La Guerra Civil (2022) - Sundance

Full Review: spoti.fi/3rBtV4g
2022 Ranked: boxd.it/eWCVi

LA GUERRA CIVIL is a solid sports documentary that manages to both introduce a lesser sport-savant like myself to the history of a sport that discusses the nature of heritage, belonging, and collective identity through two guys punching each other. What a knockout. 

For Mexican and Mexican American communities, boxing is more than a sport. From ring walk-ins to trunks, opponents take full advantage of the theatrical spectacle, narrating their histories and the stories of their individual fanbases. In 1996, Oscar De La Hoya, the charismatic golden boy from East L.A, challenged Mexican-born boxing legend Julio César Chávez in what was billed as the “ultimate glory” fight. Mexicans on both sides of the border were forced to choose their favorite champ: the record-holding immigrant from humble beginnings, or the younger and more marketable Olympian born in the U.S. These rivals felt the pressure to prove their athletic superiority, while the fans’ choice of champion revealed the type of Mexican they aspired to be.

Eva Longoria starts her feature film debut with a boxing documentary that is more about the Mexican identity than the sport itself. With traditional interjected sit-down interviews with both the fighters and other ‘witnesses’ of the time, LA GUERRA CIVIL doesn’t change the paradigm of documentary filmmaking. Nonetheless, the story is engaging with a closer look at how one can be rejected by their own heritage and people as the parasitic US identity poisons the sense of belonging and self-identity.
This inner conflict within Oscar De La Hoya doesn’t really get explored much though and we practically get a quite basic retelling of events in a mostly linear timeline. Now, this was great for someone like me - a Swiss guy in his 20s with no real interest in boxing - this was all news to me, but in saying that I realize that this documentary lacks a bit of depth in its processing of the dichotomous ideal Mexican identity in Mexico and the US.
When addressed, all we get is: Chàvez was idealized as he represents all the good Mexican values and De La Hoya does not. And both of them just kinda go: It is what it is. 

As a quick, bit-sized historic catch-up, LA GUERRA CIVIL does its job well but I doubt that it will do much for those already familiar with Chavez and De La Hoya.
The elements of the time-old story of a new challenger De La Hoya arriving and challenging the champion Chavez are framed in an exciting way and make for an entertaining watch.

6/10

The Humans (2021)

The Humans is a wonderfully captivating and devastating story of a Thanksgiving night filled with rich performances from every single actor in it. While not being conventionally shot and told, director Karem brings the best of his play onto the big screen or the slightly smaller screen to you at home.

Full Review: bit.ly/3dFaott

2021 Ranked

Transcript of audio review: 

Set inside a pre-war duplex in downtown Manhattan, The Humans follows the course of an evening in which the Blake family gathers to celebrate Thanksgiving. As darkness falls outside and eerie things start to go bump in the night, the group’s deepest fears are laid bare. 

THE HUMANS is a 2021 drama and adaptation of the play from Stephen Karam who also brings his play to the silver screen in his directorial debut.

Set among the cast are Richard Jenkins, Steven Yeun, Beanie Feldstein, Amy Schumer, Jayne Houdyshell, and June Squibb. And that's it. With its setting within a single two-story apartment in Manhattan Karam manages to make the blend between stage and screen seamlessly and often stages and shoots his scenes from a distance further away than other dramas would do. This might come off as alienating at first and refuses to make the process of caring for individual characters simple. But ultimately, that is all in service of the overall story, which is about a family gettogether and the underlying little notions of annoyance and disregard to deep feelings of empathy and love. Karam and cinematographer Crawling manage to pull the camera back further and create a captivating experience of constant perspective shift that emphasizes sound in particular.

As someone who doesn't mind the smaller scale that these stage adaptations inherently always have, The Humans doesn't let us escape from the duplex as well. We are stuck there like the characters, questioning ourselves and each other constantly and bringing the full baggage of rich family history. 

Although dramatic beats and resolutions are reached I never felt that it was all to serve a neatly constructed narrative and more to just observe this family gettogether forced upon them by the structure of traditions. 
This brings up another subject frequently brought up in the film, that being how to cope with life. and how unfair, lonely, and disheartening it can be. But instead of condemning any single character to be morally questionable, we get a full set of people all dealing with their own demons.

The Humans is a wonderfully captivating and devastating story of a Thanksgiving night filled with rich performances from every single actor in it. While not being conventionally shot and told, director Karem brings the best of his play onto the big screen or the slightly smaller screen to you at home.

My rating for The Humans is an 8/10 proved to be one of the strongest films of 2021. 

THE HUMANS is currently streaming on Showtime.

The Green Knight (2021) - Quiet On Set Podcast Review

The Green Knight tells the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain, King Arthur's nephew who embarks on a venturesome quest to hold up his side of a bargain he made with The Green Knight.

Lowery takes us on a constantly morphing quest of Sir Gawain's self-actualization. When broken down the film is not much more than a long journey in which our hero has to face challenges to get to his destination. Now, what makes The Green Knight so captivating is that (minor spoilers incoming) at the end of his journey all that is waiting for him is death.

After reading up on the legend I realized that Lowery takes quite a few liberties to adapt this story to make it his own. What initially got me so interested in The Green Knight was the incredible looking cinematography. Especially in the first act of the story, which mainly takes place inside dimly candle-lit chambres in a castle, the screen is actually very dark. I can really appreciate a director's vision that does not shy away from creating a simultaneously authentic and stylized fictional world. Palmero, the cinematographer, manages to draw me in through the numerous still shots that last seemingly forever at times but work very well to support the theme of life as this agonizing force.

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Dev Patel as Sir Gawain

Further, colors are very purposefully used to support recurring motifs and themes. Most prominently green and red. Now with all the praise that I have given the film so far, I also have to mention that I often felt quite lost with what exactly was going on. On one side I am quite content having gone into this without knowing much of anything about the story of Sir Gawain, but at the same time, I felt lost a lot.

There were a lot of details I would love to pay more attention to on the inevitable rewatch, but for now, that is all I have to say about The Green Knight without going into spoiler and a full-on analysis.

I believe that much like The Lighthouse, A24 once again has a very polarizing film in its hands. Some people are going to adore it, others will hate it oh so deeply and passionately.

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Dev Patel as Sir Gawain

Dev Patel plays Gawain with a charming naivete as he tries to fit in and find his place in the world. All of the supporting cast from Vikander to Harris and Edgerton are phenomenal in their roles. I kinda quite put my finger on it but Ralph Ineson as the Green Knight is such an imposing force that cannot go unmentioned.

At the end of the day, The Green Knight was filled with riveting themes that have crept themselves back into my mind for the last two weeks. Nature vs. civilization, responsibility & integrity, and coming-of-age.

8/10

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Ralph Ineson as the Green Knight

CODA (2021) - The Big Winner of the Sundance Film Festival 2021

Siân Heder’s CODA, an American remake of the French La Famille Bélier (2014) manages to exceed the mainly comedic approach of the original and tackles the story from a more grounded and authentic angle. Whereas the original didn’t make an effort to actually cast deaf actors in the respective roles, Siân Heder did for CODA. Emilia Jones’ Ruby is the only hearing member of her deaf family who makes ends meet with fishing. She helps out each morning before school and faces social isolation in school due to her family's disabilities. When she finally jumps over her own shadow and joins the choir to act on her lifelong passion for singing, she is encouraged by her teacher Bernardo (Eugenio Derbez), who insists on rolling the R’s in his name, to aim higher than keeping up the family fishing business and to consider going to music school.

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Emilia Jones as Ruby Rossi

CODA is the type of film you can recommend to pretty much anyone without risking that they won’t enjoy their time with it. It’s a crowd-pleasing movie with several great emotional pay-offs for multiple characters and overall it is just a great time to watch. However, apart from deaf performers in deaf roles, the movie isn’t anything groundbreaking or spectacular. At the end of the day, it is a very familiar story of a young adolescent who doesn’t believe in themselves (enough) until a third party, mostly some kind of mentor figure, comes in and teaches them to harness their true potential. It even packs the ‘don’t be held back by people around you in your small town’ trope into the mix and if I’m being totally honest, I don’t mind the storytelling clichés that CODA uses. Because the film shines especially in smaller moments of situational comedy and emotional payoffs between Ruby and her parents. 

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Amy Forsyth as Gertie, Daniel Durant as Leo Rossi, Marlee Matlin as Jackie Rossi, and Troy Kotsur as Frank Rossi (from left)

Although there are a number of knit-picks I have with the film, the overall story hinders me to not enjoy this heartfelt story to the fullest. Certain dramatic tensions feel rather forced and easily avoidable mostly through communication, but I guess ultimately that is one of the issues tackled in the narrative itself so I cannot fault it too much for that.

Siân Heder’s second feature won big at Sundance taking home the award for Directing, Ensemble Cast, and both the Audience and Grand Jury Prize for best Drama Feature. 

CODA was a worthy tick-off for the Sundance Film Festival and broke records by its $25Mio. acquisition by Apple for their streaming service AppleTV+, surpassing last year’s Palm Springs that was bought by Hulu for $17Mio & 69 Cents and can be expected to be released in the next few months on Apple’s streaming service.

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Eugenio Derbez as Bernardo Villalobos

CODA sets Ruby on a familiar journey of self-discovery and combines a Coming-of-Age story with authentic and respectful portrayals of a mostly deaf family. With a healthy dose of humor, drama, and music CODA will have something for everyone.

3.5/5

The Aristocats - 52 Years in 52 Weeks

The Aristocats (1970)

Welcome back to 52 Years in 52 Weeks. Each week in 2021 we’ll watch a film I’ve never seen before starting in 1969 moving one year forward every week.

This week, I watched The Aristocats from 1970. Wolfgang Reitherman directed this feline family adventure from Disney. Reitherman is also (at least partly) behind other Disney classics like 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians, 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, and 1970’s The Rescuers, which I believed to be connected to The Aristocats because the mice looked similar in my mind. But I guess that just makes me the racist equivalent for rodents. But I’ll leave the racial stereotyping to the experts over at Disney. More on that later. Reitherman co-directed these films but he’s arguably best known for 1973s Robin Hood and 1967’s The Jungle Book. All the films mentioned are available for streaming on Disney+. What the service might lack in original new programming it inarguably makes up with its rather impressive backlog

Phil Harris, who voices Baloo and Little John in Jungle Book and Robin Hood respectively, does the voice for the most memorable character from the Aristocats. O’Malley. It’s impressive how creepy yet still charming Harris manages to be as the stray cat that helps The Duchess and her three kittens on her way back to their wealthy home.

The plot is fairly simple. When Adelaide Bonfamille leaves all her liquidities to her cats, her butler decides to get rid of them in an effort to inherit his employer's money that he believes to deserve. Funnily enough, Edgar is too dense to realize that he would still get all the money as cats...can’t...spend...money. I know. Mind. blown. But that rather simple world-view runs through the entire plot of The Aristocats. Intense over the top action chase scenes and the occasional song is all we get from the movie. It never tries to be more than a simple - ignore the partly intended terrible pun - cat and mouse game. 

I personally found most jokes to be more miss than hit. For example, the geese characters feel particularly random and unnecessary. Maybe it’s because I just can’t stand the upper-class way of talking from the 40s-70s. Particularly the Duchess is a great example of that. I just can’t stand the way she talks. Perhaps that’s just a ‘me thing’ but I find it distracting. In the context of the story, it makes sense to have an upper-class cat speak in an upper-class manner. It’s just so annoying. But honestly, Thomas O’Malley’s constant ‘baby’ is equally irritating and predatory, to be frank. 

The Aristocats is a movie that’s supposed to be light-hearted. With Thomas O’Malley strolling along the riverside taking the family on an adventure. I just don’t connect as well with movies that I feel like don’t have a purpose or reason to exist. This might be cynical but I dislike cookie-cutter versions of stories that are way too familiar without adding much to anything. You could argue that the purpose of a movie like this is simply to entertain and I’d have to agree. Lots of studio films exist purely for that reason and don’t need any themes on top of that. But I wasn’t even entertained by anything happening in the plot. As you’d expect from a family film, its conclusion is predictable and the moments in between, at least to me, are not charming or memorable enough to leave a good impression. 

And what’s worse than a truly bad movie? A mediocre, boring one. And that’s what The Aristocats is. 

Also giving a cat with Asian features chopsticks to play the piano is at most unexpected but not really funny. In the overall context, that scene simply serves as a colorful, musical pitstop halfway through the movie before they ultimately assimilate to the aristocratic lifestyle at the mercy of an old, white woman.

Maybe I’m reading into this too much but there is that disclaimer at the start of the film that Disney puts in front of some of their older releases deemed controversial. 

Ultimately The Aristocats is a rather weak entry in the long list of animated Disney classics. But at least it’s better than all of the recent ‘live-action’ remakes, but from the recent trend of Disney redoing literally their entire 90s golden age of films, it’s only a matter of time until they’ll produce the inevitable remake for this one.

Next week we’ll watch Spielberg’s feature-length debut Duel.