Besides the latest huge film from Marvel and some highly recommended smaller titles, you’ve got a short festival of documentaries to look over this week. They’re the best of Hot Docs playing now and through the weekend at the VanCity Theatre.
And if that’s not enough, there’s a festival of Korean films coming to the same theatre starting this coming Thursday. I won’t have time to do much with it but you can. Check out what’s offered by visiting https://www.viff.org/ . Korean films are known for innovation and spirit.
Right now, these are new in town:
Ant-Man and the Wasp: 3 stars
Leave no Trace: 4 ½
Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts: 4
Boundaries: 2
Hot Docs: The Silver Branch: 3 ½
Hot Docs: The Accountant of Auschwitz: 4
The First Purge: --
ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: Here’s some great summer fun for you, although some of the logic may get away on you. That’s not too unusual. These are comic book characters after all, with fantasy powers that defy the laws of physics. Ant-Man for instance can shrink himself as tiny as an insect or grow as large as a giant. That’s thanks to a special suit he stole a couple of films ago and he does both repeatedly in this one.
At the start we find him under house arrest because in another earlier film, he had violated an international super heroes protocol. Paul Rudd has the right casual tone for this single father who is not at all courting trouble but drawn into it anyway. Michael Douglas, as a scientist, and Evangeline Lilly, as his daughter, another size-shifting character called The Wasp, recruit him to help find Michelle Pfeiffer, the original Wasp. She disappeared into the “quantum realm” a few decades ago but may still be alive. That’s exactly where the logic gets flakey but don’t worry about that, or about the multiple story strands that reach into other movies. Only the real Marvel fans worry about all those connections.
Enjoy the energy here; the breezy atmosphere, the marvelous special affects and design and most of all the humor. There’s lots of that. At key moments Ant-Man can’t make the size-change he needs. In one scene, on a turnpike, he looks like a kid playing with toy cars and watch for a motorcycle taken down by an oversize Pez dispenser. It’s silly but entertaining.
Two others are trying to get hold of Douglas’ lab (which is housed in a building that can be shrunk too, as small as a carry-on bag at times). One is an unctuous dealer in black market technology (Walton Goggins); the other is The Ghost (played with just the right touch of bitterness by Hannah John-Kamen). Scientific experiments have made her image unstable. She fades in and out and can’t control it. That’s comic-book quantum mechanics; don’t sweat it. Notice instead, there’s nobody trying to destroy the galaxy or even just control the world. That’s something, isn’t it? (5th Avenue, Scotiabank, Marine Gateway and many suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
LEAVE NO TRACE: Staying independent despite the odds is the recurring theme in Debra Granik’s films. Last time, with Winter’s Bone, she earned Academy Award nominations and made Jennifer Lawrence a star. This time she distills the subject down to its simplest and purest form and succeeds in giving us a true picture of America. It’s based on a story that really happened although it’s taken from a novel that speculated on the details. The film is immensely involving as we spend time with a father and his teenage daughter who live far off the grid—in a wilderness park near Portland, Oregon—and resist all the forces trying to draw them back into society.
They sleep under a tarpaulin roof; cook on an open fire and go into town only for groceries and to get his veteran’s check and PTSD meds. He (Ben Foster) is stoic but apparently troubled. He home schools her to keep her away from the corrupting influence of other people. She is played with a completely natural air by Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, new to us but well-known in New Zealand, where she’s from. The bond between them is strong but their living conditions can’t last. They’re discovered, examined, analyzed, separated, re-joined and given refuge in an RV park. She’s changed by it all. The outside world attracts her now. Do they go back to the wild? The growing divergence and the outcome are heartrending, and superbly acted, directed and photographed. The main financing came from the Burnaby company Bron Studios. (International Village) 4 ½ out of 5
MARLINA THE MURDERER IN FOUR ACTS: If you’re in the mood for something utterly different, try this. It’s beautiful and entrancing, grisly and funny, and carrying a punch of feminist revenge but in a surprisingly light-hearted mood. Or think of it this way: a film from Indonesia that plays and often sounds like a spaghetti western mixed with a lot of Kill Bill. It’s so eccentric you’ll sometimes wonder if it’s serious, or maybe a send up. Its message is real.
A young widow grows to rise above the norms of her gender in her culture. She’s visited by a greasy-haired tough guy at her remote farm house and told six more would be coming; they’ll steal her livestock and as a bonus will sleep with her. He suggests that’s a privilege and tells her to cook dinner. She poisons four of them, and when she’s raped by the leader, cuts off his head with a machete and sets out to tell the police. They’re dismissive (“Why did you let him rape you?”) and she’s under threat when the last two members of the gang return. Other signs of the controlling power of men are brought out by a very pregnant friend whose husband abuses her. The film, directed by Mouly Surya, lets the consciousness of both women develop to a satisfying end. There’s also a headless ghost that plays music. Only in her imagination, I'm sure, but adding much to the light, off-centre atmosphere. (VanCity Theatre) 4 out of 5
BOUNDARIES: Enjoy the variety of views of Vancouver and environs in this one. Right down to White Rock, I detect. There’s more interest with them, than with the rest of the film which is supposed to be taking place in Seattle, on the road south from there and right to California. Sausalito looks a lot like Granville Island. The story is trite, facile and not particularly well developed. The director, Shana Feste, based it on her on her own father, apparently a grifter who was out of her life much of the time and moved in when he was old and sick. Curiously, that’s not what happens in the movie.
Christopher Plummer plays the old man as a cheerful scamp. When he’s thrown out of his old-age home because of “side ventures” (pot growing and selling) he calls on his daughter (Vera Farmiga) to take him in. She won’t, leans on her sister to take him and agrees to drive him to her in California, in his gold-colored Rolls-Royce. The trunk is full of weed which she eventually discovers because he sells it along the way, to among others, veterans of the 1960s played by Christopher Lloyd and Peter Fonda. In a completely uncomfortable sub-plot, Vera has a special needs son who delights in creating pornographic drawings of people around him. It gets him expelled from school, so he’s free to come on the trip too. His signature motif is to comment on his subjects by the size of the penis he draws. The film could have been funny and charming. It isn’t. It’s strained. (International Village) 2 out of 5
THE BEST FROM HOT DOCS: The annual collection of the best from the Toronto documentary festival starts tonight at the Van City theatre and runs until Tueday. Check viff.org for details. There are five films this year; some with filmmaker talks added and several with familiar themes. They include young Afghan women challenging their repressive society by joining a national cycling team, an indigenous musician from Australia finding international success despite his blindness, the male-to-female transition of a father, weightlifter and ex-Marine and two films that I’ve seen already.
THE SILVER BRANCH, from Ireland shows that some things are the same everywhere. You live in a neighborhood you love and with hardly a notice the government tries to destroy it. A farmer poet tells about it here; about the people who live in an idyllic valley in County Claire, at peace with themselves and intimately attached to their surroundings. They’re not “prisoners” to any modern thinking, he says. The pictures are like an Eden, with broad, rolling fields, cows grazing, birds flying gently, a baby fox peering from the bushes.
Almost by accident, the people hear the area government wants to turn the place into a tourist attraction. The Hitachi excavator is already on the way. Patrick McCormack, the poet, calls it “an act of arrogance” that’s “going to violate the place.” The film is lyrical in presenting its message: “We’re just a strand in the whole web of life.” It wisely spends most of its running time extolling that although I wanted to hear more about what exactly the government was thinking and how the resulting court case was decided. (Sunday at 6:30) 3 ½ out of 5
THE ACCOUNTANT OF AUSCHWITZ couldn’t be more different. The subject is the Holocaust and confronts questions that rise up in Germany now and then. Should very old men be prosecuted? What about men who didn’t kill but only worked in the camps? Is it ever too late? The film, about a former SS member put on trial when he was 94 years old is by Toronto director Matthew Shoychet and includes three people from his city, a legal expert and two holocaust survivors when went back to testify. Most prominent among the other speakers in the film is Alan Dershowitz, the former law professor. His words and the film are powerful. I’ll write more when it comes back for a regular booking later this month. It screens tonight (Fri.) at 6:30, followed by a filmmaker Q&A via skype. 4 out of 5
Also now playing …
THE FIRST PURGE: It started as a quirky horror movie five years ago and has now lasted into a 4th installment, a potentially very profitable one, it seems. The plot imagines one night every year on which all crimes are legal—even murder. Something in that concept appealed to a lot of people. This new version finally goes back to the beginning to explain the reasons for the purge. It was a government project, originated by an official played by Maria Tomei of all people. I haven’t seen it, it wasn’t previewed here, but I understand that a lot of current ideas and fears have been written in: deadlocked political parties, a third party rising with the promise to let you dream again, racism, economic crises, the privileged rich wielding their power. You know, if you need a break from CNN.