Author: Ray Lobo

Paul Schrader’s résumé is as complete as anyone’s in film history.  As a screenwriter he gifted the world Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ.  He has directed gems such as Affliction and, in my opinion one of the best movies of the last decade, First Reformed.  As if all that were not enough, just listen to Schrader speak in interviews about the history of film and you will be humbled; he has likely forgotten more about film than you ever hope to know. 

In many of his films Schrader focuses on a male protagonist living a lonely life and who is left abandoned in a universe wherein there are no clear answers to his moral dilemmas.  Schrader’s characters wrestle with moral ambiguity; yet life forces them to choose.  There is no better example of the Schrader-ian protagonist than Ethan Hawke’s character in First Reformed.  Even Schrader’s Christ in Last Temptation is a protagonist wracked by moral doubt—this is the main reason why Last Temptation was so controversial with some Christians who cannot conceive of doubt in relation to Christ.  Schrader is the most Dostoyevsky-esque director in the history of film. 

He presents lonely underground men as vehicles for presenting Christian themes such as sacrifice, redemption, and moral fortitude.  Dostoyevsky was a Christian and a profligate gambler.  In fact, he wrote a novella titled “The Gambler.”  The connection between Dostoyevsky and Schrader becomes even tighter with Schrader’s latest, The Card Counter.   

William Tell (Oscar Isaac) is an Iraq war veteran.  He served time in a military jail after following orders to torture and humiliate inmates at Abu Ghraib prison while his superior and interrogation trainer—John Gordo (Willem Dafoe)—faced no repercussions due to the fact that he worked for a private military contractor.  After his prison term, William spends his time going from casino to casino, from sketchy motel to sketchier motel, across the USA.  He does not gamble for money. 

He gambles in the most Sisyphean manner possible—to pass the time.  Military service and prison changed him.  His sentences are clipped, he is disciplined, fastidious, engages in quirky habits, and his aura seems to carry the weight of regret.  Along the way he meets a mysterious woman, La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), who is trying to recruit him into her gambling stable; and an alienated young man, Cirk (Tye Sheridan), who tries to pull William into a plot that involves taking revenge on John Gordo.  

The Card Counter is not groundbreaking in terms of narrative.  The revenge plotline and the love story between William and La Linda are conventional.  But focusing on plot does no justice to The Card Counter.  In terms of mood, character development, and the themes explored, Schrader hits it out of the park.  Schrader crafts a character for grade A talent like Oscar Isaac, and not surprisingly, Isaac gives an acting masterclass—you need no more evidence of his talent than a scene involving Isaac and Sheridan in a diner wherein Isaac recounts his experiences as a military interrogator. 

Schrader is a director in full control of his toolbox.  We get beautiful POV shots of William Tell walking in casinos.  And a film about gambling better make sure that it captures the attraction to and beauty of cards, chips, and tables.  Schrader more than succeeds in this regard.  When he films cards, those cards float on the table, they dance as if they were ballerinas, they are sublime.  Does the film’s middle section drag a bit?  Yes.  Were there times when I felt the film’s music was too obtrusive.  Absolutely.  These flaws, however, are not enough to diminish The Card Counter’s many merits.

Ultimately, Schrader is commenting on America in The Card Counter.  America’s crimes in Iraq are front and center, patriotism is explored, and we are thrown into what is perhaps the most Underground Man/Dostoyevskian place imaginable—the epicenter of atomized individualism, America the lonely. 

Throw into the mix Catholic notions of regret and redemption in relation to America’s unaccounted for crimes in the Middle East, and you have a true understanding of what Schrader is going for in The Card Counter.  This is a powerful film.  It is mature, in control, knows what it wants to say, and says it both in terms of script and visuals.  Schrader has cemented himself as one of the giants of film.                     

Director Joe Badon’s The Blood of the Dinosaurs packs a lot into its seventeen minute runtime.  The film is a Texas Cowboy Stew that is not allowed to slowly simmer.  Instead, Badon is a frenzied chef that throws everything from the choicest cuts to gristle and bone into the pot. 

Think of The Blood of the Dinosaurs as part filmstrip video, public access TV show, obscure amateur YouTube video, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse all combined and raised to eleven on the hallucinogenic amplifier.    

Kiddie show presenter, Uncle Bobbo (Vincent Stalba), is our unblinking nutjob guide down into the lower depths of a demented visual media hell.  A DIY aesthetic is combined with a meta vibe in presenting topics and themes ranging from environmentalism, fossil fuels, birth, death, and reincarnation.  The Blood of the Dinosaurs is captivating; boring it definitely is not. 

If Rick and Morty or Adult Swim’s Too Many Cooks video is your thing, The Blood of the Dinosaurs will work for you.  But, as with the aforementioned Rick and Morty, after sitting through a machine gun assault of meta gags, one wonders what is the point of yet another piece of meta filmmaking. 

It may just be that nowadays going meta is the safest thing one can do.  I dare say that non-meta sincerity may be the most punk thing one can do in 2022.

Early on in Six Years Gone, we are gently installed in a world of safe domesticity.  Carrie Dawson (Veronica Jean Trickett) is a divorcee living with her eleven-year-old daughter, Lolly (Anna Griffiths).  They live quite typical lives.  Lolly, as many girls her age, is mesmerized by her phone.  An interest in boys is bubbling up. 

Carrie, as a concerned parent, is delicately nosy and clumsily attempts to talk to her daughter about boys.  The biggest tension, as far as tensions go, in Carrie’s life is her ex-husband’s new girlfriend.  Carrie chafes at the sight of photos of her ex with his girlfriend.  Regardless, Carrie stays grounded thanks to a deep connection with her friend Kate (Sophie Dearlove) and a new romantic interest.  Carrie’s life, however, is about to fall apart. 

Carrie gets Lolly ready for school and sees her off.  Later that day, Carrie notices she has not heard from Lolly.  Carrie’s mother was supposed to pick up Lolly from school.  Carrie’s mother forgets.  Carrie calls Lolly.  No answer.  She calls everyone in Lolly’s circle.  No one has seen her.  Director Warren Dudley accurately captures a very contemporary panic.  It is the panic of knowing that someone is always on their phone, yet not answering for an extended period.  Carrie knows something is off.  Veronica Jean Trickett’s acting is top-notch.  We feel her gut- wrenching anxiety.  Sure enough, Lolly is missing.

Six years pass—as the title indicates—and Lolly is still missing.  We now see Carrie living with her infirm mother, acting as her caretaker, and dealing with high court enforcement agents demanding that she pay her debts.  The rest of Six Years Gone is an agonizing watch.  We see Carrie descend into drug use, sex work, and unbearable loneliness—her mother’s slow mental decline does not allow Carrie to depend on her as emotional support.  Six Years Gone is a tale of two movies. 

The first half works and captures the desperation of losing a daughter to child traffickers.  The second half—six years after Lolly’s disappearance—is a steady diet of anguish and bleakness.  One understands that Dudley is trying to convey how a singular occurrence in someone’s life—in this case a child’s abduction—can drastically change a life. 

Fine, but having Carrie employ two of the creeps that solicit her for sex to track down the child trafficker she suspects nabbed Lolly is a bit too much.  There is too much contrast between Carrie pre-abduction and post to the point that the second half of the movie begins to feel a bit too Death Wish-y.    

One wonders what is the point of sitting through Six Years Gone to the end.  As a showcase of Trickett’s ability as an actor to go down increasingly dark rungs on a downward spiral—mission accomplished.  Other than that, one wonders what is the point of sitting through yet another film about child trafficking that leads to nothing more than bleakness for the sake of bleakness.

Why am I drawn to music documentaries?  Why are many of us drawn to music documentaries?  Undeniably, there is the lurid behind-the-scenes factor of getting to peek at the inner tensions of bands.  We marvel at how band members manage to come together to produce wonderful art all the while enjoying the name-calling, the flying projectiles, the breakups, and the reunions.  But we may also be drawn to music documentaries about bands for another reason, a similar but less lurid one.  Band documentaries are allegories for democratic politics. 

With a band you have a group of strangers, sometimes childhood friends, sometimes family members, thrown together and engaged in a communal project.  If democratic politics involves a collective sorting out of the procedures, convictions, and models by which a group of people wants to fashion a greater project; then a band is a microcosm of that collective endeavor.  Bands exhibit all the tensions and dynamics found in political collectives—authoritarian figures, coalition formation, deliberation, economic considerations, distribution of merit, etc.—with an end goal of creating memorable art.  

Directors Thomas Robsahm’s and Aslaug Holm’s documentary a-ha: The Movie is a comprehensive look into the careers of a-ha’s members.  A-ha was formed in Oslo by childhood friends Pål Waaktaar and Magne Furuholmen.  They formed the early musical backbone of the band and later recruited a very talented vocalist–Morten Harket.  The trio’s influences ranged from the Doors, to Uriah Heep, to Queen, to even the Velvet Underground and Joy Division.  Robsahm and Holm do a formidable job of setting the Oslo scene in the 70s, or better said, the lack of a “scene.”  Oslo at that time was not exactly the epicenter of pop or rock. 

The trio knew they had no other choice but to leave Oslo and head for London.  They arrived in London in 1981 and soaked up the punk and post punk scene that electrified the city.  They went to shows, took notes, and took inspiration from acts such as Soft Cell.  Their early days in London were the opposite of synth pop sheen and glamor.  The trio stayed in grubby flats and sometimes resorted to eating moldy food.  They, however, were able to fight their way up the musical animal kingdom, got signed by Warner Brothers, got matched with the right producers, and hit the lottery—a spot on Top of the Pops.  

Robsahm and Holm devote equal time to the stories of all three band members and their dynamics within the band.  Pål Waaktaar and Magne Furuholmen have a productive but competitive relationship—songwriting credits become a source of tension.  Morten Harket is thrust forward as the public relations face of the band.  Harket feels tension over having to be the energetic and confident public expression of the band while suffering through waves of self-doubt over his voice.  Robsahm and Holm are wise enough, however, to devote equal time to the honorary fourth member of the band—the song “Take on Me.” 

It was “Take on Me” that took a-ha to the stratosphere and the documentary does not hide this.  “Take on Me” put the band on heavy rotation on MTV, took them to number one on Billboard, made them world touring musicians, and made the boys from Oslo international household names.  Robsahm and Holm adopt the same drawn sketch aesthetic from the song’s video for the documentary.  They even reveal delightful nuggets of information about the song for those of us—me included—who were never hardcore fans of the band.  Unbeknownst to me, Furuholmen composed the song’s famous synth riff back when he was fourteen years old.  The documentary allows us to track early demos of the song on through the final version we are all familiar with.  

A-ha:  The Movie is a standard music documentary.  It is, however, an entertaining and informative watch.  For those of us who know a-ha only by way of “Take on Me,” the documentary is truly revelatory.  Robsahm and Holm acquaint us with the band’s other work—their songs are scattered throughout the documentary.  We also get to experience the band’s various phases—an awful boy band-ish phase, a U2 Joshua Tree phase, and even a more interesting proto-Coldplay phase. 

All in all, we discover that a-ha are much more than one-hit-wonders.  They are innovators.  It only takes listening to the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” for a few minutes to realize a-ha’s influence.  A-ha:  The Movie’s most interesting revelation is not so much the fighting or the tension, it is the metamorphosis of a glam synth pop band into a mature workmanlike studio and touring band.  

On the face of things, The Velvet Queen seems like just another nature documentary.  It is indeed that, but also so much more.  It is the best nature documentary I have seen in quite a long time.  Vincent Munier, a nature photographer at the top of his profession, is joined by Sylvain Tesson, an adventurer and novelist, in a quest to photograph the rare and solitary Tibetan snow leopard.  High up on the Tibetan plateau, in subzero temperatures, Munier and Tesson slowly track and wait for the furtive leopard. 

Undoubtedly, The Velvet Queen is a visual treat.  The Tibetan plateau and the animals that inhabit said plateau are majestic.  When Munier captures photographs or video of the animals, it is as if Divinity were staring at us.  But what makes The Velvet Queen a superlative work are the ruminations shared by Munier and Tesson, ruminations conveyed by way of whispers so as to not scare off the animals.  Munier and Tesson reveal themselves to be naturalists, philosophers, and above all, poets.   

Munier and Tesson perfectly complement each other.  Tesson sees Munier as a sort of spiritual guru of the Tibetan plateau, which truth be told; given the insights he has gained after much time spent on the plateau, his commentary on the hustle and bustle of life in big cities, on contemporary late-capitalist societies, and on human indifference toward the natural world; Tesson does indeed fit the role of guru, exuding an aura of enlightenment.  For Munier, going back to France and listening to the news feels like witnessing an absurd spectacle.  As he puts it, “In a city I am a different man, as if I were playing a role.”  Munier teaches Tesson how to be attentive, how to be patient, and above all, teaches him to catch the visual details on the plain that escape the untrained city eye. 

He teaches Tesson to observe; it is a master class in the training of the eye.  Tesson, however, is no mere student.  Tesson’s narration in The Velvet Queen is deeply profound.  His soothing voice is more Herzog-esque, and more transcendental than Werner Herzog’s narrations of his own nature documentaries.  And it is precisely Herzog’s documentaries that serve as an apt comparison.  Herzog’s signature is the unscripted veering off, the chance encounter, the animal that comes into the frame out of nowhere.  The Velvet Queen surprises us in the same way.  The animals surprise us at every corner.  Tibetan children appear out of nowhere and greet Munier and Tesson with joy and playfulness.  Herzog himself never captured such moments on film, moments that fill The Velvet Queen’s runtime.    

The Velvet Queen was codirected by Marie Amiguet and Munier himself.  Please do yourself a favor and try to catch it on a big screen.  It is much too beautiful a work to be seen on a computer—as was unfortunately the case for me.  There are moments of sublime beauty that can only be appreciated by way of the macro-images offered by the big screen.  There are even moments of tension—as when a yak teeters on the possibility of charging Munier and Tesson.  More than anything, The Velvet Queen offers us a much-needed antidote to our hustle and bustle, our fractured attention span, our inability to appreciate things. 

The animals in The Velvet Queen are “vessels suspended in time.”  And it is patience versus hastiness, the natural world versus the artificial contemporary world that serve as the dichotomies at the center of The Velvet Queen.  One cannot help but feel that technology, adverts, and the contemporary world overpromise and underdeliver in terms of human fulfillment.  Nature, on the other hand, seemingly under-promises given its slow pace; but, if we learn to be patient, can overdeliver in unimaginable ways.