Not Coming to a Theater Near You

I wanted, I think, to read Crawford as an optimistic film that celebrates America’s ability to accommodate a variety of viewpoints, one that reminds us that there is dissent, and a potential for dialogue, even in a place like Crawford. But by the end I had realized that any film that sets out to capture a moment in time – particularly this moment in time – needs to be more bruising than that. As the individual, human stories that make up this documentary reach their conclusions, there is indeed hope, but also trepidation, and most of all, weariness.

This is not the kind of movie you go see for its characters or plot. You see it to watch giant robots blow stuff up. And if the movie fails along predictable action-film weaknesses, it also succeeds wildly along predictable action-movie strengths. The action scenes are blisteringly choreographed, and leave you staring even if you couldn’t actually give a shit if the characters live or die.

A director like Korine moving toward more traditional narratives is like a beloved cult musician bringing song structure and melodies to what was formerly noise. To purists and lovers of abstraction, challenge, and all things fringe, it may feel like a loss of authenticity. But to the larger mainstream audience, it simply makes art more accessible, and possibly widens the range of what’s considered mainstream.

The film follows a family through reunions and separations, small triumphs and not-so-small setbacks. This narrative is focused and very personal (the title appropriately translates to “Intimacy”). Yet while it may appear to eschew global-scale muck racking in favor of a simpler tale, the piece pointedly retains its social conscience.

The back-and-forth juxtapositions of “MMOs: Good or Evil?” seemed a bit heavy-handed and clumsily constructed at times. And the film’s desire to have it both ways, to both empathize with and mock its subjects, left me feeling that the filmmaker’s intentions were a bit exploitive. But in an odd twist, it was the subjects of the documentary themselves who managed to subvert this tone.

Transsiberian makes suspenseful and sometimes violent gestures, but it’s all decoration. There’s a young, charismatic Eurasian couple – a catalyst for the American woman’s unethical whims – who forward mystery mysteriously. There’s the picturesque Russian setting that looks more like a template for a postcard than it does the imprisoning, foreign setting from which the American characters are to question their ability to exit.

You would never know it from talking to him, but Masaru is actually a superhero, and he comes from a family of superheroes deemed “Dai Nipponjin”, or “Big Man Japan.” They’re capable, via moderated electrocution, of growing to enormous size and contending with a variety of other super-sized personalities that invade Japan, each of whom is more a nuisance than threat.

There’s a small moment late in the film when Rohto confesses to Pickett that she’s angry about what happened to her brother. Pickett urges her to “stay that way,” and that may be Gilbert and James’ hope for their audiences as well. Pickett, Rohto, and of many of the others interviewed frequently contemplate their own accountability for the death of De Luna and others. It may be this element of the film that sobers even the staunchest supporter of capital punishment.

In my mind, the Beaver Kid is and does one thing, and in the filmmaker’s mind, he is and does something entirely different. Both Harris and I have evidence for our interpretations. Both of us might be wrong. Either way, The Beaver Trilogy accomplishes something astonishing. It documents the gap between an event and its interpretation, between an action and our memory of it, between the world and our perceptions.

Other nerdcore artists appear along with MC Frontalot, and there is discussion of the obvious differences and ironic similarities between nerdcore and, say, gangsta rap, as well as the potentially problematic issue of a white musician co-opting a traditionally black musical style and giving it a comic twist, but these are brief interludes in a fairly short feature, and there are stones that go noticeably unturned.

One hopes for the best when a director makes unusual choices, but such heavy-duty artifice can’t help but threaten to overwhelm a film’s story and characters. And there’s a possibility still worse than that: all that surface flash could come to feel like an elaborate cover-up, aiming to mask the fact that there is hardly a story or characters to speak of. It was with great disappointment that I came to realize that The Tracey Fragments falls pretty squarely into the latter category.

The film succeeds in creating a vivid portrait of an unusual Dublin institution, but it’s true that in some ways, life conspires against Saviours. There isn’t a great deal of satisfying closure to any of the three narratives, ending the film on a somewhat anticlimactic note. But then again, that may be the point. Saviours is an honest film, and to be honest, life is more often about fighting than it is about winning.

As a complement to the use of black metal, Severed Ways has a primal brutality to it. There is some axeplay, although it is shot so stutteredly it’s barely distinguishable. But in one instance a pair of live chickens is killed, one of which is subsequently eaten, its killer palming the raw flesh and chewing it (he does this after he has pillaged and set a makeshift church afire).

There is a level of perverse humor to some of the scenes, particularly those of a wildly self-important Bigfoot hunter who snaps petulantly at his colleagues, but the film isn’t about cheap laughs. Rather than exploiting the pair for his own fun, director Jay Delaney illuminates the highs and lows of friendship between two small-time Bigfoot hunters. The relationship is a vital part of both men’s lives, and it’s distressing to see it start to come unglued in the face of ambition.

The athletes want nothing less than to see jump roping added to competition in the Olympics, though they admit that the culture of the sport would almost inevitably change as a result. The charms of Jump!, then, are in how it captures the world of competitive jump rope as it exists at a specific moment in time, when it may or may have been on the brink of bigger things.