy is still debated to this day in Australia. Mackay was very good in 1917 and a pleasant surprise in the uneven Captain Fantastic, but this script did nothing to make use of his talents. Dismissive of its main character’s complexity, obsessed instead with pointlessly graphic violence, and shot in eccentric ways, The True History of the Kelly Gang does a disservice to its protagonist and to the book from which it came.

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→ July 29, 2020
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The Whistlers.

I doubt I would have even bothered looking for The Whistlers, which is free to watch on Hulu, if my friend Tim Grierson hadn’t named it one of his favorite films of 2020 so far. Submitted by Romania for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, The Whistlers missed the shortlist in a very competitive group, and perhaps was too quirky or absurd for the committee (who did nominate The Painted Bird, which you couldn’t pay me to watch given how much I hated the book). It’s a crime drama with a perfectly ridiculous twist that makes it one of the most interesting and unusual films I saw from last year, so even where the plot is a bit off, it still works and kept me engrossed till the end.

The Whistlers takes place in Romania and on La Gomera, one of the smaller islands in the Canaries, jumping back and forth in location and time to follow the main character, Cristi, a Romanian police officer, as tries to free a businessman named Zsolt who has been taken by an organized crime ring based on the island. I was completely unaware of this before watching The Whistlers, La Gomera has a whistling language called Silbo Gomero that has been used for centuries to communicate across the island’s valleys. (You can read more about it at UNESCO’s page, commemorating its inclusion on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.) To evade detection by foreign police officers, Cristi learns the whistling language, with comic misfires along the way, using it to talk to the various thugs with whom he’s working, along with the femme fatale Gilda, who is working with the criminals but also has her own agenda.

Cristi’s bosses suspect him of criminal involvement and have him under what appears to be nonstop surveillance, including bugging his apartment, which leads to all sorts of subterfuge, not least of which is Gilda pretending to be a sex worker, with Cristi a regular client, to fool the cameras. Of course, Cristi is hardly the only corrupt cop – one theme throughout every Romanian-language film I’ve seen is that pretty much everyone is corrupt – and it’s not really clear how effective their cover story is, especially given one detail towards the end of the film that was the only element I found hard to accept as plausible.

The Whistlers has a very neo-noir feel even with the comedic elements, thanks to a short list of named characters and a plot that has just about everyone in the story working multiple angles, including Cristi himself, reminiscent of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang orsome of the Coen Brothers’ work. The script plays the comedy very straight, respecting the whistling language even as Cristi looks utterly ridiculous trying to reproduce the sounds required for it, while also hiding enough of the byzantine machinations of all of the major characters to make the film’s resolution as suspenseful as you’d demand from a classic noir film.

Writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu is apparently better known for dramatic films, including Police, Adjective (which also stars Vlad Ivanov, who plays Cristi), so this script was a new turn for him, and his ability to write dark comedy is quite promising – and a welcome shift from the grim reputation of Romanian films. It also adheres to the spirit of traditional noir stories in that the actual crime at the heart of the plot, the theft of several million leus stuffed into a couple of mattresses, isn’t actually all that important to the film as a whole. This is about the interactions between the characters, with levity from Cristi’s difficulty mastering the whistling language, with an ending that ties the remaining threads together in clever, cohesive fashion.

Because The Whistlers was submitted and eligible for this year’s Oscars, I’ve included it as a 2019 film and added it to my ranking of all films from 2019 that I’ve seen.

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→ July 24, 2020
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The Old Guard.

The Old Guard, now available on Netflix, is an extremely competent action flick that checks just about all of the necessary boxes, with a mostly credible story and some solid character development for its two leads, played by Charlize Theron and Kiki Layne. It’s also a superhero story that has to fit some of the conventions of that particular subgenre, and has some regrettable song choices that often detract from what’s happening on screen, but the two lead actresses are so good, and Theron especially has some incredible fight sequences, that it managed to be better than I’d expect from this sort of film.

Theron plays Andy, the leader of a group of four mercenaries who, we learn very early in the film, can’t die – or, more precisely, don’t stay dead for more than a few seconds. Their bodies heal quickly, even ejecting bullets from their skin, so while our heroes do feel pain, they’re impossible to kill, and have dedicated their long existences to doing good in the world. They’re hired by an ex-CIA man to go rescue a group of kidnapped schoolchildren in South Sudan, but that mission goes awry, leading them to try to figure out who was behind the failure. Around the same time, a new immortal, Nile (Layne), appears to the four heroes in their dreams, so Andy goes on a separate mission to take Nile into their fold, knowing that she can’t continue to live in the human world when she can’t die or even age normally.

There’s a villain, of course, a pharma CEO who is rather one-note as a character and is played perfectly by Harry Melling; if his name isn’t familiar, I won’t spoil why, because the moment when you figure out where you’ve seen him before is pretty incredible. He wants the immortals’ DNA because he sees a way to save humanity, and to turn a tiny little profit too, of course, but while his words seem to favor the former, his actions entirely point to the latter, and he ends up a stock Big Pharma/evil scientist character – as does Anamaria Marinca, who won wide acclaim for her leading role in the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, but is wasted here as Melling’s lead scientist. The antagonists’ entire argument is that the immortals have an obligation to share their gift, which is presumed to reside in their genes, with the rest of humanity, but that rationale denies the immortals any agency in the decision, and ends up reducing them to the status of lab rats in the eyes of the scientists here.

Based on a series of graphic novels by Greg Rucka, who also wrote the screenplay, The Old Guard feels like an attempt to start up a franchise, especially with the way the ending of the film perfectly sets up a sequel – but it’s effective in that attempt. Andy and Booker, the next-oldest of the four superheroes, are well-drawn, distinctive characters, with varying views on the responsibilities that accompany their gift, while Nile gains depth from her struggle to accept her new powers and the imminent loss of her connections to her family. The other two heroes, Joe and Nicky, both needed a bit more to do as well as some more back story, but they’re notable because they’re a couple, apparently the first out gay superheroes in film, and the script plays that fact as totally unremarkable beyond one interaction with a homophobic mercenary.

The history of this crew is that they go around the world saving people who need saving, trying to do some good, but we don’t actually get any of that in the story here, which is a little bit disappointing since the fight scenes are exceptionally well done (especially when Theron is involved). The two subplots are the battle with Melling for their freedom and survival, and the integration of Nile into their group once they make her understand and accept what’s happened to her, neither of which shows us the Old Guard (who never call themselves that) doing the thing they would typically do. Perhaps that will come in the sequel.

The music in this movie doesn’t just suck, although I would argue that most of the songs on the soundtrack are indeed quite bad, but it’s poorly deployed, with electropop songs playing during what should be tense action sequences. This is the kind of movie that would benefit from less music, or no music at all, given how dark some of its themes are and how brutal the violence can be, although the camera seldom lingers luridly on the violence as it does in, say, Deadpool, where the gore is kind of the point. I was far less bothered by the formulaic parts of The Old Guard, which could just be unavoidable in the genre, than by the obtrusive nature of the soundtrack, which often seemed at odds with the movie’s underlying themes about mortality and meaning. It may be a movie about superheroes with impossible powers, but The Old Guard at least tries to be more serious and thoughtful than the standard MCU film, and by and large it succeeds.

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→ July 21, 2020
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Les Misérables (2019).

Les Misérables won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019 and was France’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film this past year, earning one of the five nominations but losing out to eventual Best Picture winner Parasite. The first full-length film directed by Ladj Ly, who was born in Mali and raised in the Montfermeil commune in the eastern Paris suburbs, Les Misérables takes its name from the Victor Hugo novel, but tells a very timely story of police brutality and racial strife that seems like it was made specifically for the current moment both in France and in the United States.

Based loosely on an actual incident of police violence Ly witnessed in that same commune in 2008, Les Misérables takes place over the course of about 36 hours, following three police officers – one, Stéphane, new to the job and to the city – who patrol a specific neighborhood of apartments and shops that are largely populated by immigrants from former French colonies in northern Africa. Both veteran cops, Chris (who is white) and Gwada (who is black and speaks Bambara as well as French), take the approach that they must use force to make the residents ‘respect’ them, with Chris especially willing to profile people, even kids, and rough them up while frisking them without cause, while Gwada often stands by. They’re entwined in the subculture of the neighborhood as well, with rival forces that include the “mayor,” who works with Chris in particular to maintain his local authority, and the Muslim Brotherhood, led by former drug dealer turned imam Salah. When a touring circus of Roma performers threaten the immigrants unless a lion cub stolen from them by one of the children in the neighborhood is returned, the cops’ overbearing tactics leave one child seriously injured and spark a cascade of violence.

Les Misérables is a serious film that balances its multiple themes of police brutality, racism, and xenophobia with a plot that often unfurls like that of an action film. Most of the adult characters have some complexity to them, other than Chris, who is your garden-variety racist white cop like you might find in a less nuanced film. Stéphane has a real arc to his story as he’s confronted with Chris’ increasingly violent and counterproductive tactics and Gwada’s tacit approval despite the latter’s racial and ethnic ties to many of the residents of these apartment buildings, and thus has to choose when to speak or act, finding his voice more as the story progresses and puts him into increasingly more difficult situations. The main child character is Issa, who we’re told is always causing trouble, and who ends up a central character in the trouble that follows – in no small part because the police already know him, and Chris and Gwada seem more than ready to treat him like a dangerous adult rather than a small child who (as we see in an early scene) has no guidance at home.

While this film was made in 2019 and hit amazon prime back in April, watching it right now made it seem like it was written as an argument for community policing. The racism and xenophobia depicted here are nothing new and the script isn’t making any novel points or arguments about them, but the way that Chris and Gwada maintain ‘control’ of this area is extremely damning of what I would think of as the American model of policing. It’s punctuated by their link to this local fixer/boss who calls himself the Mayor, and how they react when they find out they’ve been filmed during one such act of violence against a suspect, and in turn how Stéphane, who isn’t from this geographical area and hasn’t worked as this sort of cop before, reacts when seeing it from an outsider’s view. While the script at least creates some ambiguities around some of the adults in the community, this is a protest against the power given to and wielded by police against underprivileged and mostly powerless communities that lack avenues to fight back through political or legal channels, leaving them little recourse but to respond in kind.

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I went to put Les Misérables on my rankings of 2019 films, only to discover that I didn’t post them back in March/April like I’d planned to do. So while I still have a few stragglers from last year I’d like to see (Monos, Invisible Life), here’s everything I saw from 2019, with links to my writeups, from my favorite to my least favorite:

1. Parasite
2. Knives Out
3. Little Women
4. Uncut Gems
5. Pain and Glory
6. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
7. The Irishman
8. Corpus Christi
9. The Farewell
10. Ford v. Ferrari
11. Les Misérables
12. Monos
13. Hustlers
14. American Factory
15. Wild Rose
16. The Whistlers
17. The Two Popes
18. The Souvenir
19. 1917
20. Toy Story 4
21. Marriage Story
22. High Flying Bird
23. Non-Fiction
24. FYRE
25. Honeyland
26. Bombshell
27. Climax
28. Jojo Rabbit
29. Atlantique
30. Joker
31. Booksmart
32. Judy
33. High Life
34. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
35. The Great Hack
36. Frozen 2

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→ April 14, 2020
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Bombshell.

Bombshell (Apple/Amazon) feels very much like Vice for the #MeToo movement, taking a true and important story – the downfall of Roger Ailes as his decades of sexual harassment and assaults came to light – and trivializing it through an excessively slick, shallow script that is only salvaged by strong lead performances from Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman. I was entertained, as I was by Vice, but I was not informed, and I don’t think the movie did enough to explain how the situation was allowed to persist.

The script has a glib approach where Megyn Kelly (Theron) and Gretchen Carlson (Kidman) often break the fourth wall to tell the viewers background information relevant to the story, such as how Fox News operates behind the scenes or what Ailes’ history was prior to founding Fox News and building it into the country’s biggest cable news network. Bombshell then takes us through three roughly simultaneous storylines, one around each of the three main women in the film: Kelly’s meteoric rise at the network and Donald Trump’s subsequent attacks on her after she challenged him on his history of mistreatment of women; Carlson’s lawsuit against Ailes for sexual harassment, claiming she was demoted from her show for illegal cause; and the fictional Kayla (Margot Robbie), a wide-eyed ingenue who calls herself an “evangelical millennial” and ends up another Ailes victim. The three stories eventually intersect as Kelly and Carlson independently look for other women to speak up against Ailes. (Ailes and Fox settled with Carlson, Fox paid off Ailes’ contract by way of firing him, and Ailes was dead within a year.)

Bombshell looks incredible. Theron is a ridiculous likeness for Kelly between the hairstyling and makeup, for which the movie won its lone Academy Award, and her mimicry of Kelly’s voice and delivery. Kidman’s not quite as dead a ringer for Carlson, but is pretty close. I thought John Lithgow did his best with Ailes, making him into a blustering, lecherous tyrant, although the physical resemblance isn’t there. Nearly every on-air personality at Fox who gets a moment in this film is played by someone who looks just like them, however, which you could view as incredible dedication to verisimilitude, or a big fat missing of the point, that it is story that matters, not imitation.

Theron and Robbie were both nominated for awards, Theron for Best Actress and Robbie for Supporting, but I don’t think either deserved the win and thought Robbie was better in a smaller role Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kayla is written so thinly and Robbie has no room to do anything except show some gross emotions, mostly because she’s a prop for the plot, not an actual person or a fully-developed character – she’s there to give Ailes someone to harass while we watch.

And that’s biggest problem with Bombshell: it’s so concerned with making things look right that it doesn’t bother telling the story behind the story. How Ailes got away with this for nearly twenty years – and probably longer, although the story doesn’t touch anything he did prior to Fox News – is never addressed, nor does the story touch on the toxic corporate culture within Fox News, or why the Murdochs didn’t care until they did care, or, perhaps most interesting of all, why so many women stayed quiet. If anything, the movie blames the victim a bit when Kayla confronts Megyn to ask why she waited ten years to talk about Ailes harassing her. It’s a jarring, wrong note for a movie that seems so eager to tell you it’s right. This story, and these women, deserved a lot better.

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