A 2010s List for Those That Couldn't Wait

[Michael Kerpan]

I really liked A Quiet Passion as fiction, but wasn't convinced that it caught the essence of the real Emily D....

[bamwc2]

I agree that it's a good movie, but I'm afraid that I don't know enough of Dickinson's biography to judge its fidelity.

[Michael Kerpan]

I don't know that MY view is correct -- just that I am (sort of) attached to it. It was interesting to visit her house several years ago.

[Lemmy Caution]

The Jesus Rolls (John Turturro, 2019): John Turturro wrote, adapted, and stars in this loose spinoff of The Big Lebowski. It's actually an adaptation of Bertrand Blier's Les Valseuses who himself brought it to the screen as the 1979 masterpiece Buffet Froid.

I didn't even know this came out. I assumed the project was a bit later and its release got delayed by Covid. Wasn't sure how or if this would work, but was interested in seeing it since Turturro is so good in small roles, and the Jesus Quintana character is tremendous during a few brief scenes. Disappointing to hear the film mostly sunk from view and you didn't care for it.
Has anyone besides the Coen Bros made a good Coen style film?

[knives]

Bridge of Spies was pretty good even if most of the Coen affectations seemed scrubbed off.

[Ghersh]

I remember Bridge of Spies as being very, very much Spielberg as Spielberg can (but a decent Spielberg) with Tom Hanks and with Thomas Newman standing in for John Williams and other Spielberg stuff, but I also remember noticing some humourous touches in the dialogue between Hanks and Rylance which I credited to the Coens.

I'm surprised how the Coens are credited with writing some films in the last year that seem not typically Coen, like that Angelina Jolie war drama. There's also Suburbicon, but here the case is that mediocre director George Clooney reworked and butchered an early Coen script.

[domino harvey]

Les valseuses and Buffet froid are two different films btw

[bamwc2]

Les valseuses and Buffet froid are two different films btw

Oops. You're right. The Les valseuses I meant to refer to was Blier's novel, but you're right. It was adapted into a film by the same name, not Buffet froid. My mistake.

[Lemmy Caution]

Never heard of Bridge of Spies.
But The Men Who Stare at Goats has a rather Coen vibe to it. I like Clooney in serio-comic roles, when his character takes himself seriously, but is somewhat goofy (think O Brother). Not sure why Goats was mostly ignored. It worked quite well for me, a good tale told well. But it didn't resonate in the world at large or get much attention for whatever reason. Perhaps endless war fatigue combined with no market for mockery of the military in these times when soldiers are uncritically deemed heroes(?) ... and/or just poor marketing/studio backing(?)

[therewillbeblus]

I strongly disliked The Men Who Stare at Goats (caveat: I haven't seen it since its theatrical release, so I could easily like it today), but also really enjoyed Bridge of Spies though I detected more clear Coens contributions than knives, especially their inspired dialogue that really spiced up the earlier light interactions before Spielberg did his thing and transformed it into his typical product

[knives]

I suspect we actually agree and my wording just comes off strong. The dialogue is obviously theirs even if the tone and perspective is pure ‘berg.

[Shrew]

I haven't seen it since release (like TWBB), but I really didn't like The Men Who Stare at Goats, though Clooney is fun in it. I think it's far too cute in trying to hedge whether the soldiers actually have mind powers and the joke of the climax, with them lacing the water supply of Kevin Spacey's evil psychic soldier base with LSD, comes off as pretty flat. Apparently the original book, which is nonfiction, brings in Iraq and the present day, but mainly to draw parallels to the ways new age stuff has continued to be twisted by the military (specifically, the torturing of prisoners using "Barney and Friends" music), whereas the film seems stuck in a boomer conception of hippie soldiers hanging out in Iraq. That takes much of the satirical bite out of the Iraq stuff. There's also a lot of weird extraneous stuff with Ewan McGregor's audience surrogate character, like him being in Iraq in the first place because his wife left him for a one-armed man. Which brings to mind the anecdote about Mike Nichols not hiring Robert Redford for The Graduate; McGregor is just too handsome to play a put-upon schlub.

I recall A Quiet Passion being often enjoyable but very long, particularly Dickinson's death and burial. There are some great sequences bringing the poetry to life, like the dark stranger ascending the stairs. Also, it's weird that the late 2010s have had several depictions of Dickinson's life (sorta like Austen-mania in the 90s), and A Quiet Passion is the last hurrah of a more "traditional" view of Dickinson--though even then it stresses her iconoclasm, as bamwc notes. After this we get Wild Nights with Emily starring Molly Shannon and the AppleTV Dickinson show with Hailey Steinfeld, which both go hard on the new scholarship arguing Dickinson was a lesbian.

[knives]

A Quiet Passion in its own subtle way is just as against the grain as those two. Davies clearly sees Dickinson as a kindred spirit with her personality practically indistinguishable from his own. Semi-famously he himself is gay although abstains from sex. I think when viewed as an autobiography it is one of the best films ever.

[bottled spider]

I had one admittedly peevish irritation with a Quiet Passion -- the little gag where the photographer says 'Smile!' and the humorless Dickenson senior retorts through gritted teeth 'I am smiling!'. Everybody knows people didn't smile for photographs in those days. The joke isn't good enough to justify the wince at the clumsy anachronism. I generally liked it otherwise.

Since Dickenson was quasi-religious and Davies is presumably Catholic (?), I wonder if 'passion' is meant more in the religious sense than the colloquial sense of sexual/romantic yearning.

[Michael Kerpan]

My theory is that Dickinson would have gone all high church Anglican (at least), but for her family circumstances. I think her family's religious perspective was not one she shared (or felt comfortable with).

[bamwc2]

Viewing Log:

Captain Fantastic (Matt Ross, 2015): Deranged sociopath Ben (Viggo Mortensen) leads a cult made up of the children he trained to be anti-social super genius killers from birth. Their mother is noticeably missing from the clan's forest compound at the beginning of the film, but we soon find out that she suffers from chronic depression and commits suicide while under treatment in a nearby hospital. The family embarks on a wacky road trip to attend her funeral where all sorts of hijinks occur. They pretend to be Christian fundamentalist to scare off a nosy cop. How silly! Ben fakes a heart attack at a supermarket so his mind controlled slaves can shoplift to their heart's content. Wacky! When they finally reach his dead wife's family they encounter her father Frank (Frank Langella) who disapproves of Ben's child abuse, and refuse to follow his daughter's last wishes. Ben is the only sensible person in the movie, but he's cast as the villain for trying to get in the way of Ben's unconventional child rearing. Hey, Ben's just aggressively, uncompromisingly quirky, right? The film is obsessed with quirks, but unlike, say, a Garden State, it tries to turn these quirks into super powers. The kids know all about quantum physics and the various schools of communism. Ben taught them to speak multiple languages, and also how to hunt and kill a deer with nothing but a Bowie knife. They even have a painting of Noam Chomsky that they bring out and dance and sing a song that consists of chanting the linguist's name over and over. What's missing is any understanding of these concepts. They drop a couple of physics terms without any indication that they know what they're talking about. They throw out the terms 'Trotskyism' and 'Maoism' without any sort of inclination that they know the difference between the two. Their worship of Chomsky seems to be limited to the fact that he has a name that's fun to say. Matt Ross's script comes off as a piece of writing by someone who is profoundly ignorant, but convinces themselves of their own profundity after looking up entries on Wikipedia. The film challenges the tremendous harm wrought by Ben when the eldest child accuses him of socially stunting them, but this sentiment is undermined five minutes later when they

SpoilerShow

exhume their mother's corpse, immolate her, and flush her ashes down a toilet. After bonding from their grave robbing they sing an a cappella version of Sweet Child O' Mine and any doubt they had about they had about their father's divinity is forgotten as if it was never brought up.

I suppose that it's a competently made film, but every aspect of it is founded on terrible ideas that should have been aborted at the get go. It's as much of an ill conceived concept as The Day the Clown Cried. This movie never should have been green lit. Hell, if Matt Ross had any understanding of the way humans actually work he would have never put pen to paper. I've seen some bad movies for the project, but none come even remotely close to this one. It's not just bad. It's repugnant.

Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015): Todd Haynes’s Carol takes place in an era where male homosexuality could land you behind bars, and lesbianism was unthinkable. That's why the eponymous Carol (Cate Blanchett) lives a life of domestic hell trapped in a loveless marriage to the oafish Harge (Kyle Chandler), who she treats as a beard and nothing more. Brutish Harge is no dummy, and realizes that the relationship his wife has with her dearest friend isn't strictly Platonic. Carol's life changes one day when she visits a department store in search of a Christmas present for her young daughter. There she meets Therese (Rooney Mara), a doe eyed counter girl. They hit it off alright, but Carol finds herself drawn back; first with a phone call, and then a visit that leads to her bringing Therese back home. Harge knows what his wife has in mind, and drives the object of her affection out. Carol and Therese keep finding reasons and ways to see each other until their feeling become undeniable as their relationship with the men in their lives dissolve. Haynes knows a thing or two about gay love, but proves himself adept at representing lesbians as well. Just like his excellent Far from Heaven, he shows his ability to tell stories about forbidden love in the 1950s. However, this film is less a Sirkian melodrama than it is straight (no pun intended) love story where the characters are constantly undermined by the manners these women must observe in their era. Haynes and his production team do a remarkable job recreating the period down to the most meticulous details, and Mara disappears into her role as the naive woman introduced into a world that she didn't know existed. I've never been much of a fan of Blanchett, whose performances always seem to be preoccupied with a conscious sense of their own importance. I suppose that the same occurred here in a role that was intended to let the grand dame shine, but there's enough that works for a very strong recommendation.

The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-Wai, 2013): After director Wilson Yip opened the floodgates for biopics of the early-to-mid twentieth century martial arts master Ip Man, it was the 2010s that saw a profusion of films about him with no less than five in a ten year period. I'm still unfamiliar with the other films about the remarkable practitioner of Wing Chung, but I've finally caught up with Wong Kar-Wai's version, and wow, was it good. Encompassing decades of Man's (played here by Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) life into a mere 106 minutes (I understand that there are multiple cuts of the film. I saw the one on Netflix, which, as I've heard, has Wong's blessing), the film begins when there was a division of martial artists separated north and south of the Yangtze. After years of practice, Man takes on the task of unification through both battles and philosophy. We chronicle various adventures from his life, from the twin crises of the Sino-Japanese and World War II, to his eventual journey to Hong Kong where he finally settled and opened a dojo. Wong makes some interesting choices here such as reducing the death by starvation of two of Man's daughters to a line of text on the screen, while elevating seemingly inconsequential anecdotes to lengthy diversions. This, in effect, makes it less of a conventional biopic than a series of stories about Man's life. It works very well in that respect, with pretty much every story enthralling no matter how minor it is. With fight scenes that recall the best of China's wǔxiá cinema, the martial arts are enthralling. Leung does a magnificent job as the aging master. Highly recommended.

Philomena (Stephen Frears, 2013): Comedian Steve Coogan co-wrote and co-stars in this Stephen Frears ripped from the headlines story. Coogan plays Martin Sixsmith, a former journalist who recently got the boot from his government job. Unsure of what else to do Martin returns to newspaper writing where he's saddled with the human interest story of Philomena Lee (Judy Dench). The Irish Catholic Philomena received no sex education, and was surprised to find herself pregnant after losing her virginity to a passing fancy in her early twenties. She's forced into a convent where she gives birth in secret, but must work as an indentured servant for four years afterwards. One day Philomena's preschool-age son leaves with a man in his car, and she begins a fifty year quest to find him. Coogan takes her back to the convent that sold her boy, but they prove to be unwilling to help. About fifty minutes in we learn that

SpoilerShow

her son was taken to the US, where he obtained a law degree and worked for the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations before dying of AIDS. The rest of the film finds the pair exploring his life with those who knew him.

The movie works well as an indictment of the inhumanity of the Magdalene Laundries, but the crimes committed in them are relatively well known by this point. What makes the film work is not its searing criticisms of the injustice that Philomena experiences, but rather the relationship with the unlikely pair. As the film alternates between light comedy and drama, the good natured amity between the two opposites (she's still a devout Catholic; he's an atheist) keeps everything afloat. I spent the film worried that it would have a saccharine ending where Philomena's faith inspires Martin to reevaluate his non-belief.

SpoilerShow

Thank goodness this didn't happen!

Rango (Gore Verbinski, 2011): I have no idea how this film got on my to see list given the fact that I generally dislike Gore Verbinski's work (with the exception of The Weather Man) and thought that it looked like a mere trifle at best. When you compound that with the very credible allegations of domestic violence against star Johnny Depp, I really wasn't looking forward to this one. That's why I was surprised by the fact that I actually kinda liked it. Depp plays the titular chameleon whose terrarium is tossed from the back of a car after it runs over an armadillo. After escaping a hungry hawk, Rango finds himself confronted by Beans (Isla Fisher) a hard-working agrarian who inherited her father's dying farm. She takes him back to a town that goes by the name of Dirt which is experiencing a severe water shortage. The town's mayor, a turtle voiced by Ned Beatty, makes the braggadocious chameleon Dirt's new sheriff, and his first task is to figure out what happened to the town's water supply. The film does a wonderful job of playing with the conventions of the western genre while also making it kid friendly. There's still a lot of inventive material here that will keep the grownups entertained as well, including a brief cameo from Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. It's not high art, but it's pretty good for what it is.

Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015): Despite its reputation as one of America's major metropolitan cities, Boston only had a little over half-a-million residents at the time that Spotlight takes place in the early '00s. It is also one of the most insular of any major American metropolis with an identity not found anywhere else in the country and a sense of regional pride as strong as any. As Tom McCarthy's postscript tells us, the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church that constitutes the films centerpiece, occurred not only throughout the US, but the entire world. But this movie is about the intricacies of how the scandal played out in a distinctly Boston fashion. The film begins with the sale of The Boston Globe and the instillation of Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) as the paper's new executive editor. A Miami transplant, Marty initially comes off as a sort of interloper promising cuts to streamline the paper's efficiency, but proves to be a major booster of their Spotlight section. Headed by division chief Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton), the Globe's Spotlight team (Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery)), begins investigating isolated reports of clergy sexual abuse that were settled in civil suits. After speaking with the head of a small group of survivors they realize that they need to expand their reporting, and through dogged reporting that's blocked by a seemingly endless series of roadblocks placed by the local dioceses, come to realize it as endemic citywide. The film's focus on crusading journalists will inevitably draw comparisons with Pakula's All the President's Men. While similar in structure and theme, the film is unique enough to stand on its own. Is it the best film of 2015 as Academy voters decided? Not even close, but it is a fascinating look into the operations of a newsroom.

Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, 2015): Working on a script penned by Aaron Sorkin, the king of stilted, self-important dialogue, middle brow director Dany Boyle brings a remarkably strange portrait of Apple CEO Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) to life. Instead of exploring the ground breaking work that he and Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogan) carried out in their garage, or the former's frequent ratfucking of the latter, Sorkin's script script mainly focuses on the periods before Jobs's press conference product launches. Starting with the backstage machinations prior to the legendary 1984 launch of the Macintosh, the film portrays Jobs as a deeply flawed, paranoid, egomaniac. His ex, Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), lives in poverty with their young daughter Lisa. As we learn, Jobs denied paternity (despite a test with a 95% accuracy), and calls her a hussy who slept around in a Time interview. However, his ill will to Lisa is strangely erased when he sees a crude drawing of hers on MacPaint. Throughout the glimpses we get into his life over the next fourteen years, and find that Jobs is still a jerk, but has a secret heart of gold. This latter character trait seems like a dubious one as he carefully cultivated the public persona of an iconoclastic genius, but was known as a self-obsessed control freak to those closest to him. The film battles between these two representations, but ultimately seems to come down on the side of the frustrated genius interpretation. Boyle presents Jobs as a flawed, but great man, adding on to his long string of mediocre films. He has a few decent, but not great, films in his catalogue, but I think its high time to admit that he's just not that good of a filmmaker.

[knives]

Boston the city is very tiny. When people talk about Boston, even in the movie, they’re including several other cities like Cambridge and Newton in it. When you look at the Boston metro area it doesn’t fit your description as well.

[bamwc2]

Boston the city is very tiny. When people talk about Boston, even in the movie, they’re including several other cities like Cambridge and Newton in it. When you look at the Boston metro area it doesn’t fit your description as well.

Thanks. I've actually never been there, so I was just going off of what I had read. I had the same experience when I moved to El Paso in 2015. I expected it to be far larger than it actually was. Again, just about half a million people, but completely eclipsed by its sister city just across the boarder which is 3x as large!

[Michael Kerpan]

Lots of folks from rather remote suburbs/exurbs who rarely if ever actually come into Boston will identify as being "from Boston". This area is unique in that a lot of the near-by towns/cities are as old (or older) than Boston -- and are not, properly speaking, suburbs at all. It is all pretty confusing.

The Boston Globe, in recent years, has been more the paper of the Boston area outside Boston itself than the paper of the city of Boston. The Herald has been a pretty rotten (mostly right-wing) rag. In a way Boston proper is journalistically underserved. I often need to depend on a friend's blog, Universal Hub, to actually follow hyper-local news (but it does not have the resources to do major investigations obviously).

[bamwc2]

Lots of folks from rather remote suburbs/exurbs who rarely if ever actually come into Boston will identify as being "from Boston". This area is unique in that a lot of the near-by towns/cities are as old (or older) than Boston -- and are not, properly speaking, suburbs at all. It is all pretty confusing.

I grew up about a 20 minute drive south of Chicago, and still very much identify as a Chicagoan.

[Michael Kerpan]

bamwc2 -- Did you visit the city regularly? Lots of folks in places like Schaumburg never did -- but still said they were "from Chicago".

Which south suburb? One along the Illinois Central line? (We lived in Hyde park for 15+ years). Lots of memories....

[bamwc2]

Michael Kerpan, it's totally okay to call me Brian if you want to. I spent my first 13 years in Orland Park before moving further south to Frankfort (just outside of Joliet). Funny you should mention Schaumburg, because I worked in the movies/music section of the Borders there between grad schools. None of those cities are Chicago itself, but if someone asks where I'm from, I'll just say Chicago or more typically "Chicagoland".

[bamwc2]

Viewing Log:

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2018): Joel and Ethan Coen have had two mostly successful forays into the western genre, including their retelling of Charles Portis's novel in True Grit and the modern day neo-noir hybrid No Country for Old Men. Both films reimagined the western in ways heretofore unseen, so it's no surprise that the brothers would return to the well to deconstruct the genre even further. In this case they write (only two of the segments were adaptations of previous works) and direct six individual tales of the Old West that form a loosely connected composite that feels straight out of 19th century lore. The film shifts tone from story to story, starting with Tim Blake Nelson as the crooning gunslinger that gives the anthology its title. The segment is sublimely goofy, but also extremely violent as Buster is no stranger to killing. The next part of the film maintains the first's comedic tones as past Coen collaborator Stephen Root plays a deliciously silly, but resourceful bank teller that thwarts a nameless robber's (James Franco) attempt to hold up the place. The segment has a great payoff that was ruined by a proliferation of memes over the last two years. The film's nadir comes in the third story which finds a nameless (as well as limbless) thespian played by Harry Melling and his Liam Neeson cast handler. Next up there's a wonderful segment that consists mostly of an old prospector (Tom Waits) talking to himself as he sifts for gold. The anthology reaches its dramatic apotheosis in its penultimate segment which explores a brother and sister's attempt to travel through hostile territory. Finally, there's a deliciously creepy tale about a stage coach full of passengers that feels like it was pulled from an EC horror comic. I've seen a few reviews of the film that criticize its lack of cohesion beyond a unifying theme of the Old West. I think that this complaint is misguided. I've never seen similar charges levied against the classic horror anthologies of the '60s and '70. Perhaps you might say that something like Dead of Night at least had a metanarrative linking the individual segments, but we get that here too, just in a different form. These are stories from a storybook. These are the legends and tall tales that the nation devoured a hundred and forty-ish years ago. Viewing it in this way, the segments seem less discordant than thematically complementary. I enjoyed the individual segments more than some of the film's critics, so, yes, it's an easy recommendation.

Burning (Chang-dong Lee, 2018): Director Chang-dong Lee's Secret Sunshine is one of the best films of the '00s, and his followup, Poetry, is great as well. However, neither of the films made close to the impact as his 2018 Burning did. The relative success of Burning, along with Kore-eda's Shoplifters from the same year, paved the way for reawakening the US's long dormant appetite for East Asian cinema that culminated in Parasite's Oscar win in 2020. I think that all three are great films, but Lee's might be the best of them all. The film focuses on aspiring novelist Lee Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) who one day meets a woman, Shin Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jun). He used to bully her in middle school by her ugly, but now she's a ravishing beauty in her twenties. They hang out and, after a short reunion, they sleep together. She asks him to watch her cat during a brief excursion to Kenya which Jong-su faithfully does. When she returns, she comes back with the enigmatic Ben (Steven Yeun) who she introduces as her oldest friend. Jong-su clearly wants a relationship with Hae-mi, but the seemingly omnipresent Ben acts as a third wheel, constantly undermining his confidence in pursuing her. The film takes a dramatic shift when

SpoilerShow

Jong-su begins to question his own sanity when a number of stories told by the two turn out to be false. Hae-mi goes missing and its strongly implied that the pyromaniac Ben has murdered her.

Hae-mi comes off a little bit as a Korean manic pixie dream girl as she changes the life of the socially awkward Jong-su while doing things like pantomiming eating a tangerine and prancing about topless at twilight. If she is a MPDG, she's a much more fleshed out and interesting one than the US variant. The film features long, gorgeous stretches of Jong-su roaming the countryside, giving us a chance to reflect on what came before. Simultaneously poetic and profound, the film works equally well when it’s a story of an abortive romance, and then the darker, more mysterious turn it takes in its second half.

Get Me Roger Stone (Dylan Bank, et al., 2017): Made prior to his indictment and conviction (and subsequent pardon), Netflix's documentary traces Roger Stone's rise from a young JFK-supporting Democrat to GOP kingmaker who was instrumental in bringing both George W. Bush and Donald Trump to the White House. As anyone with a passing familiarity with Stone knows, he's perhaps the most devious and unprincipled ratfucker in modern American history. Recruited by the Nixon administration while he was still in college, he was part of the Watergate scandal at the tender age of 19. From there Stone would help get Reagan elected using rumor and innuendo as his method, before forming a lobbying first with fellow Russiagate figure, Paul Manafort. Along the way we learn of Stone's propensity for bucking the moral majority wing of his party though his swinging and frequent pot use. He also found himself in an ill fit in the modern Republican Party given his support of abortion and gay rights (Stone had a convenient public religious conversion just before his sentencing three years after the film's release. I don't know what his position on any of these things are now). The documentary culminates in the terrible night in November 2016 when Stone and Alex Jones celebrated Trump's victory; the seeming culmination of his years of political dirty tricks. There's nothing groundbreaking about the film's narrative devices. It's told through a mixture of talking heads and archival footage, but the central figure of the documentary keeps things from ever feeling stale. Stone comes across as a venal and hedonistic Forest Gump, popping up in every major political scandal over the last fifty years. Love him or hate him (and, man, do I ever hate him), Stone is an interesting guy that makes for a perfect subject for a documentary. It feeds well into his ego, for as we learn from the film, he'd far rather be hated than forgotten.

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (Griffin Dunne, 2017): Neither literature nor journalism are big parts of my life, so, while I knew the name 'Joan Didion' prior to watching this Netflix documentary, I could tell you almost nothing about her. The film, directed by her nephew, actor Griffin Dunne, does an admirable job chronicling both the height she reached in her chosen professions, and the series of tragedies that still weigh heavy on her in the autumn of her life. Born into an undistinguished California family, Didion's fame as an essayist rose early on in life until she was a national celebrity by her early thirties. Her fame attracted fellow literary icon, John Gregory Dunne, who as Didion's narration tells us, she was determined to make her husband during their first meeting. As it turned out, they did marry and became writing partners as well as husband and wife. In 1966 they would fulfill their desire for a child when they adopted an abandoned newborn named Quintana Roo. While Didion experienced great career success culminating with President Obama awarding her the National Humanities Medal in 2012, her life was not all a bed of roses. Quintana suffered from chronic illnesses that resulted in a traumatic brain injury and subsequent death a mere two years after Didion lost her husband to a heart attack. Much like Get Me Roger Stone, Dunne attempts to distill decades worth of life down into less than two hours of archival footage and talking heads. Didion does most of the speaking herself either through narration or reading selections from her own essays. Most of the other interviewees--including Harrison Ford, who was surprisingly her pre-fame carpenter--offer only fawning praise of the literary icon. In this way, there's no real conflict like there was with the Stone bio. The film goes out of its way to present her as the doyennes of writing, but we never hear anything critical. While Didion's biography is interesting enough for a mild recommendation, the work left me feeling strangely empty.

They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (Morgan Neville, 2018): Yet another Netflix documentary, this time produced by the streaming service to coincide with the premier of the Peter Bogdanovich assembly of The Other Side of the Wind. You'll never guess it, but the documentary combines archival footage, talking heads (from the surviving crew members), and scenes from the unfinished film. Using narration from a black white Alan Cumming which only pops up a few times (why does this exist?), the film spends remarkably little time tracing out Orson Welles's rise from cinema's enfant terrible to cash strapped independent filmmaker. There are a few minutes of this, but we quickly jump to the years long production of The Other Side of the Wind which was beset by chronic underfunding that necessitated a piecemeal shoot which was carried out only when Welles could gather up enough cash from acting and promo gigs to record a little more footage. The documentary does an admirable job showcasing the hustle that Welles went through to make some truly extraordinary footage. While the outside of Hollywood indy existed long before Welles fell from Universal's good graces, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead makes a convincing case that no one was as shrewd or gifted at making them than Welles. Unfortunately, he never found anyone willing to be his patron and left the film, along with several others, incomplete when he died of a heart attack at 70.

What Happened to Monday (Tommy Wirkola, 2017): Before Tommy Wirkola's film decides it wants to be an action thriller in its second act, What Happened to Monday has one of the most ludicrously incompetent and absurd set ups of any movie in the sci-fi genre, apparently existing in a universe where condoms were never invented. We're told that several decades from now climate change renders much of the world uninhabitable. Global food production plummets, so scientists genetically engineer crops to uh...do something. As a result, the number of pregnancies with multiple births explode and most mothers start giving birth to litters of young 'uns that only Octomom had previously reached. When this occurs, the state allows the parents to keep one newborn, while ushering off the others to a cryogenic stasis where they'll wait to be unthawed when resources are less scarce. Willem Dafoe plays Terrence Settman, a man whose daughter dies in childbirth after delivering seven identical baby girls. For reasons that are never explained or explored, her obstetrician allows Terrence to go home with all seven, which he bizarrely names after the days of the week. I guess that Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy and Grumpy were already taken. We then flash forward a few years where the septuplets (played by Clara Read) all speak with a British accent despite living in the US and learning to speak with a grandpa that speaks like, you know, Willem Dafoe. He teaches them that they all must exist as one identity, only venturing outside of their apartment one at a time, doing whatever is necessary to make them all appear alike. This reaches comical proportions when one of them loses a finger. About twenty minutes in and the now adult Settmans (all played by Noomi Rapace) have abandoned their British dialects for American English cum Sweden. Additionally, they all have separate personalities that are about as well fleshed out as the as The Spice Girls. There's the serious one, the sporty one, the sexy one, the nerdy one, and so one. You can tell them apart because they have different haircuts. What characterization! The 30-something year olds now have a job at a bank where they all work one day out of the week under the same identity. You have to be really smart to guess it, but they decide who works what day based on their names. How they're able to know everything that went on in the office the six days they weren't present, and be able to carry on as if they did is just another one of those mysteries that's never explained. One day the tracker that Monday is wearing stops transmitting. The next day government agents usher Tuesday off from the bank, and death squads come for her sisters. From here we get about an hour of brainless shoot 'em up violence that somehow manages to be twice as smart as anything that preceded it. What happened to Monday? The answer is painfully obvious a scant few minutes after her disappearance. Anyone who is the least bit familiar with sci-fi stories about dystopian governments should also be able to guess the big third act plot twist. This movie is aggressively stupid, and painfully bad. I had read some good things about it going in, and wanted to like it. Alas, it was not meant to be. I'd give it zero stars except for the fact that it is kind of satisfying to

SpoilerShow

see the Settman sisters culled one by one.

Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom (Evgeny Afineevsky, 2015): Playing out like a smartphone era version of Patricio Guzmán's The Battle of Chile trilogy, Evgeny Afineevsky's documentary chronicles the months of clashes between protestors and government forces in the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity using almost exclusively footage shot on the scene. As the film explains, successive presidential regimes in the Ukraine sought closer relations with Western powers and membership in the European Union. Pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych withdrew from these plans in an effort to appease Russia’s interests. Seeing this move as an attempt to curtail their freedom like the bad old days of Soviet control, thousands of protestors took to the streets of Kiev where riot police and government militias met them in a violent clash. Over the coming weeks more than a hundred protestors and eighteen police officers died, ending only when Yanukovych fled to Russia. There's virtually no nuance here, and one wouldn't expect there to be. Afineevsky presents raw footage of the violence where its undeniable who is in the right. There's no way to edit this to make the protestors look like the bad guys. In simply allowing the footage to speak for itself, Afineevsky makes a powerful case against the Russian backed forces. There is one element that caught my attention as someone who occasionally works in ethics. Around fifty minutes in, the film shows footage of a protestor who's stripped nude by the state forces. He's paraded around and the masked military force pose for pictures with him. Afineevsky presents this footage unedited, and I don't know how to feel about that. On the one hand, his job as a documentarian is to present what he sees, and this is what he saw. Additionally, blurring the footage would likely have diminished the impact of it. Would the famous photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc's nude body scarred by napalm be as powerful if the scarring were censored? On the other hand, the wrongness of something like revenge porn or leaked nudes like The Fappening leaks lies at least in part (but probably not in whole) because they show intimate things without the consent of the subject. I doubt that Afineevsky knows who the naked man is, much less asked for his approval to use the footage. If I were making the film, I'd feel deeply conflicted about whether to include it. I know that there are works in documentary ethics, but I’m entirely unfamiliar with them. Surely this seems like something they ought to address.

[Michael Kerpan]

Brian -- I think LEE Changdong is clearly Korea's greatest living director. Not sure I would rate Burning higher than Secret Sunshine or Poetry (my personal favorite, if only by a bit). I still have yet to adequately decipher Burning.

[bamwc2]

Brian -- I think LEE Changdong is clearly Korea's greatest living director. Not sure I would rate Burning higher than Secret Sunshine or Poetry (my personal favorite, if only by a bit). I still have yet to adequately decipher Burning.

He's certainly an inspiration. I'm 41 and would love to transition to independent filmmaking since my time in academia appears to be over. He made his first film around my age. Same with Bruno Dumont, and he was even an ex-philosophy professor too!