Thursday, August 25, 2016

Morris from America



SCREENED AT THE 2016 CHICAGO CRITICS FILM FESTIVAL: Back in May, when I heard the plot of the opening night film of the 2016 Chicago Critics Film Festival, I had an immediate flashback to the summer of 2012, when I was chosen as one of four Chicago teenagers to represent the United States at the Giffoni Film Festival in Italy, the largest children's film festival in the world (around 3300 teenagers from 54 countries and 79 Italian towns come to it every year). Besides the fact that I had to stay with an Italian host family for a entire week (and nobody in the family spoke English), the most exciting and unusual part of this film festival was that they would only show movies during the day and then, in the afternoon and into the evening, it would just turn into a gigantic party with all these teenagers from all over the world picnicking and hanging out and dancing to (mostly American) pop music.

However, due to my shyness and antisocialness at the time, I would mostly sit on a pair of swings in a nearby park and occasionally interact with pretty Italian girls if they seemed interested in interacting with me. Anyway, my point is, I thought a lot about my own experience as a young American boy in Europe when watching Morris from America, and while I only stayed in Italy for a week and a half, there were still a lot of things that rang true.

Here's the set-up: Morris, a 13-year-old African-American boy, is living in Heidelberg, Germany, with his dad who's a soccer coach. Since Morris' mother died a long time ago and he's beginning to become more and more distant from his father, most of the time Morris just sits in his room listening to rap music and surfing the Internet. It isn't until Morris' German tutor, Inka, makes him sign up for a program at the local youth center that he actually begins to interact with other human beings his age. Unfortunately, though, most of these German youths taunt him for his weight and his skin color, and as a result, he retreats further into depression and loneliness until an attractive young lady named Katrin takes him under her wing and develops a friendship with him.

What follows is a light, sweet, and sometimes heartbreakingly honest coming-of-age story that hit me on a lot of very personal levels. First of all, I just want to point out one scene that pretty much sums up my entire experience in Italy four years ago: when Morris and Katrin first have an actual conversation (after he's been admiring her from afar for a while), the first thing that Katrin does if offer Morris a cigarette. Considering that this is exactly what happened at least three times during interactions with pretty teenage girls in Italy, I immediately knew that writer/director Chad Hartigan knew a lot about what he was writing.

And this continued throughout the entire film. Not one thing here felt dishonest. The German teenage characters never felt like caricatures. The situations were all believable. And, most of all, the beautifully understated performance from Markees Christmas adds a lot of depth to what Hartigan already had written on paper, adding certain awkward beats and body language to moments that ultimately do a lot to capture the alienation and loneliness that he feels and that I felt during my week-and-a-half in Europe. And Craig Robinson does remarkable work as Morris' father, having just right amount of humor and pathos to be a fun character while also grounding the film, particularly in one great scene late in the film when he's driving Morris back from someone's house in Frankfurt and he tells the story of how him and Morris' mother met. I'd like to think if this film had come out later in the year, Robinson could have had a shot a Best Supporting Actor nomination. I know that won't happen, but he does deserve it.

Although I will admit to being kind of a sucker for coming-of-age films (three of my favorite films from the past several years are The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Boyhood, and Brooklyn), I still think that Morris from America is a solid entry into the genre with great performances and a beautifully honest story. And while I didn't have the urge to engage in repeat viewings like I did those other films, I would nevertheless recommend this without reservations since this isn't the kind of film that will get much of a push from its studio but it's one that deserves to be seen. Oh, and you will immediately want to visit Europe afterward.

4 stars

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Tallulah



I'm not sure how I feel about this whole "Netflix Revolution" that's been happening over the past few years. On one hand, I like how it's been able to expose my friends to some older films and indie films that they likely would have never seen otherwise, and in terms of TV I like being able to watch quality television like Breaking Bad and House of Cards in the way that one would read a book. On the other hand, I think that Netflix going into new film distribution is really troubling and disheartening. Yes, there are certain films that would be better seen on your 32-inch television or laptop. And yes, going to the movies is expensive and it's easier to just sit on your couch and watch Netflix. However, seeing a movie in a theatre, on a big screen in a dark room with a crowd of strangers, is something that's incredibly special and dear to me. The movie theatre has been my home-away-from-home since elementary school. It forces you to unplug from the world for a couple hours and embrace yourself in a story. It's the most beautiful communal art form that brings people together in a way that most art forms don't anymore.

I thought a lot about this while watching Tallulah, a Netflix pick-up from this year's Sundance Film Festival. It's a powerful film, and I think an important film, but throughout it's running time I kept thinking of how much more I might have enjoyed it if given the opportunity to experience in a dark theatre with a crowd of people.

Here's the basic set-up: Our main character, a homeless twentysomething drifter named Tallulah (or "Lu" for short), is living out of the back of her van while traveling across the country stealing credit cards and eating out of dumpsters with her boyfriend Nico. One day, however, Nico decides he's had enough of this life and takes off in the middle of the night, leaving Lu alone in a train station parking lot with no money. In response, she takes off to New York City, where she finds herself stealing room service leftovers (mainly food to tide herself over) from outside hotel rooms while trying to track down Nico's mother who lives in NYC.

While doing this at a high-end hotel, she is mistaken for housekeeping by a hotel guest named Carolyn, who is staying in a room with her one-year-old daughter, Maddy. While going on a drunk, profanity-laced, and incoherant rant to Lu about how she's going out tonight to impress a man since her husband is away in Cancun, Carolyn asks Lu to babysit Maddy, and Lu agrees once she sees how much money Carolyn is going to pay her (and also once she sees what a horrible, neglectant mother Carolyn is). Once Carolyn comes back from her affair even more drunk and passes out on her bed, Lu, having formed a connection with Maddy while her mother was away, quickly packs Maddy's things and takes her from the room. Once she finds Nico's mother, Margo, who lives in her ex-husband's 5th Avenue apartment while separated from him, Lu tells her that she is the biological mother of this baby and she needs a place to stay for the night. Margo obliges Lu, and gives her and Maddy the guest bedroom. 

That's about as far as I want to go into the plot, because what the film really becomes about is not only the beauty of motherhood, but also parental and societal responsibility for children. While the plot may have the makings of a Lifetime movie, writer/director Sian Heder is able to transcend the tropes by providing the audience with two fully developed and three-dimensional human beings as main characters. Ellen Page and Allison Janney (reunited from Juno, a similarly life-affirming film) show much more complete chemistry here than they did in that film, mainly because they just have a lot more time to spend together. Tammy Blanchard does a similiarly sublime job as Carolyn, even if I didn't quite buy her transformation by the film's end.

Overall, I believe Heder has crafted an insightful, absorbing film with her debut, painting characters with many shades of gray and giving a beautiful message that life is precious and worth living even if things don't go as planned. This would actually make a great double feature with Ellen Page's other 2016 indie film Into the Forest (which I reviewed a few weeks ago) as both are unequivocally feminist films that also honor the beauty and value of all human life. While I still believe some of the film's most intense scenes would be best viewed in a theatre, I also think this could be great Netflix viewing on a rainy day. However you decide to see it, this is one absolutely recommend. 

4 stars

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Sausage Party


Since this isn't going to be a very long review I'll just cut right to the chase: I was really looking forward to this film. This might sound weird coming from someone whose favorite films of each year tend to be along the lines of Boyhood and Brooklyn, but I've actually liked quite a few of the comedies produced by Seth Rogen and Even Goldberg (This is the End and The Interview being two of my favorite comedies of the last five years) and I had heard really good early buzz coming out of its work-in-progress screening at the South by Southwest Film Festival as well as other advance screenings. And plus, I just thought the central premise was really fun and original for an animated film: What if our food had feelings? What if the food that sits in supermarkets around the world could talk and walk around and throw wild parties in the store after-hours? There's a lot of potential in that premise, and I really thought Rogen and Goldberg and their crew could do something creative with it, given their track record and their love of double entendres, while paying homage to the likes of Toy Story and A Bug's Life and Finding Nemo.

So, here's what they do with the premise: it's Fourth of July weekend at a Whole Foods-like supermarket called Shopwells. Our main character, a sausage named Frank who's packaged with others of his kind for Fourth of July sales next to neighboring buns, is enthusiastic about the possibility of being chosen by the "gods" (supermarket customers) to enter the "Great Beyond" (the customers' homes). Once Frank and his other sausages are chosen with a package of hot dog buns (which includes Brenda, a bun that Frank is infatuated with), it seems like everything's going to go great...until a jar of Honey Mustard in the cart (who we learned earlier was mistakenly purchased by one of the "gods" and is much less than enthused about his experience in the "Great Beyond") tells everyone in the cart that the Great Beyond is "bulls***" and kills himself by jumping from the cart and smashing on the floor. Frank, haunted by seeing this and being of the inquisitive type, is determined to go on an adventure to see whether there's any sort of truth behind Honey Mustard's statements on the "Great Beyond".

What follows is, to put it bluntly, an anti-religious parable disguised as an animated sex comedy. Yes, essentially the argument that Rogen and Goldberg metaphorically make in this film is that the whole concept of Heaven (or, in the film, the "Great Beyond") is a lie invented by humans to make themselves feel better about death. And while I am a practicing Christian, I have no problem with tackling religion from an angle I don’t personally agree with as long as they handle said subject with thoughtfulness and intelligence. But what this film essentially does is pound its atheistic message down the audience's throats so forcefully that the impact of much of the film's raunchy humor and double entendres (the kind that I loved in This is the End and The Interview) is blunted and didn't really register with me. 

And on top of this, I also found it to be kind of lazy that literally all of the food talks in exactly the same profane way, so no one really sounds unique. Thankfully the voice cast does a good job at helping to differentiate the characters so they don't sound completely interchangeable, but I still just kept thinking, "Not ALL of these characters have to talk like this! Do they all have to drop f-bombs at every other word?!"



Now that's not to say there wasn't any hint of cleverness in this screenplay. I liked the relationship between the Israeli bagel and the Palestinian pita/flatbread, and how they only hate each other because their respective people hate each other. There's also a piece of chewed-up gum that has metamorphisized to resemble Stephen Hawking that shows up and allowed me to have a good laugh. And the final 10 minutes of the film is about as offensive and shocking as you can expect from Rogen and Goldberg and did a lot to pay off the preceding 80 minutes. But, overall, I just found myself really underwhelmed by Rogan and Goldberg's squandering of the film's great premise. One of the most disappointing films I've seen so far this year.

2 stars

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Into the Forest


SCREENED AT THE 2016 CHICAGO CRITICS FILM FESTIVAL: I feel as though there's been a lot of talk recently about the role that technology and the media is playing in what some people are considering to be "the downfall of our society." People say that our world is becoming one similar to Mike Judge's 2006 satire Idiocracy with the rise and success of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, which was successful primarily to the ridiculous amount of free media he received during primary season. Even people my age are saying that younger kids don't have imaginations anymore due to the easy access to smartphones and iPads. As an eternal optimist, I want to believe that our best years as a society are ahead of us, that my children will be able to have a similar childhood to the one that I had. I'm not a fan of tech-based fear-mongering, especially from people close to my age, but I do think there's a certain truth somewhere in it.

In Into the Forest, writer/director Patricia Rozema poses the question, "What if, all of a sudden, our access to this technology and media was suddenly lost? How would we be able to survive?" In the not-too-distant future, two young women named Nell and Eva, who happen to be sisters despite the fact that they treat one another like strangers, are living at their father's secluded cabin in Northern California when, all of a sudden, the power goes out. Like many annoying power outages, they just assumed it will be fixed in a matter of time; however, not only does it never get fixed, but soon word spreads that the entire country is in the dark. But thankfully for these two girls, their father is about as resourceful as they come, and it seems as though they're going to be fine...until he kills himself in a horrific chainsaw accident and they're both left to fend for themselves, and they're hardly as resourceful as their father (Nell is a bookworm and straight-A student while Eva is an extremely competitive ballet dancer).

Watching these two very different people who really only share gender and DNA in common have to work together just to survive in this cruel, brutal environment is relentlessly compelling to watch, especially given the fact that these two people are played by Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood, who bring so much humanity and emotion to these roles that at some point you don't even realize that (a) they don't look like sisters and (b) they're both in their late twenties, and these characters are clearly supposed to be much younger. Their chemistry is excellent, and their performances do a lot to suggest long-standing family ties and ratchet tension even in scenes that might seem uneventful on paper.

But throughout the inevitable hardship and suffering that these two young women face while trying to survive, there is always a slight glimmer of hope that permeates through every scene. (SPOILER): At one point during the film, Eva is raped by a local stranger who walks onto the property and gets her alone while Nell is out collecting water. Eva ends up getting pregnant from this rape and is determined to have the baby, despite Nell's pleas for her to have an abortion. This was a brilliant, beautiful storytelling decision on Rozema's part, as the scene where Eva gives birth to the baby amidst the dark woods and falling-apart house is an incredibly life-affirming moment that very much gives the film a "circle-of-life" theme, and reminds the viewer of the preciousness and beauty of Eva's child despite him being conceived in the most hateful of situations.

If I have one complaint about the film, it's that it's ending is a little too simplistic and vague for my liking. I understood the symbolism behind it, but what exactly happened felt a little out-of-character in terms of what these two women had been doing up until that point. But that quibble aside, this is one of the best (and definitely most thought-provoking) post-apocalypic dramas I've seen in the past few years that manages to have feminist and pro-life messages simultaneously, both of which I wholeheartedly approve of. This is available on most VOD platforms right now (I don't think it's in any Chicago-area theatres but I'm not 100% sure) and I absolutely recommend seeking it out.

4 stars

Friday, July 29, 2016

Sing Street



Yes, I know that Sing Street has already had its theatrical run, but considering the fact that it's now available on pretty much all digital streaming platforms as well as DVD and Blu-ray, I figured I had to write a review of it as it is without question the best movie I have seen in 2016 so far (and that says a lot, considering how much I loved Nuts! and Life, Animated, among others).

Throughout my life, I have always seen music as having the power to allow people to connect with each other and to communicate messages more than simple words can. I often turn to classic rock acts like Bruce Springsteen, The Beatles, and U2 as being artists who allow their words and melodies to carry stories and messages of hope and, in some cases, sociopolitical commentary that give their listeners greater insight into the world around them. Even some modern pop artists like Taylor Swift and the up-and-coming indie pop band Echosmith are using stories and meaningful lyrics to communicate with their listeners. Either way, music has been a big part of my life and a huge part of what's shaped the way I see the world (along with film, obviously, and theatre). And I don't think any filmmaker has quite captured the power of music as well as John Carney has in the few movies that he's done. As much as I absolutely loved Once (I haven't seen Begin Again yet but I intend to very soon), this film hit me on an emotional level unlike any other film I saw in the first half of 2016 and it reminded me of why I'm going into film as a career.

Set in 1985 in inner-city Dublin, a young boy named Conor Lalor is just starting his freshman year at a conservative prep school known as Synge Street CBS. After the first couple of days are complete hell, by the third day he meets a teenaged orphan girl named Raphina who lives across the street in a home for other orphan girls. Instantly infatuated with her, he tries to impress her by falsely saying that he's in a band and they need a girl to play a model for their new music video. After she agrees to it, he tells his new friend Darren that they need to immediately go and form a band. Putting together a ragtag team of amateur musicians from the school, they start out rough but eventually turn out to be quite good, drawing influences from numerous MTV bands at the time such as Duran Duran and The Cure, all as a part of forming their own style and (of course) impressing the girl. 


What an incredible film this is. And when I use the word "incredible," I don't necessarily mean in terms of deep hidden meaning and subtext and symbolism or anything worthy of film scholars. I mean simply in terms of the sheer joy that eminates from every frame and every performance and every line of dialogue in this movie. I wasn't even born in 1985. Heck, I've never set one foot in the country of Ireland. But after viewing this film months ago, I felt like I knew this era and this world like the back of my hand. I felt like I knew Conor and Raphina and Conor's co-songwriter Eamon (who's kind of the Lennon to Conor's McCartney) as if I had been friends with them my whole life, and I wanted to see those characters again and hang out with them long after the film ended. Lucy Boynton (having seen her in this and The Blackcoat's Daughter within a short timespan) is one of my favorite newcomer actresses of the past several years and she dazzles in this film, as do Ferdia Walsh-Peelo as Conor, Mark McKenna as Eamon, and Jack Reynor as Conor's brother Brandon (who's perhaps this film's equivalent to Philip Seymour Hoffman's Lestor Bangs in Almost Famous).

But perhaps the part of the film that struck me the deepest is its emphasis on "happy-sad." It stems from a brilliant conversation with Conor and Raphina when he's depressed about how crappy his home life and school life have become and how it's resulted in him writing sad songs, but Raphina tells him that his problem is that "he's not happy being sad," and that love by nature is "happy-sad." He quickly begins to channel that into his art, writing various "happy-sad" songs with a forward-thinking "futurist" mindset (even his piano ballad about being "friend-zoned" by Raphina, "To Find You," has glimmers of happiness and hope). This was a huge awakening for me personally as a creative writer and also in my outlook on love in general, because in reality, nothing is ever "all happy" or "all sad". The rush that I get when I have intense love-like feelings for a girl is happy, but then the blow when I realize she just wants to be friends is sad. The highs of a first date and a first kiss with a girl are happy, but the pains of the break-up phone call are sad. I've already begun to channel this into my writing, as hard as it is not to paint things as "all happy" or "all sad" depending on how I'm feeling at that moment. 

I absolutely adored every frame of this film, and I walked out of the theatre feeling the best that I've felt after a movie since Brooklyn last November (yet another Irish film). John Carney has crafted a masterpiece of a music-based script unlike any since Once while channeling the best things about School of Rock and Almost Famous into it as well. Now that it's widely available on video, everybody reading these words right now who didn't get a chance to see this film in the theatre should rent it immediately. If you're not impressed by your summer theatrical options now, stay home and watch Sing Street. Well-made feel-good movies like this don't come around very often anymore, and this is not only the best of 2016 so far, but it's one of the best movies I have seen in at least the last five years, with a soundtrack that I listened to for a long time afterward. It's a masterpiece of music-based filmmaking and filmmaking in general.

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

The BFG


It's fascinating to see how stories change over time as one gets older. I read Roald Dahl's The BFG in fourth grade, at a time in my life when I was literally consuming every book that I could. To demonstrate how much I loved to read, my parents and I were actually vacationing in Los Angeles for my tenth birthday and I would stand in line for a ride at Disneyland and read the book, often making comparisons between things in the book and rides we would go on or even things we would eat at the park (i.e., I would eat a "BFG-sized corndog" lunch). At the time, I saw Dahl's book as a beautiful story of friendship at a time when I didn't have very many true friends. It had the same dark quirkiness of my other favorite books of his like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda but also just being very sweet and funny.

But that was obviously nine years ago and I haven't been able to plow through books nearly as much since my AP English classes in high school. It's easier for me to watch films based on literature and judge them from a cinematic and critical standpoint versus as a fan of the literature the film is based on. And even as much as I loved Dahl's book in fourth grade, the nine years that has passed since I read it allowed me to go in with as clean of a slate as possible.

So, for those of you unfamiliar with the story, here's the basics: In early 1980s London (the only way you know this is by hilarious throwaway reference to Ronald Reagan about two-thirds into the film), a young orphan girl named Sophie is grabbed out-of-the-blue from her cruel orphanage by a 24-foot-tall giant, who calls himself the Big Friendly Giant (or "BFG") and is whisked away to Giant Country. There, the BFG sticks her in his cave and tries to befriend her, but it isn't until young Sophie sees the BFG being crudely bullied by the bigger cannibalistic giants that she actively becomes his friend and does things such as going out and collecting dreams with him and watching him deliver a dream to a young boy in his London home.

I was amazed watching this film how much details I had forgotten of Dahl's story. I knew the all-around plot, but I almost feel like I should read the book again to see how different it was. Because this film played out like a great Dahl story, and it shut down any suspicions I might have had going in about how Spielberg's sentimentality might affect it, because as it turns out, Spielberg was the absolute perfect director to take on this source material. Many critics have pointed out comparisons to E.T. (the unlikely friendship between a child and an otherwordly creature, a screenplay by the late Melissa Mathison), and to be honest, I had a lot of the same emotions watching this film that I did the first time I watched E.T. While the Sophie character isn't as fully fleshed out in this film as Elliott was in E.T., she was still a compelling young female protagonist with defined emotions and a spunkiness that's only elevated by the wonderful newcomer Ruby Barnhill (who I can't wait to see more of). And while I never have really been a fan of the whole motion-capture technology thing, Mark Rylance brings such a humanity and warmth to his portrayal of the BFG that he transcends the technology that he uses to perform in a way that I've never seen in a film.

One of the things I was talking to my parents about as we left the theatre was how different this movie could have been in the hands of a director like Tim Burton or a lead actor like Johnny Depp playing the BFG. And to be honest, I think the fact that it's Steven Spielberg and a lesser-name actor like Rylance on the poster for this film is one of the reasons why this film is bombing as badly as it is. But I also think one of the reasons is how (as sad as it is to say) old-fashioned the style and the story of this film are. Rather than being plot-focused and loud and snarky and full of gags, this movie is a simple, quiet friendship story. It puts equal focus on the characters and the wonder of the world that we're in. It doesn't use scatological humor as a crutch or as a desperate plea for little kiddie laughs. Heck, even the inevitable fart humor is strange and witty and quirky in the best possible way, a way that I'm sure would make Dahl smile if he were alive today.

Just before the film started I saw two trailers, one for Ice Age: Collision Course and The Secret Life of Pets. While I haven't seen either of those movies and thus can't comment on them, if the trailers are any indication they will likely be loud and snarky and gag-focused and reliant on cheap potty humor for shock value. For a film like The BFG to sneak in as a reminder of the children's films I responded to as a kid and continue to respond to now...I just pray that young children will be able to see this film and go on this journey and just get wrapped up in the wonder and the characters. Because if anybody has an understanding of the power and the wonder of cinema, it is Steven Spielberg. He understands the wide-eyed adventurous storyteller inside of everyone, the child that I was growing up and the child that still exists inside me and comes out as soon as my fingers hit a keypad. I hope that there are still children out there that can watch a Spielberg movie (whether it's this or any other one) and are inspired to embrace their inner storyteller and write or shoot or whatever it takes to tell their stories. And I truly hope that Disney doesn't take this film bombing as an excuse to churn out even more cash-grab sequels and remakes. Because films like The BFG are the ones that introduce young writers and storytellers to new worlds and inspire them to create worlds of their own. That alone should be enough to get people to give $11 of their money to this film. If it's not, then just go see it because it's a beautifully filmed, old-fashioned adventure and friendship story that brings out the best in Spielberg's directing and Dahl's storytelling. It's almost as if the movie itself is a dream concocted by the BFG of the kinds of family films that kids should be seeing instead of ones about a squirrel who can't get to an acorn for fourteen years. And that alone should be enough for anyone to shill out $11.

4 stars

Thursday, June 30, 2016

Life, Animated


SCREENED AT THE 2016 CHICAGO CRITICS FILM FESTIVAL: I'm not even going to pretend to be objective in this review, as this documentary film struck so many chords with me on so many different levels that at some point during my viewing of it at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, I just completely abandoned viewing it from a critical eye and went on this real-life journey that reminded me of my own life in ways that were both cathartic and occasionally uncomfortable.


I have been officially diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome since I was five years old, which for those of you who don't know, is a disorder on the mild end of the autism spectrum and is "characterized by higher than average intellectual ability coupled with impaired social skills and restrictive, repetitive patterns of interest and activities." Because of this, for the first few years of my schooling life I would barely talk to anybody; rather, I would get in my head and flesh out stories that I would usually act out with my Thomas the Tank Engine toys. My stories were mostly inspired by random things I would pick up on from watching TV and, of course, Disney movies (my two favorites as a kid being The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast). While part of me is thankful for the fact that I've blessed with the ability to see the world in a unique way and discover telling stories through film as an outlet for creative expression, I also realize the setbacks in my early development, that I was so in-my-own-head as a child and so obsessed with the portrait of love in those Disney movies that I began to adopt that romantic, idealized, and fantastical idea of love as my outlook. I thought that two people sharing a kiss was the most beautiful thing ever, and I couldn't wait until I could kiss someone myself. But as I got older, this outlook on love and romance became dangerous and resulted in several crushing blows of rejection and even some lost friendships. It resulted in me learning that what I struggle with is psychologically refered to as "limerence," which is something I've been seeking help for and will hopefully try to get better at working with.

But anyway, over the last few years I have come to greatly resent Disney for their portrayal of love and romance, and I do believe that it is having a negative effect on some children that watch them (I still hear stories now about young kids who literally cry when they don't get their "crush," something that I'm all too familiar with). But in Life, Animated, Disney movies quite literally give a young boy named Owen Suskind his voice. At the age of three, Owen, who at the time had been seen as a normal happy young boy with an active imagination, just stopped talking. After many doctor's appointments, it turned out that Owen had autism. His parents, understandably, were baffled and didn't know what to do to help him. One of the few things that they could still do as a family was watch the Disney animated classics that Owen always loved, and it was through this that they found a way to communicate with him (there's a reason I'm not getting more specific, and that's because you have to see this movie).

Much like the other brilliant documentary that I discovered at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, Nuts!, this doesn't simply rely on talking heads to tell its amazing real-life story. Rather, in keeping with the spirit of the Disney movies at the center of Owen Suskind's life, director Roger Ross Williams utilizes select scenes of animation and clips from various Disney animated classics to allow us to get inside Owen's head and truly come to understand how he sees the world. For example, at one point in the film, he writes a short story called "The Land of the Lost Sidekicks" and casts himself as the protector of Disney sidekicks (including Muchu from Mulan and the Genie from Aladdin) and Williams beautifully brings this story to life with an animated sequence that's as convincing as any Disney animated short played before one of their own films. It really brought to mind how I visualized my stories as a kid (and occasionally do now).

But easily the most gut-punching part of this film, and the one that elevates it beyond the sappy, cutesy after-school-special documentary that it could have been, is how it juxtoposes fly-on-the-wall glimpses into the life of 23-year-old Owen with the fanciful partly-animated Disney-focused sequences. At twenty-three, Owen had just finished school, landed a job at a local Regal multiplex, and was moving out of his parents' house and into a Cape Cod assisted-living facility. However, he was also having to learn some adult lessons that he didn't necessarily get a full grasp on through Disney films. One part of the movie that hit particularly close to home for me was when (spoiler) his girlfriend Emily breaks up with him for being too obsessive toward her. He takes this hard, because of how much she meant to him and how their relationship was his idea of the "true love" he had seen in countless Disney movies. He never does entirely get over this breakup, but it further reminded me of how much I had personally come to resent Disney films for their fantastical portrayal of "true love." Perhaps the most painful scene in the film to watch comes during this part, when Owen's mother has to comfort him when he cries about how it's "not fair" that he has to suffer through the loss of this girl who meant so much to him. His mother then invokes The Hunchback of Notre Dame as an example of a Disney film in which the hero doesn't get the girl (this is one of the few Disney films I've never seen) in an attempt to get Owen to come to terms with this.

This is the type of honesty I really wish more films would dare to come close to (I get that this is a documentary, but still) and I think kids need to be able to understand that the idea of true love in Disney films is not reality and that they're going to get rejected by their crushes most of the time. This is something I still have to grapple with to this day and to see Owen have to go through a similar thing in this film was a profound thing to witness. The film is supposedly going to be getting a Chicago release on July 8, and I honestly think it should be required viewing for every child old enough to go to school (it is rated PG) as it is a brilliant portrayal of not only a child grappling with autism and the healing power of film but also that not everything you see in films should be taken as gospel. And until Disney films decide that they want to reflect reality a little more with their "happily-ever-after" endings, I guess it's going to have to take documentaries like Life, Animated to balance those endings with reality. And maybe that's not such a bad thing as long as kids are able to see them.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Nuts!



SCREENED AT THE 2016 CHICAGO CRITICS FILM FESTIVAL: One of the reasons I love going to film festivals is because it's really the only time I can walk into a movie and have absolutely no idea what to expect. Thanks to social media and endless trailers and commercials gracing our TV and YouTube screens, the element of surprise when walking into a theatre is virtually gone, even with something like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which caused a lot of my friends to log off of social media due to spoiler alerts. So when I got off of class about a month ago and walked over to Chicago's beautiful Music Box Theatre to see a movie called Nuts!, the title was honestly the only thing I knew about it (other than that it was likely going to be good, because it was in the Chicago Critics Film Festival in the first place).

And because of this, I am going to give as little plot synopsis in this review as I can. The absolute best way to see this film is how I saw it: knowing nothing. But for those who can't stand knowing nothing about a movie before spending $11 on it (and this film is worth every cent of your money), here's just the basic set-up: In the early 1920s, a doctor named John R. Brinkley opened up a health clinic in the small Kansas town of Milford and was very popular among the locals. One day, a man walked into Brinkley's clinic and said he was feeling "sexually weak" (you can take any guess as to what he's trying to imply). While standing there, Brinkley notices a pair of goats mating intensely on a farm across the street, and he jokingly suggests to the man that if he had a pair of "goat nuts" in him, he would have no problem with trying to please his wife. Much to his (and everyone else's) surprise, the man begs Brinkley to perform the operation, and (gasp!) it works!

Oh, and I should also mention that this is a documentary, meaning that John R. Brinkley existed and the events depicted in this movie did actually happen. Yes, goat gland transplantation to cure erectile dysfunction was an actual thing. But like I said, part of the experience of watching this movie is knowing as little as possible, so don't go Googling John R. Brinkley as you'll lose a considerable amount of enjoyment if you do. Because this film blind-sided me in virtually every sense of the word. How there hasn't been a movie on this guy sooner is astonishing, because his story is the very definition of stranger than fiction.

I haven't seen of director Penny Lane's other films (I plan on watching Our Nixon very soon, and yes, Penny Lane is her actual birth certificate name; see pennylaneismyrealname.com/faq), but she seems to have an amazing knack for taking these stranger-than-fiction stories and exposing them for every piece of bizarreness and eccentricity possible. In the hands of a lesser documentarian, this could have easily been just a bunch of talking heads giving a history lesson, and while there are some, she brilliantly utilizes beautiful idiosyncratic animation to tell this story in a way that is at once perfect for the story and entertaining for everyone watching it. Seriously, I don't know who these animators are, but they deserve some kind of filmmaking/animating medal for their contributions to this movie (they won't get Oscars, but they should).

But even more brilliant than the animation in telling this story is the structure she uses. While it's very hard to talk about this without getting into spoilers, all I'll say is that it's one of the most brilliant uses of structure that I've ever seen in a documentary (right up with Kurt Kuenne's Dear Zachary; which if you haven't seen that, please do yourself a favor) and it punches you right in the gut once you hit the third act. It's like it all of a sudden goes from this bizarre Charlie Kaufman meets P.T. Anderson story to Wes Anderson's version of There Will Be Blood in the best possible way. And if that sounds like too vague of a description for you, that's kind of the intention. No amount of metaphors or analogies can do any sort of justice to the third act of this movie (not even a Google search on Mr. Brinkley, which I beg you not to do until after you see the film), as it is one of the most amazing feats of documentary filmmaking I've ever seen.  

Since I can't say much else without giving stuff away, just please seek this out wherever you can. The thing that sucks about a lot of the movies that I see at the Chicago Critics Film Festival is that (with a few exceptions) most of these films just get dumped on VOD if they get a release at all. I know it has a NY/LA release now, but I'm praying that it gets into a few Chicago area theatres and then a likely Netflix release (since I know that Penny Lane's Our Nixon is on there). But I can safely that this is easily in the top 5 documentaries that I've ever seen. It's a beautiful, gut-punching, hilarious, and bizarrely horrifying documentary with an important and I-can't-believe-I've-never-heard-of-this true story and it needs to be seen by everyone.



(For my C.P. friends, just pretend these are popcorn kernels). ;)