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Articles about movies

Review: ‘The Sinners’ (2021), starring Kaitlyn Bernard, Brenna Coates, Brenna Llewellyn, Aleks Paunovic, Lochlyn Munro, Michael Eklund and Tahmoh Penikett

February 19, 2021

by Carla Hay

Brenna Llewellyn, Natalie Malaika, Keilani Elizabeth Rose, Jasmine Randhawa, Kaitlyn Bernard, Brenna Coates and Carly Fawcett in “The Sinners.” (Photo courtesy of Brainstorm Media)

“The Sinners” (2021)

Directed by Courtney Paige

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed North American city, the horror flick “The Sinners” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few people of color) representing the middle-class and working-class.

Culture Clash: In a conservative Christian town, seven teenage girls form a cult-like clique where they each represent the seven deadly sins, and then members of the group start getting murdered.

Culture Audience: “The Sinners” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in independent horror films that are suspenseful and make the most out of their low budgets.

A scene from “The Sinners.” Pictured in front row, from left to right: Carly Fawcett, Kaitlyn Bernard and Natalie Malaika. Pictured in second row, from left to right: Jasmine Randhawa, Keilani Elizabeth Rose, Brenna Coates and Brenna Llewellyn. (Photo courtesy of Brainstorm Media)

Before anyone dismisses “The Sinners” as just another horror movie where a bunch of teenagers get murdered, consider that it skillfully takes on religious bigotry and sexual oppression while balancing it with an intriguing mystery, gruesome horror and even some touches of comedy. It’s not an easy balancing act, but “The Sinners” mostly succeeds in being a memorable independent horror film in a sea of mindless slasher flicks.

“The Sinners” is the feature-film directorial debut of Courtney Paige, who wrote the screenplay with Erin Hazlehurst and Madison Smith. Paige is also an actress, which might explain why the casting is better than most low-budget movies of this type. Some of the acting is amateurish, but the dynamics between the actors look more authentic and natural than a lot of horror movies that could care less about character development or chemistry between the actors.

The story of “The Sinners” centers on a clique of seven girls who are classmates in their last year at a Christian high school in an unnamed city in North America. (The movie was actually filmed in Paige’s Canadian hometown of Kelowna, British Columbia.) These teenagers call themselves The Sins, and they have each assigned themselves to represent one of the seven deadly sins. They are:

  • Grace Carver (played by Kaitlyn Bernard), the group’s assertive blonde leader, represents the sin of lust. It’s ironic because Grace, who is the child of a strict pastor, is a virgin, but she has a secret love that’s considered taboo in her religion.
  • Tori Davidson (played by Brenna Coates), who sometimes dresses as an emo or Goth, represents the sin of wrath. She’s the tough-talking rebel of the group, and she’s in a secretive romance with Grace.
  • Katie Hamilton (played by Keilani Elizabeth Rose), who is very spoiled and materialistic, represents the sin of greed. She likes to make others feel inferior by bragging about what her wealth can buy her.
  • Molly McIvor (played by Carli Fawcett), a compulsive eater, represents the sin of gluttony. She is very self-conscious about her looks because she’s not as thin as the other girls in the group.
  • Robyn Pearce (played by Natalie Malaika), a passive follower, represents the sin of sloth. She wants to go to a good college but is too lazy to study, so she cheats instead.
  • Stacey Rodgers (played by Jasmine Randhawa), who often compares herself to other people, represents the sin of envy. Her loyalty depends on what she can get out of it.
  • Aubrey Miller (played by Brenna Llewellyn), a quiet redhead who becomes a target for the others’ bullying, represents the sin of pride. The other members of the Sins turn on Aubrey when Grace decides that Aubrey is a snitch.

Aubrey is the narrator of the movie, which opens with a scene of Aubrey being kidnapped by the other Sins, who are wearing masks. This kidnapping ends up being the catalyst for much of the horror that happens in the last third of the film, when certain members of the Sins are murdered, one by one. This isn’t a slasher film where the murderer is revealed from the beginning. There are several people who could be suspects.

Out of all the members of the Sins, Grace is the one whose home life is shown the most. She lives with her parents and three siblings in a very oppressive and religious home ruled over by her father Pastor Dean Carver (played by Tahmoh Penikett), who demands that everything has to be done his way. Grace’s mother Brenda Carver (played by Loretta Walsh) is passive, but she has compassion and often acts as a peacemaker when Dean and Grace get into arguments.

Grace’s older sister Hannah (played by Karis Cameron) sometimes shares Grace’s tendency to be sarcastic and rebellious. By contrast, their younger teenage brother Luke Carver (played by Maxwell Haynes) wants to be the family’s “goody-two-shoes” child and is ready to tattle on Grace and Hannah to their father if he sees them doing anything wrong. The youngest child in the family is a baby boy, who’s briefly seen in the movie and whose name is not mentioned.

At the beginning of the movie, Grace has broken up with a fellow student named Kit Anderson (played by Dylan Playfair), who is still pining for Grace because he keeps calling her and trying to get back together with her. Some of the students, including the other members of the Sins, are aware that Grace and Tori are more than friends. However, Kit is in denial that Grace could be a member of the LGBTQ community and ignores the rumors that are swirling about Grace’s sexuality.

Grace and Tori have to keep their romance a secret, because they go to a religious high school (where all the students wear uniforms and have classes where they study the Bible) and they live in a very conservative Christian community. Tori and Grace canoodle in bathroom stalls at school, and their study sessions in Grace’s bedroom have some snuggling and kissing. Grace’s pastor father doesn’t really approve of Tori, who’s the type of student who will get sent to the principal’s office for blurting out impatiently in class: “Jesus, are you done?”

Grace’s father also doesn’t really approve of Grace’s part-time after-school job working at a flower stand called Andy’s Flower Stream. The business, which operates out of an Airstream trailer, is owned by a bohemian type named Andy Lund (played by James Neate), who’s a laid-back and friendly boss. Andy lives in the trailer with his hippie-ish girlfriend Summer Dobson (played by Jen Araki), who encourages Grace to walk in bare feet and feel “love and light.”

In a voiceover, Aubrey says about Summer, who used to be Aubrey’s babysitter: “I always had a creepy feeling about her. You know the people who always claim ‘light and love and positive.’ Well, they’re usually the most broken.” But the person Aubrey dislikes the most is Tori, because she thinks Tori is a hateful bully.

The top law enforcement official in town is Sherriff Fred Middleton (played by Aleks Paunovic), who provides some of the movie’s comic relief because he tries to be imposing but he’s really kind of a goofball. He’s first seen in the movie when he shows up in the empty classroom where his wife Maggie Middleton (played by Elysia Rotaru) is a teacher at the high school. (Maggie is also Andy’s sister.)

Maggie walks in the classroom and tells Fred, as she unbuttons her blouse, that they have nine minutes before the students arrive for the next class. Fred and Maggie, who’ve been trying to start a family, end up having quickie sex in the classroom. It’s played for laughs because Aubrey, who sees Fred leave the classroom and guesses what he had been doing there, asks him what he has on his collar. He quickly looks to see if a stain is there (there isn’t) and figures out that Aubrey was just trying to embarrass him when she tells him that she tried to go into the classroom but the door was locked.

Aubrey keeps a journal of her innermost thoughts. And all hell breaks loose when Tori and Kathy steal Aubrey’s journal. Certain incidents lead the other Sins to believe that Aubrey has been snitching on them. And when they find out what Aubrey has to say about them in the journal, their suspicions seem to be confirmed.

First, they lure Aubrey into a “study group” session which turns out to be an excuse to harass and haze her. Then, they kidnap Aubrey and take her to a remote wooded area, where things spiral out of control, but Aubrey manages to escape and goes missing. And then, other members of the Sins start to disappear and are brutally murdered.

Sheriff Middleton and his Deputy Douglas Sanders (played by Taylor St. Pierre) end up clashing with the higher-level government detectives who are sent to investigate the murders. The outside investigators are Detective Zankowski (played Michael Eklund) and Detective O’Ryan (played by Lochlyn Munro), who treat the sheriff and the deputy like incompetent yokels. Middleton and Sanders think that they’re being undermined by arrogant big-city types who don’t know the community. Meanwhile, as these two factions have their power struggle, more of the Sins get killed.

“The Sinners” makes great use of cinematography by Stirling Bancroft to create an atmosphere of foreboding beneath the pristine and orderly exterior of this suburban community. (There’s a recurring image of a rose stuck in the mouth of dead girl that’s particularly striking. It’s probably why the move was originally titled “The Color Rose.”) The movie’s production design and costume design are well-done, given the film’s small budget. And the whodunit aspect of the mystery is not as predictable as viewers might think it is.

There’s only one scene in the movie that seems awkward and out-of-place. It involves Grace having a secret occult meeting with two women and one man who look at least 10 years older than she is. It’s never explained how a sheltered preacher’s kid like Grace came to find these people or how long she’s known them. And the scene ends up being irrelevant, given what happens at the end of the movie.

The actresses who portray the seven Sins are convincing as a pack of “mean girls” who are “frenemies,” with their loyalty to each other always in question. As Tori, Coates stands out with having the most realistic acting and also the most obviously complicated character. On the one hand, Tori is exactly the type of bully that Aubrey despises. On the other hand, Tori has a very tough-but-tender side to her that’s loving with Grace and very protective of her. Their secret romance adds another layer of terror and anxiety in the story, since the unforgiving homophobia in their community makes Grace and Tori afraid to be open about the true nature of their relationship.

“The Sinners” is definitely not a horror classic on the level of director David Fincher’s 1995 film “Seven,” another macabre thriller with the seven deadly sins as its theme. As far as slasher films go, “The Sinners” can be considered slightly better than most. And it’s also a promising feature directorial debut for Paige, who shows she has a knack for telling a gripping horror story in a way that can capture people’s interest from beginning to end.

Brainstorm Media released “The Sinners” on digital and VOD on February 19, 2021.

UPDATE: Lifetime will premiere the movie under the title “The Virgin Sinners” on August 21, 2021.

Review: ‘The Mauritanian,’ starring Jodie Foster, Tahar Rahim, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley

February 19, 2021

by Carla Hay

Tahar Rahim and Jodie Foster in “The Mauritanian” (Photo courtesy of STX)

“The Mauritanian”

Directed by Kevin Macdonald

Some language in Arabic, French and German with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in Mauritania, Cuba, the United States, Germany and Afghanistan, the dramatic film “The Mauritanian” features a cast of white, North African, Middle Eastern and a few black characters representing people who are connected in some way to the case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian citizen who was imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for being a suspected terrorist.

Culture Clash: Slahi’s legal team argued that he was being wrongly imprisoned by the U.S. government, because he wasn’t given the proper due process in the court system and he wasn’t charged with a crime.

Culture Audience: “The Mauritanian” will appeal primarily to people in interested in social justice issues, especially in how Muslims were treated after the 9/11 attacks.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Zachary Levi in “The Mauritanian” (Photo courtesy of STX)

Movies like “The Mauritanian” usually don’t get made unless there’s a message of hope and inspiration at the very end. But this dramatic interpretation of a real-life story of legal injustice also exists to show the horrors of being caught in a system of imprisonment without being charged with a crime. That’s what happened to Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian citizen who was held captive at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for being a suspected terrorist.

In many ways, “The Mauritanian” (directed by Kevin Macdonald) follows a typical formula of a movies about a wrongfully imprisoned person who’s fighting for legal justice and release from prison. There are crusading defense attorneys, corrupt government officials and brutal scenes of prison life. There’s also some hokey dialogue that lowers the quality of the movie.

However, the “The Mauritanian” is not a typical movie of this ilk because it tells a very specific story about someone who was imprisoned for years by the U.S. government without even being charged with a crime. And that’s highly unusual in any legal case in the United States. The other way that “The Mauritanian” is not a typical movie about a legal case is that the two defense attorneys who do the most work on the case are both women, and the defense team is led by a woman.

These legal dramas often take the perspective of the privileged lawyers involved in the case, but “The Mauritanian” never loses the perspective of the person who is suffering the most in this case: Slahi (played by Tahar Rahim), whose story is told from the moment he was questioned and detained, as well as through flashbacks. However, the movie gives a lot of screen time to the legal finagling that went on outside of Guantanamo Bay, in order to give scenes to the better-known actors in this cast who portray the lawyers and government officials who are in a power struggle over this case.

“The Mauritanian” opens with a scene of 30-year-old Slahi at a wedding reception in Mauritania in November 2001. Outside, he apprehensively meets with two plainclothes Mauritanian police officers who have shown up to question Slahi about where his cousin Khalid al-Shanqiti is. Slahi replies, “I have no idea where [he] is. I doubt even Bin Laden knows.” Viewers who don’t know the story will later find out in the movie that al-Shanqiti is a personal poet and spiritual adviser to Osama Bin Laden, who was widely identified as the leader of the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks.

One of the cops tells Slahi: “After the New York attacks, Americans are going crazy. They want to talk to you.” A nervous Slahi goes inside the building and erases all of the contacts from his phone. Slahi then goes back outside and agrees to go for questioning, but he insists on taking his own car. What happened during that interrogation session, which is shown later in the movie as flashbacks, resulted in Slahi being imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.

The movie then shows how lead defense attorney Nancy Hollander (played by Jodie Foster) got involved in the case. Hollander is portrayed as a no-nonsense, politically liberal lawyer who believes in the same ideals as the American Civil Liberties Union. She’s also a partner in the law firm Friedman, Boyd & Hollander, which is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“The Mauritanian” presents a scenario of Hollander first becoming aware of Slahi’s case in 2005, when she has a lunch meeting with a colleague named Kent (played by David Flynn) from another firm. Kent tells her that a Mauritanian lawyer approached his firm to take Slahi’s case, but Kent’s firm declined the request. It’s mentioned during this lunch meeting that the German news publication Der Spiegel has reported that Slahi is suspected of helping plan the 9/11 attacks.

What lawyer wants to defend a suspected 9/11 terrorist and accuse the U.S. government of wrongful imprisonment of said terrorist? Hollander does. Her partners at the law firm discourage her from what they think will be a losing case, given the political climate at the time. They also don’t like that this would be a pro bono case for Hollander. In other words, she wouldn’t be getting a fee that would bring income to the firm.

Early on in the movie, it ‘s shown that Hollander is someone who likes to fight for underdogs, so she remains undeterred in wanting to taking the case. Because she’s a partner in the firm, Hollander has more clout than a junior lawyer or non-partner would have, so she ends up getting her way in the firm representing Slahi, with Hollander as his lead attorney. Hollander also has the advantage of having national security clearance, so she has access to certain information and people that a regular attorney would not have.

The first person she recruits to be her second-in-command attorney and researcher is Teri Duncan (played by Shailene Woodley), a junior attorney who shares Hollander’s enthusiasm for taking on the case. However, Duncan’s loyalties will be tested later on when things don’t go smoothly. Duncan is friendlier and more easygoing than Hollander, but Duncan is also someone who is more likely to be intimidated or discouraged by setbacks than Hollander is.

This contrast in Hollander’s and Duncan’s personalities affects the case in different ways. The first meeting that Hollander and Duncan have with Slahi at Guantanamo Bay (after they go through high-level clearances and briefings) is so they can convince Slahi to hire them as his attorneys. Hollander is noticeably stiff and uncomfortable in interacting Slahi, while Duncan is better at being more approachable in the conversation. Slahi can speak English, Arabic, French and German, although he sometimes needs a translator when he needs to speak to someone in English.

Duncan makes eye contact with Slahi in a way that makes him feel that he can trust them, so he agrees to let them be his attorneys. He also makes a remark that at this point in his dismal situation, he doesn’t have better options. These qualified attorneys, who wholeheartedly believe that Slahi is not guilty of being a terrorist, are offering their services for free, so it would also be foolish for him to turn down their offer.

While Hollander and Duncan are are on the case, the movie shows hints that Duncan is somewhat attracted to Slahi and might have a personal interest in him outside of their attorney/client relationship. (Duncan and Slahi were both single at the time this story took place.) It’s mentioned early on in the movie that Hollander was separated from her husband Bill and living alone during this time in her life. In other words, don’t expect to see scenes of Hollander with a family, like other characters have in the movie.

Slahi’s life before prison is shown in flashback scenes of him with his family members, including his controversial cousin al-Shanqiti, a known terrorist associate who used the aliases Abu Has al-Mauritani and Mafouz Walad al-Walid. Slahi was especially close to his mother, who expressed concerns abut him living in another country when Slahi was in his 20s and got an electrical engineering scholarship at a university in Germany.

After getting his college education, Slahi moved to Afghanistan in 1990. It was this period of time in his life that put him on the radar of being a suspected terrorist. As portrayed in the movie, Slahi and his cousin al-Shanqiti attended radical Islamic training groups. The U.S. government suspected that Slahi and his cousin al-Shanqiti joined the Al Qaeda terrorist movement that had Bin Laden as its leader at the time.

One of the main reasons for Slahi’s imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay was that the U.S. government accused him of recruiting to Al Qaeda one of the men who years later was identified as one of the 9/11 terrorists: Ramzi bin al-Shibh, also know as the 20th hijacker in the 9/11 attacks. Slahi vehemently denied that accusation, although he didn’t deny that he was taught Al Qaeda training in Afghanistan. In a flashback, it’s shown that Slahi believed the training he was undergoing in the 1990s was for Muslims to fight against Communism, and that Al Qaeda was on the same side as Americans.

However deeply involved in terrorism Slahi might or might not have been, or how credible he might or might not be, that wasn’t the key legal issue for Hollander and the defense team. As Hollander declares: “We have to prove that the U.S. government lacks sufficient evidence to detain him.” The defense team soon finds out that it will be an uphill battle.

On the opposite side of the case is Stuart Couch (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), a U.S. Marines veteran who was assigned as the lead prosecutor in Slahi’s case in September 2003, just one month after he joined the Office of Military Commissions. A graduate of the U.S. Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program, Couch has a personal reason for going after 9/11 terrorists: His close friend Bruce Taylor was on the plane that crashed into the Twin Towers’ South Tower in the 9/11 attacks. At a 9/11 anniversary memorial service, Couch comforts Bruce’s widow Cathy (played by Justine Mitchell) and tells her how proud he is to be prosecuting the case so he can help get justice for Bruce.

However, during Couch’s investigation to prepare for the prosecution, he begins to question how committed he’ll be to the case when he uncovers disturbing incidents of Guantanamo Bay prisoners (including Slahi) being illegally tortured during their interrogations. These torture scenes are shown in graphic detail in the movie, including horrific beatings and waterboarding. Couch’s investigation is further complicated because of his personal connection to one of the government officials whom Couch suspects is covering up incriminating information.

That person is Neil Buckland (played by Zachary Levi), who was a former classmate of Couch’s when they were stationed at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. Buckland is portrayed as a manipulative villain who uses his past personal connection to Couch to try to cloud Couch’s judgment in the investigation. Couch considers himself to be a highly ethical person, but even he begins to wonder how much of the government’s violations he should expose when Buckland and some other government officials question Couch’s patriotism and competence.

Meanwhile, there’s a subplot of Slahi befriending a fellow Guantanamo Bay inmate known only as Inmate #241, who is originally from Marseilles, France. They never see each other because they are separated by walls. But they end up confiding in each other about their lives and what they hope to do if they’re ever released from prison. The movie portrays Inmate #241, who gives Slahi the nickname The Mauritanian, as the closest that Slahi came to having a true friend inside the prison.

At 129 minutes, “The Mauritanian” could have felt less bloated if about 15 minutes had been trimmed from the total running time. “The Mauritanian” director Macdonald keeps an even keel throughout the movie, which is part legal thriller, part prison drama. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s not an outstanding movie that will get the industry’s most prestigious awards.

All of the actors do well in their performances, particularly Rahim, who gives an authentic portrayal of the range of emotions that his character goes through in the movie. It’s a very human depiction that shows Slahi’s strengths, weaknesses and occasional flashes of humor in grim situations. Foster, Woodley, Cumberbatch and Levi are solid, but their roles are written in a fairly predictable way.

The movie falters the most in the screenplay, which was written by M.B. Traven (also known as Michael Bronner), Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani. They adapted the screenplay from Slahi’s best-selling 2015 memoir “Guantanamo Diary.” There are many times in the movie that might remind viewers of how a formulaic legal procedural series is written for television, especially during the courtroom scenes.

And the dialogue can be a bit corny at times. During a government meeting for the prosecution, one of the officials says of one of the suspected terrorists: “This dude is like the Al Qaeda Forrest Gump. Everywhere you look, here’s there.”

These flaws don’t ruin the movie, because they are outweighed by how compelling the story is and by how well this talented cast portrays it. The approach of the movie isn’t so much from a political perspective but from a human rights perspective. It’s clear that the filmmakers want “The Mauritanian” to serve as a statement that no government should act as if it’s above the law when it comes to violating human rights.

STX released “The Mauritanian” in select U.S. cinemas on February 12, 2021. The movie’s VOD release date is March 2, 2021. Universal Pictures Home Entertainment will release “The Mauritanian” on digital on April 20, 2021, and on Blu-ray and DVD on May 11, 2021.

Review: ‘A Writer’s Odyssey,’ starring Lei Jiayin, Yang Mi and Dong Zijiang

February 18, 2021

by Carla Hay

Lei Jiayin in “A Writer’s Odyssey” (Photo courtesy of CMC Pictures)

“A Writer’s Odyssey”

Directed by Lu Yang

Mandarin with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in China, the fantasy/action film “A Writer’s Odyssey” features an all-Asian cast representing the middle-class, wealthy and criminal underground.

Culture Clash: A desperate man, who’s been searching for his missing daughter for the past six years, gets caught up in a murder plot and an alternate world that are connected to what a young novelist is writing for his latest book.

Culture Audience: “A Writer’s Odyssey” will appeal primarily to people who like immersive, eye-catching action films that have twist-filled plot developments.

Yang Mi in “A Writer’s Odyssey” (Photo courtesy of CMC Pictures)

It’s not just the graphic violence that makes the fantasy/action film “A Writer’s Odyssey” geared to adults. At the core of a movie is a time-traveling mystery that is wrapped up and eventually unraveled in layers, making it a somewhat convoluted story that very young children will have a hard time understanding. But the movie is worth a watch for anyone who’s up for a story that examines issues of grief and revenge, while taking viewers on a frenetic ride in this otherworldly enigma.

To fully understand “A Writer’s Odyssey” (directed by Yang Lu), it helps to know in advance that the movie switches back and forth between two different worlds. In the “real world,” a disillusioned and bitter man named Guan Ning has been on an unrelenting quest to find his daughter Tangerine, who disappeared six years earlier when she was 6 years old. Meanwhile, a young author named Kongwen Lu (played by Dong Zijian) has been writing the latest book in his fantasy novel series, which follows a heroic teenager who is also named Kongwen.

Kongwen Lu’s writing come to life in the movie, and it’s all presented as an “alternate world,” where monsters exist, there are armies of robot-looking mutants, and humans look and act like warriors—or at least potential warriors. In this “alternate world,” whatever Kongwen Lu writes happens on screen. But there comes a point in the movie where what happens in the “alternate world” has an effect on people in the “real world” and vice versa.

“A Writer’s Odyssey” opens up with a thrilling action scene that introduces Guan Ning as the protagonist who finds himself unexpectedly caught between these two worlds. He’s lying in wait in a mountainous area and throws a rock at the windowshield of a freight truck driving below on a winding road. The rock breaks the window, which causes the truck to crash. There are two men sitting in the front of the truck, and they suffer minor injuries.

While the driver is briefly unconscious, Guan Ning shouts to the other man about his missing daughter Tangerine: “Six years ago in Liaoyuan, you kidnapped her. Where is she?” Guan Ning and the thug end up fighting. The driver then regains his consciousness and hits Guan Ning with a pipe.

Guan Ning runs to the back of the truck, opens the door, and sees several children locked in cages, but Tangerine is not one of them. The kids in the cages all look to be about 6 to 8 years old, while Tangerine would be about 12. And the next thing you know, police arrive, the two thugs run off, and Guan Ning is arrested for suspected kidnapping and child trafficking. He protests and says he’s an innocent father who’s looking for his daughter.

In another big fight scene, Guan Ning manages to escape from the back of the police squad car. He runs to the nearest car on the street. It’s a black car that has a mysterious woman dressed in black leather in the driver’s seat. Even though Guan Ning has never met her before, she knows who he is. Her name is Tu Ling (played by Yang Mi), and she tells Guan Ning: “You’re our valued business partner.”

Tu Ling also tells Guan Ning that she knows that his life revolves around finding his missing daughter. She comments that she also knows that he used to be a banker, but after Tangerine disappeared, he quit his job, sold his house, and divorced his wife. Guan Ning is suspicious of Tu Ling, who offers to hide Guan Ning from the police if he will do some favors for her.

Guan Ning is reluctant, but then Guan Ning says that she has information that could lead to him finding his daughter. And so, Guan Ning goes with Tu Ling, who takes him further down a rabbit hole of secrets and lies. It’s enough to say that whenever a mysterious stranger makes an offer that’s too good to be true, it usually is.

Tu Ling has a ruthless boss named Li Mu who has a murderous agenda that’s eventually revealed. Meanwhile, the alternate world created by Kongwen Lu begins to collide more with the real world until it becomes obvious that there’s a power struggle going on that involves the supernatural. Meanwhile, Guan Ning is forced to make a decision that could mean the difference between sparing someone’s life and Guan Ning getting killed, or killing someone else and saving his own life.

All of the actors do moderately good jobs in their performances, but Lei Jiayin has to show the widest range of emotions. There are some predictable flashback scenes of Guan Ningin in happier times with Tangerine, with these scenes blatantly tugging at viewers’ heartstrings. The mystery behind her disappearance isn’t handled in a completely predictable way, which makes “A Writer’s Odyssey” more than a typical fantasy/action flick.

“A Writer’s Odyssey” is based on Xuetao Shuang’s book “Assassinate a Novelist.” There are seven people credited with writing the movie’s screenplay: Xuetao Shuang, director Yang Lu, Shu Chen, Xiaocao Liu, Haiyan Qin, Lu Yang and Yang Yu. With all these screenwriters for the movie, the plot sometimes seems overstuffed with ideas and bloated by “too many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome. And the total running time for the movie (130 minutes) is a little too long.

It’s obvious that a great deal of this movie’s budget was spent on visual effects, which are intricate and sometimes stunning but won’t be winning any awards. The violence is often bloody and cruel, while the choreography works very well in most of the action scenes. At times, “A Writer’s Odyssey” looks like a big-budget video game, but the movie has more humanity than a video game in handling the mystery at the center of the story. Underneath the brutal fight scenes and dazzling visual effects is a story of how a parent’s love for a child can lead someone to go to extreme and desperate actions.

CMC Pictures released “A Writer’s Odyssey” in select U.S. cinemas on February 12, 2021, the same day that it was also released in mainland China, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Singapore.

Review: ‘French Exit,’ starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges

February 18, 2021

by Carla Hay

Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges in “French Exit” (Photo by Tobias Datum/Sony Pictures Classics)

“French Exit”

Directed by Azazel Jacobs

Culture Representation: Taking place in New York City and Paris, the comedy/drama “French Exit” features an almost all-white cast of characters (with one black person and one Asian person) representing the wealthy, middle-class and working-class.

Culture Clash: An American socialite widow and her young adult son relocate from New York City to Paris after she loses her fortune.

Culture Audience: “French Exit” will appeal primarily to fans of star Michelle Pfeiffer and to people who like stories about drastic life changes, but the movie’s abrupt shift from realism into becoming a wacky supernatural story might annoy some viewers.

Pictured from left to right (in front) Danielle Macdonald, Valerie Mahaffey and Imogen Poots; (in back) Isaach de Bankolé, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Coyne in “French Exit” (Photo by Lou Scamble/Sony Pictures Classics)

The comedy/drama film “French Exit” starts out as a straightforward story about two Americans who’ve relocated to Paris, but then takes a bizarre turn that involves a psychic, a missing cat and a plot that becomes about reincarnation. Despite impressive performances from co-stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges, “French Exit” is a messy, uneven film that tries to be too quirky for its own good. The characters in the movie act more and more ridiculous until the story reaches a very uninspired and tepid conclusion.

Directed by Azazel Jacobs and written by Patrick DeWitt (who adapted the screenplay from his 2018 novel of the same name), “French Exit” begins with a flashback scene of the story’s two main characters. Haughty socialite Frances Price (played by Pfeiffer) and her 12-year-old son Malcolm (played by Eddie Holland) hastily leave the boarding school where Frances has arrived to withdraw his enrollment. Frances has taken Malcolm back home to live with her in their spacious New York City townhouse.

The next time that viewers see Frances and Malcolm (played by Hedges), it’s now 12 years later. Frances’ husband Franklin (who was Malcolm’s father) has been dead for 12 years, and Frances has run out of the money that she inherited. She’s also been told that the house is in foreclosure and she’s going to be locked out of her home in a matter of weeks. It’s implied that either Franklin left behind a lot of debts that Frances (who is now 60 years old) could not pay and/or that Frances racked up a lot of debts on her own after Frank’s death. At one point in the movie, Frances says she’s never worked a day in her life and she has no intention of ever doing so.

After Frances gets over the shock and denial that she’s no longer wealthy and is about to be homeless, she takes her accountant’s advice to sell all of her jewelry, artwork and many other possessions, in order to get enough cash for the near future. Frances has almost no friends, but she has the good luck of having a socialite confidante named Joan (played by Susan Coyne), who generously offers her unused Paris apartment as a place for Frances and Malcolm to stay.

Frances accepts the offer, even though her pride is wounded by having to take this charitable handout. Frances is so broke that she can’t afford to pay the $600 salary that she owes to her maid Sylvia (played by Christine Lan), who demands to be paid in cash because Sylvia’s most recent paycheck from Frances was returned due to insufficient funds. Frances doesn’t have the cash, but Malcolm does, so he pays the $600 that’s owed. Sylvia isn’t going to be working for Frances for much longer anyway, because Frances has told Malcolm that they could be living in Paris “perhaps for the rest of our lives.”

Meanwhile, Malcolm is dealing with some problems in his love life. He has an on-again/off-again girlfriend named Susan (played by Imogen Poots), who’s slightly older and more emotionally mature than he is. Malcolm and Susan are secretly engaged, but he’s been afraid to tell his mother Frances. In fact, Malcolm tells Frances one day over breakfast that he and Susan are in a “holding pattern,” as in, his relationship with Susan is now on pause.

It becomes very obvious early on in the movie that Frances and Malcolm have a very co-dependent relationship. Frances is the type of domineering mother who probably doesn’t approve of anything that would result in Malcolm getting his own place and starting his own independent life. Just like his mother, Malcolm is somewhat of a loner. Unlike his mother, Malcolm is tactful when dealing with people and he doesn’t have a snobbish attitude.

Franklin is never seen in the movie in flashbacks, but his presence looms large over Frances and Malcolm, who talk about him often in this story. His voice is heard later in the movie, with Tracy Letts as the voice of Franklin. Based on what Frances and Malcolm say, Franklin was an emotionally distant and often-cruel husband and father. Frances mentions that her marriage to Franklin started off happy, but then it turned into a love/hate relationship.

Malcolm, who was never close to Franklin, only started to bond with Frances after she took Malcolm away from the boarding school. It’s implied that Frances only did so after Franklin died and she was lonely and needed someone else in the house to live with her. Malcolm is a socially awkward lost soul who clings to his mother for love but knows that his relationship with her can be very unhealthy.

Susan has been pressuring Malcolm to tell Frances that they are engaged, but he keeps postponing telling Frances this news. Malcolm and Susan are on the verge of breaking up when he tells Susan that he and his mother are moving to Paris the next day. Shocked and dismayed, Susan breaks up with Malcolm because she says there’s no point in continuing in the relationship if he’s going to live so far away. She also feels disrespected that Malcolm was keeping their engagement a secret from his mother.

And so, Frances and Malcolm pack up the modest number of their remaining possessions, including their black cat Small Frank, and head to Paris on a cruise ship. Before the trip, Frances converted all of their cash into euros to carry with her. And it’s a stash that gets smaller as the story continues.

During this journey across the Atlantic Ocean, Malcolm meets a woman who calls herself Madeleine the Medium (played by Danielle Macdonald), who works as a fortune teller on the ship. Frances first sees Madeleine giving bad news to an elderly woman, who is sobbing because Madeleine predicted that the woman would die soon. Malcolm is intrigued by Madeleine, and when he sees Madeleine alone at the ship’s bar one night, he strikes up a conversation with her.

At first, Madeleine is standoffish, but eventually she warms up to Malcolm, and they end up having a sexual tryst. She spends the night in the cabin that Malcolm shares with Frances. And the next morning, Frances seems unbothered by this overnight guest because she assumes that Madeleine is just a one-night stand.

And then, things get weird. At the ship’s bar, Malcolm meets a very drunk elderly man named Boris Maurus (played by Vlasta Vrana), who’s the ship’s doctor. Boris chuckles as he tells Malcolm that he wants to show Malcolm something on the ship. Where does Boris takes Malcolm? To the ship’s morgue. Boris explains to Malcolm that it’s not unusual for people to die on a cruise ship, but cruises never advertise this fact.

Boris also points out a recently deceased woman among the bodies and says that Madeleine had predicted that this woman would die. It’s the same woman whom Frances had seen sobbing during a fortune-telling session with Madeleine. Malcolm is predictably uncomfortable with being in the morgue, but he’s too polite to scold Boris for bringing him there. And so, Malcolm gives an awkward thank you to Boris and then makes a hasty exit. The main purpose of this scene, except for being morbid and creepy, is that it lets viewers know that maybe Madeleine’s psychic abilities are real.

When Frances and Malcolm arrive in Paris, there’s a somewhat comical scene of them illegally smuggling in Small Frank through customs. (Frances gave the cat a tranquilizer that rendered the cat unconscious, so she’s able to hide the cat in her travel bag.) After Frances and Malcolm settle into Joan’s apartment, they mostly keep to themselves, simply because they don’t know anyone in the area. It’s not the first time Frances has been to Paris, but the last time she was there was when she was on a trip with Franklin in happier times.

Malcolm gets lonely, so he calls Susan to invite her to visit him in Paris. He’s hurt and surprised to find out that she’s gotten back together with a boyfriend named Tom (played by Daniel di Tomasso), whom she dated when Susan and Tom were in college. Susan drops hints that it’s a rebound relationship on her part because she doesn’t want to be alone and because Tom is very much in love with her.

Malcolm reacts as if Susan has been cheating on him, by telling her that he still thinks of Susan as fiancée. It’s a hypocritical reaction, considering that Malcolm was acting very single and available when he hooked up with Madeleine. Malcolm also doesn’t tell Susan about Madeleine in this conversation. Susan is annoyed by Malcolm’s possessiveness, and she asks Malcolm not to contact her again.

When Malcolm and Frances first arrive in Paris, the movie drags a little in showing how bored and lonely they are. In one scene, Frances and Malcolm have lunch together in a fairly empty café. When they’re ready to leave, Malcolm asks the waiter to get the bill for the meal. The waiter rudely tells Malcolm to wait.

Malcolm and Frances watch as the waiter casually jokes around with a co-worker, as if he’s on a break and doesn’t need to attend to any customers. Frances gets visibly annoyed and then calmly puts some perfume on the small vase of flowers on the table, and then sets the flowers on fire. That definitely gets the waiter’s attention, and the horrified waiter can’t believe what he’s seeing. The waiter tells Frances that she’s crazy, as he and other employees rush to put out the fire, while Frances and Malcolm just sit there and smirk.

It’s a very unrealistic “only in a movie moment” (and there will be more to come as the story goes downhill), because in the real world, causing arson in a restaurant can get someone arrested. Perhaps this arson scene was supposed to make Frances look like a “badass” who doesn’t put up with anyone disrespecting her son. But it just makes her look mean-spirited and mentally unstable, with Malcolm as her enabler.

Malcolm and Frances soon meet someone who comes into their lives as a possible friend. Frances shows Malcolm a house party invitation from another American in Paris named Madame Renard (played by Valerie Mahaffey), a widow who used to run in the same New York City social circles as Frances. Malcolm and Frances go to the party at Madame Renard’s home and find out that they are the only guests.

It turns out that Madame Renard only invited the two of them to this party. Madame Renard confesses to Frances and Malcolm that she’s been lonely since her husband died and was hoping that she could become friends with Frances. Madame Renard gives effusive compliments to Frances and says that she’s always admired Frances from afar.

Even though it’s obvious that Madame Renard is feeling very emotionally vulnerable, Frances callously tells Madame Renard in a disgusted tone of voice that she’s not interested in being her friend and isn’t looking for any friends. Madame Renard looks crushed and embarrassed, while Malcolm makes a sincere apology for the way his mother is behaving.

Despite being insulted in her own home, Madame Renard invites Frances and Malcolm to stay for dinner. Frances eventually makes an apology to Madame Renard for being so rude, and makes the excuse that she’s going through a difficult time too. Madame Renard accepts the apology and she ends up spending more time with Frances and Malcolm.

Some viewers will have a hard time connecting to Frances and Malcolm, which is why “French Exit” isn’t the charming oddball movie that it wants to be. Frances is emotionally cold, usually selfish, and really isn’t that great of a mother. She also doesn’t seem to have any talent for anything. And she’s definitely not very smart, considering she had a lot of privileged advantages and yet ended up in this awful predicament at this stage in her life.

At one point in the movie, Frances declares: “My plan was to die before the money ran out.” It tells you a lot about how short-sighted, boring and empty her life is if all she has to show for it is an emotionally stunted son and a fortune she’s squandered (money that was earned by someone else, since Frances has never worked), thereby leaving her son’s future uncertain too. Most socialites at least have some hobbies, but Frances doesn’t seem to have any interests other than trying to be the center of attention and getting what she wants.

Malcolm is a man-child who’s fairly articulate and has good manners, but he’s completely sheltered from a lot of reality and wants to live in the same psychological “bubble” that Frances tries to use to shield herself from life’s harshest problems. He also doesn’t seem willing or concerned about finding a job to help with their financial problems. Frances is close to retirement age and has no job skills. But there’s no excuse for Malcolm, who’s young and healthy, for him not to try and find work. Is he really that lazy and incapable of problem solving? Apparently so.

An example of how socially clueless Malcolm can be is in the scene in New York when Malcolm told Susan that he was moving to Paris. He brought flowers to their lunch date, even though he probably knew that Susan would break up with him. Susan sees the absurdity of this romantic gesture and chastises Malcolm for bringing flowers to this date. It’s almost as if he thinks a gift of flowers could erase the bad news that he was moving to Paris.

However, Malcolm has a sympathetic side when viewers find out how much his parents neglected him when he was a child. There’s a scene that shows how deep Malcolm’s emotional wounds run in feeling unloved by his father. It explains why Malcolm can’t quite tear himself away from Frances, because he’s trying to get the unconditional love and approval from her that he didn’t get from his father. As toxic as his mother’s love can be, Malcolm thinks it’s better than nothing.

The filmmakers clearly didn’t want “French Exit” to be a typical mother/son movie, but in trying to buck convention too much, the movie falls off the rails. In the last third of “French Exit,” the movie then turns into a silly indulgence of séances and people who don’t know each other conveniently showing up in the same place in a short period of time to continue the absurdity. There’s also a private investigator named Julius (played by Isaach De Bankolé) who comes into the picture, for reasons that are explained in the movie.

The cinematography, costume design and production design make the movie look very stylish. (“French Exit” was actually filmed in Montreal.) But the music of “French Exit” is a weird mix of sitcom schlock in some scenes and classical elegance in other scenes. It’s an example of the wildly contrasting tones in this movie, which seems like it got weirder and weirder to distract viewers from the fact that Frances and Malcolm have very aimless lives. Paris is one of the most exciting and fascinating cities in the world, but this miserable mother and son of “French Exit” have such hollow lives that their boredom comes at the expense of making Paris and this movie look like mindless gimmicks.

Sony Pictures Classics released “French Exit” in select U.S. virtual cinemas in New York City and Los Angeles on February 12, 2021. The movie expands to more cities across the U.S. on April 2, 2021.

Review: ‘9to5: The Story of a Movement,’ starring Karen Nussbaum, Ellen Cassedy, Verna Barksdale, Mary Jung, Jane Fonda, Renia Clay and Carol Sims

February 17, 2021

by Carla Hay

9to5 Cleveland activists, including Verna Barksdale (front row, third from left) and Mary Jung (front row, second from right)  in “9to5: The Story of a Movement” (Photo by Steve Cagan)

“9to5: The Story of a Movement”

Directed by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar

Culture Representation: The documentary “9to5: The Story of a Movement” features a predominantly white group (with some African Americans and a few Asians and Hispanics) of American women who were involved in the late 20th century activist movement advocating for gender and racial equality in the workplace.

Culture Clash: The activists got a lot of resistance from people who wanted the U.S. workforce to remain stuck in a culture that automatically gave the highest positions and preferential treatment to white men.

Culture Audience: “9to5: The Story of a Movement” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in feminism and historical, first-person accounts of civil rights activism in the United States.

Karen Nussbaum in “9to5: The Story of a Movement” (Photo courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and UrbanAffairs, Wayne State University)

The documentary “9to5: The Story of a Movement” shines a deserving spotlight on the activists who fought for gender equality in the U.S. workforce, beginning in the early 1970s. The mostly female group of advocates for these changes helped shape government polices and significantly altered the ways that employers were legally obligated to treat employees. There’s still a lot of progress to be made in the workforce when it comes to gender and racial equality, but the documentary gives an excellent overview of how the 9to5 movement made an essential and outstanding impact on society that can still be felt today.

Julie Reichert and Steven Bognar, the Oscar-winning directors of the 2019 documentary “American Factory,” helmed “9to5: The Story of a Movement,” which is another of their numerous documentaries that tackle workplace issues. Because “9to5” is a chronicle of events that happened in the past, it has an “oral history” format that mixes archival footage with exclusive documentary footage. In this documentary, it just so happens that everyone interviewed for the movie is a woman.

Reichert comments in the “9to5” production notes about the documentary having a female-only group of interviewees: “It felt so right. It was a movement of women, who were mostly brought up to see themselves as second-class, never as leaders, and who carried sexist baggage around in their heads. They persisted in figuring things out on their own, in creating and growing a real movement. There were some men involved, a few male clericals, and we met a handful of male activists too, but the movement was woman-led.”

The documentary, which has a lively conversational tone, opens with a montage of several of the women who were part of this movement talking about their own experiences in dead-end office jobs and/or being sexually harassed at work. Many of the women interviewed say that the main problem for employees, especially female employees, at the time was that “there was nowhere to go” to do something about discrimination and harassment. Some of the interviewees mention that they grew up in households where they were taught that women should not expect to have high career achievements in the way that men were expected to have. Other women describe growing up in progressive activist households that believed in civil rights for all.

Although the word “feminism” automatically conjures up images of politically liberal women, the documentary points out that women from all walks of life and various political persuasions supported the activism of the 9to5 movement. It’s just that a lot of them were a “silent majority” who weren’t out there participating in protests or marches. And in the end, the progress made by the movement improved working conditions and benefited many people, regardless of their personal politics.

The activist group 9to5 was founded in 1973 and gradually became the flashpoint for a lot of boycotts and protests that led to impactful policy changes for business and for government. The group also endured a lot of setbacks, obstacles and backlash from people who had a vested interest in having companies get away with discriminatory practices. Many of these practices—such as sexual harassment, discriminating against pregnant women, and denying job opportunities based on gender—are now illegal. It doesn’t mean that these bigoted practices have gone away, but employers can now be held liable for them.

9to5 co-founders Karen Nussbaum and Ellen Cassedy met as college students at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s. Nussbaum says she came from a family of anti-Vietnam War protestors. In a sense, she was born to be an activist. “My family was concerned about social justice,” Nussbaum comments in the documentary. “I learned there was strength in numbers.” Eventually, Nussbaum dropped out of college to focus on full-time political activism.

Cassedy also came from a family of civil rights activists. She remembers that her parents would show her what segregated neighborhoods looked like and would take her to civil rights marches and protests. And she remembers that the first time she meet Nussbaum, she was thought Nussbaum was “a little scary” because of Nussbaum’s militant way of looking at activism.

Nussbaum and Cassedy eventually moved to Boston, where they started a 9to5 newsletter in 1972, to focus on women’s issues in the workplace. Cassedy remembers the first newsletter, which was dated December 1972/January 1973, had more of a “let’s share a cup of coffee” tone than “women of the world unite” tone. Nussbaum says that her favorite letter from a newsletter reader had this comment that summed up the frustration of how women were usually treated on the job: “We are referred to as ‘girls’ until the day we retire without pension.”

As women began to share their workplace horror stories and hopes for ways that their work life could improve, it became obvious there was a huge need for women to band together to make changes in the workplace. And so, the 9to5 activist group was formed in a modest office space in Boston. Cassedy went to Midwest Academy to get business training on how to lead an activist group. Eventually, 9to5 expanded to more branches in other cities, until 9to5 was a group that spanned across the United States.

Dr. Lane Windham, a historian of American labor, provides historical context in the documentary and mentions that the 9to5 movement coincided with the massive surge of women entering the U.S. workforce in the 1970s. Most of the women’s work was clerical, but the sheer numbers of women in the workforce were larger than it had ever been before in U.S. history. These numbers could not be ignored, especially when 9to5 organized boycotts and employee walkouts to show the mostly male bosses that they shouldn’t take their underpaid employees for granted.

Of course, the movement didn’t come without a lot of resistance from people who hated the idea of women being treated equally and fairly on the job. Cassedy remembers after 9to5 held its first meeting with a male human-resources executive, he promised to make changes, but nothing happened. The activists soon learned how to turn performative talk into real action.

The documentary includes archival footage of how 9to5 would single out the worst bosses and employers in America and shame them in the media with protests outside their offices until policies were made at these companies to give gender equality on the job and put anti-discrimination rules in place. For example, 9to5 revealed to the media how the secretive Boston Survey Group engaged in the illegal practice of setting industry wages by gender. The subsequent media coverage and 9to5 protests forced the Boston Survey Group to be more transparent about its members and policies. Employers who were accustomed to discriminating against women were now being exposed and being held accountable.

In addition, 9to5 was instrumental in providing assistance to women and other employees experiencing discrimination, by referring them to legal aid that they could get for their cases. The 9to5 movement was also the first to establish the Office Workers Bill of Rights, which was used as a template for subsequent anti-discrimination legislation for employees. In 1983, 9to5 consolidated all of the local chapters of Working Women groups into its umbrella organization with the official title 9to5, National Association of Working Women.

All of this amazing work was the inspiration for the 1980 comedy film “9 to 5,” starring Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin, as three long-suffering administrative assistants who get revenge on their sexist and mean-spirited boss, played by Dabney Coleman. The filmmakers of the movie used real-life stories as the basis for many of the scenarios in the movie. Several people in the documentary comment that making the “9 to 5” feature film a comedy about serious issues made it easier for people to watch, but it also made people aware of how sexism in the workplace is ridiculous and that people don’t have to put up with it.

Fonda says in the documentary that when she became aware of the 9to5 movement and saw the tremendous response that the movement was getting, she thought, “I should make a movie about this!” Fonda and some of the other “9 to 5” filmmakers (such as director/co-screenwriter Colin Higgins, co-screenwriter Patricia Resnick and producer Bruce Gilbert) relied on the stories of real-life female workers to bring authenticity to the film. Fonda comments that the real-life working women, when asked if they ever had fantasies of killing their bosses, all replied “yes.” It’s the inspiration for the “revenge fantasy” sequence in the “9 to 5” comedy.

All jokes aside, Fonda has this to say about her experience making “9 to 5,” which was a big hit at the box office: “The entire time we were working on the movie, I could carry in my heart that it was married to a movement.” Fonda also remembers the first time that she heard Parton sing the “9 to 5” theme song, Fonda saw the hairs stand up on Tomlin’s arm, and Fonda says she knew instantly that the song would be an anthem for the 9to5 movement. Parton’s “9 to 5” song was also a chart-topping hit and earned an Oscar nomination and two Grammy nominations.

The documentary doesn’t gloss over some of the serious problems in the 9to5 organization, both internally and externally. Externally, the group hit several roadblocks when it renamed itself 925, relocated its headquarters in Cincinnati, and decided to form a union. The group chose Service Employees International Union (SEIU) as its labor union representative, because SEIU did something extraordinary at the time: It gave 9to5 control over its own budget. However, many of the people who supported the activism were afraid to join unions, in large part because they feared being fired by companies that intimidated employees into not to joining unions.

Internally, even among this group of civil rights activists, were some who were racist and disliked the idea of giving leadership positions to non-white women. Carol Sims of the Cleveland chapter remembers the resistance she got from 9to5’s nearly all-white campus in the Western part of Cleveland, where Sims (who’s African American) was chosen to organize and lead the group. “They said everything but ‘I want a white organizer.’ You could feel it in the room. They were tough,” Sims comments.

The other women of color interviewed in the documentary are Jackie Harris and Mary Jung of 9to5’s Cleveland chapter; Rosie Aguirre, a member of 925 Seattle; and Verna Barksdale, the first organizer of 9to5’s Seattle chapter. Jung, who is Chinese American, says that even in her own family, she got disapproval for her activism. Jung says that her mother was opposed to any lifestyle where she wasn’t a subservient wife and mother. However, Jung says she always had a rebellious streak and was surprised to find out after her mother died that her mother had kept newspaper clippings of all of Jung’s civil rights activism.

Several of the white leaders of 9to5 acknowledge in the documentary that their group wasn’t immune to racism from some of its members. But ultimately, that racism did not prevent women of color from having leadership positions in the group. Renia Clay, an activist from 9to5’s Atlanta chapter, says of the group’s racial integration and diversity: “I credit Verna Barksdale. She would always pair a black person with a white person, an older person with a younger person.”

Other activists who are interviewed in the documentary include 925 organizers Anne Hill, Cheryl Schaeffer and Adair Dammann; former Cincinnati clerical workers Donna Samuels, Inge Goldschmidt and Carolyn Schwier; and Kim Cook and Laurie Brown, who were 9to5 organizers in Seattle. What should be inspiring to anyone watching this documentary is that the people who began this movement and sustained it weren’t elite lawyers or career politicians but were mostly everyday working people who decided to take action.

“9to5: The Story of a Movement” is a well-told inside account of this important part of U.S. civil rights history. The film’s editing ties everything together in a cohesive manner and brings the movement into activism perspectives of today and beyond. The filmmakers chose their interviewees well. The women in the documentary bring a sense of humor to parts of the film, which is why “9to5” doesn’t have the type of egocentric posturing that can make historical documentaries too pompous and dull. This movie should be watched by anyone who cares about civil rights, as well as people who think that they don’t care about these important issues.

PBS’s “Independent Lens” series premiered “9to5: The Story of a Movement” on February 1, 2021.

Review: ‘The World to Come,’ starring Katherine Waterston, Vanessa Kirby, Christopher Abbott and Casey Affleck

February 16, 2021

by Carla Hay

Vanessa Kirby and Katherine Waterston in “The World to Come” (Photo by Toni Salabasev/Bleecker Street)

“The World to Come”

Directed by Mona Fastvold

Culture Representation: Taking place primarily in 1856, in a rural area of Schoharie County, New York, the dramatic film “The World to Come” features an all-white cast of characters representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: Two farmers’ wives have a secret love affair with each other while unhappily married to their husbands.

Culture Audience: “The World to Come” will appeal primarily to people are interested in well-acted dramas about LGBTQ romances and how people cope with being in unhappy marriages.

Katherine Waterston and Casey Affleck in “The World to Come” (Photo by Vlad Cioplea/Bleecker Street)

The dramatic film “The World to Come” skillfully immerses viewers into a world filled with layers of oppression for the story’s two female protagonists. The two women are stifled by being in miserable relationships with their husbands; society’s bigotry against same-sex romances; and living in an era where wives could be considered property by their husbands. It’s a story that shows in understated yet poignant details how someone’s greatest love and passion could also be that person’s greatest heartbreak.

Directed with emotional intelligence and sensitivity by Mona Fastvold, “The World to Come” is based on Jim Shepard’s lyrical short story in the 2017 collection, each titled “The World to Come.” Shepard and Ron Hansen adapted the short story into the movie’s screenplay, which is told from the point of view of a farmer’s wife named Abigail (played by Katherine Waterston), whose diary entries are read in voiceover narration. The movie takes place primarily in 1856 in a rural area of Schoharie County, New York, but “The World to Come” was actually filmed in Romania to capture the type of landscape that no longer exists in that part of New York.

Abigail is an introvert who begins keeping a personal diary of her thoughts, after her husband Dyer (played by Casey Affleck) suggested that she keep a business journal for the farm, such as tools lent out and outstanding bills. Abigail begins her diary in January of 1856, and her subsequent voiceovers over the next several months are told with the dates in chronological order.

Dyer, just like Abigail, is quiet and unassuming. They seem to have an ordinary life with their daughter Nellie (played by Karina Ziana Gherasim), who’s 4 years old. But a tragedy strikes that puts both Dyer and Abigail down a path of depression and emotional turmoil.

By February of that year, Nellie has died from diphtheria. Abigail and Dyer, who are already introverted people, become more withdrawn from each other. Not long after Nellie’s death, Dyer becomes ill with a fever, which puts the productivity of the couple’s farm in jeopardy. (They are the only apparent people who work on the farm.)

Abigail barely has time to grieve while taking care of her ailing husband when another farmer couple moves nearby and unexpectedly changes Abigail’s and Dyer’s lives. Tallie (played by Vanessa Kirby) is a vibrant redhead, while her husband Finney (played by Christopher Abbott) is a brooding control freak. During this very depressing time in Abigail’s life, she writes in her diary: “I have become my grief.”

Dyer eventually recovers from his fever, but he and Abigail remain emotionally distant from each other. They refuse to discuss the death of their daughter, because it seems to be too painful for them to even talk about it. Abigail is expected to help Dyer with farm duties, but soon she’ll have someone who will be taking up a lot of her time and attention.

The first time that Abigail is shown talking about Nellie’s death to another person is in her first conversation with Tallie, who has stopped by Abigail’s home for a neighborly visit. Abigail and Tallie’s first conversation happens to be on the day that would have been Nellie’s fifth birthday. When Abigail tells Tallie this information, unbeknownst to the two of them, it’s the birth of something else: a budding romance between Abigail and Tallie.

The two women become fast friends and eventually confide in each other about their deepest feelings. But the respective marriages to their husbands are never that far from their minds. It’s easy for anyone to see that the passion has dwindled in Abigail and Dyer’s relationship. Tallie and Finney’s relationship is not as easy to read, although Tallie tells Abigail: “I suppose he’s unhappy with me because I have yet to give him a child.”

As Abigail says in one of her diary entries that she reads in a voiceover: “Finney and Tallie’s bond confounds me. At times, when their eyes meet, they seem yoked in opposition to one another, while at other times there seems a shared regard.” Abigail remarks in her diary about her growing romantic feelings about Tallie: “There is something going on between us that I can’t unravel.”

Abigail becomes fully aware of how deep her feelings are for Tallie after Tallie becomes ill from being caught in a snowstorm. Abigail becomes distraught over wondering if Tallie will recover. The snowstorm killed about half of the chickens on Abigail and Dyer’s farm, so the couple will be experiencing some hard times in the near future. However, Abigail is more worried about Tallie’s recovery than the farm’s financial loss from the snowstorm.

Tallie seems to appreciate Abigail’s introverted nature when Tallie tells her: “It’s been my experience that it’s not always those who show the least who actually feel the least.” And Abigail describes their blossoming love affair this way in her diary: “I imagine that I love how our encircling feelings leave nothing out for us to wander or seek.”

One day, Tallie gives Abigail an atlas, which is almost symbolic of their wishful thinking of how they could run off together and travel around the world. By the month of May, Tallie and Abigail’s romance of hand holding and hesitant kisses turn into more passionate displays of affection, and they eventually become secret lovers. Their infidelity to their husbands doesn’t come without feeling guilty about it, but Tallie tries to brush it off by telling Abigail: “I hear intimacy builds good will.”

Dyer and Finney can’t help but notice that their wives are spending more and more time together, sometimes for several hours a day. Dyer expresses frustration that Abigail’s devotion to Tallie has come at the expense of Abigail doing work on the farm. Dyer is annoyed, but he doesn’t become abusive about it.

By contrast, Abigail starts to see signs that Tallie is being abused, such as bruises and how Tallie seems genuinely fearful of Finney, while Tallie tries to pretend that everything is fine. Abigail also tries not to think about something Tallie told her soon after they first met: Finney is thinking about moving further west with Tallie. Later in the story, the two couples have dinner together at Tallie and Finney’s home. And it becomes very clear how cruel Finney can be.

The romance of Abigail and Tallie isn’t really a “sexual identity” story, because the movie never makes a point of declaring what their sexual identities are. There’s no big speech or enlightenment moment that Abigail and Tallie have about why they fell in love with each other. Viewers can speculate that Abigail and Tallie are closeted lesbians or bisexuals, or viewers can speculate that Abigail and/or Tallie don’t care what gender their love partner is. In 1850s America, there really were no specific terms for LGBTQ people, and the subject of any non-heterosexuality was so taboo that it was rarely discussed out loud.

“The World to Come” is really about showing how two lonely people met each other and filled a void in each other’s lives. In Tallie and Abigail’s private conversations, it’s clear that Tallie is more sexually experienced and less sheltered than Abigail, even though Abigail is older than Tallie. Abigail mentions that she married Dyer out of convenience, because he was the older son of a neighbor. By contrast, it’s hinted that Tallie is very aware of her allure and had her pick of suitors before she married Finney. It’s implied that Abigail was probably a virgin when she got married, while Tallie was not.

These hints about their sexual history provide some context for what happens later in the story and how Abigail and Tallie react to obstacles that inevitably occur in their relationship. Abigail is the only person who makes Tallie happy, and vice versa, but Abigail has the added emotional agony of losing a child. It explains why there’s a desperate way that Abigail wants to cling to her relationship with Tallie, no matter what the cost.

Waterston, Kirby, Affleck and Abbott all give commendable performances in their roles. As the story goes on, there’s a noticeable change in the personalities of Abigail and Tallie that Waterston and Kirby express in poignant ways. Abigail starts off very shy and unsure of herself, but becomes more determined and outspoken after she falls in love with Tallie. Meanwhile, Tallie starts off as more of a fun-loving free spirit, but she slowly loses her confidence under the burden of being in an abusive marriage.

Affleck’s Dyer stays on a fairly even keel of being a mournful spouse who has trouble expressing his emotions, but Dyer is someone who hasn’t completely lost his humanity and compassion. Abbott’s Finney is the most complex person of the four because, just like many abusers, Finney has a charismatic side and is skilled at fooling people into thinking that he isn’t as bad as he really is. There’s a scene in the movie that also realistically demonstrates how people who suspect domestic abuse often don’t want to be involved in reporting it or helping a suspected victim.

“The World to Come” is not a groundbreaking film, nor is it going to appeal to people who aren’t interested in deliberately paced dramas that take place in the 1800s. Some viewers might also be slightly annoyed by the film’s constant voiceovers by Abigail. However, her writings are a subtle nod to how articulate and intelligent Abigail is, considering that she was not a wealthy woman with the means to get a higher education, in an era when women were discouraged from being as educated as men.

Fastvold’s unfussy directing style is exemplified by the technical choices made in the movie’s costume design, production design and musical score, which all complement the creative aspects of the film without being overwhelming. The farm folks in this story live simply and quietly. If the movie had made Tallie and Abigail’s romance a big melodrama, it wouldn’t ring true for this rural culture of people who live discreetly and don’t want to call attention to themselves.

The actors in this movie’s relatively small cast make the most out of this intimate snapshot of a year in the life of these four people who have been damaged in some way by disillusionment. Tallie and Abigail experience glimmers of hope and a purpose to live because of the unexpected love that they found with each other. But it’s a love where people will inevitably get hurt, and decisions are made on how much of that love is worth any personal sacrifices.

Bleecker Street released “The World to Come” in select U.S. cinemas on February 12, 2021. The movie’s digital/VOD release date is March 2, 2021.

Review: ‘The Mimic’ (2021), starring Thomas Sadoski and Jake Robinson

February 15, 2021

by Carla Hay

Jake Robinson and Thomas Sadoski in “The Mimic” (Photo courtesy of Gravitas Ventures)

“The Mimic” (2021)

Directed by Thomas F. Mazziotti

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed suburb in New York state, the comedy film “The Mimic” features an all-white cast of characters representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: A writer is annoyed by a younger man who follows him everywhere and seems to want to copy everything that the writer does.

Culture Audience: “The Mimic” will appeal primarily to people who have the patience to sit through a movie whose comedy is too self-conscious and awkward for its own good.

Jake Robinson and Thomas Sadoski in “The Mimic” (Photo courtesy of Gravitas Ventures)

In the comedy film “The Mimic,” a struggling screenwriter is aggravated because he’s being stalked by a younger man who seems to want to imitate everything about this writer’s life. But viewers will be doubly irritated because both of these characters are equally obnoxious in this dull and time-wasting film. Written and directed by Thomas F. Mazzioti, “The Mimic” is one of those movies that tries too hard to be deadpan funny, but the dialogue is often idiotic and downright cringeworthy.

Most of the characters in this movie don’t have names. In the film’s credits, the two central characters are listed as The Narrator (played by Thomas Sadoski) and The Kid (played by Jake Robinson), who are at odds with each other for almost the entire story. The Narrator is a 41-year-old widower who writes for a small newspaper in the unnamed suburb where he lives in New York state. The Kid is a 31-year-old married man who’s recently moved near The Narrator. The Kid begins stalking The Narrator and tries to copy his mannerisms and actions. Neither of these men has kids, which is a good thing, because no child deserves to have insufferable parents like these two self-absorbed creeps.

It’s soon becomes clear to viewers that there’s nothing about The Narrator’s life or personality that’s worth mimicking. He’s bitter about being alone, and he doesn’t like to see other people happy in their personal lives. And he has a weird obsession with the concept of being a sociopath—so much so that he immediately calls The Kid a sociopath. And he keeps calling him a sociopath repeatedly, when it wasn’t even funny the first time.

Needless to say, “The Mimic” is one of those movies that has annoying voiceover narration from you-know-who. And making things worse, the entire movie is filled with cheesy sitcom music as the film score. The actors in the movie are adequate but can’t save this embarrassing and clunky film that can’t decide whether it wants to be a dark comedy or a screwball comedy.

“The Mimic” starts out somewhat promising, by appearing to be unconventional and unpredictable. The opening line is a voiceover of The Narrator saying, “The high point of the weekend was when my St. Bernard fell through my attic ceiling and landed on my kitchen table.”

Why? Because The Kid was up in the attic snorting cocaine and somehow the dog fell through the floor. It sounds like a situation ripe for some potentially hilarious slapstick, but the movie just mentions this scenario and does nothing clever with it. There are too many moments in this film where it’s nothing but silly arguments and unimaginative action.

The first time that The Narrator meets The Kid, it’s when The Kid shows up unannounced at a newspaper staff meeting and says he wants to write for the paper. Apparently, this newspaper has no budget for an office but instead the staffers meet in someone’s living room. The Narrator says in a voiceover: “I first met The Kid when he infiltrated our small-town newspaper, right after my wife died. I say ‘infiltrated,’ because I believe it was a deliberate action to meet me.”

Up until The Kid came along, The Narrator (who says he’s a trying to write a screenplay) was the only man on the staff. The rest of the newspaper employees are four middle-aged and elderly women, who hire The Kid on the spot without even interviewing him. The Narrator thinks these women are all tedious and uptight because they obsess over things like comma placement in an article. Meanwhile, the only reason why this scene seems to exist is to have Marilu Henner, Didi Conn and Jessica Walter share a scene, since they play three of the women on the newspaper staff.

In fact, “The Mimic” is filled with cameos from character actors whose names are best known to people who are familiar to TV shows and movies from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. M. Emmet Walsh, Austin Pendleton and Josh Pais all make brief appearances in the movie, which wastes their talent with nonsensical scenes. Gina Gershon has a cameo as a woman who has a tryst with The Kid in a restaurant ladies’ room, because the movie keeps mentioning that The Kid has a thing for older women.

After The Narrator and The Kid meet, The Kid starts showing up in the same places where The Narrator is and says to him: “We’re on the same wavelength!” At an outdoor park, The Kid and The Narrator have a conversation where The Kid reveals a little bit more about his personal life.

The Kid, who moved from New Jersey to New York, says he’s been married for seven years to his high-school sweetheart, but their marriage hit a rough patch when he left her for an older woman. That affair didn’t last, and his wife took him back. The Kid then inexplicably plucks two giant mushrooms from the park and holds each mushroom upright in each hand during this conversation, so this movie can make his character look “quirky.” It’s one of many sight gags in the movie that don’t work well at all.

As much as The Kid seems to be obsessed with The Narrator for unknown reasons, The Narrator is also fixated on The Kid. At an optometrist appointment, The Narrator is asked to read the eye chart and he can only see the word “sociopath,” so he spells it out for the doctor who’s giving the eye exam. The Narrator says, “I’m a writer and I’m still trying to read between the lines.” The Narrator also goes to a library to do more research on sociopaths.

Later, The Narrator and The Kid have a long-winded conversation at a restaurant. The Narrator (and the audience) can’t be certain how much of what The Kid says is true and how much is a lie. However, The Narrator becomes intrigued about learning more about The Kid’s wife because she sounds like the type of wife whom The Narrator wishes he had.

The Narrator and The Kid have other meet-ups, such as at a tennis court, a hospital and eventually at The Kid’s house. The Kid’s wife seems to be elusive though, so that becomes a subplot that doesn’t really go anywhere. “The Mimic” is such a badly written movie that it never actually shows The Narrator or The Kid having lives outside of their moronic conversations.

The Narrator says that he’s using his experiences with The Kid as his next screenplay, but the movie never shows him doing any work either on the screenplay or at his newspaper job. Whatever The Kid does to make money, it remains vague and questionable, just like many other things about this character’s life.

How bad is “The Mimic”? In a scene where The Narrator and The Kid first have dinner together at what looks to be a mid-priced restaurant, The Narrator says in a voiceover: “It’s been my experience, with women at least, that if she orders white wine, she’s classy. If she orders red wine, she has class, but she can get a little wild. And if she orders rosé, she’s a slut.”

Guess which type of wine The Kid orders, considering that he’s supposed to be the “crazy” one of this duo? The Kid’s obsession with The Narrator and vice versa have some undertones of homoeroticism, which The Narrator seems to acknowledge when he says, “This is turning into a gay relationship without the sex.”

In another of many scenes with bad dialogue, Pais portrays The Narrator’s unnamed lawyer, who meets with The Narrator over lunch at a restaurant. For no reason whatsoever, the lawyer says, “I hate cats. They close their eyes when they eat. I want them to know who’s feeding them and who’s paying for everything.”

If people have the misfortune to watch this terrible movie from beginning to end, they’ll be closing their eyes too from falling asleep (because it’s so boring) or because they want to un-see some of the stupidity that’s on the screen.

Gravitas Ventures released “The Mimic” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on February 5, 2021.

Review: ‘Dara of Jasenovac,’ starring Biljana Čekić

February 14, 2021

by Carla Hay

Biljana Čekić in “Dara of Jasenovac” (Photo courtesy of 101 Studios)

“Dara of Jasenovac”

Directed by Predrag Antonijević

Serbian and Croatian with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place Croatia during World War II, the dramatic film “Dara of Jasenovac” features an all-white cast of characters portraying concentration camp prisoners and their oppressors.

Culture Clash: Ethnic Serbs, Jews and Roma people were imprisoned, tortured and killed by Croatians who were sympathetic to Nazi beliefs.

Culture Audience: “Dara of Jasenovac” will appeal primarily to people interested in a dramatic portrayal about the dark side of Croatian history, and viewers should expect to see many depressing and violent scenes.

Marko Pipić, Anja Stanić and Igor Djordjević in “Dara of Jasenovac” (Photo courtesy of 101 Studios)

Just say the words “concentration camp movie,” and you can figure out what’s in the film, so sensitive viewers should be warned. The dramatic film “Dara of Jasenovac” is well-acted and thoughtfully constructed, but the movie’s disturbing onslaught of violence (including heartbreaking depictions of children being murdered) will make this film very difficult to watch for many people. The movie has fictional characters but is inspired by real-life experiences of ethnic Serbs, Jews and Roma people who were imprisoned in Croatian concentration camps built by Croatia’s then-fascist Ustase government during the 1940s/World War II era. The most notorious Croatian concentration camp was called Jasenovac.

Directed by Predrag Antonijević and written by Natasa Drakulić, “Dara of Jasenovac” tells the story of a 10-year-old Serbian girl named Dara Ilić (played by Biljana Čekić) and her family’s tortuous saga of being separated and imprisoned in concentration camps in Croatia. Her father Mile Ilić (played by Zlatan Vidović) has been sent to the Donja Gradina Concentration Camp. A few kilometers away at Jasenovac are the rest of his immediate family: Dara, who is very introverted; her 12-year-old brother Jovo (played by Marko Pipić); her 1-year-old brother Budo, nicknamed Bude (played by triplets Luka, Jakov and Simon Saranović); and their mother Nada (played by Anja Stanić Ilić), who faces constant threats to have any or all of her children taken away from her.

Most of the movie depicts the violence, starvation and other traumas that this family and other people experience in the concentration camps. Although the movie has Dara’s name in the title, the story is often seen from the perspective of the adult prisoners. Dara endures immense tragedies, but she’s probably one of the most stoic characters you’ll ever see in a concentration camp movie, because she rarely cries or screams in terror, even when certain people she’s close to are murdered in front of her.

The torturers and murderers in this story are men and women who share in the Nazi belief of exterminating those who are not Christian or those who are considered ethnically “inferior.” Their leader in this story is Vjekoslav “Maks” Luburić (played by Marko Janketić), who is feared the most by the prisoners. His underlings, who are also very cruel and sadistic, include his second-in-command Ljabo Miloš (played by Bogdan Bogdanović) and Maks’ sister Nada Sakić (played by Alisa Radaković). And the movie doesn’t gloss over factual history that some nuns and other members of the clergy were complicit in helping people who operated concentration camps.

Mile befriends another prisoner named Jaša (played by Bojan ZiroviIlić), whose wife, four sons and one daughter were all murdered when they stayed behind in Sarajevo. As prisoners on work duty, Mile and Jaša are often tasked with dumping bodies of concentration camp victims in ditches or throwing murdered corpses into a river. It results in some harrowing scenes that further intensify the atrocities of what people witnessed in real life.

Meanwhile, Mile’s wife Nada has no idea where he is and asks another Jasenovac prisoner named Anđelko (played by Marko Pavlovski) if he’s seen her husband. Anđelko tells her that Mile is probably at Grandina, where many of the men have been sent to separate them from their families. Nada and her children soon find out that trying to reunite with Mile has to wait when they’re all just trying to survive and not be separated themselves. There are several times in the story when all five of the Ilić family members face the possibility of being torn apart from each other for various reasons.

At Jasenovac, there are three female prisoners who make a big difference in helping Dara and her family overcome some obstacles. One of them is compassionate Vera Stanić (played by Sandra Ljubojević), who steps up in a pivotal moment and pretends to be Mile’s sister, so that the Ilić family won’t be separated. There’s also feisty Mileva Kovar (played by Nikolina Friganović), who is severely beaten for stealing corn for her children. And a kind Jewish woman named Blankica (played by Jelena Grujićić) is especially fond of Dara and gives her helpful tips on survival.

The many gruesome murder scenes in the film include a vile game of musical chairs that the soldiers force the male prisoners to play. The odd man out gets his throat slit and stabbed. And sometimes a prisoner will have his throat cut for random reasons. The scene ends with the soldiers beating the prisoners to death.

This movie is relentless in showing people getting shot, beaten, stabbed and murdered in other horrific ways. And there’s no sugarcoating of the violence that happens to the children. There’s even a scene of kids who are locked in a room while a soldier throws a grenade inside to kill them. This is a movie that shows the worst of humanity, made all the more horrifying because it re-enacts what happened in real life.

Every time a significant character dies in the movie, “Dara of Jasanovec” has a technique of depicting how that person has passed into the afterlife, by showing the character walking through a snowstorm and stepping into a gloomy train car. As the story goes on, the train car gets filled up with more and more people, while more snow starts to fall. The snow is a metaphor for the worsening storm of this sickening Holocaust.

“Dara of Jasenovac” gets all of the production elements right in accurately portraying the hell of concentration camps. The actors all give convincing performances. However, the character of Dara is a bit of an enigma throughout the entire story. Viewers do not get any sense of what her hopes and dreams were before this terrible tragedy. She’s brave but very quiet, and she often barely reacts when a lot of terrible things are happening around her. But it’s also a realistic portrayal of how someone can be when they’re in shock.

It isn’t until the last third of the film, when Dara is faced with being permanently separated from her younger brother Budo, that Dara shows a fiery will to fight for her family. However, viewers should not expect to see a cliché ending where the people who survive live happily ever after. “Dara of Jasenovac” is a haunting and impactful story of how the evils of concentration camps have left permanent damage to countless families and are a shameful part of human history.

101 Studios released “Dara of Jasenovac” in select U.S. cinemas on February 5, 2021. The movie was released in Serbia in 2020.

Review: ‘The Right One,’ starring Nick Thune, Cleopatra Coleman and Iliza Shlesinger

February 13, 2021

by Carla Hay

Nick Thune and Cleopatra Coleman in “The Right One” (Photo courtesy of Lionsgate)

“The Right One”

Directed by Ken Mok

Culture Representation: Taking place in Seattle, the romantic comedy “The Right One” features a predominantly white cast (with some black people and Asians) representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: A romance novelist is attracted to an elusive man who has multiple personality disorder.

Culture Audience: “The Right One” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching flimsy romance stories with unappealing characters and offensive ways of depicting mental illness.

Iliza Shlesinger and Cleopatra Coleman in “The Right One” (Photo courtesy of Lionsgate)

Even without the ridiculous and offensive way that mental illness is handled in “The Right One,” the movie fails to meet the basic requirement of a romantic comedy: believable chemistry between the would-be couple. Written and directed by Ken Mok (who’s best known as an executive producer of “America’s Top Model”), “The Right One” is a tedious and not-very-funny slog of a story that badly mishandles this concept: A romance novelist falls for a guy who has multiple personality disorder. And she thinks he doesn’t need psychiatric help or any therapy, but that her love is enough to “cure” him. Try not to gag at this disgustingly irresponsible attitude toward mental illness.

In “The Right One,” the clueless romance novelist who ends up thinking that she’s qualified to cure someone’s multiple personality disorder is Sara (played by Cleopatra Coleman), a 31-year-old with the emotional maturity of a 17-year-old. The movie takes place in Seattle, but was actually filmed in British Columbia. For more than a year, Sara hasn’t been dating anyone and has been celibate, ever since her ex-boyfriend Simon (played by Nykeem Provo) dumped her because they didn’t agree on parenting issues and he wanted to be with another woman. Sara wants to eventually become a parent, while Simon told her he didn’t feel the same way.

When viewers first see Sara, she’s reluctantly at a trendy art gallery party with her obnoxious agent/best friend Kelly (played by Iliza Shlesinger), who insists that Sara has to start dating again. Kelly is loud, bossy and abrasive. And Kelly seems to care more about how much money Sara can make for Kelly than she cares about Sara as a human being. As seen later in the movie, Kelly is the type of horrible boss who yells insults at subordinates, throws things in the office, and makes her male administrative assistant paint her toenails.

Meanwhile, Sara is still pining over Simon and bitter about the breakup, but she doesn’t really want to admit it. At the party, Sara notices a man who’s about 10 years older than she is, and he looks like an uptight and pretentious art critic giving a lecture about some of the art on display. By the way that Sara looks at him, it’s easy to see that she’s immediately attracted to him.

Just minutes after that, Sara sees the same guy, dressed in different clothes and wearing a different hairstyle, in another room. This time, he’s acting like a hipster bohemian type, who jumps around with enthusiasm while talking to another group of people about the art on the wall. By the way, it’s a very quick-change transformation into these two different personas. Who does he think he is? Superman?

Is he an actor? Does he have an identical twin? Is he doing some kind of performance art? No. His name is Godfrey (played by Nick Thune), whose psychological problems are so serious that he’s been living his life as several different people. Sara doesn’t find out what Godfrey’s real name is until much later in the story. Until then, she meets his many personalities. And this movie wants people to believe that Godfrey’s mental illness will stop just because Sara is now in his life and she wants to “save” him. Retch.

The next time Sara sees Godfrey, he’s performing as a country singer busker on the street. He calls himself Cowboy Cody (and he says it a straight face) and speaks to her with a Southern twang when she inevitably approaches him and says, “I know you from somewhere.” When Sara figures out that he’s the same chameleon whom she saw at the art gallery party, he insists that she’s wrong and that his name is Cowboy Cody.

This back-and-forth goes on for a few minutes, but it seems like longer. Sara can’t get him to admit that he’s the same person she saw at the party. Sara makes it clear that she wants to see him again. But Cowboy Cody is about to hop on a bus, so he hands her a flyer showing when and where his next performance is going to be. And you know that Sara will be there.

After having this street encounter with Cowboy Cody, Sara excitedly tells Kelly that she no longer has writer’s block and has decided on the plot for her next romance novel “Chastity,” which Sara has to finish on a tight deadline (three months) because she’s been procrastinating. Sara tells Kelly that the novel’s female protagonist falls for a mysterious guy who has several different personalities, and this heroine will try to figure out which of his personalities is the real one. And guess how Sara going to research this book?

Kelly is very self-absorbed, but even Kelly knows that it’s a bad idea for Sara to get involved with someone who has mental health problems that Sara isn’t equipped to handle. Kelly advises Sara not to fall in love with this mystery man but only get to know him as research if it will help Sara finish the book on time. But Sara and this movie will not be stopped in their misguided quest to make it seem like all someone like Godfrey needs is the love of a good woman to cure him of his mental illness. It’s a concept that’s shoved in viewers’ faces in the most obnoxious ways.

There’s a minor subplot of Kelly setting up Sara on a blind date with a nice guy named Ben (played by Anthony Shim), who’s an artist. Sara and Ben’s first date together is somewhat awkward because Sara tells weird jokes that don’t land well at all. Still, Ben asks Sara out on a second date, and tells her they can go wherever she’d like. She suggests that they go to the nightclub where Cowboy Cody says he’ll be performing next.

But the person performing at this nightclub isn’t Cowboy Cody. It’s Godfrey in drag, wearing a blonde wig and a long dress. This time, he’s a spoken-word artist named Allie Cornbush, who does an act that’s part comedy, part avant-garde performance. Sara loves it and cheers enthusiastically, while Ben is not impressed and thinks the whole act is bizarre.

Sara is so infatuated with this chameleon, that after the performance, she follows him outside of the club, thereby ditching Ben without even a goodbye. How rude. At this point, Sara is acting like a pathetic groupie, because she begs Godfrey (who’s now dressed as a man, in jeans and a hoodie) to let her tag along with him wherever he’s going. Slow down. You just met him.

She then follows him into a dark alley, where he surprises her with two oversized, glowing helmets shaped liked cat heads—one for him, and one for her. They go to a nightclub, where yet another persona for Godfrey emerges. This time, he’s a DJ who calls himself Katamine (rhyming with ketamine), who’s an obvious ripoff of real-life DJs who wear oversized mask helmets as part of their act, such as Deadmau5 and Marshmello. DJ Katamine is very popular with the crowd, and Sara ends up on stage with him too. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.

But that’s not all. Godfrey has other personalities and other jobs, which makes you wonder why Sara thinks he would have time to date her when he has all these different lives that he’s leading. Godfrey also teaches a reading class for kindergarten-age students at what looks like a library. They call him Mr. G there.

And he also works as a high-ranking salesperson for an unnamed corporate company, where he’s nicknamed G-Money. He does most of his sales over the phone, where he has more personas that he fabricates with clients in order to close a deal. His office persona as G-Money is as an eccentric who shows up for work with spiked hair like a punk rocker, dressed like a surfer, and wearing no shoes. It’s the opening scene in the movie.

Godfrey is allowed to dress this way in a corporate environment (while his office colleagues have to wear suits) because he outperforms all the other sales staffers by 364%. That’s according to what a fellow employee tells the visiting head honcho Bob Glasser (played by David Koechner), who has arrived to evaluate the sales department and boost their productivity. In an early scene in the movie, Godfrey (aka G-Money) is able to charm Bob because they’re both fans of the jam-rock band Blues Traveler.

Meanwhile, Sara tries to keep seeing Godfrey as much as she can, even though she still doesn’t know what his real name is or anything substantial about him. She keeps a journal of all her encounters with him, as if she’s a love detective. And her attempts to get close to him hit a snag when a thuggish-looking guy in his 20s tells Sara that she needs to stay away from Godfrey.

It turns out that this guy’s name is Shad (played by M.J. Kokolis), and he’s Godfrey’s foster brother. Godfrey’s reason for his multiple personality disorder is eventually revealed in the movie. Needless to say, Sara ignores Shad’s demands to stop seeing Godfrey. She comments to Shad about Godfrey: “I know that I don’t know him, but I feel like inside, there’s this special, sweet person.”

Later in the movie, Godfrey has somewhat of a meltdown at one of his jobs, and he’s in danger of being fired. However, Shad and Sara go to talk to Godfrey’s boss, who thinks that Godfrey should get a psychiatric evaluation and professional help for his obvious mental-health problems. But then, in the worst scene in the movie, Sara has the idiotic nerve to lecture this boss and say: “Godfrey isn’t mentally unstable … He doesn’t need a psych evaluation. He needs support and time to process what he’s going through.”

Before Godfrey’s freak-out on the job, he and Sara had gone on a ballroom dancing date. During the date, his persona was Matteo, who claimed to be from Argentina but actually spoke in a weird mashup of a German/Spanish accent. As far as Sara and this awful movie is concerned, getting professional help for Godfrey’s mental health isn’t important because it would interrupt Sara’s girlish fantasies of being romanced by this very obviously messed-up person.

There’s almost nothing to root for with this would-be couple, when this movie can’t even grasp the concepts of true love and how mental illness should be handled by people who really care about the mentally ill person. Coleman and Thune have zero chemistry together. Thune looks ridiculous in about half of his personas in this movie. His uneven performance as the joyless Godfrey looks like Thune is somewhat embarrassed to be there.

Meanwhile, Coleman has terrible comedic timing in many of her scenes. She also has a way of over-emoting that’s very annoying. This cringeworthy style of acting is most apparent in a scene that takes place in a park, where Sara unexpectedly runs into her ex-boyfriend Simon and his wife Allegra (played by Leanne Lapp), who is pregnant. Allegra is the woman whom Simon got together with after he broke up with Sara.

Simon and Allegra seem very happy about this pregnancy. Meanwhile, jealous Sara is shocked to see that Simon has changed his mind about being a parent. Sara spitefully tells Allegra that Simon said he didn’t want to be a father when he and Sara were a couple. Sara also makes a body-shaming comment to Allegra, by telling Allegra that her pregnancy makes her look “big.”

It’s unknown if writer/director Mok consulted with enough women before he wrote the atrocious screenplay for this movie, which is clearly targeted to a mostly-female audience. If he had, he would’ve heard that women (and movie audiences in general) enjoy romantic comedies the best when the people in these movies don’t act delusional, air-headed and degrading to other people when it comes to finding true love. And it’s become a boring and unimaginative cliché when romantic comedies have a scenario of women being catty to each other because of a man.

The tacky and unrealistic way that relationship issues are handled in this movie is not only an insult to women but also anyone who’s suffering from mental illnesses. In addition to horrible casting choices and sloppy direction, “The Right One” disregards the severity of a mental illness such as multiple personality disorder. The way it’s portrayed in the movie, multiple personality disorder is just a phase that someone can “get over” if the right person comes along to give them love. Well, there’s one way to “get over” a bad romantic comedy like “The Right One”: Just don’t watch it.

Lionsgate released “The Right One” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on February 5, 2021, and on Blu-ray and DVD on February 9, 2021.

Review: ‘A Glitch in the Matrix,’ starring Paul Gude, Alex LeVine, Nick Bostrom, Jesse Orion, Emily Pothast, Brother Laeo Mystwood and Chris Ware

February 12, 2021

by Carla Hay

A scene from “A Glitch in the Matrix” (Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

“A Glitch in the Matrix”

Directed by Rodney Ascher

Culture Representation: The documentary “A Glitch in the Matrix” features a group of people (almost all white males, with one white woman and one African American man) of video game addicts, journalists and academics discussing the concept that life on Earth could be a virtual simulation, not the reality that people think it is.

Culture Clash: Different ways of looking at and defining reality are explored, including how video games influence people’s thoughts.

Culture Audience: “A Glitch in the Matrix” will appeal primarily to people who want to listen to ramblings from several people who admit they’re addicted to video games or some other form of virtual reality.

A scene from “A Glitch in the Matrix” (Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

In the Oscar-winning 1999 sci-fi film “The Matrix,” Carrie-Anne Moss’ Trinity character tells Keanu Reeves’ Neo character that his feeling of déjà vu is “a glitch in the matrix.” It’s meant to explain a mistake in the matrix world where the movie’s characters live in a simulated reality. The documentary “A Glitch in the Matrix” talks to several people who are open to believe or actually believe the idea that the world as we know it is not “real” but is actually a simulation controlled by unknown and unseen forces.

If you want to listen to self-admitted geeks drone on and on about this concept, then by all means, waste your time and watch “A Glitch in the Matrix,” which adds nothing new or interesting to this debate. The movie is also very poorly researched. “A Glitch in the Matrix,” which had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, spent more time gathering a variety of film clips than interviewing a variety of people.

Directed by Rodney Ascher, “A Glitch in the Matrix” is truly a case of style of over substance. It cobbles together a lot of clips from sci-fi flicks, edits them together with some animation, and tries to dazzle the viewer into thinking that movie is going to be a cutting-edge documentary. It’s not.

It’s really just a movie that gives a platform to several self-described video game addicts, who ramble on about how they sometimes have a hard time comprehending what’s reality and what is not. The only facts that this documentary really puts forth are that people can get addicted to video games and those with possible mental health issues can actually start to feel like they’re living in a video game. This problem of video game addiction has been common knowledge for decades, but the filmmakers of “A Glitch in the Matrix” try to make this documentary look as if it’s revealing insightful information. Perhaps they’re living in another reality if they think this lazy film is nothing more than a cash grab to appeal to gamers and other people interested in virtual worlds.

Some of the people interviewed in the documentary don’t even want to show their real faces. Instead, their video game avatars are shown on screen as they talk. These self-confessed video game addicts are:

  • Paul Gude, who appears with a creepy red mask surrounded by a ruby-like orb and wearing a samurai warrior outfit.
  • Brother Laeo Mystwood, who appears with an Anibus head and is decked out mostly in purple.
  • Alex LeVine, who appears as a shaman-like robot with an emoji face and a brain suspended in liquid
  • Jesse Orion, who appears as a space alien in an astronaut suit.

They all look like they’re auditioning to be a new character in a “Mortal Kombat” reboot game. And, clearly, all of them have “issues.” Orion describes himself as a video game addict who feels alienated from the world.

Gude says that when he was a student at the University of Missouri in Columbia in the early 1990s, he first became fascinated with the idea that the human brain is a computer that can be hacked into and manipulated. And he comments that he started to feel like his life was really a simulation when, as a child, he moved from Pontiac, Illinois, to the much smaller city of Dorsey, Illinois. He remembers being somewhat freaked out by things such as going to a shopping mall and seeing hardly any people there. He also thinks people are “chemical robots.”

Mystwood (which is obviously not his real name, but maybe it’s his name in the fantasy world he seems to have in his head) talks about having a religious upbringing that he thinks did some damage to his psyche. (Gude, who is the son of a pastor, describes a similar effect that religion had on him.) Mystwood also says that he got a clearer understanding of “alternate reality” when he experienced going into a sensory deprivation tank. Mystwood describes how his head started to pound and he had an out-of-body experience.

And he then came to this conclusion after going through the experience of the sensory deprivation tank: “I am a code … Nothing on me or anyone is real.” The documentary irresponsibly doesn’t include scientific information on how sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations similar to someone taking a psychedelic drug.

Speaking of psychedelics, what the filmmakers fail to ask in this documentary when people spew all of these paranoid theories is, “How often have you taken psychedelic drugs?” Because a lot of their ranting about discovering “alternate realities” just sounds like people who maybe took LSD or other psychedelics too many times. And a few of them sound like they’re in serious need of psychiatric evaluations.

Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk is mentioned as somewhat of a hero to people who think that we live in a simulation, because Musk has publicly expressed this theory too. What the documentary doesn’t mention is Musk’s self-admitted drug use. It seems irresponsible for this documentary to not mention the possibility that drug-fueled hallucinations could be behind many of the theories about simulation that some people believe as gospel.

The closest that anyone will admit that being under the influence of substances (legal or illegal) has a lot to do with how they think about reality is when LeVine describes going on a drunken joyride in Mexico with some friends when he was younger. Everyone in the car, including the driver, was very drunk from alcohol and maybe who knows what other substances that LeVine (a Harvard-educated engineer) might not wanted to admit to on camera. After driving the wrong way on a freeway and narrowly missing a head-on collision, the car eventually flipped over and crashed by itself. The car was completely wrecked.

Luckily, no one was killed or seriously injured. LeVine describes having an out-of-body experience and remembers someone carrying him away from the corrupt federales who were going to demand money from these Americans to not arrest them. LeVine says the fact that no one got killed in this serious car crash was a sign that some other forces were at play.

Actually, it’s not unusual for intoxicated people in a car crash to suffer less injuries than people in the crash who were sober. There are many cases of drunk drivers who killed other people in an automobile crash, but the drunk drivers survived with minor injuries. There’s plenty of information available with the statistics.

Medical experts believe that intoxicated people in a car crash have a better chance of surviving and getting less injured, compared to sober people, because intoxicated people’s reactions and reflexes are slower while under the influence of alcohol or another substance. But course, the filmmakers never both to include this medical/scientific information. In fact, they don’t question or try to debunk any of the hallucinatory stories that are in this movie.

The production notes for “A Glitch in the Matrix” describe the documentary interviewees who believe in simulation theory as “eyewitnesses.” LeVine also mentions that he has Crohn’s disease, which is an odd thing to bring up, because the inner workings of his bowels have nothing to do with what this documentary is all about. That’s an example of some of the irrelevant information in this movie, which was in serious need of better editing and sensible research.

“A Glitch in the Matrix” interviews a few journalists and academics (who appear on camera as their real selves), but they just repeat things that they’ve already written about in essays, books or articles that they wrote years ago. In the documentary’s production notes, these talking heads are listed as people providing “expert testimony.” Among those interviewed is writer Erik Davis, author of the 1998 book “Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information.”

There’s also Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University professor who wrote the 2003 article “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” for Philosophical Quarterly, while he was doing post-doctoral work at Yale University. He believes that there are three possibilities when it comes to simulation disguised as reality: (1) There was extinction before simulation; (2) Simulation technology was abandoned and there are only assets to simulation; (3) Simulation is “real.”

American cartoonist Chris Ware gives a useless interview where he comments on the illustration that he did for The New Yorker’s issue that was dated June 12, 2015. The cover features two girls looking at computers in their bedroom. Ware says that the video game Minecraft inspired the drawing.

Ware also has this to say about Minecraft: “Every time I play it with my daughter, I feel like we’re dead and we’re flying around the world. It’s the only experience that closely approximates what … a disembodied conscience might experience.”

Again. Are these people on drugs? These are the so-called “experts” in this movie.

Also interviewed is Emily Pothast, who wrote a 2019 article on Medium called “The (Deep) Dream of Motivated Reasoning Produces Monsters,” which gives an analysis of how people can be radicalized if they believe that their reality is different from what’s presented by the media. She is the only woman interviewed in this documentary, and she’s the only person in the movie who gives an intelligent cultural context of what can happen when people start to think that their reality is not what most other people think is reality.

Pothast comments, “I do think there’s an inability to separate the real world from digital realities, when you have the [2019 mosque mass-murder] shooter in [Christchurch] New Zealand, livestreaming what he’s doing … and going after people who are Muslims. Or people shooting up synagogues going after people who are constructed as ‘other’ by the media that [these shooters] consume.”

The New Zealand shooter was a white supremacist who appeared to be addicted to social media, such as Facebook, instead of video games. “A Glitch in the Matrix” doesn’t mention that New Zealand subsequently banned video games that were eerily similar to the mosque shootings. And there’s no discussion in this documentary on how substance abuse and/or mental illness play roles in people disconnecting from reality.

The documentary also takes a glib approach when mentioning the 2018 incident of Horizon Air employee Richard Russell stealing a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 plane, with no passengers, from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and doing dangerous tricks in the air. Russell died when he intentionally crashed the plane on Ketron Island in Puget Sound. During his communication with aircraft control, Russell (who did not have a pilot’s license) said he learned how to fly planes by playing video games. The people in the documentary, such as Orion, who comment on this tragic incident seem to be more impressed with how video games influenced this deadly stunt than caring about what led Russell to commit such a desperate act.

“A Glitch in the Matrix” also shows a clear bias in preference of white men, because all but two people interviewed in the movie fit that description. In addition to Pothast, the only other person interviewed in this documentary who is not a white man is Joshua Cooke, an African American man who was convicted of the 2003 shooting murders of his adoptive parents in Oakton, Virginia. Cooke was 19 when he committed the crime and was sentenced to 40 years in prison. He says that he was addicted to “The Matrix” movie and violent video games, and he says that he lost touch with reality. In court, he pled guilty instead of pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.

Cooke was so obsessed with “The Matrix” that he dressed like the movie’s Neo character and bought a gun that’s similar to the one that Neo uses in the movie. Cooke does not appear on camera in “A Glitch in the Matrix,” but his comments are heard in audio voiceover from interviews that the filmmakers did with him from prison. Cooke’s story is included in the documentary’s long segment about the huge influence that “The Matrix” movies (especially the first one in the series) have had on people who believe that life is a simulation. Cooke vividly describes how “The Matrix” took over his life and spilled over into murdering the people he thought were the “enemy.”

What the documentary didn’t mention is that there was a history of mental illness with Cooke’s biological parents: His biological mother was schizophrenic, and his father was bipolar. There are no mental health experts interviewed in this documentary about people who believe that the world we live in isn’t real. That gives you an idea of how careless this documentary is.

“A Glitch in the Matrix” strangely and selectively mentions Cooke and Lee Boyd Malvo (also known as one of the DC Sniper serial killers) as the only two examples of people whose obsession with “The Matrix” and violent video games turned into homicide. Everyone knows that black people are not the vast majority of those who commit mass murders or serial killings of this type. And yet, “A Glitch in the Matrix” filmmakers show an appalling racist bias by only singling out black people as examples of those who’ve committed these violent crimes.

The movie gives a lot of screen time to archival footage of a 1977 speaking appearance given by sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, who’s cited as another major influence to people who believe that life is a simulation. Several of Dick’s novels and short stories have been adapted into movies, including 1982’s “Blade Runner,” 1990’s “Total Recall,” 2002’s “Minority Report” and 2011’s “The Adjustment Bureau.” The Amazon Prime Video series “The Man in the High Castle” was also based on one of his books.

“A Glitch in the Matrix” includes clips from several movies, such as “The Matrix,” “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” 1997’s “Starship Troopers,” 1998’s “The Truman Show,” and 2009’s “Avatar.” All of these films have some version of the theme that humans are not as in control of their lives as they think they are because there are outside forces really in control or trying to invade humanity. The documentary also has several eye-catching animation clips, most notably Robert Crumb’s “Plato’s The Cave.”

“A Glitch in the Matrix” spends a lot of time discussing that people who believe that the world is really simulated are those who are usually addicted to video games. And yet, the filmmakers failed to include the perspectives of any video game developers or people who market video games. It’s a glaring oversight that shows how sloppily made and superficial this documentary is.

Some of the movie’s pace tends to drag because the rambling interviews get very boring after a while. The filmmakers also don’t confront a fact which seems pretty obvious from watching the type of people who get hooked on video games: These people have way too much time on their hands, which speaks to larger issues. There’s a certain amount of privilege that someone has to have to be able to spend all that time and money on video games.

“A Glitch in the Matrix” does a woefully inadequate job of addressing these socioeconomic issues. It’s a lot easier to want to escape into a video game world of shootouts and other mayhem if you don’t live in a gang-infested area or a war-torn environment. If any of these video game addicts who think the world isn’t real were taken out of the comfort of their homes and put in an actual war zone, they’d see how “real” the world is.

“A Glitch in the Matrix” doesn’t want to discuss how issues about mental health, substance abuse and socioeconomic status are major factors that link video game addiction to believing that the world isn’t real. The filmmakers just want to present a bright, shiny bubble of a documentary where the perspectives of people in one racial and gender demographic are given more importance over anyone else. And that lack of diversity is anything but what the real world looks like.

Magnolia Pictures released “A Glitch in the Matrix” in select U.S. cinemas and on digital and VOD on February 5, 2021.

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