Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #250: Mean Creek (2004).

Teenage Sam (Rory Culkin) tells his older brother Rocky (Trevor Morgan) that he's having trouble at school with the resident bully, the overweight and privately troubled George (Josh Peck). After Rocky then tells his friends Clyde (Ryan Kelley) and Marty (Scott Mechlowicz), they hatch a plan to stage a party for Sam's (fictional) birthday and to invite George, take him on a boating trip and then make him strip in a game of truth or dare, dump him in the river and then leave him to run home naked. George very gullibly accepts the invitation and then once the trip gets underway, some of the guys, as well as Sam's friend Millie (Carly Schroeder), who's reluctantly joined them, develop second thoughts upon realising George is just very lonely and eager for acceptance. However, the others, especially Marty, maintain their original feelings about George and insist on pressing on with the plan.

Writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes' feature debut Mean Creek is a mature, realistic and haunting cautionary tale about adolescent bullying, how it begins and, particularly, how not to combat it. Estes here demonstrates a rich but delicate cinematographic exposition of the natural locations the characters trek through and more importantly a lucid tracking of the group's dynamics and how they all remain distinctive yet intertwined. What's especially interesting is how two of them trade one narrative role, although for spoiler reasons I won't specify who.

Estes also gets very effective and natural turns out of his young cast, particularly Peck and Schroeder, and wisely resists using pop hits on the soundtrack, for a more timeless feel. Musical duo Tomandandy's score, by the way, matches the wilderness setting and mounting suspense in every scene, and the film is also edited very evenly. Mean Creek is rather like the anti-Stand by Me (although that movie has its own dark moments), but in treading its territory very confrontationally, it becomes a coming-of-age film that's admirably honest and not preachy. Exceptional stuff. 

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #249: 20 Feet from Stardom (2013).

 

They're the artists who've provided the backdrop for some of the most beloved and acclaimed songs in pop music history. But most of them have remained merely names inside album liner notes, not household names. Morgan Neville's 20 Feet from Stardom, which won the 2013 Best Documentary Feature Oscar, finally reveals a few of their stories, to give these gifted but overshadowed performers their due at last.

They include Merry Clayton (the woman who dueted with Mick Jagger on the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter"), Grammy winner Lisa Fischer, Darlene Love (who brought the house down with an a cappella performance during the filmmakers' Oscar acceptance speech), Judith Hill and Sheryl Crow (who sang backing vocals for Michael Jackson); also interviewed are Stevie Wonder, Bette Midler and Bruce Springsteen among others. Every interview is handled and integrated with the right subjective touch, and these ladies' tales will all move you, then make you cheer.

Neville handles all their stories with empathy and a healthy curiosity, but brings very much a director's eye to the visual elements. He intersperses the interviews with original information graphics and archival performance footage, both of which brilliantly infuse it with vibrancy and authenticity. The aesthetics do feel reminiscent of ones from shows like Soul Train or Top of the Pops. The emotional peak arrives with an astonishing choir rendition of "I Say a Little Prayer" at the end. It all adds up to a sizzling, insightful and powerful tribute to some of pop music's unsung (pun intended) heroes.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #248: CJ7 (2008).

 

Chow Ti (writer-director Stephen Chow) is a poor, widowed construction worker who inhabits a partially demolished house with his nine-year-old son, Dicky (Xu Jiao). Ti wishes to earn and save money to continue sending Dicky to private school, but there Dicky experiences daily bullying because of his poverty and weathered clothes. Then while shopping one day, Dicky begs Ti to buy him a whiz-bang new toy robot named CJ1, but Ti cannot afford it and this leads to Ti smacking the stubborn Dicky in front of many other shoppers. But then that night, while searching through a junkyard where he has found numerous appliances and clothes for Dicky, Ti finds a strange green orb which he takes home for his son. When it then transforms into a pint-sized green alien, their lives are turned upside down.

A departure from the martial arts slapstick comedies Chow made his name with, 2001's Shaolin Soccer and 2004's Kung Fu Hustle, this Chinese family science fiction comedy tickled me pink. It's a gloriously weird, unashamedly ridiculous and sometimes even touching romp with a wisely subtle message about socio-economic inequality in China mixed in, and very convincing visual effects for its $20 000 000 budget. Chow plots and paces it all with a firm grip and makes an amiable paternal hero but perhaps unsurprisingly the true star here is Xu Jiao, who I was stunned to discover is actually a girl! She cross-dressed for the role and makes Dicky a young hero who's neither too cute nor too mischievous.

Raymond Wong Ying-Wah's musical stylings complement the narrative and visuals effectively also, and the editing and sound design bring more flavour still. CJ7 is a prime slice of Dadaist, Eastern family filmmaking for all ages.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #247: Ten Canoes (2006).

 

In Arnhem Land, before Western influence, ten Aboriginal men work together as hunters. Young Dayindi (Jamie Gulpilil, whose father David narrates the movie) is told a story about another young man from even further back in history who coveted one of his sisters-in-law and eventually killed a member of another tried, for which he faced grave penalties. This tale resonates with Dayindi because it echoes his own situation.

Ten Canoes won the 2006 AFI Award for Best Film, and its intentions as the first movie entirely in indigenous Australian language are admirable. Plus, it did initially captivate me as a study of pre-European settlement life among Australia's First Nations peoples. But then, as it consciously goes out of its way to assert its arthouse intentions, for me it proved Rolf de Heer's status as arguably the most pretentious filmmaker in Australia. He co-directed it, to his credit, with the indigenous Peter Djigirr, but Djigirr's instincts to me didn't seem to have prevailed over de Heer's as perhaps they should have. There's lush natural photography and engaging non-professional performances here, but neither of those can counter de Heer's insistence on telling this narrative as alternatively as possible, and the lack of a score doesn't help.

De Heer obviously cared about this story of the first Australians; otherwise he wouldn't have made it. But I came away from it genuinely thinking Warwick Thornton or Rachel Perkins, two acclaimed Aboriginal filmmakers, would have made it into a far more accessible, insightful and moving film. 6/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #246: A Silent Voice (2016).

 

Shoko Nishimiya (Saori Hayami in the Japanese-language version; Lexi Cowdon doing the English dub) is a new student at her school. She's also deaf, and uses a notebook to communicate with her classmates because none of them know sign language. Among them is hot-headed Shoya Ishida (Miyu Irino and Mayu Matsuoko in the Japanese-language version; Robbie Damond dubbing him), a boy who bullies poor Shoko so relentlessly she again has to change schools. This deservedly makes Shoya himself an outcast at school. Then, several years later in high school, his behaviour towards Shoko torments him so much he plans to commit suicide, but not before trying to right that wrong. Shoya now tries to track Shoko down in order to reconcile with her before ending his life.

This anime adaptation of Yoshitoko Oima's manga is brilliant, but almost downbeat enough to make Grave of the Fireflies, a tragic war drama, resemble a slapstick comedy. Yet nonetheless, it's a very valuable and rewarding watch. Director Naoko Yamada and screenwriter Reiko Yoshida both wisely approach this awfully serious thematic territory with a very delicate, restrained touch (yet without sanitising anything), Yamada unites the visuals (realised with deliberately varying animation styles for the dream sequences and so on) with assurance and she paces it all appropriately. The English voice cast (I saw the dubbed version) all give authentic and mature turns (as I'm sure their Japanese counterparts do), and Kensuke Ushio provides a strong and most unusual score: it's very pounding, but only to fully reflect what's going through Shoya' troubled mind. It's arguably just slightly overlong at 130 minutes, but despite that, A Silent Voice is a very effective meditation on guilt, isolation, identity and redemption. 9/10.

On how I was body-shamed.

 Alright, buckle back up, because I need to get personal and emotional again. You've already read this entry's title so you know the subject, but let me elaborate on it nonetheless.

I was super-skinny as a child. I mean almost rail-thin. That was genetic; believe me, I've always had a big appetite, but an unusually fast metabolism, and nobody in my family has ever been overweight, to my knowledge. Almost every day in primary school I was called names like "Skinny legs," "Chicken legs" et cetera, I was frequently asked why I was so skinny or if I was anorexic or if I ate everything on my plate at dinner. (Let me also state here that in hindsight I wonder how so many of my classmates then knew what "anorexic" even meant.) Naturally, because of my build I was also usually among the very last to be chosen in PE class.

I've recently been re-watching Glee, and this scene from a season four episode resonated with me, even more than when I first saw it, to the point where it made me think back to those days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q_cNyMm9XE

Someone having weight issues, be it obesity as seen there or skinniness, should never make them a subject of mockery, and while body-shaming indeed says far more about the culprit than the target (and may I remind people here that both genders can fit in both of those categories), people who witness or hear it when it happens need to put their foot down and intervene. This reflective mood that scene put me in has also made me realise why, in 2017 on Facebook, I felt compelled to make a post defending a young woman who was deluged with abuse after being featured on the cover of Vogue UK as a plus-size model.

Everybody can help how their appearance evolves, with make-up and cosmetic surgery and whatnot. But nobody can help what physical genes they inherited, but everybody can help how they feel about others' physiques. Body-shaming stops with me, and hopefully with you, too.

On the debate of: "Asperger syndrome" or "Autistic spectrum disorder"?

 

This is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM for short. It's practically a bible in the psychiatry field. Now, I'm not criticising it in any way; I couldn't even if I wanted to, because I haven't read it. Anyhow, in 2013 for its fifth edition, Asperger syndrome (along with other pervasive developmental disorders) was re-categorised in it as simply "Autism spectrum disorder." This was done primarily, to my knowledge, because it had recently emerged that its namesake, the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, was involved in Nazi Germany's eugenics program which killed and injured countless disabled adults and children. (To put that into perspective, Asperger syndrome was given that name in 1994.)

Now, I have come to accept that fact about him, and I do not mean to trivialise it in any way. Nobody should. But he was by no means the only doctor (and I don't just mean the medical sort) who was, or is, guilty of evil or negative things. He certainly wasn't the only such one in Nazi Germany; many Nazi doctors were later involved in the creation of thalidomide, maybe the worst medical scandal of the 20th century. However, I digress. for all the damage he did elsewhere, Asperger still helped to pioneer autism research and in any case, somebody else named Asperger syndrome after him. And my key point with this post is this: AS may not exist as a diagnosis anymore, but it still does as a condition. It's simply listed under a different name. I can't help but liken it, in that sense, to manic depression. That still exists; it's just known as bipolar disorder today.

Nonetheless, for several reasons, I interchangeably say I'm autistic and that I have Asperger's, at specific times in conversation. I have no issue with either label. Regardless, I'm certain there are many Aspies out there, particularly ones older than me and who were diagnosed before me, for whom identifying as having Asperger's has become very much routine (and remember, routine is enormously important for most autistics), even if they know of Dr. Asperger's crimes. That's another reason why we should let people identify as whatever, and whoever, they want to. Anyway, the spectrum is long and vast, and everybody on it, whether high- or low-functioning, has something to bring to the world.