Furious path

When Pulp Fiction was released in 1994, it changed the film industry. Not only was the writing and pacing something that was largely unknown (outside of Tarantino's previous effort, Reservoir Dogs), but being an indy release, instead of something from a major studio (which would never, ever have taken the risk that both the material and the host of "non-bankable stars" presented), made many people inside and outside the industry sit up and take notice. But one of the main factors was the theme of the whole film. This was a gangster flick with realistic dialogue; with people who spoke about goofy, random stuff like real people, rather than always directly contributing to the plot ("You know, like Caine in Kung Fu.") One of the instructors at UCLA's prestigious film school said that the year after Pulp Fiction was released, every single senior project resembled it in at least some way. Now that Everything Everywhere All At Once has turned Hollywood on its ear about absurdist comedies, it's likely that we're going to be seeing many more of them. I don't want to accuse Polite Society of borrowing that approach, as it's probable that the latter film was in production long before EEAAO was released, but I feel pretty safe in thinking that almost everyone in the theater on Tuesday had the former film firmly in mind when writer/director Nida Manzoor's production started blossoming into what it becomes.

And, in truth, the overall premise of the film was much more like RRR, which was more fantastical than absurdist, and you can see Manzoor both mocking and embracing the Pakistani culture that is hers, and demonstrating its distinction from the staid English surroundings, even as teenaged Ria (Priya Kansara) does her best to try to fit in. That is, as long as "fitting in" means she can still embrace her alter ego (The Fury) and eventually let it lead her to her preferred career of stuntwoman, like her idol, Eunice Huthart (a stuntwoman in our "real life.") If that sounds like a great foundation for a comedy, it absolutely is, even without the central plot, which is Ria attempting to save her sister, Lena (Ritu Arya), from what Ria believes will be a disaster of a marriage to what seems like the perfect man. Indeed, I could've seen what might've been just as successful a story simply following Ria around and seeing what she (and The Fury) stumble into in the course of daily life. But that would've been much more like Tarantino and not nearly as much a fantasy as the story turns out to be. Throughout, I had a feeling that Manzoor had simply come up with a story that made her laugh and then did her best to convey that sense of humor to everyone else which, for the most part, she succeeded at.

What also made the film funny in a meta sense is that Kansara did so much work that it was almost a star vehicle for an actor not yet a star (but whom almost certainly should become one.) She was the lead and, in many ways, the whole film, as all of the other characters moved in her orbit and she was the driving force of almost all of the action, whether as angst-ridden teenager Ria or The Fury, who always needed a target upon which to focus her furiousness (much like another hero of yore.) One such target is family friend, Raheela (Nimra Bucha) who did a great job of stealing just a bit of the focus from Kansara, turning what resembled a borderline superhero film into more of a Bond-esque exercise in a battle of wits between the presumed bad guy and the hero who needed a mission in life. Alongside of that and one of the elements that kept the film rooted in some form of reality were Shobu Kapoor and Jeff Mirza, Ria and Lena's mother and father, who did a great job in bit roles trying to come to grips with The Fury while keeping up with the Jones-Nawazes. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Seraphina Beh and Ella Bruccoleri, as Ria's friends, Clara and Alba, as well. The two of them were a constant source of humor in the whole scheme, with Beh especially diving into the absurdist themes of the film and her role with gusto.

It's fair to say that perhaps a bit too much time was left to Ria dwelling in the aforementioned angst, as you can feel her frustration at not being understood, but also feel your own frustration when she kept falling into the most obvious of social obstacles, but that's what happens sometimes when one character is carrying so much weight. I'm engaging in a lot of comparisons to try to explain the film, which is kind of complimentary in its own way, since it was still definitely its own thing, even as much as it resembled so many others, intentionally or not. As a long-time fan of comics and superhero stuff, in general, and firmly burned out on the whole Marvel thing, Polite Society was a welcome reminder of just what these kinds of stories can deliver. Recommended.

How to deliver a message

There are a lotta stories and all kinds of ways to tell them. Likewise, there are lots of messages and many different ways to deliver them. The question that every author and director and transmitter and dogmatic is confronted with is: How? How do I tell my story in a way that will bring meaning to it? How do I convey my message in a way that will carry it into the hearts of its readers/listeners/viewers? This, I think, is a quandary no different with How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Inherent to its title and its basic premise, there's no doubt that that this is a message film. This isn't in the same vein as a romantic comedy or a sci-fi epic. This is a bit more down-to-earth, as it were, and wrapped up in very realistic themes that are tied around an actual situation that all of us are currently confronting. The book that it's based on is not an instruction manual as the title implies but rather a spirited defense of the idea of property destruction as a valid response to the destruction of the planet. That, too, is a debatable approach to both delivering one's message and telling the story of those who feel frustrated and powerless in front of the unstoppable tides of profit and modern demands of both industry and the energy production to drive it.

The story that writers Daniel Goldhaber (also the director) and Ariela Barer (who stars in it as Xochitl) extract from the book is a thin one. They're not trying to create elaborate drama. The backstories of all of the characters in the eco-defense/terrorist (feel free to pick your label) group are pretty standard; avenging a lost mother, defending the family land, the outrage of indigenous peoples, and the fury of a terminal disease most likely linked to the pollution that modern industry creates, especially among those not wealthy enough to escape direct exposure. None of these stories are new or particularly interesting, but all of them are either familiar or understandable to anyone who has bothered to pay attention for the last several decades. In fact, one thing that occurred to me halfway through the film was how much better it might be as a mini-series if one actually wanted to create characters that would sit with people, rather than just serve their purpose on the screen and disappear after a couple hours. But that wasn't really the point. The film wasn't created to leave you with lingering thoughts of Theo (Sasha Lane) and her terminal disease or Michael (Forrest Goodluck) and the drive that has led him to cut off most human contact. It was created to point out what the book's author and the film's creators are arguing is the only answer to the looming disaster before us. In that respect, spreading it out over three TV episodes would have drained it of both impact and the constant tension that the film employs to great effect. That tension is physical (the risk of handling homemade explosives) and emotional (the fear of failure, whether by being caught or blown up or simply not succeeding at the statement that they're trying to make) and mental (constantly questioning whether what they're doing is the right thing or even an effective thing) and it keeps the viewer interested by what is, again, pretty much only the framework of character and story. If it were intended to be a drama in prose, it would be a short story. Stretching that into a two-hour film is an accomplishment in and of itself.

But, despite it being entertaining, the one thing that kept nagging at the back of my brain the whole time was the essential inadequacy of blowing up one pipeline from one producer of the toxic sludge that keeps the lights on for many people. There's some justification attempted by Shawn (Marcus Scribner) about affecting oil prices and the response by Alisha (Jayme Lawson) that doing so hurts the poor people who depend on the gasoline to get to their jobs far more than it does the producers of that oil. These are all reasonable, intelligent people who know how the world works to at least some degree. There are a couple like Dwayne (Jake Weary) and Michael who are only interested in lashing out for their own reasons. But there are questions raised, mostly by Alisha, who is the only one committed to what book author Andreas Malm disdained as the environmental movement's commitment to non-violence, which he considers no longer effective or necessary. Most of these characters agree with him and, thus, the essential message of the film becomes that of the book and it's one that's hard to argue with even if, again, the global impact of a single pipeline is not likely to be large enough to generate the response that either Malm or these characters would like. The excellent tension of the film conveys that message better than any soliloquies on the injustice of the situation ever could. This is a problem now that needs to be dealt with now.

But for those concerned, like the whining National Review who referred to it as "sociopathic filmmaking", that this is an actual instructional manual, rest assured that you'll be no closer to constructing an actual IED than you would be trying to learn how to make crystal meth from Breaking Bad. My favorite part of Armond White's opinion in NR was that the film was being used to "enforce partisanship", which means that the GOP knows that they're on the wrong side of an issue and has to accuse someone of implicitly siding with the opposition rather than ever admit that. White and others like him should be the ones who are the first to burn when the situation that Chevron and companies like them have created comes crashing down, if only for turning the survival of the planet and everything inhabiting it into a political football. If by that you assume that I'm on the side of those willing to use violence to push back, you're absolutely right. The film didn't need to deliver its message to me, as I've long since internalized it. When I was running the Green party in Michigan, the most difficult part of the party's central philosophy that I had to continue to convey was non-violence, as some situations simply demand it. That's the story that I'd be telling, too.

It's all about the music, man

There's a certain gravitas that's often extended to historical films and TV series. It's often because they're depictions of actual events (or some approximation thereof) but it's also often a factor of the presentation. Most of them have elaborate sets, elaborate costumes, and are about people that carry themselves with some degree of haughtiness. You're frequently given the impression that you're watching something about Very Important People. In this respect, Chevalier is no different from any that have come before it. Indeed, given that it's about Joseph Bologne, who was a figure of fascination to the French nobility in the years just before the revolution of 1789, it almost couldn't be more self-important. The fact that Bologne is presented as supremely confident in himself and his own abilities further lends itself that room-filling presence. But the problem with a lot of them is that in their eagerness to spend money on setting and clothing, they often fall short in what I regard as the most important aspect of film (or almost any creative endeavor), which is storytelling. Chevalier, again, is no different.

Imagine yourself watching the BBCs Masterpiece Theatre. You're in the middle of I, Claudius or Bleak House and firmly in the fantasy land of the first century CE or the depredations of the 1890s. The problem is that this program is funded by the BBC, so if you were expecting some of the genuine excesses of the reign of the third emperor of Rome or how people actually lived (and mostly died) in a Dickens novel, you're going to be disappointed. There simply isn't the creative license to show things that are that up close and personal. Even worse, since they're trying to depict an historical period that many people are quite familiar with, there will be some level of restraint on what they feel they can do in the course of telling an interesting story. This is the pitfall that Chevalier entered and was unable to climb out of. We're presented with the character of Joseph Bologne, supremely talented musician, composer, and fencer within the first few minutes of the film... and that character never changes. There's basically no development whatsoever. You can say that he comes down from his cocky high of being the toast of the town to being just another supporter of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and you'd be right. But it's still the same person, post-personal shame of losing out on his most desired position in society and post-romantic tragedy of losing the one real love of his life. He is still the same Joseph and he never stops being the same Joseph. The story doesn't really carry us anywhere past the Wikipedia entry that tells you everything you need to know. The extent of the character's development could be told by suggesting that he is forced to confront his status as a Black man in the midst of racist France. But he knew that already and so did we from the first moments of the film. So, where did we go here?

Kelvin Harrison, Jr. does well in the title role, but he's restrained by a character that doesn't really allow him to be much than what he already is. It's starkly different from his much smaller role as Christian in Cyrano, who had to fully experience some range of emotion within a scene and not just express it because that scene says so. It felt like most of the characters were kind of slotted into their roles without much of a nod to really becoming something within them. Lucy Boynton demonstrates some of the conflict of Marie Antoinette as a fellow stranger-in-a-strange-land with Joseph, who then has to conform to society's general disdain for him, despite her status as queen. But Martin Csokas, formerly Guy of Guisignan in Kingdom of Heaven, is the same straightforward "bad guy who does bad things to leading lady" as he did in that film. It's a horrible thing to be typecast, but I guess it's work. In fact, the only character who seemed like she had agency within her own sphere was Nanon, Joseph's mother, played wonderfully by Ronke Adekoluejo. Whenever she was on screen, she was needling her son about his acceptance of his role in the White (and rich) man's world, but also supporting him in being who he was and wanted to be. That character felt genuine because it sounds like a genuine mother; trying to coax her son to be something more, but encouraging him to be himself, as well. That's a bit of an internal conflict, which is what made her human, whereas everyone felt like they were just playing the role of a human.

For all of its dynamic setting that, too, falls victim to the circumstance of being more encyclopedia entry than story. The film is told in a clearly American style, without any of the longer quiet shots or moodier approaches common to French films and which it really might have benefited from. It's framed, of course, by the advent of one of the most turbulent revolutions in modern history, but it takes that highly complex and varied setting and reduces it to its most basic elements that carry little of the trauma or tragedy of the situation as a whole. Indeed, the most poignant moment of the film might have been the caption at the end that mentioned that Napoleon restored slavery in the French colonies and outlawed Joseph's music, which is why so little of it is heard today, despite its obvious quality. That, of course, has to be emphasized, since Joseph's music is heard throughout the film and really does well to carry it across some of its more obviously-delivered dramatic moments. The whole time, I felt like I wanted a film that lived up to the majesty of the score that was supporting it. I wanted more story, more emotion, more character, more something that would push this from Masterpiece Theatre to a film that I wanted to see in an actual theater... which, y'know, I did so I guess I was still just wanting something that lived up to the setting? Again, like Air, I'm not meaning to trash it. It's not a bad film. It's just not what serves its very proud and talented namesake. Oh, and the concept of Mozart being offended by someone challenging him on stage is kind of ridiculous. Mozart was an inveterate showoff and being confronted by someone just like him would have only made him that much more enthusiastic. You might have gotten a better story out of just the two of them dueling with violins.

Putting on airs

I generally like biopics. I also like most of what Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have done in their careers. So when I heard that Air was being produced by their company (Artists Equity) with Damon in the lead and Affleck supporting and directing, I expected something that was fairly high quality. And, in a lot of ways, it was. It's well-written and well-acted and funny and fairly drowns itself in 80s references contemporary to its 1984 setting, much of which I still vividly remember. But... (and there's often a "but") the downside is that it's basically a hagiography of a major corporation, not a biopic. In this story, Nike is the valiant "little guy", oppressed by the economic power of behemoths Converse and Adidas. Of course, no one with any common sense believes that that's the case and Affleck as Phil Knight and Damon as Sonny Vaccaro even mention at some point that Nike is a billion-dollar corporation. Excuse me for a moment while I search for the Davidian analogy in this supposed shepherd v giant warrior tale about the basketball shoe market because it's pretty hard to find (incidentally, the biblical David was a royal armor-bearer and one of the favorites of the king, too.) So, you're saying a billion-dollar corporation is outmuscled in one aspect of the shoe market by a couple of multi-billion dollar competitors, all the while utterly dominating an even larger facet (running shoes) of the American market? My heart bleeds. And that's the essential façade that all of the clever writing and solid acting and funny moments really can't get away from.

The basic ethical premise that the film tries to push forward is that the players were getting cheated out of value by the major shoe companies, as they were essentially free marketing for said companies by playing in the NBA, and the deal that Michael Jordan struck with Nike (that he gets a percentage of every shoe with his name/image on it) was groundbreaking and turned into a bonanza for the players. When it comes to labor being delivered the value that it creates, your friendly neighborhood Marxist is all about it, even when said labor is an elite subset of individuals on the planet. They're doing a job. Their names and likenesses are being used to push a product. They deserve a piece. The situation that the film presents in 1984 is no different than what the NCAA is trying to hide from and has hidden from since the 1950s. But the film presents all of this in the context of that "little guy" triumphing over unassailable odds with just gumption and hard work, when the truth was that Nike, given its profitability, had massive resources at its disposal. If they wanted to do a triumph of the little guy story that involved Nike, they could've done one about Phil Knight building the company by selling shoes at track meets out of the trunk of his car (which is, of course, mentioned in the film because, you know, "little guy.") If they wanted to do a story about the determination and vision and principles of Sonny Vaccaro, they could've done an actual biopic about the latter's work as a scout who created the first national high school all-star game or the creation of the ABCD camp, also to showcase high school players, or his personal drive to expose the hypocrisy of the NCAA which he's been talking about for the last 40 years. You want a story of triumphing over long odds? That sounds like a much more suitable premise.

Despite its structural failings, the film isn't actively bad. As noted, it's well-written and quite funny and Damon makes the most of the material he's given. Similarly, Jason Bateman does well as marketing exec, Rob Strasser. He's also, unfortunately, given the softball of muttering about just how important it is that he hold on to his job as one of the top executives in the billion-dollar corporation so that he can continue to bring his daughter shoes on his weekend visits. It's a sappy moment that doesn't really bring much to the overall proceedings. Speaking of which, Affleck's depiction of Knight, while decent, also doesn't bring much to the stage, as his role is to basically be Damon's constant foil, only gesturing over his shoulder at the oft-mentioned "board" and how they won't be interested in throwing away money on this basketball thing. The subtle racism of decrying the sport played by mostly Black men by the company that produces shoes for mostly suburban White people is a constant. And Viola Davis is her usual competent self as Jordan's mother, Deloris, whose steely determination to not have her son taken advantage of by these massive corporations is also everpresent. That depiction of background racism comes to the fore when Sonny visits good friend, George Raveling, who tells him about how he was not only present at Martin Luther King, Jr's speech at the Lincoln Memorial ("I have a dream"), but met King and was handed one of the original copies of said speech. Of course, when that's framed against Sonny's vision of Jordan and Nike's future, such that the film essentially compares the gamble of a talent scout on a shoe deal to the most famous speech of the American civil rights movement, you begin to see how self-important the producers' opinion of their own efforts happens to be.

Speaking of which, while I thought Affleck's direction for Argo was brilliant and thought he was unfairly robbed of at least a nomination for that work, I was left with a lot more questions in that respect with this film. He seemed to have a thing for close-ups, so that when Sonny and Rob, for example, were arguing over the budget or whether Sonny was doing his job properly, we would often be resting right on one of their shoulders or so close that we could map the pores in their faces while they half-shouted at each other. If Affleck was trying to show us how intense man-to-man defense can be in the lane, well, OK, but it left me feeling like he was engaged in what he thought was a novel technique to convey the tension of the moment but it really ended up being more distracting than anything else. And it was that kind of distraction that made me feel like all of them had kind of lost the forest for the trees. Yes, it's an amusing story, but signing a big shoe deal with an NBA star doesn't quite compare to the struggle to be treated as a human being. Similarly, when the "what happened later" captions appear on the screen, they continue to try too hard on behalf of Nike by pointing out that Phil Knight has given almost $2 billion to charity. Of course, he also ran a corporation that utilized child labor for a couple decades in Southeast Asia to ensure maximum profits on all of the products that it made, including Air Jordans. It took a lot of public pressure and an assertion of rights by workers in those countries to get that to change. So, yeah, economic rights were won for star basketball players, but not for Vietnamese kids. Hooray? And during this period, Nike went from a billion-dollar corporation to a multi-billion dollar corporation, eventually buying Converse, as the similarly self-satisfied caption details at the end of the film.

So, yeah, I don't know. Again, it's not a bad film. It's just kind of shallow on many, many levels. In a way, it's a perfect encapsulation of the decade that it spares no effort to hail and lionize. Would I rush out and hand more money to a giant corporation (Amazon) in order to see it? No. But if you want a few laughs, you could do a lot worse.

All the P.A.I.N. and the anguish

I didn't realize that it had been over a month since the last time I posted here. That's a combination of factors, including having nothing to see at the Michigan Theater, seeing things again (Everything Everywhere All At Once), or seeing things that just weren't impressive enough to inspire a reflection (The Quiet Girl.) But tonight we watched something that we saw a trailer for at the theater, but ended up seeing on HBO. It was the documentary about photographer, Nan Goldin, her struggle with oxycontin addiction and the organization she created to bring attention to the Sackler family who profited from the drug and its casualties, and much more about her life: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. It was what you'd expect out of any serious documentary: informative, insightful, pertinent, but also harrowing and disturbing.

The film highlights the criminality of Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, but it also exposes the basic criminal situation of the health system in the United States, where a company nominally producing products for the care of patients, instead is motivated almost solely by profit, in true Reaganite fashion. This is brought into focus when Nan talks about her initial addiction to oxycontin, which dropped her out of the dynamic community that she'd become a part of as a creative person in the neighborhoods of south Manhattan, and into rehab. When she emerged from her treatment and tried to reconnect with that community, she said: "They were all gone." as the AIDS epidemic had ripped through the LGBTQ circles that she had been a part of and the indifference of the medical community, until there was a profit to be made, and the ignorance or contempt of the general public left so many to die. This coincides with the first story that the film begins with, which is that of Nan's sister, Barbara, who was struggling with her own sexuality and was committed to multiple mental health institutions by her parents as a consequence.

The story of Nan's (and Barbara's) life is one of an attempt to make connections. Deprived of emotional contact at home (something that also troubled her sister), Nan sought out communities that she could become a part of and which, in turn, would embrace her. This led to some extensive drug use, which is what placed her in the central quandary that gives the film its premise, but also sex work, which she had never previously spoken of, and all of the issues that come with that which are, again, often made up of an indifferent or contemptuous public and a willingness to look down upon anything that it doesn't implicitly understand or accept as "normal." Nan, in contrast, made her career by creating images of people as they are; different, alive, human, which is what Barbara was and would have remained. On a technical level, it's an interesting departure from many documentaries in that the vast majority of the footage and images are from Nan's work, as she photographed the life around her, but also filmed the protests that her organization P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) conducted to expose the Sackler family's connection to the art world, leading to many museums and galleries dissociating with the family and rejecting their money, a large portion of which they had siphoned from Perdue when the lawsuits over its products began, before it eventually declared bankruptcy. So it's not director, Laura Poitas, just filming the aftermath of the original topic, but Nan's work, in the moment, that makes up the bulk of the film.

This is a very personal film that doesn't present many jarring or urgent moments, but instead provides a two-hour look at a very long and varied life and the constant dark clouds that hovered over much of it from the point when Nan was 11 years old. It's a story of perseverance, both in the face of personal foibles and corporate ones, and it provides a fair amount of perspective from a very different standpoint from what my life has been. On the other hand, it does provide one note that neatly coincides with my experience, when Nan mentions that her parents were ill-suited to be parents, but instead had kids because "that's what you did then.", which is right in line with my own experience. It's fairly long for a documentary, but remains compelling throughout and is definitely worth the time, if only for the straightforward examination of personal trauma that she reveals and her determination to come out the other side of it.

Falling short - 2022 Animation shorts

Woof. I'm an animation fan. When I posted a tweet last week in the vein of a lot of the chains going around entitled: "10 films to get to know me" (I'll be writing more on that later), two of those ten were animated films. I read and wrote comics for years, so it's kind of a natural segue between the two media. With that in mind, I'm usually most excited to see the animated shorts when they come around every year, but this year was kind of a trial. Three of the five ranged from forgettable to outright awful; one was at least interesting and the fifth (thankfully the last) was fantastic. It basically saved what was otherwise a pretty poor outing for what we usually expect from these mini-festivals.

An Ostrich Told Me The World Is Fake And I Think I Believe It: This was the one that had an interesting premise and was at least funny in parts. It's the story of an office worker who realizes that he's trapped in an animation studio and that everything around him is less than it seems. It uses one of my favorite animation techniques, which is stop motion. I'm a diehard Ray Harryhausen fan from when I was a kid, so that labor-intensive process and the slightly jerky motion (much better with modern processing than it used to be) will always have an instinctive appeal to me. Director Lachlan Pendragon not only has a cool name but also was a student when he created this film, which makes it that much more impressive. The fact that Neil (voiced by Pendragon) breaks the fourth wall in a fairly oblique fashion by discovering the processes and the different parts that make up himself and the other puppets, rather than communicating directly with the audience, is another excellent approach. The overarching theme of modern office work being detached from the "real world" is present, but not used as a bludgeon. Why is it an ostrich that clues Neil into what's really happening? Perhaps as a metaphor for people not being willing to notice what their world is until told by the bird who willingly blinds itself according to legend? Perhaps just because it's absurd? Doesn't matter. This was a smart little piece that deserves the notice that it has gotten.

The Flying Sailor: This was an abstract reconstruction of the Halifax Explosion in 1917, centered mostly around the story of Billy Wells, who was hurled almost two kilometers by the blast but survived. While it did heed historical details, like the fact that Billy's clothes were torn from his body in the initial shockwave, it veered off from there into a perspective that Billy might have had in terms of his life flashing before his eyes and taking time to look at the stars while he was hurtling through the air. That's fine, but it doesn't leave us with a whole lot to latch onto, story-wise. It is only an eight-minute film, so I don't think it was intended to deliver anything grandiloquent, but it also didn't say enough to leave much of an impression at all. If you didn't already know that it was about Halifax, you'd come away with even less than that, so I'm a little lost as to how it got nominated in the first place.

Ice Merchants: This one delivered a bit more in that its story was completely fantastical, about a man and his son living in a house perched on a mountainside where they make ice every day and skydive to the town in the valley to sell said ice, losing their hats in the process of the dive and buying new ones every time before they return on their motorcycle winched from the ground. One wonders why they wouldn't just ride the winch to the ground so that they could keep their hats, but I suppose that would deny them the thrill of their power dive every time. It also would spoil the rather indifferent ending when the warming (of the climate? of the seasons?) of the mountainside threatens both their home and their livelihood. I suppose that metaphor about climate change is the most likely and that's all well and good in principle, but one could just as easily draw a metaphor about consumerism with the constant waste of their hats and their need to buy more. Is the awesome heat created by the furious looms down in the town, weaving new hats every day, part of what's contributing to the change that threatens to ruin their lives? That's probably spinning those threads (ahem) out a bit far, but it's that kind of speculation that's needed to really make something of this story that left the feeling it was a bit lacking and, three films in, left me feeling rather underwhelmed about the whole evening until we got to the next film...

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse: ... which was irredeemably awful. In all the years that we've been doing this, I don't think I've ever encountered a short film that I really wanted to walk out of, but there's a first time for everything. This film is dreadfully tedious. I'm all about the overall themes of empathy and kindness, but there really has to be something at least mildly dynamic about characters, story... something! Everything in this story was blasé from the opening moments of the insipid soundtrack. The animation technique was at least somewhat interesting, with the shifting pencil marks outlining the watercolors of characters and scenery, but everything else was soporific and I know it was because I caught myself starting to doze a couple times, which is never a problem in what is usually a collection of interesting perspectives (not just the animation, but all of the shorts on offer.) Tricia compared it to Winnie the Pooh, but even the stories about Pooh had a character like Tigger, who would at least provide some contrast to the fretting and timidity of Pooh, Piglet, and Eeyore. There was no such contrast here, as all of them were collegial nihilists, bemoaning their state of affairs while reassuring each other of how fond they all were of the others. At 34 minutes, this was already borderline too long for a short. Given the subject matter, it was about 33 minutes too long.

My Year of Dicks: But the evening was thankfully saved by the best film of the night, which was the last one. Pamela Ribon's story of her fifteen-year-old self trying to force her own sexual awakening was hilarious, familiar, and hugely entertaining, both visually and textually, for its entire 24 minutes. It struck a chord with the whole audience (a packed Michigan Theater screening room) because it unabashedly hit at sensations that everyone in that room had had at one time or another, whether in the role of Pamela or one of the boys that she tries to make her co-conspirator in the plot toward teenaged orgasm. The highlight, of course, was the cascade of anguish and emotion surrounding "the talk" with her father. I really appreciated the funhouse mirror approach to her feelings and expressions and everything that you remember in your own inner visualizations while having those excruciating moments with your parents. This was vastly more inclusive and understandable than the dreary Hallmark animal parade. But since it actually talks about real emotions and not fantasy ones, it will almost certainly lose the statuette to the wooden Pooh facsimiles. It's not like you can imagine anyone on stage actually voicing the title on national TV, anyway, even if they did acknowledge these film creators during the live broadcast, which they no longer do.

So, yeah, a somewhat underwhelming end to our three-day excursion. I think Live Action walked away with my personal "best of"s this time, as I'll remember The Red Suitcase and An Irish Goodbye for a long time, I think.

Crafting short stories - 2022 Live Action shorts

There's a certain art to crafting a short story. To many people, short stories are just short novels, which really isn't the case, as it often takes a different frame of mind and a whole lot of restraint to recognize that what you have isn't really novel length and is best delivered in a form that will give just enough of a story for the reader/viewer to come away with the message that you'd like to deliver (or simply the tale you'd like to tell) and not be subsumed in the world that you've created. They're glimpses; snippets; insights. The writers and directors of this year's submissions took a variety of angles toward that goal and, for the most part, produced some excellent films that embodied the concept.

Ivalu: This is a story told half in the dreamworld of intelligent ravens and memories and half in the brutal reality of a missing sibling and a dire situation at home. It's based on the graphic novel of the same name by Morten Dürr and you can tell that directors Anders Walter and Pipaluk K. Jørgenson wanted to stick to Dürr's visual style, as they create several long, focusing shots on key elements in the story: the expression on a face, the seeming intelligence in the blank eyes of a bird, and so on. This is very much a comic, panel-by-panel approach and it does a good job of sustaining a narrative without dialogue. They also decided to layer in a lot of narrative dialogue by Pipaluk, the younger sister of the namesake of the film who is desperate to find her older sibling and bring her home, half out of concern and half out of Pipaluk's own fear of the menace that exists at home. It's a solid story but, like the perhaps unneeded dialogue, I think it went too far into the reality of the situation when the implications were already plain as sunlight on a glacier from the very beginning. If the intent was to show Pipaluk's transition out of her escapist fantasy that she used to try to shield herself from what was happening, then that was accomplished. It just felt to me like they had taken an excellent indirect approach and then abandoned that in the third act to just present the problem that had caused both sisters so much anguish. It feels like the message might have been stronger without simply portraying the horrific reality. That said, it was still wonderfully shot, with great visuals of the culture and scenery in Greenland and is well worth the watch.

Night Ride (Nattrikken): This entry was an unusual story of a little person who inadvertently steals a local tram somewhere in Norway and then has to figure out how to deal with unruly passengers and their harassment of a trans person. It's a great story about the continued persecution of many among us for their size or their identity or anything that the majority deems "not normal." In some ways, this was the bluntest of presentations of the five films, since it didn't have any of the stylistic approaches of the rest but simply presented its story, including spending a fair amount of time showing Ebba (Sigrid Kandal Husjord) trying to figure out how to pilot her stolen tram. Of course, that's part and parcel of the whole story, in which she's dropped into multiple uncertain situations and has to find a way out of or through them. In that way, it paralleled "real life" moreso than the rest and didn't bother to try to reach for any deeper a moral message than what was displayed by the actions of its characters. It's the second year in a row that a little person was the star of one of the live action shorts and it's nice to see that there are continued opportunities for those who don't fit the standard billing, as it were. I wouldn't rank it as one of my favorites of this set, but it was solid.

Le pupille: In utter contrast was this film that was almost overloaded with a production design and approach that was vastly beyond any of the rest of the entries (and was by far the longest presentation, as well), including musical interludes, filming at different speeds, and attempts at absurdist humor both visual and dialogue-driven. This was the one entry where you might think that the writers needed a stronger editor because it was teetering on the edge of trying to cram a novel into a short story and not succeeding at either. We're given more detail than is really needed about the situation of these girls in a Catholic orphanage, including one getting to go to her family for the holidays while the rest are left behind, the presence of a man posing as a nun inside the orphanage while his desperate girlfriend prays for his return, and an inclusion of the chimney sweeps at said orphanage, first as background scenery and then as key figures in the conclusion. It all felt a bit disorganized and wasn't helped by my recoiling from the ardent hypocrisy of the Church and its instruments of instruction (aka nuns.) While it did have one of the most amusing scenes of the night, as the girls are forced to pose in an elaborate nativity scene while the local townsfolk come to plead for the prayers of the orphans, it all felt a bit too much and too long and, again, like it missed the point of a short story. Unfortunately, given its elaborate presentation, I have a feeling it will end up being the one to take the statuette home.

The Red Suitcase: But then we came across one of my favorites of the evening in a story about a teenaged Iranian girl in the Luxembourg airport, desperately trying to avoid the moment where she meets up with her arranged husband, a much older man who has paid her family for her. This was an excellent depiction of the most traumatic half hour of this girl's life and which she, Ariane (Nawelle Ewad), brilliantly portrays without speaking a single word throughout. All of the dialogue is from other characters asking her questions that she can't understand and her intended husband asking her father questions on the phone that he can't answer, as he's shipped his daughter off like a package to be picked up. Central to the story is her old, red suitcase that she continues to clutch at every opportunity, as it contains the elements of the life that she'd like to live and which she knows will be denied to her if she can't escape from the man that has bought her. This period of constant tension is occasionally broken by the unanswered texts from her father, at first inquisitive about her location and then increasingly frantic at her silence and unwillingness to complete the business deal that he has made. It's a story of isolation, betrayal, abominable traditions, and determination. It spotlights a brief time of crisis but tells a lifetime of meaning. This is a proper short story and, thus, a proper short film.

An Irish Goodbye: How appropriate that in a year where a darkly comic film about an Irish community is one of the favorites for Best Picture (The Banshees of Inisherin), an absurdly but also darkly funny Irish short film about two brothers dealing with the passing of their mother is in the running for its own trophy. This was easily the funniest film of the evening with Father O'Shea (Paddy Jenkins) stealing most of the scenes that he's in ("Does she feel... still warm to ye?") But Turlough (Seamus O'Hara) and Lorcan (James Martin) also have plenty of moments of their own as they try to come to terms with each other while both still grieving for their lost mum. It was especially heartening to see Martin, who has Down syndrome, essentially play it straight as someone afflicted with the same condition who, contrary to everyone else's expectations, is still fully capable of determining the direction of his own life but really wants to pursue that life alongside his older brother. This is a much bigger tale which alludes to a lot of the history that makes up the characters in front of us, but only tells us about what's happening right now. That's a smart writer, director, and editor. It's a great story with a quite predictable end, but which still ends up being very satisfying.

If there's any justice in the world, Banshees will win Best Picture and Goodbye would win Best Live Action Short but I have my doubts. I could also make a serious case for Suitcase as the best film of the night, as it embodied the art form and was gripping from beginning to end. Tomorrow night we wrap up with Animation.