This Must Be the Place (2011)

This Must Be the Place is the oddest, quirkiest Paolo Sorrentino movie – his first in English – and it boasts one of the weirdest Sean Penn performances. I don’t know… I don’t think I’ve made sense of this. I will say that it was quite funny at times; it really cracked me up, but this was only occasional. It’s just odd. I don’t even think I expect comedy from Sorrentino in this way. Who knows.

Two from Isabel Sandoval in the Philippines

I don't really understand why Apparition (2012) is called Apparition. The film is not about hauntings or spirits or apparitions of any kind – even though the poster totally makes this look like a horror film. Sandoval's movie is about a group of nuns living outside of Manila in a convent in, like, the middle of a forest during 1971 and 1972, when progressive factions were attempting to displace the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and he eventually declared martial law.

The acting in Aparisyon is wonderful. Raquel Villavicencio, in particular, gives an intense, beautiful performance. I fell in love with her in this. And Mylene Dizon and Fides Cuyugan-Asensio are also excellent.

The movie's plot is interesting, but Sandoval is a bit too precious of a filmmaker, to my mind. She doesn't build the psychological tension that is needed for this film to work well. Her preciousness translates to a focus on minutiae that feels too closed off, too isolated and messes up the pace of her films. She takes things just a little too slowly, because the moments in the film are so precious. This makes her films feel slightly off, like they could have been told in a more economic or direct way. There are way too many lingering shots.

But I like Sandoval a lot, and I'm planning to watch her film Señorita before the end of the month. I saw Aparisyon on the Criterion Channel, where it'll be playing until September 30.

* * *

Update. Señorita (2011) doesn't have a poster, so I'm just going to write about it here. Señorita is a political thriller that I really wish had been filmed a bit more like a film noir. As it is, it follows most of Sandoval's normal filmmaking habits, but watching this film – her first – did illuminate a few things. It's far too precious, like Aparisyon and Lingua Franca, but in Señorita it is clear that Sandoval is emulating the slow sequences from Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, and Wong is a good model to have. Sandoval's Wong-inspired sequences, though, don't have the poetic intensity of the master's. They seem, instead, simply to be there. As if the poetry will arrive if we take our time.

There were things to like about Señorita, and about halfway through, I thought we had been moving at a really good pace – except that I had thought we had started act three and we had not. this clips along at the beginning, but it slows down considerably, and the film's second half is plodding and precious.

Kirikou et les Hommes et les Femmes (2012)

Kirikou and the Men and Women is completely charming – and possibly just as charming as Kirikou and the Sorceress. (I haven't seen Kirikou and the Wild Animals, which appeared between the original film and this one.) The best part of this is the explicit references to Soundiata Keita. In one of the vignettes in this Kirikou story, a griot appears, and she tells the story of Soundiata to the villagers and to Karaba. And Kirikou (of course) finishes the tale and invents a new ending. I forgot how much I love Kirikou, actually. I need to get hold of the second film.

This was not released in the United States, for reasons I don't understand. This is definitely a kids' film, though, so it would need to be dubbed.

Sister (L'Enfant d'en Haut)

Sister was superb. It's a story about a very poor boy who steals things from a wealthy ski resort in order to support him and his sister. It's tense like a potboiler, and I found myself waiting for something really dangerous to happen. As my friend Christina said, though, the violence here is all slow and in the background. It's a devastating movie in many ways. I loved this.

Also, I think the title in English might be better than the title in the original French. That doesn't happen a lot, but whoever came up with Sister did a great job.

Tabu (2012)

Weirdly, I started watching this film when it was released in the U.S. in 2012 but stopped after an hour for some reason or other, so I missed the last half of this film, which is... superb. I loved this film. It's weird and atmospheric and rich and smart. Its links with the original F.W. Murnau Tabu are rather tenuous, but this, too, is a black-and-white film about colonialism. (I clearly really love black-and-white films about colonialism – Vazante, Embrace of the Serpent, Roma. I probably ought to give this some thought.)

Two from Stephen Cone

Stephen Cone's The Wise Kids (2012) is, indeed, wise. This is a nuanced, careful, and generous exploration of three religious high schoolers during the summer before they go off to college. One is dealing with being gay, one with losing her faith in Christianity, and the other with the fact that she has none of these problems. Cone himself plays the church's music director, who has his own issues. As much as I have no time for Christianity, this film is a very kind, very smart exploration of this world without the usual sensational gay conversion therapy plot. The film's central actress, Molly Kunz, is especially lovely.

Oddly enough, Cone's second feature, which I also recently watched, covers much of the same ground (albeit with several more hard-bodied shirtless actors and an absence of cargo shorts). Henry Gamble's Birthday (2016) is in many ways a retread of The Wise Kids, which is, I think a much better film. It's set in a much wealthier megachurch scenario, and the family is much, much richer. This second movie is fine, and it's occasionally pretty sexy, but the territory it wants to cover doesn't feel very new at all. This movie made a bit of a splash when it came out, and it was apparently rather polarizing with gay audience, and I don't know. I was happy to see Jack Ball in something, but Henry Gamble's Birthday really paled in comparison to The Wise Kids. 

Another thing that I guess is worth saying here is that now that I'm almost forty years old I'm much more interested in the adults in these films. I think I liked Wise Kids better than Henry Gamble is that the former film is so much more interested in what is going on with its adults. The grown-ups in Henry Gamble are mostly messes.

I watched both of these films on the Criterion Channel, where they were paired with Cone's (excellent) film Princess Cyd in a little collection there. They were about to leave the Channel on January 31st so I got in under the wire, although I think you can probably find them on Amazon Prime.

Mosquita y Mari (2012)

Mosquita y Mari is disappointing. It's not that it's not fun to see a high school Chicana lesbian love story, it's just that this one doesn't quite know what it wants to do and isn't really very enjoyable. My take on this movie is that it's really about Mosquita (who is a cypher for the director, Aurora Guerrero) and not really about Mari except as an idealized fantasy or memory.

I Wish (2011)

Kore-eda is just so good. I loved I Wish (奇跡). It's touching and sweet, but as with all of Kore-eda's movies, I Wish undercuts its sentimentality with farce and doesn't allow us to get mired in its sweetness