A film that offers a brave look at a highly charged sociopolitical issue: The Hate U Give

George Tillman Jr.'s The Hate U Give (2018) deserves much praise and credit for taking on the vital issue of police brutality and racism in a serious manner that largely avoids melodrama and sensationalism. This film, based on the novel by Angie Thomas, focuses on a 16-year-old black girl, Starr (played very well by Amandla Stenberg), who witnesses the the death of a black friend, shot by a white police officer in what should have been a routine traffic stop. Among the strengths of the film: none of the (major) characters is all good or all bad, we get a good sense of various views of the shooting death, including an important conversation Starr has w/ her uncle, a black police officer; we see how the reports of the shooting bring out all kinds of tensions and animosities in the black community; we see Starr's character grow in bravery and independence over the course of the film; and we get nuanced but largely affirmative portrayal of the a black community in crisis and confrontation. One the drawback side, however, it seems to me that the filmmakers had little sense of Starr's back story as one of the few students of color in an elite private school. For the first 20 minutes or so, establishing Starr's relationships w/ her schoolmates and her (white) boyfriend, I thought I was watching a black version of Clueless - with way too much voice-over and no credible character except for Starr herself. I also think the one of the plot strands - the drug gang's anger at Starr for her grand jury testimony - was a bit of a stretch: Would the gang really care that she named them as a source of drugs in her community? Isn't that something everyone would know? Why pick a fight over that? That said, some parts of the film were really strong, notably the filming of the Black Lives Matter protest march turned violent and a powerful scene on campus in which Starr demonstrates to a so-called friend what it feels like for a black person to be threatened by a cop. And really I don't quite buy the ending. Still, it's a film that easily could have been maudlin and didactic but turns out to be dramatic and frighteningly informative - a brave look at a highly charged sociopolitical issue.

One of the best police-procedrual series, with credible characters and a plot that makes sense

The Icelandic 10-part series on  Prime, Baltasar Kormakur's Trapped (2015), works really well start to finish on many levels. First of all, it's a murder mystery w/ many twists and tendrils - a fishing trawler pulls up a dismembered body in an Iceland harbor just as a huge Danish passenger ferry pulls into port, and the local police force - consisting of a chief and 2 officers - begins an investigation that leads them down many paths: what's the tie-in, if any, to a suspicious fire that sent a young man to jail for arson - and the man has just returned to town; what's the connection w/ a guy aboard the ferry who was transporting two captive Nigerian women to work as sex slaves; what's up with the plan for the government of China to build a massive port facility in this isolated harbor; and so on. Add to that strong character development, particularly of the ursine, beleaguered police chief, Andri, carrying the burden of a broken marriage and a failure in his previous post with any police agency, and in particular the stark, harsh beauty of the Iceland setting and this turns out to be a fine series start to finish, with the plot much more elegantly built and completed than in almost any other police-procedural drama (Sure, there could be a sequel, but the end doesn't leave you hanging on for more, either.) and awith ll of the characters coming across as lifelike, flawed, and credible - for the most part (excepting the one or two "heavies") they're "round" characters who seem to have a life beyond or outside of this narrative.   I have to say that the plot can be hard to follow for American viewers because every character has a name that's unusual or unfamiliar to us - I'd advise paying close attention to the names in early going, as that will make it easier as you go alone when the characters refer to one another by name. We had to laugh at times at the lack of "continuity" - sometimes the village was supposed to be caught in a paralyzing blizzard and in the next sequence the roads are clear - but, hey, it must be just about impossible to film a series in Iceland and literally impossible to do so in winter, with about 10 minutes of daylight. Great series to watch, though, even for the setting alone.

A dramatic expose of conversion therapy that avoids the maudlin and melodramatic

Boy Erased (2018 - does the title echo Gerl, Interrupted?)), directed and written by Joel Edgerton (who also plays a key role) and based on the memoir by Garrard Conley, tells in vivid and dramatic detail of the horrific practice of so-called conversion therapy, in which seemingly well-meaning families, usually devout Bible Belt Christians, send their children who seem to be homosexual/bisexual/lesbian to a program that promises to get them to change their sexual identity - through prayer and various "acting out" scenarios that become increasingly cruel and even dangerous. In this case, a young man- Jared, in the film - admits to his devout parents that he has "thoughts about men" and, after seeking guidance from several ministers, his parents - in particular his father - send him to a conversion program. We see the young man's struggles with his identity, his faith, his rightful skepticism of the whole underlying principle of the therapy, and the criminal abuse that takes place in at least this program - unlicensed therapists whose main goal seems to be to keep the young people in the program as long as possible. This movie could easily have descended into the mawkish, melodramatic, or didactic - but it never does. Jared's father (played well in a real casting against type by Russel Crowe) for example, could have been a bigoted ogre, but he's not - he truly loves his son and is trying, in his misguided way, to help his child. Similarly, the conversion-therapy center (Edgerton himself plays the lead so-called therapist) is horrendous and scary but many of the techniques used - role playing, journal keeping, sharing w/ the group, professions of love and support - are not horrendous in and of themselves, at least initially. Like many such films, this one ends w/ some factual info about the extent of conversion therapy in the U.S. - estimated to damage the lives of some 700k young people and legal in, I think, 33 states - and we also see some snapshots of Conley and his family; thankfully, they're not erased.

Shakespeare our contemporary? Not quite, in Hopkins's King Lear

Last night I watched the first half hour - into Act 2 I think (the expulsion from Goneril's estate) of the Anthony Hopkins King Lear (on Prime); I doubt I'll watch any further. Not that it's a terrible production or anything - it has many strengths - but there's also something about it that's entirely wrong. They set the play in contemporary London - with the opening sequence showing the bright lights of the financial-district towers at night - slowly moving us toward a government building, an appropriate locale for the first act, the king's division of the country among his daughters. But soon I recognized that the contemporary setting just feels ridiculous - at least without major modifications to the text. It's OK I guess to have an aged king of England dividing up the realm but it's totally weird when he says things like "By Appollo!" And gradually, the realistic-contemporary setting seems more and more absurd: A king sitting in a darkened room with just his three daughters and some of the upper nobility dividing the kingdom into sections on a hand-drawn map? How could this be? And the visit to Goneril, with the crowd of soldiers in camo acting like a bunch of louts? And the king has a jester, too? No, it makes no sense at all. There have been other updates of Lear - Jane Smiley's Thousand Acres; Kurosawa's Ran - that work well (at least Kurasowa's does) because they just use the dynamics of the plot, rebuilding as necessary (Shakespeare would approve of course, that greatest of adapters). But to take the play literally and stage it in contemporary setting is ludicrous; it's a medieval play and should look and feel that way - ghostly, dark, brutal, sparsely populated. That said, the English are always great at certain aspects of Shakespeare: The look of the setting is visually fine, even if it makes no sense, and the cast, especially Hopkins and Emma Thompson (Goneril) are great at line readings. It won't do you any harm to watch the whole movie - though I would definitely say it is totally unsuitable for a first-time viewer/reader of King Lear. I'd start with the Peter Brook 1971 film if possible and work down from there.

Perhaps the best and most credible h.s. drama since FNL: Elite

The 8-part Netflix series Elite (2018) has gotten little attention so far - perhaps because it's in Spanish and easily confused w/ a Telanovela - but in my view it's a series well worth watching for a # of reasons: Excellent narrative line w/ many strands that intersect intelligently and surprisingly, fine acting by a young cast (all of the principals are student in an "elite" high school in, I think, Madrid), a mystery and a murder investigation revealed in the first scene and carried through till the conclusion but that never dominates the plot, which is really about the students and their complex inter-relations; a high-school drama that is both sympathetic and highly credible (the only comparable piece I can recall would be the great Friday Night Lights). Yes, maybe there's a touch of melodrama and yes it's a litle hard in the first few episodes to keep the many characters and their back stories straight and yes the cross-cultural crushes and relationships are not always totally believable - a fact that the characters recognize themselves and joke about, calling these cross-class relationship "Disney" - but there's a lot of veracity throughout and it will hold your interest and attention top to bottom. In brief, the story line is that 3 kids from an impoverished public h.s. win scholarships to attend the elite school and their doing so and their falling in love with kids already in the school creates waves of social pressure and reaction.Among issues touched upon include homosexuality, Muslim fundamentalism, political corruption, grade-grubbing, and more, all done without didacticism and as part of character development. All told, though Madrono and Montero have come up with a really good series w/ a lot of insight into many social issues - in all cultures today - and it seems definitely headed to a Season 2 (and who knows?, an English-language remake, that would probably ruin the whole thing?).

The Dawn Wall has plenty of thrills for those who love heights and those who fear them

The Lowell-Mortimer 2018 film, The Dawn Wall, has plenty of jaw-dropping moments of awe and is a thrill for those who love heights and for those who fear them, though it doesn't break any ground in documentary cinema - pretty standard techniques throughout with too much emphasis on talking heads - in what has become a mini-genre, the mountain-climber movie (the recent Meru was one of the best). That said: Aren't these movies always pretty good and worth watching (one of my household members says an emphatic: Yes!). And I have to say that the saga of Timmy Caldwell is one of the best: He's a kid who grew up w/ learning difficulties and w/ a loving dad but one who pushed him to extremes from the earliest age and, fortunately, instead of growing up in rebellion fell in love with rock climbing and by teenage years totally excelled (and dad never became too pushy of too invested in his son's life). Timmy became obsessed with completing unique climb up the wall of El Cap (Yosemite), and the film centers on that climb - and gives us a great sense of the extraordinary difficulty of some of the 32 "pitches" en route to the summit. We get a really intimate view of the struggles of Caldwell and his much less experienced climbing partner (Kevin Jorgeson) as somehow the filmmakers followed them closely throughout the challenge (there's no info on how they shot this film - which is good; the film isn't about itself). Moreover, Caldwell has a fascinating back story, involving an ill-fated climb with his then-girlfriend and a climbing partner, in Krygyzstan, during which they were assaulted and captured by a team of rebel soldiers. So there's plenty of great material in this film, and it's especially worth watching for those who like documentary films that take us for 2 hours to places we'd never go in a million years.

An quirky search-for-the-truth documentary about a missing film: Shirkers

Sandi Tan's 2018 documentary, Shirkers, gets off to a bumpy start but by the end catches us up in its pathos and humor. Tan narrates the story of her life as a filmmaker, centered on the creation and then the mysterious loss of a film she and some friends produced when they were college students, the eponymous Shirkers. ST, now about 40 years old, grew up in Singapore, where she and 2 girlfriends were into punk, alternative rock, world cinema, and all forms of creative expression; there are and were kids like them in every single school in the U.S., but in Singapore they were complete outliers. Pursuing their mutual interest in film, they took a course in what looks to be some kind of community school, a class led by a 30ish man, Georges Cardona, who turns out to be strange to say the least. The 2 young women leave Singapore for first year of college - 2 to the US and Tan to England - and continue communications w/ Cardona (he primarily sends odd tape recordings of his brief messages to them rather than calls, cards, letters); he encourages the 3 to return to Singapore for the summer to make a movie. Tan writes a screenplay that everyone raves about; at this point her film looks to be incredibly disorganized and amateurish, but they get enough money to spend the whole summer shooting. They all return to school in the fall, leaving the film - about 70 "cans" - with Cardona to edit. And that's the last they see of the film - Cardona disappears along w/ all the video and audio. I won't provide any spoilers; however, I'll say that up to this point in the film - a bit more than halfway in - I was disappointed: Cardona is such an obvious phony and pathological liar, perhaps even a predator, that it was hard to believe these young women were so trusting in him. And the film they were working on looked to be a disaster - perhaps it was best that they just move on. The 2nd half of Shirkers, however, really picked up my interest, as Tan in particular tries to sleuth out what happened to Cardona and to the film. Without divulging anything, I'll say only that it's nice at the end to see where the 3 filmmakers are today and how much - or how little - they've changed over the years. This documentary will recall in some way other search-for-the-truth dox such as Searching for Sugar Man; I don't see this film as a likely commercial success - a little too quirky for that - but it's worth a look.