Dream Horse

 

Welsh director Euros Lyn has composed a triumphant love letter to his homeland in Dream Horse, the true story of a group of Welsh villagers who pool their meager funds to breed and train a thoroughbred that goes on to win big at the races. Toni Collette, who is Aussie, and Damian Lewis, a Londoner, lead the wildly engaging cast of characters, many of the actors are Welsh, who buy into the daft scheme by Jan Vokes (Collette) and stifled tax adviser Howard Davies (Lewis) and by doing so revitalize themselves and their bedraggled town. Collette is winning as always as the spirited wife / daughter/ store clerk who dares to see more in life than the predictability of her marriage and her job by looking into the eyes of fiercely competitive steed named Dream Alliance. Yes, the story arc is familiar but the execution is sure and delightful..

A Quiet Place Part II

 

Actor/director John Krasinski borrows from James Cameron's oeuvre of crisis cinema to build on the dreadful foundation he laid in the superb A Quiet Place (2018). Part Two begins where One ended, forcing audiences to overlook some obvious growth in the children, who are the stars of this chapter. Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe as sister Regan, who is deaf, and brother Marcus, who is traumatized, do heavy lifting in their parallel subplots. She strikes out to investigate a broadcasted message that may be a signal to safety as he recovers from a disastrous injury and tends to his infant brother while mother Evelyn (Emily Blunt) is away gathering supplies. The compounded calamities as the Abbots try to avoid the voracious aliens hunting humankind by sound for sport recall Cameron's deftness in building suspense as troubles come cascading down around the players. The final standoff between the Abbott sibs and the toothy invaders is a true nail-biter.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)

 

Fifty years ago, Melvin Van Peebles dropped an incendiary cinematic bomb with the release of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, a film that is often misclassified as blaxploitation. Blaxploitation is the label given to '70s films with Black themes that were created by white filmmakers, targeting Black audiences. Sweet Sweetback was an independent satirical protest film, funded and directed by a Black man, that has relevance two generations after its initial release.

The film was written and directed by Van Peebles, whose earlier film Watermelon Man (1970) was trashed by The New York Times as a messy, unfunny waste of his talent. Sweet Sweetback is a disjointed and uneven tale of political pandering, police corruption, community disintegration, religious fraud, false arrests, narrow escapes, violent retaliation and sex. Van Peebles is the title character, a man raised and exploited by prostitutes, who finds himself friendless after he is targeted by police needing an arrest after the murder of a Black man. Van Peebles's character spends most of the film running from the police.

Sweet Sweetback was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry last year, and, to my mind, is more important for what it says than how it says it. It is not a model of great filmmaking, but, in many other ways it is a great film to see and discuss, to wrestle with Van Peeble's sardonic vision and dark defiance and the picture's warning that those wronged will eventually return to "collect some dues."

The Black Network (1936)

A recent discovery, The Black Network (1936), is a fascinating cinematic curio, a short film set in a Harlem radio studio and its environs during the Depression. The film's headliners were Nina Mae McKinney (the Dusky Little Diamond Lil of Lancaster, South Carolina) and youthful Nicholas Brothers, in what may have been their first screen appearance as characters and not just specialty dancers. The story is slight and silly and some of the mugging and line delivery is cringe-inducing but I think the 20-minute picture, link below, is a valuable historical and cultural artifact. It was directed by the prolific creator of light film fare Roy Mack.

Wrath of Man

 

Guy Ritchie's latest collab with Jason Statham's "great stone face" adds to the Brits' bulging filmography of bruising, bromosexual caper films that feature an array of thuggish fiends, pulling heists and triggers. Because Ritchie has mastered this turf as well as any has (or perhaps should), the narrative is spiced up with a serpentine timeline and a murky internecine element that isn't fully explained or explored. Still, fan kids don't love Guy or Jason for their minds and will undoubtedly love this quippy, hi-NRG tribute to the evils of greed and the joys of red-meat revenge.

The Staggering Girl

 

"Once the world was deliberate, and now there's randomness, and no one seems to mind." ~ Bruno (Kyle MacLachlan), The Staggering Girl (2019)

Julianne Moore won an Oscar for playing a middle-aged linguistics professor struggling with early-onset Alzheimer's in Still Alice (2014). A personal favorite of mine whose on-screen breakdowns are like emotional hurricanes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-A-L9LmQmU), Moore later starred in the puzzling, impressionistic short film The Staggering Girl by auteur director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name). In it, Moore plays Francesca, a blocked writer who returns to Italy to collect her blind, aged but still willful mother Sophia (Martha Keller) -- an artist of some renown -- and bring her back to New York.

The film runs a bit over 30 minutes and is a whirlygig of Francesca's fragmented memories of her childhood -- she's supposedly working on a memoir. The pieces are ghostly and elusive. And, on reflection, that's all probably intentional.

It is beautifully shot by Guadagnino's frequent cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Suspira, Call Me By Your Name) and contains many striking tableaux and portraits. All of the women are draped in Valentino's capacious gowns and cloaks because the film was created with the help of the designer's production director. Its stunning interiors and Italianate architecture lend the movie the feel of a fashion shoot.

The quote from Bruno about the world's abandonment of order was descriptive of Sophia's latest art work -- scrawls and slashes of paint on canvas -- but it also describes this picture -- a movie that is about sense and not substance.

The Truman Show, Redux

 

I found a lot of truth in Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), an allegorical film whose premise is the ubiquity of fabrication.

When Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) hit the wall during his escape attempt at the end of the picture, many viewers no doubt felt the impact, watching him mount the stairs to see the world as he had never seen it -- as it really was. What a moment!

Non-cinematic epiphanies aren't nearly as grand as Truman's but they can be earth-shaking. Discovering a lying friend or cheating companion or one's own petty cruelty can be upsetting and call for action.

It's not always a total surprise, right? As with Truman, sometimes we've seen the cracks, the inconsistencies, the wires, and eventually pull all of the threads together and ... voila! Ed Harris has been calling the shots.

If we're lucky, discovering manipulation, deceit, disappointment will not destroy us; it will lead to better things -- a loyal friend, respectful companion ... maybe talk therapy.

But perhaps THE most significant pull from Weir's weird world was Truman's discovery that only a fake universe is all about us. And who wants that?