Critic's Notebook

Brett Roedel/Disney

A group of 35-year-olds are pulled back into high school in “Never Change!,” through petty bureaucracy rather than magical body-swap or cinematic fable. It seems the graduating class of 2008 at North Meadows High School never technically graduated. Now they must spend two weeks back in the classroom to complete coursework and receive diplomas, under onerous legislation called the Education New Deal. Their original school days were curtailed by a destructive tornado, i.e. by a rare natural event rather than one of the frequent unnatural events that interrupt the education of U.S. high school students in the real world, or end their lives altogether. Marty Schousboe’s comedy, screening at Tribeca Festival en route to streaming on Hulu, makes one direct mention of this parallel, of the risk for any student that coming to school might mean they don’t make it to 35 at all: a teacher notes that compared to 2008, modern high-school can be “a bit funky.”

Continue reading “High School Consequential” »

Tribeca Festival

Tony Kaye’s Wikipedia page records that during post-production of his anti-Nazi drama, “American History X,” in 1998, the director, stewing on various slights, disowned the studio’s cut of the film and unsuccessfully attempted to have his name removed from the credits. The debate escalated quickly. Mr. Kaye’s previous work in TV commercials included a famous 1993 ad for Dunlop tires set to “Venus in Furs” by the Velvet Underground, which shoved the fetishistic high camp of the era’s music videos forcibly into the commercial space and suggested that the man behind it might arrive at production meetings by swinging through the window on a flaming rope. In fact Mr. Kaye really did arrive at one Hollywood confrontation in the company of a rabbi and a priest, with predictably contentious results. “Humpty Dumpty X” shows some period home-video footage of Mr. Kaye retelling this story at the time to director and fellow Brit-in-L.A. Mike Figgis. “There’s no history of performance art in this town,” replies Mr. Figgis, diplomatically shaking his head only a little. “Never air a grudge.”

Continue reading “The Disaster Artist” »

Tribeca Festival

The latest documentary to grapple with the fact that artificial intelligence is probably something to worry about spends a lengthy two hours approaching the subject from several angles, doing the topic justice while grinding your optimism slowly down. The initial subject is Geoffrey Hinton, now 78, Nobel laureate for his work on machine learning and one-time member of Google’s A.I. research team, before he resigned to express his concerns about the technology more freely. Mr. Hinton’s father was an entomologist, nudging the film towards visual metaphors about things developing and emerging from cocoons. The film doesn’t mention that Mr. Hinton’s great-great-grandfather was George Boole, one of the historic architects of information science in the first place. Now an elderly apostate in a trade full of young zealots, Mr. Hinton sounds a little like Adam Curtis; the two were born only a few miles apart. In the calming cadence of a grand BBC television series, Mr. Hinton ponders exactly how distressed about the future you should be now.

Continue reading “Oh No Computer” »

Tribeca Festival

Stage magicians and practitioners of close magic, giving you the patter while palming your watch and dropping a goldfish in your martini, are engaged in a deception business with roots going back a very long time. So when that trade is targeted for some up-to-date cyber crime from a different cohort of tricksters, there’s a clash of new magic and old underway. Or there might be if, as far as the magicians are concerned, the pirates had any honor; but they don’t. All that’s happening is straight-up theft of someone else’s original material and consequent loss of income, which tips the heirs to the ancient trickster gods into the same enfeebling online grinder machine as the rest of us.

Continue reading “Trick or Cheat” »

Sundance Institute

No irony intended (perhaps) in a documentary about the imminent environmental collapse of Utah’s Great Salt Lake ecosystem and the significant collateral damage to the livelihood of large numbers of locals, premiering at the last Sundance Film Festival to be held in the state before it voluntarily transplants to Colorado. Abby Ellis’s documentary “The Lake” follows ecologists, biologists and politicians involved in what one newscaster terms “an environmental nuclear bomb,” the drying out of the Great Salt Lake as the climate puts less water into it and the citizens of Utah take more out. The lake now contains 70 percent less water than it used to, an alarming number by any standards. Utah’s is not the only saltwater lake in the world facing potential disaster; but it is the largest and has the most people living near it. And no one has managed to fix any of the others.

Continue reading “Hell or Low Water” »

Tandem Pictures

The publicity material for “Run Amok” describes its subject matter as “thorny,” although it’s the approach to the topic that might make a viewer tense up. That topic is the ongoing plague of U.S. school shootings, and the approach is a deliberate tonal jumble of pathos, sincerity, tragedy and whimsy; something for everyone (to be cross with). But the goal is for a fictional young shooting survivor to speak for herself, once she’s untangled the knot of snakes in her head; to accept that even she may not know how she feels so asking about it all the time might go nowhere. And certainly to point out that solutions to school shootings do not lie inside the schools.

Continue reading “School Daze” »

David Shadrack Smith/Sundance Institute

A tale old as time. Some piece of new technology lets people transmit themselves to the world in ways previously impossible. Diverse groups which have rarely had their voices heard speak up. Some of them are uncouth and unconventional. They resist the capitalist urge, for a while. Pornography becomes a small part and then a big part of the entire effort. Things fall apart, with casualties. Another new technology displaces the first one, and the caravan moves on. All this plays out in the story of New York’s Manhattan Cable Television, 1970s public access broadcasting in which more or less anyone could say more or less anything, taking advantage of compact reel-to-reel videotape technology which to modern eyes is as compact as an aircraft carrier.

Continue reading “Live From New York” »

No shortage already of moving pictures studying Sun Ra from one direction or another, whether tackling the man, the music, the mysticism, the fact he said he was from the planet Saturn, or some combo of the lot. Christine Turner's documentary "Sun Ra: Do the Impossible" keeps the lid on its mind-expanding contents by narrowing the focus, mostly to testimonies from past members of the Sun Ra Arkestra about life in the big man's big band, plus some scholarly perspective on the social currents swirling around him in the civil rights era. It doesn't follow those threads too far out to other stations, such as his personal life, or influence on Kenneth Anger and the American underground, or his beaming directly into the nation's living rooms via "Saturday Night Live" in 1978. It's a sampler rather than a study guide, a summary of something resistant to summary; a Sunny interval.

Continue reading “Space Jam” »

The promotional copy for "Bodyguard of Lies" ahead of its Tribeca screening said that Dan Krauss's documentary "rips the veil off one of the most costly and controversial chapters in recent American history: the war in Afghanistan." How many people are still behind a veil of ignorance at this point about the Afghan War as a piece of U.S. foreign policy is a question. You might also note the spotting of the word "recent," since as the documentary itself points out the legacy of the Vietnam War lurks in plain sight and not all that far in the past. Neither equivocal nor designed to be, the film puts on-camera statements and speeches from U.S. politicians and military leaders during the war next to material from the later "Afghan War Lessons Learned" interviews, a set of recorded debriefings loosely instigated by Congress and which formed the basis of a Washington Post exposé in 2019. The Post is among the producer credits here, making this doc an adjunct to its existing reporting on the topic. It hardly needs saying that the public statements and the private testimonies are from different planets.

Continue reading “Infinity War” »

"Nothing here but history," sang those astute cultural archeologists Steely Dan in "The Caves of Altamira," as the song's protagonist went looking for ancient figures on the wall of an underground cavern. Altamira and a few other famous prehistoric sites crop up in Robert Macfarlane's 2019 nonfiction book "Underland," which takes a bracingly broad and poetic approach to what lies below the surface of the Earth and finds that history is only the start of it. "Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save," writes the author, invoking the mystical element that hangs over both his book and the documentary now made from it by Mr. Macfarlane and director Robert Petit, with the involvement of Darren Aronofsky as an executive producer. Venture below the surface of the world and things usually separate come close together: science and magic, past and future, oxygen and poison, plus the members of a documentary crew squeezed into alarmingly tight spaces.

Continue reading “Let There Be Rock” »