Three seeming greats that didn't resonate

I try to write about everything that we see at the Michigan Theater, as I made an unofficial promise to Larissa and Jaime that I would do so when we first picked up memberships and began regularly visiting four(?) years ago. Sometimes it takes me longer than others because I just don't feel what the writer, director, and actors are laying down. I recognize the level of their accomplishment, as we rarely see a genuinely bad film at the theater, but sometimes what I'm seeing, as entertaining as it may be, just doesn't resonate with me in the manner that usually inspires one of my wordy reviews. Between the four of us, we've seen all of the Best Picture nominees (Jaime and Larissa saw West Side Story and CODA, while Tricia and I saw King Richard and Nightmare Alley (two more that I will get around to soon); I think one of the four have only missed a couple more) and all three of those I'm writing about tonight are on those nomination lists; sometimes more than once. They are Flee, The Worst Person in the World, and Ascension.

Flee has actually been nominated three times (Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary, Best International Feature- Denmark) and there's little room to argue that it's a great film. It has a gripping and very relatable story, an appealing lead/narrator (Amin) who has gone on to great success in his life despite his intense period of trial, and was done using a smart form of animation. As a former comic guy, animation is always going to hold some degree of appeal to me and I think their comic-esque approach was a really smart choice for a lengthy story of this type. You can easily imagine the panel borders as the camera moves around and scenes shift. The opening scenes reminded me of the tragedy that the emergence of the mujahedeen wrought upon that country, as I remembered the pictures of Kabul University in 1980, with women freely attending, dressed as they like. The family fled Afghanistan for a variety of reasons, not least because their father was a government official, but Amin also knew that his sexuality could easily result in him being executed, and that identity is nicely woven into the story, rather than being presented as a glaring factor. But with all of that approbation, when I got home the night we saw it, my motivation was absent. As nice as Amin was, I didn't find anything about his personal perspective that was particularly interesting. With all of the other characters, including his siblings, strained through Amin's perspective, they also became little more than stand-ins, without any of the emotional feedback that you would get from "live actors", despite efforts by the animation crew to depict them in as much detail (facial expressions, etc.) as possible. I felt, perhaps, like there was nothing for me to hang my perspective on. It was an interesting story. It was presented well. There it is. That said, I would highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in the topic, animation, or simply a good film.

The Worst Person in the World has also been nominated for Best International Feature (Norway) and, like Flee, is also indisputably a great film. In contrast to the latter, Worst Person is redolent with characters whose emotions are written on their faces and whom convey them in the most normal, human manner possible. Indeed, this is a film about emotion and how it changes through life and how some of those changes are more understandable than others, even (often especially) by those feeling them. But after I saw it, I felt like I had nothing to add to it. We'd seen the film. It was good. There it is. The main character, Julie (Renate Reinsve) is, in turn, both appealing and frustrating and her surrounding cast, especially Elvind (Herbert Nordrum), have a level of magnetism that you find in the better actors. Indeed, given that this was her first feature film, Reinsve was kinda spectacular. Here's hoping for more. I also thought the story structure was interesting (divided into 12 "chapters"), if a little drawn out in the later stages. But one of the key decisions of the film, wherein Julie breaks off her long-time relationship with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) to pursue her lurking passion for Elvind, doesn't seem to have enough built up around it for the magnitude that it's supposed to have. Their final argument before she leaves, where she complains that "Sometimes I just want to have feelings about things-!" didn't have much buildup. There weren't any flashpoints where she was prevented from having those feelings, so I wondered why so much weight was being added to a situation that she'd been in multiple times before where she simply lost interest in whoever she was with and went off after someone else. As Jaime pointed out, it's possible that we missed some of the interplay in their conversations, as it's often difficult to pick up idioms and cultural cues from translations. (This is why my friend, Adoni, who teaches classics at OSU, taught himself to read French and German so he could read the original sources.) I don't think the lack of that story support was necessarily a weakness of the film. It could just be a weakness of my viewing of it. But it just didn't sing to me the way so many other films have. It was good and I would definitely recommend it, but I didn't have much to say about it.

Ascension has been nominated for Best Documentary. From watching the trailer, I was genuinely excited to see this film. This looked like a hard and involved examination of the impact of capitalism on the People's Republic of China. I expected a lot of stories from those involved about the ups and downs of the system and how they dealt with it; similar to One Child Nation. Instead, we took kind of a meandering path through a number of situations related to that cultural impact; from recruiting on street corners with company rules and "perks" to assembly lines for plastic gadgets to people training to be servants and bodyguards to the entertainment venues that none of these working people will be able to afford. Those, along with visual allusions to the waste created by this economic boom, in the form of plastic trash on the rivers to literal piles of bicycles sitting in a lot, present a film that, at first glance (as in the trailer), would seem to be an exposé of just what China has largely become. But that message really doesn't come across in that fashion, outside of some isolated moments in those factories where the pace of the work becomes both mind- and finger-numbing. There were far fewer sharp, emotional moments than I expected, perhaps partially because of the lack of direct input from most of the subjects. There were almost no direct interviews of people talking about their circumstances and the positive and/or negative aspects to them. I'm not sure if it's because director Jessica Kingdon was forbidden to have those conversations or if company and/or national policy prevented people from giving their opinion. Consequently, the pace of the film felt languid, where I had expected at least mildly frenetic. Kingdon seemed content to simply observe, rather than question (again, presuming that she wasn't forbidden from doing so.) Her observations were still interesting, but just didn't have the impact that I had been hoping for. The only reason I'd encourage others to see it is for the prospect of them coming away with something more than we did and telling me what I was missing.

So, in the end, good enough for a paragraph, but not the multiples that usually make up these posts. Having seen so much in the past two weeks, we might have hit a dry spell in what the theater is offering, so there may be some delay in the next missive that I'll probably try to fill with the two films mentioned above that we watched on HBO.