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

Intrigo: Seductive Saboteurs Shake Up Noir With Feminist Fatales

A kind of subversive noir in a provocative genre already just that, Intrigo injects further tantalizing unconventional flavor into what may be characterized as the birth of the feminist fatale. And within the intriguing multi-layered, already by definition seductively elusive context of actors playing actors on screen.

Adapted from the work of bestseller Håkan Nesser and directed by Nasser (The Girl Who Played with Fire), Intrigo moves back and forth through time as suddenly widowed Agnes (Carla Juri) is about to lose her palatial home to her elderly deceased spouse's two adult children in no way fond of Carla - who is perceived as a gold digger. The will enables the children to sell the home, and a distraught Agnes lacks the funds to buy it from them.

Mysteriously entering this progressively sinister scenario, is Henny  (Gemma Chan), an affluent housewife who has had close emotional ties to Agnes, when they were both aspiring young actresses. However ruthless competition for a role destroyed their relationship, and while both made seductive moves at the time on Peter (Jamie Sives.) the director casting the parts, Henny later married him. 

But now apparently shackled to an unfaithful husband, Henny contemplates murdering him. Though to assure that she not end up the suspect, the seething resentful woman searches for a hired killer. Which leads to an unethusiastic to say the least former friend and subsequent foe, Agnes. But Henny eventually convinces the conflicted Agnes to agree, by offering to provide the desperate woman enough cash to keep her home.

And with both harboring long festering hostility towards Peter as well as one another, Intrigo smoulders with subdued, progressively mounting tension as an exceedingly incendiary cliffhanger that might proceed in a multitude of unanticipated directions. But the dramatic destination that ultimately transpires, shakes up conventions especially regarding notions of female fury and retaliation, even for the subversive teaser expectations of noir.

Prairie Miller

Judy & Punch: Exquisite Me-To Menu Of Anti-Patriachal Retribution

Prior to violence in movies whether terrifying or comical, or even horror on screen, there was that post-Renaissance early incarnation, Punch And Judy. And those puppetry plays for adults and children alike, intended to summon audience laughter at the sight of pummeled and battered victims - with Judy spouse Punch heralded for his brutality. And ironically, a European tradition dating back to Ancient Greece, when audience pleasure, in particular sports events, proliferated as a mechanism to substitute for war. Though hardly as effective today, when it comes to football season.
 
Set in the 17th century Welsh town of Seaside, writer/director Mirrah Foulkes' stylishly lyrical feminist fable Judy & Punch has much more on its mind to ideologically turn on its head than just the title.With both musical and socio-political surprise flourishes in the here and now popping up, Judy & Punch features a backward and brawling population of drunk when not depraved denizens. 

And, where sparse entertainment is provided at the local pub by the Punch & Judy Show. A collaborative effort of husband and wife puppeteers Mr. Punch (Damon Herriman) and Judy (Mia Wasikowska), the real brains behind the creation is Judy. While the brawn literally is her untalented other half, with egotistically frustrated, simmering tendencies by Mr. Punch, towards domestic violence.

Without delving further into the cruel and tragic events that ensue in this nevertheless invigorating and enchantingly told tale, the boldly irreverent anti-patriarchal parable critiques a me-too menu of historical atrocities that includes mass superstition, vigilante justice, the persecution and sacrifice of women as witches, domestic violence, a righteous uprising of designated ancient heretics, rebels and outcasts - and euphoric raw and real feminist flights of fantasy tying it up all nicely together. And a timely treat as well for March Women's History Month.

Prairie Miller

Radium Girls