The Whole Lot

Constraint can be an artists’ best friend.  Without the wherewithal for swooping images or lush backdrops the filmmaker is ideally forced into the heart of his piece, scything through obscuring sound design or camera movement to emerge with a treasure of real truth in his or her hands.  Forced to discover what their film is really about and present it without trappings it is made irresistible or dies. 

In practice it dies more often than not.  Shorn of their coverings a lot of decent movies are revealed to be hollow in the center.   Even more mundane or silly ideas are gussied up to a level of respectability, their art coming entirely from their craft because there’s not much else to them.

On the surface Connor Rickman’s The Whole Lot is the classic example of the form, reducing itself to just a handful of cast members and a single location to get the most from its limited resources, but also discovering what those limitations truly mean.  Dialogue heavy and character rich, Matthew Ivan Bennett’s screenplay could easily be mistaken for a stage adaptation rather than the original story it is.  A single, nearly real-time conversation between Della (McLoney), her husband Eli (Webb) and estranged brother Jamie (Kramer) over the disposition of their late fathers collection of classic cars unravels into a litany of recrimination and secrets The Whole Lot is a unity of time, place and action that would have made the Greeks stand up in admiration.

Stuck as they are in the garage until an agreement can be made about who gets which vehicles – Della and Eli seek to sell the entire collection to fund their entrepreneurial pursuits while the will restricts Jamie, who actually worked on the cars, to just one vehicle for fear he will fritter it away on drink and drugs – the film itself never comes off as trapped.  It speaks to the strength of Bennett’s screenplay and the surety of Rickman’s direction that The Whole Lot never seems slow or ungainly even as it revolves its small cast around into distinct two-character scenes that scratch away at the strange and strained relationships between the trio.  Why does Jamie dislike Eli and what is behind his drinking?  How has the SIDs death of Della and Eli’s son strained their marriage and why is Eli pushing so hard to sell the cars?  Why does Della continually give in to Jamie and is increasing demands even as she sees his instinct for self-destruction take hold of him?

Like a minuature Béla Tarr, Rickman eschews even quick cuts to add speed and drama, relying on long takes and the dance of the actors between their words to keep our attention.  A quick glance at the frozen mountains of Colorado, in its way as cold and apocalyptic as Tarr’s dusky, rainy Hungary, is nearly the only time the outside world makes an appearance before the trio disappears into the incubator of the garage preparing for some new version of themselves to be born.  As far as squeezing blood from a stone goes, the Greeks had it right about these constraints – with nowhere to go and nothing to do humans pick at their scabs until they spring forth again.  And there’s nothing to do in the garage but dig.

The downside to all that digging is it is terribly easy to go too far and wind up in a whole too deep to get out of.  Even at a scant 75 minutes The Whole Lot rips through its initial conflict and goes searching for more and more dirt under the trio’s fingernails.  As more and more secrets come to the surface Rickman and Bennett seem to wager among themselves how far their transgressions and forgetting these games of chicken usually have no winner.  The line between self-realization and self-destruction is made purposefully thin, the only chord binding these three people together being their shared difficulty in avoiding their own worst impulses.

It’s an engrossing but difficult slog to come out the other side and find the best option might be getting away from everyone you’ve spent your life with, a decision Rickman ultimately refuses to finalize.  Sometimes constraints aren’t freeing, they’re disabling and The Whole Lot wavers between those realities, never quite falling but not flying off in success either.

By Night’s End

Quiet, tense and occasionally energetic, By Night’s End is an excellent advocation for the adage that ‘it’s the singer, not the song.’  Explained at its most basic level – a couple going through a rough patch fight off a home invasion that tests their relationship – sounds similar enough to other locked door thrillers it would be easy to dash off as a low rent copy.  Instead, Walker Whited’s meditation on the genre finds grace in-between the notes, focusing on execution and ignoring the expensive trap of the high concept.

With the focus of a contained stage drama, By Night’s End never leaves the Heather (Rose) or Mark’s (Yue) steading which is already housing the grief of their recently deceased daughter and increasingly stressful realizations of potential fraud that Heather is been caught in the middle of at work.  When a strange man (Aviles) comes prowling around the house at night it becomes clear it’s also hiding some strange treasure secreted by the homes’ original owner, enough to let the couple consummate their growing dream of just escaping their current circumstance and flee to a new life elsewhere, but also enough to kill for.

As the prowlers partners descend on the house and start demanding the treasures return, the screenplay by White and Sean McCane turns quickly to the tried and true elements of the locked room thriller.  New dangers (attempts at forced entry through different parts of the home, the arrival of the police responding to the sound of gunfire) spring up periodically before resolving into quiet moments where Mark and Heather finally face the real trauma underlying their recent tension that must be resolved if they’re to have any hope of facing the invaders as a unit.

The familiar mise en scene is not a negative, it’s an essential part of the package.  The focus is not so much what Heather and Mark must face as it how Rose and Yue will bring it life, with spare dialogue and raw emotions periodically interrupted by Milligan’s over-the-top villain screeching new demands.  Whited makes the most of what he has as well and all to the point of his plot; without the resources to light an entire neighborhood or fill it with people he has instead cut it off from the world.  Like the farm in “It’s A Good Life” tormented by Bill Mumy, Heather and Mark’s home may as well exist in its own dimension, cut off from all life around it, the arrival of Moody and his minions the only proof that anything exists other than themselves and their pain.

Not coincidentally it’s only then that Heather and Mark start to come to life and inhabit their external personas again, and Whited makes one of his few changes to the formula in gender flipping the standard roles – former Marine Heather is the physical protector who engages any danger that makes its way in while Mark wilts under the pressure and begins looking for easy ways out of their predicament.  It’s Mark who, when it becomes clear the original prowler was looking for something, suggests waiting to call the police and find the hidden treasure themselves and tries to negotiate a way out of the mess when more villains arrive.  It’s also Mark, however, who keeps trying to open up the wounds of their lost daughter to try and heal while Heather continually shuts down any emotional response, preferring physical fighting and pain to the spiritual version.

It’s a role that provides a lot for Rose who, by design or not, becomes the focus of any scene she is in as she switches rapidly between subtle internal conflict and setting booby traps or battering invaders with parts of her bathroom.  It’s hard for her relationship with Yue to match that level of engagement, she ultimately has for more chemistry and far more in common with Milligan’s Moody who struts back continually around the house yelling out inducements for the couple to surrender.

It’s as pared down as thriller is going to get, removing every piece of garnish or flash to leave only its core story with nothing to distract from it.  Rather than run away from the tropes that have made these kinds of things work in the past By Night’s End flies directly for them, reminding that repetition isn’t inherently bad and the new isn’t inherently good, it’s ultimately what the filmmaker makes from them.  Walker Whited has made that song his own; that’s the sign of a real artist.

Stalker

Before we act there are a multitude of options and outcomes before us, a multiverse of possibility.  The moment we decide those doors begin to close and what are left becomes reality.  The moment of action is the end of the future.  As with life so is film; the more takes on a given idea we see the fewer options there are for new ways to approach material.  Eventually all that is left is repeating what has come before and hope the execution is vibrant enough to override the feeling of déjà vu; or delve deeper and deeper into the farthest reaches of believability and beyond in the quest for a new perspective. 

Tyler Savage’s Stalker (from a script by Savage and Dash Hawkins) has not gone so far down the rabbit hole that we can’t tell where it originated or what its goal was.  Like all good persecution thrillers it plays on the natural paranoia and feelings of persecution everyone considers at some point or another, that sense that someone is out to get you and it’s not your fault.  Savage’s take is intentionally and caustically aggravating as the best in the genre manage.  It’s in the rationale and catharsis that it takes radical swings that cost more than they are worth. 

It’s all innocent enough at first, following the arrival of recent LA transplant Andy (Van Horn), his surprising and fruitful encounter with a young woman at a bar (Ko) – fruitful enough that he needs to call a ride share driver (Joplin) to take her home.  Andy remains a surprising innocent to the point where no tinges of concern hit him when the driver of the night before, Roger, appears the next day and offers the opportunity of some quick friendship in the still strange city.  Andy is fleeing problems of his own, a failed relationship and all the psychic trauma attached to that, and any new friendship is like water to a thirsty man so he naturally grabs hold of it. 

The two options for these kinds of films is for the victim to be a jerk who needs his comeuppance to learn from his missteps, or a complete innocent increasingly befuddled by his increasing victimization.  Stalker is very much from the school of the later.  Andy is just a normal guy, he wants friends and camaraderie but he also wants love and a relationship and when forced to choose – when Roger becomes increasingly clingy to the point of interrupting Andy’s time with Sam – he makes the choice most would make.  His crime is being a normal person and Stalker’s pleasures are the increasing price he must pay for being a normal person.  Be paranoid and slow to offer trust, the film tells us. 

It’s too late for Andy, however.  He has transgressed and now his life must fall apart as his nemesis, who despite working primarily as a ride share driver has the skullduggery aptitude of a trained intelligence officer. Roger effortlessly hacks into Andy’s computer and phone, breaks into his apartment to plant hidden cameras and soon remotely takes control of his life in order to sabotage his job, his relationships and ultimately his persona in a cathartic revenge quest for Andy’s slight.

How he can do this and why he isn’t doing anything more with his life is only slightly explained, but the sleight-of-hand is almost worth it as well as it allows Andy to be fleetingly swatted by the unfeeling humans Andy probably should have been more like if he wanted to share their immunity to universal neglect.  When a video of his private moments is sent to Andy’s employer all of his efforts to explain his predicament fall upon a wall of human apathy and many of Stalker’s best moments.  Whether watching his job being taken by a polite young woman suddenly forced to hear the gory details of he has been accused of or attempting to explain his innocence to police officers who would rather bet on his crime than listen to his pleas the sudden desire to join in with Roger and his ilk is palpable.  It’s fun watching Andy suffer!

But to what end?  The fun is ultimately in the release of comeuppance on the persecutor.  Without that all that’s left is nihilism.  That may not have been Savage’s goal but as his alternatives dwindle and the search for a ‘new perspective’ takes hold the options for a workable outcome also fall apart.  Rather than turn the tables on his tormentor Andy instead finds himself trapped in warehouse with Sam and forced to make his former choice – the woman or the ‘friend’ – again with their lives in the balance.  No matter what choice he makes surprise is in store but at that point surprise is fleeting and temporary and the taste it leaves behind is never inviting.

Facing Nolan

What is it that makes a legend?  Is it the records?  The character of the player?  The impact on the nature of the game?  Everyone has a different definition and every take focuses on a different aspect.  But that’s just the why, why they were different, why they mattered.  We mostly all agree that a legend was a legend when we see them.  And we mostly all agree that Nolan Ryan was a legend.  Maybe not the greatest pitcher of all time, for all that the records say, but certainly worthy of discussion in any history of baseball.  As director Bradley Jackson notes in his overview of Ryan’s life and career, Facing Nolan, “only 1% of professional baseball players ever make it to the Hall of Fame” and that 1% matters.

More importantly, and more telling about Ryan himself, is the sheer number of fellow Hall of Famers willing to tell their own stories about Ryan and the qualities he brought to the game:  Craig Biggio, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Pete Rose.  From their shared perspective they remind what made Ryan great and what his heyday – nearly 50 years gone now – was like.  In they process they, and Nolan, personify the transformation of baseball in the latter half of the 20th century as Nolan goes from having to have summer job as an insurance salesman in the off season in his first years in the majors, to singing one of the first $1 million dollar contracts in the free agency period.

Facing Nolan tends to be very numbers oriented that way, focusing heavily on Ryan’s records and other noteworthy statistics; his 5,714 strike outs (the most ever), his 7 no-hitters (the most ever) his 51 baseball records (the most ever), the 0 Cy Young Awards.  There are periods where it can and does easily devolve into hagiography and recitation, like the expansion of a baseball card, with occasional comments from colleagues.  It’s when it moves away from just the numbers and into real insight about Ryan himself (whether from himself or others) that Ryan the man takes shape, particularly when not everything is glowing.  So far now from his prime it can be hard to look at the avuncular Ryan and see the hard-charging, aggressive pitcher who would intentionally hit batters to build fear of himself, or the ruthless competitor who hated to leave a game even after being smashed in the face by a line drive.  There’s not much comparison to the way the game is played today (or the environment in which it exists), just good-natured acceptance that this was what you did and what you put up with when you played professional sports at a high level.

As interesting as it is to view Ryan through the eyes of his peers and the lens of history, the real insight comes from his family’s view of his career, particularly his wife Ruth who followed through his career with an eye towards both practicality and career that Ryan himself sometimes lacked.  When he is locked out of winning a Cy Young award in his best season, Ryan takes it in easy stride claiming it doesn’t matter but Ruth, with one eye on the future, knows better.  She gives the clearest view of the man himself and of a reality beyond just facts and numbers; it’s easy to feel a documentary focused entirely on Ryan’s homelife and the strain it went through along his career would have been more illuminating.  As it is major events such as his sons near-fatal accident as a child are glossed over as Facing Nolan rushes to important milestones like the all-time strike-out record.

For whatever it misses out on, Facing Nolan is a fascinating record of a time in baseball and America that is easy to forget, of the people who made it up and of how we have all changed during that time.  More than that, it is a record of greatness while everyone who witnessed it is still around to talk about it and remind us how fleeting these things really are.

7.5/10 stars. Directed by Bradley Jackson. Featuring Nolan Ryan, Ruth Holdorff, Reid Ryan, President George W. Bush, Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez, Randy Johnson, Rod Carew, Dave Winfield, Craig Biggio, George Brett, Roger Clemens and Pete Rose.

Movie Money Confidential

No two films, not even sequels, are really alike and real comparison between them is almost impossible.  That’s at least in part because any the unique and irreplicable path they each take to the big screen.  The one element which does always repeat, however, is how difficult that journey is.  Scratch any given film and find a story of years of development hell, of quests for funds, of doors slammed and no’s given.  No one ever seems to believe in a film (until they do) and the path to getting them financed and made is a treacherous as any adventure film.

No part of the filmmaking process -- not the ephemeral inspiration behind stories, not the idiosyncratic nature of the acting process – is as important and shrouded in mystery as the financing that pays for them.  Intrinsically investments, films are products that can be designed to certain market needs but also artistic creations that may or may not be for many people with no ability to realistically forecast what they will do.  Facing that sort of risk why on earth would anyone ever put money into the creation of one?  At least beyond getting the opportunity to say they are a film producer.  No one seems to know and those who do know don’t say much least their own options become swarmed with other needy filmmakers and their projects.

Into that comes Rick Pamplin’s deep dive into film finance and production which is both timely and interesting but more importantly proof that within the world of movie making “no one really knows anything.”  Based on long-time film finance executive Louise Levison’s own book on film finance, Movie Money Confidential reduces the arcane elements behind funding a new creation to straight forward pieces starting with Levison’s own work creating the business plan and arranging financing for the popular horror film The Blair Witch Projects.  Breaking apart what a film business plan needs (and realistically how high budgets can go) and how much of it is currently available, Movie Money explains the essential piece of the most mysterious part of film finance … asking strangers to just give you money.

The portions coming from the words of Levison herself are the reason to watch Movie Money as she explains her view of raising film budgets without mystery or metaphor.  A film entirely of Levison’s views would be both more interesting (and probably shorter) than Movie Money but the bit available in the film, almost entirely in the opening minutes, are worth the price of admission.  Everything after that is a confused mishmash of conflicting advice – have a business plan, don’t have a business plan, cut to the chase, do a song and dance – which if nothing else prepares the potential film producer for how chaotic the reality of raising financing will be and that there is no easy way to do it.  The only other consistent piece of information from everyone from actress Salma Hayek to local Floridian producers is how painful raising funds is and the need to just gut it out.

Hayek’s appearance is one of the interesting extra elements added to the straightforward view on film financing (which at its core reduces to “ask everyone you know for money and be prepared for a lot of no’s”) which eventually reduces to a lot of philosophizing from director Pamplin and his friends and colleagues.  The includes the last recorded interview with Burt Reynolds, who hosted an annual film symposium with students in Florida, and a particularly strange digression around the ethics of including commercials within a film in order to fund a film which could add to the full subject Pamplin is investigating but instead frequently becomes a commercial for its interviewees instead.

That said, there is a lot of truly interesting and useful information about film financing within Movie Money, mostly within the first thirty minutes.  It takes some doing to fish it all out and could use some more expansion but even what is there is must viewing for anyone interested in making their own film one day or just how the films that do get made get made.  Make time to see it.

Three Eras

Every filmmaking career has to start somewhere and usually in a fight against low budgets, tight timelines and a general lack of resources.  At best its where their talent makes itself known, breaking through all barriers the way Kevin Smith’s Clerks turned its single location and limited cast into an asset to focus a laser on his ear for dialogue and Darren Aranofsky proved his visual acuity in Pi. It also shows where limitations lie and whether or not a filmmaker needs more seasoning for their own breakthrough.

Three Eras has the double whammy of attempting to be some sort of spiritual successor to Buster Keaton’s seminal masterpiece, casting his particular brand of comedic genius across three different stories accentuating humanities weaknesses which keep repeating themselves until they don’t.  Mark & Jay Meyers are not geniuses; which is not a knock, by definition there aren’t many of them.  But, intentional or otherwise, following in the fooststeps of genius invites comparison.

Even if that weren’t the case, Era’s limitations would be obvious immediately from its small cast, handful of locations and reliance on repetition.  Each eras’ man has one defining feature repeated ad nauseam just to make sure it sinks in, be it pre-historic real estate developer or western entrepreneur/teacher, and the same handful of townsfolk to stymie them.  It takes a film already limited in options and limits it in scope.

This was not a problem for the original version which had its own limit to fight against – a lack of sound – but turned that limit into a strength (the sign of real skill).  Without needing to bother with dialogue, Keaton gave up on deep investigation of his theme in lieu of generalization using the conceit to set up his patented physical comedy and a light dusting of gentle humanity.

The Meyers version is much more specifically focused on the ills of capitalism and how greed for wealth and possessions leads men to generally immoral behavior.  And not just specifically but overtly focused, cutting periodically to a bearded God figure who explains the immorality of human behavior and what it leads to in case there is any confusion about what is happening.  This is not the best setup for lighthearted storytelling but far too short for a heavier dramatic bent.  But a its anthology format and brief interludes do not offer the time or focus needed to build a deeper tone or fid the complexity in its tone.  It also doesn’t do much for comedy which wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t occasionally trying to be funny.

There are definitely good ideas in Three Eras and there are worse sins in filmmaking than taking inspiration from an old master.  But it needs more than inspiration, it needs understanding.  These kinds of early films need to hide their weaknesses and accentuate their strengths at a core conceptual level because there is no production razzle dazzle to take up that slack.  That’s the kind of thing that can only be learned with experience and it will be interesting to see where the Meyers go from there but right now everything is undercooked.

Lotawana

Is it better to live within the strictures of society, and the compromises and responsibilities that entails, or to turn your back and chart your own way?  It’s an argument that’s probably as old as the Sumeran tribes which first gave up nomadic wandering for cities and written language.  It also has no answer, at least not within art and culture which tends to simplifying and vilifying whatever the antithetical viewpoint may be.  Societal living is soul killing, ignoring it is only a matter of will that most don’t have the courage for, and on and on and on.  The reductive nature of film, and its tilt towards surface level readings, usually makes it an unlikely vehicle for a serious thematic approach (see Into the Wild, Fight Club and others), giving undue support to the individualistic option even when that’s not the point of the film.  That’s why something like Trevor Hawkins’ Lotawana is so refreshing.

Set mostly on the waters of Missouri’s Lake Lotawana, it follows young Forrest, a carefree twenty-something who has given up his job and worldly possessions to live carefree on a boat on the lake living off what he can find.  That ends when he finds Australian transplant Everly and their attempt to share his existence ends in a run into the walls of reality when Everly discovers she is pregnant.  Their attempt to thread the needle between a life on Walden and the requirements of raising a child turn their idyllic life sidewise and soon they are forced to live off what they can take rather than what they can find.

That needle threading isn’t just for Forrest and Everly.  Writer-director-cinematographr-everything elser Trevor Hawkins walks the same tightrope for the entire of Lotawana’s run time, trying desperately to maintain their wide-eyed innocence and playfulness regardless of what they mind find themselves forced to do.  It succeeds mostly on the strength of Forrest and Everly’s chemistry, as plot is mostly (not entirely, just mostly) set aside in favor of character study.  Lotawana is about how they live in the world, and what that means which means it is about them.  The includes a fair amount of wandering conversations and more than a few montages as Hawkins works in the feel of a real relationship slowly building and developing, of one personality discovering another over days and months.

That does require more than a bit of patience from the viewer, even at a tidy ninety minutes, as it can seem meandering even when it isn’t.  As character focused as it is, it is still full of its share of plot twists and turns.  The heavy character focus, rather than obscuring those twists, hides them until they can land with full force.  The strength of the primary relationship keeps it from ever seeming slow and justifies the decision to make everything about them without any extra flashiness.

From screenplay to photography to even its editing, Hawkins’ naturalistic bent keeps everything grounded even during its longer flights of fancy.  Everything and everyone feels real because everything and everyone are real.  It seems like a simple answer, as simple as the decision between living with people and living apart from them, and yet the wrong choice keeps getting made year after year.  Lotawana is not the wrong choice.

Vietnam: Fast Forward

It’s hard to say exactly what Eladio Arvelo’s Vietnam Fast Forward is.  On the surface this dive into modern Vietnam is a charming travelogue eschewing the country’s 20th century history to focus on what it is today.  And what it is, is a growing, modern society with unique resources ready to take its place on the world stage for what it has to offer and not what it has endured.

Intentional or not, however, that version of Vietnam Fast Forward only occasionally surfaces.  At zippy 59 minutes and with a focus on Vietnam as a nesting ground for future economic growth, Vietnam Fast Forward more often toes a strange line between government sponsored infomercial and pilot for proposed travelogue series.

Director and host Arvelo bounces back and forth between city and country side interviewing a handful of residents in his quest to learn about Vietnam and what it is now.  But almost all of those interviews and their related stories about the businesses involved – from tea leaf grower to chef to tech entrepreneur – and the case they make for investment in Vietnam.

There’s nothing out and out wrong with a filmmaker having and pushing a point of view; documentarian doesn’t mean the same thing as journalist.  Everything from Harlan County, USA to Bowling For Columbine had a definite stake in their subject and a way the filmmaker wished it to be viewed and didn’t bother to hide it. 

Nor is it all informercial all the time.  Arvelo has a keen eye not just for a business success story but for an interesting back story like entrepreneur Huong Dang who lost her family early in her life but through hard work attended college and came back to Vietnam to create new paths to success for others.  And he recognizes a gem of a personality like Chef Tan, a successful doctor who gave up medicine to pursue multiple different ventures looking for fulfillment in his work until he became a farmer and chef.

The humanity in those stories butts heads often with Arvelo’s focus on the Vietnam they are building for the future and the case for Vietnam’s growth.  Those don’t have to be mutually exclusive propositions, but they sometimes play that way here.  A lot of that comes down to Vietnam Fast Forward’s brevity.  At just short of an hour it goes down smoothly without dragging, but it also feels more like episodic television that a unique entry on its own. (And if it were a travelogue series, it would probably be a good one).  But it also makes it harder to dig to in depth into his subjects.  There is so much ground to cover Arvelo flits from story to story like a butterfly, just whetting the appetite before moving on to the next person and the next and the next.  Only the surface seems to be scratched, with too much depth left behind.

There are worse things to say about a film than it left money on the table (thematically speaking).  Arvelo does indeed open a world in front of us and the quick peeks at it are enticing.  If only we were able to get the full course instead of just the appetizer.

Killing the Shepherd

It’s easy to demonize poachers.  Nameless, faceless monsters who appear and disappear into the wilderness hunting down flora and fauna without care or regard for what they are doing to the ecosystem around them.  It’s harder to put a name and face to them, not least because they frequently hide themselves but more so because that requires some measure of understanding of them and why they do what they do.  They are not pure nihilists, director Thomas Opre observes (among many pieces of the international animal trade), but mostly so poor and desperate that morals or larger cares beyond survival have become luxuries they can’t afford. 

Traveling throughout Zambia and interfacing directly with both poachers and a handful of villages which serve as their base of operations Opre’s Killing the Shepherd attempts to show not just the causes but the effects of poaching on everyone who touches it – victims and assailants alike.  The poachers who kill animals (and humans as needed) do so not out of cartoonish villainy but out of desperation which requires complete compartmentalization of what they are doing from how they view themselves.  More importantly Opre’s lens focuses up the chain on the tracts of money which ultimately tempt such individuals and force them to do what even they themselves admit they find distasteful and would rather stop if they thought they could. 

Not that this is his sole or even most important focus.  Opre makes certain to place African poaching in its proper context, explaining not just the forces behind it but making the clear the real danger it does to the environment as species extinction is sped up and ecosystems begin to break down.  Though it gives only a brief history of how the modern, nearly industrialized version of the act (historically a capital crime, now less so) came about, Shepherd makes sure to focus on the various first world drivers which make it palatable.  There is just too much money to be made at it, and not enough from the few other industries available in Africa, for it to ever go away. 

But that doesn’t mean people won’t try, and it's in that attempt that Shepherd finds its heart and soul.  Focusing on a single village in Zambia, Opre traces its attempts to combat the epidemic of poaching even while admitting how tempting the money is to everyone given the general poverty in the area.  Ultimately the brave chief trying to be the change pays the price from unknown person and persons who fear change and/or the end of their livelihood.  It's an unnerving comparison to similar first world issues where those who fear change stand against it but refuse to face a battle of ideas.  Worse than that, however, is the nihilistic acceptance of the act by the citizens of the village as if there is little to be done about it. 

There’s not a lot of hope in Killing the Shepherd but there can’t always be; the nature of documentary is that exposes the world to us as it is, not necessarily the way we wish it was.  And while Opre definitely has a point of view about poaching, he also takes an expansive view of the world it exists in and the responsibility we all have in dealing with it.  It’s easy to demonize poachers but if that’s all that is done then nothing will ever change about it.  The hard take is that not only the poachers but the inactivity of society which allows them are the real demons.  Until something is done about that, all of the worst elements of sicety will always be with us. 

Outlier

What do a room full of computers, a cabin on a lake, an abusive boyfriend, strange nightmares, a white pickup truck, onions, and films made during pandemic lock down all have in common?  You will find out over the course of Outlier’s 80 some odd minutes and like most pandemic films the outcome will be only moderately successful.  Whether the answers given are fully satisfying is up to the individual viewer, but there are good ideas aplenty in Nick Strayer’s abuse-and-trauma thriller.  There is also a fair amount of recycled and cliched ideas in order to play up thriller aspects which ultimately do more harm than good.   And as much as anyone tries to change that fact, it remains as unwavering as the setting sun on a calm lake. 

Starting off as an uncomfortable scene between Olivia (Denton) and her longtime boyfriend, Outlier soon makes the undercurrent behind that discomfort clear.  Trapped in a long cycle of emotional and probably physical abuse, Olivia is distrusting of everything around her, cut off from her family and unable to break free.  That cycle is finally broken when the confrontation is broken up by the well-meaning Thomas who takes her to his idyllic cabin to rest and recuperate.  Even as he moves slowly to keep her calm and collected small things begin to stick out to her – strange conversations in the night, bad dreams, Thomas’ reading of her mail and inability to offer a phone or external communication – until she suspects she has escaped one prison for another. 

Even for a very brief film that’s not a lot of plot, but it also can’t really be as the requirements of shooting during a lockdown mean a small number of actors and locations where potential exposure can be controlled.  On the one hand, judging a film beyond what it specifically offers isn’t fair to films not made under the same conditions.  On the other hand, it’s impossible to understand a film removed from its context (even if that context is never specifically mentioned), which is why the most successful pandemic films like Locked Down have overtly included that context in their setups.  Outlier wants to have its cake and eat it to, reducing itself to a two-character interplay without offering any reason for such a thing beyond what it can create for itself.  The instinct to turn that into grist for psychological thrills is a logical one yet Outlier doesn’t do enough with the concept. 

The nature of lockdown films is to turn them essentially into stage plays, contests of will staged through interesting dialogue.  Outlier has half of that as Olivia tries more and more to get at what Thomas plans to do and what ultimately drives him, helped along by fantastic performance from Denton.  But the script is not strong enough to be more than that as it attempts to build tension while holding off its biggest twists till the end without realizing that twists need some sort of investment to be worthwhile.  Instead, what momentum Outlier has is lost as its light plot is dragged out longer than it needs to be even over a reduced running time. 

It’s all the more apparent as no one is around to break up the duel between Denton and Cheslek and Thomas himself is written as barely functional, offering only brief staccato bursts of exposition but locking away his inner processes until far too late.  Nor are the final reveals quite enough to live up to the hints and teases offered earlier on. 

It’s hard to make any film and it’s even harder to make one with only two actors and minimal plot movement for them to hold on to.  It’s been done, and done well, but not often.  The films that made it work were the real outliers.  This one is unfortunately more standard for the experiment.  A fantastic performance from Jessica Denton elevates it, but not enough to overcome an unformed screenplay. 

Look Away, Look Away

Did the changing cultural understanding of any song better underscore the historical backdrop of a region than ‘Dixie’ the minstrel stalwart of an age that never existed transformed into Confederate battle cry transformed into paean for a bygone age (that never existed) transformed into a reminder of our worst misdeeds?  Did the changing cultural understanding of the Mississippi state flag better underscore the historical backdrop of a region better?  Director Patrick O’Connor is betting the answer to both questions is ‘no’ in his chronicle of the movement to replace the Mississippi flag, which openly contains the Confederate flag within it, with something more unifying and suited to the modern moment. 

Following the rise of both the Black Lives Matter movement and an acceleration of violence against people of color (Look Away begins with the Dylann Roof killings in nearby South Caroline and the South Carolina government reaction), calls for change within the Mississippi government begin – specifically calls to change the state flag for something less divisive.  Citizens and politicians from across the Mississippi landscape soon appear petitioning the government for change and offering up new options which remove the old symbol of racial oppression.  Because it is a cultural moment and a moment of profound cultural change, reactionary forces soon appear as well claiming history and the need for remembrance.  Community gatherings and meetings quickly ratchet up in tension as opposing cultural sides come face to face to yell and scream arguments and epithets at one another before finally, ultimately giving in to the popular will.  It is simultaneously a reflection, an indictment and hopeful rumination on the American experiment. 

“Look away, look away, look away, Dixie Land,” Daniel Emmett’s standard exclaims and that is exactly what Dixie Land tries to do, for as long as possible.  While writer / director O’Connor tries to give as much space as possible to all of the different sides involved there is a tilt towards one side, not with judgment but merely presenting their words without comment.  When various defenders of the status quo have the reality of the Mississippi flag and its Confederate emblems brought up to them they quickly attempt to change the subject, declaring a care only for their history or defining symbols not being connected at all to the things they are best known for.  At its worst opposition to the changes coming evolves to multiple levels of whataboutism as public officials tie in all of the cultural changes they are confronting as part of one great assault on the land they have known.  It’s possible there is a group supporting the old flag with more self-awareness the individuals who poke and prod and confront in Look Away, but if they exist they haven’t made their faces known. 

That said, if the film was focused on that element alone it would become the tiresome polemic some of its subjects decry it as.  O’Connor, though definitely with a point of view, makes sure to turn away from his prime story and focus on all of the tangentials which give the argument meaning.  What is a flag and why does it mean something?  What are the elements of a good flag and why can the state do better than it has to date?  How does all of this fit in with the larger cultural context of Confederate monuments being pulled down throughout the country and the problems of the Civil War still not behind the country 150 years later?  What does this mean for the country going forward? 

There are no easy answers to any of these questions and O’Connor - for better or worse – does not offer any.  He focuses narrowly on the main events playing out in front of him and the handful of clear personalities taking part in it, as self-aware (or not) as they may be.  In the process he offers something like catharsis that things can change – offering hope to some and denying it to others.  That catharsis is not tied into any larger elements of similar arguments going on nationwide – Look Away is universal in its specificity – which may in the long run limit how much anyone can take from it.  But taken within itself it gives us some reason to hope. 

Touch

The gap between cultures and how to approach them is, for all the attempts at it, still very difficult for stories to encompass.  How much are all peoples the same no matter their history?  How much are we kept separate from each other from our background, how intrinsic is it to our individuality?  These are difficult questions which make them ripe for drama to explore.  Unfortunately, it also makes it very difficult for drama to say anything relatable about them either.  Most attempts to do so are, ironically, limited by the viewpoints of whoever is making them as they attempt to traverse a gap between being overly sentimental and overly cynical.  Aleksandra Szczepanowsa’s Touch does not fall into that gap, but it is a film on culture from an outsiders eye which does create a distance of its own.

Szczepanowsa, who also wrote and directed, stars as Fei Fei a world-famous dancer turned teacher living in China with her husband Zhang Hua (Yang).  How much longer she’ll be living there is up in the air, however; despite being married to a citizen an having a child she is still a foreign national trying to work through the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the country to become a permanent resident.  It’s a long, strenuous process made even more stressful by increasing distance with Zhang leaving her feeling isolated physically and emotionally.  Trying to deal with her increasing anxiety Fei turns to a blind masseuse (Yuan) and finds herself making the connection she had been fruitlessly searching for and may be too late to take advantage of.

Touch is two stories, one internal and one external and both intrinsic to its writer-director-star.  In that sense it is not a film about the crash between cultures so much as one person’s specific existence as an outsider living in a country not their own.  It is the best option she could have taken, ditching any attempt to guess at what the Chinese view on her existence may be (except when it doesn’t) to focus specifically on her own reality.  Szczepanowsa’s script, and her performance of it, is at its most on point about her (which shouldn’t surprise anyone) and her growing feelings of isolation.  Though it is occasionally very on the nose about this more often Szczepanowsa lets small elements about her life speak to how everything is affecting her, from her distance with her own child to her changes in the way she teaches her dance students, forcing them to increase their own distance from one another.

Her camera is not always so communicative, partly because it must follow her almost exclusively as the primary point of view at the film, but also from its attempts to create intimacy with Bai Yu.  Fei Fei’s attempts to regain control over herself (something the Chinese bureaucracy denies anyone and one of Touch’s more subtle critiques of the country) lead her to the blind masseuse initially for stress relief and then increasingly for the intimacy she cannot find elsewhere.

Unfortunately, it’s also the primary point of weakness in the film while also being its primary conceit.  Once Bai Yu starts to take over as the point of view character, Touch must start making those assumptions about how something outside of its author’s experience views the world and those are unavoidably weaker than Szczepanowsa’s insight into herself.  It’s a weakness that infects the rest of the film as her camera seeks ways to represent the experience of Bai Yu’s seemingly magical massages, but instead just muddles the storytelling.

And there’s no way to experience the film without that muddling.  Once Bai Yu appears he does not just take over the point of view but the plot, moving from an inscrutable caregiver to an obsessive who can’t let go of Fei Fei even when she tries to let go of him.  It takes the film away from Szczepanowsa and what she knows so well to something that is less.  That’s not enough to weaken Touch’s strengths.  As a film about an outsiders attempt to enter a new culture it is tremendously affecting, skipping over the pitfalls that have encompassed other similar attempts like a skilled dancer or the fingers of a talented masseuse.

P.E.N.S. (Poetic Energy Needed in Society)

Houston has had a long and storied music history, particularly in the hip hop scene in the early and mid 1990s.  Anyone familiar with it would not at all be surprised to discover that scene had grown and mutated over the decades to produce a thriving slam poetry incubator developing the identity and voices of the next generation of artists.  They would probably be surprised to discover that didn’t happen; that it was changes in the Houston stand-up comedy scene that led to the city developing as a slam poetry mecca.  The people involved (including P.E.N.S director Limbrick) in the scene are as surprised by that as anyone but that hasn’t stopped them from diving into the new art form with both feet.

P.E.N.S. – Poetic Energy Needed in Society – is only partly interested in the history of the art and culture scene it is documenting.  It’s there because it must be, particularly when it turns its lens on the earliest members of the current poetry moment, but that’s a side effect of its real focus.  The Houston slam poetry scene is not just a stage for self-expression, its proponents say, but first and foremost a plinth for its members to stand before the world and state that they exist and have worth.  In many cases it is the entanglement with poetry that the young poets don’t just state this for the first time publicly but actually realize it for themselves.

It’s stirring and engrossing as an idea and sometimes as an experience, but it’s also frequently let down by the nature of the film it is in.  Filmed over time, and over a pandemic, with different levels of access to its subjects and even equipment available, P.E.N.S. doesn’t embrace the amateur aesthetic that it belongs to but can’t escape from it.  It’s a reality that exists not just within the individual interviews and moments but within the construction of the film itself as different interviews are placed side-by-side with one another without any real feel for the juxtaposition or development of the story as a whole.  It frequently comes across as a random collection of interviews, each a microcosm of the world the film seeks to expose but with no real connection beyond that.  There is an attempt to bring it together at the end as Limbick holds off on his biggest interview, with Se7en the ‘founder’ of the movement, to create both a thesis and a wrap up for everything that has come before.  But that can’t hide how random much of the other material has felt.

If the complete package is not a complete package, that doesn’t take away from its internal pieces at all.  Within each individual’s story – from a football player who gets hurt and loses his sport to suddenly discover poetry to an older housewife looking for more out of her time and her life – is a universe of possibility and promise.  Whenever any sole poet is talking P.E.N.S. magnetic, its flaws melting away.  The stories themselves vary tremendously in content, from individual biography to in depth discussion of specific poems and what they mean, but all of them ultimately are descriptions of the poet’s connection with the idea of poetry itself.  It’s a style that sometimes works hand in hand with the extended pieces of poetry performance everyone is given, and sometimes works completely against.  There’s no real understanding in whether a sequence needs this or not and adds to the patchwork feeling of the film as a whole.

Both greater than and less than the sum of its parts, P.E.N.S. ultimately succeeds when we stop looking at it as a film and focus solely on its subjects.  As a film with a cogent through line leading to an easily understandable destination it is intermittently successful.  As a focus on a growing artistic movement and what it is doing for the self-realization of its members it is an unmissable proof of the power of art and its necessity as part of everyday life.

Too Late

Comedy, as the saying goes, is hard.  So is horror, actual scary horror, for very similar reasons.  Putting the two together does not reduce the scale of difficulty any.  If anything, the difficulty increases as a film now has two different sets of tastes (which may not have any correlation) to appeal to.  On the upside, if it does work the final product can be more than the sum of its parts as it pulls from radically different emotions simultaneously into something that shouldn’t work but does, like combining bacon and pineapple on a pizza. 

There is a grey middle ground, however, where nothing quite works together or quite falls apart.  Maybe it’s scarier than it is funny.  Maybe it’s funnier than it is scary.  Maybe it’s only kind of funny and kind of scary but not enough of either.  Maybe it’s Too Late. 

Set in the dank world of on-the-cusp stand-up comedy (which in and of itself is scary enough), Too Late is also the name of one of the top comedy clubs in Los Angeles, a little brother to The Improv or The Comedy Store.  It’s one of those places comedians go to be discovered for their first special or sitcom, and thus it’s one of those places where they constantly pester Violet the booker (Limperis) to get them on.  But Violet, and Too Late, have a secret as well; they are both owned by ageing comedy legend Bob Devore (Lynch) who keeps himself going by the adulation of his audience and the blood of promising comics he must consume whole during the dark of the moon. 

Too Late is certainly not the first film to dramatize the dehumanizing reality of trying to break into entertainment in the form of actual horror, from deals with the devil (Rosemary’s Baby) to sadistic bosses physically and emotionally torturing their employees and vice versa (Swimming With Sharks).  It speaks to the nature of the business that these sorts of cliches have so much power.  It also means anyone venturing in these waters needs a really deep hook or a new tack beyond just the premise itself.  Too Late does not, unfortunately. 

What it does have is a lot of humor.  Limper and Weldon (as her slowly, possibly, potential boyfriend) in particular have both great chemistry and delivery and the handful of comedy sets Too Late showcases could easily fit themselves into any standup routine anywhere.  Nor is it left to just the comedy sets; the characters themselves from the best friends to the monsters are all aware they are in a comedy and bring their best line readings to their best sequences.  Taken in bits and pieces it is exactly the absurdist diorama its makers were aiming for. 

Taken as a whole, it’s a different beast, not least because the characters – as funny as they can be – exist only in pieces themselves to set up punchlines but more often to set up its statements about life in Hollywood.  Just to make sure no one misses out on the direct line Too Late is drawing between its horror movie conceit and the dehumanizing reality of trying to break into entertainment (along with the misanthropic personalities frequently attached to that reality) writer/director D.W. Thomas makes sure to mention them several times particularly with Bob’s offhand shrug that ‘people come and people go.’ 

It’s possible to be that on the nose without it hurting your story, but not while also trying to be funny and or scary.  Too Late’s absurdist humor and absurdist heart are all in the right place but it’s trying to do too much and ultimately trips over its own ambitions. 

The Penny Black

An unbelievably rare collectible hidden in the middle of nowhere, an invisible conman who comes and goes leaving nothing but questions in his wake, an innocent man with a questionable past caught in the middle … it’s all the makings of the grandest (and sometimes most cliched) of noir stories. The make the hero (and we as his surrogate) question what makes a choice good or bad, what are the realities of being honest or dishonest and are there ever any actual consequences to any of these things. 

The Penny Black asks the most complex question of all: ‘does any of this even matter?’ 

Poking a pin in the bubble surrounding the core of your conceit doesn’t usually end well; it just reveals the whole exercise was the caretaking of hot air.  Unless it’s all (maybe) real in which case the dire moral questions of fiction are quickly dropped for the more practical question of ‘what do I, or can I, do about this?’ 

This is the question (questions) before young Will (no relation to the director), an assuming Arizona man who happens to be the custodian of several volumes of very rare, very expensive (maybe authentic) stamps, including the notorious Penny Black stamp, left behind by his vanished-off-the-face-of-the-Earth roommate Roman.  Who may or may not have been part of the Russian Mafia.  And who may or may not realize Will has the stamps.  Also, did I mention Will’s father was a conman himself who both left Will with rampant trust issues of his own and a skewed perspective on the individual merits of honesty.  Is it any wonder director Saunders felt the immediate urge to begin documenting every part of Will’s story (even if none of it turned out to be true)?  It would be less surprising if Raymond Chandler rose from the grave, drawn by its internecine web to explore one last time the uncertainties of human connection and behavior. 

Saunders knows all of this and is up front from the jump that this could be all a put on by the conman son of a conman for reasons no one (least of all himself) could understand or articulate.  The fact that the aformentioned Penny Black, one of the world’s first stamps and itself notorious for being forged by cheap London hustlers, is so incredibly on the nose about the dilemma before both Will and his story is understood and noted by Saunders from the beginning and he (and his film) never let go of his skepticism even as more and more pieces appear including the mercurial Roman himself.  And why would it?   

At some point there’s no way of knowing if any of this is real, unless you are the one perpetrating all of it and maybe not even then.  Which may be the point.  But at the same time, how could anyone not tell this story when laid in front of them?  Which also may be the point. 

The reality of it unfolds (over months and months) with the absurdist gleam of a Cohen Bros. film as Will and Saunders search for the illusive Roman, uncovering more and more evidence of his strange (possibly criminal) background while simultaneously questioning Will himself when some of the stamps going missing.  Will’s very real concern quickly becomes very real paranoia as Roman himself becomes more and more of a cult figure, always out of reach, more folklore than man.  Until suddenly, like the Wizard or Welles’ Harry Lime, he just appears in front of an apartment complex one evening to the amazement of everyone.   

Is he the devil Will has started to recreate in his imagination?  Is he just a man?  Will he exonerate Will of his families (and perhaps his own) past deeds or will he accuse him of stealing the stamps as well.  Are the stamps real or just more detritus a bunch of people with too much time on their hands have strung together in search for meaning within the everyday drudge of life? 

There are answers to all of this, up to a point.  Which is itself the point.  There’s also a tremendous amount of humanity and some real wonder that yes indeed, truth really is stranger than fiction.  And we’re all better that way. 

The Penny Black is a slice of wonderful strangeness inside a slice of wonder life.  Check it out as soon as you can. 

Bad Cupid

Is it the trip or is it the destination?  Is it the end or the means?  Can an idea or a result be so purely beneficial on its own that it doesn’t matter how awful the acquiring of it was?  Is true love so wonderful on its own it doesn’t matter how you came across it?

Bad Cupid is not asking these questions, it already has the answer and wants you to know it.     

Which is how we get Archie (Rhys-Davies), a foul-tempered, foul-mouthed mean-spirited man who’s only two passions appear to be day drinking and ensuring that lonely individuals find their one true love.  That includes the obsessed Dave (Nepyeu), who cannot get over the one who got away (Turturro).  Well, not so much got away as dumped him hard for not being dramatic enough about his love.  Even a trip to Vegas sponsored by his fun-loving cousin Morris (Marin) is enough to break him out of his funk.  It does, however, get him crossing paths with Archie, Archie’s uncanny knowledge about his romance problems, the man Archie has bound and gagged in his trunk (Elder) and a ridiculously convoluted plan to get Denise back.

There’s a good movie in there somewhere, especially fans of the understated indie comedy.  The film and its makers know it, too, which isn’t always a benefit. Every genre has its conventions and it’s easy to just accept them when they appeal to you, without asking whether those conventions are helping or hurting the final product. 

Bad Cupid is a compilation of conventions from its hangdog to lead to his mercurial cousin trying to fix him and espouse their freedom loving ways.  From there commence long dialogue scenes about the nature of relationships and love which primarily restate the same ideas over and over with little change until the moment comes when Dave must finally do something.  Quirky characters come and go in between, mixing up the constant restatement of themes and hopefully their interesting enough on their own that they add some life to the film while they’re around.

It’s a style that has been around as long as independent film has and found its ne plus ultra in Kevin Smith’s seminal Clerks and plenty of people of tried to match it’s free flowing laughs and relationship drama that made it easy to forget just a few people and one location were all that were available, but mostly what has come out of it is repetition. 

Beethoven’s theory of composing required both statement of theme and then development, nothing just staying the same in order to create a complete work.  It seems like a simple observation when just stated that way but simplicity is usually the hallmark of mastery.  But even as obvious as it is, it’s not followed through often enough.

There are spots of real humor in the script by Ira Fritz, Neal Howard and Anthony Piatek, but they are frequently buried in the unhurried delivery and pace of film that is too short to be so laid back.  It only really comes alive when Archie appears.

Rhys-Davies carries Bad Cupid on his back not unlike Sisyphus carrying that boulder uphill every day and with roughly the same effect.  Some of that is because Archie is the only character who genuinely gets to be proactive – Dave moans about his lot in life and does nothing and Morris moans about Dave doing nothing while doing nothing – and some of it is just Rhys-Davies native screen charisma which can pick up even weak material and make it seem lively.  No one else is yet able to do that while also being saddled with bland roles.   

The bottom line is none of these characters are likeable.  The closest is the mean-spirited Cupid.  It’s not that they’re unlikeable in a charming way, Its that they are controlled by their weaknesses without enough corresponding strengths to balance them.  The question of whether bad or unlikeable people deserve love and how they find it probably could make a good movie, but that’s not what Bad Cupid is offering.

Bad Cupid isn’t bad but it’s not good enough to get by with what it does have to offer.

BAD CUPID SCORE: 5.5/10

Bad Cupid was directed by Diane Cossa and Neal Howard from a screenplay by Howard, Ira Fritz and Anthony Piatek. It stars John Rhys-Davies, Shane Nepveu, and Briana Marin.

This Is Not A War Story

The new Talia Lugacy drama.

This Is Not a War Story is lying right from the title card, and that’s okay. It is most definitely a war story, even if all of its stories of war take place off screen and in the past through occasional remanences.

But if This Is Not a War Story is low on pyrotechnics, it’s big on emotional implosion with an eye firmly on the cost of war. Not just the death or destruction or even the wounded among the soldiers and civilians on both sides, but the survivors who seem to come back hale and hearty.

A quiet, reserved character study, the film wants to make sure no one forgets the invisible wounds that have been left to fester for so long.

The most counterintuitively glaring of those wounds are the ones recently-discharged Isabelle Casale (director/star Talia Lugacy) is clearly carrying around. At odds with her family and everyone around her, war has exacerbated Isabelle’s anti-social attributes to the point she can barely look at anyone much less express what she’s feeling.

Her deep well of pain and solitude meets its match in the empathy of Will (Sam Adegoke) who runs a rehab group specifically for veterans with PTSD issues. Even as he draws Isabelle out of her shell, Will’s own issues begin to creep up on him again until no one is sure who is saving who anymore.

At its best, This Is Not a War Story is a quietly-enthralling character study in pain that dives into the heart of the unspeakable and comes out the other side. That is largely due to the work Lugacy is doing on both sides of the lens. As actor and director she is firmly in the ‘less is more’ camp, producing an Isabelle who is clearly defined in her trauma even as she will only talk about it in circles.

By the end she is so well defined a half slouch or a punch to the arm speak volumes even if she can’t. Lugacy the director is similarly reserved, matching her characters’ feelings of isolation with long silent stretches of them in their chosen environments by turns fidgeting and peaceful.

She has a strong on-screen partner in Adegoke, who sets himself the unenviable task of drawing Isabelle out of her shell and reminding her she has permission to be alive. It works because Will has his own pain to deal with which is slowly pulled from him as Isabelle’s.

It would have been easy to make him an all-knowing figure of wisdom who could give Isabelle just the answers she needs when she needs them, but as he himself reminds her he doesn’t know everything. He may not know anything, his own frustrations sending him off to a mountain retreat where nothing can get to him including his newest protégé.

But his presence as character and actor creates the space for catharsis. Adegoke and Lugacy have real onscreen chemistry, all the more prevalent for how few words they share until Isabelle finally tracks him down in the proactive moment she’s had in years.

All of this works because This Is Not a War Story is very good at pretending it’s not a war story when it really is, wrapping itself in the pain of its leads which could as easily be about a lost family member or sudden shock as about war and death.

Every so often it does remind us what it is, usually through brief mouthpiece who can speak diatribes about the American war machine and what it has done in different countries, the confusion of war and occupation and the realization that one may not be the hero they had been told they were. That’s all well and good, but when someone says it out loud, just like that, among otherwise very subtle shades of character and dialogue, the dichotomy is a bit much.

But it doesn’t happen that often. And it can’t cover up a sterling bit of both character work and deep thematic relevance from artist on the rise. This Is Not a War Story is definitely a war story, and it’s more than okay.

THIS IS NOT A WAR STORY REVIEW SCORE: 7/10

Acoustic Pictures‘ This Is Not a War Story was directed by Talia Lugacy and stars Sam Adegoke, Danny Ramirez, and Frances Fisher. The film was executive produced by Rosario Dawson.

Night People

In this series, I look back at some fantastic hidden gems which have been lost over the years and deserve to be rediscovered. We’ll kick things off with Night People, which opened in theaters in March of 1954.

If you ask a hundred different people what Gregory Peck‘s best role was, probably ninety percent would say Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. If you asked Peck, he would probably have said Lt. Col. Steve Van Dyke in Night People (buy at Amazon). And he may not be wrong. A terse, lean Cold War thriller, Night People brims with sharp dialogue and complex characters stuck on either side of a (not yet literal) wall of ideology and pragmatism.

In the early days of the Cold War, allies turned enemies and enemies turned allies were all ensconced uncomfortably together in the ruins of Berlin as the city (and country) were being rebuilt. While things seemed professional and steady on the surface, just below it the betrayal and spycraft were the order of the day and it was left to men like Col. Van Dyke (Peck), the Army’s head of intelligence for the United States sector, to keep things sorted. Things like a ne’er-do-well corporal suddenly disappearing into the Russian sector one night who also happens to be the son of a powerful industrialist. Which sticks Van Dyke with the thankless job of getting the corporal back without upsetting the delicate balance of alliances which post-war Berlin had become or losing any of his own agents in the process.

It’s the sort of thankless job which would make a person ask why anyone would do it. Rather than spend a great amount of time agonizing over that question, Night People simply offers us Van Dyke. Completely cognizant of the personal stakes involved, more so than his superiors, he doesn’t take any of the requirements of the job home with him. In the middle of the tensest situations where he has done all he could do, he takes the time to wonder about football season because there’s nothing else to do, so why worry about it? For Van Dyke it’s all just a job.

Peck’s Van Dyke is a refutation of the modern Hollywood protagonist. He has no backstory or hidden concerns. Beyond his job and the fact that he’s had some sort of relationship with his East German source Hoffy, nothing else is ever known about him. He is exactly what he appears to be, appearing specifically for the story he is built for and then disappearing again, unchanged beyond completing the problem immediately before him.

The closest modern version is a David Mamet lead where internal needs are the proverbial iceberg we only ever get hints at. And none of it is missed. He is, both as a character and a performance, complete without need for greater complication. It’s obvious in his grim approach to grim work and his occasional retreat to sarcasm why the role appealed so much to Peck. In a career of forthright men, Van Dyke may be the most forthright of all while facing the greatest stakes with the potential for World War III (or at least a great loss of position in the Cold War) flowing from any mistake he may make.

In some ways, he might not seem too out of place in a film noir, a genre Peck never spent much time in. The closest he ever came was Hitchcock’s Spellbound — though Hitchcock never really did noir (even if the overlap between Hitchcock noir is large) — and Cape Fear a decade later. In that sense, Night People is probably the most film noir film Peck ever really made. And yet, like Van Dyke, it frequently seems like a refutation of film noir, which at this point was largely on its way out.

It doesn’t seem like that on the surface. Alongside Van Dyke’s stoic, sarcastic take on the people he comes across is a twisty, ever changing chameleon of a plot which requires a flow chart to keep complete track of. [This is a good thing]. While the core goal never changes — returning the wayward corporal — the reasons for his capture and the different groups it affects grows and changes as Van Dyke dives further and further into the mess below the surface.

It’s the sort of crackerjack plotting Hollywood has usually excelled at and in the hands of career filmmaker Nunnally Johnson (best known for his adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath) that’s exactly what you get. Every scene reveals character and plot and does so with the kind of off-handedly poetic tough guy dialogue that Ben Hecht and the Coen Bros. made their careers out of. That’s a small thing either, it’s the main thing. Great roles make for great performances and Van Dyke is a great role nor is he the only one. Bjork’s Hoffmeir doesn’t outshine Van Dyke because she can’t, she flits in and out in order to propel the plot along and shine light on Van Dyke as he must quickly process years of deceit and make on the fly tactical decisions regardless of his personal feelings. It’s no accident Night People’s one and only Oscar nomination in 1954 was for Best Original Screenplay (one of three Johnson accumulated in his career).

[It’s tempting to say too that it was and is horrible overlooked, but the reality is films nominated for Screenplay and Film Editing far and away outlast most of their peers in staying power].

What it gains in masterful wordsmith at first glance it seems to lose in a muddle of commercially focused visual choices. In an extreme contrast to its title, Night People is so bright and colorful it seems like it always takes place in the bright light of day, even at night.

Coming in the mid-50s, the choice of Cinemascope made sense as studios battled television for eyeballs. For the viewer it presents a visual feast of Berlin (with much of the film shot on location) combined with lush color slowly transitioning from Technicolor to the less vibrant Eastman color. Cinematographer Charles Clarke (another one of those quiet professionals who just went about his job but isn’t highly celebrated despite his skill) not only makes full use of the new wider format but keeps as much of the bright primary colors of Technicolor as possible in the final print. Yet again, Night People goes against the film noir grain. Yes, there were a handful of films which did similar — Leave Her to Heaven, Niagara — but it’s still so rare that it sticks out when it occurs.

The days are glorious blues and the nights are glorious purples and more importantly everyone is carefully uniformed from Van Dyke’s immaculately pressed green to the blue of the British and the Robin’s Egg of Hoffy’s suit (her own sort of uniform). In a world of greys, everyone is carefully color coded.

The bright look seems at first a misnomer. Night People’s noir like story cries out for black and white as the different sides wade around in moral turpitude.

Instead the dirty deeds are all done out in the open, in the bright light of day and Technicolor. The bright color reflects the upstanding, unflinching and unfailing forthrightness of Van Dyke (even as he double crosses and double deals) slamming into the grimy darkness of noir. The lack of self-doubt, the lack of shadows or grey scale (even when there were shadows) is a, knowingly or not, counter point to film noir suggesting nothing is black and white or grey unless we let ourselves view events that way and to view them that way is a sort of weakness which does not reflect reality or tell us anything about it. The world isn’t what we make of it, it simply is what it is and we must survive in it.

It’s a point of view which is hardly foreign to Johnson’s heroes, intentionally or not. An auteur who spent most of his career in the studio system of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, Johnson’s hand is frequently covered over by the needs of the studios he worked for making artistic design harder to separate. Is Night People’s expansive look reflective of a desire to refute grimy crime film or a commercial need to combat television? Is its professional, stalwart hero the reflection of a purely professional filmmaker or the end result of a studio’s idea of what a post-War audience could handle?

This may be why it is largely forgotten. It so strenuously goes against the grain of what the modern view of films of its type should be it is overlooked in favor of films which don’t.

Either way, Night People is a film of change, sneaking into the post-War / Cold War culture of the ’50s where American optimism still lived but was beginning to be tinged with paranoia and cynicism before the inevitable break of the ’60s. It’s not quite ahead of its time but may have benefitted more from having appeared later when decisions about audience appetites had more latitude. Instead it is a film in transition, slowly, cautiously moving studios from the requirements of the Hays Code to the wilds of the New Wave. Or maybe it’s simpler than all that. Maybe Night People is just the work of expert craftsman doing their jobs and no deeper than that.

In that sense, Night People reflects the men who made it; quiet, knowledgeable professionals who eschew melodrama and personality dysfunction in favor of just doing their jobs to the best of their ability. It’s that very simplicity, masking complexity, which makes it great.

Starring Gregory Peck, Broderick Crawford, Anita Bjork, Rita Gam, Walter Abel, Buddy Ebsen; written by Nunnally Johnson, Jed Harris, Tom Reed; produced and directed by Nunnally Johnson.

South Mountain

Review of Hilary Brougher’s South Mountain.

Somewhere, on the side of a mountain in the Appalachians, a family is gathering for its annual celebration. Somewhere, a family is falling apart. Somewhere, the classic reactions and responses to unconscionable betrayal are turned on their heads. Somewhere, people act out their lives in a fashion both impossible to identify with and unmistakably human. South Mountain is both a hauntingly unique story of heart break and heart mending, and a classic staple of the character drama form.

The gathering is that of Lila (Talia Balsam) and Edgar (Scott Cohen), a middle-aged married couple celebrating their latest fourth of July with their teenage children and old friends. One of them, however, knows a life-breaking secret which will slowly but surely coming spilling out over the next month and change.

Edgar has fathered a child with another woman and though Lila initially does not want to embrace the standard reaction to such news, it soon becomes clearly inevitable what must be done. As slowly as news of the Edgar’s actions spilled out, so do the reactions filled with denial and acceptance and wrapped around visits from friends and family stuck within their own preoccupations.

South Mountain is a low-budget, character-oriented independent film. That isn’t a pejorative or a warning, any more than stating that a film is a big-budget action movie or a Blumhouse horror project. It’s simply a spoken announcement of the type of film involved invoking an unspoken aside that certain cliché’s of the genre will be involved. It’s worth repeating that cliché’s also aren’t de facto negatives.

It’s just that familiarity brings both contempt and comfort and it’s a constant reminder that we’ve been this way before. Not that being unique and different is a perfect antidote to those problems, but it’s also not an issue South Mountain spends a lot of time debating. To paraphrase Dune, “the forms must be obeyed.” Well, maybe not must, but they certainly will be.

There are long, silent, all encompassing shots of nature with human beings occasionally wandering through. There are long, under played conversations about past and present emotions with plot details left to be filled in behind the scenes. There is a direct, intentional attempt to avoid obvious dramatic fireworks, focusing instead of the slow, long-term reactions to such changes. In fact, that’s pretty much all South Mountain is: a reaction. A reaction to hurt, a reaction to pain, a reaction to history, a reaction happiness, a reaction to life.

A lot of that is dependent on the skill of the actors as the minimalism of the story and the visuals leaves us with only the people to hang on to. And that is a responsibility mostly on Balsam’s shoulders as Cohen (and to an extent most of the characters) floats in and out of Lila’s life, just enough to bring up memories of love and pain and let us see how plainly they appear on Balsam’s face. And her face is just about the only place we’ll ever get to see that deeper truth writer/director Hilary Brougher seems to be going for, because everything else is just so intentionally low core.

It’s not mumblecore, no one speaks near enough for that (or for it to be accused of resembling a play, though it shares some elements with theatrical drama), but it’s similarly low key to the degree the casual viewer may wonder just how much any of this matters to the people living through it.

Not everything needs wild plot gyrations and South Mountain would feel false with them. But it’s impossible to erase the feeling that something has happened, and we missed it. There was a moment where the world changed and we were looking the other way and what’s left is regret or acceptance. Or both. Brougher wants us to see why both are not so much needed as inevitable, with much to recommend and condemn them.

And she does it skillfully, never yanking the bandage off or going for visceral thrill. Even the most melodramatic moments — the reveal of Edgar’s infidelity — are approached from the side, growing in scope until they are impossible to ignore. Similar to the way we slowly learn that a phone call Edgar is having is with the woman giving birth to his child, we learn bits and bits and bits about Edgar and Lila’s long history with its ups and downs, creating more and more context for Lila’s reactions and her long delay of accepting how life has changed. It works better in theory than it does in practice – it truly does need a few more layers of dialogue and just speech, of opening of the characters inner lives to invest an audience fully in their lives.

But once the forms are observed and seen through, there is real meat on South Mountain’s bones. Brougher’s touch is so delicate it is almost invisible, which denies Mountain the forward momentum it desperately needs. But just sit back and let it wash over you like a cleansing rain and its depths with be revealed in the aftermath.

South Mountain Review Score: 7/10

Written and directed by Hilary Brougher, Breaking Glass Pictures‘ South Mountain stars Talia Balsam as Lila, Scott Cohen as Edgar, Andrus Nichols as Gigi, Michael Oberholtzer as Jonah, Macaulee Cassaday as Sam, Midori Francis as Emme, Naian González as Dara, Isis Masoud as Gemma, Guthrie Mass as Jake, and Violet Rea as Charlotte.