Always Be My Maybe: No doubts here!

Always Be My Maybe (2019) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for sexual candor, drug use and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.24.20

Much the way the Hallmark Channel has become (in)famous for its insufferably sweet Christmas movies, Netflix has been unleashing a steady supply of original romantic comedies.

When Marcus (Emerson Min) and Sasha (Miya Cech) treat themselves to a night on the
town, of course they have to participate in a cute photo booth session.

Many fall into the so-so category; some are positively dire. (I strongly caution against Love Wedding Repeat, which debuted a few weeks ago.)

Always Be My Maybe, on the other hand, is a cut above.

The premise and execution may be familiar, but the snarky script and sharp acting — with solid, character-rich performances even by minor players — makes this a thoroughly scrumptious experience. It’s a dream project by co-writers Ali Wong and Randall Park, both accomplished actors and comedians, who wanted to produce their own version of When Harry Met Sally…

With solid assistance from co-scripter Michael Golamco and director Nahnatchka Khan — a noteworthy feature film debut — Wong and Park succeeded.

Aside from the engaging core story, their film is laden with nonstop asides, retorts and one-liners — all delivered with impeccable comic timing — and droll bits of visual business, some so subtle that you’ll have to watch a second time, just to catch them all (a not-at-all painful experience). This may be a modest endeavor, but it’s quite entertaining.

It’s also a hilarious — and dead-on accurate — send-up of pretentious foodies, and the vacuous celebrity culture.

But that comes later. We meet Sasha and Marcus — initially played engagingly by Miya Cech and Emerson Min — as 12-year-old neighbors in a friendly San Francisco neighborhood. She’s a latchkey sole child of parents forever busy elsewhere: essentially an orphan. 

She therefore spends considerable time next door with the traditional family that Marcus is lucky enough to possess; he and parents Harry (James Saito) and Judy (Susan Park) dote on each other, and Sasha becomes a grateful surrogate daughter.

Khan and her scripters breeze through the next few years in montage, hitting all the usual “young love” cute points. Because, clearly, they’re meant for each other … although each is too nervous — shy, uncertain, whatever — to acknowledge or act upon the bond.

Until, at the verge of adulthood — now played by Wong and Park — they do.

As often is the case with childhood best friends, sex ruins everything.

Your Name: Star-crossed love

Your Name (2016) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated PG, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.22.20

The spirit of Studio Ghibli lives on in writer/director Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name, a mind-bending romantic fantasy steeped in the Japanese culture, tradition and mysticism that are hallmarks of Hayao Miyazaki’s best films.

Mitsuha, center, can't begin to explain to her best friends — Tessie, left, and Sayaka — why
she isn't quite herself at the moment.

On top of which, the lush hand-drawn animation, at times approaching photo-realism, is so gorgeous that it almost hurts the eyes. Indeed, at times the visuals virtually overpower the narrative: ordinarily an ill-advised distraction, but in this case merely a welcome excuse to watch the film again.

Shinkai’s story is so carefully composed, so deviously cunning, that almost any plot description is guaranteed to spoil the viewer’s sense of elated discovery, as each fresh twist is revealed.

If your curiosity is sufficiently piqued, best to stop reading here, until afterseeing the film (which is available via Amazon Prime and other streaming services).

High school-age Mitsuha (voiced by Mone Kamishiraishi) lives in the rural community of Itomori, in Japan’s mountainous Hida region. She and her younger sister, Yotsuha (Kanon Tani), are being raised by their grandmother, Hitoha (Etsuko Ichihara); the elderly woman has schooled them in venerable Japanese traditions such as kumihimo (thread weaving) and kuchikamizake (sake fermentation), the latter taking place during a lavishly costumed kabuki ritual.

Both practices have symbolic significance that factor into what will follow.

Mitsuha, bored and restless, yearns for a more exciting life anywhere else: a desire she confides to best friends Tessie (Ryo Narita), a construction worker; and Sayaka (Aoi Yüki), a nervous girl too shy to acknowledge her crush on Tessie.

Elsewhere…

High school-age Taki (Ryunosuke Kamiki), living amid the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, works part-time in an Italian restaurant while studying to become an architect; he’s also a gifted pencil artist. He has a crush on restaurant co-worker Miki (Masami Nagasawa), a slightly older university student, who is amused by his somewhat clumsy attention.

Science Fair: An engaging presentation

Science Fair (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG, for no particularly reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.17.20

Think 2002’s Spellbound, but with STEM whiz kids rather than spelling bee champs.

Writer/directors Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster’s warm-hearted documentary — debuting on Disney+ — profiles nine high school students from around the globe, as they compete for top honors at the annual Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF).

Despite being constrained by very limited resources, Gabriel and Myllena nonetheless
made a major medical breakthrough that could help combat the Zika virus.

The young contestants are a varied group, although united in passion, persistence and — let it be said — jaw-dropping intelligence and ingenuity. Following the Spellbound template, we meet each in turn, and I advise against picking an early favorite; each new candidate is likely to win a place in your heart.

The film actually opens with a previous year’s winner, Jack Andraka, who — as a high school freshman — took the grand prize for inventing a method to possibly detect the early stages of pancreatic and other cancers. His joyous rush to the stage is wholly out of control, his elation absolutely off the chart; we can’t help but laugh.

At a later (calmer) moment, the filmmakers get Jack to briefly explain what we’re about to see, and what it means to young students who are too frequently — and often contemptuously — dismissed as geeks by their peers.

Indeed, a few contenders are total outsiders. Kashfia, impeccably polite and soft-spoken, is a Muslim girl at a massive, sports-obsessed high school in Brookings, S.D. The hallways are lined with display cases: laden with sports trophies, with nary an academic honor to be seen. Worse yet, she’s unable to find a teacher willing to serve as her research advisor, so — and you have to love this — she bonds with the school’s head football coach.

Ivo, a similarly soft-spoken German aeronautical engineering student, has re-designed a century-old, single-wing aircraft that was deemed impractical and abandoned. The young man’s outside-the-box enhancements improved stability and efficiency to a degree that impressed judges at the German National Fair, which in turn qualified him for ISEF, and his first trip to the United States.

West Virginia’s Robbie is an awkward, hopelessly shy misfit with a fondness for flamboyant shirts. Although a math genius and programming savant, he has little use for conventional instruction, and nearly flunked out of algebra. He spends his free time in the attic, building computers with parts scavenged from a local junkyard.

Tigertail: The sad price of detachment

Tigertail (2020) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG, no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.15.20

Reprimands intended to be helpful, but delivered with too much irritation, can have devastating consequences.

Try as she might, Angela (Christine Ko) can't begin to connect with herfather, Pin-Jui
(Tzi Ma), who has spent decades burying his emotions so far, that they may be irretrievable.

Writer/director Alan Yang’s Tigertail — a Netflix original — is a quietly heartbreaking depiction of how emotional isolation can be transmitted from parent to child, to the ongoing detriment of both. Tang’s approach is methodical and unhurried; even at an economical 91 minutes, his film can feel slow (particularly during the initial half hour).

But the payoff is worth the investment; the final few minutes are surprisingly powerful. There may not be a dry eye in the house.

Yang’s script traces key events in the life of his protagonist, Pin-Jui, during three time streams: young childhood, early adulthood and post-retirement. The latter phase is played by the magnificent Tzi Ma, whose finely shaded portrayal of withdrawn stoicism is conveyed mostly through sad eyes and a slumped frame (even, seemingly, when he stands erect). They depict silent resignation; this is a man who has completely abandoned any effort to find joy in life.

Given that he seems to have built a comfortably middle-class life, how could this possibly be? What could have happened?

We initially meet Pin-Jui as a little boy in Taiwan (played by Zhi-Hao Yang) — at the time, still under Chinese communist rule — living with his grandparents and helping work their vast rice fields. His father is dead; his mother is elsewhere in a nearby city, struggling to find work, in order to reunite with her only child. The boy misses her, and occasionally hallucinates seeing his parents in the distance, working the same rice field.

Harsh reality brings tears to his eyes, which his grandmother (Li Li Pang) curtly dismisses:

“Crying never solves anything. Be strong. Never let anyone see you cry.”

And there it is: the seed from which bitter fruit will spring, decades later.

But not immediately. The middle time stream finds Pin-Jui (now played by Hong-Chi Lee) toiling alongside his mother, Minghua (Yang Kuei-mei), in a sugar factory. The work is hard — and dangerous — but they lead an acceptable, if meager existence. And Pin-Jui has been lucky enough to re-connect with childhood friend Yuan (Yo-Hsing Fang); the two are deeply in love.

They'll Love Me When I'm Dead: 'Orson Around

They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated TV-MA, for nudity and strong sexual content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.10.20

Mention Orson Welles, and everybody — everybody — immediately thinks of Citizen Kane.

Film buffs are equally likely to cite The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight.

While Peter Bogdanovich (left, holding megaphone) waits to deliver his next line,
cinematographer Gary Graver adjusts lights according to the very precise instructions
given by Orson Welles (seated).

Baby-boomers are more apt to remember Welles’ ubiquitous TV commercials for Paul Masson — “We will sell no wine before its time” — which were parodied mercilessly by stand-up comics.

But in Hollywood, during his final few decades — Welles died on Oct. 10, 1985 — he was just as notorious for an expanding list of unfinished projects. They include:

• Don Quixote, filmed — off and on — between 1957 and ’69 (!), when production was halted after the death of star Francisco Reiguera, although Welles continued editing footage well into the 1970s;

• The Deep, based on Charles Williams’ novel Dead Calm, shot between 1966 and ’69, but left unfinished when financing evaporated, and completion was rendered impossible when star Laurence Harvey died in 1973 (Williams’ novel later was filmed by entirely different hands in 1989, with Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill); and

• The Dreamers, based on two short stories by Karen Blixen, which went no further than two 10-minute segments Welles filmed in 1979.

And one other, which has become the stuff of legend.

Documentarian Morgan Neville’s They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead — a Netflix original — depicts the fascinating, frustrating and ultimately heartbreaking saga of what Welles intended as his last great film: The Other Side of the Wind.

Neville’s project also gains class and dramatic heft from Alan Cumming’s arch on-camera narration, filmed in gorgeous monochrome by cinematographer Danny Grunes.

Welles’ film was cheekily autobiographical, although he repeatedly denied as much while giving cheerful interviews during the many years that production limped along. He took a “film within a film” approach; the primary action is set during a lavish party being thrown for once-famed film director Jake Hannaford (played by John Huston), who has been struggling to complete a commercially viable feature, in order to revive his faded career.

See You Yesterday: Not much to look at

See You Yesterday (2019) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated TV-MA, for violence and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.8.20

I love time-travel stories.

It’s always fun to see how clever — or not — the writer(s) are, in terms of trying to avoid blatant temporal contradictions. 

When the latest revision to their time-travel backpacks produces something of a mess,
C.J. (Eden Duncan-Smith) and Sebastian (Danté Crichlow) attract the wrong sort of
attention from his indulgent grandmother.

Gold standards include Back to the Future, Interstellar, About Time and Edge of Tomorrow, each of which ingeniously handles a twisty premise.

See You Yesterday, alas, does not belong in their company.

Director Stefon Bristol’s odd-duck fantasy doesn’t know what it wants to be, when it grows up. At first blush, the nerdish young protagonists’ aviator goggles and repurposed proton packs — apparently borrowed from Ghostbusters — suggest a larkish tone, even given the gravity of the event they’re attempting to undo by bouncing back in time.

Michael J. Fox’s cameo appearance, as their high school science teacher, also is a nice touch: an affectionate nod to one of the sub-genre’s high points.

But this initial suggestion of a family-friendly frolic is shattered by every character’s relentlessly coarse profanity; the frequent F-bombs are quite off-putting, and definitely warrant an R rating, as opposed to the misleadingly gentler “TV-MA” assigned by virtue of the film being a Netflix original.

Bristol and co-writer Fredrica Bailey also seem far more interested in making a social statement about racist white cops gunning down innocent black victims; the time-travel element becomes mere window-dressing on which to hang a “black lives matter” indictment. But it’s meager lip service; that plot element never goes anywhere. Bristol and Bailey merely state the obvious, as if that’s enough. (Hardly.)

Much worse: Their film’s so-called “conclusion” is a total cop-out, and a textbook case of lazy writing. Bristol and Bailey apparently hit a brick wall and didn’t know what to do next, so they simply … stopped. That’s just sad. And annoying.

The story begins in a deserted alley, as Brooklyn teenage prodigies and best friends C.J. Walker (Eden Duncan-Smith) and Sebastian Thomas (Danté Crichlow) test their newly assembled chrono-displacement backpacks. Sparks fly and soda cans wobble, but nothing else occurs. Back at the drawing board, they ponder what to adjust.

Uncorked: A pleasant vintage

Uncorked (2020) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated TV-MA, for profanity and mild sexual candor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.3.20

Sensitive, respectful children never want to disappoint their parents.

The guilt can be deeply distressing.

Elijah (Mamoudou Athie, left) can't find the words to tell his father (Courtney B. Vance)
that he has no interest in taking over the family's barbecue restaurant business.

But a crunch point hits when a recently minted adult child embraces a career path completely at odds with what a parent has assumed, planned and counted upon.

Uncorked — a Netflix original — is a modest but engaging feature film debut by writer/director Prentice Penny, best known (until now) for writing and producing a popular string of TV comedies such as Scrubs, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Insecure. This heartfelt little drama therefore is something of a departure, because — allowing for a for a few droll exchanges — Uncorked is mostly serious.

It’ll also feel very familiar to anybody who survived a similarly uncomfortable experience regarding parental expectations.

Elijah (Mamoudou Athie) has grown up helping his folks — Louis and Sylvia (Courtney B. Vance and Niecy Nash) — run the popular Memphis barbecue joint that was founded by the young man’s grandfather, and has been passed down since then. Although Louis has tolerated his son’s previous career flirtations, there’s no question that — eventually — Elijah is expected to carry on the family tradition.

Unfortunately, Elijah’s current fixation looks to be The One … and it has nothing to do with purchasing just the right wood to properly smoke ribs. Thanks to supplementing his income with a part-time job at a liquor store that specializes in wines, and the encouragement of its owner (Matthew Glave, nicely understated), Elijah has decided to become a master sommelier: an elite designation granted solely to the few able to pass its notoriously difficult annual exam.

Preparing for that challenge will require months of extremely intense — and time-consuming — study.

Louis isn’t the only one whose eyebrows lift, when Elijah confesses this desire during one of his family’s typically boisterous dinners; mishearing “sommelier” as Somalia, half the table wants to know why the heck he’d want to move to Africa.

And it isn’t merely the initial snickers of family members. We’ve already witnessed another, subtler hurdle, when Elijah joined a posh afternoon wine tasting … and its veritable sea of white faces. Penny (to his credit) never stresses this point, and Athie’s performance gives us no indication that Elijah views this as an obstacle; even so, we have to believe that it leaves the young man feeling somewhat isolated.

Blow the Man Down: Quietly suspenseful

Blow the Man Down (2019) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity, violence, sexual candor and brief drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.1.20

Some stones are best left unturned.

Blow the Man Down — streaming via Amazon Prime — is an impressive feature debut by indie writer/directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy, and a snarky slice of modern noir: Fargo transplanted to the similarly rugged Northeast.

Faced with the need to dispose of incriminating evidence, sisters Mary Beth (Morgan
Saylor, left) and Priscilla (Sophie Lowe) believe they've hit upon the perfect solution.
Alas, what the tide takes out, the lapping waves almost always bring back...

The setting is Easter Cove, a remote fishing village on Maine’s rocky coast, where (and I’m quoting the press notes here) “bonds run as deep as the ocean, and secrets are as thick as the morning fog.” Cole, Krudy and cinematographer Todd Banhazi deftly convey this setting’s isolation and bitter cold, and the location clearly is authentic (with Maine’s Harpswell, population just shy of 5,000, standing in for the fictitious Easter Cove).

Folks have kept themselves to themselves for generations; the notion of outsiders — or tourists — is incomprehensible. And while outwardly the community is kept alive by the tough and robust men who, every morning, take to the sea for the daily catch, appearances can be deceiving.

The story opens just after the passing of beloved town matriarch Mary Margaret Connolly. She leaves behind two young adult daughters: the elder Priscilla (Sophie Lowe), who kept the family fish shop going during their mother’s declining health; and the more restless Mary Beth (Morgan Saylor), who has long hoped for college and a life anywhere other than Easter Cove.

Ergo, Priscilla is the loyal and responsible daughter, while Mary Beth is more of an impulsive wild child. Priscilla’s obvious hope that, with their mother now gone, Mary Beth will step up and accept her share of the new responsibilities — bills and unpaid loans that have left them financially precarious — are dashed almost immediately.

Lowe’s features reflect the pinched, quietly anxious aura of one who has grown accustomed to living under constant stress; she persuasively conveys Priscilla’s visible disappointment, with a soupçon of resentment, at her younger sister’s selfishness. Saylor, in turn, is equally convincing as the spoiled and self-centered Mary Beth, who sees no reason to put on her big-girl pants.

But neither girl realizes the degree to which their mother maintained a delicate balance, behind the scenes, among the town’s true old-guard operators: discrete manipulators Susie Gallagher (June Squibb), Doreen Burke (Marceline Hugot), Gail Maguire (Annette O’Toole) and Enid Nora Devlin (the indomitable Margo Martindale). 

The latter has long run her bed & breakfast as the local brothel, an operation that was “protected” by Mary Margaret. But with that shield now absent, Susie, Doreen and Gail are (they believe) in a position to clamp down on Enid’s blatantly depraved operation, which also has been tolerated — with a wink-wink/nudge-nudge — by feckless Police Chief Coletti (Skipp Sudduth).