Once on this island

La tortue rouge (The red turtle)

Crit

I'm pretty sure this must be an allegory, but I'm darned if I know of what. It's a little bit Crusoe, a little bit Ancient Mariner, then some mermaid/selkie fable, on to Eden, toss in some apocalypse, and close with a quotidian sequence on the inevitable consequences of aging as parents. Throughout it's lovely, and except for about a half-dozen times when someone says "hey!" blessedly free of dialogue.

What but design of darkness to appall?

Get Out

Crit

Golly, what a fine film--comedy, horror, and well-founded racial paranoia: who could ask for anything more? Jordan Peele, in his directorial debut, has set a high bar for himself. Apart from the chills and the laughs, he has given viewers of Girls something we've been waiting 5 seasons to see.

And like any great horror film, it has one critical element that just doesn't make sense. Double-click this paragraph only after you've seen the film. With his hands bound, how does Chris get the stuffing in his ears? He's much younger and fitter than I, but is it humanly possible to bend your upper body down that far and manipulate your bound hands enough to accomplish that task?

Trailers

• The Belko Experiment--A terror film for the Trump era.
• Girls Trip--Water sports!
• Snatched--Amy & Goldie, but I need persuasion.
• All Eyez on Me--Tupac biopac.
• Before I Fall--Groundhog Day for depressed teens.

Dark continence

A United Kingdom

Crit

It's refreshing to see black racism give white racism a run for its money, but let's face it, that's never a fair fight. This is moral medicine, vapid writing and routine direction made sometimes palatable by the actors: David Oyelowo is Seretse Khama, a man who gave up a throne (of the Bechuanaland Protectorate, forerunner of Botswana) for the woman he loved (Rosamund Pike). Unfortunately, both leads are unremittingly saintly, thus barely human, and almost all the forces of Britain are unremittingly evil, thus ditto.

Trailers

• Table 19--I promise you this was pitched as The Breakfast Club at a wedding reception.

Four hundred years

I Am Not Your Negro

Crit

"The story of the Negro in America," wrote James Baldwin, "is the story of America. It's not a pretty story." In a scant 93 minutes, from the point of view of one man, director Raoul Peck essays to tell that story, and succeeds as no one should be able to. It helps, of course, to have Baldwin's presence--on the Dick Cavett Show, for example, and addressing Cambridge students--and it helps to have Baldwin's words for so much of the rest of the film that Peck rightly credits him as the screenwriter.

The core of the film is an abandoned project of Baldwin's to write about three iconic murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. The voice delivering Baldwin's words when the author isn't speaking them for himself is a counterintuitive choice, Samuel L. Jackson, but this Sam Jackson is not Quentin Tarantino's Negro: he forgoes the pulpy bombast and dials it down to a soft tone that lets the bitterness of the message penetrate with gentle stealth and explode deep in the gut.

This is the second excellent race documentary nominated for the upcoming Oscars that I've seen (Ava DuNernay's 13th is the other), and I've been told that O.J.: Made in America may be the best of the lot. If that's so, I guess I need to find 8 hours to watch that ESPN product.

Binocular

Plumbing emergency yesterday meant piling all these up today. Thank god I've built up my stamina with all those M4s!

Oscar-nominated animated shorts

Crit

• Borrowed Time--A Western, a decades-long saga that can be inferred from the end and the beginning. John Ford would have liked to work with this story.
• Pearl--This one is also end & beginning-centric, but the middle is also filled in, for better and worse. Sentimental, but daddy-daughter sentiment, so kinda irresistible.
• Piper--Hyperrealistic Disney cute. Saw this one pre-whatever feature it was pre- (Finding Dory?), and my assessment remains the same: pleasant, nice.
• Blind Vaysha--Not blind, but double-sighted: her left eye sees only the past, her right eye only the future. Without a doubt the class of the program for me.
• Pear Cider and Cigarettes--A promising noir beginning, but ultimately overlong and one-note. And why does the graphic novelist who narrates and (OK, you're not supposed to assume stuff is autobiographical, but I am) presumably created it feel compelled to depict his own wife in classic guy-drawing tits & ass style? Kinda creepy.

Of the unnominated fillers, two stand out: The Head Vanishes, because its surrealism is similar to that of the Yoko Tawada short stories I've been reading (except that Tawada would never sell out the surrealism by giving it a clear real-world explanation, as this does), and Once upon a Line, because it's better than the majority of the nominated films, a spare, beautiful, bitter tale of love, which seems to suggest that the cure for an affair gone wrong is to get on one of those big bouncy balls.

Oscar-nominated documentary shorts, program A

Crit

• Joe's Violin--The most uplifting film in this traditionally downer category features . . . a Holocaust survivor. A Holocaust survivor of a sort I didn't know about: he and his father fled Warsaw for Russian-controlled eastern Poland and spent the next 6½ years in a Siberian labor camp. The titular violin, which he and the brother who stayed behind and survived Auschwitz bought in a displaced persons camp in 1947, he donated to a program instituted by New York Public Radio WQXR to get unused instruments to needy students. Yet another reason Trump was a bad idea. I guess this would get my vote in a strong field without a single sterling standout.
• Extremis--A brutal film about hospital personnel trying to help patients and families make end-of-life decisions. Well made and all but unwatchable (and, I'm guessing, not even "all but" for anyone facing such questions currently or recently).
• 4.1 Miles--The Lesbian movie of the shorts programs. Which is to say it's about coast guard crews based on the island of Lesbos, the titular distance from Turkey, where agents of mostly low character take money to facilitate the passage of mostly Afghans into Europe, often (or maybe mostly) on crafts not capable of making even that short passage safely.

For the other documentary nominees, click here.

Oscar-nominated live-action shorts

Crit

• Mindenki (Sing)--Adult with a win-at-any-cost philosophy faces rebellion from children who just want to have fun, but it's not about sports.
• Silent Nights--Couple meets cute when she tells him that he's the 38th applicant at the 37-bed Salvation Army shelter and he tells her to fuck herself. Things go uphill then downhill, and eventually it's a White Person Saves Dark People story, which I then realized applies also to 2 of the documentaries.
• Timecode--As is often the case in this category, nothing blew me away, but this is probably my favorite: a literal courtship dance between parking garage security guards. Talk about meeting cute.
• Ennemis intérieurs--Police state that persecutes Muslim foreigners, even if they're not really foreigners and not really all that Muslim. It's called France.
• La Femme et le TGV--If you don't know, that's Train à grande vitesse, France's (and Switzerland's, as we learn here) 300kph zoomer, what Acela wishes it could grow up to be. In this one, Elise (Jane Birkin, the day's one familiar face) and Bruno don't meet cute. That is to say, it's their not-meeting that's cute.

Hope under the rubble

Oscar-nominated documentary shorts, program B

I start a long shorts weekend in Aleppo, looking for clues why all Syrians are personae non gratae in Trump's America. I seem to lack the brainpower to figure it out.

Crit

• Watani: My Homeland--OK, well, yeah: Abu Ali is a machine-gun toting militia commander; other things being equal, I'm all for keeping machine gun toters as far away from me as possible. But he totes his machine gun for the anti-Assad, anti-Daesh (ISIS) Free Syrian Army, the closest you get to the Good Guys. And anyway, by the midway point of the film, Abu Ali has been disappeared by Daesh, leaving his wife and their 4 children--a teenage girl, a preteen boy, and 2 young girls--to flee to the welcoming arms of Angela Merkel. Now it's true that little Farah and Sara, having grown up in close proximity to Dad at work, treat their toy guns like children of a lawyer might treat their toy briefcases, and play games of Daesh vs. Infidel, but I'd still choose them as neighbors in preference to some neighbors I actually have. They are, in short, a loving family who have gone through hell and have remained a loving family. Clearly a security threat.
• The White Helmets--These guys, on the other hand, are batshit crazy: when Assad's army launches a mortar or Putin's air force drops a missile into Aleppo, they leap into their vehicles and drive at breakneck speed--TO the bomb sight. Their thing is risking their lives to save others' lives, and they're very good at it. Obviously, we'd be foolish to want people like that coming to our country. But that's OK, because they're far too busy trying to save their own land to have any interest in ours.

For the other documentary nominees, click here.

Gloria mundi

Paterson

Crit

Ah, a week in Jarmuschland-on-Passaic Falls, with a New Jersey bus driver/poet (Adam Driver), his artist/baker/country singer/dreamer Iranian wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), and their troublemaking English bulldog Marvin (Nellie).

A poetic film about poetry and love and love poetry and the geography on which life happens. Even when catastrophe occurs, it occurs quietly, and with a smirk. This is the last 2016 film I expected to love, and I did.

Attention must be paid

Forushande (The salesman)

Crit

Emad (Shahab Hosseini) is a good man, but of course: he's a high school English teacher and an amateur actor. Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), his wife, is a good woman and his costar in a community production of the Arthur Miller play from which the film's title is drawn.

When Rana suffers a violation that is not explicit but is traumatizing, Emad is driven to find the perpetrator. When he does, the law of unexpected consequences takes over. Asghar Farhadi has made another harrowing film, of crime and punishment and pity and more punishment.

Trailers

• The Lovers--A great cast could save this, but I doubt it.
• Tulip Fever--See above.