Movie Enthusiast Issue 65: Sundance and Berlin Recap
One of the theories behind this newsletter is that it’s much more fun to get your news about movies from someone who spends way more time thinking about movies than you do and who can talk about movies a bit more excitedly and unguardedly than a freelance writer churning out news releases for a content-aggregating website. On that note, who better to provide you with a recap of this year’s Sundance and Berlin film festivals than someone who attended neither?!
Sundance 2019
The Farewell
The Golden Age of Awkwafina continues in this adaptation of director Lulu Wang’s This American Life story about the time her grandmother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and the family decided not to tell her, opting instead to put on a wedding to get the family back together.
I Am Mother
Post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror, my least favorite genre! Somewhere out there is an audience for this movie about a Rose Byrne-voiced robot who repopulates the earth one frozen embryo at a time.
Clemency (U.S. Grand Jury Prize Dramatic)
Director Chinonye Chukwu is the first black woman to win the top dramatic prize at Sundance! Her film stars Alfre Woodard as a prison warden confronting the psychological toll of a lifetime of overseeing death row executions.
Brittany Runs a Marathon (U.S. Audience Award Dramatic)
A woman on a quest for Adderall instead winds up with doctor’s orders to run a marathon so she doesn’t die of a heart attack. This is a comedy?
One Child Nation (U.S. Grand Jury Prize Documentary)
A pair of directors return to their hometown in China to investigate the history and consequences of that country’s one-child policy.
Knock Down the House (U.S. Audience Award Documentary)
Wait we already have a documentary about the women who won seats in Congress last election? Slow down, y’all.
Apollo 11
Wait again, didn’t just have a movie about this? This one is [checks notes] assembled from archival NASA footage and [squints] is “experiential rather than informative,” but wasn’t that also kind of the point of First Man?
The Report
Spotlight, but for 9/11, and with Adam Driver instead of Michael Keaton.
Native Son
I was looking forward to this one, a contemporary adaptation of Richard Wright’s novel, but apparently it didn’t meet anyone’s expectations, such that A24 (who had been attached to distribute it before the festival) sold it off to HBO.
The Souvenir
So far as I can tell this was the most well-received dramatic film at Sundance this year. About a film student who falls in love with a “complicated and untrustworthy man” (now taking bets on what that’s code for), it stars Honor Swinton Byrne with real-life mother Tilda playing her onscreen mom.
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
…are not words I typically associate with Zac Efron, but who knows! Maybe this really is a transformative role for him, playing Ted Bundy and all.
Hala
A coming-of-age story about a Muslim teenager. This was picked up by Apple, which now apparently wants to be a bigger player in the streaming business too.
Monos (Special Jury Prize Winner)
What I’ve gathered about this movie by Colombian-Ecuadorian director Alejandro Landes is that it’s Aguirre the Wrath of God except the main character’s name is Rambo and the music was done by Under the Skin’s Mica Levi. In other words, sign me the heck up.
Berlinale 2019
Synonyms (Golden Bear Winner)
Here is where you’re just going to have to deal with my aversion to reading too much about movies that I’m already highly anticipating, lest I give too much away for myself and go in with the wrong expectations. The top film at this year’s Berlin Film Festival is the follow-up feature by the director of The Kindergarten Teacher (no, not the Netflix one with Maggie Gyllenhaal, I mean the Israeli movie it’s based on). All I’m letting myself know is what IMDB tells me: it’s a movie about a guy who moves to Paris with a Franco-Israeli dictionary.
By the Grace of God
François Ozon would not have been my first choice to direct a movie about the clergy abuse crisis in the Catholic church in France, but he’s the one we got.
I Was at Home But…
You all know that I try, I really do, to stay current with who’s who in world cinema. But Angela Schanelec just keeps slipping away from me. It seems like every year we get to December and I discover, Oh! there was a new Schanelec this year, and every time my brain jumps right to thinking about that Mariah Carey “I don’t know her”gif. But not this year!! No, this year I am paying attention! This is it, I can feel it, 2019 will be the year that I intentionally try to see the new Schanelec! It’s cheekily titled in homage to the movies from Yasujiro Ozu’s silent film days, so how could I not? Look at the poster, it has a fun red print of a chicken on it! The plot synopsis uses the word “existential” in a sloppy shorthand way…! It has a…4.1/10…average rating on IMDB…uh [logs into Letterboxd]…a 2.9/5…average…mmkay maybe I’ll, uh, table this one for now.
The Golden Glove
When I initally put this list together there must have been some reason why I included this German movie about a serial killer by Faith Akin, a name which, like Atom Egoyan, just hasn’t aged all that well since the 90s.
The Kindness of Strangers (opening night film)
Both the poster for this movie and the plot synopsis (“The story of four people suffering through the worst crises of their lives”) make it sound like an entry in the genre of New Year’s Eve-style everyone is connected movie, though erring more on the side of Crash, I guess.
Varda par Agnès
Agnès Varda makes a documentary about herself, just like it says on the tin.
Tremors
Years ago I queued up a newsletter about Jayro Bustamente’s Ixcanul, a movie I saw at Film Fest DC and which immediately struck me as the kind of movie directors on the edges of international cinema make to get noticed by the tastemakers in the cultural capitals of the Western world. It was a movie about the indigenous people of Guatemala, which is a cool subject (and also one which, if memory serves, had never before received the feature-film treatment), and it mixes documentary filmmaking with touches of magical realism, which, okay great. But the story felt like it had been workshopped to appeal overtly to the modern liberal sensibilities of the film festival programmers who held the power to make or break its chances of being seen; this is a movie about a girl in an arranged marriage that goes out of its way to show you just how repressive this society is every chance it gets. I ended up not sending that issue of the newsletter because the more I thought about the point I was trying to make, the more I realized that it was kind of self-evident and also by no means a new phenomenon in film history. Anyway, Bustamente’s newest movie is about a married Evangelical man who comes out as gay so you can sure bet that I am going to see this movie and have some Opinions about it.
Piranhas
Teenage mercenaries in Naples roaming the streets with AK-47s, just what the doctor ordered.
So Long, My Son
This might pair nicely with One Child Nation: a mini-epic about two married families set against the backdrop of a rapidly-changing China from 1980 to today.
Béla Tarr also screened Sátántangó on its 25th anniversary, which for my money is what all the cool cats should have been doing at this festival.
In my last newsletter I put out a call for help in acquiring the poster for Hong Song-soo’s Hotel by the River. This weekend, a poster tube from Cinema Guild mysteriously arrived for me, and lo!
Whoever was responsible for sending this: thank you! Once I get it framed I’ll share the finished result here.