New York’sTribeca Film Festival wraps up this weekend. However, you can catch up- the festival is offering select titles via the “Tribeca at Home” online portal from June 19th through July 2nd . I have a few more reviews to share with you, so let’s dive in…
Cinnamon ** (USA) – Coffy? Meet Cinnamon. Written, directed and executive produced by Bryian Keith Montgomery Jr., this crime thriller marks the first offering under the banner of Village Roadshow Pictures’ Black Noir Cinema, which according to Variety, “…aims to adapt and redefine the Blaxploitation genre and translate its spirit of empowerment to a new generation of Black audiences.” With all due respect, isn’t that an avenue that filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino (e.g. Jackie Brown, Django Unchained) and the Hughes Brothers (e.g. Dead Presidents) have already been traversing for a couple of decades? I’m just asking questions.
Hailey Kilgore plays a young woman who works at a gas station and aspires to make it big in the music biz. David Iacono plays the petty thief who sweeps her off her feet and vows to make her a star by any means necessary (he’s handsome, but roguish). The pair brainstorm a scheme to score some cash. Complications ensue. Kilgore and Iancono are appealing, and having players like Damon Wayans and genre stalwart Pam Grier (still a formidable presence) on board lends cachet, but the film falls curiously flat.
Deep Sea *** (China) – Xiaopeng Tian’s colorful 3-D animation fantasy follows the dreamlike journey of a melancholy little girl named Shenxiu (voiced by Wang Ting Wen) after she falls overboard during a storm while on an ocean cruise with her father, stepmother, and baby brother. Shenxiu longs to reconnect with her biological mother, who she hasn’t seen or heard from since her parents’ divorce. Akin to the little boy in Where the Wild Things Are, Shenxiu encounters strange and wondrous characters that embody her troubled emotional state; anthropomorphic creatures that also serve as avatars for the people who are closest to her. An imaginative and family-friendly adventure in the vein of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away
He Went That Way ** (USA) – Or, as I have dubbed it, He Went Every Which Way but Loose. Jeffrey Darling’s heartland noir (set in 1964) gets its kicks on Route 66. An animal handler (Zachary Quinto) is on the road to Chicago with his BFF…a celebrity chimpanzee named “Spanky”. At a truck stop café, he offers a ride to a wary hitchhiker (Jacob Eldori), little suspecting that he’s picked up a vicious serial killer. While all the elements are in place for a tension-filled “killer on the road” thriller, the film never quite gels as such. The two leads are game (like Michael Madsen before him, Eldori takes full advantage of his angular James Dean countenance with a suitably twitchy and squint-eyed performance) and the scenic vistas are well-photographed but vacillating tonal shifts in the narrative ultimately drag the film down.
Hey, Viktor! **** (Canada) – In 1998, a low-budget indie dramedy called Smoke Signals became a hit with critics and festival audiences. It was also groundbreaking, in the sense of being the first film to be written (Sherman Alexie), directed (Chris Eyre) and co-produced by Native Americans. The film was a career booster for several Native-American actors like Gary Farmer, Tantoo Cardinal and Adam Beach. For other cast members, not so much …like 11-year-old Cody Lightning, who played Adam Beach’s character “Victor” as a youngster.
Fast-forward 25 years. Cody Lightning plays (wait for it) Cody Lightning in his heightened reality dramedy (co-written with Samuel Miller), which reveals Cody has hit the bottom (and the bottle). Divorced and chronically depressed, his portfolio has dwindled to adult film gigs and half-finished screenplays about zombie priests. When his best friend and creative partner Kate (Hannah Cheesman) organizes an intervention, Cody has an epiphany…not to stop drinking, but to make a Smoke Signals sequel. All he needs now is a script, some of the original cast, and (most importantly) financial backing.
Reminiscent of Alexandre Rockwell’s In the Soup, Hey, Viktor! is an alternately hilarious and brutally honest dive into the trenches of D.I.Y. film-making (I was also reminded of Robert Townshend’s Hollywood Shuffle, in the way Lightning weaves issues like ethnic stereotyping and reclamation of cultural identity into the narrative). The cast includes Smoke Signals alums Simon Baker, Adam Beach, Gary Farmer, and Irene Bedard.
Let the Canary Sing *** (USA) – The biggest surprise in Alison Elwood’s engaging portrait of Cyndi Lauper is the thoughtful, articulate, and soft-spoken woman who reflects on her life and career; a far cry from the goofball New Wave Judy Holliday shtick that defined her public persona. By the time her slyly feminist anthem “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” put her on the map in 1983, she’d already been toiling in the music biz for over a decade (mostly fronting cover bands; it was interesting to learn that she was once a backup singer for Patti LaBelle). She freely admits that the graph of her career is a classic roller coaster, but it turns out she’s more of a polymath than one might suspect and has never compromised her vision. I confess losing track of her post-80s output, but I came away with newfound respect for her ongoing dedication as an artist and an activist.
One Night with Adela *** (Spain) – Volatile, coked to the gills and seething with resentment, Adela (Laura Galán) is wrapping up another dreary late-night shift tooling around Madrid in her street sweeper. However, the young woman’s after-work plans for this evening are anything but typical. She has decided that it’s time to get even…for every wrong (real or perceived) that she’s suffered in her entire life. Galán delivers a fearless and mesmerizing performance. Shot in one take (no editor is credited), writer-director Hugo Ruiz’s debut is the most unsettling portrayal of alienation, rage, and madness I have seen since Gaspar Noe’s I Stand Alone. Definitely not for the squeamish.
Rather ***½ (USA) – Few journalists have had such a long and storied career as Dan Rather; long enough for several generations to claim their own reference point. At the risk of eliciting an eye-rolling “OK Boomer” from some quarters, mine is “I think we’re dealing with a bunch of thugs here, Dan!” (others of “a certain age” will recall that as Walter Cronkite’s reaction to watching his colleague getting roughed up by security on live TV while reporting from the floor of the 1968 Democratic National Convention). For Gen Xers, he’s the inspiration for R.E.M.’s “What’s the Frequency Kenneth?”, which is what a pair of assailants repeatedly asked Rather during a 1986 attack in New York. To Millennials, he’s a wry and wise nonagenarian with over 2 million Twitter followers.
As evidenced in Frank Marshall’s documentary, the secret to Rather’s longevity may be his ability to take a punch (literally or figuratively) and get right up with integrity intact. All the career highlights are checked, from Rather’s early days as a reporter in Dallas (where he came to national prominence covering the JFK assassination) to overseas reporting for CBS from the mid-to-late 60s (most notably in Vietnam), to taking over the coveted CBS Evening News anchor chair vacated by Cronkite in 1981, and onward. An inspiring warts-and-all portrait of a dogged truth-teller who is truly a national treasure.
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— Dennis Hartley