Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016)

Hello! It’s been a while since I posted a non-Criterion review on this site, so let’s jump back in. Cinemas may now be (more) open in certain parts of the world, but home streaming is still A Thing, and probably… always will be? Well, time will tell, but here’s another week of “random stuff I’ve watched on Netflix” because it’s still the most popular option.

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I’d watched the first two instalments (several years ago) and honestly couldn’t remember much of the plot. I wrote little capsule reviews at the time, but they’re not much longer than a sentence and barely convey any information beyond “it was quite fun”. Then again, it’s been a day or two and I don’t remember much of the plot of this one either now, so I don’t think that’s really the key to the trilogy and won’t affect your enjoyment. Basically, it’s about our rotund hero Po (voiced by Jack Black) ‘finding himself’ and discovering his powers and his empathy as part of a quest to defeat a legendary big bad guy, Kai (J.K. Simmons), who has just managed to return to the mortal realm. Po has his buddies and he has his antagonists, and I’m not sure the plot itself is particularly deep but it’s also fairly blandly positive so I can’t really fault it for that, but it’s a good excuse to get together some cute characters and show off the fine animation skills of the DreamWorks artists. I do raise my eyebrows somewhat at the writing team for this China-set film, along with getting notably non-Asian actors to voice some of these characters (Dustin Hoffman as an elderly sage called “Master Shifu”??), especially when they are called on to do an accent — but Jack Black at least isn’t doing that and isn’t really intended to be anyone but himself, and he and the filmmakers make it a likeable enough ride and an excellent conclusion to the trilogy.

CREDITS
Directors Jennifer Yuh Nelson 여인영 and Alessandro Carloni; Writers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger; Starring Jack Black, J.K. Simmons, Bryan Cranston, James Hong 吳漢章, Dustin Hoffman; Length 95 minutes.
Seen at home (Netflix streaming), Wellington, Saturday 3 July 2021.

Global Cinema 23: Botswana – Naledi: A Baby Elephant’s Tale (2016)

I am currently in the process of moving halfway around the world, so some of my regularly scheduled reviews may be a little delayed, and that’s also the reason I haven’t been running my theme weeks. I’ll get back up to speed soon enough I’m sure, when I have better access to films and places to watch them. In the meantime, here’s an older review (and a rather short one) for a Bosnian film, as we’ve reached that country, which has gone through a tumultuous recent history, and emerged as its own sovereign state in recent years.

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Republic of Botswana
population 2,254,000 | capital Gaborone (227k) | largest cities Gaborone, Francistown (100k), Molepolole (68k), Mogoditshane (58k), Maun (56k) | area 581,730 km² | religion Christianity (73%), none (20%) | official language English, Setswana (or Tswana) | major ethnicity Tswana (79%), Kalanga (11%) | currency Botswana pula (P) [BWP] | internet .bw

A largely flat landlocked country bordering South Africa, with 70% of its territory taken up by the Kalahari Desert and thus one of the most sparsely populated in the world. The name means “land of the Tswana”, the largest ethnic group in the country, though the former name under British colonisation was Bechuanaland. Human remains have been traced back 2 million years, and may have even been the birthplace of modern humans. The original inhabitants were bushmen (San) and Khoi, with Bantu speakers moving in around 600 CE and the first Tswana speakers around the 16th century or earlier. Trade routes via the Limpopo River to the Indian Ocean was largely around ivory and gold in exchange for Asian goods. Various chiefdoms prospered until brought under Batswana control by the late-19th century, resisting incursions by Afrikaner settlers from the south. Comparative peace followed, along with a settled border, and Christian missionaries flourished. Britain claimed the area during the Berlin Conference to protect its trade routes from South Africa, but resisted integrating the territory into South Africa, and independence was granted on 30 September 1966 with Seretse Khama elected as first President (with some of his story told in the 2016 film A United Kingdom). A relatively stable democracy is in place, with an elected President accountable to Parliament.

There is relatively little film production in the country, although it has been used as the location for a number of projects, including the international hit The Gods Must Be Crazy (1981) and its sequel, and a few other Western films.

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Naledi: A Baby Elephant’s Tale (2016)

I’m hardly a connoisseur of nature documentaries. This one has some occasionally lovely shots of the Batswana landscape, of elephants and other creatures roaming the wild, while the (mostly white) conservationists and veterinarians who are at the film’s heart watch them and talk about the ways in which they are trying to preserve them from ivory poachers. However, the bulk of the film is taken up by the young elephant of the film’s title, which is tracked from its birth through a difficult childhood as its mother dies, and the doctors need to ensure it continues to live. There’s a bit of drama there, all underscored by swelling music at appropriate moments. I can’t say it was transportative but it gives an idea of the work being done in these African habitats to try and ensure the survival of elephants.

CREDITS
Directors Ben Bowie and Geoffrey Luck; Cinematographer Lee Jackson; Length 90 minutes.
Seen at a hotel (Netflix streaming), Auckland, Wednesday 21 October 2020.

Baden Baden (2016)

Another Franco-Belgian co-production is this excellent film about a young woman returning to her home (also the director’s home, Strasbourg) to sort out her life. It’s not a coming of age, exactly, because the protagonist is in her 20s, but it definitely deals with a similar sort of malaise and aimlessness. That shouldn’t make it particularly compelling but I really liked it.

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Trading on all those classic elements of the cinema of self-indulgent continental introspection — a young woman returns home to her ailing grandmother to tidy up shattered plans, creating new messes to tidy, and reopening some fresh wounds — but it’s done with such verve, such control of the medium, and such fine performances in the lead roles that what initially sounds like it might be drab and unengaging is really compelling. Sure, Ana’s life may or may not be going anywhere (whose is?) but right from that first extended shot of her driving a star to a film set only to be bawled out by the producer, it shows a sure sense of what is cinematic. There are ways I’m reminded of British film Adult Life Skills in its themes, but here put across with at times an elegiac grace — little dreamlike interstices, a careful regard for small details, holding the shot just a little longer than is comfortable at times. It’s also got plenty of downbeat humour, no little thanks to its lead actor, Salomé Richard. (I didn’t even mention her delightful DIY determination to remodel her gran’s bathroom, which the titular use of a famous spa town may obliquely be referring to?)

CREDITS
Director/Writer Rachel Lang; Cinematographer Fiona Braillon; Starring Salomé Richard, Claude Gensac, Swann Arlaud, Zabou Breitman; Length 94 minutes.
Seen at Ciné Lumière, London, Tuesday 27 September 2016.

Global Cinema 15: Barbados – A Caribbean Dream (2017)

There haven’t exactly been a huge number of Barbadian films, and it’s that country’s musical creators who have achieved rather more notable international success. So it’s a little unfair that I’m focusing on a film which I didn’t love, but it has enough in it to make it worthwhile watching, and it’s certainly one of the very few that have had a cinematic release.

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Barbados
population 287,000 | capital Bridgetown (110k) | largest cities Bridgetown, Speightstown (3.6k), Oistins (2.3k), Holetown (1.6k), Bathsheba (1.5k) | area 439 km² | religion Christianity (76%), none (21%) | official language English (but Bajan Creole is also recognised) | major ethnicity Afro-Barbadian (91%), White Barbadian (4%) | currency Barbadian Dollar ($) [BBD] | internet .bb

A Caribbean island nation located in the Lesser Antilles. The name comes from the Portuguese or Spanish (l)os barbudos (meaning “bearded ones”), colloquially called “Bim”, but before Columbian times it was called Ichirouganaim. The earliest settlements are dated to c1600 BCE, with more permanent ones by Amerindians (arriving from South America) from the 4th century CE, the Arawaks at first and then the Kalinago from the 13th century. Europeans arrived by the early-16th century and largely ignored the island until the English arrived in 1625. A lot of these arrivals were indentured labourers or transported convicts, including many from Ireland. Sugar became a major crop from the mid-17th century and a number of slave rebellions took place. Reforms took place in the 20th century, leading to internal self-government in 1961 and independence on 30 November 1966. The British monarch was retained as head of state, with an elected Prime Minister.

Although there are some cinemas in Barbados, there is little to no local feature film production, as far as I can tell.

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A Caribbean Dream (2017)

There’s little enough reason for me to be mean about this film, given it’s unlikely to reach a wide audience. As a Barbados-set and filmed version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream it’s every bit as fantastical and silly as its source, and while the acting can be of variable quality, it’s more than made up for by the enthusiasm of its cast and their gameness to play with various configurations of racial and gender identity with relative ease and fluidity. There’s a sense you get that it could have been tightened up in the editing, but I’m glad it exists.

[NB The film’s date is sometimes given as 2016, but I’m not clear if it did first screen in that year.]

CREDITS
Director Shakirah Bourne; Writers Bourne and Melissa Simmonds (based on the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare); Cinematographer Robin Whenary; Starring Aden Gillett, Sonia Williams, Adrian Greene, Susannah Harker, Lorna Gayle; Length 90 minutes.
Seen at Rio, London, Sunday 12 November 2017.

Women Filmmakers: Angela Schanelec

Angela Schanelec is not a filmmaker I’d ever heard of before a 2018 retrospective on the Mubi streaming platform; indeed, I’m not aware that any of her films has had a release in the UK and I imagine even festival screenings have been fairly scarce. Her profile sadly is not high enough for her latest film, I Was Home, But (2019) to have had more than one or two screenings last year, but its Ozu-referencing title certainly makes me excited to see it.

Schanelec was born in Aalen, Germany in 1962, and trained in Frankfurst in the early-80s as a stage actress (she acts too in her own film Afternoon, an image from which accompanies this post), though she studied filmmaking at the Berlin Film and Television Academy. As such, with directors like Christian Petzold, she is grouped as part of the so-called ‘Berlin School’ of filmmakers. She made her first graduate film in the mid-90s and a few other features in the late-90s before the first film I pick up below, the earliest to feature in the Mubi retrospective of her work.

Having now seen a number of her films, Schanelec feels like a filmmaker whose oeuvre I admire and enjoy as a whole, more than I do any of her individual films (but I’d probably go for Marseille, if I must pick one). Schanelec’s films have a consistent approach to the construction of narrative which is, well, a little bit vague and can be difficult to pick up: a focus on moments that are picked out, joined elliptically, with no intertitles or contextualisation. She’s a fascinating director, and perhaps part of her low profile is just that they can be difficult films to fully get into, and that will be a throughline in the reviews below. However, she’s clearly a great talent and one of the finest working German directors.

Die Geträumten (The Dreamed Ones, 2016)

Another odd independent Austrian filmmaker is Ruth Beckermann, who has been working since the 1970s and whose films have largely been documentaries but like the one below, have played with the edges of dramatisation or with historical subjectivity. She made a sort of travelogue in A Fleeting Passage to the Orient (1999), which I’ve already reviewed on my blog, though this 2016 film was the first exposure I’d had to her work.

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It’s an odd film this one, and its oddness largely lies in its sort of contrapuntal relationship to the documentary genre. Two actors (Anja Plaschg and Laurence Rupp) read letters sent between poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann — two people who shared markedly different experiences of wartime Europe — during their relationship from the late-40s to late-60s. As it opens, in darkness, the faces of the actors are seen reading the texts into microphones and I’d thought it might be a sort of Straub/Huillet type exercise (I suppose there are similarities in that those two French-German filmmakers liked deploying texts in brutally minimalist ways). However, though the essential form doesn’t change, there are all kinds of interruptions to our expectations, not least distancing the words expressed with those exchanged between the actors. It’s hard to really encapsulate, but it’s certainly an interesting experience.

CREDITS
Director Ruth Beckermann; Writers Beckermann and Ina Hartwig (based on letters by Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan); Cinematographer Johannes Hammel; Starring Anja Plaschg, Laurence Rupp; Length 89 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury (Bertha DocHouse), London, Thursday 8 December 2016.

बार बार देखो Baar Baar Dekho (2016)

This film is a bit of an oddity, a Bollywood film which takes the form of a sci-fi romance. It’s also the debut film from a woman director, Nitya Mehra, and though it wasn’t a big success, it still has plenty of its own distinct charms I think.

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It seems it’s hardly been a critical hit, and to be fair it has plenty of silliness to its premise: that a man with doubts about his future (Sidharth Malhotra) gets to see a version of that future and thereby change his selfish behaviour (all a bit Groundhog Day I guess). However, it’s a multi-generational romance, so I think it’s fair to judge it by what it sets out to be, and I found it to be likeable and charming, even for lapses into occasional sentimentality (the film had earned it). There are sci-fi elements to some of the future settings which are nicely integrated, along with fetching touches (like a bus map suggesting Cambridge is just an outer suburb of London by the mid-21st century). The film uses — if I’m not mistaken — Glasgow for Cambridge, which doesn’t quite work but it’s less egregious than some British location work I’ve seen in other Bollywood films. It also goes through fewer tortuous tonal changes, sticking to its romantic central premise faithfully. All in all, it was sweet.

CREDITS
Director Nitya Mehra नित्या मेहरा; Writers Mehra and Sri Rao श्री राव; Cinematographer Ravi K. Chandran रवि के चन्द्रन; Starring Sidharth Malhotra ਸਿਧਾਰਥ ਮਲਹੋਤਰਾ, Katrina Kaif, Sayani Gupta সায়ানী গুপ্তা; Length 141 minutes.
Seen at Cineworld Wood Green, London, Monday 12 September 2016.

Kékszakállú (2016)

A number of South American films have lurked in the interstices between fiction and documentary, and this striking fiction debut from a documentarian is exactly one such. It barely even has any plot to speak of, but is certainly not lacking in style.

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I don’t believe any summary of what happens in this film can ever really get at what it’s like to watch it, given how little plot figures in it, and in that respect it may be as much documentary as it is drama. It’s more of an atmospheric mood piece, beautiful images of a resort, of homes and of people (mainly women) moving through these spaces, with occasional snatches of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle serving as a sort of alienation effect. It’s beautiful and carefully composed, but I imagine its effectiveness is largely down to your mood, as it washes over you. I liked it, but I didn’t fully grasp it, and that sense of mystery is palpable.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Gastón Solnicki; Cinematographers Diego Poleri and Fernando Lockett; Starring Laila Maltz; Length 72 minutes.
Seen at home (Mubi streaming), London, Tuesday 24 April 2018.

Unlocking the Cage (2016)

In the subsection of crusading documentaries bringing attention to a particular issue, this one dealing with animal rights — and specifically the legal attempt to claim them as legal persons (which is, in the States, a legal right that is also claimed by companies, I believe) — is an interesting one, which intersects with certain trends right now. It also exemplifies the place that any documentary festival has for the latest work by longstanding creators in the genre. That said, it’s a fairly minor final film from one of the great 20th century documentarians (Donn Pennebaker), who died in 2019, and there are also troubling aspects to some of the legal arguments in light of this particular historical juncture (the review below was written in 2016 when I saw the film).

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This is a solidly made documentary (as you’d expect from the talent) about the issue of animal rights. It’s lovely that people are out there trying to make a difference on this and given my own (vegan) dietary choices, I’m certainly on-side with their struggle. However, it never really convinces me that the particular legal path they’re going down is the best avenue. Still, any attempt to help animals, even arguing for their “personhood”, is a good cause, and who knows, maybe we’ll all look back in 50 years and wonder that such rights ever needed fighting for. But for now, I do strongly wonder if slavery analogies are the most tactful in this respect.

CREDITS
Directors Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker; Cinematographer Hegedus; Length 90 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury (Bertha DocHouse), London, Thursday 16 June 2016.

Chamissos Schatten (Chamisso’s Shadow, 2016)

Ulrike Ottinger is a filmmaker who came out of the 1970’s New German Cinema, making distinctive and odd films like Madame X and Ticket of No Return, before moving on to film a number of works in Mongolia and the furthest east, where she has shown a huge amount of interest in ethnography. This film fits in with that, and while it is in a sense a travelogue, it’s also very much a film about the way that history is latent in the present cultures of the Bering Sea, and the continuum of practices since the 18th century (when some of the texts she reads over these images are taken from). History, then, is indivisible from present-day life, and undoubtedly will continue to be for many generations.

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An epic ethnographic documentary in four parts, this covers the cultures and people living around the Bering Sea, both on the Alaskan and Russian sides. As you might expect from the running length it does so in some detail, and as suggested by the title, it also links in historical perspectives. Specifically these come in the form of texts written by naturalist Georg Steller (who accompanied Bering on his exploits), then a century later by Adelbert von Chamisso, a poet and botanist, as well as a little bit from James Cook. However, it’s director Ulrike Ottinger’s voice and cinematic style which dominates the film, though in a respectful way, observing and allowing the people of the region to move about their lives and tell stories when they feel compelled.

It’s difficult to sum it all up in a short review, but the sense I got was of a continuity between Steller in the 18th century and the modern scenes, as a lot of the same practices and customs take place that he described, even if political changes have meant movements of the populations and the closure of the borders between the two nations (which come closest at the top of the world, between the Big and Little Diomede Islands, between which also runs the International Date Line). A lot of the shots of the expanse of this wilderness are breathtaking, but it’s in the simple details too that the film shines, in just pointing the camera at the people, and if some of the sequences seem too long for comfort (some hunters skinning and cutting up a seal), others you feel could go on for an entire chapter (the indigenous people demonstrating their dances was a particular highlight).

CREDITS
Director/Writer/Cinematographer Ulrike Ottinger (based on texts by Adelbert von Chamisso and Georg Steller); Length 720 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Sunday 24 May 2020.