Reviews

Told in a sort of slow burn/slow reveal style that largely takes place over a few days in December 1986 (but occasionally jumps around a bit in time) during two unrelated police killings of young Algerian men (one was shot by a drunk officer, the other brutally beaten by a motorcycle riot-response unit).

The film does a very good job of depicting how police distort "officer-involved" violent incidents and ultimately try to cover them up. From early on, the fix is in as Internal Affairs scrambles to delay announcing one death so soon after another.

The film is quite well-acted and does a very good job of mixing archival footage of actual events & people with the portrayals of those events by the cast. The use of music is particularly well done, with to notable exceptions: the somewhat jarring montages set to punk rock that seem to celebrate & revel in the violence of the protests, making the film seem a little less "balanced" than one might hope. (Whatever one thinks of protests or police brutality, surely throwing Molotov cocktails onto balconies of buildings in residential areas is not worthy of jubilation.)

The ultimate outcome of the investigations is explained in text via epilogue, but should come as no surprise to anyone who follows police brutality cases.

At its best, People Are The Sky is a touching personal story about the director's experience fleeing North Korea as a child during the Korean war and returning many years later to find a very different place, plus a revisionist history of how U.S. military & political actions created two Koreas, one of which hates the U.S. to this day, at least part due to bombings of civilians during the Korean War.

Unfortunately, only half the film is spent on those subjects. The other half, unfortunately is mired with an unfortunate & deeply misguided apologia of the North Korean regime, including a naive acceptance of the Potemkin Village production that North Korean officials put on for the director's benefit and the attempted pitch of a (false) moral equivalence between the totalitarian dictatorship of North Korea that controls every aspect of people's lives and the various faults of the US criminal justice system.

The film starts a bit slow, going over both the director's personal history and the modern history of North & South Korea. It takes quite a while for the director to even get to North Korea, which is the main selling point of this film. Once the director enters North Korea, it seems as though she is not going to take things lying down from the North Korean guides, sparring with them rather feistily, and being repeatedly instructed to stop asking certain questions.

But after awhile, the director seems to relent to the demands of the guides and the remainder of the film becomes what the North Korean regime wants you to see, featuring interview after interview with people conspicuously wearing pins with pictures of the Great Leader or the North Korean flag. She visits a Potemkin (and gov't run) Christian church in Pyongyang, interviews a gov't bureaucrat who denies that anything is amiss and talks about how the People's palace is built above the government buildings in Pyongyang because the government must look up to the people, tours the locations of several alleged "massacres" of North Koreans committed by Americans (and uncritically quotes the regime tour guides at each location without providing any context or rebuttal), meets the widow of a party politico who has fond memories of how they met, and visits a happy upper middle class couple who chat happily about having 24-hour free day care, and how the wife works a job and the husband sometimes cooks dinner. "Equality!" beams the director, ignoring the horrors visited upon so many other couples by the regime.

There is even a short section of direct apologia for North Korean human rights abuses where the director concludes that racial justice issues in America really make North Korea no worse than the US.

After the screening of the film, the director was asked about why she didn't show more of the negative parts of North Korea. She explained that the gov't-supplied "guides" (in reality, censor-chaperone regime information officers) controlled where she could go. But then, rather than talking about how this was a problem, she said she didn't understand why so many people thought it was such a problem to have a guide help show you around an unfamiliar country. That pretty much says all that needs to be said about the credulity with which she approached this project.

This is a charming, somewhat picaresque comedy about a naive, but partially college-educated Tunisian hayseed (complete with the ridiculous straw hat) named Aziz (quickly nicknamed "Zizou") who comes to Tunis just before the Arab Spring and becomes much wiser to the ways of the world as events unfold in his own life and in Tunisian politics.

At first, Zizou is repeatedly hustled & used by various business, political & religious factions in Tunis, but he eventually falls in with an interesting crowd of characters in the souk (the open-air market) and begins working as a TV/satellite technician, a position that takes him into the homes of many in Tunis, some of them quite powerful.

A large cast of interesting & believable male & female characters plus some beautiful seaside scenery make this a believable world that the audience wants to live in and explore. That's important because the plot is underdeveloped and the protagonist is generally quite passive.

With the exception of a key subplot involving his attempts to rescue a beautiful woman imprisoned by the regime, the main character is largely afloat in the city, buffeted by the seas of the social change around him, as well as the machinations of others. But like Forrest Gump, Zelig, and Chauncy Gardner, he often ends up in the right place at the right time and often says or does something critical to the events that take place.

Although not groundbreaking, this is a likable film that offers an off- beat, rather light-hearted (but thoughtful & nuanced) take on the Arab Spring in Tunisia.

A funny & touching film that is very effective at getting the audience to identify and empathize with Frank Langella's aging character, a former cat burglar who is gradually growing senile. Frank's son buys him a robot caretaker --a health-nut disciplinarian with a soft spot in its hardware heart -- and Frank eventually persuades the robot to be his partner-in-crime in some late-life capers he has planned.

The film is cleverly and ambiguously set in the "near future," so the 30- & 40-somethings of today could easily be the Franks of tomorrow: still using the slang of the 2000s & 2010s, not scared of the latest technology but still somewhat befuddled by it, and rather aghast when young people ask us about our quaint "relationship with printed media."

Happy New Year, Grandma is a mean-spirited film that seems designed to spite the viewer for the time spent watching it. Ostensibly a black comedy, the film is largely tone-deaf when it comes to humor, and is unable to deliver a single amusing moment in the final act of the film, which becomes increasingly difficult to watch.

Briefly summarized, the film is about the trials & travails of a family dealing with an elderly relative (the "grandma" of the title, although she is actually a great grandmother) who needs constant care and attention, perhaps because she has dementia, or perhaps because she is pretending to have lost her senses in order to get more attention. Despite being severely burdened by her care, the woman's adult daughter, Maritxu, is unwilling to put her in a home. So, the rest of the family concoct a scheme to institutionalize grandma while Maritxu and her husband are on vacation. All does not turn out well.

The film is perfectly watchable for most of its duration, as doddering old grandma causes one problem after another, occasionally resulting in humorous developments. This is why I don't give it a much lower score. But having earned some audience goodwill and having convinced the viewer that it might be worth sticking it out to the end, the film then takes a sharp turn for the worse in the final act, frequently confusing senseless acts of violence and cruelty with dark humor. The last 20-30 minutes or so are about as funny as one of Weegee's crime scene photos, and about as enjoyable to look at.

The reader may at this point be tempted to dismiss this review, thinking that perhaps this reviewer simply does not understand or appreciate dark humor, but I have greatly enjoyed black comedies such as The Trouble with Harry, Dr. Strangelove, M*A*S*H, In Bruges, The Guard, and even the misanthropic-but-devilishly-funny Burn After Reading. This film is ultimately very little like these films in tone or style of humor, which it largely lacks.

Happy New Year, Grandma appears to be the product of someone who simply has an impaired or very irregular sense of humor and thought it might be masked by labeling this wildly uneven, borderline psychopathic, largely unfunny film as a black comedy. I cannot recommend it to anyone, except as an object lesson in how to completely squander and undermine audience goodwill in the final act of a film.

"Instead of Abracadabra" is a very funny short film about a lovable loser who lives with his parents but fancies himself a great magician of "gothic mystery and mayhem" and has developed a catch phrase of "Chimay!" as an alternative to abracadabra. His parents want him to get a real job but he wants to impress the single mom next door by performing first at her child's birthday party, and then at his father's 60th birthday get-together. The first trick we see him do goes horribly awry and much of the film is spent grimacing in anticipation of similarly catastrophic outcomes from his dangerous and elaborate magic tricks. This film has some Napoleon Dynamite-type elements of humor, some big laughs, and a couple good twists toward the end.

Fortunately, I won free tickets for a sneak preview of Die Another Day, and didn't have to pay any money to waste 2 hours of my life.

It was awful - the worst movie I've seen all year. The opening credits sequence is the worst I've ever seen - largely because the Madonna song is not only awful, but also the most incongruous Bond song ever, and they play the entire thing while this silly thermal imaging (or somesuch FX) music video about Bond being tortured plays in the background. The movie's plot doesn't even make an effort to be marginally plausible or original - and that's even within the unrealistic, paint-by-numbers world of Bond films.

Brosnan seems to just be going through the motions at this point. He delivers his lines in a serious tone, but without conviction. You can tell he's getting tired of saying the obligatory "Bond, James Bond" over and over again.

The fight scenes are as unrealistic as they've been since Goldeneye. I realize that Bond movies aren't intended to be hyper-realistic, but reality can only be toyed with so much before it seems pointless to even bother with pretending to follow the laws of physics. Something blows up every few seconds (probably to distract the audience from the fact that the fight makes no sense and the outcome doesn't matter) and apparently dozens of people with automatic weapons are GUARANTEED TO MISS if their target is running or otherwise moving. The bad guy naturally has a sports car sitting around with as many gadgets and weapons as Bond's car - including a pintle-mounted gatling gun that fires just inches over his head, but somehow manages not to burn or deafen him. And of course Bond is as good at fencing (!?!) and other forms of sword-fighting as a professional fencing champion.

The dialogue is awful and sorely lacking in cleverness. The puns are cheap, contrived, and sadly predictable. And the blunt attempts at double entendres are clearly designed to be so blatantly obvious that even your average West Virginian would realize that they have a sexual subtext. Actually, it's the real dialogue that becomes the subtext - some of the exchanges would make no sense if taken at face value, which undermines the whole point of double entendre humor.

The Bond girls try so hard to be sexual that it's embarassing. Halle Berry is a sexy actress, but the movie hits you over the head with her sexuality so much (her slow-mo emergence from the waves in a bikini is laughably unsubtle) that she actually seems less attractive by the end of the film. You know it's gone over the top when, in the final fight, one girl (for no apparent reason) shows up in a one-strap sports bra-type thing, and the other one starts stripping *while* she's fighting.

It was a painful self-parody of a self-parodying movie series. 2/10.

Saw this short film at Filmfest DC and though it was the best of the shorts shown there. It really captures the feeling of submission to authority that children often feel in school, and magnifies it through the lens of Emperor-worship in pre-war Japan. The naive honesty of the main character, rather than any attempt at subversion, gets him into trouble with the teacher on his first day at a new school.

Half of the dialogue in this film is conveyed through facial expressions and glances, and it's executed flawlessly. The conclusion is sublime - hyperlogical and humorous at the same time. This short is what film is all about - it's sure to put a smile on your face!

When released, this may have been a particularly revelatory documentary on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. But viewed today, I found little new information that gave me any deeper insights into the situation than I had before.

This film is filled with talking heads endlessly opining about the conflict. Some of these opinions, such as when a scholar compares the situation to John Wayne or Gary Cooper walking into a bar, are laughable. I was disappointed with the comparatively less time spent on showing the actual conflict itself. Talking heads can be seen on television all the time - the potential strength of a film like this is to show us the goings on that aren't normally seen. At times, they do this to good effect. There are some moving moments, but they are few and far between.

There are one or two montages done to songs by then-contemporary singers from the Israel/Palestine area. While the images are interesting, the songs are cheesy and have rudimentary lyrics. This is typical of the dated feel of this film.

If you're particularly interested in this topic, go ahead and check out the film. But otherwise, you're better off looking elsewhere.