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Reviews
The Hottest August (2019)
It's really good
Brett Story brings "show don't tell" to the documentary world like few others have. She's great at articulating a thesis purely through juxtaposition of images, and in this case, a host of unreliable narrators. The Hottest August diverges from your traditional climate change doc in that it's not caught up in trying to convert climate change deniers. The water's already up to our ankles. We don't need more shocking images of glaciers collapsing. The question at hand in this film is "Why aren't we doing anything?"
In this film however, the answer to this question doesn't begin and end with corrupt politicians and corporate greed. It stems from a deeper, collective inability to imagine our future. The subjects interviewed in this film all feel uneasy about the future. Melting glaciers loom over their heads, but for everyone there's a more pressing issue at hand that requires their immediate attention. This is how other issues such as economic inequality, xenophobia, systemic racism, and imperialism keep us busy, and keep mass climate action from gaining traction.
The film is, on its face, just viscerally entertaining to watch. The pictures are gorgeous. The sound is textured, layered, and captivating.
One of Hottest August's most interesting motifs is dance. Zumba instructors, a crowd of 1920s fetishists lindy hopping, a dancehall party at an outdoor rink. It's hard to imagine all these people caught up in the immediate, physical joy of dancing having much of an answer to Story's most common question "Do you worry about the future?" But when your brain is fried in what feels like the last, suffocatingly hot days of the human summer, what else can you do?
The Cocksure Lads Movie (2014)
A bit of a mess
The Cocksure Lads is a Canadian movie. Within the first five minutes we are entreated to a goofy ants-eye-view shot of the CN Tower. This is the only way you can shoot the CN Tower from downtown Toronto.
Each character in the Cocksure Lads has been dutifully assigned one joke, in much the same way that each of the Cocksure Lads is assigned one woman. This one's a clean freak. This one doesn't know he's in Canada. This one has committed the unpardonable sin of liking Coldplay. This one simply is a gay stereotype(HAR HAR GUFFAW).
Actually, the way this film treats gay people was maybe the biggest surprise for me. Sure, it treats its women characters like dirt, but this is a film about men who are trying to live in the 60s. I expected that. Perhaps I should have also expected that its only gay characters would be (completely unnecessarily) written as "sissy villain" stereotypes. The film's first and last jokes come at their expense despite the fact that their only crime was to offer the Lads an exit strategy when it seemed things had fallen apart.
Blake and Derek's relationship subplots managed to hit just about every misogynistic trope they could have hoped to. Blake falls for a girl really just because she's sexy and willing. Then, she breaks up with him when it appears that he is no longer in a band because she's the sort of puddle of a human being who is EXCLUSIVELY into members of bands. She then cooks him a lasagna so he forgives her. Everything about their entire exchange is despicable and lazy.
The film builds itself up as the sort of oddball comedy that plays fast and loose with its own logic, but even then the lack of coherence is a real problem in this movie. Everyone acknowledges that their lyrics are terrible and the musicianship is passable at best. Why are they such hit? Why am I being made to sit through several music videos with intentionally bad music? Why am I being asked to sympathize with the characters making this music? What are the parameters of this joke? There is one funny joke in the film. I won't spoil it, but it concerns the best way to find a missing person.
One scene in particular is deserving of explicit scorn. The record shop scene. At first I thought it must be an attempt at parody, but throughout the rest of the film Chloe is treated as something of a voice of reason, a guiding light for Dusty. Why is she delivering this completely laughable defense of vinyl records? The language in this scene is wildly out of touch. In a way, reminiscent of a video of a rapping grandmother you might have seen on America's Funniest Home Videos back in the 90s.
Technically, the film is a bit of a mixed bag. The cinematography is at no point stunningly beautiful, but it is fairly consistent throughout. There's some elements of animation that serve more to disrupt the aesthetic of the film than anything. The sound design was by times distracting and rough. Lav rustling when there wasn't even any dialogue. Why? After the screening some of the cast and crew came into the theatre for a Q&A. Murray Foster & Co. talked about the film as being something new for Canadian cinema, a break from what they perceive as an endless barrage of dramatic coming-of-age films set in Canada's farthest flung reaches. Overlooking the fact that it takes ENORMOUS balls to talk tough about Mon Oncle Antoine as someone responsible for The Cocksure Lads, I heartily disagree with the notion that our present pre-occupation with regional dramas is what's wrong with Canadian cinema.
The problem with Canadian cinema is our overwhelming ability to settle for mediocrity and broken things simply because it's our mediocrity and they are our broken things. In this regard, Cocksure Lads is not refreshing, and it is nothing new. It is another scribbled note in a very long list.
Ultimately, I empathize with Foster. I agree that Canadian cinema is a bit of a mess and needs something new. But misogynistic jokes and poor writing are nothing new. You can't blame stuff like that on weather or budget and you most certainly should never settle for it.
Lust in the Time of Heartache (2014)
Not a film.
Sometimes non-professionals and film industry outsiders use their unique perspective to create interesting works of cinema that challenge our perception of the medium and exist outside of convention.
Usually though, the result is not good (much like anyone's first experiments with an art form that is unfamiliar to them.) This is fine except when the creator tries to inflate the piece into something much more than it actually is. In this case David Aurini and his friends decided to play Bruce Lee under a bridge and call it a surrealist, neo-noir film.
The entire first half of the video is just Aurini acting the part of brooding, no-nonsense genius as he drifts through different scenes of unhappy, bickering men and women. It's difficult to draw any meaning from this because Aurini's narration is about as captivating as an economics lecture, and the scenes which are supposed to serve as some sort of counterpoint to his diatribe, are inaudible. There was no sound mix in this video. I doubt there was a proper mic. Aside from Aurini's droning spiel you mostly just hear the lilting score and a couple of sound effects that were crudely dropped in.
To actually delve into a technical criticism of the video's cinematography would be both cruel and missing the point. Like doing a close reading of a 1st grader's journal assignment when really you're just trying to see if he could spell a few words right. That said, Lust in the Time of Heartache doesn't manage to spell many words correctly.
The last five minutes are pretty boring. The diatribe (of course) continues, but for some reason Aurini's character is being attacked by a bunch of dadly henchmen. You know how your 14 year-old cousin makes videos of him and his friends play fighting and puts them on Youtube? It's exactly like that. Fortunately this does lead to the only worthwhile moment in the entire video. A guy gets stabbed in the groin. It's pretty funny. If you'd rather not waste your time watching this movie just to see a groin stab, I'll save you the hassle and just tell you that it's at 6 minutes and 20 seconds in. He gets both kicked and stabbed in the groin.
All-in-all, this movie way too proud of itself considering that all its got is one decent nut shot in 10 minutes of molasses mouthed dreck.
We Cause Scenes (2013)
Has there ever been a documentary with less narrative thrust?
Producer: What do you mean there's nothing left?
Editor: There's nothing left. There is not a single other clip or sound bite that could possibly be considered interesting. We've got 30 minutes of usable material...max.
Producer: Listen, I don't care what you have to do, but this doc has to be feature length.
Editor: Ummm, okay... we've got this one clip where he goes on a digression about how cool it was to shoot HD video.
Producer: Can you make a two minute segment out of it?
Editor: I guess.
Jesus Was a Commie (2011)
Matthew Modine is Jesus
Jesus Was A Commie starts strong with Matthew Modine realizing something that occurs to most people in about the seventh grade: Communism works... IN THEORY! From here, Modine meanders through several other bravely controversial arguments while he also literally meanders through New York City (stopping only to pose beside the most destitute of homeless men). Modine's musings are a muddled mess of political and religious nothings strung together with the sort of word association logic that would make Robert Langdon blush. After making a brief, yet totally nonsensical trek through the (as yet unproven) multiverse, Modine concludes with a vague call to arms, demanding that someone in the audience just admit that they are the new messiah.
What is most interesting about this film is the estimated $75,000 budget, because buddy, film students are churning out self-important stuff like this on the daily without even breaking a twenty. Either someone conned Modine into paying about 74,500 dollars more than he should have for the equipment rental, or VHS quality news footage of "communism" has really skyrocketed in price. OR the estimated budget is wrong, which I dearly hope is true.