Film Freak Central

Hot Docs '17: Ask the Sexpert

***/****
directed by Vaishali Sinha

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers This is a breezy, lighthearted documentary that nevertheless had me on pins and needles from the moment it introduced an antagonist. Former gynaecologist Dr. Mahinder Watsa, the eponymous "sexpert," is India's answer to Dr. Ruth. At 91, he writes a popular advice column for the MUMBAI MIRROR and continues to see patients as a sex therapist, sometimes off the street without an appointment--to the consternation of his children, who worry their widower father's fame, age, and gregariousness could attract ne'er-do-wells. Watsa's a hip dude unfazed by the most cartoonishly filthy questions, the only guy who laughed during a medical conference when a gay doctor facetiously proposed a drug that turns heterosexuals into homosexuals. The kids love him (though some who've never put a face to the name would be stunned to learn how old he is) and Penguin's publishing a book of his material, but he has a particularly vocal detractor in political science professor Dr. Pratiba Naitthani, who says by way of introduction, "I always used to be the monitor of the class. The best person is always the monitor." (Thank you, Judy Hensler.) She's filed an obscenity claim against Watsa's column on the grounds that it's smut in a publication that isn't designated smut, out of sight from minors--and if you think that's reasonable, know that she also objects to diagrams of the human anatomy appearing in classrooms. She's maddeningly obtuse; she asks rhetorically why after thousands of years the civilized world suddenly needs to know about birth control while living in the second-most overpopulated country on Earth. Though Naitthani imposes a lot of dread on the film as both she and Watsa keep checking up on her case, her dissenting voice underscores the value and urgency of Watsa's work. Abstinence-only education of the kind Naitthani endorses doesn't stop teenagers from having sex, it just makes them practise it in ignorance, putting their health and safety at risk. One young man admits that prior to discovering Watsa he didn't even know whether sex is something that's given or taken by force. Yeesh. Naitthani has a humanizing scene where she volunteers that although it looks to us and her mother like she lives alone, her busyness is a constant bedfellow. "I really don't know what's wrong with me," she blurts out with an incredulous laugh. Perhaps she should ask the sexpert.

Hot Docs '17: Hobbyhorse Revolution

***/****
directed by Selma Vilhunen

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Hobbyhorsists. They are predominantly young women, tweens and teens alike, who pretend to ride broomstick horses. The horses have names, idiosyncrasies, even lifespans (in a poetic externalization of personal growth, one girl's closet seems to double as a mausoleum for hobbyhorses), and they're billed alongside their riders in dressage tournaments that are surreal spectacles of girls bunny-hopping over fences while the crowd watches on tenterhooks, the way you dread an air-show crash or a figure skater's stumble. Slowly, though, the neophyte begins to decipher the nuances; at one point Aisku, the movie's sometimes-petulant lead, chides a beginner for moving her arms too much, and damn if this little note doesn't improve the youngster's game considerably. Hobby-horsing is a strange subculture but no stranger than bronies--and undoubtedly more athletic. The only reason to hate on it is if you're a misogynistic piece of crap. Finland's Hobbyhorse Revolution isn't the phenomenon's origin story, although it does find a common thread among the hobbyhorsists it interviews: they've all been bullied. (There's a particularly chilling ellipsis in cherubic Elsa's story: "There was this one boy... He didn't like that I was cheerful all the time. So he put an end to it.") Although being a hobbyhorsist sometimes exacerbated the abuse, the therapeutic value of the pastime and its egalitarian social scene appear to have made quitting unthinkable. Maybe it's the Scandinavian setting, but throughout Hobbyhorse Revolution I kept flashing back to Lukas Moodysson's extraordinary ode to seventh-grade riot grrls We Are the Best!: They are so many Tina Belchers, and yet there is something quite punk about our hobbyhorsists, who saw where the proverbial goalposts were and moved them for themselves. They're also hilariously profane. I love these dorks, enough to overlook that the movie's own brio never quite rises to their level.

Hot Docs '17: Living the Game

**½/****
directed by Takao Gotsu

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers In surveying a complementary milieu with the same elegant reserve, Living the Game could be a blood relative of the streaming favourite Indie Game: The Movie. Although its chill vibe doesn't feel entirely forthcoming in the age of Gamergate, the pro gamers it profiles may exhibit fewer chips on their shoulders because they all hail from the East (Japan, mostly) rather than the West. These folks are damn near role models--at least that's true of Daigo Umehara, who's grown complacent about having written memoirs and been the subject of a popular manga. Momochi owns these books but hasn't read them. He says he doesn't want to know too much about his potential opponent, which directly contradicts an earlier scene showing the copious notes he's made on the strategies of other players. Momochi lives with bubbly girlfriend Choco, the two of them eking out a living as professional gamers. The more skilled of the two, he helps her train, but his hardass approach is causing their relationship to fray at the edges, as is the couple's lack of a steady, dependable income. Momochi takes centre-stage here, though it's because of Choco's increasingly-fragile smile that his story compels. Another gamer (defeated by Momochi in a controversial victory), the Taiwanese GamerBee, inspires more affection than the morose and testy Momochi as well: A latchkey kid who sought a cure for loneliness at the arcade as a child then came around to embracing videogames again after his beloved father passed away, GamerBee is like a character out of an Edward Yang movie. Living the Game's subjects eventually descend on the Capcom Cup, a competition that awards an impressive $120,000 to the last player standing in a "Street Fighter" tournament. That the outcome is unconventionally anticlimactic might've worried the filmmakers at the time, but it almost seems to have dictated a retroactive ambivalence towards the subject of pro gaming that's slightly stultifying. There's nothing wrong with a little equivocation, of course--this is a documentary, not propaganda. But when Living the Game was over, part of me felt like I'd just watched Shrug Emoji: The Movie.

Sand Castle (2017) - Netflix

**/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Logan Marshall-Green, Glen Powell, Henry Cavill
screenplay by Chris Roessner
directed by Fernando Coimbra

by Alice Stoehr Nicholas Hoult's signature expression requires that his lips be ajar and his buckteeth be visible. The English actor then furrows or flattens his brow; narrows or widens his limpid blue eyes. It's a concise look, one that makes the most of his open, boyish face. He affects it whether flirting with his professor in A Single Man or playing the bashful Beast in the X-Men movies. That barely-open mouth can suggest uncertainty and impotence. It admits that he can neither understand nor control the world around him. Hoult assumes this expression throughout his performance as PFC Matt Ocre in Sand Castle. Ocre is fresh-faced fresh meat, too tender to handle the theatre of war in which he's abruptly immersed. ("I joined the Reserves for the college money," he explains in voiceover, a detail that screenwriter Chris Roessner plucked from his own life.) The Jordanian desert stands in for Iraq in 2003 as Ocre's platoon plows through the aftermath of the American-led invasion. Hoult's joined by hunky rising stars like Glen Powell as the macho Falvy--a far cry from his work as a pretentious ladies' man in Everybody Wants Some!!--and Logan Marshall-Green as the no-nonsense sergeant. The film follows these men as they drive from one makeshift base to another. It emphasizes their scruff, their sweat, and their loud-mouthed braggadocio. The dialogue, which oozes naturalistic profanity, is thoroughly plausible, if increasingly monotonous.

Hidden Figures (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner
screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly
directed by Theodore Melfi

by Walter Chaw Theodore Melfi's Hidden Figures is so inextricably bonded to the rote motions of awards-season biographical uplift melodrama that it functions as proof of a template studios give to directors who won't kick too much about art and individuality and expression and all that high-falutin' stuff. Better, it's proof of an attachment that fits onto the Studio sausage press ensuring that all the mashed and salted discards are extruded in the proper proportion into the collective cow gut. Hidden Figures is the story of three African-American women in the 1960s who go to work for NASA's Mercury program in the days after the Sputnik launch. It talks about how they're brilliant but forced to pee in segregated bathrooms; how they're proud family women but treated like second-class citizens or worse. It positions a white man of power who sees their value all the way through to letting one of the ladies be a co-author on a report she seems to have written herself. It has the end-credits thing where pictures of the real women whose stories the movie ostensibly tells are shown with titles detailing the horrific shit they endured to get their names on a building. Well, one of them anyway. It even has that thing in movies about numbers where there's a lot of running to try to make math exciting to watch. What it doesn't have is any lingering impact whatsoever: no gravitas, no surprise, no interest, nothing. The only thing to say about Hidden Figures, really, is that if you spend time praising it, you're being patronizing--and that is the very definition of irony.

The Bye Bye Man (2017) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount, Cressida Bonas, Faye Dunaway
screenplay by Jonathan Penner, based on "The Bridge to Body Island" by Robert Damon Schneck
directed by Stacy Title

by Bill Chambers The Bye Bye Man begins as Terminator: Nebbish, with a Poindexter in a sweater vest named Larry (Leigh Whannell, of Saw fame) pulling up to a suburban home and asking the lady of the house, Jane (Lara Knox), if she told anybody "about the name." Affirmative. Larry then returns to his vehicle, retrieves a shotgun, and blasts a hole through Jane's front door. We see a man jump out of his wheelchair in the living-room window in a tiny, easy-to-miss background detail I suspect would've been airbrushed out of a more respectable film, because the prologue ends there in the theatrical cut. In the unrated version on Blu-ray, it continues on to show Larry entering the house, finishing Jane off, executing the wheelchair dude, Rick (Andrew Gorell), as he futilely drags himself across the carpet, and grimly, dutifully marching down the street to kill some neighbours Rick just threw under the bus. Smoothly staged in one take, the sequence reminds not-unfavourably of A Serious Man, getting most of its period authenticity--the year is 1969--and middle-class dread from an aesthetic ape of that film. (The chyron-ascribed Madison, WI setting is pretty close to Coen Brothers territory, too.) It's suitably horrific. Until, that is, you start thinking about Rick: Why does his escape plan involve slumping to the floor like a sack of potatoes? The whole point of wheelchairs, see, is that they have wheels--an innovation that gave disabled people an efficient, dignified way to get a bag of chips from the kitchen or flee an axe murderer. As we will soon discover, the titular Bye Bye Man makes his marks do absurd, irrational things; the problem is, The Bye Bye Man doesn't quite know how to portray this without being hilarible itself.

Collateral Beauty (2016) - Blu-ray Disc

ZERO STARS/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras F
starring Will Smith, Edward Norton, Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren
written by Allan Loeb
directed by David Frankel

by Walter Chaw Collateral Beauty is the conversation you had that one time with the stupidest person you've ever met, in that it's so stupid it poses an existential problem for you. It happened to me once when, as a bartender, one of the waitresses asked me with concern how she could transform the Coke float she'd ordered into the Sprite float the customer had ordered. I didn't know. I still don't. And not having the answer to a question posed by the stupidest person you've ever met is horrifying. It's like you come home one day and your guinea pig greets you with a zen kōan. It's Kafka's great unwritten tale. It's Collateral Beauty: a question with no answer posed by the stupidest movie ever made. Really, the only solution is to dump it out and start from scratch. Collateral Beauty is about grief, sort of, and gaslighting, and it's shot like a visit to Whole Foods in the sense that it's burnished with a classy patina and full of pretty people you'd like to be. Then you get to the checkout lane and it's too much but you're too embarrassed to put anything back. Also the food tastes like ass.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Rogue One
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Alan Tudyk
screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw A deep cut for Star Wars fanatics, Gareth Edwards's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story also happens to be the single most topical fiction of 2016, talking as it does--in bold, melodramatic strokes befitting a space opera--about the importance of rebellion in the face of fascism. "Order," says Empirical stooge Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn). "Terror," corrects brilliant weapons engineer Galen (Mads Mikkelsen). And the representative of the fascist regime smiles, as though it were all just a matter of semantics, this idea that terror and order are opposite sides of the same devalued coin. He's engaged in a kind of political double-speak, in gaslighting--things that until this year were the scourge of banana republics and other backwards backwaters. The Empire that Krennic represents needs Galen to help them complete their Death Star superweapon, with the '80s-era Reagan/Thatcher rationale that overwhelming destructive deterrents are the only way to truly keep the peace. Galen is compelled to cooperate to keep his daughter, Jyn (Felicity Jones), safe and anonymous in the protection of violent revolutionary Saw (Forest Whitaker). The rest is Jyn's quest to clear her father's name by stealing plans for the Death Star and delivering them to a fractured resistance that isn't entirely sure if it wouldn't be a good idea to give the Empire a chance. You know, maybe they won't do all the things they said they were going to do?

Ghost in the Shell (2017)

**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic "The Ghost in the Shell" by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii's seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won't have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country's post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it's basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It's puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn't know what to do with the images it's appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there's something worth excavating here.