EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022)

April 5, 2022

(Cinemas) I’ve gone on record as being both an easy laugher and an easy crier when it comes to film viewing, but it’s very rare that I do both at the same time. The Daniels’ (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheiner, who previously helmed the surprisingly affecting dick joke of a film SWISS ARMY MAN) EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE had my face wet and aglow more than a few times.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (henceforth referred to as EVERYTHING) is an absolutely outrageous film; it’s mind-bogglingly high-concept, often amusingly puerile, always inventive, but also remarkably emotionally grounded. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, read no further and just go see it, preferably on the largest screen possible. (Although, if you do read further, I promise no major spoilers.)

EVERYTHING is all about Evelyn (see what they did there?) played by a never-better Michelle Yeoh — and that’s saying something, as her career is vast and multi-faceted and brilliant — who helms a laundromat with her overly joyful husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, who you may remember as INDIANA JONES’ Short Round) that is currently being audited by the IRS, specifically by Deirdre (Jaime Lee Curtis, clearly having the time of her life). Meanwhile, Evelyn is trying to mediate matters between taking care of her addled, elderly father (the illustrious James Hong), and her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) and her daughter’s girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel), all while personally bemoaning all of the options she could have pursued over her life, including singing and acting, instead of tending to a struggling laundromat where her husband keeps slapping googly eyes on everything.

When heading up in an elevator in a non-descript IRS building to meet Deidre and iron their financial matters out, Waymond’s disposition completely shifts; he pops an umbrella to obscure a security camera, and then gives her the barest of instructions and information, which ultimately results in: right now, I’m not your husband; I’m the same person, but from a different, splintered universe, and I need your help. Evelyn’s then walked through the process of accessing her multiverse personas, explicitly through silly, surreal actions.

Matters escalate and what ultimately follows is a very heady trip through not only a mid-life crisis, but a personal reckoning with family. And hot dog hands, which happen to exist in a universe in which people play pianos with their toes. (I can’t help but think that’s a bit of a Tarantino riff. Notably, Uma Thurman is thanked in the credits.)

While EVERYTHING feels a tad too long at almost two-and-a-half-hours, none of that running time is wasted. It is jam-packed, almost overstuffed, with so many ideas, so many effusive, brilliant visual gags, so much hurt between Evelyn and Joy, so much enthusiasm from Way, so many brilliantly choreographed and executed fight sequences, it’s hard to say what they could have cut. The film is an embarrassment of riches, a treasure-trove of cinematic appreciation, but also a surprisingly thoughtful take on hope and love and humanity and of aging and of missed opportunities. While I’m prone to crying and laughing too much at a film, it is an astonishing achievement, and one worth being exuberant about.

Lastly, buy an everything bagel before diving in, and save it for after. You’ll thank me later.

YOU WON’T BE ALONE (2022)

April 3, 2022

If forced to describe YOU WON’T BE ALONE, the first film from Goran Stolevski, in a simple log line, I’d say: it’s equal parts Truffaut’s THE WILD CHILD, Virginia Woolf’s novel ORLANDO and Sally Potter’s film adaptation, and Angela Carter’s THE BLOODY CHAMBER and Neil Jordan’s adaptation, THE COMPANY OF WOLVES. (Then again, every single one of those works were very formative for me, so I’m perhaps not the most reliable narrator for this write-up.)

While that may sound very specific, it doesn’t quite do YOU WON’T BE ALONE justice. Set in 19th century Macedenoia, it’s about a young girl promised to a wolf-eateress named Maria (a ruthlessly great Anamaria Marinca) — for all intents and purposes, a witch — by her mother to account for being set fire to at the hands of their community. Her mother then forces her daughter into an enclosed cave for the rest of her youth, in an attempt to prevent the witch from absconding with her and turning her into a wolf-eateress/witch.

Once the feral girl is grown, Maria kills the mother, takes on her disguise, and abducts Biliana (Alice Englert, who also appeared in THE POWER OF THE DOG), predictably changing her into a witch with the hopes that she’d be the daughter she never had.

What follows are a number of physical transformations, of Biliana exploring her humanity but in a rather flailing way, and often being disappointed by the results, all portrayed by depictions of fundamental elementals; hair, water, fire, earth, blood and skin.

It’s a bewildering work, one far more sensitive than I thought it’d be, with a wildly roaming camera that knows how to sit still when necessary. It’s visually astounding while also being quietly desperate; a stunningly heartfelt first film.

HORIZON: FORBIDDEN WEST (2021)

March 30, 2022

My gaming comfort food during the pandemic — stupidly, I’m literally someone known for writing about comfort food games — have been open-world games; almost exclusively ASSASSIN’S CREED games. Their doling of bite-sized, mostly frictionless, quests have been a balm while trapped inside.

It’s been a while since I’ve played HORIZON: ZERO DAWN, but I recall it as being a rather concise, smaller open-world game, one that doubled-down on plot and character rather than scenery and scale, and I greatly appreciated it for that.

HORIZON: FORBIDDEN DAWN is the polar opposite: it’s absolutely overwhelming and mind-bogglingly grandiose. When I think of the hours spent to make this, I feel a bit sick. While I think it could have reeled in its scope, I did find it notable in a number of other ways.

UNRULY HAIR

Aloy is one of the most fascinating triple-A leading videogame characters of recent times. A clone of one of the most influential scientific women of the game’s fictional history, she steps up and fills her shoes, although she does so while also being petulant and impulsive, all while still missing her ‘mother’ (her search for her was arguably the focal point of her introductory game, HORIZON: ZERO DAWN).

She also has some of the most dynamic, radiant red hair in videogames. Hair is a touchy subject when it comes to tech, as it’s often a point of programmatic pride, rarely born of character motivation. While it’s a film and not a videogame, look no further than Pixar’s BRAVE for a quintessential example, which was explicitly created as a way for them to show off their hair rendering tech (and similarly features a vibrant redhead).

As someone who has had long, wavy hair for far longer than I have not, and as someone who often thinks about hair and identity and representation, seeing anyone with unruly hair (or as Guerrilla Games labels it: tousled hair) in media has become oddly strange to see, as production models for entertainment have skewed closer to generic hairstyles to maintain continuity and production costs. While Aloy’s hair isn’t exactly curly, it is remarkably distinct and, in real life, would require significant management, something most folks don’t often think about. Long hair moves, it gets in the way; it’s something you are always aware of. It’s either in your vision or in your mouth or getting caught on something or in somewhere, and how Aloy’s hair is animated — always in motion, always cascading around her — reflects that same sort of bodily self-awareness. Even if some folks seem to think the hair animation is a bug, I see it as a feature.

It’s also worth noting that, apparently, a number of people don’t realize that women have hair elsewhere.

THE FUTURE IS FEMALE

One of the most amazing things about HORIZON: FORBIDDEN WEST is that it’s all about women repairing the damage that men have wrought. Almost all of the men alive and dead are villains or sidekicks, and the game is more than fine with that, but never explicitly calls attention to it which, for a triple-A videogame meant for worldwide consumption, seems wild, which is a sad remark on the state of blockbuster videogames.

SHAPES AND SIZES

One other brilliant facet of HORIZON: FORBIDDEN WEST is its variety of character models. The world consists of people of all sorts of shapes, sizes, and hues; it’s not your standard post-apocalypse of wafer-thin white people, and the game doesn’t commit the standard narrative sin of playing someone’s girth for laughs or pratfalls. They’re just people trying to survive in a world that is constantly trying to kill them.

TALKING TO ONE’S SELF DURING THE END OF THE WORLD

HORIZON: FORBIDDEN WEST features an absolutely astounding and exhausting amount of dialogue. I can’t even begin to fathom the script, but it consists of reams and reams of lore, meant to flesh out the world that was sketched out in the first game. However, a good portion of the game features Aloy simply talking to herself. While most of that dialogue is meant to prod the player towards goals, quite a bit of it is purely observational. Aloy is depicted as a singularly individual person, one used to being alone, one used to supplying her own entertainment, of comforting herself in her own way because who else would? Who could?

A NEW MODERN

All of this culminates into a game that comes across as remarkably fresh, as opposed to the hoary male-led misery porn of most modern big budget games. HORIZON: FORBIDDEN WEST feels like a new frontier for gaming, at least with its command of characters and scenarios, even as it leans on the old model of open-world gaming, of FAR CRY-ish puzzle towers and checking off map-centric quests. It’s a world that one can luxuriate in and explore to your heart’s content, and not hate yourself for doing so.

P.S. One facet of the game that is missing is any semblance of sexuality whatsoever, so I’d like to boost this piece.

P.P.S. Even I as a very white, prior New Englander felt that a number of character designs and attributes were not what they could have been. I’m definitely not qualified to critique this game’s Orientalism, so I’ll leave this here.

HATCHING (2022)

March 28, 2022

(Hulu/VOD) One of my favorite activities to attend when the world first re-opened in the summer of 2021 was Joe Swanberg’s Secret Screenings at Chicago’s Davis Theater. If you aren’t familiar with Swanberg, he’s perhaps best known for being a mumblecore pioneer — the low-rent indie film genre that emphasized language and small-scale human drama — but he’s also a prolific actor and producer and he loves Chicago, specifically his neighborhood of Lincoln Square, where the Davis is housed.

His secret screenings are exactly what they sound like: you buy a ticket solely knowing you’ll get to watch a film wouldn’t be possible to see otherwise. (I’ve previously written about a few of his prior screenings, including DETENTION). If you can attend, he has one more secret screening at the Davis on April 9th, and the writer/director will be present for a post-film Q&A. (Swanberg knows how to moderate these things, so it’ll be a quality Q&A!)

His first secret screening of 2022 was of Sundance darling HATCHING, a Finnish coming-of-age horror film from director Hanna Bergholm and writer Ilja Rautsi about Tinja (Siiri Solalinna), a gymnast teen with a monstrous social media-obsessed mother (a wicked Sophia Heikkilä), one who would rather break the neck of a raven that literally shatters the trappings of the family home as opposed to letting it free. Tinja later finds the crippled creature, puts it out of its misery, then sees a sole egg from the raven’s nest and decides to tend to it. Matters escalate in a brilliant way that explores puberty and terrible mothers.

Trust me, the less you know about the rest is best, but it’s a thrilling, wild, disgusting, intense ride. It’s a film that would make a great late-night double-feature with GINGER SNAPS.

I’d like to digress a bit from the film though, solely to discuss horror and bodies, as HATCHING — more than any other film I’ve seen in some time — scrutinizes physicality. Horror, perhaps more than any other genre than action, relies on people’s bodies being thrown around, either self-imposed or done by others. As someone who was infatuated with tumbling, bar work, and gymnastics in general as a youth, you’re repeatedly told to trust yourself, to get over your fears, to think of your appendages as tools; you specifically toss yourself around like an object for the amusement — or bemusement — of others. I look back and am shocked at the acts I put my body through, for no goddamn good reason apart from the fact that it felt good and it was expected.

I was not a gifted gymnast and, similarly, HATCHING’s Tinja is not a gifted gymnast, but unlike her, I was never pressured by a desperate mother to pursue it. It was just an extracurricular I latched onto.

I can’t imagine putting myself through those routines now as I’m too old and creaky, but I do miss it. That feeling is much what horror films capture and encapsulate: the thrill of youthfully putting yourself in perilous situations, of exploiting the belief of immortality of the young which is, at least in most horror films, often then cut short; victims of hubris, of launching themselves too high towards the sky and failing to stick the landing.

(As usual, including a trailer, but probably best to stay away if you have any interest in the film.)

THE SECRET HISTORY (1992)

March 25, 2022

In the ‘before-times’, one of the last novels I read from start-to-finish in a bar was Donna Tartt’s THE GOLDFINCH. It was the first novel of hers I’d read — practice for a film I’d never bother watching — and the bartender/manager/owner of said bar asked me: ‘Have you read THE SECRET HISTORY?’, which I vaguely knew as Tartt’s first novel. I responded that I had not. He solely replied: ‘You should read it,’ then walked away with an aloofness which stunned me, one that I would have found offensive if it weren’t for a specific lilt in his voice.

I had really, sincerely, stupidly, hoped that I’d be able to read it at his bar — it’s Burke’s Public House; if you’re ever in the Chicago Uptown area, they are still open, and they have great burgers — but no. COVID-19 intervened, obviously. Instead, I idly read the bulk of it at a generic suburban resort, far away from home, in a starchy, itchy bed.

THE SECRET HISTORY is a astonishingly beloved novel, one of found families, and it revels in nuanced academia of the Ancient Greek sort but, at the heart of it, it’s a Hitchcock-ian tale of power dynamics while also being a cautionary story about when everything goes sour in the most platonic of relationships, when one trusts too much in others without fully realizing the implications of doing so.

The details of THE SECRET HISTORY are rather difficult to discuss, precisely because the novel is the slowest of slow-burns, luxuriating in setting and character before finally diving into the details of its inciting incident, but I’ll summarize it as so: Richard, an indecisive, lower-middle-class Californian dude from Plano* changes majors several times before moving to a very liberal, fictitious, Vermont college in a made-up town, and throws his all into a group of well-off Classics intellectuals: Henry, the fountainhead of the group, brilliant but has a specific disassociation from humanity; Bunny, a dyslexic but charismatic individual that comes from privilege but isn’t given a cent and relies on his charm to live; Charles and Camilla, lithe fraternal twins who live together; Frances, mostly queer and moneyed; and Julian, the Ancient Greek professor who doesn’t need to teach to pay the bills, allowing him to be extraordinarily selective about the students he enlists, the students of whom murder Bunny.

THE SECRET HISTORY also scrutinizes Vermont, where I grew up, but it is firmly positioned in Central Vermont and, despite the fact that you can drive vertically through the state in under four hours — less than two horizontally — Vermont is surprisingly fragmented. There’s Northern Vermont which was — when I lived there, many moons ago — very upper-middle-class in a basic way. Families of engineers and the like. Southern Vermont I mostly knew as Bennington, specifically Bennington College, which isn’t nearly as illustrious now, but in its heyday it was all David Mamet and Shirley Jackson (who, admittedly, didn’t attend or teach there, but her husband did, and her spirit still looms large, and directly inspired THE SECRET HISTORY via her novel HANGSAMAN — about a woman finding herself at a liberal college — and perhaps her under-published short story THE MISSING GIRL).

Central Vermont though, well, there’s not much there apart from struggling farming boroughs, and the well-meaning capital of the state, Montpelier. It’s a mess; it’s always been that way, at least to me.

Tartt is a Southern American — from Mississipi — but attended Bennington College, along with other novelists like Bret Easton Ellis (of whom she partially dedicated this novel to). However, THE SECRET HISTORY is placed in Central Vermont, a nebulous place out-of-time that houses this group of (mostly) over-privileged Classics scholars who feel similarly displaced.

Consequently, THE SECRET HISTORY is a small-scale tale told in an epic way, and I’m gobsmacked that it’s never been adapted into a film, as in many ways, it suits that medium more than a novel. Conversely, Tartt’s latest, THE GOLDFINCH, which was adapted into a film, feels ill-suited to cinema, due to its severe interiority and reliance on static imagery, as opposed to HISTORY’s language and cadence and bold personalities.

(For more info on why a film adaptation of THE SECRET HISTORY stalled, see: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a28954524/donna-tartt-secret-history-movie/ )

  • Coincidentally, I saw an experimental theater production that took place in Plano — and was named Plano — three days before lockdown.

X (2022)

March 21, 2022

On paper, X (2022) sounds like sexploitation by way of the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: it’s 1979 and a group of Houston-based porn filmmakers head out to the boonies to shoot what they think will be -the- artistic home-video porno breakthrough, only for it to become their ultimate nightmare.

However, writer/director Ti West has always been supremely measured and thoughtful when it comes to his take on horror. The standout scene in his breakthrough film THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL consists of two minutes of protagonist Samantha (an ebullient Jocelin Donahue) dancing to THE FIXX’s ‘One Thing Leads to Another’ as it plays on her WalkMan, as opposed to the spectacularly nightmarish set-pieces that close the movie. West knows how to imbue emotion and heartfelt sincerity into his films in ways that few genre filmmakers do, and X is a clear case of this, even down to a similarly adorable music break.

Without spoiling anything, yes, X is lurid, is sensationalist, and definitely luxuriates in the sort of capitalist free love that existed at that time (at least, on film) but the soul of the film is about desire, to want and be wanted and feel hands on you; of coupling reciprocity. West is making the slasher subtext of physical, usually knife-centric, intimacy into text.

It also helps that West is ruminating in all of his cinematic influences: from John Ford to Jean-Luc Godard to Hitchcock, every scene — practically every shot — takes an established, recognizable visual motif and then skews — or skewers — it.

X is a wild but surprisingly sentimental ride, one that could revel in nastiness but opts instead to be an array of character pieces that also happens to be a rather thrilling, blood-soaked 90 minutes.

Lastly, I’d like to note: one facet of X’s production studio A24 that I love is that they encourage their auteurs to send out a newsletter reflecting on their film, and West’s one regarding X is worth a read.

Maria Bamford – THE LATE LATE SHOW – March 11th 2022

March 18, 2022

(CONTENT WARNING: DEATH)

Maria Bamford is well-known (well, among comedy nerds) as being a major figure of 90s alt-comedy, but also for being a comedian’s comedian. Part of it has to do with her command over her voice — if you’ve watched anything animated over the past fifteen or so years, you have heard her extremely versatile voice — but also over her command of tone. She knows how to balance serious material with absurdity through little more than a lilt or twitch.

She also had a semi-autobiographical two-season Netflix show — LADY DYNAMITE — which was a deep dive into her reckoning with mental illness. It was brilliant and laugh-out-loud funny and featured a lot of pugs.

In the before-times, I even managed to catch a performance of hers at Chicago’s Den Theatre and walked away dazed, half-drunk on laughs and self-reflection. After the show, I hung around the bar, reading a book in a cushy chair, listening to a fantastic DJ, and I watched as she spent time with everyone that approached her. She was at her merch table for well over an hour, listening to people, joking with them, making sure they felt seen and cared for.

She’s a goddamn comedic saint, and every one of her works deserve to be in the limelight. She filmed a stand-up special entitled THE SPECIAL SPECIAL SPECIAL where the only audience members were her very supportive mother and father, which I implore you to seek out. It’s an astoundingly awkward, but yet heartfelt work, partially because of Bamford’s mimicry regarding her parents — especially her mother.

Consequently, I was stunned to hear that her mother recently died of lung cancer, and that Bamford did a tight five of it on the March 11th, 2022 THE LATE LATE SHOW.

Here’s where I hand matters off to Vulture’s Jesse David Fox, who is both extremely empathic and brilliant at dissecting comedy. Read his post, watch the piece, and be prepared to laugh and cry:

https://www.vulture.com/article/maria-bamford-corden-stand-up-set-about-her-mom.html

CHICAGO – ‘Cell Block Tango’ (2002)

March 15, 2022

Every six months or so I become absolutely infatuated with a filmed musical number and will endlessly play it on repeat for days. Prior offenders include: JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR’s ’Superstar’, CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND’s ‘You Stupid Bitch’, just about any song from JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS, LIZZIE’s ‘House of Borden’, SWEET CHARITY’s ‘The Aloof/The Heavyweight/The Big Finish’, and even The View’s performance of the Broadway adaptation of FROZEN’s ‘Let It Go’.

Right now, it’s CHICAGO’s ‘Cell Block Tango’, a number from a film that I saw when it first ran in theaters, groused about how it swept the Oscars that year, and now I won’t shut up about.

To be fair, I watched it before I really started to understand musicals and accept them for what they are, instead of finding them to be overly dramatic venues for big showtunes and elaborate dance scenes.

Please understand that I’m (mostly) only discussing the ‘Cell Block Tango’ here, not the film at large because, otherwise, this piece would run at least four thousand words. (Trust me, I’ll spill the rest of those words some day, especially concerning the backstory of the play!)

One last matter worth noting: I moved to Chicago — the city, not the musical — right around the time of the theatrical revival, several years before the release of the film adaptation. So, well beforehand, I had already soaked in the look and feel of the revival’s fishnet-adorned El stop ads and billboards.

And with that, I’ll say that, twenty years later, this piece is better than ever. I was deadly wrong about dismissing it.

Taken out of context, it plays like a fever dream, a blurring of fact-and-fiction, of glamor fantasy and hardened reality, and I love it.

Women scorned, unafraid to exact vengeance. Legs as shotguns; wrists as daggers.

The secret weapon here is Catherine Zeta-Jones, who most folks at the time wrote off as a pair of versatile hips for Sean Connery, but reveals herself as one hell of a torch singer, while also throwing herself at you with a fire in her eyes.

This is a musical adaptation that a lot of folks complain about because it breaks the mould of film musicals; it relies on a lot of rapid shots and whiplash choreography, but that’s a good thing! CHICAGO (2002) is all about punc-u-a-tion and what better way to emphasize that than scissor legs and quick cuts? It’s all about the kinetic movement, even utilizing some frame-skipping to give it extra POP, and it turns CHICAGO from a leering stage production into immensely compelling cinema.

This is seven minutes of tales of abuse, anger, and unrepentant payback, tales told from a century ago via the original author Maurine Dallas Watkins, but are also a tale as old as time.

“Then he ran into my knife. He ran into my knife TEN TIMES.”

I could go on about the work’s fidelity to Fosse and his faceless, mute men, fetish wear and so on, but really, the piece speaks for itself. Go ahead, listen, and watch, and don’t disregard it like I did before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QatUaDGeRMY

Lastly, the entire history of this film’s production is astounding, and it’s all detailed here. Trust me, read it — you will not be disappointed.

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATED 2022 Documentary Shorts

Documentaries are by far the most undersung filmmaking genre — no doc has ever won an Oscar for Best Picture — and short documentaries have the worst of the lot. Some of these filmmakers have spent years and years filming their subjects, then whittle their hundreds of hours of footage into a publicly-palatable half-hour. It’s a shame that the Academy are pushing this group of nominees to the sidelines for the 2022 broadcast because these filmmakers — even when they make something that doesn’t quite cohere — invest so much time and work and emotion and empathy into their subjects.

AUDIBLE

AUDIBLE is the latest from filmmaker Matthew Ogens, best known for his documentary CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERHERO which followed around a set of Los Angeles costumed superheroes, but it’s also produced by Peter Berg, of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS fame. Like FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, AUDIBLE focuses on a high school football team, but this is an all-deaf team from the Maryland School for the Deaf. While the doc dives into how they communicate on-and-off the field, it excels at emphasizing the empathy and a specific kind of bonding that is rarely found in even the closest of social groups. Its use of subtitles, and insistance on displaying them, is also worth banging the drums for.

LEAD ME HOME

From longtime documentary workers Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk, LEAD ME HOME is an affective look at the homeless situation in tech-boom cities, notably San Francisco and Oakland, where tent cities are now very visible, as captured by their drone footage and contrasted by all of the modern construction work.

One of the more heartbreaking stories is that of Patty, who solely has her dog to keep her sane and safe from an abusive partner, and there are a litany of publicly posted signs stating ‘No dogs allowed’ in any space she would otherwise be able to use to bide the night.

THE QUEEN OF BASKETBALL

“Have you ever heard of Lucy Harris?” That’s the question posited from Ben Proudfoot (THE OX) and it’s a good one, as she was a revolutionary basketball player in a pre-WNBA era. Presented in a very face-forward Errol Morris way, this is an effortlessly pleasing doc that imbues Harris’ charms while also detailing how limited options for sport careers were for women — honestly, still probably are — even those courted by the Jazz.

“Long and tall and that’s not all.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRGsgb4WOzw

THREE SONGS FOR BENAZIR

A disheartening, slightly faltering, look at Shaista, an under-educated Afghanistan trying to escape from the opium trade by enlisting in the army. While well-shot and well-shaped by Elizabeth and Gulistan Mirzaei, especially when it comes to capturing the surveillance state that Shaista percieves, it leaves you wanting something a bit more thanks to a rather perfunctory end. Sadly, sometimes that’s just how spending years with a subject will work out.

WHEN WE WERE BULLIES

The documentary that dares to ask the question: “What if bullies were the victims all along?”

It’s a doc from prolific short film director Jay Rosenblatt that wants to examine mob mentality, youths’ desire to fit in — even if it means violence — but instead pivots to slight interviews and then almost completely writes out the actual victim. The hand-crafted animations used to set, and reset, the tableau of the bullying incident that incited the impetus for the film inject some liveliness into the film, but then leans far too heavily on it.

Despite the Academy’s sidelining of these works, you can still see them in the theater, as these shorts are currently playing in the Chicagoland area at the WILMETTE THEATER, 1122 Central Ave, Wilmette, IL 60091, USA!

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATED 2022 Live Action Shorts

March 12, 2022

You can tell that the Oscars are returning to some semblance of normalcy when they start inexplicably removing airtime for the remaining less-glamorous categories. Case in point: the Academy recently announced that the winners in a number of categories, including editing as well as the three shorts categories (Animated, Live Action, and Documentary), would no longer be announced live during the primary broadcast. As noted by many film professionals, this feels like a betrayal by the Academy, that they’re whittling away what’s supposed to be a celebration of everything that makes cinema unique to make room for more stars, singers and half-baked skits.

It’s an especially egregious sin concerning this year’s Live Action Short nominees, as the short films are mostly a banner crop of emotionally affecting works:

ALA KACHUU (TAKE AND RUN)

ALA KACHUU is from German-Swiss filmmaker Maria Brendle and opens with Sezim (Alina Turdumamatova), a young Kyrgyz woman living in a small rural town, arguing with her mother, trying to convince her to allow her to head to Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, to take an exam that could garner her a higher education scholarship. Her mother is dead set against it, espousing that Sezim find a husband instead, and forbids her to take the exam, especially underscoring her personal disdain for the woman Sezim would be staying with.

Sezim is undeterred and opts to run off to take the exam, to stay with her independently minded friend and get a job at a bakery. She glows as she eases into this new life, one of personal responsibility and individuality, and even learns how to drive a car.

While locking up the bakery at the end of the day, she gets a call from her friend, happily noting that her exam results are in! And then Sezim is grabbed by several young men, thrown into a car, and instead of living her best life as a free woman in the city, she’s forcibly married to her kidnapper, a man who doesn’t shy away from the fact that he wanted to abduct her co-worker, not herself.

Brendle tells this horrifying, but all too common, tale with an energetic verve that tugs at the viewer, while also leaning hard on visual burdens. It’s a hard watch, but one worth putting yourself through.

ON MY MIND

From 2002 Academy Award Live Short winner Martin Strange-Hansen (for THIS CHARMING MAN/DER ER EN YNDIG MAND) comes this piece about a man who just wants to sing a song for his unseen wife at a bar. At first, it feels like a one act stageplay, almost an exercise in character desire and denial, but then it turns the corner and reveals itself in a way that will clutch at your heartstrings. Especially noteworthy is how the film utilizes breath in ways that won’t cause you to wince in a pandemic way.

PLEASE HOLD

PLEASE HOLD, from Mexican-American director KD Davila, is the sort of dystopian depiction of the modern prison system that could easily be a BLACK MIRROR episode, or at least would be if that reality weren’t already here and prisoners weren’t unfairly detained and nickel-and-dimed until they’re bled dry. Starring Erick Lopez (CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND’s Hector), Davila’s use of visual confinement as well as the all-too-real sort of digital interface is particularly Kafka-esque.

THE DRESS

THE DRESS is credited as being written and directed by Tadeusz Lysiak, but allegedly he collaborated with actor Anna Dzieduszycka, who plays the lead Julka. Julka is a little person working as a maid in a Polish hotel, someone who is thirsty with desire — as visually expressed by her constant diet of slim cigarettes and booze — and seems to hit it off with a trucker, who schedules a date with her the next time he swings into town.

Dzieduszycka is brilliant in the role, but THE DRESS falters near the end, pivoting to prove an unnecessary point. Despite that, the first two-thirds are a fantastic character study, but you’ll know when you should bail.

THE LONG GOODBYE

Not to be confused with the Raymond Chandler work of the same name, THE LONG GOODBYE is a piece from director Aneil Karia (LOVESICK, SURGE) and penned by Karia and lead Riz Ahmed (SOUND OF METAL, THE NIGHT OF). It made the streaming rounds many moons ago, but deserves to be seen on screens larger than one’s phone as it’s a visual whirlwind of a large British South Asian family enjoying their day together, at least until those outside turn on them.

As with many of these works, THE LONG GOODBYE is not a traditionally fun watch, but it’s an important and engrossing one. Short films can summarize a lifetime we’d never be able to imagine within a fraction of the running time, and it’s a shame that the Academy has opted to relegate them to the sidelines. However, you can still see them in the theater, as these shorts are currently playing in the Chicagoland area at the WILMETTE THEATRE — https://www.wilmettetheatre.com/ — 1122 Central Ave, Wilmette, IL 60091, USA!