Rescued from mediocrity by India.
Today I finally got around to You Can See Everything since the morning showings felt skippable. I won’t be adding it to the list since it’s not an official part of the lineup, so you’ll have to make do with some dashed-off thoughts on what is indeed one of the best films of the year. Don’t worry, no spoilers.
Rider (Dade & Roan): C
Less a musical and more like a series of music videos for a concept album strung together. That music – Italian lo-fi beats rap combined with the usual pop R&B – isn’t half bad for the most part, though the production gets repetitive and samey, and it’s really mostly rapping and occasionally speak singing. Only once does it really feel like a proper “musical” with people singing on camera; a lot of times the music just plays over regular scenes, and the characters (or rather the main one, Sami) raps directly to the camera about his thoughts and feelings. Too slight in the story department as well: a basic romance, some low-level crime, you know the drill. Non-english musicals are something of a novelty for me just because they don’t seem to get released here at all and honestly, it does work if you don’t understand the words and can appreciate it as melody. There was strong potential here and it’s not too terribly directed, if overreliant on long takes. I wonder what a real music video director could’ve pulled out of it. Barring that, at least a stronger hook and more actual performing.
Elsinore (Simon Stone): D+
Not beating the Oscar-bait allegations, that’s for sure. This might be a controversial take for an English major but I don’t really care about Shakespeare. Yeah I appreciate the legacy and the language, I acknowledge he is Good, there’s just no reverence there for me. Chalk that up to being around theater kids for my adolescence. All of which is to say I had an even bigger uphill battle here than Hamnet (which also made my resistances go up when I could tell it was trying to Make Me Cry) and boy did it not manage to clear that hurdle. Stone is definitely not anywhere close to the visual stylist Chloe Zhao is, and he’s not helped at all by Stephen Beresford’s script, working off “an idea” from Ethan Silverman. The film takes for granted that you 1) care an immense deal about Shakespeare, 2) are familiar with actor Ian Charleson and 3) hold his performance of Hamlet up to the highest caliber. It does not do any work to justify the importance of any of those things, beyond Charleson dying of AIDS and it being his last performance (characters keep bringing up Chariots of Fire, which happened 8 years before the events of this movie, and good luck figuring out what he did in the meantime) . It perhaps is an even bigger own goal that it opens up with the notorious incident of Daniel Day-Lewis walking off-stage mid-performance (for what reason? who cares). My most uncharitable instincts were activated, especially when it suggests that Olivia Colman’s Dr. Johnson is being unreasonable about caring way more about him living than Shakespeare. Andrew Scott could be giving a great performance but it’s hard to tell given how Stone and editor Valerio Bonelli montage the hell out of proceedings, chopping up any hint of process or internal struggle; even an impromptu dance number in the ward is shot back and forth from outside and inside. Having not seen Bohemian Rhapsody, I wouldn’t be able to confirm if this is a more offensive portrayal of the AIDS crisis. Certainly it doesn’t set anything to “Another One Bites The Dust” – instead it just lingers on the Kaposi Sarcoma scars as a symbol of the disease, rattling of AZT and chemotherapy without disclosing what the side effects are or why that treatment option is taken. Most eye-rolling is the deployment of Derek Jarman as the voice of AIDS Activism who wants him to publicize his diagnosis, which Charleson argues against in a way that feels aimed right at the straight audience who wants to separate the person from the art. Rather tedious as a whole, though I won’t say I wasn’t moved by some parts. It’s the kind of movie that sets up long in advance that the doctor is going to attend the performance or the actors are going to bang on the windows at the end. No one involved can make a proper argument for why this should jerk any tears from you other than Stefan Gregory doing his best Max Richter. Scott shouldn’t be in the running at all for this and anyone claiming it’s better than All Of Us Strangers is out of their minds.
Half (Samjad): B+
Pure belt-to-ass cinema that absolutely whips. Is it simply a series of set ups for violent action scenes? Yes. Does it really do all that much with the vampire lore? Not as much as you’d think. Was I still hootin’, hollerin’, and cacklin’ for extended periods of time? Absolutely! Sometimes all you need is a pair of half-vampire siblings on a road trip, a crew of nasty highway robbers who have no qualms with killing and disposing of an entire family, and a collision course. Samjad orchestrates some brutal, nasty fights full of stabbings, scaldings, and stranglings soundtracked to Midhun Mukundan’s Bollywood techno. The action may not be as clean as The Furious or even as inventive, but it isn’t poorly dubbed in English, and free of getting bogged down in any story or real-world implications (save the ending). Both the lead actors do great snarling work even if it doesn’t really do much with one of them being mute. Flawed as it may be, I had a great time with the melange of styles from Indian Western to road movie and beyond. It’s a great display of the scrappiness of Indian (Mayalam in this case) genre flicks, a willingness to bow down to the alter of Cool and Badass. A great year for seeing dudes get the absolute hell beaten out of them and more.
