"The Climb" -- Movie Review

 

This week at MoMA Film, I streamed the comedy “The Climb”, starring and co-written by Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino (who also directed). 

Synopsis

When a man sleeps with his best friend’s fiancée (twice!), will their friendship survive?

Story

During a biking race in France, Kyle (Kyle Marvin) informs his best friend Mike (Michael Angelo Covino) that he’s going to marry his girlfriend Ava (Judith Godrèche).  Unfortunately, Mike uses this opportunity to inform Kyle that he probably shouldn’t marry Ava – because he’s already slept with her.  Understandably, this infuriates Kyle, who subsequently finds out that Ava really does have feelings for Mike and may not be that into Kyle after all.  As it turns out, Kyle and Ava cancel their wedding – and eventually, Ava winds up marrying Mike instead.  Some time later, however, Ava incurs an untimely death and at the funeral, Mike and Kyle reconcile. 

As time goes by, Mike wallows in the misery of his loss.  Kyle, on the other hand, rebounds amazingly, finding a new girlfriend in Marissa (Gayle Rankin).  Marissa and Kyle have something of an unorthodox relationship – she bosses him and orders him around, which winds up causing Kyle to become uncontrollably sexually aroused.  They plan to get married, but hold off on making the official announcement to his family until they gather together for Thanksgiving dinner.  By Christmas, Kyle has forgiven Mike and invites him to spend the holiday at his family’s house – where everyone is shocked by his appearance and behavior.

Later, Kyle and Marissa decide to go on a skiing vacation – with Mike tagging along, much to the disgruntlement of Marissa, who genuinely can’t stand her fiancé’s best friend.  One fatal night when they are gathered at Kyle and Marissa’s bungalow, Kyle has a little too much to drink and passes out.  This allows Mike and Marissa to spend some time alone together; despite rebuking Mike’s initial advances, Marissa winds up sleeping with him.  On the day of their wedding, Mike bursts into the church and objects to their union, announcing that he’s already been with Marissa.  Will Kyle still marry Marissa?  And regardless of whether he does or not, what impact does this have on his friendship with Mike?  

Review

Let’s face it – 2020 has been a year where there’s been precious little about which we could laugh.  However, there’s some good news for fans of comedy:  “The Climb” is one of the funniest movies that has come along in quite some time.  If you want to elevate your spirits to start 2021, “The Climb” is the way to do so.  Perhaps the best way to describe this film is to say that if you take one of Woody Allen’s better screenplays and have it directed by Martin Scorsese, this is what you get. A somewhat incongruous combination?  Sure.  But somehow, it manages to work.  One can only hope these two will collaborate on more comedies in the future because they make a great team. 

The cleverness in “The Climb” lies in how Covino and Marvin have taken the genre of the buddy comedy and flipped it on its ear; you might say that this is a bromance with so many extra doses of toxicity that these two men are best frenemies forever.  Mike and Kyle are hopelessly broken people, but magically, they are broken pieces that perfectly fit together, much like a yin and yang.  In the end, they stay friends in part because they need each other – but also because no one else will have them.  Whether or not the movie has a happy ending may be open to interpretation – but it certainly suggests that there may be a sequel.    

Following the movie, an interview with the filmmakers was streamed.  They said that very little of the characters in “The Climb” are autobiographical.  Michael said that the idea originated from the relationship between a friend and his ex-girlfriend; this led to the opening scene of the film where the two friends are on a bicycle – which was originally filmed as a short that they subsequently used as a “Proof Of Concept” to make the full-length feature film.  He added that for the past decade, independent features have used this method to use effectively as a “calling card” in order to attract potential investors in the longer form – this has basically become the model for the industry.  

 

   

"76 Days" -- Movie Review

 

This week at MoMA Film, I streamed the documentary “76 Days”, from China.

Synopsis

When the Coronavirus first hit Wuhan, China, the city underwent lockdown for 76 days – and the hospitals were overwhelmed.

Story

On January 23, 2020, the government ordered a lockdown of Wuhan, China – ground Zero for the source of what would come to be known as Covid-19.  The lockdown would turn out to last for a total of 76 days, finally ending on April 8^th of that year.  Almost immediately after the lockdown was announced, hospitals in the area were inundated with patients.  Some were ambulatory, but others were brought by ambulance.  Eventually, ambulances would refuse to take people to hospitals because they were all full to capacity and none of them could accept new patients.  Nearly all of these people had symptoms of Covid-19. 

Despite the fact that the healthcare workers were overworked and stressed, they did their best to care for their patients.  In some cases, it would be something as simple as to hold a hand.  Other times, it would be just listening to them or assisting in telephone calls with family members.  When patients were bedridden and needed assistance in breathing, some nurses would inflate a rubber glove, draw a smiling face on the front and write, “Get Well Soon” on the fingers.  Since all of the doctors and nurses were covered in PPE, the patients couldn’t recognize them; in order to address this, their names would be written on the front and uplifting drawings would be on the back.

One elderly man, a retired fisherman, was particularly agitated and wanted to leave the hospital; when a telephone call was arranged with his son, the son reminded him that because he was a long-time member of the Communist Party, he must set an example and be strong.  The old man’s mental health was deteriorating; it was at this point the son told one of the nurses that his father was on medication for dementia.  Another couple was expecting a baby – the mother had just been diagnosed with Covid-19 and had to have a Caesarian Section in order to give birth.  Their baby, a daughter, spent an extensive amount of time in the NICU while the parents were quarantined; once both the parents and infant wee deemed out of danger, they were finally able to take their newborn daughter home.   

Review

While watching “76 Days”, there is a stark reminder that as much as the United States has suffered from Covid-19, China suffered immensely, too – something that can easily be forgotten considering the fact that the Chinese were blamed for this outbreak and that they have successfully contained the virus where much of the rest of the world has not.  The documentary puts human faces on those in Wuhan who suffered greatly as a result of this virus.  Perhaps the most important take-away from the film is to realize that the fault lays not at the feet of the Chinese people but rather, the Chinese government for their lack of transparency.

The footage we see in this documentary was neither sanctioned nor censored by the Chinese government.  We are witnessing what actually happened with doctors, nurses and patients.  Frustration increases for all of the health care workers moment by moment not only because they are overrun by patients beyond the capacity of their hospital, but also because this is a new virus and they don’t exactly know how it should best be treated.  Both doctors and nurses are covered from head to toe in PPE and it is impossible to recognize any of them. 

Following the documentary, there was a stream of an interview with Hao Wu, the film’s editor and one of its directors.  The interview was almost as illuminating and fascinating as “76 Days” itself.  Wu said that he wound up doing the documentary accidentally – he went to Shanghai right when the lockdown started and began filming when approached by a United States television network; eventually, the network dropped out of the project.  After showing the raw footage to a couple of other filmmakers, he was able to convince them to participate.  Since one of the co-directors had state-approved credentials, he was able to get unfettered access throughout the hospital.      

"Twelve Thousand" -- Movie Review

On the final weekend of the New Directors/New Films festival, there was a streaming of the new French drama “Twelve Thousand”. 

Synopsis

When a couple find themselves strapped for cash once one of them is out of work, they agree he will take a job far away in order to earn 12,000 euros and return to her immediately after the money is made – but will the relationship hold up despite the time and geographic distance?

Story

When Frank (Arieh Worthalter) loses his job at the junkyard, he has to rush home to tell his girlfriend Maroussia (Nadège Trebal) so they can start planning their next steps.  They are not a couple of means – in the cramped apartment where they live, they share it with an older woman; this small space is rather crowded because the couple’s daughter lives there along with their dog.  As if they weren’t already sufficiently in close quarters, Maroussia is earning extra money by being a foster parent to several babies who stay with them.  Nevertheless, Frank and Maroussia always manage to find the time to enjoy an extremely active sex life.

The couple make a pact:  if Frank winds up taking a job that requires him to work out of town, he will only work there long enough to earn 12,000 euros (the amount Maroussia earns watching the children).  Maroussia insists on this because she’s concerned that if Frank stays away indefinitely, he will likely find someone else and leave her.  Frank sets out looking for work and winds up getting a job cleaning out oil tanks at a refinery quite a distance from where he and Maroussia live.  However, Frank’s not there for very long when he learns that he’s just been laid off – particularly bad news because he’s nowhere near the 12,000 euros he was hoping to earn.

One night, Frank sneaks into a yard where shipping containers are stored; his plan is to steal the merchandise in the containers and sell them with the expectation that he can eventually make the 12,000 euros.  Instead, the opportunity presents itself for him to pose as a security guard at this yard; Frank quickly realizes that he can make his money more quickly if he “sells” the rights to steal the merchandise to a group of young jobless women in the town.  It turns out to be a lucrative proposition and eventually, Frank returns to Maroussia, bringing her a surprise – but when she finds the surprise to be none too pleasant, will she remain with Frank or kick him out? 

Review

Despite its quirkiness (and as a French film, by definition it must be quirky), “12,000” is a rather pleasantly enjoyable experience.  Particularly noteworthy here is the performance by Arieh Worthalter as Frank who is a real standout as this especially roguish character.  Additionally, both the screenplay and direction by Nadège Trebal are exceptional.  Considering that her experience is somewhat limited when it comes to full-length feature films (although she’s got more writing credits than directing credits), this movie is quite a remarkable accomplishment on her part.  Trebal has a talent for writing dialog and her shot choices suggest a more seasoned auteur.   

In a daring scene early in “12,000”, Frank and Maroussia have sex and it’s fairly explicit.  Given the fact that Trebal is writer/director/actress here, it’s a bit surprising that she would go that far.  This is neither a criticism nor intended to discourage her, merely an observation since she’s nascent in her career as a dramatic filmmaker.  As an actress, your eye is drawn to her in nearly every scene in which she appears; this is quite the accomplishment because she’s able to hold her own in the scenes with Worthalter.  If Trebal continues to make full-length films, hopefully she will cast herself in them (ideally, in a larger role).    

Following the movie, there was a stream of an interview with writer/director/actress Nadège Trebal, which was conducted through a translator.  Trebal said that she was inspired to write this screenplay after working on her previous documentaries.  Those stories heightened her awareness of an economic war and class struggle in modern society.  In the documentaries, Trebal shot at an oil refinery and junkyard and she spent a considerable amount of time with the men who worked there.  Doing so put into perspective the life of displaced men who were forced to work far from home and found themselves exploited by a system that unfairly favored the employers over the working class.     

"Giraffe" -- Movie Review

 

This week at the New Directors/New Films festival, there was a streaming of the Danish drama “Giraffe”. 

Synopsis

When a major construction project causes two of its workers to meet, can they maintain a relationship for the duration of the assignment?

Story

After years of talking and planning, the Danish government is finally undertaking their long-rumored venture of building a tunnel that will connect the island of Lolland to Germany in order to create more jobs and further set up the island for future economic growth.  But there is a downside to this scheme that isn’t at all trivial:  due to eminent domain, a great many of the small island’s residents will be permanently displaced – a number of them elderly people who have been living in the same home for decades.

Due to this major endeavor, the government has assigned many workers to this island on the south of Denmark – among them is Dara (Lisa Loven Kongsli), a 38-year-old ethnologist whose job it is to document the culture and people of Lolland for archival and historic purposes.  She begins to interview many a great many motley soon-to-be former residents of Lolland – these include a farmer, whose business is disrupted; a young couple who look upon this forced move as a blessing in disguise; and senior citizens who are distraught about leaving a home where they’ve raised a family. 

Another worker is Lucek (Jakub Gierszal), a 24 year old laborer from Poland whose initial task is to assist with installing fiberoptic cable to bring high-speed Internet access to the entire island.  His co-workers are older men who have also relocated from Poland in order to support themselves and their family with a well-paying job unavailable to them in their homeland.  Eventually, Lucek crosses paths with Dara and they embark on a steamy relationship.  Later, it is learned that the subcontractor for whom Lucek and his team work is withholding their pay, causing many of his colleagues to immediately stop work and return to Poland.  With Lucek now out of a job but deeply in love with Dara, will he be able to remain in Lolland to sustain their relationship?    

Review

If “Giraffe” is going anywhere (and there’s no guarantee that it is), it’s in no particular hurry to get there.  At only an hour and a half, the story takes its time to get going; it is quite a while before the two lovers even meet each other.  It would seem that the director is more concerned with the setup about the characters than their interaction between each other – which is really what the movie should be about (at least theoretically, anyway).  An audience wants to see a film about other people and you get the sense that this director really just wanted to shoot a documentary – especially given that much of the picture has that documentary-like quality.

“Giraffe” is only partially in English and therefore has a heavy reliance on the use of subtitles.  Therein lies a rather significant quandary.  Technically speaking, the main problem with “Giraffe” has to do with its subtitles – specifically, the color.  They are in white and can be exceedingly difficult to read against a light background.  Why yellow isn’t the default choice of color for subtitles remains a mystery; yellow is a color that can be read against either light or dark backgrounds.  Hopefully, the industry will learn this lesson someday.      

Following the movie, there was a stream of an interview with writer/director Anna Sofie Hartmann.  There is a shot of a giraffe at the beginning of the motion picture and it’s never referenced again later on; Hartmann says that the title of her film came from a safari park located on the northern part of the island of Lolland – it has giraffes, elephants and rhinos.  She was struck by the fact that since these animals are not in their natural habitat, it gave her the idea of what it would be like to live in a place where you don’t really belong or where you’re not originally from.  Hartmann is originally from Lolland and has been fascinated with the changes she’s seen in her hometown over the past few years.   

 

"The Killing Of Two Lovers" -- Movie Review

 

This week at the long-belated New Directors/New Films Festival, there was a streaming of “The Killing Of Two Lovers”.

Synopsis

When a married couple grapples with their separation, how will the husband deal with learning that his wife now has a boyfriend?

Story

This is a difficult and stressful time for both David and Nikki (Clayne Crawford and Sepideh Moafi), a long-time married couple who have now agreed to a separation.  High school sweethearts who got married upon graduation, they now find themselves with four children:  a teenage daughter and three small sons.  After all of these years together, they now question whether they made the right decision.  David has now moved out and lives with his father; Nikki remains in their home with the children. 

What is particularly bothersome for David is that Nikki now has a new boyfriend – Derek (Chris Coy).  Their children know about this and are understandably confused – they miss their dad and wish he was still living with them.  Despite dedicating himself to being a good father, dealing with this new reality has driven him to ideations of murdering both Derek and Nikki out of anger, jealousy and all-around frustration.  Towards this end, David has decided to purchase a handgun, which he periodically practices shooting – at one point, taking a mannequin to an open field and imagining himself murdering someone at close range. 

David and Nikki agree to schedule date nights every so often, but these get togethers inevitably get ruined when Nikki is distracted by either worries about their children or interruptions of text messages or calls from Derek just when she and David start to rekindle romantic expressions for each other.  One Saturday when David is scheduled to have time with the children, he winds up having an argument with Nikki.  It is at this point that Derek insinuates himself into the situation and when he and David are alone, they have a physical confrontation.  When David finds the gun in his truck, will he finally get his revenge?

Review

This is a tough movie to describe – which is not necessarily a bad thing.  Is it a mystery?  Or is it a family drama?  A crime drama?  At various points, “The Killing Of Two Lovers” feels like all three.  Perhaps the best way to describe it is to say that it is something of a blue-collar version of “Marriage Story”.  However you choose to describe it, the film is quite an extraordinary experience.  From moment to moment, you never quite know exactly where you’re going in this story.  That’s what keeps you going from one scene to another because you eventually have to toss all of your expectations out the window. 

One of the more interesting things about “The Killing Of Two Lovers” is writer/director Robert Machoian’s choice to shoot much of the film with wide-shots.  This choice almost gives you the impression at times that you are watching a documentary – at a distance.  When there is a cut to a close-up, it is nearly alarming; when the camera dollies-in to a closer view, the viewer gets the impression that they’re being intrusive – they are suddenly somewhere that they don’t belong because all of this is such an intimate family moment that it’s none of a stranger’s business.  The performances by the cast transform this into being a particularly realistic experience. 

Following the streaming, there was a video of an interview with writer/director Robert Machoian and star Clayne Crawford.  Machoian said that while he grew up in California, he now lives in Utah, which is where the story is set – he likes to set stories in places where he lives because of his familiarity with the locale.  Crawford recalled meeting Machoian a decade ago at The Sundance Festival, where they hit it off and decided that they wanted to work on some projects together.  One of the better compliments that Machoian claimed he got about the film had to do with his script; after a screening, viewers actually believed that the actors had improvised all of the dialog.        

 

 

"My Psychedelic Love Story" -- Movie Review

This week, Film At Lincoln Center streamed the new Showtime documentary, “My Psychedelic Love Story”, directed by Errol Morris.

Synopsis

When a young woman pursues a relationship with Timothy Leary, is she really in love with him or is she just a CIA plant?

Story

In the 1960’s, former Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary became the nation’s primary advocate for use of LSD – a hallucinogenic drug that was considered an illegal narcotic.  With Richard Nixon as United States president in the late 60’s and early 70’s, he declared a war on drugs and was determined to make an example out of Leary.  But Leary fled the country and lived in exile in Europe.  Unwilling to return to his home country for fear of being thrown into prison, he spent his time getting high with his fellow expatriates and writing about his experiences.

Joanna Harcourt-Smith, a young well-connected woman who lived her own nonconformist lifestyle, enjoyed a wide variety of lovers – many of them older men.  One such man was a wealthy and influential European entrepreneur with a somewhat sketchy background.  This man claimed to “own” Leary (i.e. – he got Leary to sign over his literary rights to him) and was among the things he mentioned to Harcourt-Smith in order to impress her after she seemed to lose interest in him.  Initially, she wasn’t sure who Leary was – but once she learned of his rebellious nature, she relished the thought of being with someone who was considered an outlaw.

Through her connections, Harcourt-Smith got an introduction to Leary, visiting him at his chalet in Switzerland; she found this charismatic man to be irresistibly attractive and after he introduced her to LSD they soon wound up in a serious relationship.  Eventually, Leary would return to America and wound up in the same prison as Charles Manson.  He would be frequently visited by Harcourt-Smith but did their return spur the CIA to spy on him?  Later, when he got out of prison and agreed to cooperate with the Drug Enforcement Agency, both Leary and Harcourt-Smith were relocated to New Mexico where they lived under assumed identities.  Their love would be tested and when they got into an argument one night, Harcourt-Smith awoke the next morning to find Leary gone and she would never see him again.   

Review

On its surface, the story behind these two is an interesting tale – but you might never know it based on the convoluted fashion director Errol Morris chooses to tell it to the audience.  Part of the problem, too, has to go to the narrator, Joanna Harcourt-Smith; the film is based on her book, “Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story”.  Hopefully, the book makes better sense than the movie on which it is based.  It is at times rambling and incoherent; certain stories seem to go in circles making you wonder what parts (if any) may be true. 

As bad form as it may be to speak ill of the dead (she died in October of this year), Harcourt-Smith is what you might refer to as an “unreliable narrator”.  She can’t seem to say for certain if she was a Mata Hari embedded with Leary by the CIA in order to do Nixon’s dirty work.  Add to that the fact that she was a hardcore partier with various celebrities and indulged in a variety of substances during that period (not the least of which being LSD trips with Leary) and you might as well be left to make up your own story about these two.  Morris includes plenty of news clips and interviews, but none of the interviews are relatively recent.

It would appear from the interviews that Harcourt-Smith reached out to Morris after seeing his TV mini-series “Wormwood”, which focuses on some rather dark experiments conducted by The United States government.  After seeing these episodes, Harcourt-Smith was slowly convinced that she may have been a mole who was used by the government in order to get the goods on Leary once and for all.  Unfortunately, some of her seeming moments of clarity in her memory are betrayed by much clearer memories of her childhood and extensive sex life.