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The theatres are closed again and big titles, like The Croods, which were to be playing now, will have to wait. Or maybe go elsewhere, as so many films have been doing.
Your choices for streaming are growing. There’s Stardust for instance, a drama about David Bowie. Netflix has an intimate tag-along with Shawn Mendes on one of his tours, and Disney+ has a musical session where Taylor Swift performs every song from her acclaimed Folklore album and tells the background of each tune.
And Tuesday, this year’s edition of the Whistler Film Festival starts. It’ll be streaming only and therefore easily accessible anywhere in B.C. It’ll show 30 features and 67 shorts, many of them Canadian, including a new one by Carl Bessai, a new short by Guy Maddin and an opening film called Sugar Daddy about a woman working as an escort while hoping for a music career.
You can read about it and all the other titles here.
And here’s what I'm reviewing today:
Collective: 4 stars
Black Beauty: 3½
Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square: 3
The Christmas Chronicles 2: 2½
Zappa: 3½
Koko-di Koko-da: 3
COLLECTIVE: Here’s one of the best depictions of investigative journalism ever put on film. It’s a documentary from Romania but speaks to anybody anywhere about how to look for the truth. There’s no Deep Throat handing you the facts. You dig, interpret and, most of all, dare to ask questions, repeatedly, of the perpetrators or their covering-up associates.
We watch Catalin Tolontan do exactly that after 27 people died in a nightclub fire five years ago. What caused the fire? Why was there only one exit door? Those were the obvious questions. Tolontan and his colleagues at a small newspaper noticed that many more of the people who survived later died in hospital. He followed that trail and uncovered a net of corruption involving government officials, bribed doctors, business connections and diluted medicines. A whistleblower had reported it years before, but nothing was done about it. Director Alexander Nanau followed the scandal from its early stages, and you’ll be amazed at what he was able to film. Not just press conferences, but private conversations and briefings. You get right into the story, more than what most reporters ever manage. This search plays like a thriller. (Streaming VOD on Apple TV) 4 out of 5
BLACK BEAUTY: The classic story of a girl’s love for a horse (and vice versa) has been filmed many times, and this time with updating changes. Some work, some don’t, but overall, the film charms and could be a family viewing treasure. There’s a very strong lesson here about animal welfare. They have feelings, too, someone says, and the story amply illustrates that through its main narrative device (also a feature of Anna Sewell’s novel): The horse, voiced by Kate Winslet, tells the story. It’s overly anthropomorphic but does the job. Beauty is separated from her mother, is angry and untrainable at a rescue farm and gradually warms up to a young woman (Mackenzie Foy) with whom she shares a history. They’re both orphans.
The growth of their friendship is lovely as we see it on the screen, as scripted and directed by Ashley Avis, clearly a horse lover herself. Her message promoting animal welfare, and occasionally inducing tears, comes through without being overdone. Beauty is sent to a succession of owners, and we see the whole range of how people mistreat animals. A rich family pushes her into dressage, while a clumsy daughter pokes her with spurs. A tourism horse cart operator keeps her in a dirty stall and overworks her. She gets ill after a chilly river rescue because a stable hand didn’t know horses. Good humans are a relief and scenes with the young woman grow to be very emotional. That overcomes the changes, which move the story from England to present-day U.S. and make Beauty a mustang rounded up in Wyoming and mistreated in New York. The story is strong wherever. (Disney+) 3½ out of 5
DOLLY PARTON’S CHRISTMAS ON THE SQUARE: I take it she wrote this as a stage show, and visually, it’s been well-transferred to the screen by director Debbie Allen and a crew of designers, choreographers and dressers. What they’ve managed to assemble will appeal to anyone looking for a warm-hearted holiday movie, and it’s hard to criticize because of that. It’s kitschy, derivative (think of A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life as influences), but pleasant with both Parton's charm and songs and Christine Baranski’s icy-hearted Grinch.
Baranski plays Regina, who owns a small town and hands out eviction notices on the day before Christmas Eve because she wants to sell out to a shopping mall developer. The local pastor rallies his people to resist, and a woman (Dolly Parton) who usually solicits change on the street to help the underprivileged comes to her as an angel to ask her to relent. That familiar storyline is dressed up with a few surprises (motives, family history, medical subplots) and a lot of singing, dancing in the street and a couple of numbers pepped up with gospel fervour. It’s not real, but it’s congenial and comforting. (Netflix) 3 out of 5
THE CHRISTMAS CHRONICLES 2: Three years after the first, here’s a sequel to a popular Netflix holiday movie. Once again, Kurt Russell has a lively time playing Santa Claus (with Goldie Hawn having a much larger presence this time as his wife), and once again, Christmas is in danger and has to be saved. An eternal plot line if there ever was one. First time, the problem was reindeer missing and a sleigh damaged in Chicago. This time, a resentful elf (Julian Dennison) wants to end Christmas entirely by shutting Santa’s enterprise down because he hasn’t been getting enough attention from him. He lures Kate (Darby Camp), who was in the first film, out of a Mexican vacation and whisks her and a prospective stepbrother to the North Pole. He aims to cause havoc.
This is not a sweet, homey holiday tale. It’s high-tech and high-energy. There’s a vortex and a wormhole through which they travel. Santa boasts his venture is bigger than Amazon and all the others put together, and he dances exuberantly. Also, I didn’t know he plays the saxophone. The elf steals the star from the Christmas tree, you know the one linked to the Star of Bethlehem, and that shuts down the power. How to recover from that? Time travel, to a place that lacks Christmas spirit: a crowded airport. It’s pretty goofy, written by the same writer as the first, but now directed by Chris Columbus, a veteran of Hollywood comedies. He doesn’t push a typical message; he delivers adventure. This time, it wasn’t filmed in Toronto, but here in Vancouver where, come to think of it, Kurt and Goldie used to live years ago. (Netflix) 2½ out of 5
ZAPPA: This one was much-anticipated by Frank Zappa’s fans, but with the theatres closed, they’ll have to settle for video on demand. They’ll be glad if they search it out because here’s a close, appreciative and informative portrait of the iconoclastic rocker and avant garde composer. Alex Winter, better known as Bill of Bill & Ted, is obviously a fan, but doesn’t settle for a standard biography. He’s concerned with what drives an artist. You’ll have to decide for yourself if he managed to answer that question. It seems a bit hazy to me, though the journey is exhilarating.
Winter had a tremendous amount of material to draw on. There are former band members, like Steve Vai, Ian Underwood and Ruth Underwood, who tell stories, not all complimentary. Also, Alice Cooper, whom Zappa got started on records, Zappa’s wife Gail (before she died) and, interestingly, not his children. That’s not explained. Most everything else is, particularly the perfectionism with which he pushed the musicians who played for him. The film also touches on his dabbling in public issues, like music censorship, and has wonderful archival material, TV interviews, congressional committee testimony and a guest host clip from Saturday Night Live. Winter had access to Zappa’s huge hoard of tapes, film and documents and has given us a full image of an amiable, as well as prickly, artist. 3½ out of 5
KOKO-DI KOKO-DA: Sounds like a children’s song, because it is — in Sweden, anyway. And you hear it a few times in this eerie, dream-laden film that feels like a comedy at times and a creepy horror film at others. A couple goes out camping, and whether these are only dreams or real events that happen to them, they repeat over and over. While they sleep, a trio of strange people comes along and attacks them. There's a man in a white suit and hat, a tough-looking woman and a goon carrying a dead dog and leading a live one.
It happens several times, a little different each time. They collapse the tent, sic the dog inside and apparently kill one or the other. Why? That’s for us to figure out. It's three years since the couple lost a child in an accident, which we see at the beginning of the film. Is it unprocessed grief rising up? Can they fight off the three invaders? This is an unusual and intriguing film written and directed by Johannes Nyholm, whose music videos, shorts and previous features also straddle dreams and reality. It’s easy to like because it’s a puzzle, and does explain itself, sort of, at the end. (Streaming by VIFF Connect) 3 out of 5
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