A POET (A-minus) - Whether you find this tale of a sad sack heartbreaking or not will depend on your tolerance for struggling artists with drinking problems. I found it bittersweet and quite moving.
Ubeimar Rios stars as Oscar, a not-so-lovable loser who lives with his ailing mom as he approaches middle age. He is a diehard poet, a self-proclaimed tortured artist whose demons are doused only by getting blackout drunk on the sidewalks of Medellin in Colombia (more than once we see him wake up in the morning on concrete and limp home). He fumbles the most basic adult tasks -- he's a lousy, broke father to his high-school-age daughter Daniela (Alisson Correa) -- and he is blinded by his devotion to the beloved poet Jose Asuncion Silva, who died at 30 by a self-inflicted gunshot to the heart. In a small gut-wrenching scene, we watch Oscar sitting on the edge of the bed, shirtless, and using a black marker to draw a heart in the middle of his chest. He is quick to sob.
In a word, Oscar is miserable -- until he reluctantly takes a job teaching and latches on to a student who shows a lot of promise as a poet. Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade) needs a confidence boost, and she is distracted by an overstuffed household of siblings and relatives. Writer-director Simon Mesa Soto revels in the chaos among the busy brood, with little to no judgment of their working-poor lifestyle. Upon taking Yurlady under his wing, Oscar gets sober, seizing on the opportunity to replace his stalled career with the hopes of the next generation to break through.
Of course, this is not destined to go smoothly. Oscar is not the best candidate for long-term sobriety. When he chaperones Yurlady and her classmates to an adult literary event and the kids misbehave, Oscar's self-control begins to unravel.
Soto walks a tightrope throughout between humor and pathos. He does not gloss over the debilitating heartache that Oscar carries with him at all times, but he finds the day-to-day humor in the lowly adventures of a bumbling sad sack. Rios, with a stricken homeliness of Allen Ginsberg, shuffles from scene to scene. He alternates between petulant family squabbles to passionate polemics about the classic poets to incoherent babbling about his long-stalled publishing career. When he first starts teaching, he is sloppy drunk in front of the students. While it is disturbing, it is also successfully played for uneasy laughs, as the students take it in stride. Meantime, his effort at reconciling with his teenage daughter is more laughable than funny; he obviously has a form of PTSD that links her birth to the drying up of his writing abilities. But he's trying.
I can say that I laughed, I squirmed. There are no easy answers offered to Oscar's plight or to the problems of the underclass in Medellin. But the film is full of heart. Do I have to draw a picture for you?
BONUS TRACK
A lovely interlude from "A Poet," Los Zafiros with "La Luna en tu Mirada":
NIKA AND MADISON (B) - Every generation gets the "Thelma and Louise" it deserves. Here, two indigenous young women hit the road after one of them violently rejects the sexual aggression of a police officer while off the Canadian reservation.
Star Slade brings star power to the screen as Madison a
flailing college student who meets up with old pal Nika (Ellyn Jade) on a
visit back home. Nika is gruff and plain-spoken and rebuffs Madison's
pleas to go out on the town. When Madison gets into a bar fight -- and
then a tussle with the handsy cop -- Nika comes to the rescue. Meantime,
the tribal president (Gail Maurice) defies the investigators and
enforces the tribe's jurisdictional authority over the local police.
Amanda
Brugel and Shawn Doyle flash a fantastic chemistry as the TV-style
trash-talking detectives. Doyle's brusque Det. Warhurst has little
patience for the niceties of diplomatic relations, and Brugel imbues her
Det. Timmins with a jagged sarcasm that hints at sympathies for the
young women of color.
Slade lights up the screen with big eyes and an appealing smile, but she also digs deep for the ennui Madison is experiencing on the mainstream academic track. Nika has a hard-shell protecting a bruised interior; she describes herself as having "lost my momentum." But you know there is a not-so-cryptic reason for why she has shut down emotionally. The only true misstep: a "Breakfast Club" moment when the stylish, urbane Madison dolls up the tomboyish Nika for a night out in the big city.
Otherwise, this pair of dueling duos chug down parallel tracks as filmmaker Eva Thomas (co-writing with Michael McGowan) steers clear of plot potholes and brings this familiar but authentic tale to a satisfying finish in less than 90 minutes. This is thoughtful, quiet but effective storytelling.
SIRAT (B-minus) - The first half of this apocalyptic road movie has a powerful hum to it, peeling away layers from a carnival cast of characters wandering the Moroccan desert as the start of World War III apparently plays out off-screen in the background.
Sergi Lopez stars as Luis, a portly normie infiltrating the desert rave scene searching for his missing daughter. He has ill-advisedly brought his young son with him (and their dog), which bogs him down as he tries to keep pace with a troupe of oddballs leading a three-vehicle caravan to the next festival site where they might track down Luis' daughter. The off-the-grid group (compared by one viewer to a Jodorosky cast) is led by the visually arresting punk Jade (Jade Oukid) and includes the androgynous Steff (Stefania Gadda), as well as a man with one leg and another missing his right hand.
Filmmaker Oliver Laxe (co-writing with Santiago Fillol) is too enamored of the blaring, pulsating dance music that opens the film and provides trippy interludes for the nomads; he struggles to weave it smoothly into the narrative. Luis's SUV often can't keep up on the off-road path traversed by the group's steampunk trucks, but Jade & Co. refuse to abandon the poor shlub.
However, the wheels come off of this cross between "Mad Max" and "The Road" in the final third, as Laxe begins to pummel the audience with unspeakably violent acts that pick off characters one at a time. As the caravan becomes trapped in a minefield (a metaphor for a filmmaker derailed from his plot), and the detonations start, "Sirat" becomes an endurance contest. (And with every blast, I couldn't help being reminded of SCTV's Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurock.) What starts out with dystopian promise devolves into Laxe's game of Whac-a-Mole with his characters, fumbling a promising opportunity.
28 YEARS LATER (C) - I don't remember much about "28 Days Later" from 2002, but back then Danny Boyle was in his prime and his narrative skills were unmatched. With his recent sequel "28 Years Later," the next generation deals with the aftermath of the viral outbreak that spawned a rampage of the undead. A gazillion zombie movies later, there is nothing to be wrung from such a tired tale. And Boyle's brand of boyhood magical realism has lost its charm.
The British pop-auteur ("Millions," "Slumdog Millionaire," "Sunshine") re-teams with Alex Garland ("Ex Machina") from the original film, but very little works here as they unspool a drab, uninspired tale of a boy, Spike (Alfie Williams), venturing out on a vision quest from the walled-off safe zone that is England, across a land bridge to the European continent to hunt zombies with a bow-and-arrow. Would you believe that on his various missions he will narrowly escape death repeatedly so that he can eventually bring his mysteriously ailing mother (Jodie Comer) to the danger zone to seek a cure from a mad survivalist doctor?
That doctor is played, improbably and to the hilt, by Ralph Fiennes, slathered in iodine (best to ward off any virus) and juggling a detente with the wild population. (He's no Col. Kurtz, and this is no "Apocalypse Now.") By that final third of the film, you probably will be exhausted by Boyle's cliched visual effects -- awe-inducing prismatic skies, amateurish camera tricks where the image freezes upon the impact of the arrow and rotates 90 degrees before resuming motion. The narrative is a string of idiot plots lazily stitched together. Whereas "Billions" or "Slumdog Millionaire" could make boyhood adventures seem enchanting, Spike's adventures here just seem silly and strained.
Maybe we're jaded in the modern era. But whatever charm or suspense that we experienced nearly a quarter century ago has evaporated with this unnecessary, limp sequel.
BONUS TRACK
It's no "Lust for Life" from "Trainspotting," but Boyle gets good mileage out of "Lowly" by Young Fathers, which sets the table early on for "28 Years Later":
NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE (A-minus) - Matt Johnson has a genius' knack for making smart, fun films. He has the look of a sloppy vaudevillian, the mind of Groucho Marx, and the director's eye of Hal Ashby.
I don't know much about Nirvanna the band, or Nirvanna the show, but this has been a long-running project between Johnson (above left) and collaborator Jay McCarrol who spent 2007 to 2009 creating a web series that chronicled fictional versions of themselves striving to play the Rivoli theater in Toronto. They incorporate footage from the original series (which they brought to television in 2017 and 2018) to create this clever slapstick time-travel romp that spans the past 18 years.
The hook here is that the pair -- who remain down on their luck in the present day and still undiscovered -- develop a scheme to pose as time travelers from 2008 by rigging an RV to mimic the car from "Back to the Future" (whose footage is borrowed here in the name of satire). When the time-travel machine actually works (thanks to a plot device involving spilled Orbitz, a passing-fad drink from the 1990s), it is an opportunity, if all goes according to plan, to rewrite history and book that gig at the Rivoli in 2008 -- and ensure fame. Of course, all does not go according to plan. While in 2008, an unexpected rift between the two present-day pals (tiptoeing around their 2008 selves) triggers a butterfly-effect glitch in time/space, leading to an altered present day in which Jay went on to become famous and Matt hangs with a bunch of nerds in a Jay McCarrol tribute band.
The film starts with an elaborate stunt in which the pair plan to visit the deck of the CN Tower and parachute into Toronto's Sky Dome baseball stadium. It's not clear how much of this is staged, how much is real, or if doubles were used -- but the mockumentary effect is brilliant. The tower will play into a grand finale involving a crazed scheme to use a lightning strike to fuel the time machine. It's all quite complicated but enormously delightful. It all pretty much makes sense in its own controlled universe.
Like in Johnson's debut film "The Dirties," there is an "Office"-like meta touch of an unseen crew filming all of the antics, both in the present day and back in 2008. Johnson still gets a lot of mileage out of subtle glances at the camera, often trying to mask a deep-seated panic that he is determined to overcome. And like "The Dirties," this is a heartfelt buddy movie, a touching paean to enduring friendship. (The germ of an idea for the original web series started when the pair were high school besties.)
Matt is clearly the instigator of most of the mayhem. At times, Matt and Jay's interactions on the streets and in the businesses of Toronto seem like actual footage, with real people and folded into the narrative. Their TV show was known to break the fourth wall, and this melange of factual, fiction and metafictional somehow gels as a cohesive movie that absolutely nails the ending.
None of this happens without Johnson and his ability to synthesize disparate elements into a movie that somehow comes off as lame-brained and brilliant at the same time. (See also his retro take on a government film crew making a film that fabricates the 1969 moon landing, "Operation Avalanche.") Most recently, Johnson went back in time to score with "BlackBerry," which fictionalized the creation of the original PDA and precursor to Apple's iPhone.
So far, as a writer, director and performer, he can do no wrong. His joy of filmmaking pours off the screen, and this DIY inside joke is as entertaining as 100 minutes can get.
FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER (B+) - There is something rather comforting in a Jim Jarmusch film. The leisurely pace. The assured direction. The sparse, off-kilter dialogue. The loops of echoing themes. And his respect for his audience's intelligence.
Here he unspools three stories about parents and children, in three disparate settings capturing the awkwardness of family relations. The cinematic connective tissue involves random repeated threads -- skateboarders, wristwatches, family photos, overhead shots of tables full of food and drink, toasts, color coordination of outfits (in the red family), horoscopes, car trips and sly variations on the British colloquialism "Bob's your uncle." The other common theme: Usually parents are depicted as out of touch and pitied by the younger generation; here, Jarmusch offers a Boomer's wink suggesting that his generation was and is the wiser, more well-adjusted and hippest of them all.
Adam Driver accepts the torch from Tom Waits as Jarmusch's off-kilter anti-hero, as they star together as father and son in the first short, with Mayim Bialik as Waits' daughter. The two offspring set the table for the whole movie with their disjointed and arm's-length conversation during the drive on the way up to their father's isolated lake house. It is clear early on that the father is exploiting his kids' generous nature and not letting on that he might be living a better life than his messy house suggests.
Waits is perfectly odd as the mumbling, fumbling father who just doesn't connect with his spectrum-y adult children, whether he is running down a list of drugs he's not taking or wielding an ax for no good reason. Driver, who starred in the director's "Paterson," can underplay a role with the best of them; I can't imagine anyone else in this specific role. And Bialik is the ultimate get-along sister/daughter. The actors have wonderful chemistry playing three relatives that have none. You almost wish it were its own standalone short film.
The third episode jumps a generation to a pair of 20-something twins visiting Paris to clear out the apartment of their parents, who have died in a plane crash. Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) have a playful banter and a fundamental connection, which is a refreshing contrast to the stilted relations on display in the first two episodes. Again, the lives of the parents -- excavated through photos, fake IDs and documents -- suggest a much more interesting narrative than the mundane plot we are watching, a clever sleight of hand.
Moore and Sabbat display the ease and dexterity of veteran actors, and it is fun to explore the side streets and interiors of Paris with this laid-back pair. They also are the most intellectually curious of all the film's characters. And we get a final subtle generational twist for the finale.
The middle entry is the weakest. Charlotte Rampling portrays a best-selling novelist who must endure a traditional mother-daughter high tea with her two dysfunctional daughters. Cate Blanchett plays a straight-up nerd, and Vicky Krieps is the stereotypical aging punk-rock chick (at least Jarmusch's version of one). They live in Dublin, of all places, walking on eggshells around each other at the mom's fancy home.
You can't ask for three more skilled actors, but they struggle to connect; their disparate accents don't help. There is no heft to the narrative, besides the disappointment a high-powered parent can barely conceal in her under-achieving children. Maybe the filmmaker just doesn't have an ear for this type of female interaction. It's fine but dwarfed by the impeccably curated tales that bookend it.
DOWN BY LAW (1986) (A-minus) - Jarmusch is at his '80s quirkiest, blessed with three unique actors who bond in this absurdist prison tale set in the unforgiving swamplands of Louisiana.
John Lurie returns to the fold from "Stranger Than Paradise" to portray Jack, a somewhat dimwitted pimp who gets set up in an embarrassing police sting. Tom Waits, whose music career was humming along, is Zack, a hipster-doofus deejay who gets suckered into being a bagman, with disastrous results. They are eventually joined in prison by Roberto, a happy-go-lucky Italian who speaks fractured English and is played with broad comic joy by Roberto Benigni, in his American film debut (and his first of three films with the director).
Benigni seems to embody all three Marx Brothers simultaneously as he steals the show from his sublimely deadpan co-stars. He constantly mixes up Zack and Jack (understandably), and he crafts charming fractured phrases from his notebook of English idioms. ("I am a good egg. ... We are a good egg.") Waits, especially, provides a deadpan backboard for the giddy offerings from the strange man they call Bob.
Time passes slowly but pleasantly in the jail cell. When they eventually make their way into the backwoods as fugitives, Jarmusch and cinematographer Robert Mueller let their lazy camera glide along the swamps with the stumbling escapees. Jarmusch's plot employs a satisfying switch at the end, alighting upon a lovely Italian restaurateur in the middle of nowhere (Nicoletta Braschi), who helps flip the hipster script.
The filmmaker avoids the sophomore slump and sets the table for a rolling out of his patient, outre character studies and zen thought experiments that would play out over a four-decade career.
BONUS TRACKS
Jarmusch shuns music in favor of an eerie stillness for most of "Father Mother Sister Brother," but then he picks a perfect daytime car ride in Paris to drop a needle on "Spooky" by Dusty Springfield:
Here is our latest attempt to rank the films of Jim Jarmusch, from most to least favorite:
