Winter doldrums FILM JOURNAL Jan.-Feb. 2019

[Chris Knipp]

ON THE BASIS OF SEX (Mimi Leder 2018) My friend chose to call this "quite terrible," but I would reserve that epithet for really awful films, not ones about the good deeds of good people like the wonderful Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the greatest legal champion of gender equality of her generation and one of only three women so far to serve on the US Supreme Court. It brightened my week and, like the summer-released documentary RBG (Julie Cohen, Betsy West 2018) (SFIFF), but focused only on a key early pleading in the US Court of Appeals of Denver by Ruth with her husband Martin, the film chronicles the exemplary work of a diminutive giant of American law. Watched at Hilltop Century 12 Jan. 2019. Metascore 60. Okay, not a great movie, but it can be an inspiring one and is welcome in this gray season.

[oscar jubis]

This thread is a great idea. Your posts are informative and insightful. I enjoyed reading them. I liked to read about how you sometimes have a connection to a film because of your personal history, as an artist for example, and how a movie fits into your expectations. You also have a very sophisticated sense of where a movie fits within the wide range of film production nowadays and a sense about its intended audience. Lots of titles to keep in mind for the future, but having re-visited 45 Years two nights ago, it's Haigh's Lean On Pete I crave most.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks, Oscar. I hope Lean on Pete resonates with you. It was a much anticipated film for me and I was not disappointed. As long as one is catching up on some of the previous year's best, there are no Winter Doldrums.

[Chris Knipp]

STAN & OLLIE (Jon S. Baird 2018).

The makeup and costumes, period mise-en-scene and impersonations are dmirable, and the two leads do their level best to disappear into their parts. But this stage tour of England and Ireland when the pair were in their early sixties and the overweight Babe (Oliver Hardy) had a failing heart seems most of the way like a very bad idea. It's touching at the end, this movie about the Thirties and Forties movie comedy team of Laurel and Hardy (ably played by Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly, respectively) trying to go on performing past their prime and box office viability, in 1953. But otherwise it just seems a huge error of judgment. Do we want to see this downbeat situation played out? The action for the most part is merely dreary, with old hostilities between the two periodically dredged up to create conflict.

Of course sad clowns could make a great movie. Look at La Strada. But that had Giulietta Messina, and the director was Fellini. This loving but misguided movie wound up not pulling me out of the Winter Doldrums but making them worse - just as Can You Ever Forgive Me? did. Those who have described a "gentle," "sweet," "genial" picture featuring some of both actors' best work ever, saw a movie I failed to perceive. (Good work, maybe, but in a lost cause.) Maybe you will see it.

Or maybe - your enjoyment is not guaranteed because times and tastes have greatly changed - what you should watch instead of Stan and Ollie are some of the real Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy films - which I remember enjoying when I was very young at Saturday morning children's time at the movies with my grandmother. Later I came to prefer the meaner and edgier W.C. Fields, whose comedy is faster paced. Stan and Ollie's limited US release was 28 Dec. 2018; it releases wide today, 18 Jan. 2019. (Watched on an online preview screener.)

Stan & Ollie, 97 mins., debuted Oct. 2018 at BFI London Film Festival; also AFI and Gothenburg. Metascore 75.


STEVE COOGAN AND JOHN C. REILLY IN STAN & OLLIE

[Chris Knipp]

COLD WAR (Pawel Pawlikowski). Remember I said if you're catching up on the best of last year, there are no Winter Drums of film for you in this season after all? Today I rewatched Pawlikowski's Cold War again in a cinema, the local Landmark Albany Twin. It an unmistakable, distinctive tonic, because it's in black and white and academy aspect ratio, and on top of that, very striking cinematography. It's perfect filmmaking, perfect everything. If it has any flaw it might be that it's too perfect.. The concision of the scenes! The energetic, rhythmic way they're paced! The editing, in other words! And that star, that muse, Joanna Kulig! She is infinite and awesome. See this film, and tell your friends about it!

[Chris Knipp]

GLASS (M. Night Shyamalan 2019).

Raise your hand if you're tired of James McAvoy impersonating dangerous weirdos with multiple-personality disorder. (He did the same one in Spilt three years ago.) Bruce Willis is here too, on heavy valium, and Samuel L. Jackson. It's Philadelphia, and the town is besieged by nutters with a new complex: they think they're superheros. The idea sounds topical and is one somebody could have had fun with, but not M. Night. The India-born, PA raised filmmaker came on the scene as a brilliant new talent in the late Nineties and early 2000's. But though he's still got some of the same actors, the thrill is long gone. Lots of crisscrosses of characters, actors and storylines for fans and Shyamalanerds - this concludes a trilogy with the 2000Unbreakable and 2016 Split. But I see dead storylines. I see dead characters. I see drab, repetitive mise-en-scene. This is what I mean by Winter Doldrums - the really drab disappointing kind. Release date 18 Jan. Watched at AMC Bay Street 22 Jan. 2019. Metascore 42. Spoiler: get an explanation of the film and its ending
(which the writer acknowledges are "absurd, if not damned silly") HERE.

[Chris Knipp]

SF Indiefest



My first year of covering this local festival. See the Festival Coverage section to read the full reviews, where there are any.

SF Indiefest films depart from the commercial sometimes in very cool ways, holding the Winter Movie Doldrums at bay effectively for a while. I was moved by The Area, made over several years by a sociologist doctoral candidate, David Shalliol, who's also a fine still photographer. It's a Chicago documentary about a poor black neighborhood uprooted to make space for railway sidings. Stuart Swezey's Desolation Center is another documentary, about punk field trips to the desert in the early Eighties that is a study in ultra-cool. These were events so unique and edgy they make Burning Man look like Disneyland, and Swezey, the organizer at the time, provides stunning archival footage.

Callum Crawford's Degenerates is a little improvisational comedy thriller about a young screenwriter whose ultra-lowkeyed mood has an English charm. Others have been less successful. Centerline (Takumi Shimumkai), the Japanese futuristic film about a time when the computer brain of a self-driving car is taken to court for manslaughter, is a cool idea, but I got lost in the details of the case. Paul Osborne's Cruel Hearts (2018) is a tricky neo-noir with a tacky ingenuity about it, pretty forgettable, though. I couldn't stand Sarah Pirozek's feminist horror flick, #Like . If I follow my self-imposed plan, I'm not even half way through my coverage.