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salchootchkin
Reviews
Sayen (2023)
Truth and integrity in an exciting action drama
The film begins with a quote from 1910, about Chile - something like: "the inequalities in this vast part of our country come from the past and many are still hapening today. Anyone with eyes can see them." From a book called, sinceridad. Chile íntimo en 1910, by. Alejandro Valdés Canje. The story and characters are fictional but the type of events depicted are unfortunately very common, down to the greenwashing window dressing. This is a messy, heart wrenching story, like reality, and it never turns away from the brutal reality. But some of the main characters are brave, persistent, and inspirational, which is also realistic. Regarding another story, a streaming series, my friend questioned whether a young girl could credibly have suddenly turned the tables on a dangerous adult mistreating her family. I responded with the example of Lana Turner's 14 year old daughter, who in 1958 stabbed to death a 32 year onld gangland enforcer who was abusing her mother. Personally, I have met incrediibly fearless and ferocious indigenous women in Canada, in connection with water and land defense actions.
The Violinist (1959)
Great funny short cartoon
Made to entertain, but explores a profound topic, also explored darkly in one of the stories in the Japanese collection, Rashomon and other stories. Why do so many great musiciians and artists lead tragic lives, with great suffering. Are young privileged musicians doomed to produce shallow music with little feeling? Is there a bias among critics toward the dark side.
Certainly, early music like Handl, Scarlatt, Vivaldi and Bach included a lot of triumphant upbeat themes; is that why some critics reject early music on original instruments as simply inferior to music in the classical age or on instruments easier to control?
Big Gold Brick (2022)
Great first writer director outing
Was this a too long movie or a series trying to be crammed into a movie? I'm looking forward to more from. Brian Petsos. It seems to me that the long form series is now the standard to tell a complex story with interesting characters that you want to see more of. So if a series is like a novel, the one-off movie is now like a short story, where the writer only has the space to suggest interesting characters and events and the reader fills in the rest. It might be hard for a first-time director-writer to land a whole series.
It seemed like a clever mashup of Wes Anderson surreal sets and, based on the score, especially the closing credit music, and narrative format, film noir. Not exactly film noir, but the upbeat epilogue after a pretty dark retrospective narrative tale, reminded me of the film that hooked me both on movies and sci fi, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with Kevin McCarthy, which I saw at a drive-in when it first came out and I was 8. I was at my friend's house on a Saturday night and his parents accepted my desperate lie that my parents wouldn't mind if I didn't call them first before going to a double bill that ended about 2 am. I got hell when I got home, and I was so happy because it had been so much fun and excitement going to the drive-in with my friend, his teenage sisters and his parents.
Tin Star (2017)
Total lack of research or knowledge of Canada and the horrible tar sands
This really makes me have serious doubts about some British dramas set in various places. Whipping up a western Canadian town based on generic American west stereotypes is stupid and lazy. The gross misconceptions in the story details foreshadows the series decline. You could have a drama like this set in Canada with a reasonable setting if you spent one lousy day online or at the London Library researching the huge volume of Canadian fiction, TV series, and current news on Alberta, Western Canada and the tar sands. Here are a few of the glaring errors, that made me abandon a series with one of my favorite actors after 15 minutes.
1. Almost all small communities in western Canada do not have their own police force, nor a police chief. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the mounties, contract with local and provincial governments to provide police. There is no police chief, only a detachment officer in charge, a superintendent for a large detachment. The RCMP is a paramilitary style force. Almost all are trained in one facility in Regina, Saskatchewan, and they are then assigned to duty across the country. The police chief role in the small community in the story, and the American style uniform does not generally exist in Canada. If the show creators were thinking of American stereotypes, they would have been better off setting it south of border in the US. Pipelines carrying dissolved/diluted Canadian tar sands products are a big issue in the US, and in rural towns.
2. I am a committed environmental activist who thinks the Alberta tar sands should be kept in the ground. But the series gets this issue laughably wrong. Local refining is not the important concern. The expansion of tar sands extraction, and the transport of raw unrefined bitumen/tar (by far the largest form of export, most of it to foreign markets) by pipeline and rail are what sparks controversy because of horrendous pollution in vast.tailing ponds and open pit mines, the potential for catastrophic spills during transport by rail and in pipelines running through miles of wilderness and under hundreds of unspoiled rivers, and in ocean transport through British Columbia's relatively pristine coastal archipelagos, and finally the carbon/greenhouse gases impact of burning the oil in countries it is exported to. These real life issues would be fertile ground for a drama like this, if the creative team had spent a day or 2 surfing online.
The Con Is On (2018)
Worst of the worst
Every era has movies that rely on paying off popular skilled actors and make zero effort beyond trendy stylish costumes and sets. But the writing and directing on this bomb seems deliberately horrendous, like they searched for the worst production team possible. So disappointing.