Monthly Archives: January 2021

Sundance

The Sparks Brothers (2021)

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I’ve got a snapshot of your Aunt Maureen.

Okay, I don’t, actually. You probably don’t even have an Aunt Maureen. But that line is a real attention-grabber, much like the guys who came up with it, so I figured what the hell. Film criticism is an unsexy business. I’ll take any spice I can get.

Sparks, known by some as the best British band ever to come out of America, seems perennially able to remain interesting without looking like they’re trying to remain interesting. Since their inception in 1971 — that’s 50 years ago, for those who flunked math — the duo have released a whopping 25 studio albums, closing in on 300 original songs. For those who flunked math, that’s, like, a lot.

Comprised of brothers Russell and Ron Mael, their stage presence and obvious visual flair is perhaps as inextricable from Sparks as the actual music. Russell, the singer, fronts the band with hyperactive and often very sweaty antics. Meanwhile Ron, keyboardist and songwriter, sits very still and scowls while his brother goes nuts. Either of the two alone would turn heads, but together they create a contrast that would force a smile on even the most straightlaced of faces.

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Sundance

Mass (2021)

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There’s an intentional obscurity at the start of Mass, the debut feature from writer/director Fran Kranz, that instantly placed it amongst the most intriguing premieres at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. We open on a church in a suburban town, meeting the volunteers as they set up a room in the basement for an impending meeting. Much attention is paid to the placement of the table, the positioning of the chairs, the proximity of a tissue box. We meet a social worker, clearly acting in the capacity of a liaison, who asks that the tissue box not be placed in the middle of the table — that would be weird. As long as it’s within reach. This much we can glean about Mass, after a simple Times New Roman title fades in on a black screen over dead silence: we’ll probably need tissues. But we’re not sure why, exactly, and yet we’re gripped all the same. The social worker moves the chairs from their even placement around the table, putting two on one side and two on the other.

Mass is no less interesting once the purpose of this meeting is revealed, but it’s a particularly refreshing opening in an age where most films assume an audience will lose interest if they’re not given all the facts up front. Every glance and seemingly-negligible line of dialogue becomes a potential clue, and it never approaches a feeling of purposeful obscurity or frustration. Before we reach that point we finally put the pieces in place: two sets of parents are meeting six years after a tragic school shooting in which one son killed the other.

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Sundance

In the Earth (2021)

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I respect the hell out of Ben Wheatley for his drive to make new film. A good 90% of what he’s done, for better or worse, is actual original cinema — not an adaptation of a beloved novel, not a bastardization of a classic film, not a superhero flick that takes bits and pieces from comic books and cobbles them together into a weak installment of some neverending box-office-driven franchise. A Field in England and Sightseers are sort of the pinnacle of this criteria for Wheatley, with Field as a particular achievement — weird as hell, quite unlike anything you’ve seen to date, but importantly a cohesive experience that you can mine for deeper meaning and rewatch ad nauseam without feeling like you’ve exhausted it. Field does more with five or six actors and a muddy pasture than most movies do with $250 million, and so the prospect of Wheatley returning to ragtag roots with his latest film In the Earth was a promising one.

This is largely due to his most recent efforts: a workmanlike remake of Hitchcock’s Rebecca this past year, in which Armie Hammer wore the same yellow suit in like nine different scenes; High-Rise in 2016, an ultimately joyless adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel; and Free Fire, an original movie which zips along on first watch and positively drags on subsequent viewings. If each of these films was successively bigger — in budget terms, but also in scope — they also felt less and less like the scrappy Wheatley who made A Field in England in 12 days on just £300,000.

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Sundance

Summer of Soul (2021)

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“Everybody wanna know why I sing the blues…” — B.B. King

In the summer of 1969, upwards of 300,000 people gathered for the greatest concert you’ve never heard of. This was the Harlem Cultural Festival, a massive six-weekend celebration of black excellence through music, dance and prayer. The cavalcade of musicians, entertainers and preachers far exceeded anyone’s expectations, bringing together Americans from Harlem and beyond over the course of a particularly sweltering city summer. The music was amazing, sure, but it seemed all 300,000 attendees understood that this was about more than just the music. This — to quote Nina Simone — was about being young, gifted and black, about the world waiting for you, about the quest that’s just begun.

By mid-1970, the Harlem Cultural Festival was forgotten entirely.

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Film Review, Staff Picks, TV Review

Best of 2020

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Last year The Last Black Man in San Francisco took home the #1 spot on our annual Top Ten list, and we still stand by placement of that elemental experience over Bong Joon-ho’s architectural Parasite. Given the choice between a) pole position on a Motion State list and b) an Academy Award for Best Picture, well, hopefully Bong Joon-ho’s not too crushed.

Of course, as is nearly always the case, another 2019 release arose on our radar shortly after publication that would have upset the rankings significantly: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a stunning film that sort of existed as both a messy humanist experience and a meticulously-crafted work of precision. Portrait would’ve bumped Parasite to #3, sending Bong Joon-ho into utter desperation, banging on my door at 2am, pleading for another chance.

2020 was weird because…well, we won’t get into all of that. But let’s get out ahead of it this year: through lockdowns, release delays and cinema closures both temporary and tragically permanent, the moviegoing experience was different enough that the following list should be considered with a few grains of salt. I only got to about half the number of films I watched in 2019, and many of the films appearing on other Top Ten lists — notably Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole, Pablo Larrain’s Ema, Sean Durkin’s The Nest, Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela, and a dozen others — simply weren’t available in my area.

Nonetheless! Before we get to the good stuff, please remember to visit our new Support Film Art page, aimed at encouraging relief to local arthouse theaters; we’ll be expanding this section of the site throughout 2021 in an effort to give back to these strongholds of cinema art.

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