|
Review by Tatiana Miranda  Masters of the Air is the latest captivating miniseries from Apple TV+. Produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and based on the book of the same name by Donald L. Miller, the series centers around the 100th Bomb Group of the US Eighth Air Force as they were stationed in East Anglia during WWII. While the show is based on the real-life bomb group — nicknamed the Bloody Hundredth due to its 77% casualty rate — and features fictionalized versions of its members, it never comes across as a history lesson and is instead a riveting look at the realities of war and the technical aspects of the US Air Force. Chock-full of recognizable faces, as well as new names, Masters of the Air utilizes nearly every single character who comes across the screen. Led by Austin Butler as Major Gale Cleven and Callum Turner as Major John Egan, the show also features stellar lead performances from relative newcomers Nate Mann as Major Robert Rosenthal and Anthony Boyle as Major Harry Crosby. More established stars such as Barry Keoghan, Raff Law, Bel Powley, Isabel May, and Fionn O'Shea also star, although in more minor roles. Still, each performance is a standout, and even with such a large cast, the characters never feel overwhelming. While it would have been easy for each episode to fall into a routine of focusing on a specific mission that the Bloody Hundredth faced, it instead weaves different storylines and locations of members to give the series a more cinematic feel. From German imprisonment to celebrations on base, Masters of the Air doesn't focus solely on the fighting aspects of the war or the Air Force. Instead, it paints a multidimensional picture of the 100th Bomb Group and their sacrifices.  One of the more disappointing aspects of the series is its portrayal of the Tuskegee Airmen. Coming in at episode eight of the nine-episode series, the 332nd Fighter Group is portrayed as the supporters of the 100th rather than having their own established storyline and characters. Although the series focuses mainly on the 100th, the attempt to show any of the 332nd, comprising African American military pilots, comes across as a last-minute addition to the storyline. Actors such as Branden Cook and Ncuti Gatwa don't get nearly as much screen time as their white costars, and even when their storyline is interwoven with those of Butler and Turner's characters, they are seen more as background characters.
Overall, Masters of the Air is a fantastically shot and well-acted series, although it does have its few flaws. Still, it's a fascinating look into WWII that doesn't watch as solely a war series but instead features moving portrayals of grief, romance, friendship, and sacrifice in the US Air Force. Masters of the Air premieres on Apple TV+ on January 26. All nine episodes reviewed. Rating: 4/5
0 Comments
Review by Sean Boelman
Lulu Wang established herself quickly when her feature debut, The Farewell, was released, and cinephiles have eagerly been awaiting her follow-up. Wang’s miniseries Expats is maybe one of the most impressive feats in any recent series — thanks to incredible direction and nuanced writing that takes a story that could have easily been melodramatic and turns it into something more profound.
Set in the community of expatriates living in Hong Kong, Expats tells the interconnecting stories of a group of women tied together by a devastating tragedy. Based on a novel by Janice Y. K. Lee, the show is in many ways a melodrama, but there’s such a deep and unexpected humanity that oozes through it, allowing it to avoid histrionics. For much of the first two episodes, it can be hard to see where the story is going, but when the pieces fall into place around the end of the second episode, it’s astounding. Everything really comes together in the penultimate episode, which is one of the biggest swings a series has made in recent history, and it mostly pulls it off. Knowing the world in which Expats is set, one is constantly waiting for the show to become more political. There are definitely some hints of a deeper message — particularly in the fifth episode, which is predominantly set from the perspective of the Filipina servants of this upper-class enclave of society — but the writers seem more interested in the intimate human drama than the bigger societal implications. 
The show’s complexity arises from its characters, who are tremendously complicated individuals. Several of the characters do things that would generally make them unlikeable, and others would typically be seen as pitiable, but Wang’s eye on these people is refreshingly unique. Wang challenges the audience to understand our sympathies in an entirely different way, asking us to consider whether our judgments are fair.
Expats is built around three main performances: Nicole Kidman, Sarayu Blue, and Ji-young Yoo. Kidman’s performance is incredible, with as much nuance as any she has given in her career. However, Yoo steals the show, holding her own with a turn that starts mostly unfussily but explodes into something much bigger in the final third. From an aesthetic level, the show is fantastic. The cinematography by Anna Franquesa-Solano is nothing short of beautiful. However, the series is also elevated by some ambitious directorial flourishes, including some stylistic bookends that are absolutely breathtaking. Expats is a wonderfully nuanced exploration of its story, even if it feels like things wrap up a bit too cleanly. With this, Lulu Wang has cemented herself as one of the best new filmmakers working today, with an excellent ability to craft an emotional story. Expats streams on Prime Video with two episodes on January 26, with new episodes dropping weekly. All six episodes reviewed. Rating: 4.5/5
Review by Sean Boelman
In recent years, the Sundance documentary competition sections have largely been filled with biographies or social justice films, with anything more formally audacious generally being relegated to other sidebars, like NEXT. Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, playing in the World Cinema Documentary competition, is the exception to that rule — an essay film that swings for the fences and is mostly satisfying despite its complex nature.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat explores how the United States government and the Belgian monarchy, among other forces, conspired to use some of the most influential African-American musicians of the 20th century as part of their plot to assassinate the Prime Minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba. It’s an incredibly wild story, and one you might not have heard, but it’s a lot more zeitgeisty than it seems on paper. The biggest thing working against the movie is how incredibly dense it is. It’s understandable that the film is so complex — convoluted even — because the web of deceit being spun here is more intricate than virtually any espionage thriller you’d have seen. Still, for audiences who aren’t able (or willing) to put in the work to dissect the story, it could be easy to get lost in its moving pieces. Still, for all its complexity, Grimonprez manages to tell these interconnecting stories in a way that is consistently engaging. For a documentary that’s two and a half hours long, it moves by quite quickly, thanks to the combined efforts of the stranger-than-fiction story and the kinetic jazz soundtrack lent to it by its subjects. All of this is thanks to the tremendous talent of director Grimonprez. The documentary comprises entirely archive footage, yet there’s such a liveliness and modernity to it. It never feels as if we’re being taught a history lesson. The way Grimonprez weaves the stories of these musical figures into contemporary political events is something that many documentaries have tried and failed to do in the past. Admittedly, the movie does bank a lot on the audience already knowing and respecting who these musicians are. For festival audiences, that’s not going to be an issue. The names involved include jazz legends like Louis Armstrong, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Dizzy Gillespie, and more. But it is hard to imagine that a viewer who comes in that doesn’t have an appreciation — or at least a passing knowledge — of this cohort wouldn’t be frustrated by the deluge of information thrown at them. However, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a film that reward patience. The hectic first hour, when all the various pieces in this political chess game are being put into place, is incredibly hectic. But when the story begins to fall into place, the suppositions Grimonprez makes about the connection between this incident and its greater societal implications are as terrifying as they are brilliant. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is maybe the most singular documentary playing at this year’s Sundance. Although it’s not always successful — you could say it’s occasionally overambitious to a fault — there’s no denying the film’s sheer audacity, something which very few nonfiction works have these days. If nothing else, it’s an entertaining ride that poses some fascinating questions. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is screening at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, which runs January 18-28 in-person in Park City, UT and online from January 25-28. Rating: 4/5 Review by Daniel Lima  Animator Bill Plympton has been at it for decades, exploring his intensely idiosyncratic and off-kilter style and sensibility through short films, feature-length movies, and even the occasional sketch comedy show interstitial. His latest feature, Slide, is another absurdist work that could only be compared to his own oeuvre, which is to say that it is an incredible, visually captivating film that somehow manages to achieve a poetic beauty both in spite and because of how it bucks convention. This is the story of Sourdough Creek, a fictional logging town in the American West around the 1940s. When the unscrupulous mayor gets an offer from a movie studio to shoot a film there, he immediately declares that the town will be converted into a resort, with disastrous effects on the local community. As tensions flare and his grip on the locals becomes tyrannical, the only spark of hope comes from a masked vigilante who looks suspiciously like the mysterious guitar player who just happened to wander into town. To get the obvious out of the way, this does not look or feel like a polished studio release with an astronomical budget. Part of that is due to circumstance; this is a crowdfunded, independently made, traditionally animated film, with a crew of only about a dozen and an animation team of one. Befitting those facts, the animation here is crude, often animating not on ones or twos but on threes and fours, sometimes forgoing animation altogether. Every cut feels almost violent, and scenes are connected either with dream-like haziness or a jarring suddenness. Some might be taken aback by this, but it certainly isn’t atypical of indie animation, particularly when only one person is doing the work. A cursory glance at Plympton’s previous films shows that this is a predicament he has often found himself in.  His penchant for utterly surreal and abrasive imagery is well-documented, and Slide is no exception. The film filters his somewhat off-putting style through the tradition of American folk art, creating wild, borderline nightmarish caricatures of classic Americana: the enigmatic stranger astride a horse, the raucous and sinful town brothel, the darkness of a forest that hides monsters. Everyone from the most dastardly villain to the most righteous heroes is shown in such an exaggerated fashion that they become grotesque, completely divorced from reality. The way these images are drawn only calls attention to the lack of polish, with rough sketch outlines on every character and every background, as if the project was still only a workprint. At first glance, it’s hard not to find it unpleasant — even ugly.
Once the initial shock wears off, however, it’s clear that this effect is intentional. As unconventional and strange as the film looks, it is ultimately telling a very familiar story using very familiar archetypes. The humble village with an evil baron basking in his power, the girl who dreams of growing beyond the confines of home, the monster in the woods, the musician whose songs are so beautiful they can pacify a bloodthirsty mob. This is classic American folklore, but where a more traditional work would make these well-worn touchstones feel rote and safe, Plympton’s style completely disrupts the audience’s ability to let the film wash over them passively. As challenging as the form is, it forces the audience to see this story not as another conventional Western but as a tall tale — an epic myth that merely happens to be cloaked in the iconography of Americana. The initial response may be to recoil, but once the language of this bizarre vision is accepted, it’s impossible not to be swept up in its grandeur. How much one gets out of Slide depends on whether one can actually get on that wavelength. As a film attempting to evoke the spirit of myth and folklore, the actual substance is broad and simple. The moral universe of the world is black and white, the characters are thin, the story isn’t inherently compelling, and the humor is sophomoric and easy. The musical numbers — a fitting mix of the American musical tradition including blues, bluegrass, country, and jazz — are all visually stunning, audibly… less so. The entire appeal rests on whether the Plympton touch is enough to coax the audience into accepting this as not merely a low-budget indie but a 20th-century legend brought to life. It’s easy to understand why some might not be able to make that leap, but I personally find it hard to call it anything less than gorgeous. Slide is screening at the 2024 Slamdance Film Festival, running January 19-25 in-person in Park City, UT and online from January 22-28. Rating: 4.5/5
Review by Sean Boelman
Slamdance is often referred to as the quirkier, more indie alternative to Sundance, as the former is where you find many of the more idiosyncratic, smaller-budget discoveries of the year. Filmmaker Pete Ohs is no stranger to the festival world — his previous feature, Jethica, having premiered at SXSW — and his latest film, Love and Work, is a nice little satirical comedy, even if it seems to think it’s more profound than it is.
The movie follows two aimless people living in a world where having a job is illegal, which is unfortunate, because they love to work. In many ways, this high-concept comedy feels like a mixture of mumblecore and lo-fi sci-fi. It’s on a very particular, weird wavelength, but audiences who are willing to meet it on its quirky level are in for a delightful little romp. It will probably come as no surprise that this absurdist premise is tied to some pretty staunchly anti-consumerist themes. There’s absolutely no subtlety to be found here — with a narrator even going so far as to outright state the central thesis of the film in the final moments — and in many ways, it feels like preaching to the choir, as the audience that will seek out a low-fi indie like this probably already agree with its sentiments. Similarly, the humor is also rather one-note. The first twenty to thirty minutes have a novelty to them that’s quite funny, but the movie reveals its hand a bit too early. At under 75 minutes in total runtime, Love and Work is still breezy and agreeable. However, the attempts at jokes in the back half are somewhat uneven. 
That said, the film is kept consistently engaging with some interesting bits of world-building sprinkled throughout. For example, an explanation of the underground slang — best described as a Cockney-esque secret language for workaholics — is pretty ingenious and goes a long way in immersing the viewer in the movie’s “past of another future.”
This is clearly a micro-budget indie, but the style goes a long way in making it feel a lot bigger than it actually is. There’s a simple worker’s tune used as a motif in the film, which functions perfectly as a comedy song. The movie looks very good, too. The black-and-white cinematography is an age-old trick for independent filmmakers, but it is used here in an incredibly deliberate way. It also helps that the characters are pretty charming and relatable. The “love” in the title refers to the romantic comedy aspect of the story, which kicks in mostly in the back half, and really humanizes these characters on an even deeper level than we already empathize with them. Despite the absurdity, the film manages to remain firmly grounded in emotion. Love and Work is an effective, if simple micro-budget satire from Pete Ohs. Although it’s entirely obvious what the movie’s trying to say, and it doesn’t offer any particularly profound observations we haven’t heard before, it has more than enough quaint charm to have a solid life as an indie gem on the festival circuit and beyond. Love and Work is screening at the 2024 Slamdance Film Festival, which runs January 19-25 in-person in Park City, UT and online from January 22-28. Rating: 4/5 |