FILM / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / April 2023 / Gabriel Ricard
Image © Shudder
Who even has time to build an echo chamber these days? Not that you’d want to, or should, but if you spend any sort of time online, you’re going to come across people who hate or just dislike the shit you love. Some of them are interesting, or at least funny. Some of them cause minor strokes from the damage left from rolling your eyes so hard and so frequently.
At what point do you give up on engaging with negative reviews or drastically different interpretations because you just can’t ascend to someone’s concept of reality? I can’t tell if this is some sort of consequence of getting older, meaning an inability to accept concepts and interpretations that are simply different from my own, or if everyone around me is just getting weirder.
It’s probably both, as it always seems to be with these questions. I’m not going to cite any specific examples. Okay, maybe just one. The idea that any sort of fantasy in a film is dangerous to concepts like personal growth, or our collective attitudes towards societal revolution, is an opinion I can’t really respond to. This notion that watching any sort of escapist entertainment is immediately and profoundly detrimental to the soul. This one of the all-or-nothing opinions I seem to encounter more and more frequently every day.
There’s no middle ground with someone who thinks only idiots and children watch crowd-pleasing fantasy, superhero epics, or horror movies that are very straightforward with their intentions and executions for those intentions. There’s no “Well, try to challenge yourself in the art you consume and engage with.” Either you’re sustaining yourself solely on works that bring your literal or secular soul to ever greater heights, or you’re throatfucking mountains of celluloid trash with the enthusiasm of the deeply and professionally ravenous.
Don’t bother arguing with opinions like these. I don’t. I’m doing my damndest to just not engage with these viewpoints at all. Life is too short, and I promise there’s better things to do with your time.
Spirited debates are fun, and they still exist, even on social media, but I’m finding myself so worn out by people who live for issuing commandments from their pedestals, I don’t really feel like talking to anyone anywhere about anything. That’s not healthy either, but at least I suppose it leaves me with more time to watch more movies.
Skinamarink (2022): D-
Image © Shudder
Skinamarink got my interest early. I liked the trailer, particularly the way it made me think of ARGs I really enjoyed, like Marble Hornets, Ben Drowned, or The Monuments Mythos. Could an ASMR nightmare experience wrapped in a story of two children menaced by a terrifying omnipresent force sustain itself for 100 minutes? I was skeptical, but the atmosphere alone of this admittedly unique film was compelling enough that I still wanted to see what would happen.
As it turns out, and the trailer retroactively makes this very fucking clear, nothing. Nothing happens. That’s a small exaggeration, as the children’s situation becomes increasingly horrific and hellish, starting with their disappearance of their home’s doors, windows, and father. That is technically plot progression. I say “technically” because in no way, shape, or form does the plot keep up with the pacing of the film. What could have been a riveting, haunting short film is stretched out to almost unfathomable lengths. The filmmakers made this choice to build and hold its state for long, long blocks of time. Maybe I’m just too impatient for this sort of thing, and I know the movie has its fans, people who had the experience I was hoping to have myself.
But nothing here really works for me. There are some interesting visuals, as you’d expect, and the movie does at least establish the atmosphere I think it’s striving for. It just doesn’t hold together. To the point where you’re almost feeling hostile that you’re still watching something that you can very easily hit “stop” on.
In deranged wonderment, I waited for Skinamarink to show me something meaningful. Resounding nothingness was the answer I got back. Maybe that’s the point? I don’t know. Probably don’t really care either. I’m curious to see what’s next from writer/director Kyle Edward Ball, who certainly has talent, but Skinamarink wasn’t for me.
Freebie and the Bean (1974): A+
Image © Warner Bros. Pictures
Then again, I’m the kind of weirdo who believes Freebie and the Bean is one of the best cop movies I think I’ve ever seen. Why couldn’t Kyle Edward Ball just make something like Freebie and the Bean.
I’m kidding, calm down, but I did watch these two films on the same day, a few hours apart. It’s genuinely incredible that these works exist in the same medium, with Freebie and the Bean being a movie that makes its own relatively bold creative choices with regards to its script. This bizarre 1974 film has Alan Arkin and James Caan as two sarcastic cops who try to think and act quickly, when they find out a racketeer they’ve been trailing for months is due for a hitman visit from the mob. Caan and Arkin establish a strange bickering old married couple formula, with both men behaving like actual lunatics who can at least say they have each other. Their performances anchor a consistently dark comedy that’s as entertaining as it is horrifying.
Surprising might be a good word for Freebie and the Bean, too. There’s nothing quite like this movie’s decision to create comedic situations that can easily and suddenly go on a little long, or create a situation that abruptly drops tragedy into a cartoonish situation. Freebie and the Bean never lets you settle in, and you never get tired of these performances by Arkin, Caan, and particularly Valerie Harper’s scene-stealing performance as Arkin’s character’s wife Consuelo.
Beau Travail (1999): A+
Image © Pyramid Distribution
Just a guy working out some personal stuff. Denis Levant’s performance combined with the film’s focus on stark, stylized realism creates a tragic character in Claire Denis’ 1999 international success Beau Travail. French Foreign Legion officer Galoup is a veteran with a successful career. The change occurs when a young man named Sentain transfers into his section, with Galoup for reasons never made clear making it his personal mission to destroy the young man. Is it that Sentain reminds the much older Galoup of something unspeakable to him?
Beau Travail seems to let you decide what’s behind Galoup’s consuming rage and efforts to literally kill a man who has done nothing wrong. The film can also be appreciated for beautiful cinematography by Agnès Godard and editing by Nelly Quettier, but the character study with Galoup is going to consume your attention one way or another. Playing off the subdued sweetness ofGrégoire Colin as Sentain, Denis Lavant creates a man whose discipline is destroyed by something that only exists in his head, and that man is an endlessly fascinating protagonist.
The Snowman (2017): D-
Image © Universal Pictures
I think I wish director Tomas Alfredson had instead opted for a live action remake of the 1982 British TV special and children’s book The Snowman. As opposed to this tonally confused adaptation of a specific entry from a series of novels by Jo Nesbø. Almost anything in theory would have been better than this film I certainly knew by reputation. Unfortunately, I did finally watch it recently, and I’m going to make that everyone’s problem by taking us a few years back in time.
The Snowman is at least visually beautiful. The cinematography by Dion Beebe at least does it job of capturing the stunning, expansive loneliness and even bleakness buried in the gorgeous Norwegian landscape. This is another movie that at least created a world I was interested in visiting.
It’s just that the rest of the movie doesn’t live up to its scenery. A detective named Harry Hole (which apparently is less silly in Norway) tracks a brutal murderer. There’s a lot more plot to this, to be sure, but it’s all a mess of characters and motivations that barely seem to click. It’s a shame that something that shifts so often in so many strange ways is such a dull, confusing mess. This isn’t even the entertaining kind of bad. Everyone in the film, including Michael Fassbender and Val Kilmer (the only interesting performance in the entire movie) plays it way too straight for that.
The Snowman suffered in Alfredson’s view from a rushed filming schedule. More time to round things out would have helped, but you’d still be left with some bad performances and a degree of sometimes laughable tedium that’s pretending to be tension.
Four Days in July (1984): A+
Image © Warner Bros. Pictures
The singular writer and director Mike Leigh made several compelling TV movies for the BBC from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. Four Days in July was the last, depicting two families awaiting the births of their respective children over a few days in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. One family is Protestant and the other is Catholic.
There’s obviously a stage for serious drama here, but Four Days in July strives to be as seemingly ordinary as possible. We’re meant to get into the routines of these people during an exciting, albeit stressful time in their lives. The deeper we immerse ourselves in what’s going on, the more accessible and understandable everything becomes, particularly with respect to the social and political themes Four Days in July knows will be there in the writing, with no need to be obvious.
You don’t have to fully know the context of Northern Ireland at this moment in time to get into everything this movie has to offer. Although such context obviously still helps and deepens your watching experience, Four Days in May has captivating characters who hit that universal dream note of appealing to an empathy and understanding that exists everywhere.
Gabriel Ricard writes, edits, and occasionally acts. His books Love and Quarters and Bondage Night are available through Moran Press, in addition to A Ludicrous Split (Alien Buddha Press) and Clouds of Hungry Dogs (Kleft Jaw Press). He is also a writer, performer, and producer with Belligerent Prom Queen Productions. He lives on a horrible place called Long Island.
