FILM REVIEW: MANK

At first glance, David Fincher would seem like an odd choice to direct Mank (2020), a biopic about Herman J. Mankiewicz and the events that led to him writing the script for Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane. After all, Fincher is primarly known for making dark and violent thrillers that explore serial killers, psychopaths, and criminal deviants. Some may say that Fincher made Mank to pay tribute to the memory of his father, Jack Fincher, a screenwriter and journalist who wrote the script for Mank back in the 1990s. This may be true, but upon closer inspection, Mank also fits neatly into Fincher's explorations into the darker side of human nature. Now, instead of telling the story of a serial killer, Fincher is exploring the sociopathic behavior of the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s, a system that brutally manipulated its artists to conform to the demands of capitalism. With Mank, Fincher has created a brillaintly evocative portrait of the all encompassing power struggle in Hollywood between art and commerce.

Mank alternates between the early 1930s, when Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) worked as a screenwriter for Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) at MGM, and the early 1940s, when Orson Welles (Tom Burke) hired Mankiewicz to write the script for Citizen Kane for his independent production company RKO Pictures. The film shows how during both time periods, Mankiewicz struggled with alcoholism and his own personal demons, which often got in the way of his work as a screenwriter. As portrayed by Gary Oldman in an astonishingly powerful performance, Fincher shows Mankiewicz as a fiercly independent and outspoken artist whose mercurial personality led to him eventually being ostracized from Hollywood, and into the employ of the equally strident Welles.

Some have accussed Mank of supporting Pauline Kael's assertion that Mankiewicz deserved sole credit for the writing of Citizen Kane over Welles. However, Fincher doesn't portray in-depth the extended period when Mankiewicz and Welles fought over writing credit. He briefly alludes to this issue at the end of the film, with an audio clip of Orson Welles actually acknowledging Mankiewicz's contribution to writing the script for Citizen Kane. Instead, Fincher focuses primarly on Mankiewicz's career at MGM in the 1930s before he even wrote Citizen Kane. The 1940s period when Mankiewicz is actually writing the script for Citizen Kane is just the framing story device for Mank, and Welles himself only has a few scenes in the film. 

What Mank is really about is the insidious nature of Hollywood in the 1930s, and how the greed and corruption of the studio system drove Mankiewicz away from it, and into the more independent arms of Orson Welles and RKO Pictures in the early 1940s. Fincher shows how the ruthless newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) had a stranglehold over MGM and its studio heads Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley). Mayer is portrayed as a smooth talking, heartless businessman who feels no qualms about slashing the payroll of his employees in order to maximize his own personal wealth. Behind the funding for Mayer's and Thalberg's films is the financial backing of Hearst, who is revealed as being more interested in showing off his vast wealth and pleasing his mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) then in the actual art of filmmaking.

Indeed, the subject of greed over humanity is explored throughout Mank, as best exemplified with its subplot about the socialist writer Upton Sinclair's (Bill Nye) campaign for California governor against the Mayer/Thalberg backed Republican candidate Frank Merriam. Throughout Mank, Thalberg and Hearst continuously mock Sinclair as an unrealistic "Utopian socialist" whose policies to redistribue wealth to alleviate poverty would lead to what they viewed as a Communist takeover of California, and result in the loss of their vast fortune. Interestingly enough, these similar arguments about socialism versus capitalism have been seen played out in the 2020 Presidential Election. Fincher portrays Mankiewicz as sympathizing with Sinclair's more altruistic form of governance, resulting in him having further conflicts with the wealth accumulating philosophies of Mayer and Thalberg. Fincher pits his protagonist Mankiewicz squarely against this capitalist, profit driven machine, ultimately inspiring him to write the script for Citizen Kane as an attack against Hearst and everything that he stood for.

On an aesthetic level, Fincher films Mank in gorgeous black and white, and uses various filters and effects, such as a muffled audio soundtrack, scratches on the film stock, and film reel change markers, to replicate the look and feel of a classic Hollywood film. Also, the acting and dialogue is portrayed in a sometimes exaggerated and heightened style to resemble classic 1930s/1940s Hollywood studio films such as Design For Living and Woman of the Year. There's an especially amazing sequence when Mankiewicz takes a walk with Davies through Hearst's animal-filled garden, as they exchange a rapid fire dialogue exchange that recalls Howard Hawks' screwball comedy His Girl Friday.

The last act of Mank, which takes place at a costume party dinner hosted by Hearst in his mansion, is just as astonishing and frightening as any scene from one of Fincher's thrillers. Now, instead of his protagonist confronting a serial killer, Fincher has his main character take on the equally heartless and immoral Hearst. Although he doesn't physically murder anyone like Fincher's previous gallery of sociopathic villains, Hearst is portrayed as a master manipulator whose lust for power and control leads to death and destruction. Charles Dance gives a quietly chilling performance as Hearst that recalls John Huston's similarly startling character in Chinatown. When Hearst guides Mankiewicz out of his mansion after the costume party, telling him the story of the monkey organ grinder, Fincher and Dance masterfully create a sense of impending and all-consuming dread.

With Mank, Fincher has moved beyond the killers and social deviants of his previous films like Fight Club, Seven, and Zodiac, and instead broadened his examination of the evils of human nature onto the macro scale of Hollywood and the capitalist system that it feeds off of. It's no coincidence that Fincher alludes to Welles' production of Heart of Darkness early in Mank, as he is interested in revealing the dark, beating pulse of a film industry that values commerce over all else. 

Just as studios like MGM in the 1930s relied on merciless businessman like Hearst to bankroll their films, many modern studios are similarly run by executives who use power and domination as measuring sticks for success. Although he is a troubled, imperfect protagnoist, due to his struggles with alcoholism and his abrasive personality, Mankiewicz is ultimately portrayed by Fincher as a heroic figure who was punished by Hollywood for taking on a system that needed to be changed. Mank is Fincher's homage to iconoclasts, such as Mankeiwicz and Welles, who had the courage to create art not for the purpose of making a buck, but for expressing their own unique voices. 

FILM REVIEW: FAREWELL AMOR

The immigrant experience has been explored before in film, but Farewell Amor (2019) takes the cinematic depiction of immigration to new artistic heights. Farewell Amor is the feature debut of the Tanzanian-American filmmaker Ekwa Msangi, and it is an astonishingly assured film that recalls the domestic dramas of such cinematic giants as Yasuiro Ozu and Hirokazu Koreeda. Like those filmmakers, Msangi knows how to subtly explore the deep fissures that exist within all families, and how to portray these conflicts in an emotionally powerful way.

Farewell Amor is the story of a father, mother, and daughter whose lives are torn apart by the Angolan Civil War. They reunite 17 years later in Brooklyn, New York, where Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), the father, has been living, while Esther (Zainab Jah), the mother, and Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), the daughter, stayed behind in Angola. After Walter moved to New York, he started a relationship with Linda (Nana Mensah), which he has to end when his wife and daughter move in with him after their 17 year separation. This affair forms the basis of the domestic problems which Walter tries to resolve with the wife and daughter, as they try to rebuild their shattered lives.

The structure of Farewell Amor is ingenuously divided into three separate sections, with each segment focusing on the three main members of the family. By dividing the film into these three narrative arcs, Msangi is able to convey different aspects of her three main characters which aren't readily apparent in the preceding storylines. While the daughter Sylvia seems like a quiet and introspective character in the father Walter's section, she is revealed to be an outgoing and vibrant woman in the part of the film which focuses on her daily life. Also, in her own section of the film, we see why the mother Esther is so fervently obsessed by religious fervor, a trait which seems off-putting at times in the father Walter's storyline.

By separating Farewell Amor into these three narrative divisions, Msangi reveals the multiple dimensions of each of her main protagonist's story arcs, and is able to at times film the same scenes but from other perspectives. This allows Msangi to portray the multi-facted nature of the immigrant experience, and explore how it can affect the lives of each generation of a single family, from the youngest member, to the eldest. Msangi also delves into the family's history in Angola, as she slowly reveals the true tragic circumstances leading up to their reunion in New York.

The mother Esther's story explores the struggles many immigrant wives experience, as they must both learn to adapt to their new environments, while paying respect to the traditions and values of their original homelands. The father Walter's story examines the loneliness and the difficulties of assimilating to a new culture that so many immigrants experience when they move to America by themselves. The daughter Esther's narrative reveals the prejudice and discrimination immigrant youths face when they have to learn how to adapt to a new country. All three of the actors in Farewell Amor give authentic and naturalistic performances that make us feel like we are watching a documentary at times.

As Msangi slowly and powerfully unveils the complex and intricate narrative of Farewell Amor, she proves to be a master of the cinematic form. The three story arcs of her main characters intersect and and at times collide with each other at different points throughout the film, culminating in an extremely moving conclusion that gives the viewer a sort of halting, yet ultimately optimistic, vision of the future of immigrants living in America. By giving each protagonist the space to reveal their own points of view, Msangi provides a multi-layered portrait of immigrants as real people trying their best to rebuild their lives in the United States.

FILM REVIEW: FAMILY ROMANCE, LLC

 

The German filmmaker Werner Herzog has always been interested in exploring non-Western based cultures, within his larger interest in the tumultuous relationship between nature and man. With his latest film Family Romance, LLC (2019), which is set in Japan with Japanese actors speaking in their own native language, Herzog has once again created a fascinating portrayal of a non-Western culture. Family Romance, LLC also serves as a cautionary tale about the increasingly isolating effects of modern day technology, a subject which Herzog has been exploring continuously in his documentaries and narrative feature films.

Although it is a fictional, narrative film, Family Romance, LLC has a naturalistic and almost cinema verite quality to it that resembles a documentary. Herzog cast non-professional actors, but he is able to successfully elicit from them authentic, realistic portrayals of their characters. Family Romance, LLC is about Yuichi Ishii, the owner of the business in the film's title, which rents out human companions to those who feel isolated from society and need some sort of made-up family member or social contat to accompany them. Although we see Yuichi with various clients of his family rental business throughout the film, Family Romance, LLC primarily focuses on the relationship between Yuichi and Mahiro, the young daughter of the widowed and lonely Miki Fujimaki. 

Miki hires Yuichi to serve as Mahiro's surrogate father, as Mahiro never met her real-life father. Yuichi invents a story that he left Mahiro's mother when she was young, but wants to start to get to know her as his daughter. The resulting familial drama plays out almost like a Yasujiro Ozu or Hirokazu Koreeda film, but it is also distintly a Herzog film with its unique filmmaking style. Just as Herzog filmed awe-inspiring aerial shots of the Amazon jungle in his earlier films, he shoots astonishing drone-footage of the natural landscapes of Japan. Japan is known for its technology, but Herzog still wants to point out the commanding existence of nature that still persists amidst the urbanized environment.

Herzog served as the cinematographer of Family Romance, LLC himself, using a small, non-obstrusize 4K video camera, and purposefully keeping his distance from the actors to allow them the space to create realistic characters. Indeed, all the performances in Family Romance, LLC, from the bit roles to the leading roles, feel genuinely authentic and free of all theatrical artifice. By filming Family Romance, LLC away from the constraints of Hollywood studio filmmaking demands, Herzog instills the film with a sense of liberation and new possibilities in cinema. There are very few traditional establishing shots, or cutaway shots to different framing perspectives, and Herzog does this on purpose because he is more interested in filming reality than creating an artificial studio product. We as viewers know that the images we are seeing are reflections of Herzog himself, so in a way Family Romance, LLC is the ultimate auterist project. 

The handheld quality of the images gives Family Romance, LLC the feel at times of viewing home videos, or something akin to the many personal videos we see so many times online of family vacations and social gatherings. Thus, using new technology, Herzog is creating a film that is made in the tradition of modern day, online streaming videos. Indeed, technology is very much a major theme in Family Romance, LLC, as Herzog is exploring how the increasingly isolating effects of technological advances, as we spend more times living in a virtual world dominated by our phones and tablets, has resulted in an absence of intimate, real-life contacts. Thus, Yuichi is able to have a thriving business renting out a semblance of personal interactions with imaginary family members to fill this void. At times throughout the film, Herzog will slow down the footage to emphasize the comfort that Yuichi's business brings to his clients, as in a moving scene when Yuichi stages a lottery win for an elderly woman who lives by herself, and the camera lingers on the woman's smiling face.

Yuichi's business of bringing people closer together with what are essentially false relationships is Herzog's commentary on the fragility of real family and personal ties in the modern world. The line between what are true, biological family connections and virtual relationships with people we meet online are blurred; in many cases, we feel closer to those people we communicate solely with online than those we know in the outside, physical world. Yuichi offers a sort of combination of these two experiences, since he is creating intimate relationships between people who are utltimately not truly connected with each other in real life. Herzog understands this contradiction in Yuichi's business, and the last image of the film is a haunting reminder of how disconnected we as a society are to the real world. 

From his earlier films like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, Herzog, to his later films like Grizzly Man, Herzog has always been interested in exploring human's tumultuous relationship with nature, and our incessant need to conquer and control nature. As a result, humans have resorted to creating their own sort of nature through technology by creating a virtual online world, in the hopes of getting instant fame or conncetions with others through our various mobile devices. In an amusing sequence in Family Romance, LLC, a woman hires Yuichi to follow her around with a fake entourage of photographers in the hopes of becoming famous online.

In another scene in Family Romance, LLC, Yuichi visits a hotel staffed by robots to see if he can start replacing his rented out family members with robotic employees. The human and the technological worlds have merged at this hotel, but Herzog continuously focuses on the eerie nature of the robotic greeters and workers; although they attempt to emulate a semblance of humanity, they ultimately are still nothing more than robotic machines. More recently, Herzog explored this concept of technological dissonance most explicity with his film Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, which portrayed how artificial intelligence and robotics are permanently altering the human world.

With Family Romance, LLC, Herzog is examining what is possibly the next logical step in intimate relationships in an increasingly fast-paced, technologized world, as we start replacing our real-life family and personal connections with online, virtual relationships. As Yuichi, Miki, and Mahiro grow closer togeher in their invented relationships with each other, Yuichi starts to see the danger in this, as he is unable to separate his real-life relationships with his created ones. Herzog asks us to re-examine our reliance on technology and its fabricated realities, and to see what it is that truly makes us human. For Herzog, the familial love between a real mother, father, and daughter is more authentic than any virtually created connection. 

FILM REVIEW: THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

Throughout his career, Wes Anderson has steadily developed and honed his distinctive voice as an accomplished visual stylist and a sly satirist in the tradition of Ernst Lubitsch. With The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Wes Anderson has created his most fully realized portrait yet about the follies and joys of the human condition. With its baroque mise-en-scene and perfect mixture of drama and comedy, The Grand Budapest recalls an earlier time in cinema when a heightened sense of sophistication intermingled seamlessly with slap stick humor and inspired zaniness. And yet through all the joie de vivre of The Grand Budapest Hotel, there is an increasing feeling of melancholy and yearning for a bygone period when human nature elevated itself beyond the barbarity of modern times. 

Like many of Anderson's films, The Grand Budapest Hotel features an eclectic cast of characters who function as a sort of surrogate dysfuntional family. The film centers on the rise and fall of the once glorious Grand Budapest Hotel, located in an imaginary European country during the early 1930s. Living and working in this hotel are the two main characters of the film, Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), the hotel's concierge who spends his spare time seducing older, wealthy women, and Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham as the elder Moustafa, and Tony Revolori as younger Zero), the lobby boy who later gains a more prominent position in the hotel. Gustave and Zero form an alternatively dysfunctional and endearing sort of father-son relationship with each other. After one of Gustave's lovers passes away, she bequeths in her will a priceless painting to Gustave, setting off in motion a series of wild events involving secret societies, murder, imprisonment, and many other typical Anderson complications.

What makes The Grand Budapest Hotel such a fascinating and accomplished film is Anderson's complete mastery over the many layered threads of narrative construction. The film alternates seamlessly between different time periods, from modern day Europe, to the main 1930s setting of Anderson's imaginary European country, and into the more drab late 1960s and 1980s of the same location. Within each of these time periods, Anderson also employs various film stock ratios, using 2.35:1 ratio for the modern day and 1960s scenes, the Academy ratio of 4:3 for the 1930s scenes, and 1:85:1 ratio for the 1980s scenes. Each of these ratios are used to replicate the respective film stock used for the corresponding time periods The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in. 

Most notably, the Academy ratio of the 1930s is used to pay homage to the urbane comedy of manners films of Ernst Lubitsch, like Design for Living, Trouble in Paradise, and Ninotchka, as well as the classic slapstick comedies of the Marx Bros. Like the protagonists of Lubitsch's films who often are impoverished swindlers masquearading as members of the bourgeois class, Gustave lives in a small, nondescript room in the Grand Budapest Hotel, and yet he spends his time deceiving older, affluent women into funding his forays into a seemingly wealthy lifestyle. The slapstick elements of The Grand Budapest Hotel are cleverly revealed in many of Anderson's complex set pieces, highlighted by an exhilirating prison escape sequence that would have made Rube Goldberg proud.

One accusation often lobbied towards Anderson's films is that his elaborate attention to set design and detail often leaves the actors feeling stiff and theatrical. This was most noticeable in The Royal Tennenbaums, which was Anderson's dress rehearsal for The Grand Budapest Hotel. While the mise-en-scene of The Royal Tennenbaums was executed to perfection, it often left the actors feeling like puppets that weren't quite brought fully to life. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was an improvement over The Royal Tennenbaums' rigid performances, but at times even that film fell into puppet theater territory. Maybe this is why Anderson's animated films, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs, felt much more naturalistic. In these animated films, Anderson has full control over every little detail of his animated characters, as opposed to trying to elicit his desired performances from human actors who may not be fully privy to his vision.

However, with The Grand Budapest Hotel, the acting finally feels completely natural and in synch with Anderson's unqiue sensibility. Every turn of phrase and speech tic of the actors feels perfectly in tune with the equally idiosyncratic set design, color scheme, and overall mise-en-scene of each of Anderson's sequences. We are no longer seeing actors being awkwardly pulled by Anderson's puppet strings, instead each performance feels seamlessly aligned with the universal vision of the film. A great example of this is the seamlessly choreographed "Society of the Crossed Keys" sequence, in which Anderson uncovers each member of the film's secret society through an impeccable blend of visual cues and exquisitely modulated performances.

Indeed, one can list scene after scene of masterfully constructed sequences in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which at times almost resembles a live-action animated film. Anderson even employs animation at some points, such as his introduction to the hotel near the film's beginning, which we can clearly see is an elaborately designed scale model of a hotel. All of this visual eye candy would mean nothing if there was no deeper meaning behind it all, and The Grand Budapest Hotel is ultimately a yearning for decency and a simpler way of living, as the more brutal realities of society start to incringe upon Anderson's almost Edenic paradise of the hotel. 

As the film progresses, there are hints of darkness and cruelty, such as a shocking scene where a character gets his hand maimed, but through it all we delight in Anderson's lovely recreation of a time period when a respect for humanity reigned. As The Grand Budapest Hotel reaches its ending, hints of facism start to creep in as we see armed soldiers take over the hotel, and even threaten death and violence at one point. The celebratory mood of the 1930s is over, and with it the Grand Budapest Hotel starts to fall into ruin, until it's just a drab shadow of itself by the 1960s. 

This is both an allegory for the degradation of society as a whole, and the natural growth from youthful idealism to the more realistic and grounded stage of adulthood. Zero is no longer the bright eyed bellboy he was in the 1930s, instead by the late 1960s he is a bearded, older man wandering the now empty halls of his once grand hotel, reflecting on more colorful and vibrant times. As Gustave himself says near the film's end, "There are still faint glimers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity." For Anderson, as our society descends deeper into darkness and hopelessness, he makes films to point our way forward for toward a brighter, and hopefully more enlightened future.

FILM REVIEW: THE GLORIAS

Although she is mostly known for her visually extravagant and surreal Broadway theatrical productions and film work, Julie Taymor has created a more conventionally structured biopic with her film The Glorias (2020). The result is one of her most emotionally resonant works of art, and a further evolution in Taymor's increasingly accomplished cinematic projects. While Taymor's earlier films like Frida and Across The Universe were hallucinatory fever dreams that used flamboyantly constructed set pieces to tell their stories, The Glorias takes a more traditional biopic approach to tell its equally fascinating narrative.

The Glorias is about the revered political activist and writer Gloria Steinem, covering her youth traveling the country with her adventurous parents, along with her own journeys in India as a college student, and up through her rise as an important voice in the womens' rights movement from the 1970s and into the modern era. Portrayed by Julianne Moore as the older Steinem, and Alicia Vikander, Lulu Wilson, and Ryan Kira Armstrong in her younger years, The Glorias is for the most part a conventionally constructed biography. However, Taymor still employs her more fantastical visual motifs throughout the film, creating some visually astonishing set pieces to portray the inner thoughts of Steinem throughout the years.

With its story of a Caucasian woman who is exposed to and shows geniune concern for women from other cultures beyond her own, The Glorias is also the story of Taymor herself. Like Steinem, Taymor is a Caucasian woman who left the United States during her youth and college years to explore and immerse herself in non-Western culture. While Steinem travelled to and lived in India as a youth, Taymor spent time during her youth in Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, and Japan to study the arts and culture there, which would go on to influence her own work as an adult. 

Steinem's years in India exposed her to the inequities and prejudice in the culture towards women and members of different castes, which would inform much of her own political activism in the United States to fight for both the women's rights and Civil Rights movements. However, Taymor also shows how Steinem was aware of her own priviledged position as a White woman in American society. Although she still had to fight to break the glass ceiling for women in regards to reproductive issues, career prospects, and the general perceptions towards women as sex objects, Steinem was careful not be a lead spokesperson for African-American and other minority women in their own battles.

Taymor shows how Steinem genuinely cared for the rights of female minorities, but she wanted to let them tell their own stories in their own voices, and not impose her voice as a White woman into their campaigns. This is why we see scenes of Steinem encouraging African-American, Asian-American, as well as Native-American women to fight for their own causes during the 1977 National Women's Political Caucus. By doing this, Taymor is avoiding the trap of having a White savior in her film, a category which Steinem herself tried hard to avoid throughout her own career as a writer and political activist. For Steinem, her role was to empower others to discover and have their own unique voices be heard.

Indeed, the subject of finding a voice is a constant theme throughout The Glorias. In this way, Taymor's film recalls Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table, another searing portrait of a female artist embracing her unique talents as a writer in a patriarchal society. Taymor examines how due to male-centric prejudices about her as a woman, the young Steinem struggled to get her voice as a journalist heard. While Steinem wanted to write and report about the Civil Rights Movement, her male editor instead wanted her to write about more feminine topics like models, fashion, and dating. After Steinem finally finds her voice as a writer, she later struggles to find her voice as a public speaker, but with the help of the African-American political activists Dorothy Pitman Hughes (Janelle Monae) and Florynce Kennedy (Lorraine Toussaint), Steinem develops into a powerful orator for the rights of women and minorities.

Taymor also explores Steinem's relationship with her parents and how they shaped her into the feminist icon she later became. Steinem's mother Ruth Nuneviller (Enid Graham) was a former journalist who gave up her writing career to get married to Leo Steinem (Timothy Hutton) and raise Gloria. This revelation causes Steinem to avoid marriage until much later in her life, and focus on her writing and political activism career, as she didn't want to fall into the same trap as her mother. Steinem was trying to redefine the role of women as the primary caregiver for their children, which oftentimes resulted in them having to sacrifice their life goals and ambitions. Throughout the film, we see male interviewers question and criticize Steinem for never getting married, but for her the more important goal was to get her voice heard as a strong and independent woman.

Steinem's father Leo is portrayed as a hustler of sorts, who was always trying to come up with elaborate schemes to strike it rich, but more often than not his endeavors ended up as fiascos. However, Leo was also an open-minded and adventurous person, which influenced Steinem to be the courageous and strong-willed woman that she later became. Her father's spontaneous travels across the country would encourage Steinem to explore India as a young woman, and give her the curiosity to empathize with and try to understand cultures outside her own. This is why Taymor explores the lifelong friendships Steinem had with the Mexican-American labor activist Dolores Huerta (Monica Sanchez) and the Cherokee activist Wilma Mankiller (Kimberly Guerrero).

With The Glorias, Taymor has created an epic and complex portrait of an extraodinary historical figure. While Taymor for the most part holds back on her more extravagant cinematic techniques, the few occasions when he see the usual Taymor theatrical flair are wonders to behold, including a breathtaking sequence where we see Steinem transition from a young woman to her older self during a talk show, all against the backdrop of a Wizard of Oz inspired visual montage. 

Like Spike Lee with Malcolm X, Taymor uses a more traditional narrative structure to tell Steinem's story because she wants to emphasize the importance of Steinem as a historical figure, rather than bombard the audience with extraneous visual cues. In the process, Taymor has created one of her most dramatically powerful work of art so far, one that succeeds as both an examination of a society overcoming prejudice and hate, as well as a moving homage to a woman who changed the course of American history for the better. 

 

  

SERIES REVIEW: TOKYO VAMPIRE HOTEL

Many of Sion Sono's films have had labyrinthian plots with a plethora of characters which felt like they could have been developed further. The inherent limit of film is that you only have around two to three hours to traditionally tell a narrative, and sometimes this isn't sufficient time to properly explore everything a filmmaker originaly intended to portray. The solution to this for some filmmakers is that they create a sort of "cinematic universe," by having certain characters or plots from previous films re-appear in later films. With the 388 minute long Amazon TV series Tokyo Vampire Hotel (2016), Sion Sono is finally able to create a single mammoth vision that almost serves as an encapsulation of many of his previous themes and obsessions, but brought to an even more epic level. 

Although Sono previously made the Japanese television series Minna! ESPer Dayo!, that was more of a work for hire that didn't have Sono's usual artistic flair. Tokyo Vampire Hotel is a much more personal and original project for Sono. Like Noriko's Dinner Table and Love Exposure, Tokyo Vampire Hotel involves a secret cult who recruits those from the outside world to offer them a form of salvation. As Tokyo Vampire Hotel begins, a young woman named Manami (Ami Tomite) is targeted by two groups of vampires, the Dracula and the Corvin clans, who each want to abduct her to help her harnass her untapped vampiric powers. Eventually, the vampire Yamada (Shinnosuke Mitsushima) of the Corvin clan captures Manami and brings her to the palatial Requiem Hotel, where he intends to imprison Manami and a large group of other innocent people in order to help himself and his partner Elizabeth Bathory (Megumi Kagurazaka) achieve nefarious goals. In the meantime, the vampire K (Kaho) of the Dracula clan races against time to try to rescue Manami from the Corvin clan.

This plot summary makes Tokyo Vampire Hotel sound like a typical horror story, but Sion Sono embues the series with all kinds of surrealist and eccentric touches which elevate it beyond the genre. Admittedly, some of the more traditional gothic elements in the opening episodes border on vampire lore cliches, especially the scenes set in Transylvania. But, once Sono moves the story arc to the Hotel Requiem, he is back in his usual subversive terrain. The scenes of unflinching torture and depravity that Yamada inflicts on his prisoners in the hotel at times recalls Pier Paolo Pasolini notorious Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Like Salo, Tokyo Vampire Hotel explores the dark depths of human cruelty and brutality, a theme which Sono himself has depitced in previous films like Strange Circus and Antiporno. 

Much of Tokyo Vampire Hotel takes place in the Hotel Requiem, and the set design of the location is astonishing in both its aesthetic glamor as well as its more grotesque elements. The scenes where Elizabeth Bathory's pulsating body starts to merge with the very structure and architecture of the hotel itself reminds one of the body-horror films of David Cronenberg, as the barriers between the flesh and artifically created environments form a new alternately repuslive yet strangely alluring whole. Once you make it past the more traditional first few episodes, you'll discover Sion Sono in all his usual taboo destroying glory.

Another common theme in Sion Sono's later work is the battle between love and hate, or light and darkness. Many of Sono's earlier films were nihilistic portrayals of human nature, with virtually no hint of redemption or optimism. This is best exemplified by his darkest film Strange Circus, which was an almost non-stop barrage of images of torture and pain. With Love Exposure, Sono seemed to turn a corner in his career, as for the first time he made a film which, despite its many scenes of violence and brutality, had a strong undercurrent of blissful hope. Sono would return to his more despairing tone in subsequent films like Himizu and Why Don't You Play in Hell?, but even those films had a hint of faith in humankind.

With Tokyo Vampire Hotel, Sono balances out the earlier scenes of vile human behavior with later episodes that explore lightness overcoming darkness. The former scenes of innocent people being tortured and killed in the Hotel Requiem are replaced with a new society of vampires and humans living in peace and harmony with each other. The cult of the vampires based upon exploitation over others is now an altruistic group whose core values are the peace and well-being of the community, similar in a way to the Zero Church cult in Love Exposure. 

While Love Exposure signaled Sono's evolution from a prince of nihilism to a more benign filmmaker, Sono still has maintained his subversive edge, as evidenced by his decision to not shirk from exploring the darker depths of the human soul in Tokyo Vampire Hotel. One can say that Sono is a more developed artist now, because he has found a way to balance out the unyielding cynicism of his earlier films with more sanguine themes. Sono has always been fascinated in exploring the lives of outsiders who commit criminal acts, from serial killers, to con-men, to gangsters, but now he is equally intereted in portarying characters who dwell in more harmonious waters. Ultimately, Tokyo Vampire Hotel is about a battle for the soul of an innocent woman, and this time lightness may actually overcome darkness.

FILM REVIEW: LOVE EXPOSURE

In every major filmmaker's career, there is at least one film that defines who they are as an artist, and which best exemplifies their unique voice. They may go on to make equally accomplished films that may even rank among the best films of all time, but you can always trace a visionary director's work back to a single, exemplary film. For Alfred Hitchcock, that film is Vertigo, and for the maestro Martin Scorsese, that film is Goodfellas. For the controversial and brilliant Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono, that film is his masterpiece Love Exposure (2008), an epic, nearly four-hour long fantasmagoric portrait of youthful love amidst a society torn apart by violence, broken families, and religious fanaticism.

Love Exposure is the first part of a loose trilogy of films by Sion Sono, which also consists of Cold Fish (2010) and Guilty of Romance (2011). Known as his "Hate" Trilogy, Sion Sono explores how love can oftentimes become twisted into obsession and perversion in all three films. While Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance are much more downbeat and nihilistic films, Love Exposure also reaches into some pretty dark depths of human depravity. However, what sets Love Exposure apart from the other two films in the trilogy is its ultimately hopeful message of love as the ultimate form of redemption.

The focus of Love Exposure is on the relationship between Yu Honda (Takahiro Nishijima) and the young woman he is almost hopelessly in love with, the emotionally volatile Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima). Surrounding Yu's obsessive quest for Yoko's love are a plethora of outside forces which constantly threaten to entangle him--Yu's maniacally religious father Tetsu (Atsuro Watabe), a homicidal young woman named Aya Koike (Sakura Ando) who tries to abduct and indoctrinate Yu's family into a cult known as "Zero Church," and Yu's father's new girlfriend Kaori (Makiko Watanabe), a nymphomaniac whose rabid sexual appetite threatens Tetsu's religious beliefs.

Much of Love Exposure is shot with rapidly moving, hand-held cameras, giving it an exhilirating, liberating momentum which reminds one of the rule-breaking 1960s films of the French New Wave era. Scenes are displayed out of chronological order at times, as Sono freely cuts back and forth in time, and the acting in the film approaches a level of inspired hysteria at times that borders on an Andrjez Zulawski level of trance-like performances. You can feel the blood, sweat, and passion of Sono in almost every frame of Love Exposure, and one gets the sense that Sono is finally free of the traditional bounds of studio filmmaking, and he's relishing the opportunity to tell a story in his own original, unique voice. 

Against this backdrop of shall we say colorful characters, Sion Sono navigates his protagonist Yu's character arc through some outrageously absurd plot points, including an underground group of misfits who specialize in up-skirt photography of young women as a form of spiritual fulfillment. What ties all these seemingly disparate elements together is the theme of love being distorted into sexual perversion, as reflected in a more humorous manner with the up-skirt photography group, and in a darker manner with the sexual abuse subplot of Aya's character. It's no coincidence that the purpose of the Zero Church cult is to indoctrinate its members to resist all forms of sexual temptation in order to discover a more pure form of love. The final image of Love Exposure, which I will not spoil for the reader, is the purest distillation of this theme of love existing as a pure force of nature, completely divorced from all forms of perversion.

Indeed, the defining moment of Love Exposure occures after Yu abducts Yoko from the Zero Church cult, and she confronts him on a beach. Hovering over Yu like a woman possessed, Yoko gives an impassioned speech about pure love as the greatest human emotion, quoting from Corinthians 13 while Beethoven's Seventh Symphony slowly grows to a crescendo in the background. She contrasts Yu's seemingly sexual obsession with her to the familial and communal love she encountered as a cult member of the Zero Church.

It's interesting that in a career spent making films exploring all forms of human sexual debauchery and taboos, Sion Sono's best film would be one that questioned the very moral nature of these previous films. One gets the sense that Sono is almost atoning for his past "sins" as a filmmaker with Love Exposure, a film which itself contains its fair number of sexually deviant scenes, but which has an underlying current of moral and spiritual judgement running through it. After spending many years exploring the deepest and darkest depths of the human psyche, perhaps Sono has finally discovered and exposed the pure and undying love within all of us as human beings.

IT'S ABOUT INCLUSION, NOT EXCLUSION

It's interesting that ever since the Academy of Motion Picturs Art and Sciences anounced their new, more inclusive rules for eligibility for the Best Picture category, a culture war has developed between those who support the new rules as a step forward in opporutnities for minorities, and those who view the rules as somehow being a form of creative censorship and authoritarianism. Ironically, many of those in this latter camp are the same free-thinking individuals who supported the Black Lives Matter movement and were vocal in their support for police reform against brutality towards African-Americans. Now, when the Academy is doing its part to provide more equal opportunities for underrepresented communities in the industry, these formerly progressive advocates for equality are suddenly outraged and accusing the Academy of "stifling creativity."

Before we get into why so many of these individuals are so angry let's examine closely what exactly the new Academy rules are. In an effort to provide more opportunities for minorities both in front of and behind the camera in key leadership roles, the Academy implemented new rules that, starting in 2024, in order for a film to qualify for a Best Picture nomination, it must meet two out of these four standards (A through D):

Standard A (On-Screen Representation, Themes, and Narratives)-- To qualify, the film must meet one of these three criteria:

A1: At least one of the actors, either in a lead or a supporting role, must belong to an ethnic minority grouop. 

A2: At least 30% of all actors in secondary and more minor roles are from at least two of the following underrepresented groups: women, racial or ethnic group, LGBTQ+, people with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing.

A3: The main storyline(s), theme or narrative of the film is centered on an underrpresented group(s)--women, racial or ethnic grouop, LGBTQ+, people with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing. 

Standard B (Creative Leadership and Project Team)- To qualify, the film must meet one of these three criteria below:

B1: At least two of the following creative leadership positions and department heads (Casting Director, Cinematographer, Composer, Costume Designer, Director, Editor, Hairstylist, Makeup Artist, Produer, Production Designer, Set Decorator, Sound, VFX Supervisor, Writer) are from the following underrpresented groups: 

• Women
• Racial or ethnic group
• LGBTQ+
• People with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing

At least one of those positions must belong to an ethnic minority group.

B2: At least six other crew/team and technical positions are from an underrpresented racial or ethnic group. 

B3: At least 30% of the film's crew is from the following underrepresented groups:

• Women
• Racial or ethnic group
• LGBTQ+
• People with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing

And, to summarize the remaining standards, for Standard C, a film must have paid apprenticeships, internships, and training opporunities for underrpresented groups, and for Standard D, a film should have multiple in-house senior executives from an underrepresented group on their marketing, publicity, and/or distribution teams.

The key to understanding these rules are that for a film to be eligible for Best Picture, the film must only meet two out of four of the standards, and within each standard, the film would have to meet only one of the three required rules. Many of those who are opposed to the rules change state that it is somehow a form of censorhip which will stifle the creativity of the filmmakers, because it would require them to insert a minority actor/character into the film even if that character is not part of the original storyline. However, a film could qualify even if it featured an all-White cast and all-White themed storyline as long as some of the paid interns/trainees and in-house senior executives are minorities (that would qualify the film under standards C and D).

This pretty much destroys the argument by those who are against these rules as somehow stifling "creative freedom," as nothing in the actual film's storyline or character descriptions has changed, as long as the film production has employed some minority key crew members or interns/trainees.

In fact, by giving key crew positions to minorities and/or underrepresented groups, a film is opening up opporutnities for those who normally would be passed over for these positions, and this in the end would benefit the film production as a whole as it would offer a diversity of voices in the creative decision making processes of the film. These new rules are not some sort of a draconian Hays Code form of censorship dictating to filmmakers what they can or cannot film; rather, they are guidelines to provide more opportunities for ethnic groups and underrepresented communities that have traditionally been ignored on film sets.

Even if a film wanted to try to qualify under standards A and B, all the filmmakers would have to do is have at least one actor in either a lead or supporting role who was a minority or member of an underrepresented group, and hire a key leadership crew member from the same categories. Would having one Asian-American actor on set and one African-American director on set somehow ruin the creative vision of a film that otherwise was a majority White production? Those who are arguing against these new rules somehow seem to feel threatened by the presence of having two non-White people in key roles on set, and this is very troubling. It's as if those who are against implementing these new rules somehow think the African-American director and Asian-American actor would somehow conspire together to sabotage the film.

Some have even argued that by requiring a certain number of minorities on a film set, it will prevent other more qualified people from being hired solely based on their skillset. By following this line of reasoning, it implies that by introducing minorities into potential consideration for film jobs, the overall skill level for the film set will not be as consistent because the minorities are not as skilled or qualified as the non-minority film crew members. Thus, historically, Hollywood has hired White actors to portray minority characters because they were considered more talented than their minority counterparts.

This thinking is what could have led Disney to decide to hire only White crew members in all the major leadership positions, from director, to writer, to cinematographer, on their Chinese set and themed film Mulan. It was Disney's intention to create an "authentic" portayal of Chinese culture, and they didn't think it would be beneficial to hire Chinese lead crew members who had intimate knowledge of their own culture to help them in their efforts?  Instead, it is glaring that not a single key consultant on the Mulan film was Chinese; my only thought was that xenophobia played a role and they didn't want to give Chinese people control over the telling of their own stories.

On the other hand, the Disney film Black Panter (albeit it was more of a Marvel film) was the opposite of the Mulan situation in the sense that not only were all the lead actors African-American, but the director and many of the lead crew positions were also African-Americans and minorities. This resulted in a film that creatively touched on many aspects of Black culture to tell a unique and compelling story about the African-American experience in the form of a super hero film. Mulan could have turned out the same way, but instead we got a White-washed portrait of Chinese culture that couldn't even resonate with audiences in China itself.

The history of Hollywood is rife with examples of non-representation of minority cultures, from casting Al Jolson, a white lead actor in blackface, to play an African-American character in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, to casting Rex Harrison, a British actor, to play the Asian lead character in the 1946 film Anna and the King of Siam. Even behind the camera, Hollywood has traditionally hired White creative leads to tell the story of non-minority cultures, as exemplified in misfires such as Memoirs of a Geisha, which also cluelessly cast Chinese actors to play Japanese characters. 

So, the new Academy rules are smartly addressing these issues by encouraging filmmakers to employ more minorities in key leadership positions both behind and in front of the camera to tell more accurate stories about their own cultures. Again, even if filmmakers were telling an all-White themed story, all they would have to do is employ key crew positions with minorities, which would only benefit the film in the end by opening up opportunities for underrepresented communities, and bring diverse voices into the mix.

The same seemingly progressive individuals who support BLM and are agaisnt police brutatlity are suddenly up in arms over the new Academy rules for inclusivity in the industry, but as I explained above, these rules are not some new form of creative censorship. If you read the rules carefully, you can clearly see that they are framed to simply allow more opportunities for minorities and underrepresented groups to contribute to the making of a film. 

The rules do not dictate that you have to arbitraly include a minority character into your film; instead, you just have to open up your mind and allow those who have traditionally been ignored some decision making input on your film set, either behind the camera or in front of it. If you view the rules this way, you'll see that the new rules are not about exluding your creative freedom and power, instead it's about including those who want their voices to finally be heard into the filmmaking process.