Movie review by Greg Carlson

Cinematic depictions of the creative process are as common as they are usually unconvincing. Whether encapsulated in a montage or stretched out over several scenes, images of painters painting, composers composing, writers writing, and rockers rocking are regularly meant to convey to the viewer a sense of awe or accomplishment when the final product is revealed. Frustration and failure can also factor in some of the best films about the struggles of making something out of nothing. “Barton Fink” is tough to beat, and “Amadeus” communicates triumph and defeat with equal brilliance.

Musician Marc Collin’s “Le choc du futur,” one of the handful of South by Southwest-selected features recently included in the festival’s online partnership with Amazon Prime, capitalizes on a modest budget to imagine its 1978 setting amidst the rapid evolution of electronically-generated, synthesizer-based pop recordings in dance and other genres. More precisely, Collin spins a recognizable tale — the burdens and challenges faced by women in an industry controlled by men — to render the details of a moment in time. Collin knows his stuff. The massive wall of equipment that dwarfs the protagonist has been assembled with care and becomes a character in its own right. But one of the most appealing things about the film is that the director is no snob; you don’t have to be an aficionado to appreciate the journey.

The majority of the film’s action is confined to the gear-filled apartment Ana (Alma Jodorowsky, whose grandfather is indeed Alejandro) watches for a traveling friend. Collin eventually visits a few more locations, but “Le choc du futur,” whether by design or by budgetary limitations, tethers our protagonist to the tools of her trade. Ana’s self-quarantine is one of devotion to her craft and is unrelated to the one currently underway. Ana also receives many guests, and each one, like a new instrument added to the symphony, expands our understanding of her character and her objectives.

Collin contrasts Philippe Rebbot’s entitled producer/go-between — whose unwelcome and creepy advances Ana must routinely deflect — with the warmer and more avuncular personality of Geoffrey Carey’s instantly recognizable aging hipster. Carey and Jodorowsky share one of the movie’s best scenes, when he drops the needle on a stack of fresh records to gauge Ana’s reaction. She misses the boat by shrugging off Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop,” but the interaction establishes Ana’s hunger for fresh sounds. Even more rewarding is the sequence in which a vocalist played by Clara Luciani establishes a powerful creative connection, leading to the film’s most sustained depiction of song-building.

Several critics have complained that Collin fails to fully explore the social inequities and gender imbalance that put Ana at a disadvantage compared to male artists who don’t have to deal with misogyny and sexism. But Collin’s more subtle approach rewards us with front-row seats to this highly specific world. One of the most accomplished elements of “Le choc du futur,” which is Collin’s feature debut (he is better known as covers project Nouvelle Vague’s co-founder), is the way it engages in an ongoing conversation on the nature of art and how we consume it as well as create it. Ana’s desire to add her voice as a practitioner is echoed in a closing title that pays tribute to the groundbreaking women of electronic music.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

As alternative viewing strategies for avid moviegoers seeking fresh content continue, the South by Southwest filmmakers who opted to join the Amazon Prime collection have benefited this week from attention that would have otherwise been more limited by the in-person version of the Austin, Texas showcase. One of the best films in the lineup is Rachel Harrison Gordon’s narrative short “Broken Bird.” Crafted with a level of sophistication and storytelling acumen rarely seen in first-time efforts, let alone pieces that begin as film school assignments, Harrison Gordon’s movie is a whole world. It may be only ten minutes long, but the rhythms, characterizations, and thematic interests make “Broken Bird” feel like a richly detailed feature-length accomplishment.

If Harrison Gordon ever develops this story into a long-form effort, I will be among the first in line to buy a ticket. I would also wish for the same performers, since the actors selected by the moviemaker are perfectly cast. The director’s statement shared by Harrison Gordon on the movie’s website reads, “‘Broken Bird’ follows Birdie, a biracial girl raised by her Jewish mom in a New Jersey suburb, as she spends a rare visitation day with her father while preparing for her Bat Mitzvah. She overcomes her doubts, and decides to risk inviting him back into her life. Birdie confronts what independence means as she steps into adulthood on her own terms.”

Harrison Gordon concludes, “This film celebrates the various worlds and lives we incorporate into our own unique identities. I had to learn to be comfortable in my own skin, and I know there are a lot of young people out there who feel the same way. I hope they can take a measure of comfort from Birdie’s story, and that they see their own strengths through Birdie’s eyes.” While Harrison Gordon pulls many of the details contained within the narrative from her own biography, “Broken Bird” — like all great examples of bildungsroman — locates the universal in the specific.

Indigo Hubbard-Salk (who plays Skylar Gilstrap on Netflix’s “She’s Gotta Have It”) inhabits Birdie with fierce individuality. Harrison Gordon shrewdly resists any overt dramatizations of troubling alt-right politics that would place her alter-ego in the crosshairs of the racist and the anti-Semite. Instead, no matter what our own demographic signifiers may be, we get the humanness of a young person still grieving over the loss of her previously united nuclear family. At a restaurant, Birdie’s father Andre (television veteran Chad L. Coleman, so superb in “The Wire” and several other series) orders her a forbidden soda, and the small, seemingly inconsequential exchange tells us as much about Birdie’s two worlds as the scene in which she has her hair straightened.

Music connects Birdie to her father and to the particulars of her experience, and Harrison Gordon’s song choices ring out. Too many filmmakers misunderstand the function of a well-placed needle-drop in the diegesis, especially when they succumb to the temptation of an unnecessary explanation or lecture. The inclusion here of Nina Simone’s recording of “Eretz Zavat Chalav” speaks for itself. And while the version of “Bad Girls” excerpted in one of the movie’s most powerful scenes is by Penelope and the Dream, the movie’s precise integration of “toot toot, hey, beep beep” from the Donna Summer classic will break your heart.

“Broken Bird” premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and is available to watch online at no cost until May 6, 2020, as part of Amazon Prime’s collaboration with SXSW.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s noteworthy feature debut as writer-director examines, with a degree of precision and deliberateness that would impress Alfred Hitchcock, the actions of a young woman who consumes inedible objects as a way to attain some measure of control in her suffocating marriage to a wealthy man. The disorder, identified in the DSM-V as pica, includes subtypes categorized by the eating of specific non-nutritional items ranging from glass to stones to soil to sharp objects. As a title, “Swallow” reverberates with several meanings — among them an allusion to the protagonist’s potentially harmful ingestions and the indignities she must suffer under the humiliating surveillance of her husband’s parents.

Producer and star Haley Bennett’s performance is career-best work. In collaboration with Mirabella-Davis, Bennett endows her Hunter Conrad with empathy and humanity that will bring even the most reluctant and skeptical viewers to an understanding of the need to feel a sense of accomplishment, even one far outside the realm of cultural appropriateness. The majority of the movie is spent in close and intimate proximity to Hunter. Sometimes, the viewer is invited to her most private rituals, including the collection of small things that Hunter retrieves after they have passed out of her body.

At other times, we see Hunter in the company of others. These scenes are initially marked by the inconsiderate and rude manner in which Hunter is constantly ignored, talked over, diminished, dismissed, and disrespected. Past and present collide in the construction of Hunter as the contemporary equivalent of a mid-century, “trophy wife” homemaker — underscored by the pregnancy that reduces her to a vessel. Entitled spouse Richie (Austin Stowell) may or may not have a mistress in the city, but Hunter is another kind of odalisque: a slave and captive in her own gilded cage.

Mirabella-Davis uses the central location — a modernist Hudson Valley dwelling designed by architect Robert J. Dupont and filled with perfect touches and objects selected and arranged by production designer Erin Magill — with bold flourishes that emphasize Hunter’s increasingly worrisome isolation from human contact outside the tiny circle of coddled Richie and overbearing in-laws. Richie’s parents, we learn, gave the home to their son and his wife as a gift, a fact which suggests that Hunter is an interloper or pretender who does not really belong as a true member of the family and does not deserve the opulence and wealth surrounding her.

Later, Hunter will establish precarious relationships with others. One, which is performed by the superb, indispensable Denis O’Hare and sets up the shattering final scenes, is best left for the viewer to discover. A seemingly helpful therapist, played by Zabryna Guevara, may not necessarily abide by the ethical standards of her profession, and a hulking Syrian (Laith Nakli) retained by Richie’s family as a sitter/minder/nurse will also upend expectations. These relationships all affect Hunter in increasingly important ways, and while many reviewers have argued that “Swallow” could or should be classified as a horror film, Mirabella-Davis engineers a perfect final shot that suggests there can be light on the other side of darkness.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Sundance 2020 opening night selection and audience award winner “Crip Camp” — now streaming on Netflix — recounts the incredible grassroots movement that ultimately led to the passage and implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law on July 26, 1990. But before that ceremonial milestone, which appears late in Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht’s terrific documentary, audiences are invited to go on a long, strange trip that starts at the location of the title. In 1951, north of New York City, in the Catskills at the foot of Hunter Mountain, Camp Jened began offering summer sessions for campers with disabilities of all kinds.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, the camp developed a permissive and experimental environment largely driven by the era’s countercultural attitudes and fostered by program director Larry Allison. The movie’s first section, which shrewdly introduces viewers to the Jened vibe as if we were arriving on the bus like uncomfortable first-time campers and counselors, is as eye-opening as it is invigorating. Counselor Joe O’Conor says, “I was not prepared for the visual of so many disabled people at one time, and I froze. I became paralyzed with fear. Then somebody behind me pushed me because I was in the way and that forward momentum carried me through the summer.”

Co-director LeBrecht, who began attending Camp Jened as a fourteen-year-old, would bring the fire and energy inspired by the philosophies and experiences of fellow attendees into disability rights activism before establishing a career as a motion picture and theatrical sound designer. LeBrecht is one of the movie’s key personalities, but it is a testament to his filmmaking skills that he and Newnham share the movie’s point of view among a core group of people. The most dynamic of these players is undoubtedly the cosmically-named Judy Heumann, an indefatigable civil rights activist and Jened alumna who did as much as any other organizer to bring about significant and lasting change for members of the disability community.

So much of the dynamism and excitement of “Crip Camp” is communicated through the broad scope of the archival footage that allows Newnham and LeBrecht to immerse the viewer in the past. Daily activities at Jened were memorialized on film and half-inch videotape, often captured by the campers themselves and also recorded in conjunction with the members of the People’s Video Theater. That content is especially vital, as it does more to dismantle stereotypes and break down myths than the well-meaning news reports also excerpted in the film. Newnham and LeBrecht soon turn their attention to the 504 Sit-in that would include, at the San Francisco Office of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the longest occupation of a federal building in United States history, but the soul of the movie lives at the camp.

Some viewers might argue that “Crip Camp” could have been two films: one about Jened itself and one about the activism that happened after the campers left. Summer camp is already a genre unto itself, with hallmarks like “The Parent Trap,” “Meatballs,” “Little Darlings,” “Wet Hot American Summer,” and the classic 1998 “This American Life” episode “Notes on Camp,” to name a few. “Crip Camp” must now be added, with an exclamation point, to that roster. Jened’s real-life teen angst and its participants’ hopes and dreams — from endless makeout sessions to the hysterical aftermath of an outbreak of crabs — are as horny, heartfelt, and human as it gets.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Eliza Hittman’s Sundance favorite “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” which played in theaters for just three days before Focus Features pulled the film amidst the widespread and unprecedented coronavirus-related closures, will be made available on demand beginning April 3. According to Anne Thompson, the movie will cost $19.99 to rent for a 48 hour period and will be carried on several platforms. As distributors and consumers navigate the unexpected changes brought about by stay-at-home measures, social distancing, and self-quarantine, the industry will adjust — at least for the time being — to the idea of premium video on demand rather than a traditional rollout in movie theaters.

“Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” which received a Sundance Special Jury Award for Neo-Realism before going on to claim the Silver Bear at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, tells the story of a pregnant Pennsylvania teenager who travels with her cousin to New York City to get an abortion. Hittman’s third feature continues to demonstrate the talents, sensibilities, and cinematic evolution of a first-rate writer-director, following the closely-observed and emotionally-charged “It Felt Like Love” (2013) and “Beach Rats” (2017) — both of which premiered at Sundance.

A stunning debut performance by Sidney Flanigan, who anchors the movie as the pregnant Autumn, keeps with Hittman’s tradition of using young actors who convey achingly recognizable humanity. We spend the movie in close proximity to Autumn, whose determination in the face of seemingly insurmountable setbacks and challenges aligns with Hittman’s own surgical restraint and withheld judgements regarding her protagonist’s actions. For reasons that Hittman allows the audience to infer from the behavior of the people depicted in the expository scenes, self-reliance is the first, best, and only option as Autumn sees it. But she does take cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) along on her journey, and the relationship of the two develops as one of the movie’s most rewarding components.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the devastating consequences anticipated by Autumn, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” is as powerful a coming-of-age story as any in recent memory. Hittman is unfailingly good at expressing the uncertainties of the liminal passages facing the two young women. Autumn is naive not only to the speed and volume of NYC, but also to the labyrinth of abortion services, rules, and regulations. The cousins are also caught right on the very edge between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience. Hittman effectively illustrates the latter via the introduction of Jasper (Theodore Pellerin), a pushy, pesky, and persistent admirer of Skylar. The unsettling mood that accompanies his presence underscores the extent to which both Skylar and Autumn are vulnerable.

Throughout the course of the film, Autumn meets with a series of adults, and these figures exist along the entire spectrum of pro- and anti-choice (one such scene, among the very best of the year, gives the movie its title). Hittman does not hide her own sympathies, and all of these counselors, caretakers, and practitioners act from deep personal investment and firmly-held moral and ethical orientations. In other words, all intend to do what they think is right, or best, for Autumn and others like her. Hittman’s depictions of these interactions, which were constructed from the director’s own deep research, remain wholly devoted to the personal experience of Autumn, whose face and voice reveal the deepest and most empathetic notes, again and again.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Veteran sound editor and USC professor Midge Costin educates and entertains as the director of “Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound.” An engaging, entry-level crash course on the role of audio in motion picture storytelling, the film is a sibling to “Visions of Light,” “Side by Side,” and other behind-the-scenes documentaries that examine various aspects of the dream factory. Movies like “Making Waves” follow a common formula: talking head interviews with well-known filmmakers alternate with dazzling images from spectacular Hollywood successes. The addition of just enough explanation of technique and process, delivered in layperson-friendly terms with helpful graphics, rounds out the presentation.

“Making Waves” pays tribute to key historical flashpoints before vaulting into the era defined by the work of Walter Murch and Ben Burtt. After a quick segment bridging the silent era to the immediately popular phenomenon of synchronous dialogue, Costin acknowledges the pioneering, game-changing contributions of Murray Spivack, the legendary sound engineer and musician who effectively created an entire motion picture audioscape for the 1933 “King Kong.” Spivack’s innovations, which included recording a set of animal voices and manipulating their speeds to suggest creatures previously unheard, stood in contrast to the less expensive method that reused and recycled stock ricochets, punches, explosions, and other effects.

Along with Spivack, radio veteran Orson Welles is cited for the enormity of respect he held for crafting unique sonic signatures for each location in “Citizen Kane.” Due admiration is also given to sound-savvy filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, and Stanley Kubrick. Costin shifts into higher gear with the section devoted to Murch, who may deserve the largest share of individual credit for treating sound as a critical artistic element in filmmaking. Murch’s philosophy is illustrated through some beautiful examples, and one of the most effective — Michael Corleone’s restaurant murder of Sollozzo and McCluskey in “The Godfather” — is an eye-opening lesson in Murch’s affinity for musique concrete and the role of sound in conveying meaning and emotion in film.

So many popular media documents that communicate the historical evolution of the Hollywood story overlook, diminish, or erase the contributions of women and people of color. “Making Waves” marks a refreshing corrective to that trend, and Costin shares a terrific section on the indefatigable Barbra Streisand and her commitment to next-generation sound on “A Star Is Born.” Costin also makes certain to place the observations of Pat Jackson, Ryan Coogler, Victoria Rose Sampson (who talks about working with her mom Kay Rose), Teresa Eckton, Karen Baker Landers, Jessica Gallavan, Bobbi Banks, Greg Hedgepath, Cece Hall, Ai-Ling Lee, Alyson Dee Moore, Anna Behlmer, and others alongside those offered by household names like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Lora Hirschberg’s thoughts on the layering of sound in the airport scene in “Nashville” are as inspiring as her later comments on dismantling gender barriers in the industry.

No matter how many times we have listened, awestruck, to the emergence of Burtt as the preternaturally gifted, galaxy-building sound wizard of “Star Wars,” it is still an expected stop on the journey. The most dedicated cinephiles might quibble with the distribution of wealth (more David Lynch and Alan Splet for me, please), but Costin parcels out each of her major segments with built-in arguments and a sense of mission. The chapter on Foley will take film students of a certain vintage back to Terry Burke’s 1979 “Track Stars,” and “Making Waves” often turns its ears to previously unheard nooks and crannies that will light a fire in the next generation of world-class film artists.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In 2017, the always vital Guy Maddin and regular collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson were commissioned by the San Francisco Film Society to create some kind of city-themed motion picture homage/tribute in collage form for the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival. The movie that resulted, “The Green Fog,” has not been previously accessible to audiences outside of several big 2018 dates on the international film festival circuit. Finally, Maddin has remedied fan disgruntlement by making the superbly strange trip available to view free of charge on his Vimeo channel.

In an interview with Eric Kohn published at the time of the festival premiere in April of 2017, Maddin stated that he and the Johnsons initially approached their task by screening some 200 San Francisco-set movies and television shows at ramped-up speeds, mining the footage for key motifs. Sometime during that process, the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” emerged as the central reference point around which “The Green Fog” would come to be organized. At just over an hour, the final product is a glorious and triumphant metanarrative to be cherished by Maddin’s fellow film-obsessives and lovers of the Master of Suspense’s 1958 gift that keeps on giving.

Shrewd and nimble editing by the Johnsons cuts carefully around and over choices that might otherwise have brought the wrath of copyright-holding corporations greedy for some kind of financial compensation. One of the movie’s most consistently delightful techniques slices away nearly all the spoken dialogue from Ernie’s-tipped dining room conversation scenes, but leaves the breaths, lip-smacks, sighs, hesitations, pauses and reactions. The effect is deliciously erotic. Maddin has always been an equal opportunity satyr, a pansexual provocateur whose libidinous fevers are as often homosexual as they are heterosexual. “The Green Fog” exhibits compelling evidence that the gaze can be cast in the direction of men in their very own state of to-be-looked-at-ness.

Thankfully, the conclusion of “The Green Fog” cuts together the title cards from the source material used by the moviemakers, allowing the curious to compile a future viewing list of the less familiar content. The roll call serves as a reminder of Maddin’s considerable gifts as an appreciator of the tragic and the comic (“The Green Fog” inspires awe, but it is also very, very funny). After all, we’ve seen glimpses of “Basic Instinct” and “An Eye for an Eye,” “Portrait in Black” and “Pacific Heights,” “McMillan and Wife” and, liberally and indispensably, so many astonishing clips from “The Streets of San Francisco.”

Several inspirations/precursors inform the categorization of “The Green Fog.” From Christian Marclay’s monumental experiment “The Clock,” to great city-themed postcards such as Thom Andersen’s “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” “The Green Fog” is another shining example of how easy it can be to disappear in the silver screen labyrinth. These mirrors and rhymes of familiar sights, looks, places, actions, and themes form the basis of how we experience narrative filmmaking.

In “Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton,” Maddin narrates, “The colors, sounds, and desires of the living can never be perfectly replicated by video or film. Close, but only approximated. And anything that approximates imperfectly, no matter how well, is a distortion, as good as a lie, and every bit as dangerous.” The sentiment could just as easily apply to “Vertigo” and “The Green Fog.” Who better than Maddin, who has spent a career exploring the conundrum of cinema’s battle between reality and artifice, to remix as splendidly and confidently as Marclay and Andersen and Gyorgy Palfi?

“The Green Fog” is a more pointed and precise variation of the cinephilia constructed by Palfi in the spectacular “Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen.” Where the 450 plus sources used in the Hungarian mashup build a much wider love story, Maddin’s “Vertigo”-based specificity motivates a reading of Hitchcock’s masterpiece that invites us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about rooftop chases, voyeurism, surveillance, sexual obsession, and the overlooked and ignored thoughts and feelings of Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus visited the Fargo Film Festival in 2002 — the second year of the event — to introduce a screening of her Emmy and Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning, Oscar-nominated “The Farm: Angola, USA.” The supremely talented artist would go on to make many other nonfiction films of note before “Lost Girls,” her fiction debut, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival before finding its current home on Netflix. Based on Robert Kolker’s book “Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery,” the movie follows the painful odyssey of Mari Gilbert (Amy Ryan) as she doggedly pursues justice and closure in the case of her missing daughter Shannan, a likely victim of the so-called Long Island serial killer, who operated from 1996 to 2010.

Plenty of liberties are taken in the screenplay by Michael Werwie, whose script for last year’s “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” represents another instance of collaboration with a social justice documentarian — Joe Berlinger in that example — who interprets the events described in a true-crime book. Of the two projects, “Lost Girls” is significantly more successful. Garbus emphasizes the female relationships in a loose network of victims’ family members over the more sensational tropes of the serial killer narrative. The result is a story that espouses a point of view focused as sharply on the experiences of women as Gilbert herself was focused on attaining answers from an unhelpful police department.

“Lost Girls” avoids some of the less effective cliches of the genre, but stumbles over others. Kevin Corrigan’s axe-grinding conspiracy theorist, for example, needed another short scene or two in order to fully make sense. The weary police commissioner, played sympathetically by Gabriel Byrne, offers little more than frustrating impotence and borderline ineptitude. In contrast and by design, the female characters own the narrative. Orbiting around Ryan’s indefatigable crusader are Thomasin McKenzie and Oona Laurence as daughters Sherre and Sarra. Lola Kirke makes a real impression as Kim, a sex worker whose proximity to the murders and similarity to Shannan initially put Mari on edge.

One of the most important messages Garbus communicates in “Lost Girls” is the idea that the victims are human beings deserving of a degree of dignity that is otherwise absent when media narratives and police frame them as “only” or “just” prostitutes. Unfortunately, Werwie’s script is never subtle enough to give the same treatment to the overarching systems and structures that fail women who are marginalized just for existing on the fringes and edges of society.

In contrast to the success Garbus enjoys in her collaboration with Ryan, whose edge remains sharp from beginning to end, the lack of resolution inherent in the source material sets up an insurmountable task: the solution to the central crime and mystery that puts this particular story in motion. Kolker’s book looks at the lives of five of the serial killer’s victims and considers the implications of Craigslist and online personal ad spaces used to sell sex; the movie selects one victim and opts to ignore any probing consideration of web-based sex work. Had “Lost Girls” scrutinized the latter, the film may have been able to stack up alongside the director’s more accomplished documentaries.