Saturday Matinee: Yes

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

Source: RogerEbert.com

Nadav Lapid’s “Yes!” is about married entertainers performing for the rich and powerful in Tel Aviv while a genocide unfolds 40 miles away and feeling bad about it, but not bad enough to quit doing it. The film has been described elsewhere as a satire, but despite its trips into cuckoo comedy and some devices so cheerfully self-aware that they’d fit into a Looney Tunes or Three Stooges short, the movie is too earnest to wear the satire label comfortably. Like most of the director’s work—including “Ahed’s Knee”—it has many expressionistic and dreamlike elements, and weaves a loose, fairly simple story around wild situations that are mainly about questioning Israel’s self-image, prodding it, sometimes tearing at it. 

The main characters are a pianist-comedian known as Y (Ariel Bronz) and his dancer-choreographer wife, Yasmine (Efrat Dor). They share a small Tel Aviv apartment with their infant son, Noah, and eke out a living mainly by performing for powerful Israelis and foreigners at parties where drugs, skin, and indifference to suffering are all on display.

Then a Russian oligarch identified in the credits only as Big Billionaire (Aleksei Serebryakov) connects with Y and offers him a huge sum to write the new anthem, a jingoistic bit of self-affirmation praising the Israeli Defense Force and validating the mistreatment of Palestinians in Gaza as a necessary for self-defense. The anthem that Y ends up writing is actually a pre-existing song, 2023’s “The Song of the Victory Generation,” a jingoistic exhortation to mass murder that rewrites the lyrics to Haim Gouri and Sasha Argov’s “Hareut,” a poem set to music honoring soldiers who were killed during Israel’s founding.

Both Y and his wife are thirty-somethings who live like college students who probably won’t graduate. They stay out all night after gigs, and join in decadent scenarios (Yasmine even snorts coke lines off two pairs of buttocks), then return home wasted. They both know such a lifestyle is neither sustainable nor conducive to good parenting. They’d love to give it up for a quieter existence, one where they aren’t constantly anxious about money. So Y says yes to the anthem assignment, then impulsively dyes his hair blonde. Radically changing one’s appearance, of course, is a way for fictional and real people alike to announce to the world that they’ve changed, or give themselves permission to change at some future date.

The first half of the movie makes Y and Yasmine seem so tightly bonded and politically aligned that they could be autonomous halves of the same organism. Y’s commission introduces real tension into the relationship, shattering their connection. “Do you know what this song will do for us?” Y pleads. “Noah will grow up in a palace!” Yasmine used to smile sweetly at her husband. Now her resting face is a go-to-hell look.

The film mostly avoids charges of being a self-satisfied but empty spectacle by regularly returning to a big question: can you consider yourself a moral person while participating in immoral acts? The question has been dealt with in countless works of art. A notable difference here, particularly in the context of films about Israeli identity post-Oct. 7, is that the filmmaker doesn’t have any sympathy for complicity, no matter what the context. That point-of-view is consistent and unyielding. It’s expressed not just in the couple’s arguments but in omniscient narration that chimes in occasionally with a sardonic quip or a cutting observation, such as noting the irony that a nation founded by survivors of a genocide would perpetrate one. The scene between Y and Big Billionaire is the serpent approaching Eve in the Garden of Eden. Y sells his soul, then tries to justify the choice as necessary for the family’s survival (i.e., their comfort).

It’s not surprising to learn that this director studied philosophy at university. Lapid’s movies often choose a straightforward, didactic approach that would soon become tedious if the filmmaking weren’t kinetic and adventurous. At a time when too many filmmakers are buckling under survival pressures and adopting the Netflix technique of constantly reminding people of what’s happening in the plot, so that viewers half-watching while scrolling their phones don’t get lost, it’s refreshing to see a movie that asks viewers to concentrate and listen, formulate opinions on every choice, and accept that not everything in the movie will be to their liking.

There are also moments in where you can’t be sure what’s real and what is, for lack of a better phrase, a visual figure of speech—hyperbole or metaphor expressed through a sight gag. After a discussion of whether the public cares about specific ethical issues, two characters look directly into the camera, their playfully reproachful faces saying, “Well, you don’t! When a character describes a new skyscraper that’s to be built on seized land, we see the building erupt from the ground and rise hundreds of feet into the air.

The immersive score (by Sleeping Giants and Omer Klein) and the lively editing (by Nili Feller) would give “Yes!” a powerful musicality even if it weren’t packed with musical interludes of various sorts—so many that it’s constantly on the edge of turning into a full-on sung-through musical. It opens with a long dance sequence at a gathering of the filthy rich, with Y and Yasmine performing a semi-improvised act that takes them from a stage down into the audience and then into a swimming pool, and involves clowning with the guests, swallowing and expelling tiny plastic balls, faking a death, even fellating a dildo for laughs. It’s as if party clowns specializing in children’s birthday parties had been hired for a bacchanal.

Things grow more visually euphonious from there. The couple’s theme song is the Elvis Presley version of “Love Me Tender,” like Sailor and Lulu in David Lynch’s “Wild At Heart,” but in place of Sailor’s snakeskin jacket (just like Marlon Brando’s in “The Fugitive Kind”), Y has snakeskin boots (a reference to a reference to a reference); the song is performed as a duet, then solo. The opening ends with a glimpse of a painting by Berlin-born George Grosz, who, per Encyclopedia Britannica, “…savagely [attacked] militarism, war profiteering, the gulf between rich and poor, social decadence, and Nazism.” Grosz’s warped, grotesque portraits connect “Yes!” to Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret,” a film full of human faces made Grosz-like (or just gross) by masks, fish-eye lenses, and funhouse-mirror reflections: a story of militarized bigotry trampling creatives, progressives, and the dispossessed—and, of course, a musical.

A pivotal sequence finds Y reconnecting with a childhood friend and onetime lover named Leah (Naama Preis), whose pre-Oct. 7 job translating texts for businesspeople was derailed into a gig translating for the IDF. She’s become radicalized in the opposite direction from Y and Yasmine. Y absorbs Leah’s reactionary sentiments by spending time with her and mirroring her self-pitying, nationalistic talking points. As he and Leah drive through occupied territory remembering days gone by, Leah recounts her experience of the Hamas attacks against Israelis, racing through a list of witnessed atrocities—shootings, rapes, dismemberments, necrophilia—until she runs out of breath and breaks down in rage and despair: a spoken-word aria from hell. It’s the capper on Preis’s tour-de-force performance. And it sets up another haunting musical moment, one that links love and loyalty to patriarchy and nationalism: a montage of the duo driving past signifiers of dictatorship (fences topped with razor wire; monolithic border walls; a flatbed truck carrying a tank) while the car radio plays “Stand by Your Man.” This is all presaged with a long, brilliantly staged piano duet by Y and Leah in which their intuitive recall of how to play a beloved song (their “Love Me Tender,” perhaps) foretells Y reconnecting with the obedient boy he used to be.

“Yes” runs 150 minutes and doesn’t always fill the running time with material that feels urgently necessary. It’s rambling, disconnected, even navel-gazing at times. But it’s always exciting to watch—sometimes to a fault, with Shaï Goldman’s camera whipping from side to side and careening through rooms and hallways to accentuate the characters’ emotions or put us in their anxious, guilt-ridden minds. There’s a branch of 21st international art cinema that works within an oddly specific mode: kinetic, visceral, with the look and sound of a top-of-the-line Hollywood production, and a confrontational attitude leavened by bleak humor. “Yes!” exemplifies it. It’s worth seeing and arguing about. Even if you end up hating it, there are moments you’ll never forget.

Watch Yes on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/16330270

Saturday Matinee: Head

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By Jake Walters

Source: The Long Take

At the beginning of Head, Monkees’ drummer Micky Dolenz runs away from a legion of fans and dives off a bridge into a body of water. If this is too-obviously following in the footsteps of its prankish predecessor, A Hard Day’s Night, where the Beatles suffered a similar crowd-sourced fate, it also blows it to smithereens. Rather than canonizing the ‘60s, Head offers a comeuppance, jumps into the deep end of the next decade, dissolving into an aqueous, collective, diffuse space called the early ‘70s.

 Soon enough, the band performs the phenomenal, acid-stained rocker “Circle Sky,” a mission statement of the band’s newly serious attitude toward their music that ultimately unweaves itself in the very act of coming into being. If the song promises progress, a band achieving new heights of self-worth and self-ownership, the lyrics offer a vision of eternal return that culminates in fans rushing the stage only for the band to be crumble as mannequins, material constructs of composite parts, all image and no flesh. Rather than personal authenticity, the film explodes into gleeful mediation, a promise that ostensible freedom only masks new modes of control, that genuine originality is only one more mask. Head marked the band announcing their recovery of their own catalogue as an exercise in self-becoming, and in doing so they paradoxically destroy themselves. We’re off to the race in the opening minutes, in other words, but we’re also lost in an abyss. In the band’s go-for-broke stylistic tour-de-force, they go beyond playful monkeying around and instead monkey wrench the nuts and bolts of the machine that made them.

Writer-Director Bob Rafelson had concocted, quite literally, the band’s image, explicitly turning the “fab” in their PreFab Four image from Fabulous into Fabrication. Slotting the band members into artificial roles and shuttling them through various mostly unexplained situations, The Monkees television show was the epitome of pop post-modernism, a roguishly disobedient experiment in televisual liquidity that was also a vexing and mettlesome portrait of four lost souls struggling to maintain stable selves amidst a polymorphous and unmooring world. While the show largely took this playful casting aside of reality in stride, testing and teasing at systems of popular imagery from the relative inside, Head is a more cynical, explosive affair, a downright nasty exercise in self-deconstruction. The band look and sound tired here, being pushed and prodded in and around sets, sequences, and sketches, forced into new roles and identities all while being asked to maintain their artificially constructed image. In almost every sequence, they’re running to or from something, or being walled in by forces that seem increasingly opaque and invisible as the film continues, as though it alone simply cannot visualize what ails it, cannot conjure the totality of overlapping enigmas constraining it.  

Thus the film imagines pyrrhic victories like Dolenz futilely punching a Coca-Cola machine in a desert, an amusing parody of the Wild West saturated with corporate malfeasance. When Dolenz finds a tank, presumably arrived from one of the other sequences, a faux war film turned into a bunker football game, the film understands his demented-grin glee as a sign of his exhaustion. (It’s less surprising than it may seem that Dolenz was originally considered for the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 film, a role that went to Rafelson’s friend Jack Nicholson). Later, the film reveals that at least part of the film takes place in the hair of past-his-prime Western actor Victor Mature. If the band are Sea Monkeys, those mischievous little devils, they’re also head lice, itching and scratching, propagating profusely, dancing on the brain of classic Hollywood Western cinema.

In doing so, Head turns to televisual flow as termite art, eating away at cinema’s hollowed form. They at least have the good grace to take Mature along for the ride, recognizing that his name is so apt for an antagonist for the band’s acid-scrawled juvenilia that you’d forgive the band for thinking they’d conjured his whole career up whole cloth just to appear here. Head’s finale, where the band escape and escape again, dissolving themselves in a literal age of Aquarius only to find themselves in another more pernicious prison in the back of Mature’s truck, is as vicious as anything Godard or Antonioni created, perhaps because it establishes its critique of what Guy Debord called “the spectacle” from within Hollywood’s own entrails. Imagining a cinematic diarrhea, Head constantly and incessantly spews the band back into the desert, the biome that, in films, books, critical theories, and head-trips alike, so frequently serves as the unformed and deconstructive space of the mind. Here, the film joins Monte Hellman’s The Shooting in questioning whether this formlessness was simply an Ouroboros, an imaginative ego trip for minds to spew their own thoughts out and have them talk back to us. The further we spread horizontally outward, the more we end up right where we started.

Admittedly, Head’s head-scratching ambition, which involves chasing a kind of cosmic self-abnegation on the part of both the band and the film, requires an energy that doesn’t come easy for the film, nor its characters. The film’s paradoxical atmosphere of curdled zest thrives on never really progressing anywhere, and the film seems all too self-aware in naming a key, Ringo Starr-ish song “Do I Have to do this All Over Again.” Head’s endlessly frictive relationship between freedom and enclosure figures television as a prison-like black box and an implosive void that reorients and revises itself constantly, shifting tonal and textural registers. Or does it? Part of the film’s argument is its own triviality, and, daringly, the band figures the remarkable heterogeneity of its sequences and sketches as little more than a smooth paste. That’s a damned, damaged thing for any film to do. Head shoves it down our throat, cackling, and the ‘60s seem to die in the process.

Score: 10/10

Saturday Matinee: Eega

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EEGA Is The Best, Most Insane, Most Inventive Film Of The Year. Catch This Fly While You Can!

By J. Hurtado

Source: ScreenAnarchy

There is a reason that S.S. Rajamouli is considered the most innovative director in the Telugu film industry, and Eega is the perfect illustration of why he deserves to wear that crown. The film is completely insane, endlessly enjoyable, and absolutely unique. Eega is the best film about a man reincarnated as a housefly avenging his own murder that you will ever see. It isn’t easy to find, but I highly recommend looking through the list of theaters linked below for a screening near you, you’ll come out of the auditorium a changed person.

Nani, played by an actor of the same name, is a free spirit, a young man whose only goal in life is to woo the beautiful Bindhu (Samantha). Bindhu works at a non-profit organization, and as such she makes the occasional cold call looking for donations to keep her wheels moving. One day she is unfortunate enough to call on Sudeep, played by Kannada film star Kiccha Sudeep, a wealthy land developer with a skeezy look about him and a weakness for pretty young things. When Sudeep learns that Bindhu has a crush on Nani, he kills his only rival for Bindhu’s hand and attempts to make his move, but Sudeep didn’t count on the transcendent power of love. Reincarnated as a common housefly, Nani proceeds to make Sudeep’s life a living hell. With a bit of persistence and some help from his former human flame, Bindhu, a plot hatches and the pair plan their vengeance in some of the most amazing sequences I’ve ever seen.

First thing’s first, I think it is only fair to note that I saw Eega in its original Telugu language with no subtitles. While I was able to pick out a word hear and there (anyone who watches enough south Indian films learns to say “I will kill you” in a number of languages and dialects pretty quickly), the script and dialogue were completely lost on me. That being said, at no point during the film did I feel lost, the plot and story are completely understandable even without subtitles, and while literal understanding of the dialogue may have helped, I would have no problem walking right back into another unsubtitled screening of Eega and watching it all over again.

Now. Eega. Where to start. First of all, the very concept of the film is completely insane. How does one turn a non-verbal housefly into (a) a compelling protagonist, and (b) a believable threat to a human antagonist. Rajamouli’s scripting and marvelously inventive story handles both of those concerns with aplomb. In spite of the lunacy of the concept, at no point did I feel that the characters were acting in ways that didn’t fit the story or the universe that was created for them. The fly is not endowed with any superpowers, he doesn’t talk or crack jokes, he doesn’t really do anything that a fly, in sentient, couldn’t do. And I bought it; hook, line, and sinker.

There are so many ways that this film could have failed. One big worry of mine was the fact that the idea of an avenging housefly makes the filmmakers necessarily reliant on massive quantities of CG, something with which even the biggest Indian productions still have problems. However, to my delight, the CG was never distracting, not even for a moment. I suppose if I’d been bored I could have taken the time to dissect the flaws in the technical aspects, but those moments just didn’t exist in this film. It never stops moving, it’s incredibly well-paced, and at right around two and a half hours, that’s quite a feat in and of itself.

One standout performance in the film comes from Telugu film newcomer, Kiccha Sudeep as the villainous Sudeep. The requirements of the role have Sudeep acting largely opposite an imaginary fly. The fly goes into his ears, up his nose, into his eye, and gets literally and figuratively into his head very early on. His ability to convey this character’s decaying mental state in the midst of all of the chaos around his is remarkable. He is manic, he is sincerely threatening, but most of all, he’s legitimately hilarious. Sudeep has these crazy bug eyes that scream madness and say more with a glance than many actors can with three pages of monologue. In a performance that goes long stretches with no dialogue at all, Sudeep steals the show, and was my favorite human character in Eega.

However, I cannot leave this review without talking about the craziest thing of all, that goddamned fly. I suppose that everyone has had the experience of being pestered by a fly or a gnat at some point in their lives, but not like this. Nani’s perseverance is remarkable, and the continual invention on the part of Rajamouli to make him a sincere threat to Sudeep is remarkable. Only S.S. Rajamouli could show a fly causing a human to roll his car in a most spectacular fashion to end the first half of the film, and then follow it up by making that seem like mere distraction for the really good stuff.  There’s a training montage with the fly lifting weights and running on a makeshift treadmill for Christ’s sake! And it doesn’t feel out of place AT ALL.

Every time I thought I had a handle on Eega, it threw me for a loop in the best possible way. Eega is easily the most flat-out entertaining film I’ve seen this year, bar none, and I didn’t understand more than half a dozen words of dialogue in the whole thing. It’s that good. It’s often said that the best filmmakers know how to show, not tell their stories, and if that’s the criterion for master filmmakers, S.S. Rajamouli is someone you need to know about. Incredible action sequences, inventive storytelling, technical excellence, and laughs and gasps that just keep coming; Eega has it all.

I happen to know for a fact that there are forty seven screens in the USA showing Eega this weekend, and only about ten of them will have subtitles. If you are near one of those ten, I will punch you in the throat if you miss this film. If you aren’t near a theater with subs, don’t be a fucking pussy, you don’t need them to enjoy this remarkable piece of work. Eega is a winner, plain and simple.

Saturday Matinee: Sylvio

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By Bill Arceneaux

Source: Film Threat

Perhaps doomed to go unnoticed on first viewing, there are lovely and thoughtful moments strung throughout Sylvio, made up of slow gazes and floating / falling particles. Dust in the sun light, bubbles in a fish tank and snow on a street corner provide temporary reprieve from reality and unexpected bursts of clarity for lead gorilla Sylvio (played by himself) and new friend Al (co-director Kentucker Audley). These short bits of time are first used to express the doldrums of unfulfilled life – via a water cooler and kitschy toys first – but as the scenarios shift, so go these bits, matching emotion for emotion. Most impressive and done with little to no dialogue at all, we gather what we need to know and ought to feel about a stone faced gorilla and his exhausted buddy.

Movies like Sylvio are, in their own way, slapstick. Not in the traditional Three Stooges manner, mind you, but in a more subdued way. A more atmospheric and emotional way. Silently slapstick, I’d say, in the way that I consider Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel a little slapstick. In that film, this goof genre is mostly rude, crude and blunt. For Sylvio, which wears its heart on its sleeve, the funny is not when our hero breaks stuff on cue, but when the absurdly silly meets the dramatically genuine. It’s an almost tragi-comedy of over exaggerated clumsy like circumstances. It reminds me of (despite the stone face reference made a paragraph ago) Harold Lloyd, the everyman involved in the impossible. Our lovable and heartfelt gorilla matches the man with the glasses by being a hopeless romantic who is sensitive and capable of anything. A double bill with Grandma’s Boy might be in the cards.

The plot is, to boil it down, UHF from the point of view of an office clerk version of Stanley Spadowski. Which is, to boil it down again, brilliant. The World’s Greatest Janitor and TV Star trophy holder isn’t as disillusioned when we first meet him in the Weird Al movie, and is certainly more flat out ridiculous than Sylvio’s Sylvio, but he’s just as childlike and fantastical. Being a gorilla, living alone and greeted after work by depressing microwavable dinners, Sylvio’s one outlet of release comes in the form of his puppet show short films, The Quiet Times with Herbert Herpels. This is no Spadowski’s Clubhouse – more “Moral Orel” and Anomalisa. His shows are hilarious on one hand, giving us an inner id that we wouldn’t expect from an everyday working animal. On the other hand, these segments provide terrifically innocent insight into Sylvio’s background, his hopes, his dreams and his worries. They’re enough to bring about teary eyes.

I was at first concerned that, given the nature of Kentucker Audley’s video essays for The Talkhouse (which are great), Sylvio may be some sort of joke or prank, poking fun at the themes within and the audience without. An Andy Kaufman routine, essentially. But, thinking on it, I came to the conclusion that this doesn’t matter. Kaufman’s comedy was outlandish and utilized trickery for sure, but also came from true places deep inside of himself. He meant no ill will. I don’t believe this movie is a play on our minds, but even if it were, it comes from a good place and would only enrich our collective experience. Yes, it’s a film based on a Vine act. Yes, an app famous gorilla can make do more than perform tricks. No, the slight of hand here is not at our expense nor is it exploiting anyone. Sylvio is hilarious and deeply kind, granting us an adaptation more depthful than expected from internet stardom.     

We could all stand to have the kind of spaced out observational moments of self reflection that Sylvio so nicely performs. Be it stars or rain drops, zoning out American Beauty style, even for a few seconds, might be enough to make one appreciate the little things. Or the bigger thing… am I spinning out of my head? Could Sylvio be such a perfectly constructed trick on critics like me, making us miss the forest for the trees? DID Andy Kaufman fake his own death? Nah. Perception is reality, and intent is usually irrelevant. No matter what, Sylvio gave me belly laughs and evocative feels. Thus far, it is my favorite film of the year. A most disturbing year, but still.

Sylvio (2017): Directors: Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley / Writers: Albert Birney, Kentucker Audley and Meghan Doherty / Stars: Sylvio Bernardi (as himself), Kentucker Audley, Tallie Medel

Watch Sylvio on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/watch/video/16458238