Review by Daniel Lima The democratization of filmmaking has allowed many people who would otherwise never be able to make a movie the ability to do so. Sometimes, this allows for unique perspectives and the kind of passion projects that would never make it past the studio gatekeepers of Hollywood. Other times, you get something like They're Here, a documentary that reveals absolutely nothing about its subject matter, the people it follows, or those who put time and energy into getting it made. This is nominally a documentary about alien encounters, or more specifically, the people who believe they have made contact with otherworldly beings. Young burnouts who believe they witnessed extraterrestrial activities, retirees who claim a cordial relationship with alien scientists, and one old man who simply wants to believe in something greater than himself. The one thing that unites them beyond their incredible experiences is… well, that gets to the heart of the problem. All these people are residents of upstate New York and even congregate at a small festival for people who have had these close encounters. Strangely, this scene that provides such an obvious and useful structure to all the individual stories is buried thirty minutes into a movie that is barely over an hour long. Instead, the film haphazardly bounces between all these people, with no rhyme or reason and no actual narrative to push forward. It amounts to a bunch of random interviews with a peculiar ensemble. That lack of connective tissue is an immediate indication of the lack of thematic focus that plagues They're Here. Though the people offering their own experiences often talk about reaching out to others and forming a community that will support each other as they all search for answers, the filmmakers are clearly uninterested in showing that side of these people's lives. One would assume that in lieu of that, there is a deeper interrogation of the participants, exploring who they are and how their experiences have fundamentally changed them or what draws them to make the claims they do (or alternatively, what draws aliens to them). Since the film spends so much time bouncing between all of them, however, no one receives the definition that could prove insightful. As far as this film is concerned, their entire lives began and ended with their fantastic accounts and interest in UFOs. That does not offer a particularly compelling portrait of these people. That manipulation that reduces these people to only UFO cultists is evident through much of the filmmaking craft. The festival shows multiple characters who we have been introduced to talking to each other for seemingly the first time, an obvious construction that would have been less obvious had it been laying the groundwork at the start. Many conversations are shot-reverse shot as if they were in a traditional narrative film, lending each of them a suffocating sense of artifice. Then, there are the abduction sequences, which seem to exist only to get this to feature length. If there is anything to dissect here, it is the pervading sense of loneliness and sadness that all these people share. Beyond the scorn and disbelief they are met with whenever speaking their personal truth, it's not hard to read into each of them a discontent with their lives, a sense that there needs to be something vast and powerful out there that they have been allowed to make contact with. It just so happens that that need drove them to aliens rather than religion. This is most evident in the younger people interviewed, two men who clearly have very little going on in their lives (and one who might be the least funny person to ever attempt stand-up comedy), and in an older metalworker named Steve.
Steve is an associate of a local UFO group, going to meetings and clearly being fascinated by the idea of abduction. He spends long hours in his machine shop, hoping to retire but lacking the means to do so. At the prodding of his friend who leads the group (or perhaps the filmmakers, hoping for good content), he undergoes hypnotherapy in an attempt to uncover suppressed memories of his own potential abduction. It doesn't work out, and in one of the film's few genuine moments, he expresses his dismay. "You hope that things are going to work out, and in my life, it's like it never does." He laughs, then sags into his seat and gazes at the floor. If the team behind They're Here had any real interest in the people they were covering, regardless of how they felt about the veracity of their claims, this would be what the movie is about: people cast adrift on their home planet, gazing at the stars and dreaming of — or perhaps even touching — something more. However, the shoddy craftsmanship and lack of focus in exploring their lives is a testament to how little the filmmakers were invested in what these men and women had to say. Steve and the rest deserved better than this. They're Here is screening at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, which runs June 5-16 in New York City. Rating: 1.5/5
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Review by Daniel Lima The 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City remains the single deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history. In telling its story, it’s not hard to imagine a variety of approaches: a character study of the perpetrator, a slow-burn thriller, a procedural that details everything that went into its execution, even using this one case as an examination of the right-wing libertarian politics of the era. McVeigh studiously and stubbornly resists any of these. The result is a film that does not seem to have a single animating principle beyond having enough footage to make a feature-length movie. Timothy McVeigh, the man who planted the truck with the fertilizer bomb at the site, is played by Alfie Allen. He’s a disaffected Gulf War veteran, slowly radicalized by instances of government overreach that animated many in the 1990s (most notably, the sieges at Waco and Ruby Ridge). He lives a quiet existence, but underneath his stoic exterior lies a man burning with passions that have long since congealed into something more hateful. At least, that’s probably the intent. Sadly, most of the insight into McVeigh as a person has to come from outside knowledge of the case because, as portrayed, he, the man, was a near-mute with no discernible personality traits beyond blankly looking into space. Perhaps Allen was the wrong choice for such a subdued role, but as written, there’s simply not much indication of how McVeigh views the world, how he connects with other people, or why the people in his orbit even stand to be in his company in the first place. It’s rare to walk into a biopic and walk out knowing less about the subject than before, but such is the case here. The film structures itself by detailing the inception of the bombing plan up through the day it goes off. To give credit where it’s due, at first, the slow, deliberate pace seems to evoke something like an S. Craig Zahler movie, giving a pronounced weight to something as simple as meeting a strange man at a gun show or being stopped by a police officer for speeding (well, simple for a white man). Unfortunately, setting itself before the bombing does mean there is no tension in any of the situations McVeigh finds himself in. As scenes where there is no danger and no information about the man is being revealed drag on and on, things quickly tip into tedium. As a sort of fictional document on the process behind planning out such a deadly attack, the movie immediately compromises itself by inventing things whole cloth. A local waitress who takes an interest in McVeigh, an old man in federal custody facing execution for a hate crime who McVeigh visits in prison, a bewildering French-Canadian man looking to recruit McVeigh into a wider movement. One scene shows the man seemingly motivated to murder a Black man simply because he put on rap music in a jukebox bar; multiple scenes seem to go so far as to imply that there was a second bomber with him when he planted the bomb at the federal building.
Fidelity to real life is hardly a prerequisite in making a film like this, though it could be argued there’s a degree of responsibility being flouted in fabricating so much. More aggravating is that all these inventions amount to absolutely nothing. None of the interactions with these characters reveal anything more about McVeigh’s psyche that isn’t already evident: he’s cold, unsociable, and identifies with right-wing grievances of the time. The only thing all these people add is minutes to the run time. What’s most aggravating about the movie’s failure to do anything with this story is how fascinating it actually is. The Oklahoma City bombing was the culmination of years of right-wing extremist agitation about the government’s abuse of police power, a mind-boggling thing to imagine thirty years on with a conservative embrace of state-sanctioned violence. McVeigh himself was a true, passionate devotee, going so far as to end friendships over what he saw as great evils the government perpetrated within its borders and abroad. At least some of his agitations could even be said to be reasonable, even if his actions were not. This level of moral complexity, this snapshot of the time this story provides, the anger and animus of man at its center, is completely absent from this dull, soulless retelling. McVeigh ends with a flurry of news clips from the immediate aftermath of the attack. One, in particular, stands out: at what appears to be a demonstration of what a fertilizer bomb is capable of, a young woman smiles and laughs at the sheer power of the device, then slowly breaks down into heavy sobs as she realizes the horror of what it wrought. When the most emotionally stirring part of your movie is news footage from three decades ago, something has gone horribly wrong. McVeigh is screening at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, which runs June 5-16 in New York City. Rating: 1/5 Review by Daniel Lima For the whole of human history, storytellers have explored and exploited the horror of isolation. Be it the lonely echoes of an empty home or the dark recesses in the midst of a vast wilderness, what the mind creates without the comfort of company is often vastly more terrifying than any monster or demon. What the mind creates is also more interesting than anything in The Damned, a period horror film that attempts to be an evocative, atmospheric descent into madness and comes up with nothing at all. Odessa Young plays a young widow in 18th-century Iceland, running a small fishing outpost completely cut off from the outside world in the cold winter months. As they slowly starve through an unsuccessful season, a large ship wrecks within sight of them. Electing not to lend help, the outpost soon finds itself haunted by a being out of old Norse legend, and the inhabitants begin to turn on each other. It is clear that The Damned will not win any awards for originality or screenwriting. From just this premise, anyone with a passing familiarity with modern trends in horror cinema knows exactly what to expect: a slow burn, quasi-supernatural threat that could be interpreted as a manifestation of guilt and trauma, completely within the characters' minds. To that end, the film never tips its hand fully one way or the other and so never allows itself space to distinguish itself from any number of other works, at least on a purely narrative level. This is not, by itself, such a big problem. A film like this lives and dies on the world it can build. On paper, that shouldn't be an issue here: with such a unique setting and a small ensemble forced to spend a lot of time in one location, there is ample opportunity to craft a rich, insular little community with fully fleshed-out characters. Unfortunately, the immersive quality this breed of survival horror begs for is constantly kept at bay by conventional filmmaking form. The score constantly announces how the audience should feel and ruins the ambiance that the sound design should create on its own. The stark beauty of the Icelandic landscape should be an almost ironic backdrop for such a bleak tale, but the bland cinematography does nothing to capitalize on the grand expanse. Numerous cheap jump scares litter a film that should be all about a creeping sense of dread. All these minor flaws ultimately create a sense of artifice that breaks any semblance of naturalism.
Worse yet, however, is the characters. There are not many of them; they spend basically every moment of screentime with one another, and yet they are all utterly indistinguishable beyond one or two traits: the woman-in-charge, the love interest, the kid, the superstitious crone. These stock archetypes simply do not suffice in a film about the deteriorating mental states of its ensemble, where death is constantly waiting in the wings and would represent a staggering blow to a community without bodies to spare. By the end of the film, I found myself struggling to figure out why I should care what happens to any of these people. Ultimately, this speaks to why The Damned doesn't work. It's an atmospheric film with no sense of atmosphere, psychological horror with no minds to interrogate. It has nothing original to say about the state of the world and no themes to explore that haven't been tackled by a plethora of more engaging films. It's the kind of movie you forget about almost as soon as the credits roll. The Damned is screening at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, which runs June 5-16 in New York City. Rating: 1.5/5 Review by Daniel Lima In the 1990s, high-concept studio family films were all the rage. From expensive productions about dinosaur metropolises (of which there were somehow more than one) to humble tales of fathers putting their kids in blackface to fabricate an undiscovered African tribe, the decade was the golden age of weirdo movies that earnestly committed to their oddball premises, often to mixed but fascinating results. Though it may lack the polish of those films, Invaders from Proxima B feels very much in conversation with them, showing far more vision than the low-budget DTV dreck of today. Ward Roberts is the producer, director, writer, and — of course — the star of the film, playing both a loving family man who spends an unfathomable amount of time away from his wife and daughter and an alien creature on a mission to save the world. As the alien attempts to coerce the man into helping him, more people are drawn into the plot, and the hijinks and shenanigans quickly stack up in a comedy of errors. The first glimpse of life on Earth is a man stepping out of a van in the dead of night and walking quietly into a home, easing himself into place between a woman and child as they sleep under a “Welcome Home Dada!” banner in the living room in a single unbroken shot. There is no score communicating how the audience should feel; the lack of cuts maintains the stillness and serenity a scene like this calls for. There is deliberate attention paid to how the scene is framed and composed., emphasizing the coziness of the home and the closeness of the family. This is hardly the most complex example of visual storytelling, but it shows that this goes beyond a mere vanity project for Roberts. Where so much family fare today cuts corners on basic craft, there is a level of care here that gives time spent with the core trio — and even the alien — an emotional weight that grounds the film, even as it gets progressively sillier. Perhaps it’s more an indictment of contemporary filmmaking standards than an exemplary quality of Invaders, but the fact remains that the film looks as good as anything at this scale can look, and lacks the shagginess that often comes with such a meager production. Where the film gets particularly ambitious is in its alien, portrayed here as an Oscar the Grouch-esque puppet with big bushy eyebrows and a Brooklyn accent (at least, I think it’s Brooklyn, do not correct me). Any use of puppetry or practical effects today is inherently captivating, providing a tactile feel that no level of CG can adequately replicate. Touches like the glowing residue he leaves behind, his impressively realized spacecraft, and even the crudely animated 2D effects give this a charm and energy that is incredibly compelling.
Of course, this is still obviously intended to be a showcase for Roberts’s skills as an actor, and he doesn’t disappoint. Through certain plot machinations, he is given ample opportunity to embody multiple characters and personalities, and he handles them all with a frankly surprising level of nuance. The rest of the ensemble is every bit as committed, regardless of how outlandish and outsized their roles are. This earnestness goes a long way in making the most cartoonish antics tolerable… which, unfortunately, gets to the heart of the movie’s one great flaw. Unfortunately, this is a family comedy that isn’t very funny. That isn’t too much of a problem at the start when the lowkey drama and the world-building around the alien take up a good amount of screen time. As the film goes on, those elements — the most interesting — begin to recede, and instead, new wacky characters take over the narrative in a most unwelcome way. They are, almost to a one, intensely aggravating, relying on being goofy rather than actually constructing jokes and gags. Add in some off-color jokes that seem at odds with the rest of the film, and by the time the credits roll, these characters have largely outstayed their welcome. Yet it’s hard to be too upset at Invaders from Proxima B. There is a genuine sense of passion and purpose here, which eludes films with budgets that astronomically dwarf it. Even at its worst, it maintains a focus and attention to craft that smooths over its roughest edges. Three decades ago, this could have been a studio project that overcame its most abrasive elements through the impressive production design that that level of funding allows for. As it stands, you could do far worse today. Invaders from Proxima B is now available on VOD. Rating: 3/5 Review by Daniel Lima How much one gets out of In Our Day may depend as much on their relationship with the director’s body of work as their response to this film. Hong Sang-soo has been making films for the past three decades, and by all accounts, they have tackled many of the same themes in many of the same forms. As someone with only a cursory familiarity with his oeuvre, it’s not hard to see the appeal, but there’s only so much to be gleaned from what is presented here. Like most of his other works, the film follows artists: an older poet experiencing a late-career resurgence and a middle-aged actress who recently returned to Seoul after becoming disenchanted with her craft. The two narratives — though that is perhaps too lofty a phrase to describe them — never actually intersect, though there are common elements reflected in both. Through conversations with friends and admirers, the two reflect on art, life, and loss. Also, there is a cat. Formally, this is as bare bones and rudimentary as you can get. Shooting on what appears to be consumer-grade cameras, two locations for each story (one of which is just outside the door of each artist’s home), each scene just a single, continuous, locked-down shot, and heavily improvised dialogue. With no prior knowledge of the director, it’d be easy to mistake this for a student production; even having only seen his 2011 film The Day He Arrives, I was a bit taken aback by just how pared down this movie is. While the conversations are meandering, with lots of repetitive small talk about the food they’re eating and games of Rock Paper Scissors, they both hit familiar beats. The poet has found some measure of success that had eluded him for so long, but he finds himself more preoccupied with everyday concerns. When pressed to offer some sage wisdom, he implores his audience to enjoy life’s simple pleasures. Similarly, while she struggles to offer a young fan any advice on breaking into the industry, the actress has a clear understanding of what convinced her to leave it behind, explaining the exact moment that she felt her art lost its luster. Both harbor regrets over misspent youths and pleasures that are now closed off to them, but they have an appreciation for the life they lead now.
The amateur quality of this film is impossible to ignore, particularly coming from a filmmaker who regularly shows up at big international film festivals and has been making movies since the 1990s. Though his work clearly resonates with many, and these themes are certainly self-reflective as he ages into his twilight years, there is something to be said about how much should be expected from an artist of his caliber. Considering how low rent this is, how vaguely these ideas are actually explored, and how often he explores them in this way, should it be judged more harshly? Should someone with his stature be expected to show more growth, to take more care, to offer… more? There is something to be said for that. However personal this film might be, when you’re three minutes into just watching people eat dinner, repeating that they like the food in every possible permutation the improving actors can think of, staying within that moment can be difficult. A sharp, focused script could have lent this a more hand-crafted quality, a sense of intention that would make spending time with these characters more resonant and meaningful, even if they’re still just eating and enjoying each other’s company. Yet, I can’t say that In Our Day is an unpleasant time. As tossed off as it may feel to some, there is something admirable about an experienced filmmaker who so commits to such an unobtrusive style, stripping away the craft to only the bare essentials and then going further still. It makes for a calming, serene experience, albeit one with a definite ceiling for how much it can actually achieve. Also, there is a cat. In Our Day hits theaters on May 17. Rating: 3/5 Review by Daniel Lima The hazy, loose Los Angeles-set neo-noir has become its own distinct subgenre. Seminal films such as The Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski, and Inherent Vice follow detectives who end up way over their heads, caught in a web of conspiracies and subterfuge that they unravel only by happenstance. Poolman, the directorial debut of actor Chris Pine, has the charm, the disconnected narrative, the performances, and the look of these films down pat. Paradoxically, however, it lacks the focus that makes the best of them so potent. Pine stars as — wouldn’t you know it — a poolman who lives and works at a roadside motel. After a routine visit to city hall, heckling local officials for not meeting the needs of their constituents, he is approached by a mysterious woman who asks for his help in uncovering a criminal plot involving some of the most powerful men in LA. Together with his closest friends, he attempts to expose the seedy underbelly of the highest echelon of the city… regardless of how utterly lost he actually is. To give the film some credit, it is clear this is a labor of love. Pine is as charming as he has ever been, and it’s clear he has great empathy for the now-familiar archetype of the principled yet underachieving lout, committed to the cause of righteousness even if he is neither the most competent nor exemplary model of a do-gooder. The rest of the ensemble relishes their role, with DaWanda Wise and Stephen Toblowsky especially being the clear standouts. Fostering a sense of community goes a long way in grounding a film like this, and the distinct characters that populate this world certainly help with that. For what it’s worth, it doesn’t have the amateurish, slapdash feel that many an actor’s vanity project has either. Produced by filmmaker Patty Jenkins and the experienced Stacey Sher, shot on celluloid by Jenkins’ frequent cinematographer, and having intricate sets and costumes that are varied and revealing, the care that went into creating this world is right on the screen. In Poolman, Los Angeles is exactly the vibrant, offbeat, singular place that its title character would take such interest in defending. It is unfortunate, then, that the movie makes absolutely no sense. An ephemeral and esoteric narrative, or at least a prohibitively convoluted one, is part and parcel of this brand of sun-soaked noir. That said, they still have to maintain a perspective, impart some kind of artistic thesis, or, at the very least, establish stakes. At some point, there needs to be a sense of exactly how out of their depth the protagonist is, how far-reaching the power of their foes is, and how integral their nefarious schemes are to the society they corrupt.
That moment of elucidation never arrives here. Multiple viewings of Pine’s appeals to the city council do nothing to help clear up what exactly has him so aggrieved in the first place. As he investigates further, the names of people and places are rattled off so quickly, with no faces to attach them to, that it becomes impossible to keep track of who is who and what is what. When these unseen figures do finally show up, they are shuffled into and out of the narrative so quickly that it’s hard to make sense of their significance. All this means that what is actually happening is unfathomable long before the mystery gets underway. This means that this film lives and dies on how much the audience can enjoy hanging out with these characters. The problem there is that, while the performances are solid and the character’s personalities are well-defined, they don’t have good material to work with. For all the absurd humor and outsized acting, nothing here is particularly funny. For all the technical craftsmanship on display, both the flow of the story and the rhythm of individual scenes feel off, with too much dead air in both. A sharper script would have benefitted all the best elements of the movie greatly; without that, there’s nothing to tie it together into a cohesive whole. Yet it’s hard to be too hard on Poolman. At a time when even smaller films feel like they are playing things safe, attempting to meet audience expectations rather than set them, it is nice to see someone use their star power to push something so shaggy and odd to the finish line. Poolman is now playing in theaters Rating: 3/5 H2: THE OCCUPATION LAB -- Informative, Effective Doc on Israeli Occupation Limits Ambitions5/9/2024 Review by Daniel Lima Documentary filmmaking may be the most dynamic and engaging way to succinctly impart information to an audience, but making that the primary artistic goal creates a ceiling that can be impossible to break through. H2: The Occupation Lab is a sterling example of this, as it seeks to educate viewers about the Palestinian city of Hebron, a portion of which is under the direct control of the Israeli government. Though it is undoubtedly an informative work, it lacks the perspective and drive that would make it stand out. An old city in the West Bank of significant religious importance to both Jews and Muslims, Hebron was forcibly occupied by Israel shortly after its creation. Tensions between the Palestinian residents and the Israeli settlers rose through the decades as the IDF exerted more and more direct control on behalf of the settlers. Today, H2 — the Israeli section of the city — is practically a ghost town, with the Muslim residents subject to raids, detainment, random acts of violence, and a lingering malevolent aura, a sense that they are not welcome in their own homes. The film is certainly effective in detailing how the situation deteriorated to its present state, offering a comprehensive overview of the city’s history. Beginning not with the establishment of the Israeli military government of Hebron but with the massacre of the Jewish population in 1927, the holistic portrait of conflict within the city manages to acknowledge sins committed by both factions without bothsiderist rhetoric that ignores power differentials. It is clear from how the movie is structured, bookending with images of empty streets and IDF soldiers harassing Palestinians, that the occupation is an evil for which there is no defense. It just doesn’t shy away from inconvenient truths. Most of the film is a chronological rundown of H2, with archival footage and talking head interviews with people present at major events. Surprisingly, not all the interviews are with Arabs; plenty of former Israeli officials and soldiers offer their own accounts, albeit most with a sympathetic or regretful perspective toward the people they worked to oppress. While these segments intend to impart the history of the city, the footage and testimonials are often emotionally stirring and disturbing. Jewish settlers mock Palestinians in their homes; IDF soldiers gleefully talk about gunning down taxis; Arab residents are executed on public streets. Perhaps most chilling is the cumulative substance of the footage, as lively streets full of Palestinians from decades ago give way to a barren, empty ghost town.
However, the movie falls a bit short in articulating a thesis beyond merely retelling and detailing how things got so bad. As implied by the title, it is stated early on that the practices that Israel instituted throughout the occupied territories were first tested within H2 — a perfect staging ground as an Israeli stronghold with a Muslim majority. Since most of the movie is spent on history, however, no time is spent drawing more than a casual link between what goes on in Hebron and Palestine as a whole. Naturally, anyone with a passing familiarity with what has been happening in Gaza can recognize the similarities, but establishing a timeline and a causal relationship between H2 and the world at large would have given these images even more potency and urgency. Ultimately, H2: The Occupation Lab is still interesting, harrowing, and informative enough to warrant a watch despite a relative lack of artistic ambition. Its primary purpose is simply to make its audience more knowledgeable about the situation in Hebron and the whole of Palestine, and it does an admirable job at that. It just would be nice if it attempted to go further than that. H2: The Occupation Lab is available on VOD May 10. Rating: 3.5/5 Review by Daniel Lima As much as I love science fiction, I can’t help but wonder to myself when the last truly visionary work in the genre was. That isn’t to say we are bereft of any good examples these days, but it feels like there has not been a work like Blade Runner or The Matrix — totemic works that introduced new ideas to the popular consciousness and changed the way we imagined the future — in quite some time. Mars Express is not another game-changer, indebted as it is to well-worn themes and tropes, but it is still a gorgeous package with an interesting world and an engrossing mystery. Set 100 years in the future, humanity has colonized Mars and is supported by a large population of robots — shackled AIs bound into servitude. A pair of private detectives, one human and one robot, go on a routine missing persons job and find themselves embroiled in a much larger conspiracy. Murder, a shady corporation, and a nascent liberation movement threaten to upend the society that has been built on the red planet. This is cyberpunk in a grounded, relatively hard sci-fi world, and it follows many of the conventions set by past works in the genre. Colonists live in huge domes with screens that mimic blue skies; activists jailbreak AI to unlock unrestricted sentience; digital backups for the recently deceased, given a second life in robotic bodies. Similarly, ideas about what it means to be human and the path humanity chooses to take as it pushes further into the universe are part and parcel of this particular subgenre. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there’s not much novelty to this particular vision of the future. Where the film does succeed is in bringing that vision to life. This is a low-budget animated film, mostly 2D (3D is used for the backgrounds, some characters, and environmental objects), so there is a stiffness to much of the movement, and many of the shorts feel static. The art design, however, goes a long way in giving Mars a distinct feel, clean and corporatized, with hints of older technologies still holding on as the bleeding edge is rolled out. Concepts like organic computers overtaking digital counterparts might not be fresh, but seeing these eerie bioengineered organisms floating in jars is still fascinating.
The way information about this world is doled is one of the greatest strengths of Mars Express. This colony has a long and storied history, with a clear set of pervading beliefs and attitudes. Those details are only ever learned in passing, through dialogue and character beats that don’t take the tenor of exposition. The robot detective has a tenuous relationship with humans that reflects his place in society; mentions of a past military incident involving robots explain the rise of bioware; shunned practices exploit the possibility of copying one’s mind into another body. Worldbuilding like this, seamless and natural, is what separates truly involving speculative fiction from careless dreck. Admittedly, these details are a bit more memorable than the actual story. The investigation does have propulsive energy, and the budgetary limitations of an animated film obviously forced the creative team to consider every single frame very carefully to its benefit. The characters are all well-defined, from the leads all the way down to those that only get a line or two. The ultimate conclusion is surprisingly thoughtful and decidedly not designed to sate a general audience, which makes it all the more affecting. Yet, when thinking about what makes the movie work, the scope and amount of detail spring to mind far quicker than the narrative details themselves. As impressive as Mars Express is, the one thing holding it back is how indebted it is to what came before. At a time when artificial intelligence is now a hot-button issue set to disrupt the current order of things — perhaps for the worst — it is a bit of a missed opportunity for a film like this to reflect past iterations of what the future may bring. That might not detract from what the film offers, but it limits its horizons. Mars Express is now in theaters. Rating: 4/5 Review by Daniel Lima Another year, another installment of The Roundup. Beginning in 2017 with The Outlaws, the series sees the hulking Ma Dong-seok as a Seoul detective who is as quick to punch through red tape and police regulations as he is an army of criminal scum. The latest entry, The Roundup: Punishment, does little to change a formula already growing stale, but watching its star go to work is its own singular joy. Summarizing the plot feels like a fool's errand, not because it's overly complex but because it is so similar to the previous entries that a description feels unnecessary. A new criminal element pops up in Seoul, with some kind of overseas connection (these films are the xenophobic mirror to Hong Kong's In the Line of Duty series). Ma Dong-seok quickly becomes embroiled in taking down this syndicate, utilizing his extensive underworld connections and brash, bull-in-a-china-shop approach to policing to get results. As the dastardly villains do as they please, he closes in, usually butting heads with his chain of command along the way. Eventually, there is a climactic confrontation, and our rugged hero outboxes the psychopaths he's chasing. Lather, rinse, repeat. Obviously, the details change, but that basic structure seems set in stone. There are worse things for a crime-actioner to be than predictable, but four entries in the plot machinations of this online gambling conspiracy feel cursory, and the antagonists never feel threatening, mainly because of how inevitable their downfall will be. To make matters worse, their schemes and crimes remain largely disconnected from the efforts of the team of detectives to catch them, meaning it takes some time to develop a real personal stake for the cops to apprehend their quarry. Sometimes, it feels like you're watching a Godfrey Ho film, two totally different movies stitched together. Normally, watching the cops go about their procedural business is fun in and of itself. Here, it feels similarly weightless and perfunctory. At first, it seems like there will be much made of the brutish lead detective's inability to punch out cybercrime, but some techs are added to the team to solve that, none of whom receive any substantial characterization. They also feel like far less of a team in this entry, with very little of the banter that filled the previous films. The one highlight is Park Ji-hwan's petty thief, a fixture in this series who always provides some flamboyant comic relief, and he's not even a cop (one of the few gags relies on that).
Despite all this, it's impossible to be hard on this movie when there is so much time spent watching Ma Dong-seok punch people. The man is a former boxer. He's big and brawny, and just about every movie he is in takes full advantage of those facts. This one, in particular, is liberally peppered with scuffles that see him throwing haymakers that send his adversaries literally flying through the air. The action design isn't particularly impressive, but the man's sharp movements, the reactions of the stuntmen taking the hits, and even the sound design go a long way in selling the power of his blows. It's truly the movie's highlight and one of the selling points of the entire franchise. That said, The Roundup: Punishment does feel like the series is starting to lose steam. Perhaps the creative team behind it is perfectly willing to apply this formula to foreign criminals from every country in the world, but a change would be welcome if only to ensure some kind of emotional investment in what actually happens. If nothing else, I'll always come back to watch this guy hit things. The Roundup: Punishment is now in theaters. Rating: 3/5 Review by Daniel Lima “You can’t do comedy anymore because of woke” is a conviction that comedian Jerry Seinfeld has proclaimed for years now. In spite of his own squeaky-clean material, he firmly believes that comedy is an art and craft that should be separated from the world around it, offering no political perspective, social commentary, or even insight into the artist’s personality or worldview. It’s no surprise, then, that his feature directorial debut Unfrosted is so detached from reality that it’s impossible to see what exactly animated him to spearhead the project. What might be surprising is how poisonously, dangerously unfunny it is. The film is the newest entry in the current infernal trend of corporate IP cinema, movies about the invention of specific consumer products. The product in question here is the Pop-Tart, produced by Kellogg’s in the 1960s. Unlike previous examples that insist on the earth-shattering importance of a pair of basketball shoes or a children’s video game, Seinfeld recognizes that there is nothing special about a breakfast pastry. Instead, the film is a broad, absurdist take on this kind of film: colorful and ornate ‘60s sets and costumes, a vast array of goofy characters played by a murderer’s row of comedians and celebrities, and a dense aura of self-parody and irony. On paper, this is the best possible way to approach the material. Seinfeld’s observation brand of comedy has always been laser-focused on pointing out the absurdity of everyday mundanity (something he has only a tenuous grasp of, given his ultra-rich lifestyle), and a silly movie about a sugary breakfast food seems perfect fodder. There’s plenty of humor to be mined, either by parodying the self-serious version of this kind of film or simply using the skeleton of the familiar narrative structure to allow for every gag the artist can think of. Unfortunately, it becomes immediately apparent that the seventy-year-old man who insists that comedy is an unchanging entity separate from worldly concerns has an incredibly limited imagination. The one-liners are all tired, hack material that recalls Seinfeld’s own stand-up, a relic even forty years ago: “Who’s On First?” style riffs, playground humor about the names of different cereals, and only the most basic pop culture references. The genuinely impressive production design is undermined by high key lighting that gives everything a cheap look, and the scant attempts at visual humor are just as lame and tired. Most egregious is the utter lack of comic rhythm and timing, either stifling the jokes or leaving them to die on the vine. All this is in service to the one big joke underpinning every moment of Unfrosted: “Isn’t it stupid to make a movie like this?” This kind of anti-comedy isn’t inherently bad, with both alt-comics and more mainstream comedians utilizing offbeat timing and hackneyed material to great ironic effect. Where Seinfeld goes wrong is he has nowhere to go except to point out how dumb the enterprise is. This isn’t an explicit parody of the current IP movie trend; there’s a lack of the cartoonishly broad ingenuity of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, and the specificity of a Coen Brothers farce is absent. The ensemble is good, but they can only do so much with finger-on-the-pulse jokes about JFK having extramarital affairs (with the exception of Hugh Grant, who shines). Ultimately, the only thing the film has to offer is the acknowledgment that it isn’t good. Which, paradoxically, reveals that Seinfeld truly thinks that this is enough to pass muster with a contemporary audience. The result is a work that is both absurdly self-assured and woefully undercooked. As resistant as the man is to comedy that professes a set of beliefs or directly contends with the comic’s inner self, it’s the fleeting moments of Unfrosted where Seinfeld’s own reactionary impulses shine through that it shows any signs of life. Offhand jokes at the expense of the working class, unions, and socialism manage to sneak through his studiously calculated apolitical veneer in keeping with his frequent criticism of the American left and political correctness. This ambient ideology is never given any weight. Still, when a worker’s strike turns into a Jan. 6-style assault on Kellogg’s headquarters, it doesn’t take much to read between the lines: to Seinfeld, low-wage workers asking for a raise and right-wing extremists storming the Capital are equally silly. As disagreeable as this outlook might be, it does give the film a verve that it otherwise lacks.
Seinfeld's central misunderstanding of art is that it is not a mere mechanism. To him, comedy is a feat of engineering, taking the raw materials that the lives we lead afford us and molding them into something that provokes a certain response; any message or statement is simply a byproduct of that process. While craft is certainly important, art is, in fact, a form of self-expression and communication, and the ideal artist actually has something to say, either about the world or themselves. Cultivating a singular voice and perspective is what marks a true artist and, in the case of comedy, what separates the truly funny from the hacks. This is why Unfrosted is a failure. For all the work done to bring this vision to life, it is shockingly hollow and devoid of any sense of purpose. Even if it were a technically accomplished film that got all the fundamentals right, it would be every bit as soulless and out of touch as the man behind it. It just so happens that it’s also not funny. Unfrosted releases on Netflix May 3. Rating: 1.5/5 |
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