My reviews today include two big titles and several smaller ones. Chief among them is Da 5 Bloods, which is surely one of the films of the year. I don’t have another big title, The King of Staten Island, though. The studio wouldn’t provide a preview. There are reviews elsewhere and you should check them out before you spend almost $20 to see it.
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Da 5 Bloods: 4½ stars
Artemis Fowl: 3
It Must be Heaven: 4
In My Blood It Runs: 3½
Wintopia: 3
Sovereign Soil: 3½
The Postcard Killings: 2
DA 5 BLOODS: If there’s any justice, this film is going to get multiple nominations when awards season comes around. And it should win many. This is Spike Lee’s masterpiece and it works on several levels, including pure entertainment and as a thoughtful and urgent essay on race relations in the U.S. How timely is that? In Do the Right Thing, he explained what causes urban rioting and looting. Here he goes wider, to all black history in the U.S., by recalling George Washington, slave owner; Muhammad Ali refusing to go to war; many other well- and lesser-known figures in the racial struggle; and the overall state of affairs — inequality for Blacks and violence and incarceration used against them. That’s all attached to an adventure story, initially in a historical montage and then as a potent subtext. And there’s a bonus. Lee is rewriting the low status American war movies have given to Black soldiers.
He shows four army buddies from the Vietnam War (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and Norm Lewis) returning there decades later, along with a son, for a couple of reasons. They want to find the remains of a fifth buddy (Chadwick Boseman, seen in flashbacks) who had introduced them to radical politics, but died in a battle. Also, they want to find a fortune in gold bars that they had recovered from a crashed CIA helicopter and buried. The sons of former Viet Cong fighters want them, too, and jungle gun battles and explosions blend easily with the reinterpretation of history going on in the background. Lindo must get a best actor nomination. All the buddies are distinct characters, but his stands out. He’s a Trump supporter, suffers from PTSD and convincingly slides into madness, a bit too deeply and quickly, but effectively. The Vietnamese characters get a valid representation, too, a rarity in war movies. There’s lots to praise in this film. (Netflix) 4½ out of 5
ARTEMIS FOWL: It’s taken years to get to the screen and young boys (aged eight to 13, I’d say) will be happy that it made it there. So will anybody who can remember those ages. This is a grand fantasy adventure taken from the first two of the eight novels by Irish author Eoin Colfer, and is directed by Kenneth Branagh. Between the two of them, they visualize a world of fairies with high-tech elements, like Star Wars at times, like Flash Gordon at others. Watching this you really wish it was playing on a big screen because the images are so detailed and complex. The story is too speedy. Fun, though, and works well streaming into your TV.
Ferdia Shaw (Robert Shaw’s grandson) plays Artemis Jr., whose dad (Colin Farrell) inspired him with stories about leprechauns, goblins and other mythical creatures who he said actually exist. When dad goes missing, and TV reports that he’s an antiquities thief, Artemis finds his journal and goes to find him. That takes him to an underworld of fairies, ruled over by Commander Root (Judy Dench, in a gender switch from the male character in the novel).
She wants a device he has stolen called the Aculos and wields a major tool called the “time freeze,” a giant dome she can have placed over an entire city to control what’s inside. Artemis captures and aligns with a young fairy (Lara McDonnell) and a fairy army comes swarming into his home. Discussions about human and fairy co-existence are reduced from the book and Artemis, written as unstable, is rather blandly cleaned up. But the images and the action are fun. (Disney+) 3 out of 5
IT MUST BE HEAVEN: If ever there’s been a need for a pleasant funny comedy, right now would be it. And here’s one that’s gently droll and full of absurdity that it will make you giggle. It won a major prize at Cannes last year and nominations at many other festivals. And it’s from an unlikely source, Palestine. Elia Suleiman, a filmmaker based in Nazareth, sets off to pitch his latest project and get funding. A producer in Paris is sympathetic, but says the proposed film isn’t Palestinian enough. That’s just one of a series of absurd sequences that make up the film. Many are without dialogue, like a scene with four gendarmes meticulously checking out the sidewalk cafe he’s sitting at to make sure it complies with regulations.
Earlier in Palestine he watched a couple of men angry at a cafe owner for serving their sister a chicken dish she claims tastes sour. It was made with wine. The scene has nothing to do with many others, a neighbour repeatedly getting at his fruit trees, for instance, but they’re enjoyable to watch anyway. Elia also heads to New York, where a cab driver is excited to finally meet a Palestinian, a film teacher asks him pompous questions, and Gael García Bernal gets the last spot with another potential producer. Canadian actor Stephen McHattie also has a cameo as a tarot card reader in Montreal. If there’s an overall theme here, cultural differences maybe, I didn’t catch it. Just the amusing fun is enough. (Streaming at https://viff.org and at similar theatres in Montreal, Hamilton and Sudbury.) 4 out of 5
IN MY BLOOD IT RUNS: I kept flashing on our own province and country as I watched this documentary about how Australia is failing its Indigenous young people. I hope we’re better than this, because these are colonialist attitudes we’re shown in the small town of Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory. They show up in the school, where Captain Cook’s arrival and his claiming the land for England is a major lesson. It’s a student, not the teacher, who adds that he claimed it “for white people, not the Aboriginals.” Sure, the filmmaker, Maya Newell, chose that particular lesson because it supported her critique. Just as she chose an old archival news report about Aboriginals being encouraged to avoid “their tribal compulsions.”
The film centres on one boy, 10-year-old Dujuan, who’s between cultures. He wears a Michael Jordan jersey, but insists he’s a “bush kid.” He identifies with the homeland of his ancestors and wants to go back there. He doesn’t do well in school and often runs away. His mom is worried that the police will report him to child welfare authorities. “They don’t treat your kids the right way,” she says. They don’t teach them their culture and would surely send him to a detention centre. Mom repeatedly tries to get her kids to repeat something they’ve said in Arrernte, their traditional language. Dujuan resists white people’s schooling although imagines that it could give him tools for the fight to get the land back. It’s a very affecting film and an eye-opener. (Streaming at https://thecinematheque.ca/ at $10 for three days.) 3½ out of 5
WINTOPIA: This is fascinating look back at a celebrated documentary filmmaker, dreamer and obsessive, by his daughter. It’s also a mystery of sorts as she follows a trail to figure out the facts behind a great project that he was never able to complete. Peter Wintonick made many films for the National Film Board and is best known for Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. He made it with UBC’s Mark Achbar and it was named the Most Popular Canadian Film at the 1992 Vancouver International Film Festival. But after he died, his daughter, Mira Burt-Wintonick, found a box with hundreds of tapes and in this film gives us the story behind them.
He wanted to make a film called Utopia and wherever he went on assignment, he shot footage for it on the side. He used to message her from every spot, once from an Australian town called Utopia, and often carried a copy of Don Quixote or a book about an Irish saint who was also looking for a paradise. What Utopia meant to him isn’t clear, but his footage seems to suggest various ideas. From peaceful communities to Coney Island, which Mira says is “what Utopia might look like if it was designed by a child.” Colleagues like Nettie Wild and Ron Mann talk about how generous he was helping them with films they made, and Eduard Galean of Uruguay said he represented “the right to dream, to hallucinate.” He never had enough money to make that film, and this one is both a tribute and an authentic study of what drives people like him. It’s the opening film Thursday as the DOXA festival goes virtual this year at https://www.doxafestival.ca/. 3 out of 5
SOVEREIGN SOIL: Growing food in the far north? Only 279 kilometres from the Arctic Circle? Not something I would have imagined, but the people we see in this film do it successfully. In and near Dawson City in the Yukon, and year round. An early scene shows one of them harvesting something he calls “frozen candy” from under deep snow. The rest of the film takes us through all the seasons, tapping sap from birch trees in April, starting seedlings in a greenhouse, getting out the rototiller and the tractor later on and right to the fall harvest. And we see a thriving market system as the growers sell their produce.
“This land can sustain us,” one says, but the message from all is that you have to follow the time frame and the requirements that nature imposes. It’s a principle learned from local Indigenous people who started a farm five years ago to demonstrate and teach their methods. Keep it small is one central idea and mix your crops. Remove any trees that blow down because insects get at them, go on to harm the forest and also attract birds, which get at your plants. There’s lots of practical information like that. It’s mostly of interest to gardeners, but with a great deal of talk about our relationship to the land, it could appeal to anyone. It was written and directed by David Curtis, a UBC grad now living in the Yukon. (Now streaming at https://viff.org and from other art house theatres across Canada.) 3½ out of 5
THE POSTCARD KILLINGS: There have been too many high ratings this week. Here’s an antidote. It starts with a good idea and goes badly off the rails. The blame rests with the source, a novel by the prolific James Patterson, who joined up this one time with the Scandinavian writer Liza Marklund for a chilly northern thriller. Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays an ex-NY cop who goes to London to investigate the murder of his daughter and the man she had just married. There are reports of a similar case in Madrid, and then more in other European cities. We watch one young couple chatted up by a heavily tattooed guy on a train and the film builds great tension.
Unfortunately, it also lets in improbable story elements that make you doubt things and then shatters what little sense is left when it explains the mystery. There are grisly scenes along the way as the bodies are shown to have been mutilated and positioned like famous paintings. Why that happens is also incredible, in the sense of not believable. The director, Danis Tanovic from Sarajevo, has been celebrated at film festivals. Not for this, though. (Video on Demand and EST.) 2 out of 5
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