Category: Film Reviews

At the Sofaplex 20/10/01

* All In: The Fight for Democracy(PG-13)

This documentary is a nice primer on the Voting Rights Act (its purpose and history) and the Shelby County v. Holder U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down parts of that law. It is also a nice bio of Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat who served in the state legislature for 10 years and then ran for governor in 2018. She’s one of those people who I feel like I’ve read a lot about but haven’t heard from directly as much as I did here. Sure, every person and their uncle (and the cover of the paper you’re holding) is talking to you about voting, but if you can take just one more… B+ Available on Amazon Prime.

*The Social Dilemma (PG-13)

Get ready to be scared and bummed out by this documentary, the gist of which seems to be that social media (Facebook in particular) is making it hard to have privacy, good government and a civil society. The documentary’s talking heads are primarily former employees of Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, etc., and they explain how some of the most problematic aspects of these platforms are intentional parts of getting consumers to stay on sites longer and monetize that presence. The documentary also looks at the effect these sites have on kids and teens; one person mentions that it would be best to keep kids off social media until at least 16. Less successful are dramatic enactments (featuring multiple Vincent “Pete Campbell” Kartheisers playing, basically, social media algorithms) with teenagers facing all sorts of teen drama online and a teen boy succumbing to the conspiracy theories of the “radical centrists.” The documentary builds to an interesting case for government regulation of these platforms. B Available on Netflix.

* The Fight (PG-13)

This documentary about the lawyers of the ACLU follows four legal tussles with the Trump administration: the battle over making citizenship a census question; the request for abortion services by a young woman held in detention while seeking refugee status; a pushback of Trump’s attempts to ban transgender people from serving in the military and cases related to the Muslim travel ban and family separation policies. I found myself fascinated not just by the discussion of these cases themselves but also by the procedures — how the lawyers go about their appeals for relief for their clients, many of whom are in some kind of race against time, and how they build class action cases. The documentary also offers a look at ACLU’s broader history. B+ Available on Hulu.

* We Are Freestyle Love Supreme (TV-MA)

Watch extremely talented young theater nerds work together to make something in this documentary about Freestyle Love Supreme, a freestyle rap improv group started in the early aughts by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Thomas Kail (probably best known as the director of Hamilton), Chris Jackson (Hamilton’s best-known George Washington), Utkarsh Ambudkar (who you know from lots of things, including The Mindy Project; also, awesomely, he’s a voice on Disney Junior’s Mira, Royal Detective) and other longtime friends and theater people. And I say “nerds” with great affection and in the absolute best sense. This documentary features footage from a 2019 reunion run of Freestyle Love Supreme as well as the group in the mid-2000s (just before and as Miranda’s In the Heights production was ramping up) and some looks back to their start in the early 2000s. This isn’t a super tight, dramatic tale but I tiredly flipped it on one evening and it was a charming boost of happiness. B+ Available on Hulu.

* Disclosure(TV-MA)

This documentary about transgender representation (and the long lack thereof) in Hollywood beautifully answers the “why is it important to see someone like you on screen” question. Actors, filmmakers, writers and other creative types discuss the limited (and often problematic) examples of transgender characters in the TV and movies of their youth and how transgender stories have found at least some entrance into mainstream TV and movies in, basically, the last decade or so. The documentary makes a strong argument for the richer, smarter, more interesting art that comes from giving a more diverse pool of writers and directors the means to tell their stories. B+ Available on Netflix.

The Speed Cubers (TV-PG)

Weighing in at a brisk 40 minutes, this documentary looks at the international Rubik’s Cube competition community (with competitors ranging in age from tween to early twenties) focusing in particular on Australian Feliks Zemdegs and American Max Park. Zemdegs, the older of the two boys, started winning competitions and breaking world records as a young teen. Park, who is a little younger and was diagnosed with autism as a preschool-aged child, started playing with a Rubik’s Cube as a kid as part of his mother’s strategy to help him with finger dexterity. As Park gets good and gets into competition, the basic social skills that requires — like listening to rules and interacting with others — are as much a win as the results of the competition, as his parents explain. As Park gets more into competition, he meets and eventually becomes friends with Zemdegs, who is his cubing hero. The documentary is as much about the boys’ relationship as it is about competitive cubing and the story is a sweet one that also offers a nice slice of this competitive world I’d never heard about before.B Available on Netflix.

Love, Guaranteed (TV-PG)

Rachel Leigh Cook, Damon Wayans Jr.

Sometimes you just need some dumb happy romantic comedies. All the better if it has some genuine talent like Wayans in the mix. Love, Guaranteed features a broke but ethical lawyer (Cook) who decides to represent a man (Wayans) suing a dating website. At first she thinks his lawsuit — over the company’s promise to help him find love in 1,000 dates — is sort of a scam but she takes it anyway because she needs the case and he gives her a check. But, naturally, she starts to Feel, especially when she learns that he’s a physical therapist who likes helping people and is still nursing a heartbreak. Heather Graham is sort of a hoot playing the Gwyneth Paltrow-esque owner of the dating site. This movie is cute but rather simplistic but some evenings, “simple, romantic and with a happily-ever-after ending” is just what the doctor ordered. C+ Available on Netflix.

At the Sofaplex 20/08/27

*Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado (TV-14)
You don’t have to know who Walter Mercado was to understand his place in the 1990s TV ecosystem, thanks in part to clips presented here of his appearances on shows hosted by Sally Jessy Raphael and Sinbad. And that’s just for English-language American audiences; the movie also helps to explain his far greater fame among Latin Americans (both living in the U.S. and in the rest of the hemisphere). An astrologer, Mercado had a wardrobe Liberace might envy and projected a love for all of his viewers that had an almost Mister Rogers-like tone. Certainly, fans meeting him shortly before his death in 2019 seemed to be filled with a kind of giddy awe mixed with childhood nostalgia. As one fan (Lin-Manuel Miranda) explains, his show was the stuff of afternoons spent with grandma and a general aura of unconditional love. Fans, friends and business associates (including one who eventually sued Mercado for use of his own name) explain the legend and the impact of Walter Mercado in this jolly documentary. Even if you aren’t a Walter Mercado fan going in, you will be when the movie is done. A Available on Netflix.

At the Sofaplex 20/08/13

*Black Is King (TV-14)

Beyonce writes, co-directs and stars in this visual album whose music and story are based on 2019’s photorealistically animated The Lion King, to which she lent her voice, and which inspired the album The Lion King: The Gift (the songs from which appear here). 

Not surprisingly, Black Is King is vastly superior to the 2019 movie that served as its creative prompt. Even the song “Spirit,” which felt flat to me in the 2019 movie, feels fresh and cinematic and joyous as used here. The visuals of this movie blend images of Africa (the people, the culture, the land, the flora and fauna), with eyeball-grabbing high fashion and, just, like, Beyonce awesomeness. Each song fits into the overall narrative, which is sort of Lion King-ish in its examination of children and parents and ancestors and duty. Some songs are more literally connected to the throughline than others, but each also offers up its own set of ideas. In particular, the song “Brown Skin Girl” and its accompanying visuals and presentation are so sweet and lovely I feel like I’ll be thinking about its ideas and message long after I’ve stopped thinking about the overall project’s Lion King comparisons. (There are graduate theses to be written on that video’s use of the female point of view in praise and honor of Black and brown beauty.) It’s so cool that this much artistry exists in such a mainstream-accessible way. A Available on Disney+.

Radioactive (PG-13)

Rosamund Pike, Sam Riley

Marie Curie gets the biopic treatment in this movie directed by Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novels Persepolis and Chicken with Plums, among others. Her background (she also directed the movie adaptations of those books) makes sense here because this story is specifically adapted from the graphic novel Radioactive and it has an overall graphic novel feel. In between more straightforward depictions of Curie’s life, we get scenes from Hiroshima in 1945, Chernobyl in 1986, a nuclear testing ground in the American West, a hospital in the 1950s where a boy is getting cancer treatment. This narrative choice doesn’t always work great but it also doesn’t not work — it shows the wider ripples of Curie’s work, along with the things she saw in her lifetime (like the use of X-ray technology to help treat soldiers injured during World War I).

Of the more conventional parts of Curie’s life, I liked how Pike shows us how Curie is desperately in love with her husband and fellow scientist Pierre Curie (Riley) but also struggles with the way her field is more comfortable with lauding him for their work than praising them together. We also, delightfully, get a fair amount of that “great scientist, less than great co-worker/boss/parent” element of Curie, which is so common in stories of Great Men. Curie is, at times, an awkward, single-minded person uninterested in the squishy emotional or career-diplomacy side of things. B Available on Amazon Prime.

Animal Crackers (PG)

Voice of John Krasinski, Emily Blunt.

Circus family drama and a box of magical animal crackers are at the center of this very plot-stuffed animated movie that I first heard about on a Cinema Sins Sincast podcast episode (“The Curious Case of Animal Crackers”) a few years ago. That podcast, with this movie’s co-director Scott Christan Sava (who returned to a recent Sincast episode), delved into not only the making of the movie but also the strange and at the time ongoing process of trying to get it distributed. It was an interesting tale and I went into this movie pulling for it.

But…

Owen (Krasinski) grows up loving the circus run by his uncle Bob (voice of James Arnold Taylor) and aunt Talia (voice of Tara Strong). Regular circus goer Zoe (Blunt) grew up loving the circus too — and Owen. When he proposes, she blissfully accepts but her father (voice of Wallace Shawn) wants her to follow in his footsteps at the dog biscuit factory. He bullies Owen into leaving circus stuff behind and coming to work for him. Years later, Owen, an official dog biscuit taster, is miserable in his job. And yet, when offered a chance to run the circus after the death of Bob and Talia, he doesn’t jump at it — Zoe does. On the way home from the funeral, Owen eats one of the strange animal crackers left to him by Bob and Talia and, poof, turns into the hamster whose cookie form he just ate. While his young daughter, Mackenzie (voice of Lydia Taylor) is delighted with her animal-daddy, Owen is at first reluctant to assume the role of “animal performer” that is the true secret to Bob’s successful circus.

There are a lot of other subplots: a dog-biscuit-factory inventor (voice of Raven-Simone) looking to create biscuits that taste like people food who is constantly undermined by a suck-up ladder-climber (voice of Patrick Warburton); Bob’s jealous bad-guy brother Horatio (voice of Ian McKellen), who still thinks the animal crackers and Talia should have been his, and the various exploits of Horatio’s not totally competent henchman Zucchini (voice of Gilbert Gottfried). It’s all a lot, and a serious streamlining of story would have benefited this movie that does have a lot of good elements. There is also a bit of adult “what am I doing with my life” stuff in here that felt like it would just be a lot of action-slowing blah-blah-blah to the kids who should be this circus and funny animal movie’s core audience. B- Available on Netflix.

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