Film Freak Central

Hot Docs '16: Sonita

***½/****
directed by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers By coincidence or zeitgeist design, Sonita is my third consecutive Hot Doc about the disenfranchised's quest for "personhood." Here it's the titular Sonita Alizadeh, an Afghan teenager who fled the Taliban and, as the film begins, is living in a fleapit in Tehran with her sister and young niece; an unseen brother apparently resides nearby, close enough to duck in and trash her belongings while she's out. Sonita's nightmare family expects a lot from her--when they're evicted, her hookah-smoking sister barks, "Go find us a new home! Now!"--and that includes that she will one day soon return to Afghanistan to be sold into marriage. She has dreams of becoming a recording artist, though, and a wilfulness that director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami tries desperately to cultivate without violating the documentarian's Prime Directive of impartial observation. When Sonita's mother extorts Maghami for $2000 to buy her subject six more months in Tehran, Sonita and Maghami get busy and make a video for Sonita's prosaic but politically-charged rap song "Brides for Sale," which goes viral and attracts the attention of a nonprofit that wants to fly Sonita to America, birthplace of her beloved Michael Jackson. (In a memorable sidebar, she's baffled by an Iranian map of the world that colour codes the U.S. as a desert--propaganda at its most diabolical.) Because I didn't follow Alizadeh's story as it happened live, the final third of Sonita played for me like a heist movie, with Sonita tiptoeing back into Afghanistan to retrieve her passport while keeping her final destination on the down-low. But there's a sadness gnawing away at the suspense: Sonita's mother is determined to find a man who will pay nine grand for her so that one of her sons can afford his own $9000 wife (she's the kind of older person who enforces the awful traditions to which she was subjected out of spite), and in Iran Sonita's social circle is drying up because nobody wants to be seen fraternizing with an outlaw (given that women there are technically not permitted to sing)--institutionalized misogyny has left her without a sanctuary. Sonita's victories are by no means Pyrrhic, yet the lonesome final shot shows that freedom and isolation are sometimes uncannily similar.

Hot Docs '16: Unlocking the Cage

**½/****
directed by Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers As an idealistic young lawyer, Harvard law professor Steven Wise went looking for the biggest "underdog" he could possibly represent and realized that animals were it. He founded the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to aid any and all "autonomous" wildlife in cases of abuse, but Unlocking the Cage, the latest from the prolific team of Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker, zeroes in on his efforts to liberate some chimpanzees from the horrid conditions at a state medical school and various cut-rate zoos by getting a judge to grant them "personhood." He's met with incredulity and ridicule by members of the court and media alike, who bristle at his ill-advised correlation of chimps with slaves. (The press is equally reductive when they jokingly accuse Wise of setting in motion a real-life Planet of the Apes.) And Wise's pursuit of habeas corpus for the effectively imprisoned primates has the unintended, Kafka-esque side effect of setting back human rights by forcing a redefinition of personhood that renders ineligible those who "cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities[,] or be held legally accountable for their actions" (i.e., not just chimpanzees but children and the mentally-impaired as well). But Wise is not a stupid or dangerous figure--if anything, the film doesn't find enough wrinkles in his righteousness. Compared to the obsessive subjects of previous Hegedus and/or Pennebaker docs like Bob Dylan, James Carville, or even the Startup.com guys, Wise's single-mindedness is blandly wholesome, and his only advertised idiosyncrasy is his use of the redundant "non-human animals" to denote his clients, which says more about his empathy and push for equality than almost anything else. As an activist doc, Unlocking the Cage may be too timid about going the full PETA for its own good; that Wise's chimps keep dying before he can save them is abstracted if not mitigated on screen by the fact that many of them are only names on a piece of paper, off limits to the filmmakers, and the stock footage Pennebaker/Hegedus have chosen tends to highlight the animals' considerable intelligence rather than their jeopardy. That's not immaterial, but the depiction of Wise's advocacy could use a little more urgency.

Hot Docs '16: The Pearl of Africa

***/****
directed by Jonny von Wallström

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Cleopatra Kambugu and her husband Nelson Kasaija board a train. Although the seats in their sleeping car are discouragingly narrow, Nelson consults the passenger guidelines and sure enough sex is not explicitly forbidden. It's sitcom-cute that he checks, but his impulse to do so also creates a palpable unease; the accumulation of ominous imagery at the start--a barbed-wire fence; a front door, open though not beckoning; the word "Uganda," imposed and imposing over a dismal horizon--suggests there is some Orwellian element from which train travel can only tentatively shield them. Most of Africa but especially Uganda, where Cleopatra is from, is a hotbed of homophobia, and Cleopatra is a trans woman looking to return home after being shamed out of the country. To that end, she and Nelson are making their way to Thailand so she can have gender-reassignment surgery and clear up any ambiguities about her sexual orientation. It seems a little pie-in-the-sky, given how hostile Ugandans appear to be towards any kind of kink (in news footage, one guy spits Leviticus at the camera, the way a particular genre of Christian always does; The Pearl of Africa itself preemptively counters with an opening quotation of Galatians 3:28)--and indeed, it's somewhat disappointing that the film is an incomplete journey, ending on Kambugu's recovery in the immediate aftermath of her operation. But director Jonny von Wallström couldn't have found more charming, loving partners than these two, and he treats them like movie stars, even billing them as if they're actors. For a documentary, in fact, the widescreen-lensed The Pearl of Africa behaves a lot like a narrative feature; when Nelson's waiting for Cleopatra to get out of surgery, Wallström extrapolates his apprehension with a montage of the couple in happier times straight out of She's Having a Baby. It protagonizes them in a disarming way, and while the film could stand to be a bit less infatuated with the pair (it hermetically seals itself in their relationship such that the picture starts to feel shallowly subjective), its empathy is unimpeachable.

The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016)

*/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron, Emily Blunt, Jessica Chastain
written by Evan Spiliotopoulos and Craig Mazin
directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan

by Walter Chaw It's not offensive, or provocative, or particularly funny, or especially exciting. It doesn't do anything very well, but neither does it do anything very poorly. It has a ridiculously overqualified cast game for anything in the way that good sports are when engaged in a losing battle against poor pacing and essential silliness; frankly, I don't have anything against silliness per se. In that spirit, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan's The Huntsman: Winter's War (hereafter Huntsman 2) reminds a lot of pleasant disasters like Ladyhawke and Krull, with its biggest crime maybe being that it's not ridiculous enough, given how the fantastic commitment of Charlize Theron, reprising her role from the previous film (which I'm sure I saw and probably reviewed), seems ultimately squandered. A shame that she's in the movie for about five minutes, spending some of that as a CGI phantom and a lot of that screaming. It's telling that she still manages to be the most interesting thing in it.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) [The Gruesome Edition] - DVD + The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
***/****
BD - Image A Sound B+ Extras A
DVD - Image B+ Sound B- Extras B
starring Dennis Hopper, Caroline Williams, Jim Siedow, Bill Moseley
screenplay by L.M. Kit Carson
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If the first film is about living with malevolent ghosts--the sins of the father made flesh and leather, if you will--then the second is a cunning piece about the Reagan '80s: the fantasia, the nostalgia, the delusions of grandeur, the inflationary monomania, and, finally, the decay of actual values in a society believing itself to be the illusory City on the Hill. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is also a highly sexualized film, the American Psycho of its day, mixing sex with money until the two are indistinguishable from the great gouts of blood, bluster, and designer suits used in their acquisition. The picture's smart enough to be a commentary on its time while its time is still unspooling. Undeniably, there's something bankrupt about the morality of this story told in this context--the rise of corporations in the McDecade skewered as the monster Sawyer clan of the original launches a successful man-meat chili business with affable, no-longer-reluctant Cook (Jim Siedow) as its clown pitchman. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 can be read as every bit the product of its era as the following year's Wall Street and Predator--a science-fiction of regression and animalism that is not entirely unlike its star Dennis Hopper's Blue Velvet, also from 1986. It feels like the twelve years separating source and sequel (just like the ten that separate the first two George Romero "Dead" movies) mark director Tobe Hooper as a sharp sociologist when painting with this very specific brush, evolving the tumor of the Vietnam War manifested as a pair of lumpen bogeys on a young girl's back into this florid bloodbath erected on those conservative tent poles of mass media, mass consumerism, and misguided phallic projection. No accident, either, one supposes, that its central avenging angel is a dim-witted, swaggering cowboy figure, ambling in from the 1950s to win fights we've already lost.

Midnight Special (2016)

***½/****
starring Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Sam Shepard
written and directed by Jeff Nichols

by Walter Chaw Jeff Nichols's Midnight Special is beautiful. It's a film about aspiration and sacrifice. It believes that the world is still a mysterious place anchored by love and hope and devotion to simple ideas about how hard it is to be a parent--and how important. It's about nurturing a thing with all your heart and letting it go when it's strong enough. It's about listening when it's the last thing you want to hear; it's about believing there's a future for your kids even if all evidence seems to suggest the opposite. It's like Tomorrowland in many ways, but mostly in its suggestion that there's a place maybe where things feel like they used to feel when you were a kid and everything was still possible. Even though nothing made sense, things would make sense one day when you were big. Midnight Special deserves its comparisons to films like E.T. and Starman and especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It works in the same small places with ordinary characters who grow to fill larger, echoing spaces. Nichols puts us in medias res with Roy (Michael Shannon) and his best friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) on the run from cult leader Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), having fled at some point before the movie starts with Roy's son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher). We learn it was around Alton's oddities that the cult largely formed. We learn that Alton's oddities are perhaps supernatural, or extraterrestrial, or interdimensional. It doesn't really matter. They're profoundly strange, and there are times it appears that he's able to tell a little of the future.

Bitter Rice (1949) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Riso amaro
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Vittorio Gassmann, Doris Dowling, Silvana Mangano, Raf Vallone
screenplay by Corrado Alvaro, Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani,Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli, Gianni Puccini
directed by Giuseppe De Santis

by Bryant Frazer Bitter Rice is a heck of a film. It's the story of a couple of refugees from an American film noir who stumble into a grindhouse showing an Italian social-issues drama. The beautiful losers are Walter and Francesca (Vittorio Gassman and Doris Dowling), a pair of small-time crooks on the run following the heist of a lifetime. The social conscience is personified by a class of peasant women who have for hundreds of years travelled from all over the country to work hard days in the rice fields of northern Italy, and also by, to some degree, ethical, committed soldier Marco (Raf Vallone), who lingers in the rice fields after his discharge because he has come to care about the fate of the women there. And the sex appeal is provided, in spades, by Silvana Mangano, a bombshell and a half. When producer Dino de Laurentiis and director Giuseppe De Santis cast the 18-year-old in the role, she had already appeared in a few films and had been the teenaged girlfriend of young Marcello Mastroianni. But her performance in Bitter Rice--a role that had her shaking her tits, swinging her hips, and hiking her skirt up to here--made her an overnight sensation.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + DigitalHD

Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Max Von Sydow
written by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw I was four when I saw Star Wars. It was the first time I'd seen a film in a theatre; it was the first film I'd seen, period. I didn't speak a word of English. It was overwhelming, and I'm discovering, after watching J.J. Abrams's Star Wars: The Force Awakens (hereafter Star Wars 7), that it imprinted itself on my DNA. Thirty-eight years later, I collect the toys my parents couldn't afford to buy me when I was a kid--the ones I played with at friends' houses, when I pretended to be Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as a child of immigrants doing his best to fit into a society that promised blond and blue-eyed messiahs. My office is full of these toys. They are fetishized relics for me. I hold them and they possess a totemic value. The curve of a molded plastic stormtrooper's helmet reminds me of the department store where I looked at it through the packaging--and of my delight at my mom one day buying me one, which I opened on the way home in the backseat of the family car.

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

**/****
starring Will Brittain, Zoey Deutch, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda It's easy to underestimate Richard Linklater, America's nice-guy filmmaker par excellence. If his chill aura more or less kept him out of the prestige-film sweepstakes until Boyhood, it also made the formal dice rolls of Waking Life and the Before trilogy land more impressively--and contrary to expectations--than they might have coming from a more bullish director. But Linklater's genial Texas cool proves a liability in Everybody Wants Some!!, a calculated, unambitious return to the rhythms of Dazed and Confused that picks up with a new crew in the next decade. Riding a wave of good vibes from cinephiles clamouring for another shaggy-dog hangout movie, Everybody Wants Some!! never quite earns either its Van Halen-cribbed exclamation or its status as a presumptive critical and audience favourite, settling for aw-shucks likeability and shopworn familiarity where Linklater's best work sneaks anthropology in through the backdoor.