FALLING

FALLING (2020) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Director: Viggo Mortensen. Cast Viggo Mortensen, Lance Henriksen, Sverrir Gudnason, Laura Linney

Viggo Mortensen’s first directorial effort is a gentle, honest, empathic account of a relationship between a father and son. Vigo himself plays the “son”, revery restrained and willing to take a step back to let other star shine: in fact it’s veteran Lance Henriksen, who plays his dad, who is the real revelation here. 

The film feels a little bit like a pressure cooker: it bubbles and boils throughout the whole film and you know that sooner or later it’s going to explodes. However it does also become very repetitive: most of the scenes are slightly interchangeable and I didn’t feel there was any sense of real progression of emotions from A to B to C… it was just an agglomeration of scenes, some of them more obvious than others, some of them a bit cliché, but always done very tastefully and clearly with good intention.

Henriksen is losing his marbles and he’s got real anger inside. As he’s nearing his end, it gets harder and harder to like him and to see the person he might have once been: you get that in the first scene… and then again, and then again. At some point you do wonder whether the film is ever going to do something different. And actually it doesn’t. It just meanders about until it finally reaches a rather telegraphed “confrontation” before it goes back to meander a bit more and then it baffles the audience with a rather weird coda.

“Falling” is being released followed by a whole pointless controversy about Viggo Mortensen playing a gay character (something which he does very tastefully and respectfully. I’m so over this idiot debate about straight actors who shouldn’t play gay characters and all this political correctness… I mean, they are actors, from crying out loud!); but at least the controversy is making people notice the film, which would otherwise disappear, especially in a year where a masterpiece like “The Father” (still about an old man losing his memory) is being released…

Check here how you can watch this: https://www.modernfilms.com/falling

Oscar Nominated Animated Short Films 2019

To shake things up a bit I watched all the Oscar nominated short animated films from 2020. You can find most of them online or rent them/buy them on iTunes or Amazon.

DAUGHTER (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)(Dceraj)

Written and Directed by Daria Kashcheeva

Nominated for best animated short at the Oscar back in February 2020, this poignant and beautifully realised Czech film uses a sort of stop motion technique using puppets made in what looks like paper mache. It is filmed as a real film would be, with big close ups of faces, shallow depth of field, handheld camerawork and so on. Not a single line of dialogue is spoken as a woman sits by her father’s deathbed waiting for the final moment… and as she does remembers…Poetic, minimal and profound.

SISTER (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

Director: Siqi Song

“Today I want to tell you about sister” starts this short animated film, this one too nominated for an Oscar in 2020.Coming from China, I should have expected the twist, which suddenly lifts the film and gives it a whole new meaning. Dedicated to ”the siblings we never had” between 1985 and 2015, this is a strange, gentle (like the way the characters are portrait here, like cotton stuffed dolls) and haunting film about siblings (or lack of), is probably a quiet political form or protest, but also a cry for lost generations… for what lives could have been… if…

MEMORABLE (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

Director: Bruno Collet

Another short animated nominated at the Oscar 2020, this French little gem depicts a couple of old people. The husband, probably with dementia, lives a strange reality as he forgot most about his life and how to live in it and yet he still has remnants of his old self, his humour, his love for paintings and his love for his wife. Romantic, touching, poignant.

HAIR LOVE (⭐️⭐️⭐️)

Directed by: Matthew A. Cherry, Everett Downing Jr., Bruce W. Smith

A dad literally wrestling with his daughter’s hair… she’s seen a video online about how to take care of her hair and she asks her dad for help. What a seemly trivial little story about finding the right hairstyle hides a poignant twist. Slightly manipulative, and a bit cheap (both in its intent and in the execution), this would have been fine if I hadn’t seen the others first. It is probably the second least interesting of the lot and yet, because it’s American and it’s distributed by Sony, eventually it was the one that won the Oscar.

KITBULL (⭐️⭐️)

Director: Rosana Sullivan

I don’t think I got this one… or at least I got it, but I did it think it was worth a nomination. An unlikely friendship between a dog and a kitten, which could only be made in animation, because as we know cats are selfish and would never help a dog escape his abusive owner. Very unmemorable and not even that interesting from the technical point of view.

Climb Blind

Climb Blind (2020) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

It’s impossible not to compare this documentary about a blind climber (yes, you heard me right!) with the Oscar winning nail biting “Free Solo”. The film -makers probably know too they can’t compete, so the documentary focuses on the climbing and the climber in equal measure. The more intimate moments with him spreading butter on a piece of bread are just as successful as the final climb of red sandstone on the west coast of Hoy (the Old Man of Hoy).

Originally mad for tv by the BBC (though the version I saw was a slightly longer one), “climb Blind” is mainly one for the mountain lovers out there, but it’s also made for people who know nothing about climbing, making sure the techniques are explained step by step.It’s one of those life affirming film showing people who will not be defeated by their disability.

The surprising thing about “Climb Blind” is how much humour you’ll find. Jesse Dufton is an extraordinary person, as well as a very skilled climber. There’s never any sense of self-pity from him (actually at some point he even says that if he did have his sight back he wouldn’t be as good as climber) nor from the people around him (trying themselves to climb blindfolded) or even his parents (laughing about how he used to bump into things when he was younger).

The last lines of the film says it all: “I’m not disable, I’m blind and able”.

I am Greta

I Am Greta

Director Nathan Grossman. Cast: Greta Thunberg

I have to make a confession here: I wasn’t too keen to watch this one at all. I really thought I already knew everything that there is to know, both about the girl and the issues she campaigns for. I’ve been a keen environmental campaigner myself too as those who know me (and see my constant posts online) are very all too aware of and for that reason I had the presumption to know everything about it. Well, let me tell you: I was wrong. It’s easy to piece together one plus one and draw a picture of Greta from what we’ve seen on television, on the news, what we read on the newspapers, the tabloids…. But the success of this documentary is the big headlines, beyond the speeches, the nasty looks at Trump, Greta is first and foremost a human being.

The documentary, though a little bit repetitive in a few places, has some incredible access and is able to produce some very intimate moments with Greta alone with her family, or just by herself, where you actually get a few glimpses into her real persona: a 15 years old girl, with an incredible brain yes, with all the idiosyncrasies and obsessive compulsions that her Asperger syndrome brings with it, but also a person who feels lonely at times, burdened by the weight of responsibility that’s been put on her: “It’s just too much for me” she cries towards the end talking on the phone with her family. And yet her weaknesses are also her strengths: her OCD/Asperger syndrome, in her own words, helps her to focus and “cut all the noise out”…. and then she concludes with “Sometime I think it would be good if people could have a little bit of Asperger’s… At least when it comes to seeing climate change”.She’s an amazing source of inspiration for many and a source of great annoyance (and even hate) for some.

I just hope some of the latter ones will stumble across this film at some point and hopefully reevaluate their thinking… not just about Greta herself but about the environmental problem we are facing.

Mank

Mank ⭐️⭐️

Director: David Fincher Cast: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Tom Pelphrey, Arliss Howard.

I was desperately waiting for this one. I had even re-watched Citizen Kane, to remind myself of all the little details I might have missed, having last watched about 25 years ago. Also, David Fincher is up there among my favourite directors: in fact even when he fails, he does it with so much style and meticulousness that can only be admired. 

Watching Mank I kept of thinking: “this is a film that seems made for critics”. I could see and hear already flocks of them swooning over this and praising like nothing before. After all it’s a film that explores the origins of the beloved Orson Welles’ masterpiece, Citizen Kane, but also it looks stunning in its black & white exquisitely detailed depiction of the old Hollywood of the 30s, transmitting the magic of cinema though the impeccably crafted production design, make-up and costumes. It also happens to have a drunken Gary Oldman who inhabits his character Mank as a second nature. 

Having said all that, despite the cinephile in me (or rather the “movie-geek” in me), I have to confess that this is one if those films I was mentioning above: a film that can certainly admire, but actually I didn’t really enjoy. 

I found most of its dialogue impenetrable, something which I am sure was intentional, but resulted in me tuning off more often that I probably should have. I remained emotionally distant throughout, watching it from a far away, detached and rather uninvolved. I found the story of the actual writing process of “Citizen Kane” fascinating (and quite liked the ending too, though apparently debatable in terms of truth), but felt it was too diluted into  too many  flashback and even more subplots, most if which left me pretty cold as they seemed to lack warmth and colour (no pun intended: I actually really liked its black and white).

This is certainly a film not for everyone and clearly not for me: if you’re looking for another “Se7en” or “Fight Club” or even “The Social Network”, you might as well forget about “Mank”.

Between me and you… handsome as the film is, I was really bored.