Review: ‘5 Years Apart,’ starring Chloe Bennet, Michael Vlamis, Ally Maki, Scott Michael Foster and Craig Low

August 23, 2020

by Carla Hay

Chloe Bennet, Craig Low, Michael Vlamis, Scott Michael Foster and Ally Maki in “5 Years Apart” (Photo courtesy of Gravitas Ventures)

“5 Years Apart”

Directed by Joe Angelo Menconi

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed city in Arizona, the romantic comedy “5 Years Apart” features a predominantly white cast (with some Asians and African Americans) representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: Two estranged brothers, who are five years apart in age but share the same birthday, have an awkward and tension-filled reunion on a weekend of their birthday.

Culture Audience: “5 Years Apart” will appeal primarily to people who like realistically written adult comedies with low-key humor.

Craig Low and Chloe Bennet in “5 Years Apart” (Photo courtesy of Gravitas Ventures)

The title of the romantic comedy “5 Years Apart” has a double meaning: The two feuding brothers who are the center of the story were born five years apart, and they’ve been estranged for the past five years. How estranged are they? They haven’t seen or spoken to each other in that five-year period. But that’s all about to change when they unexpectedly see each other again and find out that their love lives have become entangled in an unusual way.

“5 Years Apart,” directed by Joe Angelo Menconi (who wrote the screenplay with Zac Krause), is written in such a way that the characters are realistic and relatable because many adults know people who are just like the ones in this story. The two estranged brothers whose relationship is the catalyst for much of the story’s tension have almost completely opposite personalities and lifestyles. The movie takes places in Arizona during a weekend when the brothers end up in the same place for a birthday celebration. The brothers share the same birthday month and date, but they were born five years apart.

Older brother Andrew (played by Scott Michael Foster) is the responsible one who’s the type of person who likes to meticulously plan out his life. Younger brother Sammy (played by Michael Vlamis) is the irresponsible one who’s the type of person who likes to be impulsive and “go with the flow.” Andrew and Sammy live in Chicago, but (unbeknownst to the other) they’re both in Arizona, to stay at their parents’ house to celebrate their birthday on the weekend that Andrew turns 30 and Sammy turns 25. Their parents (who are not seen or heard in the movie) are on vacation for a month in Italy, so the brothers know that the house will be empty.

Andrew is married to Olivia (played by Ally Maki), who shares Andrew’s penchant for scheduling their lives. The beginning of the movie shows Andrew and Olivia planning for and worrying about when they’ll start a family. They have a slight disagreement because Andrew says he’s willing to take a second job if Olivia wants to take as much time as she can for a maternity leave. Olivia doesn’t want him to take a second job because she thinks he’ll be overworked.

Sammy is carefree and single. As Andrew and Olivia are seen settling into the house, Sammy is flirting with a woman he’s just met outside a bar. Her name is Emma (played by Chloe Bennet), and he immediately charms her by joking that the bar is his “house,” so she needs to take her shoes off before she goes inside. Over drinks, the flirtation continues between Sammy and Emma, who are obviously attracted to each other.

Emma and Sammy find out that they both live in Chicago, but Sammy says that he spends a lot of time in Arizona because he went to college at Arizona State University. (The movie doesn’t name the Arizona city were this story take place, but it’s safe to assume they’re in or near Tempe, which is where ASU is located.) Sammy works for a bounce house company called Sir Bounce-A-Lot. Emma works for a 3-D printing company. It’s a job she doesn’t particularly like, but she says it would be somewhat complicated for her to leave the job because her sister is her boss.

Because they both live in Chicago, Sammy asks Emma if she prefers the Cubs or the White Sox. When she says she’s a Cubs fan, he pretends to be offended because he’s a die-hard White Sox fan, and he jokingly moves to the other side of the bar counter. The banter between Sammy and Emma in this scene (as well as their chemistry together) is entirely believable. They both like to poke fun at each other in a way where you know that it’s a rapport they’ll keep having if they end up as a couple.

It’s not much of a surprise that Sammy and Emma go to his parents’ house for a sexual hookup. Andrew and Olivia are upstairs having their own (scheduled) sex, when they hear noises downstairs and go to investigate. Andrew and Olivia catch Sammy and Emma having sex on the living room couch. And that’s how Andrew and Sammy find out that they both want to stay at their parents’ house that weekend.

It’s also how Sammy meets Olivia in person for the first time and finds out that Emma is Olivia’s younger half-sister. (Sammy never went to Andrew and Olivia’s wedding, but he saw photos of Olivia before they met in person.) Olivia is also Emma’s boss, so Andrew already knows Emma. Stranger things have happened in real life. It’s made clear in the movie that Andrew cut Sammy out of his life, which is why Andrew probably never talked about Sammy to Emma and why she probably never saw any photos of him during the time that she’s known Andrew.

Sammy thinks it’s hilarious that the two brothers are romantically involved with the two sisters, but Andrew is not amused. There’s some back-and-forth tension between the two brothers, as they argue over who will get to stay in the house that weekend. In the end, they both agree to share the house, as long as they “do their own thing.”

Andrew is more determined to keep his activities separate from Sammy, but Sammy wants to be included in Andrew’s upcoming golf game. Andrew and Olivia are both golfing enthusiasts, but Sammy could care less about golf. He just wants to tag along because he knows it will annoy Andrew and because Emma will be there.

Why are Andrew and Sammy estranged? It’s revealed later in the story what caused the fight that led to their estrangement. The last time they saw each other before this trip, it was during a family get-together at Christmas when Andrew and Sammy argued about something, and Andrew punched Sammy in the face. There’s been bad blood between Sammy and Andrew ever since.

The sibling tension isn’t just between Andrew and Sammy. Olivia and Emma  (who have the same mother) also have opposite personalities and have their share of squabbles. Olivia, who has a tendency to be a judgmental control freak, is estranged from her mother, who has a long history of being promiscuous and irresponsible. Emma is more forgiving of their mother, probably because Emma (just like Sammy) hasn’t quite figured out what to do with her life.

Emma and Olivia’s mother has been evicted from her apartment, and Emma has let their mother move in with Emma. When Olivia finds out, she’s furious with Emma, whom she calls an “enabler.” However, Emma sees things differently. She thinks that Olivia has lost her compassion and should be more understanding over why Emma wants to help their mother.

At the golf game, Sammy meets a guy who will be a rival for Emma’s affections. His name is Mark (played by Craig Low), a socially awkward Australian, who sees himself as a macho “jack of all trades,” but he’s actually more of a jackass. Andrew and Olivia know Mark through their job, and they’ve been playing matchmaker because they think Mark would be an ideal boyfriend for Emma. Mark is attracted to Emma, but the feeling isn’t mutual.

And when Mark sees Sammy on the golf course with Emma, the two men instinctively seem to know that they both want to end up with Emma. Therefore, Mark immediately insults Sammy by deriding the shirt he’s wearing and calling Sammy the childish name “Cookie Monster,” after the messy “Sesame Street” character. Mark’s insufferable attitude and constant jabs at Sammy get even worse as the story unfolds, and it culminates in one of the best scenes in the movie.

Meanwhile, it should come as no surprise that Sammy has invited some friends that he knows from his ASU days over to the house for some loud partying. Andrew and Olivia, who were expecting a quiet night at the house, are unhappy about this turn of events. They try to check into nearby hotels and find out that they’re all booked up because of an event happening in the area that weekend. And so, Andrew and Olivia have no choice but to stay in the house during Sammy’s party.

It’s pretty clear that Andrew and Olivia are the uptight “boring” couple, while Sammy and Emma are the open-minded “fun” couple. However, director/co-writer Menconi never veers into caricature territory with any of the characters, thanks to a lot of the movie’s snappy and authentic-sounding dialogue. A lot of credit also goes to the actors, since they all handle the material in a way that looks natural and effortless.

Bennet and Vlamis portray the more interesting couple, and they do such a good job of making Sammy and Emma believable together that people watching “5 Years Apart” might want Sammy and Emma to get their own movie. And although Sammy’s diverse group of friends aren’t in “5 Years Apart” for very long (they’re only in the party scene), they are also written as realistic people. (Malcolm Hatchett as Sammy’s friend Percy is kind of a scene-stealer, with his hilarious facial expressions and the way he delivers his lines.)

“5 Years Apart” isn’t the type of comedy where there are laughs every few minutes because of slapstick moments or raunchy jokes. Most of the humor is subtle and derived from situations that can realistically occur when stubborn and opposite personalities clash. The movie also has some emotionally touching moments that make this comedy worth watching if you want to see a “slice of life” story with people who come across as authentic human beings instead of joke machines or parodies.

Gravitas Ventures released “5 Years Apart” on digital and VOD on August 21, 2020.

Review: ‘Tesla,’ starring Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Eve Hewson, Jim Gaffigan and Hannah Gross

August 23, 2020

by Carla Hay

Ethan Hawke in “Tesla” (Photo courtesy of IFC Films)

“Tesla”

Directed by Michael Almereyda

Culture Representation: Taking place in various parts of the U.S. Northeast and in Colorado, primarily from 1884 to 1901, the dramatic film “Tesla” has an all-white cast representing the middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Nikola Tesla, a Serbian immigrant in the United States who later became a U.S. citizen, is a brilliant inventor, but he struggles to get investors and he experiences bad business deals.

Culture Audience: “Tesla” will appeal mostly to people who are open to experimental biopics, since the movie has some unconventional elements that viewers will either like or dislike.

Ethan Hawke and Eve Hewson in “Tesla” (Photo courtesy of IFC Films)

If you think a movie called “Tesla,” about pioneering Serbian American inventor Nikola Tesla, who died in 1943 at the age of 86, is a stuffy affair with the usual biopic tropes, think again. “Tesla” writer/director Michael Almereyda’s very unconventional depiction of Tesla’s life has some out-of-left-field scenes that will either intrigue or annoy viewers. The movie should be commended for taking some bold risks, although the pacing in some parts of “Tesla” drags to the point where people might get bored.

That’s because “Tesla” is more of an introspective and murky think piece instead of a rousing story about one of science’s pioneers who was underrated and often overlooked during his time. (Tesla’s name was the inspiration for the tech company founded by Elon Musk, as well as the California-based rock band Tesla, which had hits in the 1980s and early 1990s.) The movie “Tesla” might hold the interest of people who don’t want to see a typical biopic, but everyone else should stay clear of this movie if they want something that sticks to a briskly paced “feel good” formula. And this movie (which mostly takes place from 1884 to 1901) isn’t really told from Tesla’s perspective.

One of the unpredictable aspects of “Tesla” is that Tesla (played by Ethan Hawke) is almost like a supporting character in this story that’s supposed to be about Tesla’s life. The movie is narrated by heiress/philanthropist Anne Morgan (played by Eve Hewson), who befriends Tesla in the movie and offers observations of him, as if she’s commenting in the present day. (In real life, she died in 1952, at the age of 78.) For example, there are multiple scenes with Anne using an Apple laptop computer and mentioning that if people do Google searches on inventors Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Tesla, there are millions more search results for Edison and Westinghouse than there are for Tesla.

The point is clear: Tesla, who worked with Edison and Westinghouse during various parts of his career, is still frequently overshadowed by them in the present day, just as he was when he was alive. Does the movie “Tesla” present him as a misunderstood genius? Yes and no.

On the one hand, the movie shows how Tesla (who immigrated to the U.S. in 1884) could excel as a scientist/inventor. His inventions included designing one of the first alternate current [AC] hydroelectric power plants in the United States in 1895. On the other hand, Tesla wasn’t so smart when it came to business. The movie depicts some well-documented situations when he was notoriously cheated in business deals and made other bad financial decisions that left him destitute by the time he died.

The “Tesla” movie makes it clear, through Anne’s constant narration, that Tesla was so introverted that the few people he allowed to get close to him often did not know what he was thinking. Anne explains that one of the biggest frustrations she had with Tesla was that he “lives inside his head” too much.

The movie shows that, in addition to Anne, there was one person Tesla was close to in his prime years as an inventor: his assistant Anthony Szigeti (played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a Hungarian engineer whom Tesla met when they were students at Prague University. There’s a scene where Tesla shows that he’s still haunted by the death of his brother Dane, who died in a horsing accident at the age of 12, when Tesla was 7. Tesla confides to Anthony about his beloved brother Dane: “He was the brilliant one. I could never measure up.”

And the movie also depicts that although Tesla certainly excelled in his intellectual pursuits, due to his pioneering work with electricity, he placed his work over his personal life. Tesla never married, did not have children, and he died alone. Anne mentions in voiceover narration that Tesla was very close to his mother in his childhood. Anne says aloud at one point in the movie: “I came to wonder: Could any woman touch or reach Tesla the way his mother had?”

In the movie, Anne is just a platonic friend to Tesla, although it’s hinted that at some point that she had a romantic attraction to him, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. Anne cared a great deal about what Tesla thought of her, as evidenced in a scene where Anne and Tesla are rollerskating together in a courtyard. Tesla falls down and cuts short the activity. “I’m fine,” he tells Anne. “Sometimes I have an unfavorable reaction to pearls.” Anne then hastily takes off the pearl necklace she is wearing.

French superstar actress Sarah Bernhardt (played by Rebecca Dayan) has a brief flirtation with Tesla, but it never goes anywhere, since they only encounter each other occasionally at social events. During one of those encounters, Sarah emerges in a scene set to electronic dance music. It’s one of many scenes where the movie infuses modern elements of things that weren’t invented yet during the time period depicted in the movie.

Other real-life people depicted in the movie include banker Alfred Brown (played by Ian Lithgow) and attorney Charles Peck (played by Michael Mastro), two investors who formed the Tesla Electric Company with Tesla and helped Tesla set up his own lab in 1887. Also portrayed in the movie are writer/editor Robert Underwood Johnson (played by Josh Hamilton), who was best known for his work with The Century Magazine, and his wife Katharine Johnson (played by Lucy Walters), who both befriended Tesla in the 1890s.

Hawke, who starred in director Almereyda’s 2000 movie adaptation of “Hamlet,” certainly wasn’t cast in the role of Tesla because of his physical resemblance. In real life, Tesla was about 6’2″ and had a rail-thin figure. Hawke is 5’10” and has an average build. And Hawke’s accent in the movie isn’t that great. It’s supposed to be a Serbian accent, but it comes out sounding quasi-European.

However, what Hawke does capture well (and it looks like this was the intention of the filmmakers) is Tesla’s introverted nature, his reluctance to deal with confrontation and his almost blind trust that other inventors would have the same type of integrity that he seemed to have. There are several scenes in the movie that show how Tesla could be in a room with other people and be overshadowed by people with bigger personalities and more financial clout.

Anne, a daughter of wealthy banker J.P. Morgan (played by Donnie Keshawarz), is one of those people, as depicted in this movie. Even though she’s much younger than Tesla, she has the power to get him major investment money via her father. And being the narrator of this movie, Anne’s confident personality shines through much more than Tesla’s.

Anne would become an outspoken feminist later in her life, and the movie shows signs of her being a free thinker who wasn’t afraid to go against tradition. She likes to challenge Tesla with questions having to do with science or philosophy. In one scene, Anne says to Tesla: “Idealism cannot work together with capitalism. True or false?”

Another personality that outshines Tesla’s is that of Thomas Edison (played by Kyle MacLachlan), the flashy inventor who took big risks and was often accused of taking credit for other people’s work. Tesla was sometime caught between the bitter rivalry of Edison and the more low-key George Westinghouse (played by Jim Gaffigan), but the end result was that Tesla was helped and hurt by his business deals with both of these titan inventors. Westinghouse was not as much of an attention-seeker as Edison was, but the movie shows that Westinghouse (just like Edison) was also capable of making ruthless business decisions, at the expense of alienating colleagues and in order to make himself wealthy.

Of the three inventors, Edison is one who’s depicted in the least flattering way in the movie. In a scene taking place in New York City in 1884, and portraying recent immigrant Tesla joining his new employer Edison for dinner with some other men, Edison shows some xenophobia by trying to embarrass Tesla with these questions: “Is it true that you’re from Transylvania? Have you ever eaten human flesh?” Edison then tries to laugh off these insults by saying, “We like to give the new men a hard time.”

Edison is essentially portrayed as a pompous blowhard who could be short-sighted if he couldn’t see immediate ways to make money. In one scene, Edison tells a group of businessmen: “Alternating current is a waste of time. There’s no future in it.” And in another scene, Tesla comments on Edison: “He talks to everyone but is incapable of listening.”

The movie has some whimsical fantasy sequences that Anne admits in narration never happened. One is a scene depicting Edison and Tesla getting into an argument, and they take ice cream cones that they’re holding and smash each cone on the other person. Another fabricated scene is one where Edison meets Tesla in a saloon and makes an apology to Tesla, who worked briefly for Edison from 1884 to 1885. And who really knows if Tesla and Anne ever rollerskated together in a courtyard? However, it’s depicted more than once in the movie.

The movie also portrays milestone achievements in science and technology, such as the invention of the phonograph, indoor electrical wiring and the first experiments in human electrocution. In all of these depictions, Edison or Westinghouse get all the glory, while Tesla’s contributions are trivialized to the media and to the public. The movie also shows Tesla in various times and places, such as New York City in 1881; Pittsburgh in 1888; Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1899; and New York state’s Long Island in 1901.

Anne narrates what goes on in the personal lives of Edison and Westinghouse, including Edison’s marriage to second wife Mina Miller Edison (played by Hannah Gross), who had a big influence on her husband’s business decisions. The movie even goes as far to show some of Edison’s courtship with Mina, when she was engaged to marry a preacher’s son. It’s another example of how much of Tesla’s life takes a back seat to larger personalities in the movie.

The Tesla scene in the movie that most people will talk about or remember is one of those “bizarre time warp” moments, because it shows Tesla, alone with a microphone, belting out Tears for Fears’ 1985 hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” It’s not performed in an upbeat karaoke way, but in a world-weary way that reflects Tesla’s state of mind of being worn down by his life’s disappointments. This scene is so kooky and unexpected that viewers will either love it or hate it.

Is this “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” scene meant to be funny or edgy? That’s up to viewers decide. The scene comes near the end of the movie, and it’s a welcome jolt from some of the tedium that happens during various parts of this unevenly paced film.

Because indoor electrical wiring was still a luxury for most of the time period in which the movie takes place, many of the interior scenes are darkly lit and present many of the characters in dour and shadowy tones. And the movie doesn’t offer a lot of scenes of Tesla actually doing any inventing, probably because the filmmakers thought that these types of scenes would bore viewers who aren’t science-minded.

Tesla isn’t always center stage in this story, and that might be off-putting to viewers who are expecting an in-depth portrayal of his personality. But it’s obvious that Tesla was an enigma to many people who knew him. Would it have been better for a movie about Tesla to invent aspects of his personality that might not have existed, just to be a more crowd-pleasing movie? It’s obvious that the filmmakers decided to keep Tesla an enigma and throw in some modern and unexpected twists in telling this story.

For a more conventional portrayal of Tesla, people can see director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s 2019 dramatic film “The Current War: The Director’s Cut,” which is about the competition between Edison (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) and Westinghouse (played by Michael Shannon), with Nicholas Hoult in the supporting role of Tesla. Just like with the “Tesla” movie, “The Current War: The Director’s Cut” has cast members whose acting talent elevates the flawed screenplay. “Tesla” offers enough original unpredictability that makes this movie worth watching for anyone who’s curious to see an artsy, non-traditional version of Tesla’s life.

IFC Films released “Tesla” in select U.S. cinemas and on VOD on August 21, 2020.

Review: ‘Words on Bathroom Walls,’ starring Charlie Plummer, Taylor Russell, Andy Garcia, Beth Grant, Molly Parker and Walton Goggins

August 22, 2020

by Carla Hay

Taylor Russell and Charlie Plummer in “Words on Bathroom Walls” (Photo by Jacob Yakob/LD Entertainment and Roadside Attractions)

“Words on Bathroom Walls”

Directed by Thor Freudenthal

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed U.S. city, the romantic drama “Words on Bathroom Walls” has a predominantly white cast (with some Latinos and African Americans) representing the middle-class and working-class.

Culture Clash: A high-school senior with schizophrenia wants to go to culinary school to become a chef, and he has a hard time dealing with the stigma of his mental illness, which he hides from a fellow student who’s his secret crush.

Culture Audience: “Words on Bathroom Walls” will appeal mostly to people who like movies about young love, but some of the movie’s occasionally trite or hokey way of portraying mental illness might offend or frustrate viewers.

Charlie Plummer and Andy Garcia in “Words on Bathroom Walls” (Photo by Jacob Yakob/LD Entertainment and Roadside Attractions)

In romantic dramas about high-school students, the biggest problems that the students usually face are issues about academics, sports or popularity among their peers. “Words on Bathroom Walls” goes deep into the serious issue of mental illness by having its narrator/protagonist struggling with schizophrenia, which causes problems for him at home and at school. Directed by Thor Freudenthal and written by Nick Naveda (based on the novel by Julia Walton), “Words on Bathroom Walls” makes a sincere effort to portray this psychiatric disorder with respect, but the results sometime veer into the type of hokey territory that is seen all too-often in teen dramas.

The movie’s most ludicrous and melodramatic moments are elevated by the above-average performances by Charlie Plummer and Taylor Russell, who play the would-be teen couple at the center of the story. Without the acting talent of these two stars, “Words on Bathroom Walls” would be on par with the lower-quality “disease of the week” story that is usually made for mediocre television shows. The movie also has some witty dialogue which is much better than some of the contrived, unrealistic situations in the story.

It’s clear from the beginning of the movie that Adam Petrazelli (played by Plummer) has been living with mental illness (which includes having delusions) for a while, but he has more recently been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which includes having delusions. Adam, who is a senior in high school, lives with his divorced mother Beth (played by Molly Parker) in an unnamed U.S. city. (The movie was actually filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina.)

Adam loves to cook, and his career goal is to become a professional chef, but he worries about how his mental illness will affect his chances to reach that goal. Early on in the movie, Adam comments in a voiceover about his awareness that he had schizophrenia: “What I would’ve given for a classic case of glaucoma, because soon after, I started hearing the voices.”

Adam doesn’t just hear voices. He also sees three fictional people who are part of his hallucinations and who become his imaginary companions/advisors when he’s going through a schizophrenic episode. Joaquin (played by Devon Bostick) is a guy in his late teens whom Adam describes as being like “the horny best friend in a ‘90s teen movie following you around.” Rebecca (played by AnnaSophia Robb) is a neo-hippie type in her 20s who likes to spread optimism and positive vibes. Bodyguard (played by Lobo Sebastian) is a rough-looking, tracksuit-wearing protector in his 30s who carries around a baseball bat and other weapons. Bodyguard doesn’t hesitate to get violent if he thinks Adam is in danger. Occasionally, some of Bodyguard’s friends (who wear similar tracksuits) also show up to do some damage.

Adam is the type of teenager who speaks like he’s about 10 years older than his real age. In a voiceover, he asks: “How hard could it be to hide my burgeoning insanity from the unforgiving ecosystem that is high school?” Adam is keeping his mental illness a secret from the people at his public high school, but it’s a secret that was exposed in an incident that led to him being diagnosed with schizophrenia. This incident is shown in a flashback scene.

While attending a chemistry class, Adam had a disturbing psychotic break in which he hallucinated that the Bodyguard and his friends were destroying the classroom. The imaginary mayhem caused Adam to accidentally strike out at his acquaintance/lab partner Todd (played by Aaron Domingues), who was severely burned when a container of chemicals accidentally spilled on his arm. This incident led to Adam being expelled from school and shunned by Todd, who hangs out with a group of school bullies who taunt Adam with insults about his mental illness.

Adam’s expulsion from school comes at a very tricky time for him because he’s applying to go to culinary school, and he won’t be eligible without a high-school diploma. And something else has happened in his life that he’s not happy about: His mother Beth has started dating a man named Paul (played by Walton Goggins), and the relationship has become serious enough that Paul has moved into the family home. Paul and Beth are very much in love, and Paul makes it clear to Adam that he’s in the relationship for the long haul.

Adam tries to keep his emotional distance from Paul, who is willing to help Beth with the responsibilities of caring for a schizophrenic child. Adam and Beth have no relationship with Adam’s father, who abandoned the family years ago. Later in the story, Adam gets some news about his family that makes him feel even more insecure about his mental illness and how it affects the close emotional bond that he’s had with his mother.

Beth is the type of mother who goes overboard in trying to find ways that Adam can be “cured” of his schizophrenia. She has dozens of books and magazine articles, she spends hours poring over information on the Internet, and she’s heavily involved in online support communities for parents of schizophrenic children. Beth’s devotion to Adam is indisputable, but the movie demonstrates that her overzealousness in helping Adam is almost to a fault, because it’s with the expectation that all her efforts will lead to Adam eventually being “cured.” It’s why Beth pushes for Adam to starting taking a prescribed experimental drug that could help with his schizophrenia.

Since there’s no cure for schizophrenia at this time, the best that schizophrenic people can do is try to manage their mental illness. If they are fortunate enough to be under a doctor’s care, the treatment usually means that the patients have to take prescribed medication. When the medication works and the patient feels better, the vicious circle comes when the patient thinks the medication is no longer needed, the patient stops taking the medication, and then the worst symptoms of the mental illness come back again. The movie depicts Adam being caught up in this frustrating and emotionally debilitating cycle.

Beth is able to get Adam enrolled on short notice in a Catholic school that accepts Adam as a student, on the condition that Adam maintain a 3.5 GPA, score above 90% on the school’s annual benchmark exam, and give monthly updates on his psychiatric treatment. During an enrollment meeting that Beth, Paul and Adam have with the school’s stern but compassionate principal Sister Catherine (played by Beth Grant), Adam hallucinates that Sister Catherine’s head catches on fire, and the fire spreads throughout the entire room.

At his new school, Adam is predictably a loner whose socially awkward and introverted nature makes it difficult for him to make new friends. The students, who mostly come from privileged families, aren’t exactly welcoming. Adam is also an “outsider” because he’s not Catholic and he isn’t religious. Therefore, when the school’s students attend Catholic services, he cannot participate.

On his first day at school, when Adam is in the men’s room, he sees a fellow student paying a female student named Maya Arnez (played by Russell) in exchange for homework that she did for him. (This men’s room later becomes the place where Adam hallucinates messages on the walls—hence, the title of this story.)

The way that Adam looks at Maya, it’s obvious that he’s attracted to her, but he nervously bungles his first conversation with her. Maya later strikes up a conversation with him over lunch in the school’s cafeteria. It’s during this conversation that they both find out that they share a similar quirky sense of humor where they like to poke fun at some of life’s absurdities.

It turns out that Maya is in her senior year too, and she’s a star pupil at the school: She’s an “A” student who’s the student-body president, and she’s gotten early acceptance into Duke University. Maya also proudly tells Adam that she fully expects to be chosen as the class valedictorian.

Maya might want the traditional honor of being the class valedictorian, but she sees herself as enough of a nonconformist that she looks down on another high-school tradition: She doesn’t believe in the prom, and she doesn’t want to go. Adam finds out about Maya’s dislike of prom activities during their cafeteria conversation, when Maya abruptly brushes off a female student who approaches her about being involved in the prom committee.

Taylor explains to Adam, “I choose not to affiliate myself with patriarchal norms like prom.” It’s that this point in the movie, considering this is a teen romance story, that you know that there will definitely be a scene where Maya is at the school’s prom. Adam doesn’t mind the idea of going to the school’s prom. If he does go, it’s very obvious he only wants to go with Maya as his date.

When Adam asks Maya about why she would risk her status and reputation in the school to help other students cheat, she says that the money she makes is a “side hustle” for her. Because Adam now knows that Maya will accept money to help other students get better grades, he offers to hire her to be his math tutor, since math is one of his weakest subjects and he needs to maintain a 3.5 GPA.

At first, Maya is reluctant to help Adam because she says the pay rate he cites is too low for her. But Maya changes her mind when Adam invites Maya over to dinner at his home and she meets Beth, who tells Maya the amount she can afford to pay her to tutor Adam, and Maya accepts the amount.

These tutoring sessions lead to Adam and Maya becoming closer, but he’s afraid to tell her about his schizophrenia. Several times, Maya senses that something is wrong with Adam, but every time she asks him what’s wrong, he lies and makes up excuses, such as he’s just tired, or he has a headache condition, or he’s having a bad day.

Meanwhile, Maya has a big secret of her own that she hasn’t told Adam. She goes to great lengths to lie and cover up this secret. When the secret is revealed, it isn’t too surprising because a major clue was there from the start of Adam and Maya’s first meeting.

“Words on Bathroom Walls” has a subplot of Adam establishing a friendly rapport with the school’s chief priest Father Patrick (played by Andy Garcia), who counsels Adam during confessionals, even though Adam tells Father Patrick up front that he’s not Catholic. Father Patrick can see that Adam is troubled, and he’s aware of Adam’s psychiatric problems, but Father Patrick doesn’t push the issue with Adam and seems to accept Adam for who he is.

The last third of the movie has a lot of melodrama that’s typical of a teen romance movie, but with the added element of schizophrenia. Parker and Goggins give solid performances as the main parental figures in the story. However, Adam and Maya’s budding romance is the main draw of this movie, which goes in a lot of the expected directions for this adolescent love story. Fortunately, Plummer and Russell (who was a standout in the 2019 drama “Waves”) give very believable and emotionally genuine performances.

At times, “Words on Bathroom Walls” seems to use schizophrenia as merely just another plot device in the obligatory “obstacle/secret” that most romantic stories have to create conflict for the story’s couple. At other times, the movie does a fairly good job of portraying the frustration and loneliness that schizophrenics must feel when experiencing a delusional world that only they can see.

Some of the movie’s schizophrenic visual effects are a bit heavy-handed, but it’s to make a point that these delusions aren’t just quiet little thoughts that go away just by closing your eyes and trying to think of something else. “Words on Bathroom Walls” has some very formulaic ways of portraying the story’s teen romance, but the admirable performances from Plummer and Russell improve the quality of the film so that it’s not an ordinary teen movie.

LD Entertainment and Roadside Attractions released “Words on Bathroom Walls” in select U.S. cinemas on August 21, 2020.

Review: ‘Unhinged’ (2020) starring Russell Crowe

August 21, 2020

by Carla Hay

Russell Crowe in “Unhinged” (Photo by Skip Bolden/Solstice Studios)

“Unhinged” (2020) 

Directed by Derrick Borte

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed U.S. city, the dramatic action film “Unhinged” features a predominantly white cast (with a few African Americans) representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash:  A woman becomes the stalking target of a stranger who wants deadly revenge after they were involved in a road rage incident.

Culture Audience: “Unhinged” appeals primarily to people who like formulaic “stalking” movies that often have unrealistic and illogical scenes.

Caren Pistorius in “Unhinged” (Photo by Skip Bolden/Solstice Studios)

The dramatic action film “Unhinged” is the type of movie that wants people to turn off their logic and common sense and just go along for the chaotic and often-ludicrous ride of this story’s demented stalking. “Unhinged” could be considered a horror film, but the tone is more about being suspenseful than being scary. The way that “Unhinged” was made is as if it’s a Lifetime drama movie made for people who want manic, testosterone-fueled action with cars.

Directed by Derrick Borte and written by Carl Ellsworth, “Unhinged” shows right from the opening scene that the movie’s title describes the story’s villain. This deranged antagonist doesn’t have a name in the movie (although he uses the alias Tom Cooper later in the story), and he’s played by Russell Crowe, an Oscar-winning actor who should be doing higher-quality movies than this awful dreck. For the purposes of this review, we’ll call the villain Unhinged Man.

The movie begins with Unhinged Man parked outside a house on a quiet residential street on a rainy night in an unnamed U.S. city. (“Unhinged” was actually filmed in the New Orleans area.) He’s sitting in his pickup truck, he pops a pill, and then lights a match before the match extinguishes. He then takes a hammer, goes up to the house he’s been watching, and uses the hammer to break down the front door.

He then viciously murders a man and woman inside the house with the hammer while the house’s door is open. The murder victims can be heard screaming as they’re being attacked. After he kills them, he sets the house on fire before calmly driving away.

All of this loud mayhem would definitely get the neighbors’ attention in real life, but as Unhinged Man drives away, there are no signs of neighbors even knowing what just took place. No lights go on in the surrounding houses, no neighbors go outside or peek through their windows to see what’s happening. It’s the first sign that this movie is going to have some dumb scenes set up so that Unhinged Man can brazenly commit murder in front of numerous potential witnesses and get away with it for as long as possible.

During the movie’s opening credits, there’s a montage showing TV news footage or viral videos about how angry people are in America and how that rage is turning into random acts of violence. This montage is intended to get viewers in the state of mind that Unhinged Man is one of those people who will violently lash out at strangers, so whoever becomes his next target better watch out.

As for the people he murdered in that house, the movie never reveals who they are and why they were murdered. It’s one of many loose ends and plot holes in “Unhinged.” The identities of these murder victims seem to be kept deliberately anonymous as a metaphor for how anyone could be a target for Unhinged Man, and he can have very petty reasons for wanting to murder.

So who will be his next unlucky victim? It’s hair stylist Rachel (played by Caren Pistorius), who’s about to have a very bad day. (Most of the action in “Unhinged” takes place during a 24-hour period.) Rachel, who is in her 30s, is also going through some tough times. She’s in the middle of a contentious divorce that has reached a point where her estranged husband now wants to have the house where she lives with their son Kyle (played by Gabriel Bateman), who’s about 13 or 14 years old.

Also living in the house is Rachel’s younger brother Fred (played by Austin P. McKenzie), who’s in his early 20s and unemployed, but he says he has some great business ideas. In other words, he’s a freeloader. Fred has a girlfriend named Mary (played by Juliene Joyner), who might or might not live there too. The movie doesn’t make it clear where Mary lives, but she has a serious-enough relationship with Fred that she’s often at the house.

Rachel’s divorce lawyer Andy (played by Jimmi Simpson) happens to be her best friend, as he’s described later in the movie. One morning, before Rachel is about to drive Kyle to school, Andy calls to tell Rachel the bad news that her soon-to-be ex-husband Richard (who’s never seen on camera) is going to put up a big fight to get the house. Rachel is already running late for an appointment with her most important client Deborah Haskell (played by Anne Leighton), and she’s also in a rush to get Kyle to school.

Before they drive off, Rachel and Kyle debate on which route she should take to get him to school: Should they take the freeway or surface streets? Either way, they’re going to be in rush-hour traffic but they have to guess which might be the faster way. They take the freeway and run into a traffic jam, so Rachel decides to get off the freeway and drive on the streets.

These driving scenes have increasing tension, because during this car trip, Rachel gets two phone calls with bad news. Richard calls to let Kyle know that he has to cancel their upcoming father/son get-together for a sports game, because Richard just started a new job that is requiring him to do some work that conflicts with the game schedule. And then, Deborah calls Rachel in frustration over Rachel’s tardiness. Deborah tells Rachel that not only is she canceling the appointment but she’s also firing Rachel.

It’s during this phone call that Deborah mentions another setback that Rachel went through not too long ago: Rachel used to own her own hair salon, but she lost that business. The movie doesn’t reveal exactly when or why Rachel lost the salon, but this business failure is brought up as another example of how Rachel is under tremendous financial pressure. Losing her most important client has just made things worse.

Therefore, by the time Rachel encounters Unhinged Man, she’s feeling very stressed-out and anxious. While waiting at an intersection at a stoplight, she notices that the pickup truck in front of her won’t move after the light turns green. She loudly honks her horn, but the driver still won’t move. Finally, she decides to pass the truck and gives the driver a dirty look as she passes. The driver is Unhinged Man, of course.

Rachel hits another traffic jam on the streets, where she notices that Unhinged Man has followed her. He eventually drives up next to Rachel’s car, where Kyle (who’s in the back seat) has the window next to him rolled down. Fearing that she could be dealing with a nutjob, Rachel tells Kyle not to talk to the stranger. And it just so happens that when Kyle tries to close the window with the automatic button, there’s a malfunction and the window is stuck.

Unhinged Man has his window rolled down. He starts a conversation where he asks Rachel why she had to lean hard on her car horn instead of giving it a polite tap. She tells him that it was justified because he wouldn’t move while the light was green. Rachel also says that she’s in a hurry and she’s having a bad day. Unhinged Man then apologizes and asks Rachel to apologize too, but she refuses.

His demeanor then becomes menacing as he tells Rachel, “I don’t think you even know what a bad day is. But you’re going to find out. You’re going to fucking learn.”

And this heated exchange sets off the stalking and chase scenes in the movie, which includes numerous car crashes and some more people who end up murdered. The worst things about the movie are how many unrealistic things happen and how Rachel is written as a dimwit who makes horrible decisions.

For example, there’s a scene in the movie where Unhinged Man is chasing after Rachel while they’re in their cars. Rachel finds out that her phone is missing (for reasons that are shown in the movie), and she frantically tries to go through her purse to look for her phone while she’s driving. When she sees that her phone isn’t there, instead of going somewhere to get help and use a phone, she keeps driving.

There’s another scene where Unhinged Man goes after Rachel and he traps her in a packed fleet of cars that are locked in a traffic jam. Unhinged Man then acts like he’s at a monster truck derby and starts ramming cars. And yet, there’s no sign of people in any of the cars getting on their phones to call 911.

Unhinged Man also causes mayhem at a diner in another unrealistic scene. Unhinged Man just casually does what he does and stays too long in places where he knows that the cops are going to show up any minute. Let’s just say that the police take too long to arrive in many scenes in this movie.

And there’s another scene where after the cops show up, the people who were brutally attacked by Unhinged Man aren’t even taken to a hospital. The cops just take the report and then leave. The movie’s sloppy screenwriting also includes Rachel coming up with an illogical and unnecessary idea to lure Unhinged Man to the nursing home where her mother lives. Whether or not she goes through with the idea is shown in the movie.

But the biggest illogical thing about the movie is how, during all of this madness, Rachel doesn’t go to a police station. Instead, she wastes a lot of time making stupid decisions while she’s being chased by Unhinged Man. Crowe’s performance is almost campy, because there are some scenes where he literally growls as he gets angry. The rest of the cast don’t do anything particularly noteworthy in their roles, because their characters are written as fairly generic.

There are hints that Unhinged Man is someone with a troubled past. It’s revealed that he has problems holding on to a steady job (he was fired after just a month on his most recent job) and it’s implied that he went through a painful divorce. Based on how he reacts when he finds out that Rachel is in the middle of a divorce, it seems as if Unhinged Man felt he was the “victim” in his own divorce and he’s extremely bitter about it.

“Unhinged” essentially takes a trope that’s common for a Lifetime movie (a woman in peril) but with male rage given more weight in the story. The high-octane chase scenes and car crashes are meant to appeal to people who like “bang ’em up” action and don’t really care about the reasons for why this destruction is happening. Don’t expect to get a lot of insight into why these characters behave as illogically as they do. Viewers who get to the end of this movie will feel like they were trapped in a badly structured video game where only the chase scenes matter and the characters are as hollow and mindless as they can be.

Solstice Studios released “Unhinged” in U.S. cinemas on August 21, 2020.

Review: ‘Project Power,’ starring Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dominique Fishback, Rodrigo Santoro, Colson Baker, Amy Landecker and Courtney B. Vance

August 16, 2020

by Carla Hay

Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in “Project Power” (Photo by Skip Bolen/Netflix)

“Project Power”

Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman

Culture Representation: Taking place in New Orleans, the action thriller “Project Power” features a racially diverse cast (African American, white and Latino) representing the middle-class and the criminal underworld.

Culture Clash:  An underground drug called Power, which has the ability to give people superpowers for five minutes each time the drug is ingested, is at the center of a power struggle between criminals, cops, a man on a revenge mission and the teenage rebel enlisted to help him.

Culture Audience: “Project Power” will appeal mostly to people who like “race against time” stories that have sci-fi elements, numerous fight scenes and gory visual effects.

Dominique Fishback in “Project Power” (Photo by Skip Bolen/Netflix)

How do you get a superpower? In fictional stories, there are so many ways. And in the world of the action thriller “Project Power,” getting a superpower means swallowing a capsule pill called Power that can have one of two results: give someone a superpower for five minutes or immediately kill the person who ingests it. And in the world of “Project Power,” people are each born with a superpower that they won’t know they have until they take the Power pill that will unleash the power. When the pill kills someone instantly, it’s usually a bloody and gruesome death, such as someone’s body self-exploding.

Is it worth the risk to take the Power pill? That’s a dilemma that characters in this movie, which is set in New Orleans, constantly have to face when they have access to Power. Of course, this is the type of drug that’s not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, so the underground/illegal status of the pill makes it even more valuable, especially to criminals. It’s why in the beginning of the movie, New Orleans is pretty much under siege by criminals who are taking the drug to commit and get away with violent crimes.

It’s during this chaos that three people’s lives collide: Frank (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a cop who’s secretly ingesting Power to fight criminals; Robin (played by Dominique Fishback), a feisty teenager who’s been selling Power; and Art (played by Jamie Foxx), a military veteran who likes to call himself “The Major” who’s out for revenge. (The reason for Art’s vendetta is revealed in the movie.)

Frank knows Robin because she’s the one who sells Frank his Power pills. To ensure her loyalty, he also buys her a motorcycle for her birthday. Frank’s superpower is that he’s bulletproof and can can heal quickly from any injuries.

Frank is involved in a big chase scene with a robber, and it becomes almost impossible for Frank not to hide that he’s taken a Power pill, based on the superhuman way that he was able to be immune to deadly bullets. It might only be a matter of time before Frank’s boss Captain Craine (played by Courtney B. Vance) notices that Frank has superhuman abilities on the job.

Meanwhile, Art rolls into the area from Tampa, Florida, because he’s on a revenge mission. He has to do some investigating into who is responsible for a crime that he’s avenging. He knows that the people he’s looking for are involved in dealing the Power drug. Art stops by the apartment of a lowlife named Newt (played by Colson Baker), who takes a Power pill when he figures out that Art is looking for him and there’s going to be a big fight. This showdown between Art and Newt kicks off a series of high-octane action scenes that involve a lot of mayhem, blood and destruction.

Art and Robin “cross paths” when Art kidnaps her and basically forces her to help him on his mission to find the crime lord responsible for overseeing the illegal sales of Power in the area. Why? Because Robin is a local drug dealer of Power, and Art figures that she can be easily pressured into giving up information that will lead to the higher-ups on the drug-dealing hierarchy.

When she finds out the reason why Art is hell-bent on revenge, Robin becomes more sympathetic to him and a willing ally. But Frank is after Art because he’s convinced that Art is one of the bad guys. And so, Robin is somewhat caught in the middle, and she has to decide which person she can trust more.

The two chief villains of the story are Biggie (played by Rodrigo Santoro), who’s a typical scumbag type who inevitably takes someone hostage in the movie, and Gardner (played by Amy Landecker), the type of boss who walks around in power suits and gets other people to do the dirty work. There’s nothing inherently scary or memorable about these two generic villains.

“Project Power” (directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman) is the type of movie where the characters are constantly chasing after or at the mercy of something that can “get into the wrong hands.” The main reason why people will want to see “Project Power” is to see what type of superpowers that characters will get to when they take the pill. The movie is essentially a showcase for these visual effects and chase scenes.

On the one hand, it’s refreshing to see an African American teenage girl have a prominent role in an action flick, when this type of role usually goes to male actors. On the other hand, “Project Power” (written by Mattson Tomlin) falls back on some over-used and negative stereotypes that African American teens in urban areas are criminals, because Robin is basically a drug dealer.

And the movie has this other tired cliché about African Americans: This teenage drug dealer is also an aspiring rapper. If this role had gone to someone who isn’t African American, it’s doubtful that the character would be a drug dealer/wannabe rapper. There’s a scene in the movie where Robin does a freestyle insult rap to a teacher who tries to discipline her.

The movie also has Robin as another African American negative stereotype: She’s the product of a financially deprived, broken home: She lives with her single mother Irene (played by Andrea Ward-Hammond), who’s struggling with an unnamed illness, and Robin has to be her caretaker. Andrea has no idea that her daughter is a drug dealer, even though it’s obvious that Robin’s minimum-wage, part-time job at a fast-food joint isn’t the reason why Robin has enough cash on her to help with the household bills.

All of these negative stereotypes would be extremely annoying if not for the fact that there is some redemption for Robin, and “Project Power” doesn’t spend a lot of time on these lazy and unimaginative clichés. What saves this movie from being a mindless set of action sequences is that Foxx and Gordon-Levitt have a push-and-pull rapport that is very entertaining to watch. Fishback also has some moments where she’s a scene-stealer.

“Project Power” also has some not-so-subtle messaging about how power (or the idea of having power) can be so addicting that people will stop at nothing to get it, even if it means risking death. There are some scenes where superpowers that are only supposed to last five minutes seem to go longer than five minutes. But most people watching this movie aren’t going to sit there and nitpick by keeping track of the length of time that the superpowers are really in effect. They just want to a lot of thrilling action scenes and at least one “freak creature” that hasn’t been seen before in a movie.

Netflix premiered “Project Power” on August 14, 2020.

Review: ‘Starting at Zero,’ starring Tracey Strichik, Steve Bullock, Ralph Northam, Cynthia Jackson, Tara Skiles, James Ernest and Sunny McPhillips

August 16, 2020

by Carla Hay

A scene from “Starting at Zero” (Photo courtesy of Abramorama)

“Starting at Zero”

Directed by Willa Kammerer

Culture Representation: The documentary “Starting at Zero,” about the U.S. education system for children younger than 6 years old, interviews white and black people (and one person of Asian descent), mostly from U.S. states in the South and Midwest, who are educators, politicians, academics and parents representing the middle-class and upper-class.

Culture Clash: Because access to a good education is usually determined by socioeconomic factors, most of the people interviewed say that more U.S. states need to do a better job at making it a more level playing field for people to have access.

Culture Audience: “Starting at Zero” will appeal primarily to people who are concerned about education for children under the age of 6, but the documentary puts so much emphasis on states in the South (especially Alabama) and the Midwest that people who live in other regions of the U.S. might be turned off by this bias.

A scene from “Starting at Zero” (Photo courtesy of Abramorama)

The child-education documentary “Starting at Zero” (directed by Willa Kammerer), for all of its noble intentions, is a very flawed and extremely dull film that was in serious need of good editing before this movie was released to the public. “Starting at Zero” is supposed to be about pre-kindergarten (pre-K) education in the United States, but more than half of the movie looks like a public-relations promotional video to glorify the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education (ADECE), as if it’s the only government-funded pre-school department that works well in America. It’s best not to play an alcohol drinking game to take a drink every time Alabama is mentioned in this documentary, because that will definitely result in alcohol poisoning. The movie is only 63 minutes long, but it feels like it’s a lot longer.

In the production notes for “Starting at Zero,” Kammerer says that the movie (which is her first feature-length documentary) started out as exploration of why ADECE’s First Class Pre-K program has been consistently ranked #1 for more than a decade by the National Institute for Early Education Research. (There’s no mention in the documentary that Alabama is consistently ranked one of the worst states in the U.S. for education. More on that in a moment.) But as Kammerer and the other filmmakers got deeper into making the documentary, Kammerer says that they “realized there was so much more to the story—that it had roots in North Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi, and other threads in Oklahoma and Montana, Chicago and Omaha and beyond.”

The problem is that the movie pretty much ignores the “beyond” part, by sticking to interviewing people who are connected to the pre-school education system in the South or Midwest. It’s a huge misstep for a documentary that’s supposed to be about the overall pre-school education system in the U.S., even though the documentary is actually a narrow look at only certain regions of the country. “Starting at Zero” gives the impression that the filmmakers didn’t want to spend the time, money or resources to include other regions of the U.S. outside of the South and Midwest. And that myopic view is just going to alienate a lot of viewers when they see that this is a documentary focused primarily on pre-school education in Southern and Midwestern states.

The fact-finding in this documentary is amateurish and, at times, atrocious. “Starting at Zero” cites statistics but does not list any sources for those statistics, which will make viewers wonder how credible those statistics are. It’s very disappointing that a movie about education seems like it was made by people who have no education in research, such as this basic standard: Always cite your sources.

And in being too eager/biased in promoting Alabama as an ideal state for pre-school education, the filmmakers of “Starting at Zero” completely ignored something that’s common knowledge to many people who are in and outside of the U.S. education system: Alabama is consistently ranked at or near the bottom of all U.S. states in education. According to U.S. News and World Report, Alabama is ranked dead last out of all 50 states in overall education and ranked at #49 out of 50 in education for pre-K to 12th grade.

The lack of diversity in “Starting at Zero” isn’t just with the U.S. regions covered in the film. Although there are several black people interviewed in “Starting at Zero,” Latinos are completely shut out of the documentary, and the only Asian who’s interviewed in the movie (Harvard University professor of public economics Raj Chetty) gets less than a minute of screen time toward the end. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Asians and Latinos are the fastest-growing racial groups in the United States. It’s really appalling that a documentary about the education of future generations in the U.S. leaves out significant representation of these racial groups in the documentary.

Only one person in the documentary realistically discusses the issue of how racial diversity impacts U.S. public schools. Cynthia Jackson, executive director of Educare, comments: “There are groups of children—immigrant children, children of color, children from under-served and under-represented communities—that are being left behind because of unconscious bias, because of equity issues.”

And speaking of unconscious bias, “Starting at Zero” has some racist editing too, because every time someone mentions “poor” or “under-performing” students in a voiceover, the film shows children who aren’t white, usually African American children. It reinforces a racist stereotype that non-white students are the only kids in school who could possibly be bad students or poor. The reality is that there are poor people and bad students of all races in America, but the filmmakers of this substandard documentary don’t seem to have a grasp on that reality.

Another major blind spot in “Starting at Zero” is how it barely mentions that being able to afford pre-school child care is a huge issue for many families. Not everyone can afford the “best” pre-schools in their communities. “Starting at Zero” has absolutely no one in the movie who says they’re struggling with being able to afford pre-school childcare, but it isn’t surprising that this perspective is shut out of “Starting at Zero,” since the movie fails on so many levels. Of the long list of people interviewed for this movie (see below), only two are parents who talk about having kids in a pre-school program, and they don’t talk about how it affects their finances.

The movie preaches that every state should eventually have the type of great pre-school child care that will be free to all, in order to “level the playing field” in U.S. education. Several people in the movie declare that since government-funded U.S. education is on the state level, not national level, it will be up to each state to make these improvements. Easier said than done.

Virginia governor Ralph Northam comments, “When one family has the means to send their children to early childhood education programs and another family doesn’t, it’s really what starts the gap. And we can either invest in it responsibly at an early age or can try to catch up later. The math is very simple.”

But the movie never answers this question: “Who’s going to pay for it?” Too many people are already angry at their state governments for raising taxes, and they don’t want higher taxes for the government to pay for these pre-school education programs. And although some people in “Starting at Zero” say that education is a non-partisan issue, the reality is that education funding is a partisan issue when one party can be more resistant than another to raise taxes to improve funding for severely under-funded public schools for children.

And speaking of funding, there’s no real discussion in “Starting at Zero” about the fact that school teachers for children are underpaid and how these severely low salaries are a major problem in attracting “quality” educators in public schools for children. A lot of people in the documentary spout vague platitudes about “high-quality education,” yet it’s irresponsible for the documentary to ignore that it’s harder to attract “high-quality” educators on the pre-school level if the educators aren’t even being paid a living wage.

Some of the ADECE people in the documentary brag that in Alabama, pre-school teachers and kindergarten teachers who work for government-funded schools are paid the same salary. But the documentary doesn’t mention is that teachers on this level all across the U.S. are usually part-time employees (they don’t get health insurance or other full-time benefits from their job) who get such low salaries that it’s not enough to be considered a living wage. ADECE has a program that brings pre-school teachers to people’s homes, but the documentary omits specific information about how much money it costs for Alabama to provide these home services and how many households actually get these services.

“Starting at Zero” spends a lot of time repeating things that are common knowledge, such as the fact that kids start learning before they go to school and that the type of pre-school education a child has will make a difference in how well the child does in school. The more educated a society is, the more likely the society’s economy will prosper. Therefore, it makes sense to invest in and care about a child’s education even before the child enrolls in school.

You don’t have to be an educator or a parent to know all of that, but there are several people who repeat these things throughout the film. Because this constant repetition is put in the movie, the filmmakers seem to think viewers are too stupid to understand the first time someone said it in the documentary. “Starting at Zero” makes the same mistake that a lot of documentaries make: It overstuffs the movie with talking heads who say the same things over and over.

The filmmakers of “Starting at Zero” don’t seem to understand that a documentary isn’t automatically good if you put as many interviews as possible in the documentary. In fact, interviews with too many people can make a documentary look cluttered and absolutely boring, especially if many of the people being interviewed don’t have a lot of charisma. It should be commended that the filmmakers made an effort to have numerous sources to interview, but this documentary needed better directing and editing, by putting into practice the concept of “quality over quantity” in the final cut of the movie.

Here’s the list of interviewees in “Starting at Zero,” keeping in mind that this movie is only a little more than an hour long, not a docuseries:

  • Joe Adams, research coordinator of Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama
  • Susan Adams, assistant commissioner for Pre-K, Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning
  • Rhian Evans Allvin, CEO of National Association for the Education of Young Children
  • Laura Baker, regional director coordinator of Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education
  • Pam Baker, Alabama First Class Pre-K teacher
  • Erin Barton, Vanderbilt Peabody College associate professor 
  • Camilla Benbow, dean of Vanderbilt Peabody College
  • Rebecca Berlin, senior vice-president of Ounce of Prevention Fund
  • Misty Blackmon, regional director of Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education
  • Edwin Bridges, retired director of Alabama Department of Archives and History  
  • Steve Bullock, governor of Montana
  • Phil Bryant, former governor of Mississippi
  • Greg Canfield, Alabama secretary of commerce
  • Raj Chetty, Harvard University professor of economics
  • Lucy Cohen, HIPPY state lead of Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education
  • Jeff Coleman, CEO of Coleman Worldwide Moving
  • Shernila Cook, graduate and Alabama First Class Pre-K
  • Tom Dodd, regional vice-president, Kaplan Early Learning Company
  • Steven Dow, executive director of CAP Tulsa
  • Amy Dunn, coach, Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education
  • James Ernest, University of Alabama, Birmingham professor
  • Alice Evans, monitor of Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education
  • Jean Feldman, teacher/author
  • Stacy Ferguson, retired regional director of Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education
  • Dorothy Flowers, Alabama First Class Pre-K teacher
  • Delliiah Hasberry, Alabama First Class Pre-K parent/Help Me Grow Alabama community liaison
  • Jana Hoggle, Satsuma City Schools director of Pre-K
  • Jan Hume, grants and budgets of Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education
  • James B. Hunt Jr., former governor of North Carolina
  • Cynthia Jackson, executive director of Educare Learning Network
  • Laura Jana, pediatrician/author
  • Lee Johnson III, director of First 5 Alabama, Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education
  • Archie Jones, Harvard Business School director/senior lecturer
  • Todd Klunk, W.K. Kellogg Foundation program officer
  • Ken Levit, executive director of George Kaiser Family Foundation
  • Sunny McPhillips, lead teacher of Alabama First Class Pre-K
  • Allison Muhlendorf, executive director of Alabama School Readiness Alliance
  • Ralph and Pamela Northam, governor and first lady of Virginia
  • Diana Mendley Rauner, president of Ounce of Prevention Fund
  • Bentley Ponder, senior director of research and policy, Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning
  • Dallas Rabig, Alabama State Coordinator for Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health
  • Jeana Ross, secretary of Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education
  • Aaliyah Samuel, formerly of National Governor’s Association
  • Diane Schanzenbach, Northwestern University director of Institute for Policy Research
  • Javaid E. Siddiqi, president/CEO of the Hunt Institute
  • Tara Skiles, professional development manager of Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education
  • Trellis Smith, Head Start state collaboration director of Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education
  • Jim Squires, retired employee of National Institute for Early Education Research   
  • Katharine B. Stevens, American Enterprise Institute education policy scholar
  • Jera Stribling, director of Alabama Giving
  • Trayce Strichik, senior director, Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education
  • Rachel Wagner, Devereux Center for Resilient Children
  • Emily Warren-Bailey, Alabama First Class Pre-K teacher
  • Eria White, Alabama First Class Pre-K parent
  • Kash White, Alabama First Class Pre-K student

NOTE: Alabama governor Kay Ivey is not interviewed for the documentary, but the movie has footage of her giving a speech that mentions pre-school education.

Stylistically, “Starting at Zero” is structured like a tedious PowerPoint presentation, including having outlines on the screen that lists each of the documentary’s five chapters, with headings and subheadings. Footage of real-life pre-school classes is mostly used as anonymous background to the voiceover commentaries from the interviews. However, these visual features of the documentary aren’t the film’s biggest problem.

“Starting at Zero” might be only 63 minutes long, but it’s bloated with too many people, mainly from the South or Midwest, who repeat the same things about how “high-quality” pre-school education should be available to everyone in the U.S., without discussing the practicalities of how to pay for it. If you thought that the list of interviewees was long, imagine how it must feel to watch most of them repeating similar generic comments about education. Excruciating.

Most of the people interviewed are in privileged positions where they don’t have to think about how pre-school education will break their household budgets if they have children who need this type of education. A lot of people in America aren’t that lucky; pre-school education is out of their reach because they can’t afford it. Meanwhile, most pre-school educators’ salaries in the U.S. aren’t enough for a basic standard of living in the U.S.

The way that “Starting at Zero” ignores these problems and many other issues makes this documentary short-sighted at best, irresponsible at worst. If people want to see a much better documentary about pre-school education in the U.S., then watch “No Small Matter,” which takes a more comprehensive and more informative look at this important subject.

Abramorama released “Starting at Zero” in select U.S. virtual cinemas on August 14, 2020.

Review: ‘Sputnik,’ starring Oksana Akinshina, Pyotr Fyodorov, Fedor Bondarchuk and Anton Vasilev

August 16, 2020

by Carla Hay

Pyotr Fyodorov and Oksana Akinshinain in “Sputnik” (Photo courtesy of IFC Films/IFC Midnight)

“Sputnik” 

Directed by Egor Abramenko

Russian with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in Russia (and briefly in outer space) in 1983, the sci-fi/horror film “Sputnik” features an all-white cast of characters representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash:  A psychologist at a crossroads in her career is recruited to examine a cosmonaut who has lost his memory after a botched space mission, which resulted in a parasite creature living inside his body.

Culture Audience:  “Sputnik” will appeal primarily to people who like sci-fi/horror films influenced by “Alien.”

Pyotr Fyodorov in “Sputnik” (Photo courtesy of IFC Films/IFC Midnight)

There’s no way to get around the comparison, so it might as well be brought up right away: “Sputnik” is undoubtedly inspired by director Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror classic “Alien,” because it’s essentially about people trapped in an enclosed space with a deadly parasitic creature that feeds off of humans. “Sputnik” (directed by Egor Abramenko) is nowhere near as groundbreaking as “Alien,” but it’s an intriguing, well-paced thriller that is an impressive feature-film debut from Abramenko.

“Sputnik,” just like in “Alien,” begins with a space mission that goes very wrong. It’s 1983, and the Russian small spacecraft Orbita-4 has experienced a major jolt that causes the control panel to go haywire and the spacecraft begins malfunctioning, as if it’s going to crash. The people on board then hear what sounds like something walking on top of the spacecraft.

It’s unknown what happened after that, because the next thing that viewers see is that Orbita-4 has crashed back down to Earth. The commander is dead, the flight engineer is in a coma, and the only survivor is Konstantin Veshnyakov (played by Pyotr Fyodorovas), who has no memory of what happened to him while he was in outer space. The media and the government of the Soviet Union (as Russia was known back then) have hailed Konstantin as a hero. In the meantime, he is being held in quarantine so scientists can investigate.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, at the Research Institute of Brain AMS USSR, a strong-willed psychologist named Tatyana Klimova (played Oksana Akinshinain) is being interrogated by a Health Ministry panel because she’s been accused of misconduct and negligence. Tatyana is under investigation for the death of a 17-year-old boy, by holding him underwater for nearly a minute. This incident is not seen in the movie, but Tatyana is told by the lead interrogator that she will not accused of willfully inflicting injuries on a patient.

Tatyana admits that she temporarily cut off oxygen to the patient because he was misdiagnosed. She also refuses to admit to any wrongdoing and says she actually did the right thing when treating the patient. Even though the outcome of the investigation is pending, Tatyana is sure that her days are numbered at her job: She knows she’s going to be fired or forced to resign. But, for now, Tatyana refuses to quit and is adamant about defending herself from what she says is a wrongful accusation.

After this interrogation, as Tatyana is about to leave her workplace for the day, a man identifying himself as Colonel Semiradov (played by Fedor Bondarchuk) approaches her and tells her that he runs a research institute, he’s interested in neuropsychology, and he wants her expert opinion. Semiradov is in charge of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute in Kazakhstan, where he wants Tatyana to go to examine a patient.

Tatyana is reluctant at first because she doesn’t want to spend time away from Moscow. However, Semiradov makes her an offer she doesn’t refuse: If she does what he asks of her, he promises that he “take care of the review board,” implying that those career-damaging accusations against her will go away. Tatyana doesn’t really question Semiradov’s credentials or do a background check on him. Nor does she ask him to go into details about who or what she’s being asked to examine.

Tatyana trusts that Semiradov telling the truth and she agrees to go to Kazakhstan for this mysterious job. It’s implied in the movie that Tatyana is putting blind faith in Semiradov, largely because of her circumstances: She’s about to lose her job and she’s probably curious about this new research opportunity that could lead to her next job. It explains why she doesn’t ask very many questions and willingly goes to Kazakhstan without really knowing why she’s there.

When she gets to All-Union Scientific Research Institute in Kazakhstan, Tatyana finds out that she’s supposed to examine the quarantined Konstantin, who is being held there in secrecy. Although Tatyana has been told that she will have access to 90% of the facilities, she feels a growing sense of unease that she is being “trapped” there because of the secrets that she uncovers.

During her time at All-Union Scientific Research Institute, Tatyana meets Yan Leonidovich Rigel (played by Anton Vasilev) , the director of the institute, who tells her that Konstatin can be hypnotized. Yan and Tatyana end up clashing over ways to treat Konstantin, so there’s somewhat of a power struggle between them that can get in the way of what Tatyana was recruited to do. And it isn’t long before Semiradov tells Tatyana that she was chosen specifically because of her maverick ways. He wants someone who can think “outside the box,” even if it sometimes going against the government’s rules.

During Tatyana’s analysis of Konstantin, he seems to be playing games with her. He says that he is a field marshall named Robert Duvall. But all kidding aside, Konstantin is aware that he might be sequestered for the long haul, because he asks Tatyana to call his mother Lydia and tell her that he’s fine. Another member of Konstantin’s family is part of one of the more touching subplots of the movie. Tatyana diagnoses Konstantin with post-traumatic stress disorder, but there’s obviously something else going on with him.

And because it’s already revealed in the “Sputnik” trailer, it’s not a spoiler to say that Tatyana isn’t just there to try to help Konstantin recover his memories. Konstantin has a large parasite creature living inside him that is controlling Konstantin’s brain and has a symbiotic relationship with Konstantin’s other organs. The creature apparently invaded Konstantin’s body while he was in outer space.

And the creature only comes out of Konstantin’s body between 2:40 a.m. and 3:10 a.m., when it has an appetite that is deadly to humans. Tatyana and the other people who know this secret are supposed to figure out a way to keep the parasite separate from Konstantin without getting anyone killed. Easier said than done.

Much of “Sputnik” borrows elements from “Alien,” including the idea of a slimy and grotesque creature living inside a human and even the way that the movie is shot that evokes a cold, dark interior that feels more claustrophobic as terror starts to take hold. And just like in “Alien,” the female protagonist is the smartest and bravest person in the story. She has grit but she also has compassion.

And although it’s not overtly mentioned in “Sputnik,” the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States affects the motivations of this top-secret research institute. Knowing that one of their “hero” cosmonauts has brought a deadly creature back to Earth is a shameful scandal that they don’t want exposed to people on the outside. It’s one of the reasons why “Sputnik” isn’t a typical “alien creature on the loose” story, although certain parts of the movie are like a typical horror flick where it’s all about guessing who will die and who will survive.

The “Sputnik” screenplay, written by Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev, fortunately doesn’t clutter the story with too many characters. Abramenko’s assured and stylish direction make “Sputnik” an engaging thriller that has some twists that are surprising but not shocking. A movie like this could easily get too caught up in the visual scares, but the ending of the movie is a poignant reminder that space explorations that are ostensibly for the greater good of humankind can come with a human cost that represent life’s fragility.

IFC Films/IFC Midnight released “Sputnik” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and on VOD.

Review: ‘River City Drumbeat,’ staring Ed ‘Nardie’ White, Albert Shumake, Imani V. Keith, Jailen Leavell, Emily Carey and Ed Hamilton

August 15, 2020

by Carla Hay

Pictured in front row: Imani V. Keith and Jailen Leavell in “River City Drumbeat” (Photo by Juan Castañeda/Owsley Brown Presents)

“River City Drumbeat”

Directed by Marlon Johnson and Anne Flatté

Culture Representation: Taking place primarily in Louisville, Kentucky, the documentary “River City Drumbeat” features an all-African American group of people discussing River City Drum Corp (RCDC), a musical band for children who are primarily from the underprivileged area of West Louisville.

Culture Clash:  Many of the members of RCDC come from crime-ridden neighborhoods and/or troubled families, and the band has helped them lead positive and productive lives.

Culture Audience: “River City Drumbeat” will appeal primarily to people who like documentaries about adults who inspire and mentor young people to believe in themselves and pursue their dreams.

Albert Shumake in “River City Drumbeat” (Photo by Juan Castañeda/Owsley Brown Presents)

Whenever there’s a movie that takes place in financially deprived, predominantly African American area of a big city, too often the narrative is about crime or hopelessness. However, the documentary “River City Drumbeat” is an excellent example of how people in this type of community can help the community’s youth without expecting pity or the government to be in charge of a program that’s aimed at solutions. This inspiring film (directed by Marlon Johnson and Anne Flatté) shines a deserving spotlight on the Louisville-based youth group River City Drum Corp (RCDC) Cultural Arts Institute, as it goes through a leadership transition.

RCDC is no fluke. Founded in 1991 by Louisville residents Ed “Nardie” White and his wife Zambia Nkrumah (who tragically died of breast cancer in 2010), RCDC began as a way for young people in the community to have an after-school activity as a positive alternative to criminal activities plaguing the city, specifically in the lower-income west side of Louisville. The age range for RCDC members are 2 to 18. Although RCDC is open to people of all races, the membership is predominantly African American, and the group places an emphasis on drumming and culture rooted in African traditions.

In other words, the group is about more than just teaching musical skills. As White says in the documentary: “We developed River City Drum Corp to connect children to arts and culture. Our culture is going to be our savior.”

The documentary chronicles White’s decision to retire as leader of RCDC and pass on the leadership position to his protégé Albert Shumake, who is an alum of RCDC. Shumake (who was 34 when most of this documentary was filmed) is just like a son to White, and he credits White and Nkrumah for leading him in the right direction, because his life could have turned out very differently.

Shumake was 8 or 9 years old when he met White, who says in the documentary that Shumake’s parents both had heavy substance-abuse issues at the time. White knew that Shumake was not an athletic kid, in a community that placed a high value on sports (especially basketball or football) as a way to get out of the “ghetto” and get rich. White and Nkrumah became surrogate parents and got Shumake to join RCDC because they could see that he had musical talent.

Shumake ended up getting a vocal scholarship at the University of Kentucky. After graduation, he became an artist and a DJ. However, Shumake says that his priorities changed after became a father (he’s shown with his adorable daughter Ella and Ella’s mother) and after Shumake’s mother became sick and he had to help take care of her. Shumake says that he wanted a job in music that would be more stable and give back to the community, and so the time was right for him to work with RCDC. He became White’s right-hand person until White announced his retirement and that Shumake would be his successor.

In the documentary, Shumake gets teary-eyed and emotional when he reads a letter that he wrote in the year 2000, when he was a teenager in high school. In the letter, he describes his hopes and dreams to Nkrumah. Shumake says reading the letter also brings back a painful memory of a teacher who told him that he wouldn’t amount to anything, However, Nkrumah and White believed in him. It’s that type of mentoring and inspiration that RCDC offers to the children in the program, because sometimes they don’t have that type of encouragement at home or at school.

White says that he certainly wasn’t encouraged to be artistic when he was growing up, because he came from a neighborhood where African American males were expected to excel at one of three things: basketball, football or criminal activities. He grew up poor, in a household where there were 15 to 20 people living in close quarters at the time. White credits Nkrumah for introducing him to African arts.

After years as a photojournalist, White took the plunge to launch RCDC with Nkrumah. It was venture that was inspired after he taught drumming at a Boys and Girls Club in Louisville, and he saw that the youth in the community didn’t have many artistic outlets where adults took the time to teach them music and life skills. Not only do the children in the non-profit RCDC program learn how to drum (they start off with pipe drums and then can graduate to the drum line), but they also learn how to make their own drums. White and Shumake say that the kids being able to put their own drums together gives them a certain self-confidence and positive pride that they wouldn’t get if the drums were donated to them.

Shumake also demonstrates in the movie’s opening scene how drumming can be relatable to everyone if they think of it in terms of a heartbeat. He speaks to a group of RCDC students and tells them to put their hands on their hearts so that they can feel their heartbeats. He says that everyone can understand rhythm because the first sounds that everyone hears in the womb is a mother’s heartbeat.

RCDC is funded through performances that it gives and through donations, but the documentary doesn’t get too much into the details of fundraising for the RCDC. The fact that the group has been able to survive for all these years speaks for itself. And it’s very obvious from what’s seen in the film that RCDC has the full support of the community.

“When your kid joins Drum Corp, you join Drum Corp,” says the mother of Imani V. Keith, one of the RCDC students featured in the documentary. At the time this documentary was filmed, Keith was a senior in high school, so it was also her last year for her to be a member of RCDC. In a documentary interview, Keith says that before she joined RCDC, she had a “rocky” and “unstable” year in sixth grade. “I was in the principal’s office all the time.”

She adds that she found stability and purpose in RCDC. She comments: “Mr. White instilled in me leadership: Who are are going to be? Will you step up?” Keith also mentions some of the sexism she’s experienced because she’s in a drumming band, which is usually male-dominated. She says that when people don’t believe that she can drum because she’s a girl, she likes to prove them wrong.

Two other RCDC students are featured in the documentary: Jailen Leavell (who was also a senior in high school at the time this documentary was filmed) and Emily Carey, who was still an underclassman at the time. Leavell talks about how he was doing sports and RCDC, but White told him he had to choose one over the other in order to excel. Leavell chose RCDC, but he gripes that he felt that he could’ve handled his sports and drumming activities at the same time. Leavell and Keith both have college plans, and they say that RCDC helped them achieve those goals.

The documentary also takes a little bit of detour by showing White with his longtime friend Ed Hamilton, a Louisville sculptor. White then gives a tour of some of Hamilton’s art that is on display in the area. It becomes clear in the documentary’s epilogue why this “sculpture tour” segment gets this amount of screen time in the film.

Losing his wife to breast cancer isn’t the only family tragedy that White has experienced. He also opens up about what losing a granddaughter to gun violence. It adds greater poignancy and urgency to his work with RCDC and the legacy that is expected to be passed on through generations of children. At one RCDC event, White marvels at how many RCDC alumni are there who have brought their children and whose children are now in RCDC.

“River City Drumbeat” also includes footage of the group performing and traveling by bus to do concerts outside of the Louisville area. Keith’s and Leavell’s graduation from high school is included in the movie, as well as their graduation from RCDC. And it’s easy to see that White transitioning out of the leadership position is bittersweet for him, but he knows it’s the right thing to do and that he’s given the reigns to the right person.

As Shumake says at the end of the documentary: “The things that I feel are my strengths or my superpowers, I won’t let circumstances stop that. That’s the battle of everyday life. People who give up and don’t know how to fight the battle end up unhappy. I don’t plan on doing that. I’m going to keep fighting.”

Although “River City Drumbeat,” which is made in a very straightforward and traditional manner, is ostensibly a music documentary, the movie doesn’t focus very much on the technical aspects of learning how to play music in the RCDC program. And there’s no big championship competition driving the story, as there are in most movies about young students in a musical group. The real story is about the emotions and the lives affected by RCDC and how the group has changed them for the better.

Owsley Brown Presents released “River City Drumbeat” in select U.S. cinemas on August 7, 2020.

Review: ‘A Thousand Cuts’ (2020), starring Maria Ressa

August 15, 2020

by Carla Hay

Maria Ressa in “A Thousand Cuts” (Photo courtesy of PBS Distribution and Frontline)

A Thousand Cuts” 

Directed by Ramona S. Diaz 

Some language in Tagalog with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in the Philippines and the United States, the documentary “A Thousand Cuts” features interviews with a predominantly Filipino group of people about journalist Maria Ressa, the CEO of the Filipino news media outlet Rappler, and Rappler’s coverage of Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte and his “war on drugs” in the Philippines.

Culture Clash:  Rappler has come under attack by Duterte and his supporters, igniting debates and conflicts over what is “fake news” and what is “freedom of the press.”

Culture Audience: “A Thousand Cuts” will appeal primarily to people interested in issues of democracy, the media and constitutional freedoms, regardless of which country is grappling with these issues.

The Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte (center) in “A Thousand Cuts” (Photo courtesy of PBS Distribution and Frontline)

What happens when the president of a democratic country, with a constitution that’s supposed to guarantee freedom of the press, goes to war against the leader of a news outlet that has been openly critical of the president? The riveting documentary “A Thousand Cuts” (directed by Ramona S. Diaz) goes inside that war between Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte and Rappler, a Manila-based online news website.

Rappler executive editor/CEO Maria Ressa, who is a partial owner of Rappler, is the main focus of the documentary, which has an up-close look into her life during her battles with the Duterte administration. “A Thousand Cuts” unapologetically takes the side of Rappler and the media overall, but the movie also includes viewpoints from both sides of the conflict.

In 2016, Duterte was elected president of the Philippines on a populist platform and an image that he was a political outsider who would be tough on crime. His controversial rhetoric includes crude language, sexist comments and open disdain for the media that have resulted in many people describing him as the Donald Trump of the Philippines. (Ironically, Duterte is chairman of the PDP–Laban Party, which has usually had a reputation for being left-leaning and liberal.) One of the top priorities in Duterte’s agenda is his “war on drugs,” in which he openly declares in speeches and in interviews that he wants everyone who sells, buys or uses illegal drugs in the Philippines to be murdered.

Before becoming president of the Philippines, Duterte was mayor of Davao. Under his leadership in Davao, the high murder rate and government-sanctioned “death squads” came under intense criticism from human-rights groups such as Human Rights Watch. However, this controversy apparently helped his presidential campaign. Duterte is not interviewed in “A Thousand Cuts,” which has archival news clips of some his speeches and interviews, including exclusive on-camera interviews that he did with Ressa before he turned against her and Rappler.

And when Duterte became president, he continued his “death squad” policies as his administration’s way of battling crime, this time on a national level. (“A Thousand Cuts,” which is being distributed in U.S. cinemas by PBS Distribution and Frontline before debuting on PBS’s “Frontline” series, can be considered the companion piece to the documentary “On the President’s Orders,” which “Frontline” debuted in 2019.)

Rappler was one of the media outlets in the Philippines that dared to question these policies and demand that Duterte and his administration be held accountable for senseless murders done in the name of enforcing the law. Complicating matters is that the police could be committing these murders, or the murders could be committed by vigilante citizens. Either way, during Duterte’s rule, open season has been declared on people suspected of being involved in illegal drugs.

Many of the thousands of people murdered in the Philippines since Duarte because president (estimates range from 4,500 to more than 20,000 murder victims by “death squad”) were suspected of low-level crimes, but had not been given a chance to go through due process under the law. And an untold number of those victims might not have been guilty of any crimes.

Rappler published the names, faces and background stories of several murder victims to show that these victims were unfairly murdered for suspected crimes that did not justify their brutal killings. It wasn’t long before Rappler began running into legal troubles from the government. In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission of the Philippines revoked Rappler’s certificate of incorporation.

In 2019, Rappler was sued for cyberlibel, while Ressa and former Rappler reporter Reynaldo Santos Jr. were arrested and faced criminal charges for libel. In March 2019, one month after being arrested for libel, Ressa was arrested for alleged violations of the Anti-Dummy Law, a law created to punish those who violate foreign equity restrictions and avoid nationalization laws of the Philippines.

“A Thousand Cuts,” which was filmed primarily in 2018 and 2019, only chronicles the arrest and legal procedures of Ressa, not Santos. Her libel trial began in June 2019. When “A Thousand Cuts” had its world premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, the outcome of Ressa’s libel trial was pending. The movie has since been updated with an epilogue of the trial’s outcome.

The movie gets its title from the concept of how a thousand cuts can accumulate over time to a brutal slaying. Ressa invokes this concept during a speech that she gives at De La Salle University in Manila, where she comments on what the Duterte administration is doing to the Philippines: “What we are seeing is death by a thousand cuts to our democracy.”

In addition to Ressa, other members of the Rappler team who are featured in the documentary are investigative reporter Patricia Evangelista, police beat reporter Ranbo Talabong and Malacañan Palace reporter Pia Ranada. Evangelista explains why Duterte appeals to his Filipino supporters: “He offers not just change. He offers revenge.”

One of the outspoken Duterte supporters who’s interviewed in the documentary is Mocha Uson, a member of the singing/dancing group Mocha Girls, who became a prominent government official in the Duterte administration, despite having no political experience. In 2017, she was appointed assistant secretary of presidential communications operations, which essentially involves a lot of social media activities to promote Duterte’s policies and to sell Duterte merchandise. (There’s footage of Uson shilling some of this merchandise in an infomercial-like format.)

In 2018, Uson resigned from the position after a controversial stint in which she was frequently accused of spreading “fake news.” In 2019, Duterte appointed Uson to another government position: deputy executive director of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration. This appointment caused even more controversy.

Uson says in the documentary, “I never planned to go into politics. When I supported then-mayor Duterte, it was voluntary.” She and others in the documentary say that her influential blog, which is read by millions of people, helped get Duterte elected. Uson comes across as someone who would rather be in showbiz, but she’s working in politics because it’s given her access to power.

And later in the documentary, Uson tells a very tragic story about the personal reason why Duterte has her loyal support. Uson says that her father, who was a judge, didn’t really approve of her working in the entertainment industry, because he didn’t think being a dancer was a “real job.” This disapproval led to her being estranged from her father for many years, but they eventually reconciled. The day after their reconciliation, her father was shot to death.

Uson says of her father’s murder: “He was a judge and handling a mayoral electoral protest, so it was political.” She adds, “What President Duterte said is true. There are criminals pretending to be politicians, so that’s who killed my father.”

Bato De La Rosa is another extroverted character who has expressed undying loyalty to Duterte. A former general who was in charge of the Filipino prison system, De La Rosa (who is a member of the PDP–Laban Party) ran for office in a crowded race for a seat in the Philippines Senate in 2018. De La Rosa is not interviewed in the documentary, but there is video footage of him doing an ABS-CBN interview where he says of Duterte: “I would kill for the president.”

De La Rosa has a flamboyant “look at me” public persona where he displays some unorthodox campaign methods, such as singing and dancing at his campaign rallies, where he looks like he wants to give a music concert instead of a political speech. And when he does political speeches during the campaign, they echo much of what Duterte spouts in his speeches, such as people involved in illegal drugs must be killed and the media can’t be trusted.

The documentary also includes some footage of De La Rosa, before he declared his campaign to become a senator, visiting the maximum security New Bilibid Prison for men. He addresses a large crowd of seated prisoners and asks some of them to open their mouths so he can look at their teeth. He accuses the prisoners with missing teeth of being meth addicts.

And then, De La Rosa gives a short, scolding speech that has an almost cheerful, upbeat tone, in which he warns: “Trust me, I have my own way of stopping you from doing your illegal acts.” He then asks the group of prisoners to give a “gentlemen’s agreement” that they will stay away from drugs. The prisoners then cheer as De LaRosa leaves, as if they know his appearance is just a spectacle for show, and they’re playing along.

“A Thousand Cuts” features Samira Gutoc, one of De La Rosa’s opponents in the senatorial race. Gutoc was a candidate from the Otso Diretso Party, an electoral alliance that’s an opposition party to Durtete and his administration. Gutoc comments in the documentary about why she is opposed to Durtete and his policies: “You can’t be judge and executioner at the same time.”

The movie doesn’t try to sugarcoat that journalists who speak out or report on controversial issues are not immune to criticism too. The documentary includes some coverage of the vicious cyberbullying that Ressa receives. Ressa comments on “fake news” accusations: “The end goal is to make you doubt the facts.”

In another part of the documentary, Rappler’s Evangelista gets teary-eyed and emotional when she talks about the toll that her job has taken in her personal life: “It sort of leaks into every part of your life: the paranoia. Maria doesn’t scare easily. I do.”

The documentary also includes footage that gives a peek into but not a full revelation of Ressa’s personal life. Ressa, who is not married and doesn’t have children, doesn’t discuss her love life, but the cameras tag along when she spends time with her sisters Michelle Aventajado and Mary Jane Ballinger. Ressa is shown having dinner with Aventajado and discussing Ressa’s busy work schedule.

And when Ressa is in the New York City area to attend the the Time 100 Gala as an honoree, Ballinger is seen with Ressa in Ressa’s hotel room. They have some light-hearted banter because Ballinger has picked out a gown and high heels for Ressa to wear to the gala, but Ressa declines because she says she prefers wearing trousers and flat-heeled shoes.

George and Amal Clooney make a cameo in the film, as Ressa is also seen attending the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s TrialWatch launch event in New York. While the famous couple is on stage for a discussion panel, George Clooney singles out Ressa from the audience to commend her for her bravery, and he says that she has their support. After the event, Amal Clooney offers her personal email address to Ressa, and they engage in some pleasant small talk.

Despite hobnobbing at these glamorous events, Ressa’s legal problems are never far from her and her family members’ minds. While visiting with her sister in her hotel room, Ballinger begins to cry when she expresses fear about what will happen to Ressa in the trial, while Ressa tries to ease her sister’s fears by remaining practical and optimistic. Ressa says she’s mentally prepared for any outcome because she’s already decided what to do in the worst-case scenario.

Ressa (who was born in 1963) opens up a little bit about her background, which explains why she is able to deal with the type of adversity that would break other people. She says that her biological mother died when Ressa was only a year old. Ressa’s father and stepmother moved to the United States without Ressa because they couldn’t afford to bring her with them when they sought a better life in America.

When she was 10 years old and they could afford to raise her, they sent for her, and the family settled in Toms River, New Jersey. Ressa had to learn English and adjust to living in a country where her skin color and ethnicity made her a minority. She says of being a person of color who expects to be treated equally in a predominantly white society: “You have to prove that you deserve it.”

Ressa graduated from Princeton University in 1986, and earned a Fulbright Fellowship to study political theater at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She ultimately made the choice to permanently move back to the Philippines. In the documentary, Ressa admits she briefly thought of not returning to the Philippines to avoid her legal problems, but she says she knows that would be a mistake and a betrayal of all her values. She also says that facing the attacks and legal issues is part of a larger cause in the fight for freedom of the press.

“A Thousand Cuts” director Diaz doesn’t lose sight of this big picture either. The obvious message of the movie is that attacks on constitutional freedoms (such as freedom of the press and freedom of speech) are attacks on democracy. And although “A Thousand Cuts” focuses specifically on the Philippines, the documentary also serves as a dire warning that other democracies could face the same problems if they’re not careful.

PBS Distribution and Frontline released “A Thousand Cuts” in select U.S. cinemas on August 7, 2020. PBS’s “Frontline” series will premiere the movie in January 2021.

Review: ‘La Llorona,’ starring María Mercedes Coroy, Sabrina De La Hoz, Margarita Kenétic, Julio Díaz and María Telón

August 15, 2020

by Carla Hay

María Mercedes Coroy and María Telón in “La Llorona” (Photo courtesy of Shudder)

“La Llorona” 

Directed by Jayro Bustamante

Spanish and Kaqchikel with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in Guatemala, the horror film “La Llorona” has an all-Latino cast representing the wealthy and the working-class.

Culture Clash: A convicted war criminal and his family are haunted by the sins from his past.

Culture Audience: “La Llorona” will appeal to people who like horror films that have social commentary beyond the usual scares.

Sabrina De La Hoz in “La Llorana” (Photo courtesy of Shudder)

“La Llorona” (written and directed by Jayro Bustamante) goes where few horror movies have gone before, by taking a well-known folk story and giving it a new spin that’s a scathing commentary on human-rights violations committed during war. The movie should not be confused with the vastly inferior 2019 horror flick “The Curse of La Llorona,” a not-very-scary movie that got a lot of criticism for being a “whitewashed” Hollywood version of Hispanic folklore. Instead, “La Llorona” is much better than the average horror flick because it makes a bold statement about the aftermath of war and how the pain doesn’t end after the war is over.

The movie begins with a striking scene of several women gathered in a circle, with lit candles all around, and praying in a chanting manner asking an unknown entity: “Come back to us.” The next scene is of a group of men who are being told, “Remember, you are heroes, not victims.” They are also told that they should wear dark suits, as long as they’re not black suits, and they must never lower their heads.

What do these two groups of people have in common? It’s made clear later in the story, but most of the activity in the movie takes place in a wealthy family’s mansion that is experiencing a lot of emotional turmoil. The family patriarch is Enrique Monteverde (played by Julio Díaz), a former government army general in Guatemala’s civil war in the early 1980s, when General Efraín Ríos Montt’s totalitarian regime fought against insurgent armies (many of whom consisted of indigenous people) that wanted a more democratic rule.

Guatemala eventually made a new constitution allowing free and democratic elections in 1986. But the civil unrest in Guatemala resulted in thousands of people being tortured and killed, with indigenous people as the target of much of the government’s genocide. And decades later, Enrique is on trial for these war crimes that he is accused of committing in 1982 and 1983. 

While he is awaiting trial, Enrique and his family have been living a semi-sequestered life in the mansion. His family members in the household are his wife Carmen (played by Margarita Kenétic); their daughter Natalia (played by Sabrina De La Hoz); and Natalia’s daughter Sara (played by Ayla-Elea Hurtado), who’s about 9 or 10 years old. Sara is aware that her grandfather Enrique is a controversial public figure, because she asks her mother Natalia, “Why do people say bad things about my grandpa?” When Natalia asks Sara where she heard these things, Sara tells her that it’s been mostly on the Internet.

One night, Enrique wakes up to the sound of someone taking a shower and breathing heavily in a nearby bathroom. When he goes in the bathroom to investigate, no one is there. The movie has many symbolic and literal references to water and drowning, in a nod to the La Llorona folklore, which is about a ghost woman who’s tormented by the memory of drowning her two young sons.

Is Enrique delusional or was he just dreaming? It’s clear that he has some mental anguish because he’s so freaked out by what he hears in the bathroom that he takes his gun with him. And when his wife Carmen (played by Margarita Kenétic) checks up on him in the bathroom to see what’s going on, he thinks she’s an intruder and he shoots at her and barely misses. The bullet instead hits the bathroom door frame.

The family’s chief maid Valeriana (played by María Telón) has also gone to see what all the ruckus is about. But Enrique, in a state of panic, grabs Valeriana and holds her as if she’s a hostage. During the chaos, Enrique and Carmen’s daughter Natalia runs into the room and sees what’s going on and calls out for the family’s trusted security employee Letona (played by Juan Pablo Olyslager), who manages to get the gun away from Enrique and calm things down.

This disturbing incident was witnessed by several of the live-in servants, who are all indigenous people. The next day, they band together with Valeriana to tell Carmen and Natalia that they want to quit. But Carmen and Natalia convince the servants to stay, by telling them that no other employers will treat them as well as they’ve been treated by the Monteverde family. This scene can be considered symbolic of Spanish colonialism in Guatemala, where indigenous people were kept subservient by Spanish invaders, who believed that they knew what was best for the native people.

It’s also the first real sign of the condescending attitude that Carmen and Natalia have toward people whom they considered “inferior” to them, especially if they are working-class and indigenous people. And it’s also the first indication of how Carmen and Natalia deny and enable Enrique’s bad behavior. Later in the story, it becomes apparent that Carmen is a lot worse than Natalia when it comes to the snobbery toward indigenous people and the covering up of Enrique’s crimes.

And the reason why Carmen has particular disdain for indigenous women is also revealed. (The reason why isn’t so surprising.) Carmen’s willingness to stay silent and cover up for her husband, in order to maintain her outwardly privileged lifestyle, is an attitude that is very common with the spouses of powerful men who are corrupt. 

During the trial, people testify about the Guatemalan government army’s vicious torture and killings during the civil war in the early 1980s. One of the witnesses is a woman who testifies to being raped by government soldiers, who then murdered her family. Enrique’s attorney argues that Enrique never ordered the Guatemalan army to kill a specific race or religion. Enrique testifies that any actions he took were to help better establish a national identity.

Enrique is found guilty, and the verdict causes an eruption of chaos in and outside the courtroom. Enrique looks like he’s about to have a heart attack, so he is rushed to a hospital. A huge crowd outside celebrates the verdict. It’s a mob scene of protestors and media that follow the family back to their home. Letona advises that the family stay fully sequestered in their home until the situation dies down.

While Enrique is recuperating in a hospital, Natalia and Carmen have a private conversation at their home. Natalia starts to question Enrique’s mental stability and wonders if they should get him psychiatric help and possibly put him in a psychiatric institution, but Carmen is against the idea. Natalia is also disturbed by the testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses, because she believes them, and she wonders if her father participated in the atrocities that he was accused of ordering.

Carmen’s response is to tell Natalia that many of the women who claimed that they were raped were “whores” who offered themselves to the soldiers, and those who were raped were violated by lower-level soldiers. Carmen says that although Enrique was never a faithful husband, she implies that his military ranking was too high to be a common soldier raping people. Carmen then questions Natalia’s family loyalty by asking, “Which side are you on?” She also asks Natalia if she’s turning into a leftie Communist.

And when Enrique is released from the hospital, it’s another chaotic event with a large crowd of angry protestors surrounding the ambulance that takes Enrique home. It’s revealed later in the story that Enrique’s guilty verdict was overturned. Although he won’t be incarcerated for his crimes, his home has turned into another type of prison.

As the protestors are gathered outside the mansion, they shout angry statements during all hours of the day, but Carmen and Natalia appear to be stoic about all the mayhem. There’s a scene of them sunning themselves outside in their backyard (Natalia is meditating), as if they want to tune out all the uproar surrounding them. But things become dangerous, as the protests start to become violent, with objects being thrown at the house and through windows.

During all of this uproar, a young woman with big, haunting eyes suddenly appears in the crowd. She is let into the house by Valeriana. Her name is Alma (played by María Mercedes Coroy), who has come to work as a live-in maid for the Monteverde family. It isn’t explained why she is in now in the family’s life, but she knows Valeriana very well, so it’s implied that Valeriana is the one who helped get Alma the job.

Alma immediately develops a bond with Sara, who wants Alma to teach her how to hold her breath underwater. It’s soon revealed that Alma has had a tragic life: Her two children (a son and a daughter) have died, and her husband has disappeared. Natalia’s husband (Sara’s father) has also been missing for the last few years, with no signs of foul play. Enrique is convinced that Natalia’s husband abandoned her because her husband doesn’t love her anymore, which is a theory that he cruelly brings up to Natalie when she talks to Enrique about her missing spouse.

After Alma arrives in the household, more strange things starts happening. Carmen begins having nightmares. Enrique does something very creepy, which makes it obvious that he hasn’t changed his ways. And there’s a pet frog that Sara has grown attached to that ends up being the basis for a startling scene in the movie.

“La Llorona” is not the type of horror movie where someone gets attacked or killed every 15 minutes. Instead, the seeping and growing terror is more psychological, although there’s still some disturbing violence in the movie. Alma is the catalyst for many of the things that happen later in the story, but the movie’s emotional center is really Natalia, who becomes increasingly conflicted as she starts to find out that the man she thought her father was directly contradicts with who he actually is.

Writer/director Bustamante has impressively crafted a story not just about revenge for human atrocities but also family betrayal. “La Llorona” has many scenes that are visually striking, beginning with the opening scene, that will send chills up the spines of people watching the movie. And unlike a lot of horror movies, “La Llorona” will make people think about the social issues raised in the film. The movie vividly juxtaposes the brutalities of war with the torment caused by the aftermath of war—and the film makes people wonder which is worse.

Shudder premiered “La Llorona” on August 6, 2020.

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