Self-absorption as a way of life

 

Director Magnus van Horn tackles the emptiness of an Instagram-driven life in Sweat, the story of an ambitious young woman (Magdalena Kolesnik) who amasses 600,000 adoring followers as a love-spreading exercise guru. Kolesnik's Sylwia resides in the world of the selfie. She's all about appearances and the movie brings us into three days of a life that's both manically focused and weirdly unsettled. In its early going, Sweat functions as a near-blatant critique of a hyper but hollow existence, a condition emphasized by lots of hand-held camera work. Sylwia has an exercise pal (Julian Swiezewski), but she's mostly a solo act and her days seem to consist of striking a series of poses. Look, I'm making a shake now. In one of her endless videos, Sylwia admits to feelings of loneliness, which allows the movie to open the door to an underside that continues when Sylwia encounters a stalker who likes to watch her from his car while masturbating. A visit to her mother's birthday celebration shows how out-of-touch Sylwia  can be with anything resembling normal interaction. I'm not sure that Van Horn deepens the movie enough but Kolesnik's performance drives Sweat through the burn of endless exercise and the pain of a life measured by  online posts dealing with matters such as the virtues of climbing stairs rather than riding elevators. Sylwia's thousands of devotees can't alleviate her isolation or satisfy the glimmers of longing that even she can't suppress. But it's not clear that she'll ever be able choose moments of meaning if her 600,000 followers aren't watching.

Best not to fool with Mother Nature

 

The term Earth Mother takes on a frightening dimension in South African director Jaco Bouwer's Gaia, a movie that fits into a genre some critics have dubbed "eco-horror." Though mysterious and eerie and a trifle ambiguous, the movie's main point is relatively simple: We've been consuming the Earth for so long that it's time that the tables were turned. In this movie, the Earth consumes us -- or least some of the movie's characters. Be particularly wary of fungi. Two forest rangers (Monique Rockman and Anthony Oseyemi) are doing their observational duties in a dense forest. When they’re separated, Rockman's Gabi encounters a father-and-son combo (Carel Nel and Alex van Dyk), a duo that has abandoned civilization to spend time trying to placate forest forces. Bouwer artfully sets us up to view this duo as a murderous threat but the story takes a less expected turn, developing a relationship between Gabi and the two men who have been made-up to look as if they've been eating forest cuisine far too long.  Bouwer knows his way around a haunting image, receiving considerable help from the movie's cinematographer, Jorrie van der Walt. There's gore and surreal images of folks whose bodies have been invaded by floating mushroom spores. The story thins out considerably upon reflection but mood and overview (nature is mad and refusing to take it anymore) make Gaia into something more than routine horror. In Afrikaans and English.

The unstoppable Rita Moreno

 

     Fortunately for us and for director Mariem Perez Riera, Rita Moreno enjoys being in the spotlight. She's not one of those stars who feigns shyness when it comes to talking about her career or her personal life. 

    The documentary Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, begins with Moreno's 87th birthday party before proceeding to tell the story of a Puerto Rican woman subjected to stereotyping early in her career when she played many complaint "native" girls. 

    But Moreno went on to win an Oscar for Westside Story, as well as Grammy, Emmy, and Tony honors. I don't know what it felt like for her, but viewed in retrospect, Moreno seems to have been unstoppable.

    I won't reprise Moreno's entire career, but Riera's documentary reminded me of how many bases Moreno has touched in a life that has included dancing, singing, drama, and nearly every other show business endeavor. 

    The movie's title comes from a T-shirt that Moreno wore to the Television Critics Association event at which she received a career achievement award in 2020. It aptly sums up the spirit of a woman who understood how to play the Hollywood game and still managed to turn herself into a ground-breaking winner.

    To say that Moreno has range would be to understate the case about an actress who has remained current with work in HBO's Oz and Netflix's One Day at a Time, a show inspired by the 1975 sitcom. 

    Now 89, Moreno has had her share of personal heartbreak. She was romantically involved with Marlon Brando, a relationship that she says contributed to an attempted suicide. She also offers a frank appraisal of her marriage to Leonard Gordon, who served as her manager for a time.

    If you don't like candor, you probably don't want to hang out with Moreno. At one point, Riera films Moreno in her dressing room on the set of One Day at a Time. Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearing plays on a nearby TV. Moreno freely lets us know what she's thinking. 

    That's true of just about every moment of this engaging and well-made documentary, which includes interviews with Morgan Freeman, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Eva Longoria, Gloria Estefan, and Hector Elizondo.  

    Make no mistake, though, Moreno's the star of this show. She and we wouldn't have it any other way.

They've lit many musical 'Sparks'

 

In the obscenely profuse world of pop culture, keeping up has become a virtual impossibility. So, it's without shame that I admit to never having heard of Sparks, an art rock-duo created  by two brothers, Ron and Russell Mael. 

   Sparks, it turns out is hardly a newcomer on the rock scene: The brothers have been making music since the 1960s, usually with the support of other musicians assembled for bands that have morphed through a variety of incarnations. 

    Lead singer Russell serves as frontman. But the most compelling figure is keyboardist Ron, who sports a razor-thin mustache and approaches his work with a deadpan gaze that deflects interpretation.

    Perhaps because he knows that many of his viewers won’t be familiar with Sparks, director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) allows The Sparks Brothers to run for two hours and 15 minutes. The length should prove educational for tyros and satisfyingly abundant for aficionados. 

     Though it became big in Britain, Sparks never cracked the ceiling that leads to megastardom. The group more than makes up for its lack of mega-aura with durability. Sparks continually adapts and recreates itself -- not to keep pace with any trend, but to vent the group's considerable creativity. 

    The brothers' interests have taken them from serious but non-reverential interest in French New Wave cinema to albums with titles such as Kimono My House, Whomp that Sucker, and Lil' Beethoven. 

    Sparks manages a neat trick: The band delivers the rock goods while also keeping a tongue firmly planted in cheek, particularly when it comes to the businesses of rock.  When a producer suggested they do an album to which people could dance, the brothers wryly named their record Music That You Can Dance To. 

    Wright includes interviews (ranging from fan Patton Oswalt to Todd Rundgren to Flea to Mike Myers), all laudatory.

     It's probably a good idea to get ready for more Sparks to fly.

     Along with director Leos Carax, the brothers wrote the script for Annette, a Carax-directed movie starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard that will premiere at Cannes in July.  The story reportedly is told almost entirely through song and if The Sparks Brothers is any indication, the movie won't lack for invention, wit, and perhaps even a danceable beat.

The traps of gang life

 Set in Toronto and New York, Akilla's Escape takes a big leap, beginning with Jamaican politics before jumping to urban gang life in the US and Canada. The movie wants us to make a connection. Akilla’s Escape plays on two tracks. In one we meet, Akilla, a 15-year-old whose father (Ronnie Rowe, Jr.) runs a hard-boiled gang. He also  tries to school his son in what he regards as warrior values. This part of the movie is set against a similar story about Sheppard (Thamela Mpumlwana), a Toronto teenager who also finds himself caught up in gang life.  The grown Akilla (Saul Williams) -- now moved to Toronto -- becomes involved in Sheppard’s life when their paths cross in a drug transaction. Williams gives a quietly solid performance as a man who understands Sheppard's problems. He wants out of the marijuana business, which has wearied his soul. A strong Mpumlwana plays dual roles, appearing both as Sheppard and the young Akilla. This sometimes proves disorienting but it underscores the movie's point about the continuing cycle that envelops young black men who fall into the gang-controlled drug trade. Sheppard's aunt (Donisha Rita Claire Prendergast) asks Akilla to rescue her nephew from the drug barons who are trying to locate the boy as part of their attempt to retrieve looted cash.  In trying to save Sheppard, Akilla is also trying to finds his own salvation. It's a powerful theme, even if director Charles Officer sometimes loses its thread.  Still, credit Officer for bringing a sense of tragic realism to what could have been one more thriller with nothing to say.

'In the Heights' hits lots of high notes

 

     With In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda established himself as a major figure in American musical theater. Miranda followed In the Heights with Hamilton, the production that took Broadway and then the nation by storm. 

    Now In the Heights has reached the big screen where it serves as a vibrant celebration of the Washington Heights neighborhood that has become a center of New York Dominican culture, broadened here to encompass a variety of Latino ethnicities living in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge.

    The message behind the energy that director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) and a fine cast bring to the movie involves identity and assertiveness, insistence of characters on building lives in New York while keeping their culture close at hand.

   A large-scale ensemble piece, the movie nonetheless centers around Usnavi de la Vega played by Anthony Ramos in a commanding performance. Ramos narrates the story and also participates in the tale as a bodega owner who, in the movie's framing device, tells a group of youngsters how he wrestled with the idea of giving up his New York business and emigrating to the Dominican Republic to open a nightclub.

    Scenes in the bodega make good use of Gregory Diaz IV, who plays Sonny, Usnavi's teen assistant, a kid who wants to legalize his presence in the US, attend college, and make a life for himself.

    Chu introduces the movie in a way that makes it clear that he's telling the story of a neighborhood, showing us a block springing to life on a hot summer day. To underscore the challenges of big-city living, a crippling power outage looms.

    A large case keeps things lively, but a few of the performances must be highlighted.  Leslie Grace plays Nina, a young woman who has returned to the neighborhood after dropping out of Stanford, where she didn't feel accepted and where she felt she was betraying her roots. 

    Nina's father (Jimmy Smits) owns the cab company where Nina's boyfriend (Corey Hawkins) works as a dispatcher.

    Most of the movie's themes revolve around the issue of flight, how to balance aspiration with faithfulness to heritage.

    -- Smits's character is ready to sell his business to finance Nina's tuition.

    -- Daniela (Daphne Rubin-Vega) runs the local hair salon and is thinking about moving her business to the Grand Concourse, abandoning Manhattan for the Bronx.

    -- Melissa Barrera portrays Vanessa, a young woman who wants to abandon the Heights to establish herself in the downtown fashion world.  

     The beating heart of the neighborhood belongs to Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz), a Cuban-American woman who has no children but who has become a grandmother figure for the entire neighborhood.   

     Merediz sings one of the movie’s key songs, Paciencia y Fe  (Hope and Patience), which Chu stages in a New York subway station.

    Chu adds some nice graphics and effects flourishes, one involving a spinning manhole cover, another enabling Grace and Hawkins to scale the side of an apartment building as they sing a love duet. 

     Other highlights include a number at the local pool, where the characters wondering what they'd do if they had a winning lottery ticket that would pay $96,000.

    Miranda appears in the role of Piraguero, the guy who sells flavored ice from a pushcart.

    When I lived in New York, Washington Heights was known as an Irish neighborhood, a fact to which the screenplay makes glancing reference. Smits’s character bought his business from an Irish-American who was moving elsewhere.

    The movie's themes aren't exactly groundbreaking, but new voices give the entire enterprise an invigorating feeling of freshness.

     Chu and Quiara Alegria Hudes, who wrote the movie's screenplay, might have done a bit more to condense a two-hour and 23-minute run time, but In the Heights stands as a rich and spirited entertainment that brims with love for a neighborhood and the people who populate it. 

    Oh, and did I mention that it’s also a lot of fun?

A foray into a New York subculture

Manhattan can be a peculiar place, a teeming impersonal hunk of urban landscape that's conducive to the formation of what can seem like thousands of subcultures. That was true when I lived there in the '60s and '70s and it's evidently still true, at least judging by Port Authority.  Set partly in the Kiki ballroom scene, the movie features a notable performance from Lenya Bloom, a model and actress who became the first trans woman to star in a movie at a major festival when Port Authority had its debut at Cannes in 2019. Bloom portrays Wye, a trans woman who's part of the Kiki ballroom scene, which seems to consist primarily of  LGBTQ+ young people who create family structures for themselves. Paul (Fionn Whitehead) stumbles into this world after arriving in New York from Pittsburgh. He’s supposed to be met at the Port Authority Bus Terminal by his half-sister. When she doesn’t show, Paul falls in with Lee (McCaul Lombardi), who earns a meager living doing less-than-honorable work for landlords. Wye treats Paul with concern that he badly needs and romance looms. Director Danielle Lessovitz doesn't dot every "i" or cross every "t" but her story immerses us in a scene that most of us only know from documentaries about vogue dancing. The central relationship between Paul and Wye feels a bit undercooked and it takes an improbably long time for Paul to realize that Wye is transgender. But Lessovitz strikes a strong note by reminding us that people the larger society tends to marginalize often find one another, building sheltering worlds in the bargain -- in other words, Port Authority qualifies as a real New York story.

Myth and romance mingle in "Undine'

    It takes near foolhardy courage to make a contemporary romance that wraps present-day realities around a fairy-tale spine. Director Christian Petzold (Transit) takes the dare with Undine, the story of the relationship between an industrial diver (Franz Rogowski) and Undine (Paula Beer), a woman who delivers lectures about the history of Berlin.

    Oh, and by the way, Undine is a water nymph.

    Rogowski's meets Undine after she's been ditched by Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), a jerk who we later learn is married and cheating on his wife. 

    Rogowski and Beer light sparks as their romance plays against a backdrop of daily life. If you know the Undine myth, you know that Undine is fated to kill any lover who's unfaithful to her. 

   Confident in his approach, Petzold makes no apologies for the movie's folkloric elements, allowing them to turn up in the midst of a story based in Berlin and the surrounding countryside. He presents the mythical without fanfare. 

   The movie’s appeal has less to do with its story or any mythology than with the charm of its two leads, with the poise Petzold brings to his filmmaking and the grace notes he sounds. 

    Watching Christoph welding underwater as he helps repair a turbine immerses us in a dark silent world of mystery. 

    Petzold's story includes elements of deceit and vengeance but also reaches for exalted levels of devotional love, the kind that you might expect to find on an opera stage.

   At its best, Undine flows and floats its way through an unconventional story that like the models of Berlin that Undine uses for her lectures knows that many layers lie beneath its contemporary surface.

This "Spirit' need to be more untamed

 Middle-of-the-road live-action movies seldom delight. Same goes for middle-of-the-road animated features,  and that's the category in which the new movie Spirit Untamed lands. A predecessor movie -- Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron -- debuted in 2002. Now comes another helping that tries to touch as many bases as possible, mixing a multicultural cast of characters with lots of action and a girl-power pep talk. A wild horse befriends Lucky Prescott, (voice by Isabela Merced), a 12-year-old girl who travels west with her aunt (Julianne Moore). Lucky is supposed-to visit her father (Jake Gyllenhaal), a decent but broken man who hasn't recovered from the loss of Lucky's mom,   a trick-rider who was killed in an accident. Lucky quickly makes friends with two girls (Mckenna Grace and Marsai Martin) in the small town where she lands. She also defies her dad, who warns her to avoid Spirit, a wild horse that winds up in the town corral. Lucky's mastery of riding goes from zero to highly skilled within an improbable few minutes. The plot takes an adventure turn when Lucky sets out to rescue Spirit from a rustler (Walton Goggins) and his dastardly gang.  Little about the animation feels particularly special. Even with some mild ecological concerns, Spirit Untamed feels like multiplex filler. In the absence of any other kid-fare, Spirit might suffice, but it's mostly a negligible hunk of family oriented entertainment.