FILM REVIEWS:
THE BEAUTIFUL SUMMER (LA BELLA ESTATE) (Italy 2023) ***
Directed by Laura Luchett
Turin, 1938. Young Ginia has just left the countryside with her brother in search of a new life in the city. Though Turin lies in the shadow of a rising fascistic government and her brother yearns to return home, Ginia is more optimistic about the future. In a short time, she excels in her work as a seamstress at an atelier, gaining new clients with her designs and impressing her otherwise irascible employer. Restless and seeking adventure, Ginia soon finds it in a beautiful, enigmatic young woman named Amelia. Though similar in age, her new friend’s sensuality and confidence among the bohemian artists she socializes with embolden Ginia to begin modeling for the male painters in her circle. A whirlwind affair ensues, and the young seamstress finds herself swept up in this new and unfamiliar world, all the while never escaping Amelia’s spell. The young women grow closer, and Ginia makes an emotional journey toward self-discovery over the course of one beautiful, sun-dappled summer.
Making a life in the countryside is hard work. We do not belong to the big cities. These are the words spoken by Ferucci to her sister Ginia as they discuss their possible futures. She has bruised hands from overwork as a seamstress and the brother has almost given up his University studies believing that University is mainly for wealthy people. The siblings illustrate the struggle of the poorer country folk compared to their more fortunate city counterparts. The siblings argue but they care for each other.
From the stunning cinematography of the countryside that includes scenes of the lakes, rivers and woods, there is an obvious bias of the film towards life in the country as opposed to the city. Yet Ginia is seduced by the city as she grows fond of a girl that she had just met, Amelia who works as a model for painters, often using nude for them.
The same-sex relationship between Ginia and Amelia is gradual. Ginia first eyes Amelia emerging from the water of a lake after swimming, her nipples observably erect from her wet top, the appearance similar to Ursula Andress and Halle Berry as they emerged from the water in the James Bond films. They meet again at a bar and their friendship goes from there, leading to a relationship that is unacceptable at the time. Their first kiss occurs only after the one-hour mark of the film - quite a wait. In the meantime and also after, Ginia flirts with a painter. From her looks during the lovemaking, courtesy of the camerawork, one can see from her facial expressions that Ginia is quite uncomfortable while making love to a male. In one scene she says” “There is too much light.” Too bad as the male is quite good-looking.
Because of the period and the fact that the film is set in the Italian countryside, it is reminiscent of the disturbing recent Italian film FIREWORKS about two boys who find love who are eventually murdered by the villagers in disapproval - a disturbing true story. This film is one of the best I have seen this year and is now available on demand. THE BEAUTIFUL SUMMER is a fleeting, light coming-of-age story that celebrates the Italian countryside, The music and light treatment of the period piece is also reminiscent of Fellini’s AMACORD.
The Locarno Audience Award Nominee premiers via VOD and Digital and streams on SVOD (Movement Plus) on August the 9th
Trailer:
BORDERLANDS (USA 2024) ***
Directed by Eli Roth
BORDERLANDS is based on a video game.
Borderlands is an action role-playing first-person looter shooter video game franchise in a space Western science fantasy setting, created and produced by Gearbox Software and published by 2K for multiple platforms. The series consists of seven games, each with multiple downloadable content packs. The series has received critical acclaim and commercial success for its loot-driven multiplayer co-op gameplay and its sense of humour. It is one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time. so a film adaptation of the series is inevitable and arrives this week.
It is difficult to get excited with a film adaptation of a video game. But BORDERLANDS has two things going for it. Firstly, it is a highly successful, well-known and critically acclaimed video game and secondly, it is directed by Eli Roth, though the reshoots were done by Tim Miller (DEADPOOL) due to a conflicting schedule.
` Like the video game, the film’s setting takes place on the planet of Pandora, a horrid planet where law and order is absent and anarchy exists to its fullest. The planet contains a vault that contains the secret tooth Universe, which in this case is all the tech information needed to rule the Universe, in short AI. The planet has many vault hunters looking for the location of the vault and the key to opening it.
Lilith (Cate Blanchett), an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past, reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter of the universe's most powerful S.O.B., Atlas (Edgar Ramirez). Lilith forms an alliance with an unexpected team – Roland (Kevin Hart), a former elite mercenary, now desperate for redemption; Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), a feral teenage demolitionist; Krieg, Tina's musclebound, rhetorically challenged protector; Tannis, the scientist with a tenuous grip on sanity; and Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black), a persistent wiseass robot. These unlikely heroes must battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power. The fate of the universe could be in their hands but they'll be fighting for something more: each other.
Academy Award Winner Catt Blanchett lends her acting chops as the action hero in the film. She is, as usual good but do not expect any groundbreaking performances of the TAR or CAROL quality. Cate Blanchett was cast as Lilith in May 2020. Speaking of her decision to join the project, Blanchett said: "The gun-slinging stuff was so much fun. I got absorbed in that whole world. I think there also may have been a little Covid madness. An impressive cast rounds off some solid comic performances. Thank God the annoying Jack Black can only be heard and not seen. Motor-mouthed Black is actually quite good here, as in KUNGFU PANDA.
It appears that filmgoers love humour in action-packed sci-fi futuristic action movies as in the recent record-breaking DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE
BORDERLANDS which hosts $100 million to make is from Lionsgate Studios. The film opens Friday, August the 2nd.
Trailer:
CUCKOO (USA/Germany 2024) ***
Directed by Tilman Singer
Reluctantly, 17-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) leaves her American home to live with her father (Marton Csokas), who has just moved into a resort in the German Alps with his new family. Arriving at their future residence, they are greeted by Mr. König (Dan Stevens), her father's boss, who takes an inexplicable interest in Gretchen's mute half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu). Something doesn't seem right in this tranquil vacation paradise. Gretchen is plagued by strange noises and bloody visions until she discovers a shocking secret that also concerns her own family.
The film introduces audiences to a horrible event that results in what is known in science as an emaciated twin. The young step-sister is the surviving twin while in the womb of her pregnant mother. In the case of pregnancy continuation, the dead twin will progressively transform into “fetus papyraceous” due to the absorption of the soft tissues, and placental and amniotic fluids. The dead fetus will be found compressed between the amniotic sac of the survival twin and the uterine wall. A wide range of structural abnormalities have been reported in the surviving twin such as neural tube defects, optic nerve hypoplasia, hypoxic-ischemic lesions of the white matter (multicystic encephalomalacia), microcephaly (cerebral atrophy), hydranencephaly, porencephaly, hemorrhagic lesions of white matter, posthemorrhagic hydrocephalus, and bilateral renal cortical necrosis. All this is pretty scary.
At the film’s 30-minute mark, director Kruger has his audience guessing as to what the hell is going on. The female protagonist has just escaped from everyone at the resort where she is staying and working and taken off, on a whim with a French girl from Paris in a car. She has stolen all the cash from the resort’s cash register. They have a catastrophic road accident which then leaves her in the hospital. Before this 30-minute mark, Gretchen sees a mysterious woman that is as yet unexplained. She is accosted by a so-called detective to help solve a murder case. Her father has had enough of her. Alma suffers from epileptic fits. No one works at the reception of the resort after 10 pm the time weird things start to happen. If ever a film has sparked interest in the audience or created anticipation, this film is the one that excels. The question then comes as to whether the re of the film can live to the early build-up and whether all the mysteries can be explained creditably.
Unfortunately, the film starts showing cracks during the second half. Not every incident can be explained, like the toilet scene, and a few of these seem to be put there just for jump scares. The repeated jolts in time -why so many characters suffer the same demise are not explained.
Performances-wise, Hunter Schafer as the 17-year-old serves the horror feature well. British actor Dam Steves appears all weird here, sporting a German accent and trying his best to pass for German.
CUCKOO plays for horror and scare effects, coming from plot and camera techniques while paying less attention to story continuity or ending. (A similar recent horror film is LONGLEGS.)
CUCKOO is in theatres on August 9th.
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DANCE FIRST (USA/UK/Belgium/Hungary2023) ***
Directed by James Marsh
The film documents the life of Irish writer’ Samuel Beckett, from his childhood, his friendship with James Joyce until the incarceration of the latter's mentally ill daughter Lucia Joyce, his relationship with his future wife Suzanne Dumesnil, his time as a fighter for the French Resistance during the Second World War, his postwar literary rise and subsequent Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, his affair with translator Barbara Bray and his later life right until his death in 1989. Throughout the film, Beckett carries out an interior monologue
There are two ways to shoot a biopic. One is to tell the story straightforwardly, whether in chronological order or non-chronological order with the often use of flashbacks - commonly used in most biopic films. The other is a risky varied approach as in DANCE FIRST, the biopic of Irish Pulitzer Prize Winner Samuel Beckett using a style befitting to what the world has claimed as one of the best writers of the century and a literary genius. The biopic unfolds with Beckett speaking to himself as his story unfolds.
Literary genius Samuel Beckett lived a life of many parts: Parisian bon vivant, WWII Resistance fighter, Nobel Prize-winning playwright, philandering husband, and recluse. But despite all the adulation that came his way, he was a man acutely aware of his own failings. The biopic is entitled DANCE FIRST, titled after Beckett’s famous ethos Dance first, think later. The film is a sweeping account of the life of this 20th-century icon.
Samuel Barclay Beckett, who passed as recently as in December 1989, was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. His work became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream-of-consciousness repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. His most notable play is WAITING FOR GODOT written originally in French and translated also into English. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1949. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The film begins with the older Beckett (Gabriel Byrne) at the ceremony where he wins the Novel Prize and the money. He climbs up through the theatre to a cave where he meets himself and together they try to decide what to do with the cash! This chat provides the scenario for a retrospective of the man's life. As Beckett often used in his writing, a technique called ‘stream of consciousness’, this method issued in the telling of his life story in the biopic. (In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which [sic] pass through the mind" of a narrator.)
This method used in the biopic by director Marsh (MAN ON WIRE, THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING) is admirable though it does not really work in terms of dramatic impact but serves to often blur the story which the audience has to decipher. Byrne’s performance is lacklustre compared to Aikden Gillen who plays his younger counterpart.
At its best, the film captures the spirit of love and regret as well as the process of growing old but it fails to account for Beckett’s genius - what it is that literalists really like and where his genius originated from.
DANCDE FRIST does provide a comprehensive account of his life and his philandering ways.
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INSIDE THE MIND OF A DOG (USA 2024) ***
Directed by Andy Knight Mitchell
Writer’s note: I am a dog owner and a proud one at that. My puppy, a Rhodesian Ridgeback (Lucy) just turned one on August 2nd. I am thus affected by this documentary INSIDE THE MIND OF A DOG, and I am hoping to benefit from some insights.
Netflix’s new doggie documentary INSIDE THE MIND OF A DOG aims to explore the ancient and complex human-dog relationship, reveal cutting-edge research and offer at-home tips for dog owners everywhere. The doc begins by saying that most people might know the inside of the mind of a dog but modern studies have discovered more information that will benefit both the canine and the human species. Following three main characters – a brilliant, super-trained border collie; a precocious pug; and a lovable rescued mutt – the doc’s team of elite canine experts from across the globe, dive deep into our best friend’s hidden mind, to answer everyone’s biggest canine questions.
The doc is filled with fun facts that one might already know or not know. The average number of a litter is 6, the record being 24. Dogs have nose prints just as human beings have unique fingerprints. Dogs are as unique as their nose prints are, and researchers are trying to find out why. Dogs understand human gestures better than apes as shown in the finger pointing cognitive experiment. Puppies are born blind and deaf and their sight develops only after a period of three weeks. The sight of newly born puppies finding their way to the milk of their mother and feeding on her is just such an endearing sight, powerful enough to warn the heart of the most evil villain. The reason dogs are so adorable are their sad puppy eyes, the white part that can be seen that absolutely drives humans crazy. Friendliness rules. Dogs use this element to bond with humans and survive. The most popular dog breed was the golden retriever now overtaken by the French bulldog. My own dog breed was shown at the beginning of the doc as a standing tall canine Rhodesian Ridgeback, standing tall, bred originally from Africa.
The doc’s information comes from many sources including a canine research facility dedicated to understand the behaviour of dogs. Canine Companion is another started up by Charles Schultz’s Peanuts and Snoopy. The disc includes segments of the training of guide dogs.
The director of the film is Andy Knight Mitchell, a four-time Emmy Award winner, returning to direct the new documentary following the 2022 movie INSIDE THE MIND OF A CAT. It did quite well on Netflix following its release in August 2022. It was featured on Netflix's daily top 10s in over 49 countries and in the global top 10s for a single week, picking up 6.99 million hours of TV time. Andy Knight Mitchell
has worked for most distributors, including National Geographic, Disney+, Nat Geo Wild, Discovery, and Animal Planet.
INSIDE THE MIND OF A DOG, total entertaining for both dog lovers and non-dog lovers with insight and fun-filled facts, is available for streaming on Netflix this week.
Trailer:
IT ENDS WITH US (USA 2024) ***
Directed by Justin Baldoni
The new female-slanted romantic drama centering on female abuse IT ENDS WITH US is based on the romance novel of the same name, by Colleen Hoover, published by Atria Books on August 2, 2016. Based on the relationship between her mother and father, author Hoover described it as "the hardest book I've ever written.”
The IT in the title of both the book and the film refers to the abuse of the Bloom family - the abuse faced and suffered by both the mother and daughter at the hands of violent men. The meaning is only made clear at the end of the movie bringing the film to a satisfactory explained closed ending.
IT ENDS WITH US could have been titled THE ABUSE ENDS WITH US, but then the entire story would have been too pious and expected.
IT ENDS WITH US, the first Colleen Hoover novel adapted for the big screen, tells the compelling story of Lily Bloom (Blake Lively), a woman who overcomes a traumatic childhood to embark on a new life in Boston and chase a lifelong dream of opening her own flower shop business. A chance meeting with charming neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni who also directed the movie) sparks an intense connection, but as the two fall deeply in love, Lily begins to see sides of Ryle that remind her of her parents' relationship. (i.e. the violent abuse) When Lily's first love, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), suddenly reenters her life, her relationship with Ryle is upended, and Lily realizes she must learn to rely on her own strength to make an impossible choice for her future.
The film’s treatment of abuse can be looked upon in two ways. In the first, it is romanticized and accepted, as Lily accepts Ryle’s abuse of her as being acceptable only because the abuse was different from her mother’s. Ryle always has an excuse which Lily always readily accepts. Finally, however, she separates from him at the end with the words “It (the abuse) ends with us) referring to the baby born of the abuse which is Ryle’s rape). The story also offers Ryle an excuse for his violent behaviour which is attributed to the traumatic accidental killing of his younger brother when Ryle was a child.
Despite being directed by a male, the film has a strong female slant from the source material with a female author and a strong female protagonist supported by a lively performance by Blake Lively, pardon the pun. The male characters are treated as secondary and mere pawns in the story, subject to where the plot of the film leads.
The flashbacks shown of Lily’s parents’s abuse are vague and it is difficult to determine what exactly is going on, despite the scene being repeated a number of times. If this is director Baldoni’s purpose to reflect the vagueness of Lily’s own memory, then why show it a number of times? One can hardly tell too if the father was having sex with the mother or another woman or even with his daughter in the room, which makes the story confusing at that point.
Running at 130 minutes and despite being a female-slanted film and its questionable treatment of the sensitive topic, IT ENDS WITH US engages both genders with what abuse and violence can do to a relationship.
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LOLO AND THE KID (Philippines 2024) **
Directed by Benedict Mique
“Say it’s only a PAPER MOON, sailing over a cardboard sky. But it’s only make-believe if you believe in me." So go the words of the theme song of the 1973 Peter Bogdanovic hit starring real-life father and daughter Ryan O’Neal and Tatum O’Neal about a father and daughter con team that won the hearts of moviegoers everywhere and made PAPER MOON a classic hit. There are many things that can be learned from that movie, but apparently, the new Netflix Filipino film LOLO AND THE KID about a kid and grandpa con team, fails to have taken up any pointers.
The opening scene of LOLO AND THE KID introduces the protagonists of the movie, LOLO which means grandpa in Filipino and his supposedly grandson. They sit on a curb eating rice mixed with soya sauce as observed by a sympathetic couple. Gemma and Alan admit that they want to adopt the kid, making it clear that they have tried everything to have kids before, but nothing worked for them. This request throws Grandpa Lolo off, but he agrees, leaving Kid behind, who seems distraught. This is a tearjerker scene which is perhaps the film’s best moment as it is revealed later than it is one that has fooled the audience. It is revealed that this was all part of their con, and the duo leaves the house with plenty to sell and earn some money.
Unfortunately, the film falls apart right at this point. The two continue to dupe others and as the audience is already familiar with the scheme, it gets boring quickly. In PAPER MOON, the scams are different and there are other twists in the plot that make the film more intriguing with hardly a dull moment, aided by Tantum O’Neal’s fantastic performance earning her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, also making her the youngest winner in Oscar history.
In LOLO AND THE KID, however, director Mique plays at the heartstrings of the viewers instead, as many Filipino movies do, falling into cliched melodrama. But in contrast, the characters are also quick to play with the emotions of other people to earn a living.
As expected and as cliches go, things change, and Lolo realizes that Kid can’t live like this forever, so he makes a difficult decision on behalf of both of them. It is insightful to examine how PAPER MOON avoids this pitfall by ending the story before this consideration occurs.
Joel Torres who plays Lolo, the grandpa does his best in his role but is unable to save the film.
LOLO AND THE KID plays like a melodramatic pauper’s version of the Peter Bogdanovic’s classic PAPER MOON in which two family con artists set up to make a living act at the expense of sympathetic victims. It lacks originality, humour and drama making a dry and ultimately boring 90 minutes. The awful dragged-on climax aimed at tearing the heartstrings is too much to bear.
LOLO AND THE KID is a Philippines Netflix original film that opens for streaming this week. Best to rent PAPER MOON again and watch that instead.
Trailer:
SUGARCANE (USA/Canada 2024) ***
Directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie
The film begins with an advisory warning. The film is about Indian and residential schools and contains discussions on sexual violence.
SUGARCANE is the name of an Indigenous Reservation in British Columbia, Canada. The doc serves as a tribute to the resilience of Native people and their way of life. SUGARCANE is the debut feature documentary from Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, which is a cinematic portrait of a community during a moment of international reckoning.
It all began in 2021 when evidence of unmarked graves was discovered on the grounds of an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada. The doc spent time investigating and excavating a few graves. Since then and after years of silence, the forced separation, assimilation and abuse many children experienced at these segregated boarding schools was brought to light, sparking a national outcry against a system designed to destroy Indigenous communities. Services and gatherings with interviews of those attending attest to the importance of these meetings.
Canadians have been bombarded with the news of uncovered graves, and indeed many, many more have been discovered since then, and not only in the province of British Columba. The doc takes a personal look at this shameful segment of History of Canada by focusing on Julian and his family and how they had been affected by the news.
As most Canadians have already been bombarded with so much news of the unmarked graves in residential schools, there is nothing new that Canadians have not already heard of. But by looking from Julian’s family’s perspective, all the bad stuff has been made more credible and unaccepting. It makes a difference when one hears a testimony firsthand compared to the reading of what has happened in the news.
A woman tells of her Indigenous experiences. We were given all these strict rules to obey and the ones that broke them were the people in charge. She woman also testified of herself being sexually abused and when she informed the authorities, they did not believe her.
A segment of the doc is devoted to the procedure of the investigation.
Set amidst a groundbreaking investigation, SUGARCANE illuminates the heartbreak and beauty of a community breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma and finding the strength to survive.
After making its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year — where it won the U.S. Documentary Competition Directing Award — the film went on to receive the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the 2024 Filmmaker Award from the Margaret Mead Film Festival. To date, SUGARCANE has won over a dozen awards, including Best Documentary Feature Awards from Mountainfilm, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival and Sarasota Film Festival, along with Special Jury Prizes at the Seattle International Film Festival and the International Film Festival of Boston.
SUGARCANE opens in the U.S. and Canadian Theatres August 9.
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