We Shall Not Be Moved - Sedentary Cinema At The Oscars

 We Shall Not Be Moved - Sedentary Cinema At The Oscars

Don't expect the usual demeaning caricatures sidelining female elders in this deplorable Mexican international Oscar entry this year, when not monsters on the menu of horror fare. In fact far worse, at least when it comes to that other usual 'out of context cinema' bypassing history in progress all around it.

For starters, the misleading title, whether intentional or not - an insult to the historic US Civil Rights Movement anthem. In other words, in a case of detrimental double meaning, dismissing both popular struggle and the honoring of those who sacrificed enabling those causes as a kind of psychological impairment - embracing collective sedentary amnesia as the path forward instead.

Symbolizing and central to this drama's cynical historical hypothesis, is Socorro (Luisa Huertas), a seemingly senile alcoholic, chain smoking Mexican lawyer. The bitter, bedraggled Socorro is portrayed as psychotically obsessed with finding and murdering the unindicted officer who tortured to death her brother nearly six decades ago during the 1968 student uprising culminating in the Tlatelolco Massacre. And though her family is dismissive of what is portrayed as a toxic mix of geriatric fantasy and dementia, Socorro proceeds on her determined mission. This while soliciting the assistance of local hitmen, when not staging a homicidal dress rehearsal murdering a neighbor's cat. And the rest is history - or rather, not.

Much more a reflection of perhaps pessimistic and derisive younger generations today, the film sets itself squarely, when it comes to the real world all around them, a flinching Mexico bowing beneath the bullying, increasingly imposing threats of the US that began with renaming the Gulf Of Mexico. And which has progressed to internal signaling of that potential invasion of the country, under the pretext of wiping out their neighbor's domestic criminal activity - along with the simultaneous encroaching US occupation of the entire Caribbean with their massive military fleet, and engaged in assassinating alleged fishing boat suspects in the surrounding waters. 

Thus signaling a not unrelated allegory of a film promoting historical passivity and amnesia as the cure, culminating in a cynically rehabilitated Socorro ultimately breaking with the past in creating a funeral pyre out of a symbolic photo of both criminal perpetrators and victims. And likely palatable simultaneously to US movie audiences - that is, the Oscars...

Prairie Miller

 LILLY

"Diving into the glut of superhero-saturated cinema, a workplace feminist slips in...

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Alice: Critical Race Theory On Steroids

 

 This time travel, back to the future critical race theory on steroids rebel road movie shakes up that classic looking glass, with sixties uprising blaxploitation fury -  while exhuming the buried history of slavery in this relentlessly self-congratulatory country. And the best action hero so far this year. In other words, Right On.

 As Keke Palmer in a phenomenal portrayal of the designated ultimately rebel slave, traverses centuries back and forth in an uncharted but enlightening quest. And to figure it all out on the way to correcting on her terms, the shameful, unrecognized and unresolved history of slavery and racist  brutality in America.

 And while executive producer Common has not only assembled a hypnotic soundtrack composed along with Patrick Warren, Karrien Riggins, Isaiah Sharkey and Burniss Travis - but steps side and concedes to a female co-star as the main attraction for a change. Along with portraying as a Georgia trucker and flawed guiding light for Alice through the seventies political racial turmoil, again rare on screen, a mutually evolving platonic relationship. Basically Common - just keeps on truckin'.

 

African American director Krystin Ver Linden displays a deep dive youthful vigor and energy taking narratively brave chances on multiple time travel excursions - ultimately connecting slave horrors back then to working class oppression today. And seemingly following her own delivered manifesto instructing in the film herself: 'Doing the right thing is never wrong.'

 

While as valiant postscript, Alice is 'Dedicated to the African Americans who remained enslaved during the Twentieth Century, and to those who remain oppressed world-wide."

 

Prairie Miller

 

 

 

The Unforgivable: Sandra Bullock Surviving Brutal System - And Cop-out Story

 

                         Bullock Goes Full Mao In The Movie              

 

...In the US with its shameful history as the most mass incarcerated country in the world, just hand the Oscar to Bullock for her ex-con's defiant, devastating performance...

Though The Unforgivable may disappoint the mostly male movie critics out there for Sandra Bullock bypassing the usual flirty, sexually degrading roles women are subjected to on screen, her raw and real, stinging performance as a socially and emotionally battered ex-con resonates as a metaphorically take no prisoners performance. This, despite the fact that Bullock and Nora Fingscheidt, a director fiercely committed to her craft, seem to both be struggling against a metaphorically cop-out script that first challenges then cowardly concedes to the cruelty of the existing system.

Bullock commands the proceedings as Ruth, a Seattle woman just released from prison after twenty years behind bars for killing a cop. What led to the incident, was the eviction being staged against Ruth and her young sister Katy, who finding themselves without parents, can no longer pay for the expenses to keep the home. When the sheriff breaks down the door, he is blown away and Katy vanishes into the adoption system. 

And upon Ruth's release, she struggles as both an emotionally broken but fiercely determined woman, to locate her sister - while enduring post-incarceration life as a cop killer pariah just trying to endure and find work. And in remarkable scenes where the dead end brutality of working class existence, whether a slum hotel or fish factory, intertwine with her own. And in no small part signaling the skills of the director, gifted with a keen sense of Italian neo-realism and her own roots in the social realism of the GDR where she was born, in crafting this doomed landscape.

But where the script takes a cowardly detour, is in blinding the reality of the here and now - the mass evictions in a declining economic system, and Seattle as one of the western epicenters revolting against police brutality, poverty and political repression. And if the screenwriters had actually had the courage of conviction to be in tune to what's going down in the real world today rather than opting for the increasingly anachronistic family values Hollywood happy ending, Bullock going full Mao in The Unforgivable would have signified a far more complex dramatic mission than just reuniting a family.

 

Prairie Miller

The Manor: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Or Maybe Not

 

Barbara Hershey turns up in The Manor somewhat as feisty and subversive as her youthful persona in Boxcar Bertha nearly a century ago - a seventy year old reluctantly confined by her family to the nursing home in question, following a mild stroke. Increasingly convinced that there's something sinister going on way beyond just over-medicating the residents to shut them up and keep them docile and compliant, the instinctive rebel in Judith is on the case. Or is she? 

 And that's where this chilling forensic elder care home scrutiny, dubbed here as 'death row' takes a sudden, unpredictable turn into a different sort of horror spree - touching on life under capitalism. And that masterful storyteller, writer/director Axelle Carolyn who originally hails from Brussels, would appear to infuse this gothically shrouded narrative with a lot more than European cinematic sensibility. Say, the increasingly dark descent of US society into economic and psychological decline and desperation.

 

As for Judith's rebel instincts in a confrontation with her fascist leaning, progressively freaky surroundings - though Barbara Hershey in this instance is ultimately no Jack Nicholson, there seems to be a refreshing trend in movies lately, of elderly female action heroes. Last year, for instance, Dianne Wiest stood up as a defiant victim of retirement home physical and emotional abuse along with financial exploitation, in 'I Care A Lot' - while Cicely Tyson, who just passed away earlier this year, risks her life as spunky whistleblower in her nineties, exposing a criminal enterprise holding the elderly hostage tied up in a basement for their monthly social security checks, in Tyler Perry's A Fall From Grace. 

 

And getting back to The Manor, though some reactions may range from bewilderment to disappointment regarding Judith's ultimate behavior - and without giving too much away - let's just say that under capitalism, it's inevitably a given that enriching oneself is to the expendable, comparable detriment of others in US society. And which may be said to lend significant, ironically realistic if brutal existential weight, to this otherwise fantasy horror tale.

 

Prairie Miller

 

Karen: The Karens Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks

 

Karen- Who Is She, What Is She Up To, And Why. So what compelled African American filmmaker Coke Daniels to make this movie on the Karen racist phenomenon - starring Orange Is The New Black's Taryn Manning as the Karen in question, and civil rights George Floyd family attorney Ben Crump turning up on screen too. 

Though a Karen movie is long overdue, it's by no means a recent ugly phenomenon - and really as old as this country itself. Whether precipitating the countless slave and Jim Crow lynchings or some of the most glaring reported cases of Emmett Till and the Tulsa Massacre with connections to the particular phenomenon of white female racism, it's about time to say the least. And though critics out there are not at all happy with this particular Atlanta Karen created by Daniels, their motivations may be either bossy backseat driver tendencies to have not made a movie their way - or methinks the Karens doth protest too much. 

Or perhaps it's considered a violation of the unspoken demand when it comes to placating liberal guilt at the movies, that an emotional rather than political catharsis is required for a stamp of approval on any film about what is always the controversial topic of racism. So were they dismayed at not encountering to their liking a documentary or a weepie instead. Though admittedly, that fast forward happy ending seemed in too much of a rush to cut narrative corners. 

In any case, props to Daniels, in reviving the subversive, irreverent blaxploitation genre - while continuing the emerging Black Renaissance in film to make movies their way, in its challenge to that entrenched cultural apartheid in Hollywood and beyond. Not to mention the reference in the movie to the covert blue brotherhood of cops because yes, the police force in this country originated in plantation slave patrols to hunt down runaway slaves.

Said Daniels in my conversation with the filmmaker: "My film is for other communities to just feel, you know, the pain and anguish of what black people go through in this country on a regular basis. And this is just putting a band aid on a bullet wound. But I would just hope that showing my film in this light will maybe put the mirror to some of the Karen types of behavior in people's faces, to say hey - this is ugly what we do..." 

Oh, and by the way, regarding one critic mocking the inclusion of 'a wailing trumpeter for some reason' - hey, a little research never hurt any review. That 'wailing trumpeter for some reason' happens to be renowned Grammy Award winning jazz musician Keyon Harrold Sr., a victim along with his young son of Soho Karen in NYC, and who likewise similarly performed in a protest gathering following that horrendous incident. 

Prairie Miller

Mama Weed: Shopping As The New Female Weapon Of Choice Scene Of The Crime Scenario

Mama Weed: Shopping As The New Female Insurrection Scene Of The Crime On Screen

 Huppert's 'arresting' charisma rules in this daring Economic Crisis Cinema gem. Flaunting a subversive female-centric literally undercover fashion statement superhero shopping spree, as the new weapon of choice scene of the crime scenario on screen.

Originally titled The Godmother and adapted from the Hannelore Cayre novel of the same name, Mama Weed excels irreverently as a daring Isabelle Huppert astonishes and delights with a take no prisoners takeover in this feminist comic noir with a raw rebel heart. Huppert as Patience Portefeux is anything but, a financially struggling older woman - a mother, widow and low wage worker as an Arabic wiretapping translator for an undercover narco squad at a Paris precinct. And with her knowledge of the language owing to her origins as the daughter of an Algerian immigrant father who married her French mother - now likewise widowed and confined to a nursing home.

Running out of economic options with dual looming evictions from her apartment, as well as her mother's nursing home that she can't afford, Patience by chance encounters a highly unusual opportunity that materializes for this female breaking bad girl in progress, when she translates for the undercover squad a pending big bust of imported hash - and whose driver is the son of the devoted immigrant attendant caring for her mother at the nursing home. Dabbling in an identity theft fashion statement, literally undercover concoction of traditional Arab female attire, Patience emerges as her own self-styled free lance double agent, marketing the marijuana in question - while simultaneously staging a rebellion against an economic system indifferent to low wage working class distress, to say the least.

An Economic Crisis Cinema gem, along with targeting an oppressive legal system criminalizing drugs, Mama Weed manages a flawless mix of satire and serious political issues. While illuminating at its center Huppert who with 'arresting' charisma, miraculously manages a compelling combo of frail and fierce, both on and off screen. Not to mention a mind over muscle feminist approach to superhero solutions, hatching scene of the crime scenarios with shopping as the preferred weapon of choice in places most female frequented - supermarkets and department stores.

Prairie Miller