New this week, we’ve got a possible challenger to the Avengers’ hold on the box office, four excellent documentaries, three films I haven’t seen and two I didn’t really need to.
Here’s the list:
Pokémon Detective Pikachu: 3
The White Crow: 2 ½
Poms: 1 ½
DOXA films: One Child Nation, Midnight Traveler
DOXA films: Miles Davis Birth of the Cool, Who Let the Dogs Out
ALSO PLAYING :
An Elephant Sitting Still: --
Tolkien: --
The Hustle: --
POKÉMON DETECTIVE PIKACHU: I’m new to the Pokémon phenomenon. I went to see what I could learn and quite enjoyed the movie. Better to listen to my grandsons, though. They’re the natural audience for it; they’ve collected the cards and seen some of the animated movies or TV episodes and they were entertained by the variation here and the huge special effects scenes it came with.
As I understand it, Pokémon are fanciful creatures that are pitted into battles against each other by their trainers. That’s banned in this version because an industrialist (Bill Nighy) has built a city where they and human beings can live together and partner up. Technically, visually on screen, this co-existence is done well, but there’s a dark side that three characters discover.
Tim (Justice Smith), his dad’s ex-partner in the detective trade (Pikachu, the yellow thing voiced by Ryan Reynolds) and an intern at a TV news station (Kathryn Newton) get into a secret research facility and find a project with good intentions gone wrong. The details are complicated and not all that logical but the presentation is spectacular. The facility is gleaming with sci-fi ambience. Earlier, there’s a raucous illegal Pokémon battle and later an earthquake that crumbles the hills around. As thrilling as these are though, it’s the buddy comedy that is the real highlight. The wise-cracking Reynolds is a perfect opposite to Smith acting glum. The lines are only intermittently funny but they fly fast. (Scotiabank, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
THE WHITE CROW: At the height of the Cold War, in 1961, Rudolf Nureyev was the first artist to defect from the Soviet Union. It was a major event both culturally and politically. He was revered as the best ballet dancer of his generation and his leaving was a huge loss for Russia. Not much of that comes across about him in this film directed by Ralph Fiennes, scripted by playwright David Hare and taken from a biography by Julie Kavanagh. We don’t learn what drove him to excel, need to be the best and why he was such an outsider, the white crow of the Russian idiom.
It doesn’t help that the film switches repeatedly between three time frames: childhood, ballet school and a tour to Paris. Fiennes is very low key playing his teacher and the Ukrainian dancer, Oleg Ivenko, who they found to play Nureyev, just doesn’t manage to convey his powerful presence. One character calls him “the most selfish man I’ve ever met” and very arrogant. Then why is the first half of the film so turgid with sedate discussions about the art of ballet, what to communicate and why dance at all? Later in Paris, when Nureyev haunted the art galleries, gay bars and nightclubs, drawing strict warnings from his KGB handlers and leading to his defection, the film does turn interesting and tense. It doesn’t explain much though, despite repeated flashbacks to his childhood and Fiennes’ own reference to “the ferocity of who Nureyev needed to be.” The dance sequences are nice but too short. (5th Avenue) 2 ½ out of 5
POMS: I thought hard and long on how to turn aside my negative feelings about this one. It’s so well-intentioned and trying so hard to be uplifting that I shouldn’t just dismiss it. But I am. Its cliché-ridden mission to tell old people that it’s never too late comes off as more than a little uncomfortable. That’s mostly because the seniors here pick the wrong way to show it. They become cheerleaders.
Diane Keaton, Rhea Perlman, Pam Grier, Jacki Weaver and four others form a squad to show they can still do it. They live in a retirement community where anything like that is forbidden. So, they’re rebels against unkind authority as well as old people trying to re-live their youth. That’s all fine, but the details aren’t. Keaton’s character is dying of cancer. She vomits into the toilet several times. Another performs in a wheelchair, after a fall. Weaver’s character, the liveliest of the lot, likes to attend funerals for the free food. There are a lot of jokes about the problems of old people, an embarrassing video that goes viral and then coaching help from a real cheerleader to get the squad into a national competition. Even as a fantasy, it’s hard to take seriously although it does build to a poignant ending. Too late to save the film, though. (International Village and suburban theatres) 1 ½ out of 5
Four DOXA films: The festival is on through Sunday. For more information visit www.doxafestival.ca
ONE CHILD NATION: China was so for about 35 years in an attempted population control that misfired. They now allow couples to bear two children. Here you can learn about everything that went wrong and much of it is absolutely harrowing. There were forced sterilizations, abortions, punishments that included the destruction of family homes and, not unexpectedly, corruption. Some of that took surprising forms. For some years there was a thriving adoption industry sending babies overseas—for a fee. Newspaper ads showed pictures of children available.
How they got those children is one of the most shocking parts of the story that Nanfu Wang tells in her film. She’s from China, lives in the US and went back to document what happened so that people won’t forget. What she hears, including from relatives, is startling. A former village chief tells why he enforced the policy. He had to obey orders. A midwife regrets the thousands of sterilization and abortions she did. People talk of abandoning babies (usually girls) on the roads and others talk of picking them up and selling them to orphanages for adoption. There’s much more, none of it pretty, in this remarkable film. (Screens Sat at 4 and Sun at noon)
MIDNIGHT TRAVELER: I’ve seen it before in news reports and other films—migrants making the desperate trek northward to Europe. But never like this. All these scenes are caught on cell phones by the people themselves. Nothing shakey, all clear, colorful, tightly edited and very dramatic. The Fazili family from Kabul, Afghanistan is targeted by the Taliban after a mullah started a boycott of the café they operated. They were refused asylum wherever they applied and set out (with the help of people smugglers) hoping to get to Germany. We’re with them for almost three years on late night transports in cars, van, boats or even just long walks. We get to a succession of refugee camps, a safe house in Bulgaria, four nights sleeping in a forest. Local toughs attack a crowd of refugees in one town. The police can’t do anything and the smugglers often demand more money. The migrants have to do a lot of waiting in various places and we get an authentic up close study of a distressing reality playing out every day. Says one girl, “I don’t want to remember this in the future.” (Screens Sat and Sun evening)
MILES DAVIS: BIRTH OF THE COOL: This biography of the iconic jazz innovator is anything but cool. Early on maybe, when it feels like a standard life sketch of an artist. Then it digs deeper. It’s a multi-layered study of a complex man, driven to make music, searching for his own sound, feeling insecure at times, angry just as often particularly about racism in America, anti-social and depressed, drug addicted until his friends rescued him. Many appear to talk about him, including Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, George Wein, Quincy Jones and his first wife Frances Taylor.
The actor Carl Lumbly reads his words and it’s as if Davis is narrating his own story. He was the son of a dentist in East St. Louis, absorbed all kinds of music, got himself invited to and discovered at the Newport Jazz Festival and loved to visit Paris where he was accepted without mention of his race. He met intellectuals, scored a movie for Louis Malle and romanced Juliet Greco. Back in the US, he turned depressed and paranoid. He died of a stroke in 1991.There are generous excerpts from his music and full background on some of his classic albums like Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew. And above all, a deep appreciation of his sound. Harbie Hancock says it’s “like a stone skippin’ across a pond.” (Screens tonight, Fri, at 7 and Sun afternoon)
WHO LET THE DOGS OUT: Of all the DOXA films I’ve seen this year, this is the most fun. A little absurd too. You know that song from 19 years ago. It was a huge hit for the Baha Men and its been the subject of many law suits by people claiming they wrote it. New York artist Ben Sisto spent eight years investigating, distilled his research into a slide and music lecture and Vancouver’s Brent Hodge has him performing it in this film. The story takes many turns. The band is from the Bahamas, but a Trinidad version preceded it. Then a couple of Toronto producers said they wrote it. Then a guy in England. Another recording preceded him and Sisto was told about (and heard or saw video) of even earlier uses of the song in Michigan and Texas. Completely engrossing stuff. Musicologists talk about the folk process that used to carry songs around. Now everything gets copyrighted and litigated. Sad but also funny sometimes. (Screens tonight, Fri., and Sun. afternoon)
And three that I haven’t seen …
AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL: By all accounts this is a masterpiece. Reviews have been raves and Cinema Scope magazine named it the best film of last year. But at four hours long, I haven’t had the time to see its day-in-the-life story of four disillusioned characters in northern China. The title refers to a trip they take to a zoo where an elephant seems to not care about any problems at all. It is director Hu Bo’s only film. He also wrote the novel but committed suicide after filming wrapped. (VanCity Theatre Mon to Thurs)
TOLKIEN: Not previewed here but the subject of some praise in England is this drama telling the life story of JRR Tolkien, the Lord of the Rings author. He’s played by Nicholas Hoult during his university years and war service, especially charting the effects of the latter. (Park Theatre)
THE HUSTLE: This remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which was itself a remake of Bedtime Story, shows that women can be just as good as men at con jobs. Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson do the scams this time, with considerable pains to show how easily men can fall victim because of their vanity and pride. An old story updated to fit the times, I guess. (International Village and suburban theatres)