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La bola negra’s Curious Collage of Gay Life and Longing

Federico Garc í a Lorca’s La bola negra wasn’t left unfinished, it was barely started. Only the first four pages of this play were ever completed before Lorca, a gay socialist, was murdered by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. All that we know of the plot is that it concerned a privileged young man trying to join an exclusive club, who vote on approving members via blackballs (la bola negra) -and is denied entry due to his sexuality. What was intended to come after this is unknown. But directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi endeavour to speculate in their film of the same name, in which they intertwine this vision of the work with two more stories related to the play set many decades apart -each speaking to the transcendent themes Lorca was apparently grappling with as well as a small tapestry of gay identity across the span of a century. By scope, it is one of the biggest films I’ve seen to centre homosexuality, its grandiosity of ambition matched with an intensity of mel...
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Mordant Though Melancholy Soul-Searching in Wild Horse Nine

Folks in America barely ever think about it, but their country’s reputation in Chile will always be clouded by what they did in 1973. It’s not widely taught, but the U.S. was instrumental (if not arguably the architect) in the September 11 th  coup that saw the country’s first democratically elected leader Salvador Allende -a socialist- overthrown and executed to be replaced by the fascist military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, whose junta dominated the nation for the next seventeen years. It was not a unique affair, this was an era where the U.S. first earned a reputation for destabilizing democracies -often left-wing democracies- in places likes Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Congo. Violence often came with these, and you have to imagine some guilty consciences among those involved in carrying out such drastic interventions. At least that is what Martin McDonagh imagines in his latest satirical comedy- drama in which a legacy of American imperialism is built up and consolidate...
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Few Marks Deducted from Godzilla Minus Zero

There is nothing fundamentally unique to the premise of Godzilla Minus Zero , which wasn’t true of its predecessor, the franchise-revitalizing Godzilla Minus One . Indeed it follows roughly the same formula that multiple previous iterations of the Godzilla universe have in upping the ante by introducing the three-headed dragon King Ghidorah as nemesis to the titular behemoth and forcing the two of them to fight. Most recently, it was the exact plot of the American Godzilla: King of the Monsters . And that is a little disappointing to see from the follow-up to a Godzilla film that felt genuinely fresh and original, hearkening back to the post-war anxiety context that fueled the very first movie as well as the rhythms of classic Hollywood blockbusters through a focus on a compelling cast of characters. There are several ways in which this movie feels like an average Godzilla flick. And yet there are just as many ways that it doesn’t, and a big part of that does come down to director Ta...
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Back to the Feature: CQ (2001)

I think Roman is the only Coppola filmmaker I’ve never seen a movie by. I’ve seen several that he has written of course through his collaborations with Wes Anderson but nothing that he has directed. That is pretty fair though, because he has only directed two movies, not nearly as engaged in that side of the business as his father, sister, and niece -although he has assisted his family as second unit director on several of Francis and Sofia’s movies. CQ from 2001 however was all his own. It did come on the heels though of a prolific career for Coppola as a director of commercials and music videos and that shows in the visual style of CQ , wholly an homage to campy European genre films of the 1960s. You see it in the mock production values, and the elaborate costuming, in some of its compositions and editing -interestingly it is a movie about a film editor. Jeremy Davies, just a few years out from Saving Private Ryan , plays the editor Paul -an American based in Paris in 1969 where he...
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Fjord, and the Challenging Frictions of Multiculturalism

Cultural assimilation for immigrants and newcomers is a loaded topic. There are those who believe that people coming to a new country should adopt some sense of that country’s broad mores and values in order to be a respectable, contributing member of society. Others contend that such people don’t owe a new country their assimilation, that they should hold onto their own traditions and sense of identity as a way of preserving their cultural roots. Some believe the correct position is somewhere in the middle of these, or that it depends on circumstances and a case-by-case basis. It is always a bit of a tricky issue to navigate. But that didn’t stop director Christian Mungiu from diving into it wholeheartedly in his new movie Fjord , winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It is a severe and challenging movie. And all the more curious given it deals with a crisis involving cultural assimilation in a country like Norway, which prides itself on its openness and progre...
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He Had to Pick a Pocket or Two

For the kind of plot that this movie engages in, it is a surprisingly, refreshingly sombre movie. There is a time crunch through a decent chunk of it, and yet the script doesn’t treat it as such. It holds and is patient as it veers into other priorities, the rationale for which isn’t exposed until the end. It is rather poetic in fact. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is a film by Noah Segan, typically an actor best known for his various roles in films by Rian Johnson (who serves as an executive producer here). And it is indeed a movie about petty crime perpetrated by an expert petty criminal against the most endeared New York backdrop of any movie in years. There are elements of typical crime thrillers in its story and make-up, and yet it appears to be a character study more than anything, dwelling on his life, his friendships, kindly attitude, and noble humanity before also touching on the past faults of his character, the ramifications of these and his regrets. It is as though...
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The Texture of Clay

  Clayface might be the most interesting Batman villain to -up until now- never appear in a live-action movie. His signature episode of Batman: The Animated Series , “Feat of Clay” is one of that show’s highlights, his origin story ranking up there with Two-Face and Mr. Freeze in terms of its pathos and tragedy. It is interesting that he was selected as the headliner of his own DC Studios movie though -his story is certainly interesting enough but there is a level of obscurity to him with the general public. Certainly compared to the likes of the Joker and Penguin and Harley Quinn. I suspect the chief reason for the movie’s existence is the opportunity it gives DC to play in a different wheelhouse -something DC head James Gunn appears still interested in doing. Clayface is  an R-rated body horror film that importantly does not neuter the character’s villainy for the sake of a more conventional superhero movie mold -the way that Marvel and Sony’s equivalent movies -the Veno...
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The Mangled Tones of Klara and the Sun

Taika Waititi was not the right person to make Klara and the Sun . There were several moments while watching this adaptation of the bestselling novel by Kazuo Ishiguro that I could see exactly what Waititi was going for and how it would work in the hands of a director like Steven Spielberg or Guillermo del Toro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet or even Wes Anderson. Hell, Hirokazu Kore-eda proved this year with the similar Sheep in the Box   that he was capable of handling a sentimental story about a child-like artificial consciousness. But Waititi, who does have real strengths as a director, is not convincingly capable of the required level of earnestness here and he can't help himself when it comes to certain proclivities with his dialogue and characterization -which have their place in his other films but feel quite inappropriate here. For one thing, Klara and the Sun is set in a dystopia that is never treated as such by the narrative, merely alluded to on a few brief occasions and as quickly...
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