Kelly Reichardt teams up with Michelle Williams again in another delightfully understated film. Once again it’s set in Portland, Oregon and being centered around the Oregon College of Art and Craft (OCAC), just about everyone in it is an artist of some stripe. But as this film shows, not all artists get to be famous or rich or successful. As usual, Reichardt’s work is so subtle that it might not seem like it has much of a point. But the soft rivalry between Lizzy and Jo, highlighting how the latter is just ever so slightly closer to the artist that the former aspires to be, is good enough for me.
A documentary made by an American director about the underground nightlife scene in China sounds exactly like something the Chinese government would frown on and that I’d love. The vibes, the images and the sound are all incredible, adding up to a powerful portrayal of a side of Chinese society we rarely get to see. Yet while there is no doubt that director Benjamin Mullinkosson is a friend of the queer community, I sense a certain wistfulness in it. The people in it don’t seem so much to be enjoying life to the fullest than using the nightclub as a way to cope with depression and the stresses of life. It doesn’t seem healthy at all and so this documentary isn’t an altogether sympathetic view of their lifestyle as I would expect.
This isn’t the kind of film I’d catch in the cinemas at all but I had expiring movie club points so here we are. Liam Neeson seems like unlikely successor to Leslie Nielsen and I have to say that while I appreciate the effort and his straight-faced Frank Drebin, he doesn’t have the comedic timing to pull it off. To me this was good for some giggles and I’m flabbergasted by some of the very weird segues. But I wouldn’t say this was very good. Its gags are neither very original nor very clever and the time is long past when police in America were seen as allies to the people.
Continuing the series of films that show how bad life in Japan was in the post-World War II period under American occupation, here’s a lesser known one set in the slums outside a US military base. I’d expected it to have more of an anti-American message but it really just has them as part of the background reality that everyone needs to work around. The scenes of poverty, moral corruption and blatant lawlessness are grim and far from the idealized Japan seen in other works of the era. The downside is that its conclusion feels fake and hacked on. In reality the criminals win so comprehensively that there’s no happy ending for anyone else.
This is a show that has been much talked about and that my wife asked to watch. Shot entirely within a Hawaiian resort during the COVID-19 lockdowns, it has the trappings of luxury and glamor while being a comparatively cheap show to make. The opening scene teases a death to draw your interest and soon we’re introduced to a batch of rich and spoiled guests. The social commentary is lightly piquant, the little stories of their lives gossipy and it’s entertaining at least if intellectually unchallenging. Then it works towards the ending and I realize it’s one of the most cynical shows I can remember.
I don’t know what I was thinking when I added this to my list because films about BDSM rarely turn out to be very deep, no matter what the makers say. In this case it stars Nicole Kidman who makes a big deal about preferring to work with female directors and this was indeed directed and written by a woman Halina Reijin. The great innovation of this film is that it flips the script so that while the woman remains the submissive in the relationship, in real life she is the older and more powerful of the two. It’s interesting for a while but I had a hard time buying the plausibility of the character and the director flubs some key moments so badly that I just can’t take the film seriously.
Being a big admirer of the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, I’d been searching for this title for a long time. It predates his 2010 breakout hit Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and was good enough to win the Jury Prize at Cannes. Unfortunately while the director’s fingerprints all over it are familiar and it even presages his later films in some ways, this is on the whole inferior. His ability to string together images into something that is compelling to watch is as magical as ever but both the story and the structure here are almost conventional and nearly boring.
