East of Wall

South Dakota Will Make You Humble

or

"Life's a Metaphor, Isn't It?" "(F... Off!)"

 

East of Wall is a difficult film to classify. It defies pigeon-holing and slotting. Classification. It's not a documentary, because it's scripted. It has real people playing themselves (with two actorly exceptions), so it's not exactly fiction, even though it fits the bill of being "based on a true story." Even if it isn't. But, it could happen. That it doesn't goes a long way in explaining the nature of the real people involved. So, that's fiction "becoming" fact. In an interview with NPR, director Kate Beecroft, describes her film as "docufiction" filmed on location, sometimes documentary style "on the fly" with the actual people who live the daily lives depicted in the film. To paraphrase "Dragnet": "The names you are about to see are true. The story has been changed to project the innocent."

 

Tabatha Zimiga has lived on her husband's family horse farm for years after his death. She's raising three kids, a lot of horses—training them in a style similar to "Buck" Brannaman—and taking in strays...animals and kids, teens who through issues with their parents (addiction, incarceration, incompetence or indifference or just plain delinquency) live on the Zimiga farm working the land and the animals, and working on themselves.

I first heard of Zimiga and her South Dakota ranch on the news...probably PBS Newshour because I've lost interest in network news...and her unconventional approach to caring for all her charges. Tatted and head-shaved, she defies the conventions of ranch-owner, her property a collection of paddocks and mobile homes--horses and people house similarly--and she scrapes by a living training horses and selling them at auction, while also keeping her revolving door of kids fed, clothed and sheltered...and schooled. She's had sufficient life lived to understand...but not necessarily sanction...teen drama, keeping a wary eye on behavior, both human and equestrian. She has enough drama of her own.

Unlike most cowboys, she has an internet presence, posting on TikTok, showing off the kids' riding skills as well as the dexterity of her horses, all good marketing tools for showing off the animals before the weekend auction day. 

Director Beecroft uses those videos to show the day-to-day, connecting and interlacing bits of story-fabric, providing background on the various interactions, all revolving around the hub of Tabatha, going to court seeking conservancy for new members of her makeshift brood, keeping truancy to a minimum, dealing with the slights and jolts of everyday ranch life...and not talking about the death of her husband, who committed suicide years before. This is one of the threads running through East of Wall because it affects her daughter Porshia (a really impressive performance) who aches to remember him as he was her mentor and taught her how to ride.

One keeps looking for artifice and the film is remarkably free of it—there are only two actors, Scoot McNairy (he played Woodie Guthrie in A Complete Unknown) and Jennifer Ehle who plays Tabatha's mother Tracey (her resume is so impressive and I've seen her in so many things that the way she insinuates into the role is, frankly, startling) but you can "sense" the actors from everybody else—even the makeshift stuff feels completely natural in this day and age of corporate takeover. But, when the real people playing their real selves (though fictionalized a bit) are on-screen, it's a truly eerie feeling. You feel like you're watching a documentary, despite the occasional beautiful landscape shot. Movies do a really good job of faking real. East of Wall isn't faking.

That becomes readily apparent during Tabatha's drunk monologue about finding her dead husband, which is one of the most riveting one shots I've ever seen. Raw, profane, and bitter, all expressed through a haze of repressed regret, it's a jaw-dropping sequence, repeatedly challenging the sense of reality and drama in an audience's mind. Sort of like real life.   

Some have gone so far as to say the film is a modern "take" on the Western (if we're still pining for categorization). I'm not so sure one could call this a traditional Western per se, but if John Ford's entries are, in the end, about the struggles of making a community in a wasteland, then East of Wall certainly fills that bill.

 

It's one of the best films of the year. 

Emilia Pérez

The Exhumation of the Dead

or

Careful, There's No Railing

 

Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez (streaming forever on Netflix) seems purposely designed to make half of America's head explode. A musical with a trans protagonist who decides to quit their life as a drug kingpin and to become a woman. It's both a practical decision—he wants out of the drug trade, which guarantees a short life expectancy and he has a wife and kids that he adores—and a personal one—he wants a clean soul and to be true to himself, and his life in the macho world of the drug-trade just doesn't lend itself to his aspirations. He wants out, both of the way of the cartels and the way he must live his life as a merciless no-nonsense drug lord. 

Easier said than done.

 

Top-lining the film is Zoe Saldaña as attorney Rita Mora Castro, who we first see writing the closing argument for a case she does not believe in, but that ultimately is won, which leaves her conflicted about her profession. She receives an anonymous phone-call that puts it bluntly "Do you want to become rich? I have a proposition for you."

She's directed to a location 10 minutes away, where a car comes to pick her up, a hood is placed over her head, and she is taken to the stronghold of the Los Cabalos drug cartel, run by Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), the man who made the phone-call. His proposition is this: he wants to "disappear", fake his own death, and to have gender-affirming surgery so that he can live the rest of his life as a woman, with his family transported to Switzerland for their safety. Rita's job is to investigate, advocate, and see to the details to accomplish these goals.

She manages to make all the arrangements and walks away a very rich woman. Four years later at a swank dinner party she meets a woman named Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascónagain) and suddenly realizes...it's her client.

Audiard dramatizes the moment by shutting off every decorative light in the room, isolating the two women, who are the only people on Earth (well, besides the operating team) who know Emilia's past. For Rita, it's a moment of horror, because why would they suddenly cross paths just four years later—she fears for her life. But Emilia has other plans for Rita; as she accomplished things so well previously, she hires her to arrange to bring his wife (played by Selena Gomez) and his two children back to Mexico, to live with Emilia, who will masquerade as Manitas' sister. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, a lot, apparently. If half the heads of America have exploded, almost all of them have in the story's setting of Mexico. Director Audiard is French and he filmed the movie in Paris. Only one of the principal actors is Mexican, and the script has been criticized for its confusion of Spanish and Mexican idioms as well as incorrect uses of pronouns, and for those "in the know" the accents are all over the place, needing to have them explained away in some expositional dialogue and for all this the movie is considered something of a pariah in Mexico. There are various controversies at the core of Emilia Pérez, but they've tended to eclipse some of the more problematic aspects to the film.

Before we get into that, the performances, however untechnical in terms of accents, are game. Gascón, a trans actor, is great in both roles she plays, and manages to garner empathy, while retaining an element that makes you suspect she could snap at any minute. Selena Gomez does well with her role as Manitas' wife, who realizes her place as a pawn in the relationship, but has just enough brio to make her own choices when given a long enough leash. But, the stand-out is Saldaña, who has done well for herself in well-established roles even if they're CGI enhanced, but here she gets to show her abilities as singer and dancer and she electrifies at it, while also going through some pretty complex emotions in transition scenes when the professional veneer she maintains drops.

Now, the downside...for a musical, the music isn't that great, for the most part taking the "Hamilton" approach of scatting between beats with lyrics that are better than the ones in, say, Annette, but far from memorable. The piece was first designed as an operetta, so the songs are just syncopated dialog revealing inner thoughts that transactional dialog is too plain to convey and the way they're presented is director-heavy music-video mode, where the camera does most of the dancing.

But, the part of the movie that irritates me is it's very old-fashioned in its way of dealing with the trans issues. To tell you why would reveal too much of the plot, but let's just say there's no such thing as redemption in Emilia Pérez. No second chances. It says, you may live a new life, but you will pay for the sins of the previous one...which, given the fact that the character tries to redeem herself with a charitable organization to provide answers to the families of victims of drug-cartels, is very Old Testament. You could argue that Manitas was a drug-lord, that he's destroyed so many lives she doesn't deserve to atone or to achieve atonement. Point taken. The crimes one then does are a forever-trap, despite secular ideas of reformation or religious ones of penance absolving them.

But, if that's so, it's akin (to the nth degree) to the faux-pas of "dead-naming" a trans person. Does blame transcend sexual identity? Does guilt? And if a person changes their life to atone for the sins of their past, to try to make it right for the survivors, is it atonement, or is it "too little too late." But, somebody just didn't have the chops to "go there." Emilia Pérez completely by-passes any deep-thought for melodrama and a conclusion for complex moral arguments right out of the Hays Code. It's annoying.

There's just enough clutziness to the whole enterprise, that you kind of wish there was a trans director (a Mexican trans director) behind it who might have been a bit more savvy, not only to the possibilities, but also the problems. Audiard has done some great work in the past (Une Prophete and Rust and Bone), but this one, he overreached and stylistic story-telling or satirical elements cannot camouflage the inherent issue of being a bit behind the curve when dealing with gender-politics. 

 

Emilia Perez is content to merely be outrageous. Well, they got the outrage. Just not the kind they were expecting.

Everybody's Fine

Written at the time of the film's release...

"Everybody's Fine. But the Film? N'yeah, Not So Much!"

 

Widower Frank Goode (Robert De Niro) has a big family reunion planned when all the kids at the last minute cancel. Assuming, as do we, that they're just avoiding seeing "the old man," he packs his bags, his keys and his pills, and buses and trains across the country to drop in, unannounced, on each and every one of them, with a mystery note. He doesn't fly, you see, as he's suffering from pulmonary fibrosis, which he's acquired from his job of weather-coating phone-cable with PCB's. It is the very nature of this movie to let no plot-detail go underutilized in this bubble-world of a movie, so, of course, that becomes important later.

When visiting each kid, he realizes that they're leading somewhat less successful lives than they and his late wife had led him to believe. And he's determined to get everybody back together for a big get-together at Christmas. It sounds like the excellent Christmas "ABC Movie of the Week," "The Gathering," in which a dying Edward Asner attempts to have one last Christmas with all his estranged adult kids before he goes to the Great Gift Return in the Sky. But this is actually based on an Italian film by Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore called Stanno Tutti Bene (or "Everybody's Fine") and de-cultured, simplified, sweetened and topped by an ineffectual Paul McCartney song by Kirk Jones (who made Waking Ned Devine and Nanny McPhee and should know better).

I haven't seen the original (shame on me, I loved ...Paradiso*), but I know it wasn't as slick and as simple-minded as this version. For example, it hinges on the false premise that nobody ever talks in this family...ever.

The entire movie could have been solved in an hour by Dr. Phil. Everybody keeps secrets, sure. But usually not very well. How long did these kids think they could keep their charades going, especially with the major life-changes they entail? The machinations that daughter Rosie (Drew Barrymore) has to go through are herculean and more than a little uncredible for what she's hiding, and also speak of a lack of feeling that the rest of her performance belies.

Added to that, the plot device of inflating your importance to your parents has been used in every sit-com ever conceived—but pulling it off on an elaborate movie budget tends to make the concept explode like shrapnel. It's especially frustrating, after seeing a mature film for adults like Up in the Air to see froth like this, designed for the eye-candy-and-blue-hair crowd, where no opportunity for closure goes unachieved with an unsubtle slam.

The cast in uniformly great, however. De Niro (man, he looks plasticized in that poster—they airbrushed out all his wrinkles to attract a younger crowd?) schlumpfs around the country, asking, ironically, "Are you not talking to ME?" and still manages to find simple, interesting ways to be "a joe." The kids are played by Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwelll**, who all do fine jobs given the paucity of material, though Rockwell looks particularly frustrated with his role.

Who could blame him? This isn't a film. It's a "project," gussied up with an all-star cast of available talent who have nothing in common other than they wanted to work with De Niro; a constuct that looks good on the surface, but has no underlying thought to it that would make it legitimate in its own right, and plausible as a story. It's Meet the Fockers done as drama, a collection of parts that don't fit for a coherent film, much less as a representation of real life. Everybody involved should be sentenced to a year of working in theater where they might stumble on some actual characters to play and thoughts to express. Their aspirations are too low, and need to be adjusted.

* And the same director's Maléna and last year's documentary about Ennio Morricone.

* That's another thing: there's no way De Niro could have had these three kids without marrying three different wives. Nobody looks like they belong in the same family. It looked good on paper on the Miramax ledger-sheet, I'm sure, but it looks like sham on the screen.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010) Brilliant little nested doll of a documentary from acclaimed (and anonymous) "street artist" Banksy, making a film about the guy who was making a film about him...and, frankly, coming up with a more compelling—and cautionary—story...done with a rueful humor and wise self-examination.

But, it doesn't start out that way. One man's vandalism is another man's "art." And as Banksy spins the tale, fully acknowledging that the genre falls in "the legal gray area," one sees graffiti artists risking life and limb to express themselves on somebody else's canvas, then having to beat feet before the cops show up. It is art under pressure, having to be done as quickly as possible—pre-designed and its application created as quick as possible under duress. The motivations of these spray-can Picasso's are never questioned, their results never examined. They simply exist as a phenomenon and something of worth.

Enter the guy making a film about Banksy. He's Thierry Guetta, French emigre, living in L.A. who runs a vintage clothes shop, where he charges outrageous prices for people's castaways—there's a theme here already. A traumatic event in his childhood makes Guetta fixate on documenting everything in his life the moment he first puts a video camera in his hand. He becomes obsessed documenting his family, his journeys, everything...amassing a considerable amount of tape, but, like a drawer full of snap-shots, never categorizing it. Filming a cousin who's a street artist imprints another in a series of obsessions onto Guetta: filming street-artists at work, combining their art with the drama of getting caught in the act. He becomes compelled to document the work, with the hope to make a film, but never really getting around to it. What Guetta is good at is getting raw data, not turning it into something, and it is at this point, he meets Bristol's famous street artist, Banksy.

What emerges is a cautionary tale of encouraging someone who is constantly
"becoming" into finding an end-point, especially someone with delusions of grandeur and a con-artists' soul in a milieu in which hype is the gold standard and "value" is on a sliding scale determined by the gullible. Especially "value" in an art-form that its practitioners admit is only temporary.

One begins questioning the values espoused, only to feel a certain amount of amused regret when the espousers are made aware that their fashion may be "The Emperor's New Clothes." As one of the artist reps says at one point, "I'm not sure who the joke's on. I'm not sure there is a joke."

One thing is certain: Exit Through the Gift Shop is a great documentary, whether, as some have accused (to the consternation of the producers), it is "staged" or not. It manages to make its points abundantly clear, while not really condemning the participants. It's smart, frequently funny, sometimes painful and ultimately, very wise.

File it in your video collection next to Welles' F for Fake under "W" for "Worth."

Banksy's tough-love opening for "The Simpsons"

Ennio (2024)

Ennio (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2024) There was no way this movie was going to hit any of the local theaters. It's too "inside", too limited interest, even if the potential audience has assuredly heard at least one of the composer's compositions (and that might be because of a beer commercial). And...it's mostly in Italian. But, thank the Academy for TCM. Monday night, they showed the recently released documentary (in the States, anyway—it'd been available in Italy since 2022), Ennio, a more than two hour look at the life and career of composer Ennio Morricone.

 

The subject of the documentary has such a legendary reputation—one stat: he composed scores for over 400 films of every genre (despite giving himself a deadline of quitting the business every decade), over a six decade career in the film industry. And, although his output slowed a bit from his peak at 19 films in a year, he was extraordinarily busy with concerts and collecting the accolades that he was due—like two late-in-life Academy Awards: one for his career, and one for his score for The Hateful Eight.

The film by Tornatore—who had the extraordinary good fortune to have Morricone score his film, Cinema Paradiso—is almost encyclopedic, sometimes too much, as the many talking heads pop in and pop out with little breathing room, recounting childhood stories, his teachers and influences, collaborators, and filmmakers who he composed for—or wish he had. Particularly of interest are those scenes documenting Morricone's forays into musique concrète, which, of course, punctuated his Leone soundtracks. The whip-cracks, whistles, and twangs of that earlier music gradually gave way to complex—and sometimes conflicting—harmonies that often approached the music of the spheres.

But, I love how the film starts. The maestro comes into his cluttered study, stretches, and lays down on the floor. For the next few minutes, he does some simple stretches, relaxing his body, in simple yoga-like movements, concentrating. Then, you see him attack a manuscript, penning notes aggressively like he's doing battle with it, scrambling to put the music in his head onto paper. He's approaching 90, but the energy is that of a young man. One could say that nobody composes music like that, at any age. 

 

But, then, nobody could. Morricone is—was—unique.

 

And his music is eternal.

Morricone playing themes for his class-mate/film collaborator Sergio Leone

Elemental

Elemental (Peter Sohn, 2023) We will try to keep this review as pun-free as possible as Pixar's latest release seems to be doing somersaults trying to use every paronomasia to the four classical elements—Earth, Air, Fire and Water—as it possibly can within its slim 100 minute length (including the voluminous Pixar end-credits). The film is so crowded and over-stuffed that one should be glad they stuck with the Empedocles-ian list and tabled the other 118 (and, see, there I go).

 

It resembles Disney's Zootopia in that it posits a multi-cultural world in which there are segregated zones for the disparate groups of Earth-people, the Vapors, the Combustibles, and Those Who Go with the Flow within Elemental City, a construct that seems to have been made just for such a purpose, as things tend to melt, flow, slide, and burn when the four basics collide and exchange energy.

"Who knows?"

There's an amusing little moment when the two main characters, fiery Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis) and watery Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie) both walk through a chain-link fence—him gushing through and her melting it—where they muse "Why do they even have these?" "Who knows?" Indeed, in a society, however segregated, where barriers serve no purpose to mutual self-interest, what's the point? But, it's just a moment—an aside—that resonates within the bigger context of the movie's intentions.

And that is to show the "immigrant experience" in a film where that will serve as backdrop for the main relationship between Ember and Wade—a sort of "Wet Side Story" if you will (and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't).

Ember comes from the immigrant family of Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi)—two anglicized names they got when they entered Element City—who left their home island of Fireland for a better life, and who met resistance from moving into the wooden structures of the Earth area (fire danger!) and the Water sector (they'll evaporate the place!) and settled for a walk-up from the bodega they've found in order to make a living and serve the community. Their daughter, Ember, learns the ropes of minding the store, with the aim of taking over the place when the Old Man retires.

But, she has anger-management issues, which turns into a burning purple rage, when dealing obstinate customers. One of those hissy fits results in a broken pipe in the basement, which floods it, dropping Wade, a city inspector, into the mix. Wade is a bit of a sensitive soul, given to crying jags, naturally, so he is distressed to find out that the Lumen store isn't exactly up to code and must report it for multiple violations putting the business in jeopardy of being shut down. This puts him at odds with Ember, who is determined to save the store at all costs.

Though seemingly polar opposites, in nature and purposes, the two become close in their efforts—her to save the store and him to find out why Elemental City seems to be in danger of an infrastructure defect that could threaten to flood the Fire district—even as they know that any sort of relationship could mean...well, extinction or extinguishment for one or both of them. They can't help their natures, but their nature is also to be attracted to each other.

This is a different kind of Pixar movie for a number of reasons. One is that the story takes on the tropes of a film genre that the studio has never partaken before, that of the rom-com. It follows the basic steps—the meet-cute, the diametric odds, the mutual interest, the separating complication, and the final emotional epiphany that resolves all issues until the final fade-out, which leaves everyone in a soggy after-glow that assumes nothing else will compromise the happy ending. Elemental is not immune to such step-by-step manipulation, even if the characters are mere concepts rather than attractive B-listers for Hallmark. It's still a little phony and a lot trite.

The other thing is that although the backgrounds are the same Pixar magic we've come to expect and take for granted, the characters...are concepts, not some animated anthropomorphic projection of identifiable species, more of the type of animation done in the analog 2-D days. Pixar did much the same thing with their animated emotional traits in Inside Out, but they were off-set by more relatable characters in the enveloping story. There is just that couple of degrees of animated "otherness" that keeps one becoming wholly invested in the story.

Still, there are moments; there always are with Pixar, even with their handful of sub-par—and that "par" is very high—releases. There are moments that pay off quite well, even if one feels that the extra polish the film-makers usually do to nail the things feels missing.

 

It's good Pixar, not great Pixar. But, one awaits the next one with anticipation...now that Disney is allowing them back in theaters again.