More Than Robots: Impressively inspirational

More Than Robots (2022) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Not rated, and suitable for all ages

Available via: Disney+

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.18.22

Documentarians — particularly those who track their subjects in real time — are at the mercy of unexpected developments.

 

Team Sakura Tempesta's mentor, Kanon — seated, third from left — watches
apprehensively as their robot tackles its required tasks, during a test run performed in
front of a room filled with sponsor spectators.

This somewhat uneven film therefore isn’t quite what actress-turned-director Gillian Jacobs set out to make … but that doesn’t detract from its uplifting charm.

Jacobs set out to track four high school teams participating in the annual FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC): from kickoff announcement and “kit reveal,” through regional competitions, and concluding with the championship face-offs.

 

One or two students and mentors are profiled from each team; we get a sense, through their eyes, of the respective robotics units.

 

(Davis’ stellar Citrus Circuits team, alas, was not among the chosen few. Which simply means that Jacobs didn’t look hard enough.)

 

Teams from throughout the world attend the January 4 kickoff event — either in person or remotely — which is hosted by (among others) actor Mark Hamill and FIRST founder Dean Kamen.

 

(Kamen comes by this involvement honestly; he holds more than 1,000 patents and is perhaps best known for inventing the Segway and iBOT, along with portable dialysis machines and insulin pumps. He founded FIRST — “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology” — in 1989, as a means of inspiring students’ interest in STEM fields.)

 

The challenge changes each year; this particular season is dubbed “Infinite Recharge.” Each team is given an identical “build kit”; how the components are used is up to individual ingenuity.

 

Cue a classic quote by Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

 

The scenario concerns a futuristic city that must activate a protective shield before an asteroid strike. This is accomplished by student-built robots that scoop up and shoot “power cells” (yellow foam balls) into targeted holes, to activate the “shield generator.” The shield then must be manipulated via a control panel, and — finally — two robots must “park” by hanging themselves from a balance beam, with extendable “arms,” so that both robots are wholly off the floor.

 

The teams greet the details of each year’s challenge, Kamen explains, with equal parts “excitement and terror.”

 

Terror, because the teams have only six weeks to build their robots.

 

Deep Water: Rather murky

Deep Water (2022) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for sexual content, nudity, profanity and violence

Available via: Hulu

By Derrick Bang

British director Adrian Lyne hit pop-culture gold with 1983’s Flashdance and 1987’s Fatal Attraction. Although his subsequent films were uneven — Jacob’s Ladder, Indecent Proposal, Lolita — they certainly generated interest and controversy, further cementing his status as a purveyor of erotic thrillers.

 

Despite having long tolerated her nymphomaniacal tendencies, Vic (Ben Affleck) warns
Melinda (Ana de Armas) that she has become too brazen and reckless.

Lyne rebounded with 2002’s Unfaithful, which brought a well-deserved Oscar nomination to Diane Lane, for her nuanced role as a cheating wife who comes to her senses a bit too late.

Then Lyne dropped off the map. For two full decades.

 

He has returned in form with this similarly salacious handling of Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel, adapted fairly faithfully — to a point — by scripters Zach Helm and Sam Levinson.

 

I’m surprised Lyne waited so long to dip into Highsmith; they’re made for each other. Her morality-bending stories dig deep into the psychological quirks of stone-cold psychopaths; the most famous examples are the methodical impersonator in The Talented Mr. Ripley (and four sequel novels), and the murder-trading playboy in Strangers on a Train. Both were made into superb films.

 

Lyne’s Deep Water is a long way from superb, but it certainly grabs one’s attention, due mostly to the earthy, sexually charged performance by Ana de Armas. This is breathtaking, fearless, all-in acting; she oozes carnal intensity with every breath, word and gesture.

 

To casual observers, Vic (Ben Affleck) and Melinda Van Allen (de Armas) are a content, picture-perfect couple living an affluent life made possible by the extreme wealth he earned as a microchip inventor. Now retired, he publishes a quarterly arts magazine, rides about town on his mountain bike, raises snails as a hobby (!), and is totally besotted with their 6-year-old daughter, Trixie (the utterly adorable Grace Jenkins, in an impressive feature debut).

 

But Vic and Melinda’s marriage actually is one of uneasy convenience: He tolerates her endless string of lovers, as long as she doesn’t break up their family.

 

Unfortunately, her indiscreet, narcissistic behavior — and an insistence being the center of attention — has made their friends uneasy. They’re also concerned about Vic, particularly because he seems oddly unfazed: even when Melinda — inevitably poured into one of costume designer Heidi Bivens’ barely-there dresses — flirts shamelessly with some guy at the many cocktail parties enjoyed by everybody in their social circle. (Ah, how the other half lives…)

 

Affleck plays this role well; he excels at quietly stoic characters who nonetheless have something bottled up inside. Indeed, there’s a bit more than resignation and mild-mannered apathy in Vic’s gaze, when he watches, from an upper-story window, as Melinda drapes herself onto her next likely conquest.

 

(You’ll detect more than a few echoes of the similar role Affleck played in 2014’s Gone Girl, albeit with different plot twists.)

Compartment No. 6: Strangers on a train

Compartment No. 6 (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity and vulgarity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

We meet Laura (Seidi Haarla) as she wanders among — but not part of — the people gathered at a party hosted by her somewhat older lover, Irina (Dinara Drukarova); they treat Laura with mildly mocking disdain, as if she’s the hired help attempting to rise above her station.

 

Laura (Seidi Haarla) and Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) — separated by nationality, schooling,
refinement and just about every other possible human quality — seem unlikely to
get along, when forced to share a cramped train compartment.

In a few quick scenes, Finnish writer/director Juho Kuosmanen deftly sketches Laura, Irina and their clearly unequal dynamic; we sense that Irina keeps her around like a toy, for the amusement of her snobbish, condescending friends.

Even so, the two have planned a trip together. Laura, a Finnish student studying archaeology at Moscow University — Irina probably is one of her professors — is eager to see the Kanozero petroglyphs. This will involve a train ride to distant Murmansk: a 35-hour trip that’ll cover roughly 925 miles.

 

But Irina backs out at the last moment. (Possibly as a means of severing the relationship? Kuosmanen doesn’t bother with such details.) Obviously stung but still determined, Laura boards the train by herself.

 

She winds up sharing a two-person sleeper compartment with Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov), a loutish Russian who assumes that she’s a sex worker, and makes appropriately vulgar remarks to that effect. She’s more repulsed than frightened; he doesn’t exactly radiate menace, but he seems the worst sort of guy with whom to share such a confined space. Sadly, efforts to switch compartments prove fruitless.

 

When she returns to their compartment, Ljoha has passed out in an alcoholic stupor.

 

The time is unspecified, although it feels like the mid- to late 1990s, shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union (an event that fits this story’s evolving moral center). Laura listens to music on a Walkman, and takes photos — and narrates her impression of things — with a hand-held camcorder.

 

By daylight Ljoha is less threatening, if still vulgar; they trade superficial details, and he explains that he’s traveling to work at a massive mine near the Arctic Circle. He’s amused by her “scholarly ways”; she regards him with mild contempt, having decided that his limited education puts him beneath her (little realizing that she’s now treating him the way Irina’s friends treated her).

 

You’d expect such a film to be claustrophobic and confined, but that isn’t the case; Kuosmanen finds plenty of ways to “open up” the narrative. Other passengers briefly sit in their compartment as the trip proceeds; Laura and Ljoha encounter numerous other people during the train’s many station stops, some of them lengthy. These interactions further shape their evolving dynamic.

 

He seems able to make friends with anybody, which impresses her.  

 

She repeatedly calls Irina, with limited satisfaction.

 

Turning Red: Clever depiction of teenage crisis

Turning Red (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG, for mild intensity

Available via: Disney+

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.11.22

The folks at Pixar love to tackle big topics, and they do so with humor, perceptive wit and clever storytelling.

 

Having poofed into a giant red panda at precisely the wrong moment, Mei (the panda)
waits anxiously to see how her friends — from left, Abby, Miriam and Priya — will
react to this admittedly unusual development.

They gave us an ingenious explanation of human emotions, in 2015’s Inside Out, and an equally astute depiction of human purpose, in 2020’s Soul. Both garnered well-deserved Academy Awards.

Pixar now has embraced an even greater challenge:

 

Female puberty.

 

The boldly inspired result — directed by Domee Shi, from an original script by Shi and Julia Cho — is both a remarkably apt metaphor, and an absolutely hilarious depiction of one young girl’s maturity crisis.

 

(As a superb example of the way Pixar nurtures talent, Shi earned this feature film assignment after winning an Oscar for her 2018 short, Bao.)

 

The setting is Toronto, in the early 2000s. Thirteen-year-old Meilin “Mei” Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) is an exuberant, mildly dorky, over-achieving force of nature who proudly excels at school. She’d likely be exasperating, except that her potentially patronizing edges are softened by her loyal posse: Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Abby (Hyein Park).

 

Mei also is a model daughter at home, cheerfully helping her mother Ming (Sandra Oh) tend to the ancestral family temple, in Toronto’s Chinatown.

 

Everything is regimented into a familiar and carefully controlled routine. As Mei giddily tells us, at the top of this film — mildly breaking the fourth wall — “This is gonna be the best year ever, and nothing’s gonna get in my way.”

 

Wishful thinking.

 

Like the flip of a switch, Mei suddenly becomes obsessed with the hunky guys in 4*Town, the hottest, coolest band of all time (which, defying its name, has five members). Her three besties share this passion, and their out-of-control enthusiasm turns them into giddily shrieking fangirls.

 

As a result — in a whimsical nod to Kafka’s Metamorphosis — Mei wakens one morning in the form of a an eight-foot-tall, bright red panda. Unable to control this new body, she becomes inadvertently destructive, messy and smelly. (Sound like any teenagers you know?)

Belfast: Deeply moving snapshot of a nation in crisis

Belfast (2021) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for violence and profanity

Available via: Movie theaters, Amazon Prime and other streaming services

By Derrick Bang

Armed with an impressive seven Academy Award nominations, Kenneth Branagh’s riveting, semi-autobiographical drama has just become available via streaming services.

 

This is must-see cinema.

 

Buddy (Jude Hill, his back to camera) listens quietly while his mother (Caitriona Balfe),
grandmother (Judi Dench) and grandfather (Ciarán Hinds) explain what has been
happening in their neighborhood.

It isn’t easy to layer an era of chaos, tumult and danger with warmth and humor, and Branagh — who wrote the script, as well as directing — has done so sublimely. He wisely followed John Boorman’s lead, who in 1987’s Hope and Glory similarly depicted the horrors he experienced as a child in London during World War II.

In this case, Branagh’s quasi-surrogate self is 9-year-old Buddy, played with beguiling innocence and impishness by Jude Hill, in a stunning feature film debut. Because this story is viewed through Buddy’s experiences and imagination, Hill is in practically every scene, and he capably carries the film; he’s beyond adorable. 

 

Branagh extracts an amazingly accomplished and nuanced performance from this young lad. It’s a crime that he didn’t secure a Best Actor nod to accompany all the other well-earned nominations.

 

Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos opens with an imposing, full-color overview of today’s Belfast. We then slide into a crowded, working-class pocket neighborhood; the image turns monochromatic as we’re whisked back to the summer of 1969. Children play merrily in the sun-dappled streets; adults chat amiably while walking to and from the little shops nestled in between row houses.

 

Everybody knows everybody else. When Buddy’s Ma (Caitriona Balfe) calls him in for tea, the message is passed along via children and adults until it finally reaches him. 

 

Then, suddenly, anarchy: An angry mob rounds a street corner like a swarm of maddened bees, laying waste to homes, shop windows, vehicles and anything else in their path … with a focus on Catholic families. It’s the opening salvo of the five-day political and sectarian violence that quickly spread through Ireland and led to the 30-year conflict dubbed “The Troubles.”

 

Buddy, terrified, stands frozen like a deer caught in headlights. We see the disconnect in his gaze; the boy cannot begin to comprehend the savage reality of what’s happening.

 

In that instant, his life — and that of his family, and everybody else — is altered. Forever. The calm of sociable neighborliness has been shattered, never to return; Catholic and Protestant families, once close friends, now eye each other warily. (Buddy and his family are Protestants.)

 

In the aftermath, streets are barricaded; watchers are posted 24/7. Buddy’s universe — this tiny portion of Northern Belfast — has become an artificial island.

 

Lucy and Desi: Captivating ode to a talented duo

Lucy and Desi (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG, for no particular reason

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

Hollywood folks are reading each other’s mail again.

 

Just a few months after the release of writer/director Aaron Sorkin’s captivating Being the Ricardos, we now have the documentary Lucy and Desi.

 

Lucille  Ball and Desi Arnaz weren't merely co-stars of television's
most popular show in the 1950s; they were equal business partners
in all manner of other activities taking place under the banner of
their production company, Desilu.

I suspect Lucie Arnaz — Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s daughter — got wind of Sorkin’s project, likely didn’t approve, and “encouraged” the creation of this equally engaging response.

Lucie Arnaz has been down this road before, having produced and hosted 1993’s Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie, just four years after her mother died … which was just three years after Desi Arnaz passed. Sweet as it is, grief and loss palpably hovered over that earlier project; this new film, chaperoned by director Amy Poehler and veteran documentarian Mark Monroe, is more measured and methodical.

 

Ball and Arnaz were a beloved Hollywood family, frequently in the public eye, and constantly the subjects of studio photographs; they also had access to personal film cameras that few people owned in the 1940s and ’50s. We benefit from the impressive abundance of home movie footage — 8mm and even 16mm — and extensive media interviews given by both Ball and Arnaz throughout their lives. 

 

Most notably, Ball spent weeks and months with journalist Betty Hannah Hoffman in the mid-’60s, recounting what turned into a detailed oral history preserved on a couple dozen audio tapes.

 

This essentially allows Ball and Arnaz to narrate their own stories, as this documentary proceeds. Poehler wisely keeps contemporary talking heads to a minimum, cutting only occasionally to commentary from Lucie Arnaz, Carol Burnett and Bette Midler. The latter two are an apt choice, as both were mentored by Ball; their warmhearted gratitude is obvious.

 

Ball was a slowly rising film star when she and Arnaz met in Hollywood, during 1940’s big-screen adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Too Many Girls. It was love at first sight, and they eloped not quite two months after the film debuted.

 

Ironically, as Ball explains via voice-over, they saw very little of each other during the next decade.

 

She became the “Queen of the B’s,” appearing constantly in a string of lesser-budget dramas, musicals, tear-jerkers and even film noir thrillers. She starred or co-starred in 20 (!) films between 1941 and ’49 … not one of which allowed her to display the comic talent for which she’d later become famous.

 

Even so, the hard work paid off. The pleasure is evident in Ball’s voice when she remembers how, one day, she overheard a studio head telling somebody to find him “a Lucille Ball type.” 

 

Arnaz wasn’t nearly as successful in Hollywood; after a few unremarkable supporting roles, he was drafted and spent his WWII years directing USO programs. Post-service, he formed what became an enormously popular band, and spent several years touring.

 

These years are covered via a captivating collection of publicity photos, studio stills, movie posters and archival film clips; it’ll likely be an eye-opening surprise to learn that Arnaz is credited with introducing conga line dancing to the States.

The 2022 Oscar Shorts: Wildly uneven

The 2022 Oscar Shorts • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Not rated, and patently adult

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.4.22

I always look forward to the live action and animated Academy Award nominees; it’s fun to wonder if we’ll see the first efforts of the next Spielberg, Kurosawa or Scorsese, or the next Miyazaki or Lasseter.

 

Most of this year’s live action nominees show plenty of promise.

 

The animated nominees are, um, more challenging. And be advised: Two of them absolutely are not for children.

 

Starting with live action, Polish director Tadeusz Lysiak’s tender, deeply moving The Dress is fueled by Anna Dzieduszycka’s terrific starring performance as Julia, a lonely woman who works as a maid in a rundown rural motel. 

Lysiak’s story is a bittersweet “first sexual encounter” saga, but Julia isn’t a fresh-faced youth; she’s an embittered, sexually frustrated, middle-aged woman who has spent her entire life deflecting rude comments about her diminutive stature as a “little person.” The pain is palpable in Dzieduszycka’s expression and posture, as she angrily chain-smokes and feeds endless coins into slot machines.

 

Then she chances to meet Bogdan (Szymon Piotr Warszawski), a trucker who smiles and treats Julia with respect; the flicker of hope that illuminates Dzieduszycka’s eyes is heartbreaking. Lysiak doesn’t pull back from subsequent details; the difficulty she has buying a suitable “date dress,” for example, is particularly touching.

 

Swiss filmmaker Maria Brendle’s Ala Kachuu (Take and Run) is a harrowing “statement drama.” Nineteen-year-old Sezim (Alina Turdumamatova) lives in a small, rural Kyrgyz village. She’s smart enough to attend university in the capital city of Bishkek: a goal her traditional parents forbid, knowing they’d be “shamed” by a daughter who made such a lifestyle choice.

Sezim nonetheless runs away to Beshkek, moves in with her friend Aksana (Madina Talipbekova), and gets a job in a bakery while awaiting the results of a university entrance exam. One day, totally without warning, she’s kidnapped by three young men; they drive her to an even more remote Kyrgyz village, where she’s forced to marry one of them (Nurbek Esengazy Uulu, as Dayrbek).

 

The village women, themselves former victims of “bride-kidnapping” — which apparently is endemic in Kyrgyzstan — offer no sympathy.

 

Turdumamatova’s performance is shattering; Sezim’s despair and desperation are palpable. Brendle’s plot beats are unrelenting; we Western viewers can’t help being shocked by her helplessness, and the callous “traditions” that tolerate such treatment of young women.