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One bit of movie news this week delighted me. It comes from the International Documentary Association which runs its own awards program and which often predicts the Academy Awards. The IDA's early list includes Sugarcane, the powerful film about Canada's residential schools atrocity. The title refers to the school near Williams Lake, B.C.
Two other very strong films I've written about are also on the list: No Other Land, the incendiary documentary about Palestinians driven out of their homes and The Remarkable Life of Ibelin about a Norwegian online gamer and what his parents learned about him after he died.
The IDA awards are Dec 5 and the Oscars are Sunday, March 2. The first film I review today could very well be a contender there.
EMILIA PÉREZ: If you’re looking for a movie that’s different, unusual, imaginative, step right in. This one is all that and it’s most entertaining. Imagine a crime thriller, a psychological twister, a sex-change tale and a musical all mixed together and you’re thinking in the right direction. It’s from the French writer-director Jacques Audiard whose films regularly draw praise at film festivals. This one got two awards at Cannes and is now getting a lot of buzz for its Academy Award chances. They are high I’d say because this film is continuously surprising and innovative. And it has a social conscience. Songs too.
Zoe Saldaña, a familiar face in super-hero movies, plays a lawyer in Mexico who is fed up defending criminals who are obviously guilty. She gets a call from a cartel leader with a big-money offer. What she has to do he won’t say. She has to accept first. Turns out he wants to quit crime and what better way than to hide out from his enemies by faking his death. How? By getting a sex-change operation to become a woman (which he says he always wanted to be anyway). Of course it has to be done in complete secrecy. Zoe travels to three countries to find the right doctor and later meets the transitioned patient.
Karla Sofía Gascón, a trans actress from Spain plays the cartel boss both as a man and then after the operation as a woman. She’s the standout in the quartette of women who collectively won the best actress award at Cannes. The other two are Adriana Paz, as a friend, and Selena Gomez as the boss’s wife, now a widow.
The film brings on one bit of irony after another. To have his two children close by the father becomes their aunt. The son thinks she has his father’s smell. The widow does not seem to recognize her as her former husband. And can he atone for his criminal history? He/she starts an NGO to expose the on-going murders and disappearances by the cartels? And do songs help tell the story and feel natural? They do. An intriguing film. (In theaters, said to be “select” but actually numerous and cross-Canada. On Netflix in two weeks) 4 out of 5
LEVELS: We’re all computer nerds these days, so much do we work with them. This film from Winnipeg runs with that idea showing a world infused with technology and playing like a creation of someone obsessed with it. The themes are familiar from other movies –are we all inside a computer program?/is AI dangerous and must it be ruled by law?—but they feel new because they come in a slick presentation that draws you in. Adam Stern, who has done a lot of TV work, wrote, directed and scored this. He doesn’t manage to explain everything but he keeps us interested.
Peter Mooney plays Joe, a bookstore owner who’s got technology all around him, including a Siri-like voice called Mel that alerts him to do whatever he has to and does his bidding, even as minor as opening the curtains. He becomes enchanted by a young woman named Ash (Cara Gee) who says she’s not from here and is suddenly shot dead. A guy named Hunter (Aaron Abrams) seems to be trying to control things; people at a wall of monitors are watching and something they call “the digital universe” is at stake, or being built, or something. I’m not sure on how all this fits together, but they do talk about levels of existence. Of our world one character rails against “primitive ideologies, superstitions and targeted misinformation based on mass manipulation”. That could bring a narcissist to power, he says. Topical, eh? The film’s a puzzle but engrossing. (in theaters) 3 ½ out of 5
INAY (MAMA): It’s short but affecting. It’s one version of an issue that’s familiar these days: immigration to fill jobs that Canadians don’t want to do. From the 1990s to 2014 we had the Live-In Caregiver Program which brought in people to be nannies for children and caregivers for the elderly. If they did that work for two years they could qualify to stay and possibly become citizens. Thousands of women from the Philippines came. Many left their children behind and sent money back home. It’s been much written about but this film looks at what it did to those left-behind children. That is emotional.
Director Thea Loo heard stories from her husband Jeremiah Reyes, a cinematographer (they both work in the Vancouver film industry) and also from her friend Shirley Lagman. Their experience was painful. They were young, mom was nowhere around and they didn’t know why. The film looks at the effects on their mental health and how they linger. Jeremiah felt actual depression, mentions the thoughts of suicide he had and still often feels sad. Of the missing moms, Shirley says “It’s tough having to repair what they broke.” The film explains it directly, truthfully and with great feeling. It doesn’t explore what Ottawa was thinking when it brought in the program. It does give the impact. Inay is mama in the Tagalog language. (In theaters) 3 ½ out of 5
HITPIG: Remember the newspaper comic strips Bloom County and then Opus and the irreverent and often politically-charged humor they carried? Well, the man who drew them is back with an animated movie he co-wrote based on his book Pete & Pickles. The flippant humor is intact and the film is fine for those who make fun of just about anything. It’s less mocking than the comic strips were (they riled up Donald Trump, for instance) but they do go after self-importance and pretensions. That’s notable in a Las Vegas impresario who calls himself The Leapin’ Lord of the Leotard (voice of Rainn Wilson). He's wild, strutting his stuff. But he loses his star attraction, Pickles the Elephant, when an animal rights activist frees it.
Hitpig (Jason Sudeikis) is a bounty hunter who chases escaped animals and is offered a million dollars to bring Pickles (Lilly Singh) back home. It's a world-wide search, involves new friends (Lola, voiced by Hannah Gadsby and a polecat voiced by RuPaul) and eventually a frenetic TV cartoon character called Super Rooster (a dig at some wilder animated shows passed off as fun for the kids). This film has lots of fun, heart and surprises coming at you at speed. Along with absurd humor, of course. It's directed by Cinzia Angelini and David Feiss. Very entertaining. (In theaters) 4 out of 5
JOIN OR DIE: This film offers one solution to what’s ailing the United States. It’s similar to what the Pope recently said in his encyclical decrying rampant individualism. The brother and sister filmmakers, Pete Davis and Rebecca Davis refer back to another thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote that what makes America strong is that its people join and work in groups. It is now splintering because joining like that is dropping. One reason is that people are staying home, watching TV maybe, choosing the channel that tells them what they want to hear. They’re not getting views from others.
In simple terms, the solution is to join a club because “social networks have value.” That’s from the work of a Harvard Social Scientist Robert Putnam who got his first inkling of the idea at a bowling alley. Fewer people were joining leagues, he was told. That led him to research elsewhere, to write an article and then a book Bowling Alone. That prompted a nationwide discussion and invitations to meetings with Bill Clinton and others. JFK’s words “Ask not what your country can do for you …” echoed in his mind. He was in the crowd that day and heard those words directly. America is hurting because “we’ve all dropped out of organizations,” he says. Joining clubs, even like the Elks and Kiwanis, has multiple benefits. He gives details. Worth mulling over, I’d say. (Netflix) 3 out of 5
ABSOLUTION: Liam Neeson says this is his last action movie. He's done a string of them starting with Taken which grew into three films. With this one he seems to be looking back over all that action and maybe regretting some of it. The character he plays certainly does. He ponders the concept of manliness and lectures a younger man about it. And he's trying to halt the life of a thug that he's led. All that musing makes for a slow film with a melancholy tone.
Old age is creeping in on him. He thinks it's just his memory failing now and then. A doctor says it's worse: he's suffering a neurological disease called CTE. There's no treatment and he'll die within a couple of years. Because of that, the crook he works for (played by Ron Perlman) fires him. He tries to patch things up with his estranged daughter (Frankie Shaw) and his grandson (Terrence Pulliam) but is rejected. In fact, Daisy uses the "F" word to tell him to go away. She says he's part of a long line of bad fathers (she uses a worse word than bad). It goes back through the generations, all the way to the cavemen, she says. We see a series of dreams that illustrate what he's feeling and there is a try for redemption but, worthy as its intentions are, the film is slow and ponderous. (In theaters) 2 ½ out of 5
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