LunaFest 2022: Emotionally uplifting

LunaFest 2022 • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Not rated, appropriate for ages 13 and older

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.16.22

This year’s LunaFest features a strong showing of short subjects by and about women.

 

Akanksha (Akanksha Cruczynski), who takes her dog-sitting job quite seriously,
ensures that the adorable — if overly pampered — Timothée never is out of her sight.

From its inception in 2001, LunaFest — the world’s first all-women traveling film festival — has given a national platform to a diverse and talented set of women filmmakers. From one small California screening that first year, the program has grown into an annual event that has showcased more than 170 filmmakers, and raised more than $6.5 million for local women’s causes.

Although this year’s offerings once again feature a wide variety of subjects and filmmaking styles, several are linked by an artistic response to the norm-shattering arrival of the Covid virus.

 

This topic is at the heart of Canadian filmmaker Andrea Dorfman’s How to Be at Home, a very cleverly animated “how-to” primer on coping with isolation during the first year’s soul-wrenching withdrawal from public contact. This 5-minute short — adapted from a poignant poem by Tanya Davis, which is narrated throughout — blends two- and three-dimensional animation to remind the viewer that we are united in our misery.

 

“If you’re really anxious, don’t worry,” the poem begins, “it’ll get worse.”

 

The subsequent suggestions range from wise to amusing, from “Hug a tree” to (my favorite): “Watch a movie, and watch all the credits … because you have time.”

 

Covid also influenced the “social experiment” at the heart of Emily McAllister’s Wearable Tracy, which profiles an adorably eccentric Bronx woman named Lee, who indulges in “design thinking.” She decided to wear a goofy “crown” made of pipe cleaners one day, as a means of celebrating her friend Tracy’s birthday.

 

Intrigued by the response this drew, Lee turned this gesture into a daily event with three firm rules: each day had to feature a new (and increasingly elaborate) “wearable Tracy” pipe cleaner crown; she had to wear it all day, at work and during her subway commute; and she had to ask the name of anybody who spoke to her about her unusual headwear.

 

As Lee explains, this got her past a life-long fear of judgment; it also broke down barriers, as it provoked — in a positive way — communication with strangers.

 

She did this every day, for more than a year … and then Covid hit. As for what Lee did next … well, that would be telling.

 

Olympus Has Fallen: If only it were so...

Olympus Has Fallen (2013) • View trailer 
1.5 stars. Rating: R, for strong violence and plenty of profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.22.13

An “exhortation to tweet,” handed to patrons who attended Tuesday evening’s preview screening of this film, asked if we all were ready for a “heart-pounding, nonstop, action-packed thrill ride?”

Hey, you bet; I’m always up for that much entertainment.

Once a suicide bomber blows a hole through the protective fence that surrounds the
White House, terrorists begin to pour through the gap. Seeing his slim chance,
Banning (Gerard Butler) follows quietly from the rear, hoping to pick off any stragglers.
Hey ... it could work!

But having now seen the film, I’m still waiting.

Olympus Has Fallen isn’t a thrill ride; it’s a thoroughly unpleasant, mean-spirited, jingoistic slice of propaganda disguised as a mainstream movie. It’s also insufferably and unforgivably stupid, laced with characters who spout laughably trite dialogue while behaving, for the most part, like cowardly morons.

If our heads of state truly responded like the idiots depicted here in Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt’s offensively brainless script, we’d deserve to be invaded by terrorists.

Attempting to position this bomb as a “thrill ride” also implies at least a certain degree of fun, and you’ll find none of that here. What you will find, under Antoine Fuqua’s hammer-handed direction, is a first act that lovingly depicts the mass slaughter of hundreds, if not thousands, with most victims gorily shredded by high-powered gunfire. The bloodbath goes on and on and on and on. Long past the point of necessity.

Then, for good measure — and to rev up our patriotic fury, donchaknow — we watch the Washington Monument destroyed in a manner uncomfortably similar to the 9/11 shattering of the twin towers. And then Fuqua lays waste to the White House.

Uh-huh. Jolly good fun.

This is the sort of turgid melodrama that forces an actor of Morgan Freeman’s stature — playing the Speaker of the House of Representatives, fergawdsake — to intone the immortal line, “They’ve opened up the gates of hell!” To a melodramatic crescendo from Trevor Morris’ bombastic score, of course.

I’d dismiss this hokey nonsense as a latter-day descendant of 1970s disaster flicks, such as Earthquake and The Towering Inferno, were it not for the nasty political subtext. Otherwise, though, the genre clichés are consistent: Any bit player granted a line of dialogue here — just enough to fix him or her in our minds — is guaranteed to go the way of Star Trek red-shirts. Gratuitously, I might add.

Our hero is Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), once a star Secret Service agent in charge of protecting President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart), now assigned to desk duty in the Treasury Department, in the wake of events in a rather cruel prologue. That’s typical of the overkill approach Rothenberger and Benedikt take to all elements of their script: no need for credibility or reasonable psychological subtlety, when a sledgehammer will do.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower: Enchanting coming-of-age drama

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) • View trailer
4.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for drug and alcohol use, sexual candor and brief violence
By Derrick Bang

Judging by the number of perceptive, achingly poignant high school misfit dramas produced over the years, being unpopular must’ve been a whole lot more popular than it seemed at the time.

After unknowingly devouring some marijuana-laced brownies, Charlie (Logan Lerman,
center) unintentionally becomes the hilarious star of his first party. But new friends
Sam (Emma Watson) and Patrick (Ezra Miller) ignore this opportunity to humiliate him,
instead taking care to ensure that Charlie survives the experience with his dignity
(mostly) intact.

Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, published in 1999, has sold more than a million copies and become something of a modern Catcher in the Rye (an earlier classic, perhaps not coincidentally, said to be a favorite of Chbosky’s young protagonist). Perks also has the distinction of being one of the top entries in the American Library Association’s list of most frequently challenged and banned books, in 2004 and from ’06 through ’09 (where it peaked, at No. 3) ... which, in my mind, merely proves that Chbosky did an excellent job.

Hollywood naturally came calling, but Chbosky held onto his baby, mindful of the many horror stories revolving around successful authors who had seen their popular works destroyed by other hands. Meanwhile, he nurtured his varied talents by scripting the 2005 film adaptation of Rent and creating, writing and producing the 2006-08 TV series Jericho. A decade earlier, he also wrote, directed and produced The Four Corners of Nowhere, a little-seen 1995 indie film which I suspect is about to be rescued from obscurity.

Point being, Chbosky earned the right to script and direct Perks, and has done a commendable job. His angst-ridden saga of emotional isolation is well cast, impeccably acted, sensitively directed and — no surprise here — impressively faithful to the book. The film will be embraced both by young readers who devoured the epistolary novel, and by older movie fans who remember seeing themselves in John Hughes’ equally insightful teen dramas of the late 1980s (Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club and others).

Perks is, in short, destined to become one of the defining teen dramas of the early 21st century.

The year is 1991, as the precocious but socially awkward Charlie (Logan Lerman) begins his first morning as a freshman at Pittsburgh’s Mill Grove High School. He arrives in quiet terror, already counting down the days until he can flee as a graduating senior.

He’s smart and perceptive, easily able to answer his English teacher’s introductory questions ... but only privately, in his opened notebook, rather than risking peer censure by raising his hand and branding himself a teacher’s pet. But the instructor, Mr. Anderson (Paul Rudd), notices; a tentative bond is formed.