We’ve got two new films in town plus more to see at DOXA and if that’s not enough consider these:
It’s Friday the 13th and if that calls for some horror entertainment here are two possibilities. At the Rio at midnight they’re showing the original Friday the 13th, you know with the guy in a hockey mask slashing up a summer camp. Earlier, at 9 p.m. at the UBC Student Union Building you can watch The Conjuring, James Wan’s quite good and very popular haunted house thriller of three years ago. A couple of ghost hunters investigate demons in the house they’ve just moved into. The screening is free and there are prizes because it’s part of a continent-wide promotion for an upcoming sequel, The Conjuring 2.
On Thursday next week, the Cinematheque opens a retrospective of Kelly Reichardt's films starting with Old Joy from 2006. It's one of four films, along with Wendy and Lucy, Meek's Cutoff and Night Moves that she made in the Pacific Northwest and for which she's best known. Her rarely seen first feature is being shown on Saturday and on opening night you'll be able to see her talk via a skype interview. See theCinematheque.ca for details.
Meanwhile, these are the new films in town:
Money Monster: 2 ½ stars
Dheepan: 3 ½
DOXA Documentaries:
A Good American, The Ballad of Oppenheimer Park, The Crossing, Nuts
MONEY MONSTER: It’s clear what the message is intended to be. George Clooney and Jodie Foster are saying little guys don’t stand a chance dealing with Wall Street. As one character declares, the stock market is rigged against them. There’s even a short clip of Robert Reich near the end saying it. He’s a major voice these days on income inequality. But Clooney, as star and producer, and Foster, as director, are so intent on making the film entertaining, they muddy its serious side.
Clooney plays the host, and Julia Roberts the producer, of a TV show not unlike Mad Money, but way too exaggerated. (Clooney singing and dancing? Not credible.) One of his in-your-face stock tips has gone rotten. A young man (Jack O'Connell) who lost $60,000 on it barges in and takes him hostage on air. He wants to know how such a sure-thing could go so wrong. Roberts, various staffers and the PR woman at the company he invested in rush to find the answer as police converge, crowds gather outside and audiences world-wide watch on TV.
Some of this works. For instance, high-tech stock trading is looked into. Clooney’s character starts questioning the influence he’s been wielding. But a lot doesn’t. When the police link the young man’s pregnant girlfriend to talk to him, she yells how worthless a man he is, in much stronger language than that. It’s not only unfeeling, it undercuts the sympathy we’re supposed to have for him. Maybe he’s always a loser. The script has to make some challenging turns to put the blame where we know all along its going. There’s little suspense and some of the humor misfires but the acting is good. Caitriona Balfe (of the Outlander TV series) is a standout as the PR woman. (Scotiabank, The Park, Dunbar, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres) 2 ½ out of 5
DHEEPAN: A year ago this one took the top prize at Cannes. If you didn’t see it at our film festival four months later, you should now. It’s an intensely moving film about refugees making a new life in France with strong performances by actors you’ve never heard of and a completely authentic depiction of the immigrant experience. Director Jacques Audiard, known for Rust and Bone and A Prophet, based the script on the memories of his lead actor.
Jesuthasan Antonythasan, now a writer in France, is a former child soldier with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. He plays an adult soldier, who with a purloined passport, a woman pretending to be his wife, and a “daughter” she found in a refugee camp, convinces French immigration authorities to give him asylum. They set him up with a job as the caretaker at one of those grim housing projects in a northern part of Paris. One of the buildings is controlled by drug dealers. People come go all night. There’s always noise. In that environment, Dheepan and his “wife” and “daughter” try to become a family. That’s one distinct story line. Another is their attempt to fit in, including little details like pretending to understand more of the French language than they know. And then, there’s a violent run in with the drug dealers, after he draws a line they can’t cross. It comes on too fast and isn’t properly anticipated but makes perfect sense. Most striking are the actors, he for his intense presence and she (Indian stage actress Kalieaswari Srinivasan) for her confusion as the make-believe wife. (5th Avenue) 3 ½ out of 5
DOXA: You’ve got the weekend left and here are some choice documentaries you can still catch at this year’s festival. I didn’t get to see Seed, which takes up the questions once again about Monsanto and other companies or League of Exotique Dancers in which veterans of the old burlesque shows recall both the joys and the seedy underside of the industry. The film, which has been praised by most everyone who’s seen it, comes back next week, to the Rio Theatre.
These I have seen …
A GOOD AMERICAN: This could be the most stunning film in the festival for what it reveals about missed opportunities, bureaucracy, cronyism and waste of money at the National Security Agency in the United States. The NSA could have prevented 9-11. That’s the key assertion by William Binney, a former technical director there and now a whistleblower. He demonstrated there were warning signs in the agency’s data base but the very expensive “key word” system NSA favored couldn’t pick them up. His group was working on a better system: collecting meta data that looked for connections; who was phoning who, not what they were saying. But NSA shut them down and brought in the mass surveillance that’s been in the news so much, minus Binney’s privacy safeguards. There’s much more: ill-deserved promotions within the agency and legal attacks without. This bracing expose by Austria’s Friedrich Moser plays like a spy thriller. (Saturday afternoon at the Cinematheque)
THE BALLAD OF OPPENHEIMER PARK: Seventy minutes of hanging out with the regulars in the downtown eastside’s most central park. It’s an eye opener.
There’s “Bear” as he calls himself. “I fight,” he proclaims, especially if you touch his hair. Harley acts like a standup up comic, sings a little and later puts a feather in his hair. A guy simulates shooting up. A woman and a man yell about money. Another woman calls her “trash”. Most of these people are First Nations. The film by Juan Manuel Sepúlveda, a Mexican and a former SFU student, makes the dubious suggestion that society has forced them to be there, in a new sort of confinement.
Some insist they’re on un-ceded land and have the right to sleep there. Several seem drunk or hung over as they argue, play cards, push an old-style buckboard carriage around and at one point carry a coffin. There’s no linking story, just incidents and the growing impression that though they don’t seem to have anything to do, they are a community. It’s just as effective at a famous American film from 1957, On the Bowery which was both praised and blasted for showing real people on New York’s skid road. (Saturday afternoon Cinematheque)
THE CROSSING: This short film, just under an hour, goes beyond all those documentaries we saw on the news about migrants coming into Europe. We get very close to seven of them, two couples and three singles, as they make their separate ways north from Cairo where they first meet. We don’t see the smugglers who send them, but we see the trip. We’re in small boats with them, feel the stress after seven days at sea, get picked up by an oil tanker, processed in Italy and sent on. Some of the scenes are caught with cellphone cameras and are unusually intimate.
The more prolonged drama comes when they arrive in their destinations: Berlin, Sweden, Belgium and Holland. They have to adjust but aren’t allowed to do anything while they wait for their papers granting them asylum. One feels he’s in “a prison” and would go back to Syria if he could. Another describes his “culture shock”. A third is said to be losing his spirit. One hears that his father back home had been murdered. The film is ordinary in style but remarkable in content. (Saturday evening, Cinematheque)
NUTS: I first heard about that odd character John R. Brinkley in a documentary about the Carter Family. They became famous on one of his radio stations. This film shows he was much more than a quack doctor who made millions in the 1030s with a treatment for male impotence. His Viagra was a piece of a goat’s testicle grafted on the man’s. He was also a radio pioneer broadcasting country music, commercials for dodgy medicines and his own speeches from the most powerful station in the US, and later Mexico. Listeners loved him but both the medical establishment and radio regulators came after him.
The film tells his story with just a touch of humor (the facts provide enough of that), a surprising amount of film and sound actuality from the time and some sparkling animation to fill in the gaps. As often happens with characters like this, he brought about his own downfall. The film doesn’t say them but you’ll feel the connections to today, the anti-vaxers, the alternate therapies and the fervour of the people who believe in them. (Saturday night, Cinematheque)