Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #297: Burn, Motherfucker, Burn! (2017)

 

In 1991, dashcam footage of four Los Angeles Police Department officers assaulting African-American motorist Rodney King made worldwide news; the next year, the acquittal of those officers sparked the most devastating riots in US history. Sacha Jenkins' 2017 documentary Burn, Motherfucker, Burn! explores the complicated race relations in LA in the decades leading up to the 1992 riots, beginning with the 1965 Watts riots and using the Black Lives Matter movement as a framing device for the contemporary legacy of 1992.

This documentary for US cable TV network Showtime I think gets as much right as it gets wrong. Jenkins' approach in both how he conducts the interviews and aesthetically traces the events in question is appropriately restrained and adequately objective, and it doesn't fall back on pop culture references from any of the time periods to jog our memories or to legitimise Jenkins' coverage of the events. But as it progressed, I found it lingered on numerous points for too long, certainly long after they'd been made, and that really diminished its power and emotional effect. It also has a few animated scenes that I found rather jarringly reminiscent of Brett Morgen's documentaries; I love those, but in employing that similar technique here I felt Jenkins was compromising his own directorial vision.

Overall, Jenkins' film engaged me as a cinematic history lesson, but did not rivet me as a documentary. I'm afraid for me, Burn, Motherfucker, Burn! fizzles out just before it catches fire. 6/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #296: Biography: I Want My MTV (2019).

 

On 1 August, 1981, the Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star beamed out onto TV screens across the US, and Music Television, the network that came to define Generation X, was born. The 2019 documentary Biography: I Want My MTV, from directors Tyler Measom and Patrick Waldrop, traces MTV's history from its difficult creation to its transformation of the music industry, then to its shift in the 1990s to scripted and reality programming.

This is a pretty superficial documentary but that's appropriate because MTV was meant all along to be superficial. It does, however, demonstrate very illuminatingly how MTV revolutionised the music industry with the increasing significance of music videos as an art form and television with, for better or worse, the advent of the reality genre and rival music networks like VH1. It also deals quite frankly with the issues of inclusivity and equality the network has faced, particularly in its early years when artists like Rick James publicly called it out for playing too few artists of colour and for how heavily women were objectified in many hard rock videos. (In fairness to them, the second video played on MTV was Pat Benatar's You Better Run.) Once the '90s rolled around, the spike in competition as well as changing cultural trends inspired MTV brass to dabble in non-music programming with the show The Real World, in whose wake shows like Beavis and Butthead, Jackass, Punk'd and (my personal favourite) Teen Wolf followed, and the documentary ends with how music consumption and music videos have gone from MTV to YouTube, suggesting that while MTV may be on the wane, it still had quite its reign as a musical and cultural behemoth.

Pop culture documentaries can be very hagiographic, but this one isn't. Measom and Waldrop evidently are passionate about their subject and its history but here they still strive to capture that history's essence honestly, as I discussed above. Their goal, with which they of course use archive footage and interviews with numerous former hosts and music artists, is ultimately to trace MTV's trajectory and reveal its cultural and artistic legacy. In doing that, they also manage to remind the viewer how impermanence works to ensure all trends and institutions come and go, but the joy and inspiration they generate, linger nonetheless. Biography: I Want My MTV does its iconic subject genuine justice.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #295: The Mafia Kills Only in Summer (2013).

 

It's 1969 in Palermo, Italy. Our hero is Arturo (Alex Bisconti as a child; writer-director Pierfrancesco Dilberto as an adult), an aspiring journalist with his heart set firmly on his beautiful classmate Flora (Ginevra Antona as a child; Claudia Gioe as an adult). His awkward efforts to woo Flora happen simultaneously with the rise of the Cosa Nostra, or the Silician Mafia, and his and the rest of Palermo's dawning awareness of them over the next two decades. 

This Italian critical darling began really so well for me, with its unusual but genuinely charming mix of The Wonder Years, Amelie, Goodfellas and Good Bye, Lenin!. The first half with child Arturo mixes the respective nostalgia and narration, romantic whimsy, mafia theme and political subtext of those four classics. But then it jumps forward to adult Arturu now working as a journalist and still in love with Flora, and I can understand and appreciate how that creative choice was taken for a narrative arc and variety but that's where the film's consistency really dropped for me. The childhood scenes are sweeter than a gelato (and you know I've made that reference because this is an Italian movie) and the adulthood ones, in fairness, abandon that for realism to show the contrasts between those life stages, but I just found the transition quite jarring and the outcome increasingly bland. I think Dilberto should've added some subtle visual or thematic connections in the latter scenes to the events in Arturo's and Flora's childhoods. Not to mention more emphasis in the cinematography, particularly, on the Mediterranean landscape nearby, and in a few scenes Roberto Forza's score I found rather intrusive. 

The cast, particularly the child ones, are delightful on-screen, too, but The Mafia Kills Only in Summer really ended up taking the wrong stylistic route for me. I give it 6/10. However, it won Best Comedy Film at the 2013 European Film Awards, former anti-Mafia magistrate Pietro Grasso called it the best film ever made about the Sicilian Mafia and it spawned an Italian TV series, so what do I know?

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #294: Hotel Artemis (2019).

 

In 2028 Los Angeles, a riot breaks out over water privatisation. Seeing an ideal chance, career criminal Sherman (Sterling K. Brown) wages a bank robbery that leaves half his crew dead and his brother Lev (Brian Tyree Henry) critically injured. Realising how much that idea backfired, Sherman, Lev and the other survivors now take refuge in the nearby Hotel Artemis, a secret local hospital that only treats criminals, run by Jean "The Nurse" Thomas (Jodie Foster, made up to appear older), who's not left the place in 22 years because of agoraphobia and grief over her son's death. Jean's rules are strict: no weapons, no non-members and no killing of other guests. As Sherman and his crew get acquainted with Thomas and vice versa, the authorities hunting Sherman down outside learn he's in the Artemis, and so now they're going in; meanwhile, on the inside Sherman finds other foes to combat.

Hotel Artemis, English writer-director Drew Pearce's feature debut, is like a futuristic version of Bad Times at the El Royale. Only, minus all the unmistakable swagger and assertiveness that partly made that film such a rollicking, suspenseful great time. In its defence there is a touch of futuristic science fiction to it, with Thomas' robot-aided surgery and 3D printing, but these elements are too brief to offer any true uniqueness and their inclusion also felt slightly jarring to me. There's just nothing immediate here to forcefully grab and hold your attention (or at least mine) and that was the fatal missing ingredient for me here.

Foster, of course, is solid as the Nurse and even wears the aging make-up very well, but her co-stars mostly go through the motions here and the supporting female roles are very derivative and one-dimensional. The action scenes are all shot (pun intended) very clearly but staged unimaginatively, and Cliff Martinez' soundtrack is no different there. Therefore, paying a visit to Hotel Artemis was harmless enough, but I won't be checking in there any time soon for a stay.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #293: Only the Animals (2019).

 

A young French woman, Evelynne Ducat (Valeria Bruni Tadeschi) has recently disappeared. A search for her can't happen yet because there are no leads, but then after a snowstorm, her car is found near the Causse Mejean plateau where a small rural community is struggling to survive. Five of its residents, all from vastly different backgrounds, immediately know they are people of interest once the search starts. But they and the authorities all don't yet know this murderous and cold saga actually began on another continent entirely. As their stories overlap, their secrets emerge as Evelynne's fate and the person responsible for that is revealed.

Only the Animals is a crime drama based on Colin Niel's French-language novel, from director Dominik Moll and writer/composer Benedikt Schiefer. It's definitely a slow-burner and so it doesn't explode with suspense or violence, but it's quite unique in how it takes the avenue of interlocking stories rather than the hardboiled potboiler one. That also gives it, for me, a pleasantly intriguing and even sensuous quality, which Moll visualises lucidly and cohesively as he jumps between stories. Schiefer's dialogue feels consistently realistic and natural, and his score is appropriately delicate. Moll also draws engaging and convincing performances from all his actors, and employs Patrick Ghiringelli's cinematography for a haunting effect.

One or two scenes may be just slightly too long, but Only the Animals nonetheless is a refreshing departure for European thrillers. 8/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #292: Weathering with You (2019).

 

First-year high schooler Hodaka Morishima (voiced by Kotaro Diago in the original Japanese version) flees his home on the island of Kozu-shima to make a new life in Tokyo. After his ferry gets caught in a huge rainstorm, he meets a businessman named Keisue Suga (Shun Oguri) who soon gives him a part-time job at his publishing company. As Hodaka and the company begin investigating urban legends regarding Tokyo's unusually wet weather, Hodoka and Suga learn of the mythical "sunshine girl" with weather-controlling activities. But Hodoka is about to learn she exists, and he finds her in the form of Hina Amano (Nana Mori), a fellow high schooler and a McDonald's employee who gave him food just after he arrived in Tokyo and was homeless and unemployed. So now he tracks her down again and they form a strong connection, particularly after she proves her powers to him. The powers that be, however, of course won't let them be together, so they must find a way to do so.

This latest effort from anime writer-director Makoto Shinkai begins really very promisingly and engagingly, but like its predecessor Your Name (2016), it peaked about 30 minutes in for me. Again, the visuals are gorgeous and painstakingly detailed, but Shinkai's pacing is, I think, more erratic than a toddler's handwriting and I swear some of his dialogue here is so corny it makes James Cameron's sound like opera. I also don't think its narrative is nearly as thematically deep as it thinks it is (and as it arguably should be), and Japanese rock band Radwimps' score (they also scored Your Name) feels much too electronic for a film so overtly about nature and connection; I think a really organic, new-age score would've fit much better.

If you read this and you're about to watch the movie, that's my forecast for what you'll get with Weathering with You. 6/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #291: The Emperor's Club (2002).

 

William Hundert (Kevin Kline) is a passionate classics professor at St. Benedict's Academy, an all-boys boarding school, in the 1970s. At the beginning of a new school year, his class welcomes new arrival Sedgewick Bell (Emile Hirsch), a talented but lazy and disruptive son of national Senator Hiram Bell (Harris Yulin). Professor Hundert's efforts to academically transform Sedgewick are successful but detrimental to some of his other students, particularly the quiet and neurotic Martin Blythe (Paul Dano). However, Hundert ultimately manages to nurture and unite his class before they all compete in the school's traditional "Mr. Julius Caesar" classics quiz. Then, 25 years later, Hundert is unexpectedly overlooked for the now-vacant headmaster position, but his former students have something else planned for him.

Based on Ethan Canin's 1994 short story The Palace Thief, The Emperor's Club is harmless but unremarkable. That's because despite Kline's solid lead performance and the presence of a few newbies who've since gone on to A-list Hollywood status (there's also a young Jesse Eisenberg here), this narrative makes absolutely no effort to explore ignored avenues or to bravely throw the big emotional punches. Both of those intentions are very risky, as both can make the book/film etc. seem like it's trying too hard to be respectively unconventional or powerful. (What makes all the difference is how the director treads the chosen territory.) But trying to take either of those routes and falling into the respective traps is, I think, preferable in some ways than shying away from said routes altogether. Instead, director Michael Hoffman and screenwriter Neil Tolkin take a quite stuffy approach to this school-based coming of age flick and while I had feeling at the start that this would be emotional overkill and it turns out I was wrong there, I still wasn't engaged, moved or inspired. 

It's nowhere near as awful as Mr. Holland's Opus (that was emotional overkill), but The Emperor's Club is also nowhere near as great or distinctive or groundbreaking as Dead Poets Society, Heathers or The Breakfast Club. 6/10.

On THAT slap.

Everybody saw it. Literally the entire world; the amount with TV or internet access anyhow. What the hell was Will Smith thinking - if he was thinking at all? You were at the Academy Awards, dude! The world's highest-profile awards show! Plus, you were about to mark a career peak with the Best Actor Oscar!

I don't know. But I do know what happened around me when I saw it. I was watching the show with a friend and, in the moment, I thought Will's intentions, at least, were understandable, but my friend was outraged. Personally, I still don't think he should've gone up there and hit Chris Rock, but I do think doing that was just foolish, and it has overshadowed the achievements of the other winners, namely the queer and Latino Ariana DeBose and the deaf Troy Kotsur. I also knew when it happened that it would be an instant media - news and social - whipping horse, and there I was right. Plus, what was keeping Smith from saving those feelings for his acceptance speech since he must've known he was his category's warm favourite?

Furthermore, he was laughing himself at Rock's joke that sparked it all, until he saw wife Jada's upset reaction. That was evidently what tipped the scales, but it didn't make his initial reaction any less hypocritical and then in his speech itself, he advocated for peace and harmony. Rock's joke also was sexist and body-shaming, but it was just a joke and it was meant to provoke, so by lashing out like he did, Smith gave Rock that very satisfaction. I also think somebody seated near Smith should've tried to restrain or calm him before he walked on stage; they must've known, from his yelling, how angry he was.

In fairness, Smith did apologise during his speech and, at greater length, in a statement after the show. But now, after the Academy announced an investigation into this incident and possible disciplinary action against him (including stripping him of his Oscar), he has resigned from their membership. I call that cowardly jumping before you can be pushed. I'm still prepared to give him a second chance; too many celebrities have been punished more for equal or greater sins. But Will would be very wise to avoid a repeat of this entire very public scandal.