The Northman

6/21/2023

Just the sheer quantity of grunting and screaming in this movie is enough to spike my blood with a level of testosterone that I didn’t think I possessed. I’m thinking about playing the score next time I clean the house to turn the chore into a battle in my mind.

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Past Lives

6/12/2023

I’m split on the opening in medias res shot: we see the three main characters in a crucial moment, and we hear voices speculating on the question, “Who are they to each other?” I like the concept of the scene because I’ve played this game when people-watching in public spaces. On the other hand, the movie telegraphs itself, and I spent the first part of the movie impatient to get to the part which I knew was coming. But once it gets there… wow. It’s a masterclass of emotional tension, reminiscent of Moonlight’s diner scene.

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Jiro Dreams of Sushi

6/2/2023

Jiro’s son Yoshikazu talks about wanting to be a race-car driver before bowing to the pressure of family expectations and joining his father as a sushi chef. By all accounts, we are all glad that he didn’t follow his dreams, as he’s considered to be among the best sushi chefs in the world. Would he have been the best race-car driver in the world, because he has the ability to become the best at anything he does? Or could he only become the best at sushi, because that’s the ability he was “assigned” at birth? Does everyone only get one thing that they can be the best at? What if the thing that you’re assigned doesn’t match your life circumstances? What if the person who would become the best sushi chef is born in the middle of the desert where there are no fish?

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Does anyone really think that profiting off landmines and hand grenades is not immoral? Because the anti-capitalist messaging in Triangle of Sadness can be so unsubtle, it had a “preaching to the choir” vibe for me. But I enjoyed the comedic absurdity that permeates the film, especially the gross-out “Captain’s Dinner” scene. Special shout-out to Charlbi Dean’s magnetic performance. RIP.

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Rebuild of Evangelion

5/22/2023

I got into the original Neon Genesis Evangelion series sometime in the mid-2000’s. Always been a fan of the creative creature designs and gory action, but never really got what was happening from a story perspective. When the Rebuild series started in the early 2010’s, promising a more accessible and clearer story, I watched the first film and decided to wait for the rest before bingeing them together. A decade later, the series is complete and I finally revisited this world.

It kind of felt like one step forward, two steps back for me: while this version does explain some plot elements earlier, it also adds so many new ideas that the net result is just as confusing as the original series. I’m also not a huge fan of the CG “2.5-D” animation style, especially in the latter two movies, which just looked like a fluid simulation exercise at times.

Overall, I think it’s skippable… better to just rewatch the original series.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

5/8/2023

I’ve always preferred the more “mainstream” parts of the MCU over the offbeat energy of the Guardians series. This third one is my favourite of the trilogy. Rocket’s backstory is effectively dark and tragic, and especially hard to watch if you’re an animal lover, like me.

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The Truffle Hunters is a documentary film about a bunch of old dudes in Italy who work with dogs to find truffles¹ buried in the ground, deep inside forests. As a dog lover, I envy the working relationship that these people have with their dogs. My dog is great, but she’s never going to help me write any Javascript.

The film is visually gorgeous, made up mostly of static shots that are perfectly composed, lit and colour-graded. One shot that springs to mind is of a married couple sitting behind a stack of tomatoes, washing them one by one. Every unblemished tomato is a deep, rich shade of red.

While it looks great, the impeccable style makes me question the authenticity of some of the more emotional scenes. I couldn’t help but imagine the filmmakers meticulously setting up the camera and the subjects, and waiting for the perfect sun, and then saying “action” to what is supposed to be a genuine outpouring of emotion. For example, there’s one scene involving a distraught and crying truffle hunter, telling a police officer that one of his dogs has been poisoned by ruthless corporate truffle hunters trying to encroach on his territory. I felt bad for him, but still, I had to ask myself, Is he acting here?

Which brings us to the dark side of the film: because truffles are so rare and valuable, greed and competition have entered into the truffle hunters’ lives. I’ve always had a distaste for “foodie” culture because of the accompanying snobbishness, and this film pushed those buttons for sure. The Truffle Hunters depicts the middlemen and consumers of the truffles as shady characters. They haggle for low prices with the hunters in nighttime back-alley meetings, before turning around and selling to restaurants for a huge profit margin. They berate hunters for leaving a little bit of dirt on the goods. They demand attention from journalists and photographers by holding truffle exhibitions. And worst of all, they are seemingly involved in the intentional harm of innocent animals.

The cost of elevating food to a status symbol is that honest and hard-working people (and their beloved pets) are exploited and hurt.

Men at Lunch & The Central Park Five

By coincidence, I saw these two New York-centric documentaries back-to-back.

The former is about the famous 1930’s photograph of the construction workers sitting on a steel beam, casually having lunch despite the dangerous position that they’re in. The latter deals with a criminal case in the 1980’s where five teenage boys were wrongly convicted for the sexual assault of a jogger in Central Park.

Both of them portray New York as a place where many cultures come together, and sometimes clash, but I thought The Central Park Five did a better job of it. The five subjects are all very well-spoken, and through their interviews, you come to understand the racial tension that existed in New York at the time. By the end of the film, it’s a real relief that they were exonerated, but at the same time, you still feel angry and sad that they wasted so many years in prison.

Men at Lunch, on the other hand, does not have the same narrative strength. Essentially, it tries to tell the story of who those men on the beam were, but since nobody knows their identities for sure, it settles for making them into symbols of the many Irish immigrants who worked in construction at the time. That’s fine, but the film gets a little repetitive, and keeps telling us how brave they were, how hard life was during the Depression, how the construction workers shaped New York as a city, &c. I found it especially awkward when they tried to draw a connection between those men, and the men who are working now to build the new World Trade Centre tower. The 9/11 scenes seemed a bit out of place and exploitative to me.

Rating:

Men at Lunch: 5/10

The Central Park Five: 7/10

Thale

Towards the end of the festival, I get a little tired. I might have enjoyed this one more if I saw it earlier in the week. I realize that it’s a low-budget movie, and I respect what they did technically. Thale has some cool horror moments and some cool action moments, but maybe that’s the problem: it doesn’t feel like either a horror film or an action film. I couldn’t really get into the story because I didn’t know what the characters were after. But again, I was pretty tired.

Rating: 5/10

Tai Chi 0

This, on the other hand, was a much more suitable pace for a weary festival-goer. It’s basically a Chinese kung-fu film, mixed with the style of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (e.g., whenever someone does a kung-fu move, the name of the move is shown in stylized text on the screen), with some steampunk thrown in. Cartoonish action at its finest. It’s the first film in a 2-part series, so structurally, it’s a bit off: what you think will be the final battle is actually just setup for the sequel, which makes the previous battle the actual final battle, and a little unsatisfying.

Rating: 7/10