Beltmann

Tonight my 16-year-old son and I paired David Lowery's The Old Man & the Gun (2018) with Michael Mann's Heat (1995) to create an idiosyncratic double feature about career American thieves. It's both bonkers and edifying to perceive Lowery's microscopic rural charmer--a personal favorite--as a bizarro version of Mann's large-canvas urban thriller. For starters, there's a common theme of how this line of work impacts someone's private life. To imagine further, there's Robert Redford as De Niro, Casey Affleck as Pacino, and Sissy Spacek as Ashley Judd; there's the restroom meeting that echoes the iconic coffee shop scene; and there are cherished sparks between acting legends. There's even tucked-in subtext about Redford's late career that recalls how Heat included subtext about the careers of De Niro and Pacino intersecting at long last.
 

Some viewers will find İlker Çatak's The Teachers' Lounge too far-fetched, too gripping to be believable. After all, this idealistic teacher will navigate an ordinary situation that spirals, with domino logic, into the interrogation of critical pedagogy, deep-seated workplace tension, toxic office politics, weaponized parent groups, accusations of xenophobia and privacy violations, student civil disobedience, physical altercations, district staffing and legal woes, the censorship of student journalism and even a broken copy machine. But as a teacher who has been in the public school trenches--and advised the student newspaper--for more than 25 years, I can vouch for this movie's authenticity. I've witnessed every single thing that happens in this story and then some. Most of all I connected to how Çatak conveys the job's relentless psychological pressure and untallied emotional labor, and also each day's supersonic velocity of micro decisions, each one carrying a new and perhaps unforeseen hazard.

The Teachers' Lounge gets everything right, except, perhaps, the teachers' lounge. These instructors in Germany seem to have downtime during the school day--they are exceptionally available for digressions--while my minute-by-minute reality is so prescribed and breakneck that downtime exists only as a mythical creature. I haven't stepped inside the teachers' lounge in 15 years. What American teacher has time for that?

Matthew Vaughn's Argylle starts with a ridiculous sequence that's excusable because it's pitched as an easy yet winking satire of clunky spy movie cliches ("We're not so different, you and I"). The idea, seemingly, is that Elly Conway is a very bad writer with a devoted following of very bad readers. But then the movie switches to a "real" story that becomes precisely the thing that Vaughn opened by mocking, and it disorients the entire enterprise. Is he taunting his own viewers? Is he interrogating his own showmanship instincts? There's nothing in the movie, however, that suggests any level of self-awareness or self-reflection. It just moves forward, with the cartoonish energy of overly excited sixth graders: "And then wouldn't it be cool if...!"

I have a high tolerance for lightweight absurdities that strive only to entertain--I feel unreasonable loyalty to, say, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Knight and Day and even Undercover Blues, which my wife and I have regularly quoted since 1993--but Argylle's sloppiness really grates. It doesn't take long for it to feel like Vaughn is just making it up as he goes, connective tissue be damned.

The use and abuse of the Beatles' "Now and Then" is cynical, desperate, unforgivable. The mid-credits stinger is also self-serving rubbish. You know what might have been fun, though? If Stanley Tucci had been sitting in that pub and Dennis Quaid showed up looking for "Morty!"

Throughout The Zone of Interest a woman sitting near me eagerly chomped through a bucket of popcorn, and I wanted to lean over and ask, "You were making out during Schindler's List?"
 

My 15-year-old son came along, and our subsequent conversation during the 35-minute car ride home was one of our best movie conversations ever. (And he had the moral wherewithal to intentionally finish his nachos during the trailers!)

Okay, I saw this intensely moving, elegantly crafted movie in the final days of 2023, but I have bonus thoughts about The Iron Claw right now. There's a surface layer about family, masculinity, bodies, and sports that is rather obvious, but then there's the deeper layer that finds much more eloquent things to say about those same things, often expressed solely through meticulous cinematography and resourceful editing. There's something Shakespearean in this telling, which might explain why, two hours after leaving the theater, I was still feeling wrecked.

Semi-spoiler: There seems to be growing consensus that the ending would be stronger if Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron) didn't directly communicate his thoughts about being a brother and if his children didn't expressly endorse his need for catharsis. Basically, the complaint is an argument in favor of more subtlety. That's an argument I'll usually champion, too, but The Iron Claw complicates the attendant assumptions.

Assumption #1: Subtle is always better. But why should subtlety automatically confer special value? Even Welles and Hitchcock understood that sometimes direct pronouncement can carry its own value; many of the most iconic moments in cinema history are iconic precisely because they aim for straightforward impact. Ironically, there's nothing "sophisticated" about a knee-jerk demand for subtlety without exception.

Assumption #2: The ending scene is about Von Erich's sense of loss, which has already been effectively conveyed. My view is that Efron does indeed deliver terrific, subtle work throughout the entire film, but the power of the ending scene is rooted in how Efron injects another unexpected nuance that, ironically, requires direct verbal expression. It's important that Von Erich is speaking to children in that scene. He is striving to articulate complexity in a knowable way, a task that actually requires appreciable sophistication. He is struggling to convert his labyrinthine emotions--the ones making him cry--into something digestible that his children can grasp. As a teacher, I immediately recognized how the scene gets that mental burden right. As a father, though, my heart skipped a beat when the movie got another thing right: What Von Erich says in that scene closely echoes the words I once used to tell my own children about my brother's death. The key takeaway, I think, is that the ending scene isn't primarily about Von Erich's loss and need for catharsis. The main subject of that scene is Von Erich's evolving identity. It's about being a father rather than a brother, and that adds rather than subtracts subtlety.

On 12/16/2023 at 9:25 PM, Tweedling said:

Kidsmoke, Beltmann, Analogman, tongue-tied lightning very cool to see you all here. 

Same to you, Tweedling! Wonderful to see you popping in.

Caught up with The Exorcist: Believer (2023). Perhaps the point is to make us despair. David Gordon Green has now hollowed out two major franchises, this time especially doing Ellen Burstyn dirty. We cast you out, Mr. Green. The power of Chris (MacNeil) compels you!

My last viewing of The Exorcist was in 2000, when I went to a theater to see the recut "Version You've Never Seen," which means I last saw Friedkin's masterpiece right as I was beginning to rearrange my own religious convictions and several years before becoming a father. These days, I'm much more agonized about my children's well-being than about the devil; our family demons are more concrete, related to physical and mental health rather than the imagined perils of the incorporeal world. But confronting those demons can feel just as mysterious and confounding as trying to decode the so-called workings of God.
 

This time around, I'm struck by how my mind has dismantled and reconstructed The Exorcist, finding it as compelling as ever but much less effective as a faith experience and much more effective as a story about frantic parenting. Twenty-three years ago, I connected to Jason Miller's portrait of a man navigating a crisis of faith, but today, I'm most drawn to Ellen Burstyn's scared mother, her helpless, anguished face expressing the kind of fear that runs cold into your soul, the kind that I could not fully comprehend and appreciate until now.
 

After only two fiction features (Adam and now The Blue Caftan), former journalist Maryam Touzani has proven to be a tender observer of how the personal becomes political, so much so that the social themes appear to evaporate before our eyes, leaving behind characters that are simply living their lives in ways that overpower any urge to see them as avatars rather than unique people. In both stories, what matters most is the filigree, the heartrending intimacy between individuals at a specific moment in time.
 

I put this on Facebook after seeing the movie on Saturday, but I'll put it here, too, since it's a topic of conversation:

I've seen Stop Making Sense too many times to count--David Byrne is one of those artists that make me eternally grateful that my brief time on this planet has coincided with their lifespans--but this 40th anniversary restoration, in IMAX and 4K, has made the movie feel bold and fresh all over again. For my money, it's the most intensely pleasurable movie experience of the year. 

Of course the Talking Heads songs are genius--and there's automatic exhilaration in hearing them played LOUD in a movie theater--but what makes Stop Making Sense the greatest concert film ever is the way Byrne and Demme conceived the project as a full-bodied movie. This is not a mere recording of a live event; rather, it is a music story of varied textures and tones presented via artful mise en scène that unites all set design, props, costumes, lighting, positioning, cinematography, and cutting. Watching Stop Making Sense is like attending a rip-roaring live rock show, a joyous act of performance art, and a magical work of cinema all at once.

Sadly, my wife and I were the only ones at today's screening. But that couldn't suppress this movie's sheer exuberance. By the time "Burning Down the House" arrived, we were on our feet, enjoying our own private dance party.

On 9/12/2023 at 8:19 PM, kidsmoke said:

My husband actually knows her dad really well. 

WHAT

8 hours ago, bleedorange said:

Man, it has been a minute, but good to see everyone.

Glad to see you, bleedorange!

I still love this place. Thanks for being a big part of it, TCP!

On 6/7/2023 at 5:25 PM, u2roolz said:

This was quite the film to experience in a theater. I found myself alone in the auditorium and was completely entrenched in the story, even if some of it lost me several times throughout.

When I saw it,  there were only two other people, a couple presumably on a date, in the theater. At the end the guy turned to me and sincerely asked, "What the hell was that?" We laughed, I stayed for the credits, and then ran into the same guy in the bathroom. Upon seeing me, he said, "Seriously, what the HELL was that?!?"

(I liked it a lot.)

The term “documentary” may be insufficient to describe Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves, a listening experiment that incorporates elements of nonfiction, narrative, video art and the kind of essay film for which Chris Marker was known. Most of all, it is an experiential work about sound and the loss of sound. As with Duchamp’s conceptual art, the object we see is rarely the point; for O’Daniel, the sounds embedded inside the images are her main subject. The movie teaches you how to watch and listen as it goes, which is endlessly exciting. Boundaries are also obliterated, including the distinctions between instruments, voices, highway growls, ocean waves, etc. According to The Tuba Thieves, it’s all music. And it’s all cinema.

At the Milwaukee Film Festival, good movies are a dime a dozen. The special movies, though, often expand our notions of what movies can be. This year, The Tuba Thieves radiated such restless curiosity—but so did a frostbitten farce about hundreds of beavers.

No Bears signals how some stories exist in the zone between what’s real and what’s true. In fact, the two best documentaries I saw at the festival transcended the genre’s tired sit-and-get machinery to become something more adventurous.

Constructed largely out of decade-spanning home videos, Sam Now starts with Sam’s mother Jois vanishing without a trace. But the more compelling mystery lies within Sam: How will his mother’s absence affect him? In this three-paneled character study, Sam authentically moves from a carefree 11-year-old to an awkward 17-year-old searching for his mom to a damaged, introspective 36-year-old man. When Jois enters the documentary, she remains an incomprehensible “character” because, the viewer suspects, she is reluctant to present her true self to her family and their camera. Still, the honesty gap between Sam and Jois doesn’t matter very much, because both, in their own way, furnish complex insights about intergenerational trauma.

Apprehension courses equally through No Bears, Jafar Panahi’s fifth clandestine feature since being banned from making films in 2010. It may also be his wisest. Playing a fictionalized version of himself, Panahi appears in the movie as an Iranian filmmaker remotely directing his actors, via subterfuge, while hiding in a rural village. Once again Panahi has made an allegory about imprisonment, but this time the anger and frustration have been absorbed into a larger, more philosophical quest for answers. This is a movie about confinement, both physical and psychological; borders, both real and imagined; and myths, both destructive and enlightening.

Charlotte Le Bon’s Falcon Lake is another Canadian triumph photographed in 4:3 on 16mm that MFF slotted into its Teen Screen division (which was surprisingly excellent this year). It shares with Riceboy Sleeps a natural feel for adolescence, but here the vibe is decidedly more ominous, even when the vacationing central characters, a 14-year-old boy and 16-year-old girl, fumble their way through summer mischief. Punctuated by shivery landscapes, creeping sounds and local rumors of a haunted lake, this coming-of-age story solves a thought experiment: What if Éric Rohmer, the French New Wave poet of youth, leisure and seduction, made a cabin-in-the-woods horror movie?
 

Cinema is at a crossroads—theaters are dying, distribution models have collapsed, digital video has dented the gatekeepers—which means the time is ripe for filmmakers to challenge traditional notions of what movies “ought” to look like. During the festival, for example, I saw nearly a dozen titles presented in the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio (think of the shape of old tube TVs), including The Eight Mountains and Godland, two epics brimming with the kind of breathtaking vistas for which widescreen was invented. As our home televisions get bigger, it’s curious that the movies are deliberately shrinking in a way that was unthinkable even 10 years ago.

So commonplace has the narrower format become that when director Anthony Shim used 4:3 for his Canadian immigration drama Riceboy Sleeps, my mind barely registered the fact. That technical choice, though, was crucial groundwork for what would prove to be, for me, the festival’s most overwhelming third act.

Working from his own memories, Shim observes a Korean mother and her son as they struggle to assimilate to a Vancouver suburb in the 1990s. Riceboy Sleeps sidesteps potential clichés by focusing on the duo’s interior lives, conveying their private earthquakes through layered, mindful details captured on Kodak’s sensitive 16mm film. With idiosyncratic cutting, long takes and camera movements that often track, circle and pause with ethereal grace, the movie’s visual architecture has the net effect of drawing viewers closer. This adds epic emotional intensity to a story that is otherwise small in scope. The frame’s cage-like dimensions accentuate the characters’ sense of claustrophobia, but when Shim deploys a late pivot to the expansive 16:9 format, it’s not just a reprieve. It’s also a lush, exhilarating affirmation of identity, family and home.

“Wow,” said Matt Mueller, culture editor for OnMilwaukee. “Wow,” I replied, as we tried to process the movie on the sidewalk outside the Avalon Theater on South Kinnickinnic Avenue. There may be no greater testament to the power of Riceboy Sleeps than how it wrecked and rendered speechless two guys who are, um, professionally verbose.
 

Never read your reviews, goes the old adage.

But maybe it’s not so easy for an actor to ignore a bad notice while being heckled by his own director during their movie’s hometown premiere.

“Boo!,” bellowed Mike Cheslik from the right aisle of the Oriental Theatre’s main auditorium, which was packed April 28 for the Milwaukee Film Festival debut of Hundreds of Beavers, a comedy made by a team with local roots. Cheslik’s jeers were aimed at lead performer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, and frankly, Tews had it coming. After all, in the middle of the screening the actor had climbed onto the stage, pointed at his own projected, jumbo-sized face and squealed, “It’s me!”

That anarchic routine was all part of the show, of course. Cheslik and Tews are born entertainers—they were also behind 2018’s cult favorite Lake Michigan Monster—and on this night their penchant for willful excess was apparent from the get-go. Filmgoers were greeted on the sidewalk by performers costumed as wolves and rabbits and Cheslik’s over-the-top introduction included an impromptu chant (“100 more years!”) beseeching the film gods to preserve the Oriental, a movie palace built in 1927, for another century. By the time the post-film Q&A devolved into a WWE-style brawl, the audience was primed to witness Tews splintering a wooden chair against an attacker dressed in a full-body beaver outfit.

While the evening blissfully channeled the showman instincts of William Castle, what happened on screen was closer in spirit to Chuck Jones. Set in a snowy, 19th-century forest, Hundreds of Beavers is a live-action cartoon starring Tews as a goofy fur trapper who falls for a merchant’s daughter and then must go to war against a beaver colony with grand plans for world domination. What if Elmer Fudd was humanity’s only hope? That madcap premise unfolds in a black-and-white, dialogue-free slapstick universe marked by artificial effects, copious green screens and scores of animals that are obviously just people wearing Halloween costumes. By converting his limited resources into a virtue, Cheslik has crafted an alternative visual style that plays like a wholly original, charming riposte to mainstream orthodoxy.

In other words, Hundreds of Beavers is both old-timey and forward-looking. The movie, which mines silent classics for inspiration and steals directly from Chaplin, certainly knows the past. My favorite homage comes courtesy of Doug Mancheski, who, as the crusty merchant, delivers an exaggerated performance that evokes James Finlayson, Hollywood’s mustachioed comic foil to Laurel and Hardy. But the vintage allusions are paired with ultramodern gags, including a sudden, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it recreation of the “Nodding Guy” Internet meme that doubled me over. Not everything in Hundreds of Beavers works—and it’s at least 15 minutes too long—but even in its slippery patches, the movie seems to tighten its raccoon-skin cap and continue trudging toward a new, weirder frontier.

The 15-day Milwaukee Film Film Festival ended Thursday, May 4 (although some virtual options continued through Sunday). I managed to see 58 feature films and 64 shorts, all while teaching fulltime. I'm feeling half-dead, but exhilarated, too. I'm glad it's over and sad it's over.

Boss_Tweedy, you might be interested to hear that the fest's centerpiece selection was Little Richard: I Am Everything. The post-film Q&A with director Lisa Cortes was a blast.

As always, I wrote about the festival for three area newspapers and over the next few days I'll probably re-post some of those thoughts here, too. I'm eager to recommend some cool stuff!

I pretty much never stopped laughing, because there's a peculiar tension between this movie's efforts to impeccably and affectionately revive the '90s teen movie and its simultaneous interrogation of those tropes. Do Revenge doesn't stick the landing, but otherwise I kind of had a blast. Kudos to the music department. Gen Z, thank your forebears.

The documentary Aftershock addresses an important subject--the maternal health crisis affecting Black and Brown pregnancies--and it contains compelling portraits of lived experiences. Still, it spends nearly 90 minutes to deliver stories and data that could have been learned in five minutes were this instead a well-researched and well-written article published in, say, The Atlantic. The topic deserves a deeper, less boilerplate exploration, or at least a more cinematic approach. I don't want to gripe too much, because Aftershock is a worthwhile movie, in its relentlessly conventional way. But I'm afraid I've simply grown allergic to this kind of nonfiction activism.
 

Is it hyperbole to compare to Buster Keaton the celebrated scene in Yes, Madam! where goofy criminal Tsui Hark evades an assassin within the confines of his tiny, jerry-rigged apartment? Well, the scene is fast enough and clever enough that I insisted my son Keaton take a look. (Then I watched it a third time, with my wife.)

I watched both Royal Warriors (1986) and Yes Madam! (1985), along with The Stunt Woman (1996), on the Criterion Channel, as part of an eight-film curated collection called "Michelle Yeoh Kicks Ass." (I had previously seen the other five titles, and those are worth checking out, too!)

Royal Warriors is the kind of '80s Hong Kong actioner where somebody said, "Hey, let's jump this car over two cars for real!" and then somebody said, "Yeah, and then let's do it again, but with a bus!"