Category Archives: Film

Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It’s Time to Recalibrate the Government

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame?”— V for Vendetta

We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.

Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

With Vendetta, whose imagery borrows heavily from Nazi Germany’s Third Reich and George Orwell’s 1984, we come full circle. The corporate state in V conducts mass surveillance on its citizens, helped along by closed-circuit televisions. Also, London is under yellow-coded curfew alerts, similar to the American government’s color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System.

Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?

As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”

Clearly, those we appointed to represent our interests have stopped following the Constitution and listening to the American people.

What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?

In V for Vendetta, as in my novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the subtext is that authoritarian regimes—through a vicious cycle of manipulation, oppression and fear-mongering—foment violence, manufacture crises, and breed terrorists, thereby giving rise to a recurring cycle of blowback and violence.

Only when the government itself becomes synonymous with the terrorism wreaking havoc in their lives do the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny.

V, a bold, charismatic freedom fighter, urges the British people to rise up and resist the government. In Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.

Acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.

This way lies madness.

Then again, madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.

It is time to recalibrate the government.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the farce that is the highly partisan, two-party, bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.

Crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.

That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.

“The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.

There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.

So, what we can do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?

It won’t be easy.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.

This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.

We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.

We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.

We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.

In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.

That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.

In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.

Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.

How to do this? It’s not rocket science.

There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.

Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.

Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.

Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.

That’s their job: make them do it.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.

Saturday Matinee: Lahaina on Fire

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By Craig “Pasta” Jardula

Source: YouTube

Craig “Pasta” Jardula talks with the people of Maui in the wake of the Lahaina Fire. They share their stories about the night of the fire, their opinions on the Government’s response, and their journey moving forward. Craig also explores the community aid camps where Locals are directly helping Locals, providing basic necessities to thousands of people impacted by the fire.

To directly support the residents featured in this film:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/pohaku-sturns-community-relief-fund

https://www.givesendgo.com/honokowair…

https://account.venmo.com/u/jubemello

If you enjoyed this film, consider supporting. On the ground, independent, journalism like this is only made possible by you, the viewer. We rely on, and are so thankful of, your continued support.

https://www.givesendgo.com/Lahainaonfire

Follow Pasta at https://twitter.com/yopasta

Saturday Matinee: White God

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WHITE GOD (2014): DOGS FIGHT BACK

By Dawn Keetley

Source: Horror Homeroom

Summary of White God: Thirteen-year old Lili (Zsófia Psotta) moves in with her father who proves unwilling to pay the fees incumbent on the owners of mongrel dogs. He thus forces Lili to abandon her beloved Hagen on the streets of Budapest. The film follows the dual paths of Lili and Hagen as they, finally, find their way back to each other.

I loved White God (I’ll get that out up front), which premiered at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and recently become widely available in the US. White God is a particularly interesting intervention in the horror genre in that it is the only film I can think of in which the animal (Hagen) becomes the protagonist rather than the antagonist. In all the other natural horror films I’ve seen recently, animals (wolves, sharks, crocodiles, bears) threaten more-or-less sympathetic humans. White God stands alone in showing how profoundly humans threaten animals.

White God is about two-hours long and I’ll warn you up front that it doesn’t become a horror film until about 30 minutes from the end. Only then does the beautifully shape-shifting form of the film end up as a revenge narrative (I couldn’t help comparing it to I Spit on Your Grave [1978]). And while both its human protagonist, Lili, and its dog protagonist, Hagen, are both, in their different ways, abandoned, it’s Hagen who suffers most and who ends up getting his justified revenge.

Up to that point, though, the director brilliantly weaves together resonances of childhood stories like Anna Sewall’s Black Beauty (1877), Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey (1961), filmed in 1963 and again, as Homeward Bound, in 1993, and William H. Armstrong’s Sounder (1969), along with direct references to Jack London’s fiction, notably White Fang (1906).

In fact, White God‘s title is undoubtedly taken from White Fang, as Hagen’s adventures among the uniformly despicable humans that populate Budapest resemble almost exactly a portion of White Fang’s life with a man London pointedly calls the “mad god.” White Fang’s first encounters with humans are with Native Americans—and while they are certainly not positive, their barbarity pales in comparison to the brutality of his first encounters with white men, whom White Fang calls “white gods.” As London writes: “White Fang did not reason it out, did not in his mind make the sharp generalization that the white gods were more powerful.”[i] But so they are—and most of them do not use their power well. The mad “white god” that serves as the clear progenitor to a character Hagen has the misfortune to meet in White God takes White Fang and subjects him to an abusive training program designed to make him a vicious fighter. The training works well, and White Fang goes on to defeat every dog in the Yukon, as well as sundry wolves and a lynx.

Unlike White Fang, Hagen defies his training at a crucial moment, though. At first he goes along with it, acceding to his master’s desire. But then, at the end of his first fight, Hagen looks at his dead rival and has a realization that White Fang does not. Dogs aren’t the enemy.[ii]

From that moment, looking at the bloodied body of the dog he fleetingly thought was his rival, Hagen knows exactly who the enemy really is. He then rounds up all the stray dogs in Budapest, urging them into revolt.

While White God works as a powerful parable of the uprising of animals against their domination and brutalization by humans, it can also be read as an allegory for human oppression. The title, White God, along with the racial hierarchies (of Native Americans and whites) that it imports from White Fang, suggest that the dogs are also stand-ins for those humans who are cast aside because they are not “white,” because they are “mutts” and “half-breeds.” The current crisis in Europe over immigrants, mostly from Syria, and Hungary’s contentious role in that crisis, only intensifies this allegory, as the film has already begun to accrue meanings beyond its moment of inception.

As the dogs stream through Budapest’s streets, exhilarated by their collective power, the film unequivocally becomes a horror film, and the dogs invoke the zombies that streamed through London and Paris in 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) and 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007).

While it is indeed exhilarating to see them, the dogs’ resemblance to zombies infuses these scenes with sadness and dread. Does this resemblance foreshadow their eventual doom? What can dogs do, in the end, in the face of determined human opposition? Do they really have any choice but to submit to their role of our “best friends” as their best means of survival? Despite how bad so many of us are at being their “friend.”

The ending of White God, after Hagen’s glorious and bloody revenge, is ambiguous. Hagen meets Lili again but she’s changed: we’ve seen her shift much more of her allegiance toward humans during the course of her journey (which I found much less gripping than Hagen’s). There’s a scene, which we see right at the opening of the film and then near the end, in which dogs run furiously as Lili pedals her bike. Are they chasing Lili? Is she leading them? Are they both on separate journeys, the dogs indifferent to her? The answer becomes only a bit clearer in the second reiteration of the scene.

The ending presents us with an image that is on all the posters for the film—and its meaning is ambiguous too.

Clearly Lili figures as some kind of “god” figure here, for Hagen and the other dogs: she has become the “white god” of the title. But will she use her power to save the dogs? Or will she merely appease them until others come to destroy them. You can make up your own mind. Me? I’m not hopeful.

R   |   121 mins.   |   Kornél Mundruczó   |   Hungary   |   2014

Grade: A

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Watch White God on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/2332130

Saturday Matinee: Final Cut

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REVIEW: “Final Cut” (2022)

By Keith Garlington

Source: Keith and the Movies

It’s hard to believe that it has been twelve years since French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius won his Best Director Academy Award for the Best Picture winning “The Artist”. While it has become somewhat fashionable in some circles to dismiss that brilliant 2011 film as unworthy, I still hold it in incredibly high regard as a delightful ode to a bygone cinematic era.

Hazanavicius’ latest film couldn’t be more different. “Final Cut” is a meta zombie comedy that is an open-armed tribute to cinema, a love letter to genre filmmaking, a celebration of creative collaboration, and just an all-around wacky piece of work. It’s a faithful remake of Shin’ichirô Ueda’s 2017 cult hit “One Cut of the Dead” but with its own French twist. It’s a consistently clever and routinely funny concoction that sees Hazanavicius and his all-in cast having the time of their lives.

Describing “Final Cut” to those who haven’t seen “One Cut of the Dead” is a bit of a challenge because the less you know going in the better. The film’s unorthodox structure plays a big part in making it such a fun experience. It’s a case of a filmmaker showing you one thing and then adding an entirely different perspective later on. I know that’s vague, but suffice it to say Hazanavicius has a field day playing with his audience’s expectations.

The spoiler-free gist of the story goes something like this. Romain Duris plays Rémi Bouillon, a frustrated filmmaker who signs on to direct a low-budget zombie short film for an upstart streaming platform that specializes in B-movies. But there’s a catch. The 30-minute single-take film is to be shot and streamed LIVE! It’s an unheard of undertaking but one the platform’s ownership has already pulled off in their home country of Japan. Now they want to do it in France.

Rémi is hesitant to take the job at first, seeing it as a doomed-to-fail project. But with the encouragement of his wife Nadia (Bérénice Bejo) and with hopes it will rekindle his relationship with his aspiring filmmaker daughter Romy (Simone Hazanavicius) he agrees.

Soon he’s on location dealing with a smug high-maintenance lead actor (Finnegan Oldfield), his inexperienced lead actress Ava (Matilda Lutz), a supporting actor who can’t stay off the bottle (Grégory Gadebois), and the demands of domineering producers who don’t prescribe to the notion of a director’s creative freedom.

As “Final Cut” shifts to the show’s production phase things get crazy and we gain an entirely new perspective on everything we’ve seen up to that point. Hazanavicius drenches his audience in blood, gore, and countless zombie horror tropes which is a big part of the fun. That said, it’s never the slightest bit tense or scary but neither does it try to be. It’s much more of a comedy, full of running gags, fun characters, an infectious B-movie charm, and a surprising level of warmth that I never expected.

Watch Final Cut on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/13547325

Saturday Matinee: Labyrinth of Cinema

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By Simon Abrams

Source: RogerEbert.com

Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2016, about three years before he completed “Labyrinth of Cinema,” a trippy anti-war drama about Japanese war movies, of which Obayashi re-creates, parodies, and criticizes in one long movie within his movie. Or really, it’s one long movie marathon within Obayashi’s movie since “Labyrinth of Cinema” takes place at an evening-long war film festival hosted by Setouchi Kinema, a small Hiroshima movie theater that’s putting on one last show before permanently closing.

The plot is simple enough to be irrelevant: three bright young things— teeth-picking film historian Hosuke (Takahito Hosoyamada), enthusiastic film buff Mario (Takuro Atsuki), and aspiring gangster Shigeru (Yoshihiko Hosoda)—chase after chaste 13-year-old Noriko (Rei Yoshida) after she tumbles into the Setouchi Kinema’s movie screen, and becomes part of Obayashi’s unstable meta-narrative. By the way: Obayashi died of lung cancer a year and a half ago. You can tell that his death weighed on him just by watching “Labyrinth of Cinema,” his last movie, a three-hour living will, and a dazzling curtain call.

The movie’s Hiroshima setting gives away its personal nature since Onomichi, Hiroshima is director/co-writer/co-editor Obayashi’s hometown and also the main location for some of his movies, including the 1983 bubblegum-psych fantasy “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.” Obayashi is best known to American cinephiles as the director of the 1977 day-glo nightmare “House,” a fizzy horror-fantasy that only became an international cause célèbre in 2009 after it screened at the New York Asian Film Festival and a few other noteworthy events. In “Labyrinth of Cinema,” Obayashi (along with co-writers Kazuya Konaka and Tadashi Naito) tries to sum up what he’s learned and tried to convey through filmmaking in a volatile auto-critique of movies as both seductive propaganda and palliative empathy machines.

Obayashi uses green-screen technology and cheap (but effective) computer graphics to dramatize folksy anecdotes about filmmakers like John Ford and Yasujiro Ozu, which he sandwiches between brutal and/or sentimental episodes about local war crimes and counter-cultural resistance. Sometimes Obayashi quotes poetry, particularly by Chuya “Japan’s Rimbaud” Nakahara. Sometimes, a cartoon character or samurai folk hero (Musashi Miyamoto?!) steals a scene or two. A few characters, like the time-traveling authorial stand-in Fanta G (drummer Yukihiro Takahashi), talk about movies as a beautiful, essential lie that’s first used as a balm and a distraction, and then also considered as a runway to a brighter and still unimaginable future. You give Obayashi three hours of your time, and he’ll give you a brilliant headache.

You might watch “Labyrinth of Cinema” and wonder where the hell this all came from. Like Obayashi’s recent war trilogy (2011-2017), and many of his earlier features—and short movies and TV commercials—“Labyrinth of Cinema” constantly reminds you that it’s “A Movie.” Before Obayashi’s movies begin, the words “A Movie” are usually presented on-screen in a frame within the image’s frame. So in “Labyrinth of Cinema,” Obayashi’s characters are often re-framed by small circular frames within the camera’s frame. Sometimes these images flip around on-screen, so that a character who was on the left side of the screen is now upside, or on the right, as if they were in conversation with themselves, the viewer, and anyone else who’s watching. There are also a surprising number of fart jokes and some callbacks to older Japanese movies like “I Am a Cat,” “The Rickshaw Man,” and “Wife! Be Like a Rose.” “Labyrinth of Cinema” is a lot of movie.

Obayashi’s various projects are instantly recognizable, given his usual combination of mistrust and fascination with movies as an expression of wish fulfillment and nostalgia. So it’s not surprising that his view of the past—and the cinematic image—is never really seductive in “Labyrinth of Cinema.” Cheerfully naïve characters get lost in their companions’ comforting, half-remembered memories, and never stop to wonder why one thing inevitably leads to another, and another, and another. They float around on-screen, unmoved by the laws of gravity or physics and unable to hide in whatever photo-booth-quality backdrop surrounds them. Obayashi’s characters all half-know and half-hope that they’ll live to see the next scene, so they take their time learning how to ride the ever-breaking tidal wave of Japanese history according to Nobuhiko Obayashi.

“Labyrinth of Cinema” is tremendously affecting, frequently beguiling, usually exhausting, and on, and on, and on. An indulgent ramble from an innovative surrealist who was always sensitive and even suspicious of his own work’s impact—as a tool for advertising, political whitewashing, and pure sentimental indoctrination. On his out way the door, Nobuhiko Obayashi left us wondering how he got all the way from “House” to here without losing faith in humanity and his art; I don’t know, but “Labyrinth of Cinema” is still there anyway.

Saturday Matinee: Mandy

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By Brian Tallerico

Source: RogerEbert.com

More than most movies, it’s hard to know where to begin with an appreciation or critique of Panos Cosmatos’ “Mandy.” It’s a really difficult film to capture tonally and even narratively in a review, largely because it is such a stylish, visceral experience that it demands you give yourself over to it actively instead of passively analyzing it. On the one hand, it’s a thriller, of sorts, a vengeance piece about a man killing those who destroyed his life. But, man, does that not really capture the experience of this movie. Some have compared it to an ‘80s heavy metal album cover sprung to life, but that’s only part of “Mandy,” and doesn’t convey the emotional depth that saturates every frame. And then there’s the fact that “Mandy” is kind of two movies in one, a slow-burn journey into hell in the first hour and a blood-soaked climb out of it in the second. Did I mention the chainsaw fight yet?

Nicolas Cage stars in “Mandy” as Red Miller, a lumberjack who lives a quiet life in the woods with his girlfriend Mandy, played by Andrea Riseborough. One day, Mandy catches the eye of a cult leader named Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache), who proceeds to conjure motorcycle-riding demons to steal the girl and make her one of their own. In the process, Red is tortured and nearly killed. The first half of “Mandy” is filled with long, color-saturated takes of impending doom. Even casual behavior like quiet scenes between Mandy and Red have a foreboding nature, and then the film peaks in the middle with a waking nightmare as Red sees something no one should ever see happen to the love of his life. Deeply traumatized, Red is destroyed, and there’s a sequence in which Cage drinks an entire bottle of booze (well he ingests the stuff that isn’t poured on his wounds) while in his underwear, howling like an injured animal. It’s going to be GIF-ed and mocked, but it’s actually a great bit of acting, conveying a man not just mourning or in grief but literally destroyed.

Like a character in a Queensrÿche concept album, Red emerges from this destruction with his plans for vengeance. With a title card that divides the film in half, “Mandy” then becomes the movie that most people will remember in that it’s about Red working his way through both the demons that Jeremiah conjured and, inevitably, the gang itself. The heavy metal comparison is apt not just because the genre often included figures like the nightmarish creations that Jeremiah brought to life but in the very structure of “Mandy,” which unfolds in a very untraditional manner in both halves. Scenes play out like songs on an album, episodically cast in extreme color palettes that amplify the trippy, surreal natures of the entire experience. “Mandy” is a fascinating genre exercise in that it is as untraditional a horror movie as you’ll see this year but also relies on so many classics of the form. It is, at its core, a downright biblical tale of evil and vengeance.

It’s also pretty bad-ass when it comes to stand-out moments, particularly an already-acclaimed fight with two men wielding chainsaws like they’re swords. It’s a perfect blend of the old and new in “Mandy” and a distillation of what the film does well in how it takes a familiar good vs. evil sequence and twists it to fit Cosmatos’ vision.

Having said that, there are times when I felt the length of said vision. “Mandy” runs over two hours, and a little of its style goes a long way. I think there’s a masterful version of this movie that runs notably shorter, but that doesn’t mean there’s not an unforgettable one the way it is right now. 

One more thing before you go on this journey with Nicolas Cage: the incredible Johann Johannsson (“Sicario,” “Arrival“) does the best of his career in this, his final film composition. The score here is another character, a series of screeching, violent noises that add to the tone of the film in ways that can’t be overstated. The film simply doesn’t work without it. And, as much as I like other parts of the movie, Johannson’s work alone justifies a viewing. It reminds us how much we lost by his early passing.

Watch Mandy on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/12253438

Saturday Matinee: Shadow

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

Source: RogerEbert.com

In retrospect, it seems hard to believe that director Zhang Yimou didn’t make his first wuxia-influenced historical action film until two decades into his career, after a string of intimate yet visually striking dramas. But the double-hit of “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers” (both released in 2004 in North America) reinvented him as one of cinema’s foremost directors of intricate mayhem, designed, lit, and edited with such care as to make the cliche comparison between action pictures and musicals feel not just fresh, but deep. Zhang never quite climbed to that peak of global crossover again. His family drama “Coming Home” and his remake of the Coen brothers’ “Blood Simple,” titled “A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop” were more intriguing than compelling, and his recent big-budget international coproductions (“The Flowers of War” and “The Great Wall“) felt more like ambitious financial undertakings than artistic ones. 

“Shadow,” a tale of court intrigue sprinkled with giddy duels and scenes of armored soldiers clashing, isn’t quite a return to form; Zhang’s first two action pictures were so nearly miraculous that it’s hard to imagine them being equalled. But it’s filled with so many remarkable images, particularly in its middle section, that fans of palace intrigue and metaphorically ripe violence will find plenty to like. 

Be warned going in that the first half-hour of “Shadow” is a pretty laborious setup: mostly characters walking in and out of rooms and announcing how they are related to each other, in terms of both bloodline and power dynamics. King of Pei (Zhang Kai), a snippy little despot, is still angry that a neighboring city that used to belong to his kingdom is now in the control of a general named Yang (Hu Jun), who won it in a duel. The king wants to get the city back somehow, or at least gain a foothold in it, so he offers his sister Princess Qingping (Guan Xiaotong) as a wife for Yang’s son, only to be insulted by a counteroffer of making her a concubine and presenting a ceremonial dagger as a gift. To further complicate things, the king’s Commander (Chinese star Deng Chao) just returned from challenging the general to a duel without authorization from higher up. 

And wouldn’t you know it: the Commander isn’t even really the commander. He’s a double named Jing (also played by Chao) who’s been trained from childhood to take over for the Commander if circumstances demand it. And they do: the Commander is hiding in a secret chamber beneath the royal city, recovering from a grievous wound he sustained in the aforementioned duel with the general that resulted in the other city being lost. The only person who knows about the subterfuge is the Commander’s wife Madam (Sun Li), who quite naturally starts to develop feelings for her husband’s double. 

The expository stuff at the front of the film isn’t inherently awful—it’s necessary to understand the large-scale violence that dominates the rest of the story, and the cast does a fine job of balancing simplicity and stylization with psychology. But aesthetically, it doesn’t begin to hint at the splendors that await, and it promises a richness of characterization (particularly among the secondary players) that the movie, which is often pitched at the level of a brilliantly designed video game, doesn’t quite deliver. (Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa—a major influence on Zhang whose works include “Kagemusha,” another historical action/military movie with a secret double at its heart—was better at making the talky bits exciting, too.) 

Once the action kicks in, though, “Shadow” is on rails. Zhang, co-screenwriter Li Wei, cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding, production designer Horace Ma, and costumer Chen Minzheng work in seemingly perfect harmony to create a visual scheme that the director has said is based on the brush techniques of Chinese painting and calligraphy. The world they present would read as black and white (and grey) were it not for the flesh tones of the actors’ faces and bodies, and the voluptuous dark blood that splatters the screen whenever swords, knives, arrows, and crossbow bolts start to fly. 

It’s impossible to understate how thrilling “Shadow” is during its middle section, when Zhang is crosscutting between the increasingly knotty intrigue in two cities, a second duel that we’ve been building toward for 45 minutes, the romantic tension between the Commander and his wife and his double, and a large-scale military action that’s intended to retake a city. 

Confidently showy in a manner that evokes the most dazzling sequences in Zhang’s action classics, the movie takes symbolism that might seem simplistic and overdone (such as the prominent display of the yin and yang symbol in both dialogue and sets) and makes them feel organic to the tale, not in the manner of a novel or play, but an opera or art installation or graphic novel. The true yin and yang of the film is its expressive balance of masculine and feminine elements of design and choreography, especially as they’re expressed in combat. 

The bluntly macho shapes of swords and halberds (as swung and thrust by confident, scowling men) are contrasted against razor-edged umbrella weapons deployed with deliberately feminine motions (by men as well as women; when combatants get in touch with their feminine side, the movie suggests, they’re able to achieve their goals in different, often surprising ways). The bearers of these killer umbrellas practically waltz into combat with them, hips swaying demurely, then use them as toboggans to carry them down steep, muddy hills. A sequence where an umbrella battalion tries to retake an occupied thoroughfare during a rainstorm attains a peak of controlled madness reminiscent of some of the wildest scenes in “Kung Fu Hustle,” a classic that wasn’t afraid to go full Looney Tunes. When Zhang crosscuts between a duel on a rainy mountaintop and a zither battle happening in a subterranean chamber, with the zither music providing the sequence’s melody and the clanging blades percussion, the essence of action cinema is distilled.

When the movie decelerates in its third act, the better to resolve all the plot particulars laid out in the first section, it’s hard not to feel let down. It’s like that feeling where you disembark a roller coaster and can still feel vertigo in your belly. But “Shadow” is so masterful during its wilder sections that a bit of tedium eventually seems a rather small price to pay. Zhang’s action is so magnificently imagined—not just in the bigger, more brazen touches, but in grace notes, like the way a weapon’s gory blade grinds as it’s dragged over rainy cobblestones, trailing plumes of muck and blood—that it shames the current industry norm as expressed in Marvel and DC films and most action thrillers post-Jason Bourne, which consist mainly of swinging the camera around and cutting as fast as possible, often (it seems) to disguise the fact that the performers aren’t all that graceful, and the director doesn’t really have a style, just money. 

Zhang’s best work here is old-school craft, practiced with the latest filmmaking equipment and processes. The movie knows not just what do to technically, but how to make it resonate with the story and themes, and how to make images sing and dance. In a time of diminished expectations for big screen spectacle, and “content” replacing cinema, it takes a master to remind us of what’s been lost. 

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Watch Shadow on Tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/649980/shadow

Saturday Matinee: The Artifice Girl

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By Sheila O’Malley

Source: RogerEbert.com

The fears and possibilities of Artificial Intelligence have probably lurked in the human brain since human beings started telling stories. Pygmalion and his statue could be seen as members of the AI Universe. So, too, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But A.I. has moved out of science-fiction and into reality, impacting various workplaces in ways which would have seemed far-fetched just a couple of years ago. Franklin Ritch’s “The Artifice Girl” is a thought-provoking film that examines the ethics of A.I., moving into even the existential aspects of the concept of artificial intelligence. Any deep inquiry into A.I. is also an inquiry into what it means to be human. Ritch, who wrote, directed, and also appears in the film, keeps the story tightly controlled, so the sole focus is on the mental and emotional challenges facing us when we’re dealing with our preconceived notions of reality and authenticity.

This calls to mind “Blade Runner,” and its source material, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? If a memory is implanted into an android’s brain, a “personal” memory of a childhood that never happened, then isn’t that memory a real thing to the android? The android can’t tell the difference. It feels real. At a certain point, what is or is not “real” is irrelevant. This is when things get unsettling, and “The Artifice Girl” sits in that very unsettling place.

Broken up into three sections, each of which is about half an hour long, “The Artifice Girl” starts off in a very small, dark, windowless room, where a man named Gareth (Ritch) has been brought in for questioning. The two agents in charge (Sinda Nichols and David Girard) take a very rough approach, terrifying and intimidating Gareth (who is not as naive as he initially appears). The issue is an ongoing project designed to combat the spread of pedophiles and predators operating online, devising technological ways to lure these perverted creeps out into the open. Their newest tactic is Cherry (Tatum Matthews), a digitally created nine-year-old girl who hangs out in chat rooms, going on live chats, logging her persistent viewers, the ones who show up, who message her. She’s an effective decoy. She has also developed beyond her original programming, beyond the humans who designed her.

“The Artifice Girl” isn’t plot-heavy. Each scene occurs in a single location, making the film extremely claustrophobic. The characters sit or stand, or pace in windowless rooms, grappling with weighty subjects, throwing around references to the Turing Test, game theory, the uncanny valley, and NLP; all while trying to deal with the complications surrounding either the sentience of “Cherry“, or their own perception of her sentience. In one scene, Gareth and the two agents argue over whether or not Cherry, the digitized child, can consent to something. She looks so real. The thought of her in all those chat rooms is horrifying. It’s almost like the “adults” in charge of Cherry have to keep reminding themselves: “She’s not real, she’s not real, she’s not real.”

To speak more about how the story is structured would be to give too much away. Ritch’s script is thoughtful and intense, making “The Artifice Girl” a mentally engaging and challenging work. The small cast is excellent, particularly young Matthews, whose dialogue is dauntingly technical and delivered in a monotone. There’s a lot of dialogue, and yet “The Artifice Girl” doesn’t feel like it’s too “talky” (except for the third and final scene, where the long monologues drag). The issues at hand are intellectual and cerebral as much as emotional. There’s a great moment where Cherry, the A.I., is being questioned about what she feels about something. Cherry replies, in a flat voice, “Human nature is not something I aspire to.” Considering all she has “seen” online, one can’t blame her.

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Watch The Artifice Girl on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/16151819