Cruella: Twisted Tale For A Cynical Time

Mean is queen it would appear these days, as feminism finds itself, following hopeful and inspiring origins in the late last century, at the crossroads of right wing and cancel culture combo assaults, and endangered species irrelevance. Enter Cruella, and its movie screen as distorted mirror twisted tale for a cynical period. 

Splitting screen time are the outrageously sassy two Emma's. With Emma Stone doing split personality double duty as bottom feeder lower depths orphaned thief Estella and dark side Cruella - while obsessively bent on ruthlessly crashing her way into the designer fashion world. Though ultimately locking horns with even more ruthless Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson), who presides over the reigning London fashion house. The baroness eventually allows her entry into the business as an apprentice. Though with a suspicious eye poised to run any necessary interference on  Estella clawing her way into upstaging her.

A mix of male and female writers helmed by Craig Gillespie and that includes script by committee screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada) and Kelly Marcel (Fifty Shades Of Grey), Cruella would seem to reflect their own personal ambitions.  That is, as women like the female protagonists in Cruella, in fierce competition pitting themselves against both men and other women - in a race to the top of that professional food chain. While the actual males in this oddly sexless movie, range from eunuchs to clowns.

So with all erotic desire unconventionally absent and passion preserved solely for ambition and professional back biting, the typical Hollywood approach to human struggle on screen prevails. As always, personal and never mass movement inspired - even in this economic crisis moment, both in the movie and the real world.

Along with a warped notion of feminism that has evolved ideologically from Cruella's late 20th century setting to the present time, that women must be meaner than men in order to make it in the world. One look no further than female public figures Margaret Thatcher, 'We came, we saw, he died' giggling Hillary, Bolivia coup dictator Jeanine Anez, and rabid right wing Congresswomen Marjorie Tayler Greene along with QAnon linked Lauren Boebert today. 

In other words, move over Meryl Streep - Emma Thompson would have made the much more deliciously malevolent Thatcher.

Prairie Miller

Nomadland - More Kerouac Than Grapes Of Wrath

 Hollywood Exploits Homeless Crisis As Cross Country Great Adventure

A pandemic wet dream escapist antidote in ever worst sense of the word, Nomadland and its current breathless avalanche of critic accolades could not be further from its sobering reality. Director Chloe Zhao seems to be exploiting free spirit fantasy - somehow traveling the Trump train in that regard making US socio-economic misery great again. 

Nomadland finds Frances McDormand impersonating a homeless elderly woman who embarks on a lone journey in her van across the barren western landscape, following the death of her husband and the shutting down of that mining region - the zip code vanishing as well. At first Fern's plight plays out as disturbing and heartbreaking, a reality progressively observed as this country sinks into an economic crisis counting joblessness, hunger and homelessness everywhere.

But as Nomadland progresses, Zhao's focus digresses into increasingly unrelated side trips - namely homelessness not only as choice, but rambler euphoria. Far less a massive hard times state of hopelessness than an adventure across state lines. And a fleshing out of Fern's increasingly unlikable personality as misanthropic, a rejection of family and deep relationships with an aversion to other than fleeting human contact on the road.

Meanwhile, no need apparently to responsibly include the alarming statistics on homeless female assaults, murders and rapes. And by defining homelessness here as mental or emotional in origin, the travesty continues, not only in maligning the homeless - who may very well have psychological issues though predominantly as a result of being homeless - but in sidestepping the economic causes and solutions to their predicaments.

 And to sum up, with Nomadland essentially featuring characters hugging and kissing their poverty like a great hyper-romaticized US adventure - including intermittent cheerful gigs at Amazon warehouse pit stops along the way to earn some spare change. Wonder if Amazon allowed filming there if criticism of their worker exploitation was totally off the table.

Oh wait, Zhao's reward for buttering up the critics with this middle class pandemic virtual escape romp - she has been pegged to helm Hollywood's latest Marvel superhero spree, The Eternals.

Prairie Miller
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The Last Vermeer: Combo Classic Trickster, Cunning Subversive

 

 

** "In the colonies of yesteryear, we were the Nazis. We raped, we murdered, we took slaves - we even threw babies on to fires. And the statues of the men who led that, stand proudly in our public spaces." 

Guy Pearce is one of the most accomplished - and unheralded actors around, noted for his roles in Memento, LA Confidential and Brimstone. And now the Australian actor both astonishes and bewilders in The Last Vermeer,  inhabiting the psyche of the real life, ostentaciously evasive WWII Dutch artist and art forger Han van Meegeren. Who sold the classic painting in question to the Nazi occupiers - in exchange for art they looted from the national museums. Or did he. 

Simultaneously convicted, cursed and celebrated in his lifetime for trading classic artwork to the Nazis - while at the same time adored in Dutch popular culture by trading a forged Vermeer to them in exchange for authentic museum art they pillaged from the national museums,  the notorious figure symbolizes beyond his situation in this dramatic feature, the questionable US and European powers who today claim, or rather self-proclaim global moral authority. And continued demonizing and assault in that regard, against Third World countries they've targeted with genocide and exploitation, for centuries.

And which brings up key political questions masterfully encircling and fueling the narrative revisiting this relatively unknown figure elsewhere. Essentially, what is truth really, when it comes to victims and villains, who gets to define them whether courtrooms or the historical verdict - and all the gray areas in between.

The Last Vermeer may be the first candid, uncompromising dramatic interrogation probing what passes for truth or fabrication in the inevitably confounding aspects of human history. And swept along by the astonishing, deliriously elusive and mystifying Oscar-worthy performance of Guy Pearce - fueling a splendidly perverse, alternately shrewd and discerning vivacity to the notion of unreliable narrator, indeed. And, those eyebrows...

Prairie Miller

Wuhan Wuhan: Concern Not Cash For Care Triumphs Over The Pandemic

 

It goes without saying that documentary filmmakers with conviction step in as truth tellers where the media fear - or conspire - to tread. Such could not be more true, and timely, as a pressing and corrective screen statement than Yung Chang's Wuhan Wuhan. The Canadian director journeyed to Wuhan, the site of the first massive outbreak of the covid pandemic, to collaborate on this feature with Gong Cheng, a graduate of the People's Liberation Army Academy of Art, joining together their diverse international perspectives for this extraordinary venture.

Strikingly crafted as cinema verite, allowing the film's subjects to speak for themselves, Wuhan Wuhan proceeds into the city's pandemic stricken corridors to pursue a story with no predetermined ending - and more about crisis in progress than conclusion. Which deftly lends an element as well of dramatic suspense towards the unknown - which in hindsight has been victorious - a rare accomplishment in documentaries.

But of likewise astonishing note, is China's collective cultural contrast when it comes to health care. The sick simply walk into a hospital to receive treatment - no interrogations about acceptable insurance or paying for exorbitant procedures - which in this country leads many too fearful to seek critical help for the virus or any number of conditions, and instead hoping to get better at home but dying there instead. And with one patient casually announcing something never heard here in medical settings "I know the government cares about us."

Yet another surprising observation, is the sighting of psychologists, essential components of the medical teams making the rounds of the covid wards. And one inquiring of the patients - does anyone need therapy, maybe for anxiety or insomnia. Or just being sad. "You don't have to ask me. Everyone here needs therapy, including me."

 

Prairie Miller

Queen Of Comedy: All Joking Aside Compassionate Portrait Of Young Doomer Bloomer Comic

 

Raylene Harewood takes center stage literally and figuratively in All Joking Aside as Charlie, a glum young African American grocery clerk with standup aspirations to make people laugh, even if that's her own least accessible emotion off stage. More about fulfilling the comic dreams of her late father, Charlie inexplicably dares the reluctant washed up, once renowned standup barfly Bob (Brian Markinson) - who heckles her off the stage on her first less than impressive try - to mentor her with his shared gifts of the trade.

Equal parts satirical and sensitively crafted, All Joking Aside is a kind of contemporary updating of Shaw's Pygmalion - in this case boomer misery in collision with low wage millennial extreme dreams. That it works so well, may be a reflection of what's going down in the real world right now, as 'misery loves comedy' broken human beings struggle to mend and stay afloat in the present time. And drawing from the compelling premise that 'there are two types of people in the world - funny people and happy people.'

 

Less effective is director Shannon Kohli (Supergirl) conveying Charlie's creative transformation, opting instead for a reticent rather than raw blossoming on stage when it comes to mining race and gender comic irreverence. In other words, if the audience off screen is not as amused as the club crowd, an essential connection is missing. Also somewhat MIA is famed veteran Canadian standup performer, actor and poet Richard Lett, relegated here to an intermittent cameo as nurturing bartender in the background.

 

And likewise distracting, is a setting that claims to be New York City and a supposedly Bronx bred Charlie - but is actually blizzard drenched Canada. As with jokes that go nowhere without the element of funny, Big Apple patriots will pick up on the difference.

 

Prairie Miller

 

The True Adventures of Wolfboy: Animal Instincts Rule

 

A coming of age tale in rebellion against the grownup world, The True Adventures Of Wolfboy could have been more relevant than ever during this chaotic moment in time signaling either adult perplexity or destructive collusion concerning a broken planet the youth are inheriting from them - but it isn't. 

 

A missed opportunity for youth to traditionally try carving their own future as a better place by confronting and addressing that collapsing world in shambles politically, economically and ecologically, and with a perpetual pandemic in progress - this visually impressive, surreal fantastical outing harboring a cruel heart has all the trappings of an enticing confection, with a toxic list of ingredients attached.

The Wolfboy in question is Paul (Jaeden Martel) a glum thirteen year old bullied and ostracized as a result of a skin condition covering him head to toe in fur. Abandoned by a mother (Chloe Sevigny) unable to psychologically deal with a deformed child, and parented by helplessly frustrated single father and local garbageman Denny (Chris Messina), Paul runs away from home to find the mother he never knew. 

And stopping by to join the local circus in a bid to raise travel money, Paul is subjected by maniacal owner Mr. Silk (a wildly flamboyant John Turturro) to being caged as a freak public attraction on exhibit. Resentful when not immediately paid, Paul burns down the circus and then subsequently flees with a gun toting kid gang robbing their way across the country. 

For starters in this underage inmates taking over the asylum revelry, Paul sets fire to a carnival filled with physically deformed human beings like himself. Along with these subsequent plot ingredients counting in addition to arson - armed robbery, self-disfigurement and yet one more bad mother in those many movies. 

 

This incongruently giddy youth revenge fantasy ultimately on a journey going nowhere, seems more akin to John Carpenter's Village Of The Damned and Stephen King's Children of The Corn - and those kid takeover "beware the children" horror movies.

 

Prairie Miller

EMPEROR REVIEW

"He was a fugitive slave, who had made his escape from Charleston, South Carolina; a state from which a slave found it no easy matter to run away. But Shields Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers.

He was a man of few words, and his speech was singularly broken; but his courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character. John Brown saw at once what "stuff" Green "was made of," and Green easily believed in Brown, and promised to go with him whenever he should be ready to move. Shields Green, one of the bravest of his soldiers..."
~ Frederick Douglass

A rebel slave uprising political action thriller, Emperor is based on the life of Shields Green, African royalty kidnapped and enslaved on a Southern plantation - who escaped and fought with John Brown at Harpers Ferry. And a longtime collaboration and labor of love with producer/filmmaker Reginald Hudlin - yet another greatest story never told in the annals of all too often buried courageous black history.

Emperor stars Dayo Okeniyi as Shields Green, Harry Lennix as Frederick Douglass, James Cromwell as John Brown, and Bruce Dern as a kind of Underground Railroad solo Greek chorus tying everything together narratively and ideologically. Likewise the bold and impressive collaboration of Iranian born writer/directer Mark Amin and Black Lightning/Sons of Anarchy co-writer Pat Charles.

Emperor, though released by chance during this Black Lives Matter moment in time, could not have been more timely and evocative. Along with immensely bracing Brechtian interludes of debate included as well - confronting essential ideological questions surrounding struggle - as expressed here by the characters Frederick Douglass, Shields Green, and John Brown. And Robert E. Lee - regarding in particular the hypocrisy enshrined in the Declaration Of Independence when it comes to who exactly is created equal.

And while the film delves into the numerous insurmountable tragic circumstances that filled Green's life, Amin's interest lies primarily elsewhere. Indeed, in focusing on the ingredients of legend - the journey and the struggle - imbued in the life of any extraordinary human being. And embellishing those heroic highlights as a future offscreen blueprint and path to hope, absolved of breathlessly captivating flourishes.

And like John Brown/Green's immortalized defeat, or Che in Bolivia, a film of courage according to Amin. Focused on earnestly paying tribute to "history filled with people who knowingly went to battle and fought causes - knowing they're risking everything including their lives."

Prairie Miller

The Tobacconist: Freud, Fascism And Smokers Guide To Surviving History

Though primarily the story of one rural migrant young man's coming of age during the rise of Nazism in 1930s Vienna and Hitler's subsequent invasion of Austria, Franz (Simon Morze) and his traumatic transformation in The Tobacconist is somewhat, but should have been more substantially upstaged by a chance encounter and subsequent friendship with Sigmund Freud back then. Based on the adapted work of historical fiction by Austrian novelist Robert Seethaler, the details have yet to be sorted out as to what is factually true or poetic license of the author's imagination. But the subdued yet luminous portrayal of Freud by the late Bruno Ganz in one of his last films, should have been comparably afforded more attention as dramatic historical record.

Directed by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Leytner, the film begins with 19 year old Franz sent from the countryside by his financially struggling single mother after her lover dies, to help make ends meet by working as an apprentice for Vienna tobacco shop owner Otto - a former lover as well and a World War I veteran who has lost a leg in the war. Franz begins to pursue a friendship with the celebrated psychoanalyst Dr. Freud, who frequents the shop for his personal, ultimately deadly drug of choice, cigars. Meanwhile, Otto whose premises remain welcoming to Communists and Jews, is himself increasingly in danger of political persecution.

The relationship between the young man in search of the meaning of life during this increasingly chaotic and dangerous time, and the wise but intellectually elusive octogenarian, alternates with yet another elusive character - a flirtatious, mysterious Bohemian immigrant Anezka who sexually toys with the young man, while working nights as a scantily attired dancer at a cabaret initially mocking Hitler - then adulating him as the country falls under German occupation. Franz is desperate to learn from the older learned man about his irrepressible desire for this thankless woman, and the interpretation of his persistent related dreams bordering on nightmares - which are rendered visually in the movie with exquisitely crafted imagery.

On the other hand, Freud is more preoccupied with his own possible fate as a Jew, as those concerned about him urge his exile to London - which eventually transpires but is not depicted in the film. Nor disappointingly, is the arrest and interrogation by the Nazis of daughter Anna Freud, a distinguished historical figure in her own right, and the eventual murder of his three elderly sisters in the death camps. And as Freud appears to ponder and question the fate of his previously confident theories about human nature, under these horrifically unpredictable circumstances - yet another unfleshed out plot point seemingly crying out for dramatic development and context.

Freud would end his own life a year later in London, as an assisted suicide in the face of excruciating terminal cancer of the jaw. And though The Tobacconist deprives audiences psychologically (What would Freud say!) with its abbreviated options, moments as when the acclaimed psychoanalyst wearily succumbs to crashing on his own therapy couch out of historical exasperation - along with a final farewell to Bruno Ganz - are indelibly laced with a delicately conceived dark yet whimsical humor.

 

Prairie Miller