Class. Films reviewed: The Old Oak, Monkey Man, Wicked Little Letters
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Ordinary people fighting back is an old story, but not a tired one. This week I’m looking at three new movies — one from northern England, one from southern England, and one from India — about people confronting injustice. There are women fighting the courts, a poor man fighting the oligarchs, and a lonely man trying to stop his town’s gradual collapse.
The Old Oak
Dir: Ken Loach (my interview: 2020)
It’s 2016 in a seaside village in northern England. TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) is the publican of The Old Oak, one of the few gathering places left standing. But like the town — once a thriving coal pit, but now impoverished and depressed — the pub is not what it used to be. It has few customers aside from a few regulars. The sign is sagging, and half of the building is no longer used. TJ lives above the pub; he’s lonely and pessimistic. His son won’t speak to him, and he has only a little dog to keep him company. But when a group of Syrian refugees arrives in town, TJ decides to help. Alongside Laura (Claire Rodgerson) he distributes furniture and food — donated through local churches and unions — to the newcomers. They are grateful, but some people resent it. Why are they helping refugees when local kids are going without food and heating? Syrian kids are bullied in schools, and a young photographer Yara (Ebla Mari)’s camera is broken.
What can they do to bring the community together? Together with Yara,
Laura, and dozens of volunteers, they reopen a long boarded up section of the Old Oak to provide a place where people can come to eat and spend time together. The photographs on the walls recall the coal miners strike of Thatcher’s England: If you eat together, you stick together, says one sign. But can they overcome old prejudices to form new friendships? Or will it all fall apart?
The Old Oak is a wonderfully poignant and deeply-moving drama that deals with big issues but on a personal scale. It looks at racism, poverty, unions and scabs, and how geopolitics affect us all. Like all of Ken Loach’s movies, it looks at imperfect people from multiple viewpoints. Some you like and end up hating, others seem like villains but you find out later they’re good people. Lots of grey, no black and white (aside from the photographs Yara takes.)
Once again, the script is by Loach’s longtime collaborator Paul Laverty, and the ensemble cast includes both professionals and first-time actors, many hired at the location.
It shows the real Britain, warts and all, not the shiny tourist-attraction you see in Hollywood movies. It’s a tear jerker, with more than one heartbreaking scenes. But it still leaves room for hope. The Old Oak may be Ken Loach’s final film, so you should get out and see it. I really like this film.
Monkey Man
Co-Wri/Dir: Dev Patel
Kid (Dev Patel) is a man with a vengeance — to punish those whose crimes he witnessed as a small child. Raised by his mother in a forest in rural India, he now lives in an unnamed megalopolis in the mythical state of Yatana (= torment, anguish). It is ruled by a god-king followed by throngs of devoted cult-like followers. They kick farmers off their land for corporate profit and persecute minorities with impunity. Kid earns his money as a boxer, beaten up regularly by bigger, stronger men. In the ring, he conceals his face behind a monkey mask, in honour of the god Hanuman whose story his mother had told him as a child. Following a complex scheme, he somehow manages to get work inside an exclusive nightclub ruled by a woman named Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar). She warns him to never disobey her or step out of his class. He gradually works his way up the latter until he makes it into the kitchen. His goal? To shoot a corrupt police chief named Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher). But his plans all fail, and he ends up a nearly-dead fugitive, his body floating in a canal. He is rescued and brought back to health by a temple dedicated to Shiva, and run by androgynous priests.
They admire that he, an outcaste, dares to fight authority. But he needs the strength and skill if he wants to succeed. So, to the sounds of a tabla drum, he trains in the temple, gradually building up his stamina and muscles until he its
ready to face his enemies to the death once again. But does he even have a chance against the powers that be?
Monkey Man is a class-struggle action-thriller about one man’s quest for personal vengeance and his plan to overthrow by force corrupt and autocratic leaders. It’s told using intricate plotting, involving dozens of people cooperating for a single goal. And it interweaves visions and sounds, like a child’s picture book, an elaborate mural, and the thumping of a tabla music. There’s a lot of content to digest. The problem is, a large part of the movie consists of chases and violent fights, and they’re not very good. Blurred shots using a jiggly, hand-held camera may be artistic, but they’re unpleasant and hard to look at. Seasickness is not a valid substitute for good fight choreography.
I admire Dev Patel’s first attempt as a director and his transformation into an action hero, but Monkey Man doesn’t cut it.
Wicked Little Letters
Dir: Thea Sharrock
It’s the 1920s in Littlehampton, Sussex, a small town in southern England. Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) is a middle aged educated woman who still lives with her strict parents in a tiny row house. She reads the bible and quotes its teachings; basically, she’s an uptight prig. She shares a wall with Rose (Jessie Buckley) a migrant from the Emerald Isle. She is fond of drinking and carousing, can swear a blue streak, and is often seen wandering in just a slip outside her home. Rose likes her live-in boyfriend Bill (her husband died in WWI) but most of all, adores her daughter Nancy (Elisha Weir). But her neighbour, Edith’s father Edward Swan (Timothy Spall) despises Rose and her libertine ways, and blames her for everything going wrong in Littlehampton. They live in a tenuous detente, until everything changes when Edith receives a piece of hate mail. The unsigned letter is filled with cruel insults and vulgar words.
And when the letters pile up, the police come to investigate. They arrest Rose for the nasty letters and throw her in jail, despite her protests of innocence. The press picks up the story and it becomes a national scandal. But not everyone believes Rose is guilty. A small group of women, led by Police Officer Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan), think Rose is innocent and set out to prove it. But can they find the true culprit before the trial? And what will happen to Nancy if her 
mother ends up behind bars?
Wicked Little Letters is a delightful dark comedy, based on a true story; apparently this was a hot topic 100 years ago. Little is the key word: little letters, Littlehampton, and the kind of petty quarrels that can blow up into serious events. This is a movie that knows it’s own boundaries and sticks to them perfectly, without veering off into remote tangents, flashbacks or lengthy soliloquies. It’s tight, set in tiny homes around town, and in the courthouse and jail. The acting is wonderful — everyone’s a character. Olivia Colman and Jesse Buckley previously co-starred in The Lost Daughter, but I like this one much better. And though it’s a period drama set in 1920s England, it uses colourblind casting, with many roles played by black and brown actors, without racial or ethnic issues ever entering the story (except, of course, Rose being Irish in England).
If you’re looking for a fun night out, I think you’ll like this one.
Wicked Little Letters, Monkey Man and The Old Oak all open this weekend in Toronto: check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.
Latin America? Films reviewed: Autumn and the Black Jaguar, Satanic Hispanics PLUS #Hotdocs24!
(missing some background music)
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Spring is here, and so is Toronto’s Spring film festival season. And its crowning glory is Hot Docs the world’s biggest International Documentary Film Festival. It’s a month away — it runs from April 25 to May 5 — but now’s a good time to start booking tickets. As usual there are over 100 docs from more than 60 countries, with many international premieres. And, as always, students and seniors (over 60) can go to daytime screenings for free.
They just released the whole festival slate, so here are a few docs that I haven’t seen yet, but look interesting to me. Black Box Diaries is about a young Japanese journalist who was raped, and is taking her case to court in a demand for justice. Grand Theft Hamlet shows some UK actors attempting to mount a production of Shakespeare entirely within the notorious game Grand Theft Auto. Norwegian Democrazy is about extreme street level politics in that country, and Stray Bodies takes a similar look at how people handle bodily restrictions within their own countries can be resisted by crossing national borders within the EU. Pelikan Blue is an animated film about what young Hungarians did to leave the country when the Iron Curtain fell. There are also video diaries: The Here Now Project about how climate change effects people around the world; and XiXi, an intimate look at the innermost thoughts and beliefs of a Chinese improvisation artist living in Europe. Curl Power is a funny and tender examination of five teenage girls over three years on a curling team. And for those interested in musical celebs, there are features about Toronto’s own Peaches, called Teaches of Peaches, and Disco’s Revenge about the legendary musical producer Nile Rogers.
Like I said, Hotdocs is a full month away, but now’s the time to start thinking about it.
This week, though, I’m looking at two movies, one for children and one for definitely for grownups. There’s a girl looking for a wild beast in the jungle, and a man in an El Paso jail trying to explain why he’s the only one to survive a mass killing.
Autumn and the Black Jaguar
Dir: Gilles de Maistre
Autumn Edison (Lumi Pollack) is a young girl in middle school in New York City. She grew up in a rainforest somewhere in Latin America with her environmentalist parents. Her Dad is from the North, her Mom a member of the local indigenous nation. So Autumn treats the jungle as her backyard. As a small child she befriended a baby black jaguar who was left parentless when poachers shot the mother jaguar. So they grew up together. Developers and animal traffickers, led by the evil Poacher, Doria Dargan (Kelly Hope Taylor) wanted to evict her people from their land. They also hunted rare species to sell on the black market. But when Autumn’s mother is killed, her Dad takes her back to North America, where it’s safe. Seven years later, she’s almost a teen, but still hates it up there. No one seems to care about our animal friends or the environment. Especially her biology teacher Anja (Emily Bett Rickards). She wants the class to dissect frogs — can you believe it? — and Autumn refuses to participate in such cruelty. She stages a one-person protest. So she’s suspended from school, and not the first time. Stuck at home, she finds a letter from her uncle in the rain forest, a veritable cry for help. Our lives are teetering on the brink, he writes. They want to build a dam, flooding where we have lived for millennia. And they’re after Hope, the beloved black jaguar!
Autumn takes this as a beacon, calling her back to her ancestral home.
She lies to her father that everything’s fine, and secretly rushes off to the airport. What she doesn’t realize is her teacher — notable for her fear of germs, insecurity and agoraphobia — is somehow following her; she’s afraid Autumn is in danger, and wants to bring her back home. She’s risking her worst phobias to rescue the little girl. But they both end up in the rainforest, alone, with Autumn the one who is confident and at home. Will she find Hope the Jaguar? Will Hope still recognize her? And can they somehow stop the destruction of her culture, and the kidnapping of the last black jaguar?
Autumn and the Black Jaguar is a heart-warming kids’ movie. By kids, I mean little kids. As a grown-up, I found the dialogue klunky at best and cringy at worst, as if written by Chat GBT and edited by Google Translate. The teacher talks like a cartoon character. comically overreacting to everything she sees (as in most kids’ TV shows). But there are also some very cool adventures, like when they climb a tall tree and walk around on top of the forest’s canopy. I think little kids will really like this.
Watching the movie, I was impressed by the CGI version of a Jaguar playing with Autumn — it looked real. Could it be a CGI head superimposed on a friendly dog’s body? But after I did a bit of research, I found out the actress, Lumi Pollack, spent 10 months learning to bond with two actual jaguars. That wild cat is real! Impressive. Which moved it up quite a few notches on my mental score card.
Satanic Hispanics
Dir: Alejandro Brugués, Mike Mendez, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Eduardo Sánchez, Demián Rugna
It’s El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Juarez, Chihuahua. The police discover dozens of dead bodies in an old, abandoned building, with only one man still alive, unarmed, and handcuffed to a metal table. So they arrest him. He calls himself the Traveler (Efren Ramirez) and says he was born here — meaning in the US — and speaks at least 5 languages. But he’s undocumented, with no papers to prove his existence. Still, he pleads for the police to let him go. If they don’t, in 90 minutes they’ll all end up dead, just like the others they found. You see, he says he’s being followed by the Saint of Death, a terrifying, mystical being who wants to kill him. That’s why he’s the traveller: he always has to keep a step ahead of the Saint, to avoid massive bloodshed like this one.
But the cops don’t believe him — they accuse him of drug trafficking. They bring out his cache of strange paraphernalia and ask for an explanation. So, like Scheherazade, he embarks on a series of stories that tell where each item comes from. One of his strangest stories is called Tambien Lo Vi. It’s about a mathematical genius named Gustavo (Demián Salomón) a Rubik’s cube champ who somehow transfers his mental algorithms into light patterns projected on a wall using the light from his cel phone. He flaps his arms wildly flashing… that seems to bridge the gap between the living and the dead.
Other stories deal with a voracious vampire having a night on the town on Halloween — the only time of year when he can dress as a blood sucker in public — and a very bizarre take of a man fighting off a demon using a prodigious weapon known as the Hammer of 
Zanzibar that I cannot describe on daytime radio. But back to the main plot: can The Traveller finish his stories before the evil entity arrives to kill us all?
Satanic Hispanics is a compilation horror movie told by 5 directors and countless writers, producers, cast and crew. Each story is told as discrete, complete short film, within the whole movie, but with all sharing a similar look. The directors themselves are originally from Argentina, the US, Mexico and Cuba, with dialogue shifting from English to Spanish to pre-Columbian languages. Being a horror movie, there’s lots of gratuitous violence, blood and guts, some shocks and chills, and some horrible-looking evil entities.
Does it work? Oh yes! Not every segment is perfect, but altogether they tell us some very original and scary stories.
Autumn and the Black Jaguar opens this weekend in Toronto: check your local listings; Satanic Hispanics is currently streaming on Shudder.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.
Daniel Garber talks with Kore-eda Hirokazu about Monster at #TIFF23
Edited version (8m 27s)
Unedited version (17m 51s) 日本語付き
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Photograph by Jeff Harris
Minato is a school kid in a small town whose mother works in a dry cleaner. But when he comes home one day bleeding, in pain and deeply troubled wants to know who hurt him. When she finds his teacher, Mr Hori is to blame, she tries to get him punished but faces indifference or polite, meaningless words from the teachers and principal. But as the story unfolds, we discover his teacher may not be the monster she suspected.
Monster is also an intriguing new feature film by Kore-eda Hirokazu that looks at children, makeshift families, and positions of power, and examines who suffers from bullying and violent crimes, who is blamed for them, and who actually does them and gets away with it. He also ponders bigger concepts like disasters, reincarnation and life after death.
It features an intricate story, great acting, and a lovely soundtrack by the late Sakamoto Ryuichi. Kore-eda is an award-winning director, writer and producer, whom I’ve previously talks with about Like Father, Like Son, Our Little Sister, After the Storm, and The Third Murder.
I spoke with Kore-eda in person, on-site at #TIFF23.
Monster opens in Toronto on December 1, 2023 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
My, my. Films reviewed: My Animal, Maestro
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
This week, I’m looking at two new films opening this weekend — a horror movie from Canada and a biopic from the US. There’s a young conductor with his eyes on Carnegie Hall, and a young werewolf with her eyes on a figure skater at the hockey rink.
My Animal
Dir: Jacqueline Castel
Wri: Jae Matthews
It’s a cold day in the 1980s somewhere in Northern Ontario. Heather (Bobbi Salvör Menuez) is a young woman with blood-red hair. She reads women’s bodybuilding magazines on the sly and watches female pro-wrestlers late at night on TV. She’s athletic herself — works part-time at the arena’s snack bar — and hopes to join the local hockey team as goalie. Heather lives in the outskirts of town with her grizzled dad who runs a diner (Stephen McHattie), her angry, alcoholic mom (Heidi von Palleske) and the twins Cooper and Hardy (Charles and Harrison Halpenny). She and her little brothers inherited red hair from their mom and an unusual trait from their Dad. That’s why their mom keeps everyone shackled to their beds whenever there’s a full moon. Can’t have them 
running around unwatched after midnight — they might bite someone! Yup… they’re werewolves.
Everyone knows everyone in this town, so when a new face appears at the rink, Heather takes notice. Jonny (Amandla Stenberg) is a beautiful, young, pro figure skater. She’s kept under tight control by her effeminate father (who is also her ice-dance-partner) and her domineering baseball-player boyfriend (Cory Lipman).
But when Heather meets Jonny, they both sense something electric between them. They start going out late at night to parties and adventures, like dropping acid at the casino with their friend Otto (Joe Apollonio). Heather says she wants to show Jonny new things — if she’s not too scared to try. Are they just friends? Or something more? Will Jonny accept Heather’s shape-shifting… never mind her sexuality? Or will Heather’s late-night risk-taking lead to violence, or even death?
My Animal is a beautiful look at a bittersweet romance between a lesbian, hockey-playing werewolf and a (possibly) straight figure skater. Although the two lead roles (starring the wonderful Stenberg and cool newcomer Menuez) are played by Americans, they, and the movie itself, feel totally Canadian, from the Zamboni to the snack bar to the snow-swept highway. (It was shot in Timmins, Ontario). I love the look of this film, playing with red, black and white, from Heather’s dark red bed sheets and ginger hair, to the hockey uniforms and maple leaf flags at the rink. From its gorgeous nighttime photography, to its blurry 80s music tracks, it’s relatively low-budget and simple but really good. Appropriately — and keeping with the red and white colour scheme — it won Best Director, Best Screenplay & Best Cinematography at the Blood in the Snow Film Festival. My Animal picks up on paths paved by classic female werewolf pics like Ginger Snaps.
I liked this one a lot.
Maestro
Co-Wri/Dir: Bradley Cooper
It’s 1943 in New York City. Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) is a musician, composer and conductor in his mid-20s, who suddenly gets a phone call from Carnegie Hall. Their regular conductor is ill, and they want Lennie to come in that day, without any rehearsals, to take his place. He leaps into the role, feeling the music and motivating al the musicians to play with passion. The concert is broadcast live on radio, nationwide, to huge response. This kickstarts his future as a conductor and suddenly the world is his oyster. He celebrates his newfound success with his boyfriend David (Matt Bomer) also a musician, and his career starts to soar.
Later, he meets Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) a broadway actress originally from Chile. 
They fall in love and raise three children together. He composes movie and stage scores for hit musicals like West Side Story and Candide, and brings largely unknown composers, like Mahler, into the public eye. But Lennie is never quite ready to give up his gay sex life, and has a series of longtime lovers. Can Lennie and Felicia’s relationship weather both his superstar status and his sexuality? Or will it tear their marriage apart?
Maestro is a biopic about the personal and professional life of the celebrated conductor Leonard Bernstein. The musical side of this film is a visual and audio treat, with extended performances recreated with detailed care, in the original locations, Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, and a cathedral in London. Beautiful music and photography. The film itself is told chronologically in three parts. The 40s and 50s are filmed in the style of movies from that period — gorgeous black and white, with elliptical scene changes, where he’ll leave his bedroom and walk straight onto a stage in front of a cheering crowd. Cooper perfectly captures Bernstein’s physicality in his conducting, jumping on the platform, thrusting a hand forward or balancing on one foot. The second part is in a 
grainier faded colour film to represent the 60s and 70s, while the third section is also in colour but with sharp photography, following his increasing fame and his faltering marriage. These are punctuated by word-for-word recreations of actual interviews.
But there’s a big difference between accuracy and reality. The script seems to be based on actual letters and diaries that Lennie and Felicia wrote at the time. This makes their lines sound scripted or transcribed, not real. And in the first section they speak with mannered voices, as if they were characters in a 1940s movie.
Mulligan is wonderful as Felicia, but you wonder, why — in a movie that puts Bernstein’s gayness 
front and centre — are we seeing detailed and extended private arguments between Lennie and Felicia, while his relationships with men are kept opaque? And for a movie about sexuality, why is it so non-sexual? Aside from an occasional post- coital cigarette (he was a chain smoker) or a short kiss, it’s kept anodyne and almost fully-dressed, a movie you could watch with your grandparents without blushing.
There are many delightful parts of the film, with good acting all around, and, as I said, the concerts are magnificent… I just never felt like I was learning anything new about Leonard and Felicia or delving deeply into their psyches.
Maestro is playing now at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, and opening soon at other theatres across Canada — check your local listings. My Animal is also playing nationally at select theatres.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.
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