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Sheffield Doc Fest Shorts (Part 2)

Sheffield Doc Fest Shorts (Part 2). Esme Betamax | @betamaxer

Rhyme & Rhythm

Cinema meets sculpture, painting, dancing and drumming in this selection of short films from the Rhyme & Rhythm strand. From Croatia, Cuba, the UK and the USA, we immerse ourselves in the artistic expression of individuals and the joy of creative collaboration. The Sheffield Doc Fest Shorts programme serves to help us (re)discover artists from around the world, reminding us of the radical potential of the arts and the importance of collective cultural experiences and spaces.

Esme Betamax | @betamaxer

The Rhyme & Rhythm Shorts Programme includes 5 films, the first two of which are reviewed in Sheffield Doc Fest Shorts (Part 1). The rest are reviewed here:

Uproar

Diunis is the band leader of Rumba Morena, a nine-strong all women group. It’s an anomaly in Havana’s rigidly male Rumba tradition. Stemming from the Abakua religion, the men claim that the spirit of the drum (Ana) loses her power if women play it or even go near it. Diunis counters that it is simply down to “machismo”: The men don’t like the women to play.

It was not easy for Moe Najati to film Uproar in such an openly hostile atmosphere. Often their performances would be cancelled at short notice, or disrupted by people upset to see the group receiving any attention.

Najati gives a major proponent of the opposite view fair time to air his views on the matter, who wastes no time in backing up Diunis’s explanation that Rumba is traditionally highly misogynistic and homophobic. His reasons include his distaste for women wearing trousers, and that rumba is “profane”. He practically spits out the name Buena Vista Social Club, being offended as he is about their inclusivity.

Ultimately it’s heartening to hear from Diunis’s elderly father, who champions equality and encouraged her to follow her passion. His pride is palpable: “Cuban women are brave and capable people.”

The Business of Thought

Artists Space is an independent arts collective and gallery founded in 1972.

The Business of Thought demonstrates the passion and intensity required to create and maintain this type of environment. So often DIY arts collectives succumb to internal conflict or external forces (property developers). It is highly unusual for it to have survived, and thrived, for almost five decades.

The soundtrack is outstanding. It includes Arto Lindsay Trio, The Contortions, DNA, and Sonic Youth, all of whom performed at Artists Space over the years. It maps a line from No Wave, through Punk and Grunge and highlights the relationship that these genres are known to have with DIY art spaces. It has the potential to lead you down a musical rabbit hole, along with the likes of Brian Eno and Mars.

Director Sarah Pettengill chooses not to linger on any one aspect of Artists Space, which has seen several generations of artists call it home. Anti-establishment and not without controversy, a thorough history of Artists Space would require a change of pace. The Business of Thought is quickfire and multi-layered. It is impossible to take it all in in a single viewing. In using the raw materials she has—voiceover culled from 30 hours of archival cassette tape interviews over a 45 year period—this 11 minute film evokes the key to Artists Space: its spirit.

Material Bodies

What is a prosthetic limb? Is it a body part? A piece of clothing? An accessory? Director Dorothy Allen-Pickard puts this to a small group of people, all of whom have prosthetic limbs. Material Bodies is a short meditation on prostheses, the unique perspective of each person who has one, and the reception they have noticed from wider society: from fetishisation to pity.

Material Bodies is filmed in such a way as to emphasise abstract shapes. It offers a limited view of the subjects, with music, colour, and texture adding to this abstract visual.

The UK has a poor record when it comes to ableism, only seeing worth if Paralympic medals can be won. But Allen-Pickard’s 4 minute short does not speak in terms of value, simply a group of people saying “I exist”.

More Rhyme & Rhythm at Sheffield Doc Fest here.

14th July 2020
Bianca: Review

If anything was going to survive the epidemic currently plaguing the world, it was the art of filmmaking, and slowly but surely, we are seeing the products that attest to that. Italian director Federico Zampaglione’s “Bianca” is one such product.

Shot entirely on an iPad, running for 10 minutes, and starring only the director’s daughter and partner, Bianca is the perfect example of a quarantine film, and as such, is all about style over substance. The story follows Bianca (Linda Zampaglione) and her mother (Giglia Marra), on a night where Bianca is being kept from going to a party on account of being too young. In a testament to how easy tension can be to build the thrills flow from there.

It becomes apparent very early on that someone is in the house who should not be. Becoming aware of this, the mother prepares to call the police but finds the phone to be disconnected. A man then rings the doorbell wearing a surgical mask to cover his face in the peephole, and things being to feel quite sinister. All of this happens at a rapid pace and soon Bianca’s mother is brandishing a knife and fearing the worst for her daughter. The rest you can find out watching yourself, but I can offer my thoughts on how it is all pieced together.

In other circumstances, there is not a lot to note here, but considering this is more of a symbol of art surviving strife than anything else, it is quite brilliant. Yes, there have been better examples of filming on apple products, and there will likely be more inventive quarantine films.

Still, thanks to some striking work with shadows and an excellent, almost comic use of slow-motion violence, this gets a big old tick from me. I was even on edge briefly as the pace makes things challenging to grasp, and the edit convinces you someone is coming.

Making films in times like these is perfect for making art for art’s sake, the need for deeper meaning or technical prowess is not as urgent, just create. For that matter, in normal circumstances, things are the same, YouTube will always have a place for content like this, and it’s as good a place to share as any.

Would this short film get into a film festival, probably not, but it has eyes on it and passed the time when there was far too much time available to pass.

14th July 2020
Greyhound: The BRWC Review

U.S. Navy Commander Ernest Krause (Tom Hanks) is assigned to lead an Allied convoy across the Atlantic during World War II. His convoy, however, is pursued by German U-boats. Although this is Krause’s first wartime mission, he finds himself embroiled in what would come to be known as the longest, largest, and most complex naval battle in history: The Battle of the Atlantic.

Ever since I first saw the trailer for Aaron Schneider’s Greyhound as a coming attraction many months ago, back when the coronavirus didn’t take over the entire world and back when movie theatres were open and operating at full capacity, I thought that the film looked like quite the adventure. Something about it reminded me quite strongly of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, an excellent war film that places you on the front lines with the soldiers in the midst of the deadly event.

But besides the amazing trailer, one of the most exciting things about the release of Greyhound is the fact that it is written by its lead actor, the legendary Tom Hanks. We all love Hanks. He has been in so many terrific films over the years, and we all know him to be one of the nicest celebrities in the world. I, for one, was fully ready to see what a Tom Hanks-written film would feel like. Now that I have seen it, I can’t say that it lived up to the hype, but Greyhound is still a fast-paced and enjoyable war film that is entirely digestible to watch, almost to a fault.

Without a doubt, the weakest aspect of this film sadly has to do with the characters. They essentially get nothing when it comes to development. The only one that gets even the smallest amount of an arc is that of Hanks’ character Ernest Krause, and even he feels underdeveloped. Everybody else on his ship feels even flatter. We don’t learn a single thing about them throughout the entire duration of the movie, and as a result, it makes it a little bit difficult for the audience to truly care about the team’s plight and their efforts.

Although I greatly enjoyed the aforementioned Dunkirk, that was the exact same problem I had with that film too. It just didn’t have any character development. Both Dunkirk and Greyhound are far more interested in placing you, the viewer, in the middle of an intense battle and showing you how scary it would be to be in the middle of an event like this.

After you get past the first thirty minutes of this film, which is unfortunately rather boring and uneventful, it moves at a much faster pace and the movie as a whole becomes much more enjoyable. It doesn’t show you the grittiness of war and the consequences that come with it and it doesn’t have the interesting and compelling characters as it should, but Greyhound still manages to be an entertaining war movie with plenty of ship-to-ship combat and action spectacles to keep viewers in their seats.

Greyhound suffers from an immense lack of character development, but it’s nevertheless a well-paced and perfectly enjoyable war film with plenty of action set pieces.

13th July 2020
The Old Guard: The BRWC Review

Along with producing a bevy of binge-worthy shows and awards-caliber films, Netflix has dipped their toes into blockbuster filmmaking. The early results have been generally unimpressive, with efforts like Bright and 6 Underground failing to translate grandiose thrills to the small-screen. These missteps have not stopped the platform’s pursuit of tentpole projects, returning from the drawing board with The Old Guard, an adaptation of Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernandez’s graphic novel. I am thrilled to report that The Old Guard not only dwarfs its streaming contemporaries, it also emphatically raises the bar for the superhero genre with its surprisingly tender approach.

The Old Guard follows Andy (Charlize Theron), an ageless warrior leading a group of immortal figures who look to stop worldwide atrocities (Matthias Schoenaerts as Booker, Marwan Kenzari as Joe, and Luca Marinelli as Nicky). After a newly-initiated immortal Nile (Kiki Layne) is discovered, the team must join together to battle an organization looking to harness and monetize their abilities.

At the center of The Old Guard lies an equally capable and appealing ensemble cast. With her grizzled bravado and commanding presence, Charlize Theron continues to thrive as one of the best stars in the industry, as her adept ability allows the actor to render some much-needed humanity out of her struggles with mortality (or in this case, lack thereof). Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli are a joy to watch as a romantically entangled pair, creating a lived-in onscreen dynamic that never steps into stereotypical territory. Matthias Schoenarts, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Kiki Layne enhance their respective roles, with Layne breathing an effervescent life into her role as the team’s newcomer.

Where most superhero ventures simply infuse their protagonist with abnormal abilities to create endless bloodshed, The Old Guard refreshingly peels at the veneer of these larger-than-life figures. Screenwriter Greg Rucka’s adaption keeps the work’s intimate design largely intact, constructively exploring the emotional complications that derive from a life of immortality. This uncontrollable inflection is by no means the gift, with the team being sentenced to a life of isolation devoid of the familial bonds and a sense of completion. It’s incredibly gratifying to watch a superhero film grapple with its premise’s deeper implications (the characters even question the nature of their violent vigilantism), allowing our heroes to be more than empty vessels of carnage.

That’s not to say The Old Guard doesn’t offer the crowd-pleasing pleasures of the genre. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood delicately balances the insular character building with rousing setpieces, taking full advantage of the creative premise with some inventively designed stuntwork (seeing a character jump out of a skyscraper to then witnessing their bones reheal on impact is glorious to watch). Some may leave the film wanting more bone-crushing fights, but I believe the restraint is well-calibrated to ensure each setpiece has an actual impact on the narrative.

There’s a lot to like about The Old Guard, but the final product still features its fair share of blemishes. Rucka’s narrative gives his characters room to breathe, but it also straddles them with the standard-issue action conventions. Whether its the mustache-twirling villains or over-eager pop tracks that fail to add much of a pulse, there are elements that could have been refined to generate a more original experience. Personally, I hope that a potential sequel steeps itself further into the film’s promising social implications, with the characters standing strong as agents for progressive concepts.

Infusing its familiar superhero framework with a well-calibrated balance of thrills and humanity, The Old Guard excels as a promising first chapter in a new franchise.

13th July 2020
Pitt, Whannell, Halloween: Weekly Round Up

Pitt, Whannell, Halloween: Weekly Round Up – Although it might seem strange to think it now, there was a point in time where Keanu Reeves was all washed up. His career had been steadily declining for many years. Of course, all that changed once John Wick came along and reignited interested in the star, and rewrote the rules of the modern action movie as we know it.

While Brad Pitt’s career isn’t what one would call in decline, after all, only last year he had great success appearing in a leading role in Tarantino’s well-received Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it has been a while since we last saw the actor take on a role in an out and out action movie.

This looks set to change, mind, with this week’s announcement that Pitt will be starring in action thriller Bullet Train, directed by John Wick and Atomic Blonde director David Leitch. The film will be adapted from the Japanese novel Maria Beetle, by author Kotaro Isaka, a tells the story of five assassins who find themselves on the same train as each other, headed from Tokyo.

Of course, as you can no doubt imagine from that set-up alone, this leads to all sorts of carnage, and with Leitch at the helm, it’s a safe bet to assume all of this will be realized in energetic and exciting action set-pieces. After all, his last film was the Fast and Furious spin-pff Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw, which was a lot of goofy fun.

Although, truthfully, I’m sort of hoping for a more grounded adrenaline-fuelled thrill-ride of the kind we’ve seen before in both the John Wick franchise and the excellent and underappreciated Atomic Blond. Although, either way, with that premise, Leitch’s involvement, and Pitt leading the film’s cast. I’ll admit that I’m pretty excited about this one either way.

But, now we’ve had a little good and interesting news, let’s move on to some downright depressing stuff, shall we?

This week we learned that the movie industry is still not free and clear of the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic, and this has been made no clearer than in Universal Studios’ decision to push back four of their highest-profile horror movies.

The first was Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (a film that I genuinely cannot wait for), which was originally scheduled for a release date of June 12^th, but is now scheduled for October 16^th of this year instead. It’s not too harsh a push, but it’s enough to feel the frustration. Then with have the next installment in the Purge franchise (seriously surprised that thing is still going, guys), titled The Forever Purge, which was supposed to be coming out July 10^th but has now been pushed back a whole year to 2021.

Perhaps the highest-profile of these films, though, comes in the form of the two sequels to 2018’s Halloween reboot (also called Halloween, which… I mean, does anyone else find that infuriatingly complicated and a little lazy?).

Producer John Carpenter released a statement on Twitter explaining the decision for the move, and also confirmed that the new 2021 release date for Halloween Kills will include an IMAX release of the movie. Of course, the full-year push back for Kills means that the third movie, Halloween Ends, has also been pushed back a year, meaning we won’t be seeing that film until 2022.

Fortunately, for horror fans like me at least, it’s not all push backs and doom in the genre, as this week we got some pretty exciting news concerning Blumhouse’s upcoming reboot of the classic Universal monster movie The Wolf Man.

We already knew that the film would star Ryan Gosling, but what we didn’t know, that we do now, is that the film will be written and directed by Leigh Whannell.

For those of you unfamiliar with Whannell, he’s the man who brought us the excellent reboot of The Invisible Man, so his involvement here is pretty exciting. Universal and Blumhouse both seem keen to get these new monster movies off the ground as quickly as the can, perhaps to make everyone forget about the awful Dark Universe attempt that we had with Mummy: Impossible (but I’m going to keep bringing it up anyway).

Either way, after the success of The Invisible Man it makes sense to bring Whannell back, meaning that these films are going to have certain similarities beyond their shared inspiration. It’s been a long time since we had a genuinely scary, well-made werewolf movie, so here’s hoping that Gosling and Whannell can bring that to the piece. – Pitt, Whannell, Halloween: Weekly Round Up

13th July 2020