Monday, August 12, 2024

Three More Summer Movies of 2024

I didn’t anticipate that I’d find three more summer film releases interesting enough for me to write about in 2024, but indeed there have been some more excellent movies out in cinemas, which I watched multiple times in order to puzzle through what I want to say about them. It’s a diverse range of films, each one powerful in a very different way. Who knows, from an industry standpoint at least, what causes these little bursts of worthwhile movies to get released at around the same time? Perhaps it’s all just sheer coincidence. Does anybody other than movie critics even notice? Perhaps not. Would any of them agree with me about what I’ve found worthwhile?

Rich Pepplatt’s Kneecap follows the hip-hop group of the same name, a rowdy trio of Irish language speakers from West Belfast who rap in Gaelic. Their fictionalized yet true-to-life story shifts into high gear as their band starts to gain both artistic traction and popular momentum in the north of Ireland, while also becoming the target of political slings and arrows due to their Irish-speaker, language-centric stance and "Brits Out!" subject matter. I got a bit addicted to this movie, honestly, in part because it’s an overdue reminder of why men would always be wise to shave their handsome faces. (And bearded DJ Próvaí in the group, who must obscure his face because he teaches Gaelic to students at a local public school, wears a balaclava in the colors of the Irish flag whenever Kneecap performs in concert; maybe he also somehow intuited my preference for clean-shaven mugs, though his neat beard does look quite dashing as well.) Anyhow, Kneecap was a total kick of adrenaline for me every time I watched it at the cinema over the course of the past week or so. I downloaded the band’s 2018 album 3Cag as soon as I got home from my first viewing of the movie, and I’ve enjoyed listening to the songs and their break-neck, intelligent lyrics over & over again. Why oh why is there no soundtrack for this brilliant film yet? Oh well...I’ll just wait for it to surface out there in the record shops eventually.

As much as I adore these young Irish hoods, however, I mustn’t forget about Michael Fassbender, who plays the political dissident father of Móglaí Bap, who's just barely the second-cutest of the rappers. (I currently have a gay man-crush on frontman Mo Chara [sorry, mate!] due to the unique combination of his jughead crewcut and his widescreen electric smile, charms that he’s fully aware he possesses because he uses them to dazzling effect at several key moments in the narrative.) But back to Michael Fassbender, on whom I’ve long had a nearly equal crush. His grizzled daddy character named Arlo blew shit up all over Belfast in protest of the British occupiers two decades prior, then faked his own death at sea to avoid serving prison time. Some citizens of Belfast think he’s actually dead, some think he’s still alive, and some are eager to embrace him again if so, such as the punk-mouthed leader of the Radical Republicans Against Drugs, another trio of hooligans who effectively act as a collective nemesis for the lads of Kneecap throughout the movie. I’d say more about the sweet kinetic flow of this motion picture, its fun plot twists and deft Roland 808 beats, plus the actresses who are uniformly admirable in their well-rounded roles, but guess what? It’s my blog, and I prefer to let my focus on the male hotties be the mission of this particular review since those muckers are all both talented and sexy.

I enjoyed seeing Sean Wang introduce his film Dìdi at Coolidge Corner Theatre a couple of weeks ago. He said that his idea for the movie originated with films like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and he wondered whether he could make that kind of classic movie about childhood, except with Asian-American characters instead. He’s succeeded, and he even pays homage to Truffaut’s masterpiece at the climax of his own movie, when his central character Chris Wang (played by Isaac Wang, who’s hilariously bittersweet and pitch-perfect for every single second of Dìdi’s running time) starts running at full speed in the opposite direction after having a terrible blowout fight with his mom (the absolutely phenomenal Joan Chen) out in their car one night. Wang-Wang (his friends’ nickname for him, whereas Dìdi is his family’s nickname for him) is kind of continually grumpy because his dad has been far away working in Taiwan, so he feels like he’s being nagged constantly by the three females in his life: his mom, his otherwise beloved grandmother Nǎi Nai (Zhang Li Hua, a sweetly wrinkled firecracker), and his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), who’s getting ready to leave home for college at the end of the summer.

The film is set decisively in 2008. Audiences of a certain age group will laugh at the many strategically crafted messenger chats on MySpace and details like that, even though it’s all been done before by now. Nevertheless, I heard a shocked female gasp ripple through the audience in unison at my screening when Chris blocked online the girl whom he’d been pursuing, Madi (Mahaela Park), after they had a typical teenage falling out. The other teen actors are all wackily precise in their roles, from skateboarders who recruit Chris to film their antics around their suburb of Fremont, California, to peripheral semi-friends who often try to bully and taunt Chris despite (or maybe because of) their own apparent nerdiness. The film adequately captures the insecurities, anxieties, and occasional cruelties of American kids at that age, along with a petulant, entitled adolescent attitude that Nǎi Nai scolds her daughter for not more sternly countering as a mother who always lets her two children get away with things.

After all, their mother is a painter who lives in her own little world a bit, in spite of faithfully attending to her children’s daily needs. Her delicate, Mary Cassatt-like paintings of maternal care are the film’s first indication of the emotional curveball that Joan Chen’s masterful performance will be throwing toward us as the movie progresses. One of the greatest rarities, and also one of the greatest pleasures, is to be able to see an actress actually thinking, and Joan Chen subtly conveys every gentle layer of her character’s inner workings. Her motherly portrayal is so good that it’s kind of supersonic. I’ll be beyond disappointed if she receives no attention during awards season, but sadly, because her performance is so deep and unflashy, I predict that most viewers will unfairly forget about her role in this film by year’s end. Although Sean Wang’s movie treads ever so slightly inventively on familiar ground for most of its duration, two profoundly moving scenes between Chris and his mother during the film’s final minutes have secured his future place as a director to watch. They’re two of the most memorable mother/son sequences ever committed to celluloid, and both of the actors in those scenes know it, too.

I’d like to live forever at the relaxed yet steady pace of Baltasar Kormákur’s Touch, a beautifully unhurried tale of an Icelandic man named Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson), who’s facing a serious medical diagnosis later in life and decides to try to find a woman whom he was involved with long ago, back when he worked at a Japanese restaurant during his student days in London. Frustrated with the conservative administration at the London School of Economics during the era when John Lennon and Yoko Ono were cultural forces for promoting peace, young Kristófer (Pálmi Kormákur, a born runway model if ever I saw one) drops out of school to work as a dishwasher and cook at the restaurant owned and run by Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki), alongside his family and close friends. Takahashi is very protective of his daughter Miko (Kôki), for complex and historically tragic reasons that are revealed gradually later in the film. Miko is the woman whom Kristófer returns to London and then Tokyo to find over five decades later, right in the initial days of what would become the Covid-19 pandemic in March of 2020, just as the whole world was slowly and bizarrely winding down to a hitherto unforeseen standstill.

What Kristófer and Miko experience together is best kept in the world of the story for the viewer to appreciate when watching the film. Much of its success rests on the subdued performance of Ólafsson, whose character is content with the life he’s lived, yet he also feels that something has been missing or gone unresolved for far too long. The movie’s strongest element is how it explores what it must be like to sense that one’s life could have gone in an entirely different direction, a life that would perhaps have been a better fit, and so a person in that predicament must continue to live with an unarticulated yet ongoing tinge of regret, even if the events that set the alternate life-path into motion were totally beyond anybody’s control. When Kristófer finally re-connects with the older Miko (Yoko Narahashi), the quiet cascade of emotion which the audience is guided through was intense enough for one young woman in the cinema at my screening to make her cry uncontrollably right up to the end of the film’s closing credits. The final outcome is not one of despair but rather beauty and redemption.

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