Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #268: Oculus (2013).

 

Jumping back and forth between the present day and eleven years prior, this is the story of siblings Kaylee and Tim Russell (Karen Gillan and Brenton Thwaites). Tim's just been released from a psychiatric facility after his and Kaylee's parents were murdered in 2002. That happened after father Alan (Rory Cochrane) bought an antique mirror to put in his office, not realising it supernaturally inspires hallucinations. After the increasingly violent Alan starts abusing his wife Marie (Katee Sackhoff), that's when the tragedy is set in motion. Now, back after Tim's release, he and Kaylee try to clear his name, but the mirror's game is far from over.

Mike Flanagan's 2013 effort Oculus, based on his 2005 short film Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man with the Plan, is, I think, immensely overrated. Firstly, the narrative is increasingly convoluted which I realise was the point, but I didn't find it convoluted in a lucid or logical manner. There's even an especially dumb scene involving a lightbulb being eaten. Flanagan's pacing and editing are much too relaxed for a horror movie (even one that relies on on strong character development as this one does, to its credit), Michael Fimognari's cinematography is unimaginative and Flanagan's regular composers the Newton Brothers' score is too subtle even when most horror scores are too excessive. Gillan tries to bring authority and sympathy to Kaylee, but Thwaites gives a lazy performance and goes through numerous scenes with his mouth gaping open like one of those metal clowns at the show (funfair, for you American readers if I have any). Seriously, I felt like feeding him a ping-pong ball.

For a great - and more importantly, scary - recent horror flick about a dysfunctional family, I say skip this one and watch Hereditary or Lights Out instead. To me, Oculus is no match for them. 6/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #267: Sun Children (2020).

 

12-year-old Ali (Ruhoullah Zamani) and his three friends in rural Iran undertake small jobs and petty crimes in order to help their families get by amidst widespread poverty. Their current work is in a mine, where Ali is soon enlisted to locate a secret underground treasure. He agrees, but before he can access the tunnel where the treasure's buried, he and his crew have first to enrol at the nearby Sun School, a charitable institution that seeks to be a school for street kids and child labourers.

Iranian writer-director Majid Majidi's 2020 effort Sun Children is the latest of his films about underprivileged young people and after screening successfully at the Venice International Film Festival (where Zamani won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for an emerging actor or actress), it was the Iranian submission for the Best International Feature Film Oscar and made the shortlist of fifteen films. I think it's easy to understand why; this movie achieves the tricky balancing act of exploring the themes of child labour and poverty in a family-friendly manner without actually trivialising or sanitising them, and it also offers quite a bravely critical reminder of how patriarchal Middle Eastern culture is. There's also a moving climactic twist, when we discover what the treasure really is.

Ramin Kousha's score feels somewhat too Westernised, but that was the only flaw I found here, and Majidi's concern for these impoverished young protagonists is thoroughly evident as is his commitment to working a cohesive narrative around their lives, and Zamani is totally charming and convincing as their leader. Wisely, there's nothing flashy about the aesthetics either. Sun Children indeed shines bright. 9/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #266: Eighth Grade (2018).

 

Kayla (Elsie Fisher) is 13. She lives with her single father Mark (Josh Hamilton) and, like most of her teenage peers, spends most of her time behind a screen; she even actually makes YouTube vlogs in which she portrays herself as a motivational influencer. At school she's a pariah and she knows it, with this being the primary source of her insecurity and angst. But when the last week of eighth grade rolls around, Kayla sets out to finally acquire acceptance from her classmates. Meanwhile, domestically she and her father, who resents her efforts to exclude him from her activities, try to find common ground.

This filmmaking debut from comedian Bo Burnham, himself a former YouTuber (and I loved watching his videos), is nothing ambitious or (entirely) original, but it's not really meant to be either of those qualities anyhow. What it is meant to be (and manages to be) is a frank but tender exploration of growing up in the social media age, with the pitfalls that has imposed particularly on children and teens. Kayla and most of her peers share virtually all their thoughts online and one scene even hints at the posting and sharing of their sexually explicit images. I suspect Burnham added this criticism of social media because he's admitted to abandoning his YouTube career after becoming disillusioned with the website, but he makes this condemnation in a smart and and sincere manner of emphasising how social media platforms tend to deliberately prey on the young and vulnerable. By contrast, he treats them here with obvious concern and his screenplay also doesn't have them talking unrealistically eloquently like too many teen movies do.

Fisher, leading a mostly non-professional teenage cast, is effective and beautifully understated as Kayla, and Anna Meredith's largely electronic score is fitting because it sounds at least to me very much like the kind of music currently in vogue. I found some of the supporting characters, namely the handful of kids who ultimately befriend Kayla, to be slightly underdeveloped, and the climax to be rather formulaic, but nonetheless I overall consider Eighth Grade a wise, astute and empathetic directorial debut, and despite being a male millennial I noticed a lot of similarities between Kayla and my 13-year-old self. 8/10.

My reaction to the death of Halyna Hutchins.

 

I think everybody knows the story now. Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, above, died last Friday after actor Alec Baldwin accidentally shot her with a prop gun he was told was not loaded. When the story broke, I was online and it immediately shocked me and I knew it would make the primetime news even here in Australia (which it did).

As the hours passed I couldn't help but question whether this tragedy would've been considered as newsworthy had a less well-known actor than Baldwin been the one who pulled the trigger. He is also serving as a producer on the film, entitled Rust, and therefore has more responsibilities on-set than were he just one of the stars, but although he still has indeed technically killed Hutchins, and injured the director Joel Souza, I think the primary culprit here is Dave Halls, the assistant director who gave him the gun and assured him it was empty without checking it (yet Baldwin maybe should've checked it himself before firing it).

Amidst all these initial thoughts, however, and still now, I feel horrible for Hutchins and her young family and her friends; my heart goes out to them all. But I'm frustrated with how the media is treating this incident. They are, from what I have noticed, focusing almost exclusively on her death and how that was caused rather than on her work. I think it's despicable that most media outlets are doing that, particularly when women cinematographers (and women filmmakers in general) have to fight their way to success and job stability in what is an overwhelmingly male profession. Hutchins achieved that, but the media seems intent on ensuring she will be remembered exclusively as the woman who Alec Baldwin accidentally shot on a movie set. They've also used this tragedy to renew interest in the accidental shooting that killed Brandon Lee while filming The Crow in 1993, which I suspect has only fueled conspiracy theories and affected his family.

But anyway, I won't go on any more as I feel I've made every point I wanted to here perfectly clearly and if I ramble on more I may just inadvertently use the same reporting tactics I've criticised here. RIP, Ms. Hutchins.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #265: Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (2020).

 

Cherry (voiced in the Japanese-language version by Ichikawa Somegoro VIII) is a shy teenage boy with social and communication difficulties who expresses his feelings through haikus instead of verbally, and always wears headphones to block loud noise out. Meanwhile, Smile (Hana Sugisaki) is a teenage girl who externally projects confidence and vivaciousness as a social media influencer, but wears a mask because internally she's deeply insecure about her very large and braced front teeth. One day during summer they have a fateful chance meeting and quickly become more than friends, but then Cherry's father Koichi (Hiroshi Yamiya) informs him they will be moving town in a month.

This anime romance from co-writer and director Kyohei Ishiguro is frequently so fluorescently colourful it could give even Baz Luhrmann an epileptic seizure, but that's a very clever artistic choice and indeed it's the point because it helps the viewer see the world as both the protagonists do. Smile is, as I said, an influencer, an occupation and lifestyle which can frankly be very superficial, and Cherry is quite evidently autistic, which often means being hypersensitive to visual brightness or having enhanced visual perception. That is also why they together make a realistic couple because it's a case of opposite attracting, and it makes their separate arcs more relatably modern. They are also affectingly voiced, and the animation shows a perfectionistic approach throughout.

The pacing is occasionally meandering, but overall Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (and how fun and cute is that title?) struck me as a really sweet, intelligent and balanced anime love story from Ishiguro and studio Signal.MD. 8/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #264: Whisper of the Heart (1995).

 

14-year-old Shizuku Tsukishima (voiced by Yoko Honna in the Japanese-language version) attends Mukaihara Junior High School in Tokyo. She lives with her parents and older sister and her best friend at school is Yuko (Maiko Kayama), but her real love is books. She's a bookworm's bookworm, and one day she visits her local library and is stunned to find all the books missing. Upon browsing the checkout cards, she discovers somebody named Seiji Amasawa (Issei Takahashi) has borrowed them all. Shizuku now tries to track Seiji down, and learns he's actually boy in her grade and Mukaihara. Once they then meet, she discovers he's a budding luthier who has a crush on her and therefore has begun borrowing books en masse, obviously knowing how much she loves them, to make her notice him. In return as they get to know each other, Shizuku starts writing more and singing, and then their relationship deepens and their previously unknown connections are revealed.

Whisper of the Heart was former animator Yoshifumi Kondo's sole directorial effort before his sudden death at age 47 in 1998, and Studio Ghibli's first theatrical film directed by neither Hayao Miyazaki (who nonetheless wrote the screenplay) nor Isao Takahata, but I'm afraid for me, it could've been considerably better. Visually it's as gorgeous as anything else Ghibli have made, and the voice cast all give adequate and natural performances, with dialogue that feels realistic for each character. However, the narrative was, for me, increasingly plodding and predictable to the point where I was ultimately almost entirely disengaged. It simply felt to me to be much too formulaic a YA romance, even for 1995 which was long before that genre exploded in popularity at least here in the West.

It's a nice story, sure, but one that I found to be told in a very stale manner despite the aesthetic flair on display, and it also ignored what I considered numerous chances for comic relief. Overall, Whisper of the Heart obviously did not win my heart. 6/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #263: Microbe and Gasoline (2015).

 

Daniel (Ange Darnent) lives with his mother Marie-Therese (Audrey Tautou) his distant father and two brothers in Versailles. He's lonely and bored, but is a budding painter. One day there arrives at his school a new boy, Theo (Theophile Baquet), who is basically his alter ego: loud and grungy. But they click immediately, and are soon hanging out together outside school. Sharing similar home lives and having found common interests like vehicles and design, they decide to build a makeshift car and take it on the road. They now become "Microbe" and "Gasoline" as they traverse their DIY automobile across the French countryside. En route, their relationship also changes and deepens.

This is a family-friendly departure for writer-director Michel Gondry after mostly adult-oriented features and a heap of music videos, and good on him for trying to inject some variety into his filmography, but frankly I expected less convention from the maker of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind. Primarily, I think this one would've been fresher and more profound had the dynamic been a girl and a boy  - with a completely platonic relationship, that is - instead of two boys. I think that would've allowed the film to combat childhood and gender stereotypes and to convey a message to children that boys and girls can find an emotional connection with each other Instead, as it is, for me the main duo felt quite hackneyed, even though Darnent and Bacquet both show promise on screen. Tautou, however, is wasted in a role that offers her no challenges whatsoever.

Gondry wisely depicts the young protagonists as obscene and uncouth (especially Theo), but that touch cannot mask the otherwise deeply cliched narrative and themes, and visually there's nothing distinctive or subversive either. I expected a far stranger family movie from Michel. 6/10.